varying degrees of intensity

 mr smear's friend was supposed to come over today, but later on we learned that he'd only gone to bed at 5am. so that didn't happen.

in the meanwhile, we had a very special day: my son has watched the terminator, so i guess now he is a man? it was a bit rough watching it in daylight, even with the brightness settings way up, and i only figured out that placing the subwoofer differently vastly improves the experience after we finished watching, but a good time was had by all.

gd and i did a lot of tidying up and moving things around this afternoon, which included a scary encounter with the spider from the other day. now that i've killed it and seen it up close, i think it was a black widow. and it moved a lot faster and less predictably than i expected. in retrospect, i think it was coming for me.

[a quick search later: it might have been a "false black widow". either way.]

mr smear and i went out on a snack mission, going past the gas station (so i could point out to him, and myself, where we'll pick up the playstation peripherals i ordered today), and then on for a while to one of the new candy stores. we didn't find anything we wanted - mr smear's very excited by all the sweets, but he doesn't want to get fat - but i did pick up a roll of proper bubblegum and by the time we got home he was very excited that i'd finally managed to teach him how to blow bubbles ^_^

between arriving home and sitting down for dinner, which was less than half an hour, i used sticklight again to put together logic flow to teach mr smear about logic gates and boolean algebra. i think the idea needs some fine-tuning, but it feels like a great start!

we watched strip search's elimination #7. we all got quite involved because as much as we like her, she really crossed all the lines in such an unhealthy way.

even with mr smear's holiday bedtime being pushed back to 10pm, i still ended up "reading" with him until 11pm (he didn't want to continue with the color of magic, so we compromised and ended up doing brainteasers). after that, i sat down to get something done on my telephony side project, which took much longer to complete than anticipated, and now i've written this up and it's almost 1am and oh-god-tomorrow's-a-work-day-already-and-i-don't-feel-like-i've-rested-this-weekend-at-all*.

* it doesn't matter if that isn't exactly true

getting out the house

 it's almost 1am as i begin writing this, and i'm sitting here with my usual sore lower back  / bum, and indigestion. i guess this is the price to pay for trying to go to bed earlier. or just for being me.

...

we had a quiet night last night; the day was full of attacks, but it was a quiet night last night. i started the day sitting on our couch with a cup of coffee and the first volume of dragon ball. and arguing with gd over which side of the living room the couch or projector or future television need to be. my primary concern is not being able to look out a window from the couch, and my eyes have been strained and my vision blurry for the last couple of days so that's kinda front of mind (just like my eyes).

...

if there's something that set the tone of the day, though, it was putting together a whole lot of my old jokes and scripts ideas just before we had to shelter from a strike, and while we waited out the attack i used notebooklm and gemini to put together a two-panel comic that came out really well!

...

my client / boss invited a few of us to the office for lunch and beers, and i decided it was worth it. gd packed me a sandwich and some salad, which turned out to be a good idea as the guys ordered vietnamese with zero vegan options on the menu, and i managed to get to and from the office without any alerts (i was a bit nervous crossing the massive bridge over the highway).

it was nice to be in an office with my coworkers, it was a good vibe and in theory it was more comfortable to work than from my home "office". but in practice, the moment i left the apartment i felt weird, a bit dizzy and "off", and my stomach was uncomfortable the entire time i was there. by the time i left, i was nursing a pretty serious headache and i needed to lie down.

while i lay down, my sister sent us messages informing us that she's finally got permanent residence in the UK! this is great news; even though she's nervous about what a shit-hole britain has become, it's a much better class of shit-hole than south africa.

we spoke for a bit until there was another attack; i'm beginning to lose my mind, because the last week or so there's been a problem with our shelter wifi. then i saw a message about the state of our garbage bins, and realized that a large part of it was from the couch guys yesterday... so i headed downstairs and literally got my hands dirty, so much so that i needed to jump in the shower immediately after returning to our apartment.

i had a chat with my mother, and then gd ordered dinner and i sat down with mr smear to help him through another level of human resource machine.

getting him to think through problems out loud, and guiding him without giving him answers, is tough. but i'm extremely pleased to report that he's doing it!

over rainbow burger dinner, we watched another couple of episodes of strip search, then it was shower time for mr smear, after which there was some drama (gd called the shower "condemned").

and then suddenly it was 10pm, and we apparently agreed that that was a valid pesach holiday bedtime for mr smear, so i read some more of the colour of magic from my bed (his bed has been next to mine for the last while) and then we both fell asleep.

...

i'm listening to the latest tousi tv report, the news is completely insane. i played a bit of balatro last night before going to bed, perhaps i'll do something similarly braindead now.

the rod of shower-destiny

 gods, i feel tired and worn out. we all slept late this morning, but although it was definitely better sleep than the past while, it wasn't good sleep. i feel like i'm going to fall apart at any moment.

i napped for an hour this afternoon, but even that wasn't comfortable and i had to get up eventually.

aside from trying to catch up on the world via youtube, and doing a lot of dealing with utterly retarded AI models that are kind of helping me with my telephony side project but also kind of getting in my way a lot, my biggest achievement today was going out with mr smear and acquiring a shower curtain rod and the very specific shape of metal required to put it up on an angled wall.

trying to explain what i needed to the poor guys working at the hardware store was impossible. i tried in a variety of ways, and they felt bad that they didn't "get" it. but *i* "got" it, and i got it, and we now have a shower rod that sits nicely 💪

destabilized

 i did go to bed, but i barely got much sleep. certainly nothing restful. mr smear stayed in our bed until morning, and then we all got up early ("in solidarity" according to gd), although i ended up lying down for an additional hour afterwards.

the day started off alright, though. i sat down with mr smear and my coffee and introduced him to mad magazine - issue #295, back to the future part ii - and it was really cool. i had to explain a whole lot of stuff to him, which led to some interesting moments. i think i blew his mind describing the difference by how we all dealt with the CFC / ozone hole crisis as a species, but allowed the oil and animal agriculture industries to divide us all on global warming.

i don't know how much "work" i got done today, certainly nothing significant. in addition to my brain feeling wrecked, gd was on a cleaning spree and discovered (what then became unavoidable) a sewer smell coming from the office bathroom next to my desk which we have no explanation for.

between meetings, mr smear and i walked to the hardware store to pick up draino, and did some tea shopping on the way back home. we sat down for a "salad pita" lunch while out, which was nice, and explored a local toy store's lego selection realizing that we never got mr smear a birthday present.

it's been a year. or two, or three.

i just got off a long call with horseman, most of it discussion the terrifying state of AI-fueled propaganda and the last fifty years building up to the west collapsing in on itself because its people have all been brainwashed to love their enemies more than themselves.

now to drag mr smear away from spore and get some exercise.

no offset

 last night was disruptive again. less than the night before, enough to make today a bit messy.

we all got up late again.

coffee and ghost in the shell - currently in the chapter which the central action of the movie is based on - and then most of the work day spent fighting an IDE not playing nicely with AI agents whose wheels are spinning but aren't going anywhere fast.

meanwhile, gd had a productive day unpacking and moving things around, and our apartment is starting to make a bit more sense. i mean, i still don't know what kind of furniture we'll need or how things will fit together, but it's definitely easier to begin using our imaginations.

zero exercise today, unless taking recycling downstairs counts. and now, after showering and brushing my teeth and making myself a cup of tea, i remember that i put a box of not-trash outside where the trash goes, and i probably need to go out and take it somewhere more likely to be enjoyed by random passers-by...

i had a short chat with one of our cousins earlier, it looks like we're not the only ones lacking confidence that a normal pesach seder is going to happen this year. my mom's re-booked her flights for next month, which i'm guessing will be more-or-less back to (a new) normal.

i feel... kind empty this evening. like i just don't have mental capacity to feel. but there's stuff i wanna do and it's bothering me that i'm not doing it, and that it's been days of not doing it...

the counter-routine

 another attack, second time this evening. it's late, and mr smear was just going to sleep... we have an agreement that we're going to start getting up early in the mornings to reestablish our routines.

...

today was a - i want to say a weird day, but every day in wartime is weird. i know i had weird dreams again last night, though i don't remember anything, and while it was a quieter night than before it was still quite disrupted.

i was pretty relaxed about work today, spending a fair amount of time on tangential stuff that i hope ends up shaving enough time off our CI that we can get a lot more of the real work done.

i surprised myself by participating more in today's (employer's) meeting than i would have expected considering i was mostly focused on the aforementioned tangential work, but i had a good idea about AI and game development and the others seemed to like it, so 🤷‍♂️

gd did a lot of cleaning and sorting today - i helped by moving a heavy piece of furniture - and our apartment feels considerably more together. so that's nice.

mr smear was mostly well-behaved today, somewhat helpful and contributed a bit to gd's efforts, and we had a really good mma session before dinner. daddy is very proud of his little boy's liver punches, and he kinda got the idea of a kickboxing roundhouse eventually.

i feel like the exercise we're getting is at least offsetting some of the excessive snacking that's been going on during the days.

we've gotten into the beginning of the strip search drama snowball. everyone's invested.

breathing easy

gd's making dinner (late, kind of as usual these days), but mr smear and i have already showered and i've managed to establish that the recent spate of wet floors was due to his showering and drying technique, not some plumbing issue.

while i wait, he's reading harry potter and i'm trying to convince AI agents to implement a new auth system i came up with this afternoon. and listening to drugs bunny on the sound bar i've set up at my feet.

i even napped today for a bit, after putting together a pretty cool fruit basket system we bought just when we moved in a month and a half ago.

...

i spoke to my mom at some point, and we agreed that it's not worth the trouble / potential trouble to try and force her way here for pesach. hopefully she'll be able to make it here a month or so later instead.

two for two

 i'm now two for two with the canishower.com app, i'm in.

i'm also two for two getting mr smear into short, but real, martial arts training sessions by rewarding him with screen time. my, how the mighty have fallen... but he did pretty well in yesterday's boxing drills, and was very pleased with himself in today's taekwondo drills. if this is what it takes...

also, mr smear and i made a fun little rage game during an attack today, capture the fly, sticklight's surprisingly good at what it does!

...

yesterday:

in a nutshell, yesterday was all about network disruptions; mainly due to misconfigurations, but also dealing with a lot of intermittent VPN disconnections that i've been experiencing ever since i got my company laptop.

it was extremely frustrating, and while i'm finally dealing with the provider's support directly... after an entire day of back-and-forth troubleshooting over email, i'm starting to suspect that their support team is a bunch of AI agents dressed in a trench coat 😕

who ever thought that the trickiest part of the turing test would be that humans can be so unexpectedly dumb?

the frustration of hearing a door buzzing just before a siren and hoping i didn't miss the delivery of the new network device...

gd cleaned the apartment yesterday, with mr smear and i helping occasionally. it's a big apartment, compared to what we're used to.

our early dinner, more like a very late lunch, was followed by me teaching mr smear boxing fundamentals, and then me continuing to work on the RCA that i was finally finished around 9pm, during another attack.

mr smear went to bed really late last night, and i read to him anyway, then crashed. and then half the night was spent with him in our bed after attacks.

i had a weird dream about him and his previous class, but they were much younger and in danger of falling out of these weird little cots.

today:

we all got up late, and i spent at least an hour tweaking the network until i had it good enough that it felt like maybe? we don't need the new network device. but after a day spent moving back and forth between the office, the bedroom and the living room, i'm pretty sure we need it to sit in the middle of the two wired points.

i struggled in a rush to get mr smear's account set up for his online classes, and then spent the work day feeling pretty useless and entirely unmotivated.

between yesterday and today, i got my first real taste of using MCPs. they can be extremely helpful, especially when it comes to understanding badly produced logs.

we received a very welcome voucher from my employer for a tub of ice cream. gd found a decent vegan salmon replacement (thank god), and brewer's yeast, that we could have delivered. and there was much rejoicing.

discomfort zones

 yesterday morning started off bitter, then got a little better (gd and mr smear had had a talk about being kinder to me). mr smear telling me i needed to stop clinging to bad feelings stung a little, but he wasn't wrong.

over breakfast, i read the veldt to him, which was an interesting experience. he was firmly on the side of the parents, and railing against the spoiled children, but there was just a moment when i was talking about how it maps to screen time and addiction that he got defensive - then i finished my thought that his entire generation was suffering from this stuff, as well as all the adults, and he was back on board :P

a little after he went to school, i completed the base of the chest of drawers and gd and i left for misrad hapnim. this time it was open, and we got numbers and sat down to wait, but immediately gd started feeling terrible and we soon had to leave and come home.

that was a very frustrating and disappointing experience, and also a complete waste of time.

i had breakfast and went to work, arriving in time for a lengthy discussion with my bulgarian teammates as i described my redesign while one of them diagramed it, and once we were done they were totally on my side - "this is how it should have been made in the first place" 💪

what followed was a few hours jumping between reviewing the results of the previous day's rollout - discovering later that i'd been instructed to look at an intermediate file, which explained the conflicting results - and reviewing large quantities of code (ultimately deferring to the AI review bots because i didn't have bandwidth and we were in a hurry), getting buy-in for the redesign, and then working on the redesign itself.

that last part was mostly - hours - me fighting with java tooling and an AI that helped in some ways, but for the most part insisted on "fixing" the problems by either breaking things, or injecting obvious security risks into the code 🤦‍♂️

...

on the one hand, i really want to impress my client and represent my employer in a way that makes them look good. on the other, my client is behaving in a disturbing way and it's uncomfortable for me. i'm working with technology that i want to be learning to work with, and it's an interesting technical challenge, but i'm working with a team whose only member with tribal knowledge is leaving in a week or two and whose other members were nowhere to be found during a week of a massive, highly sensitive rollout in the middle of which they handed everything over to a contractor without context and without any real guidance.

WTAF.

...

by the time i was ready to deliver my part of the solution to my teammate, in the hopes that it wasn't hot garbage because i hadn't had any way to properly test it, i had just enough time to go home, spend twenty minutes with my family, unblock a toilet, and head to the ozen bar for a surprisingly intimate (~50 people) show of yohay sponder, alone because gd was still feeling too ill to come with and mr smear's too young.

the show was a lot of fun. very awkward, both because of the crowd and because he was testing new material, but some of it was hilarious and a fair amount of things that amused me when he said them made me laugh later as i was on my way home.

when he got to the end and invited questions from the audience, things were a bit too silent for a bit too long, so i took a chance and asked a question that i thought he might find funny. i caught him off-guard, and was completely blown away that he didn't get the reference for the question (from his own set), and while he responded with a pretty clever comeback (after asking me why i had to bring the show down) i remain with the hope that he has a revelatory moment later where he suddenly gets it 🤣

i came home just in time to say good night to mr smear (who'd gone to bed much later than he should have), ate a lot (the leftovers from dinner were great, and yo egg on toast was a jolly good idea), and then had a cool shower (that was disappointing), and pretty soon after went to bed.

i guess i slept alright, relatively, at least.

the morning began with a stupidly shit vibe (mr smear "intentionally" doing something wrong instead of just accepting a minor correction, gd pissed off at a person rather than a situation - although she came around eventually), and i completed yesterday's chest of drawers so i can now being on the last one before moving on to the wardrobes. i need new tools, which is another source of frustration.

anyway, i've had some relaxed time, and i'm shocked to discover that i'm down to 76kg, and i have a ton of stuff to do this morning...

shabbos

 the first week in the new apartment is over. it's peaceful, the air-conditioner is on, gd's on the balcony smoking a joint, watching the highway traffic, mr smear's in bed (he told gd that since we've moved, he's excited to go to bed - i suspect it's the combination of his door not closing and him enjoying the night-light view of bright skyscrapers), we've all eaten well (or, possibly, too well) and the apartment's feeling a step closer to home.

gd managed to cook us dinner on the borrowed electric plates, we lit candles and made kiddush and mr smear joined me for benching (he started falling asleep at the end, i guess he totally caught the vibe) before showering, and i just got out the shower feeling pretty darned good and just about ready for bed.

...

it was a busy morning, lots of stuff about aliyah bureaucracy. and old trance friend (one of the doof crew) who's a lawyer called me to give me some advice (gd was bothered by the fact that he barely let me finish a sentence, but i got useful information out of it), and i had a chat with one of my cousins who's trying to help my mom out as much as she can and might be able to connect me to someone who can do or say something.

...

gd came with me to the ace hardware store, first stopping by the pharmacy. we subsequently had to return to the pharmacy because she didn't realize that the protein in the "protein water" she'd picked up was dairy 🤦‍♂️

we didn't find the main thing we were looking for - insulation tape - but we taxied home with a full kit comprising of "babushka" bins (they had toilet brushes inside), a complex-to-assemble stand for fruits and vegetables, a drying rack for dishes that i made sure she wanted but she now doesn't seem to want, and a couple of small things. then i hopped on a bus heading to south tel aviv, but we were on the highway when half of us realized we weren't going the right way.

"i didn't have the energy to yell at you all to get off the bus," the bus driver said when i asked him why he hadn't told us he was taking a detour. [there was a bad bus accident this morning]

after being encouraged to stick with my current mattress for another week or two, i ended up walking quite a ways around the area and happened to find a hardware store with insulation tape!

i grabbed a coffee, caught a bus to dizengoff center, looked around a bit for cheap air tags for mr smear's new key, gave up, took a bus home, and then we went shopping.

our local supermarket is completely shit. our 24/7 is great, but expensive :/

we came home, rested, coffee'd up, and i began building one of gd's kitchen ikea units as our upstairs friends arrived, and gave some much needed help. aside from putting together furniture, and our kids playing nicely for a while (in both apartments), we had a pleasant afternoon of adult discussions until eventually it was time for our respective dinners.

i built another small kitchen unit by myself - taking breaks to help mr smear put together a birthday card for gd - and that was all i wrote.

fiero

this move has possibly been the most prolonged intense physical and mental exertion i’ve endured since officer’s course.

[redacted: a photo of me in full fiero mode holding a toilet seat over my head ("why's dad making a war cry?!") taken by gd, who had to be convinced to come back and support me after being thoroughly disturbed by what i was putting my body through. as well as by me accidentally lifting the entire bowl slightly off the floor in a moment of lost composure.]

i just won a tough jiujitsu match against two manky old toilet seat screws that were jammed right up into the holes by an incredibly sadistic or incompetent worker and i may need a few days to recover.

...

gods i'm tired. and sore. and parched. [goes to get some water]

i couldn't sleep last night, i spent most of the night "eating movies" [translated from the hebrew] about the damage, and the costs to fix the damage, and a million things that all need to be taken care of.

by 4am i was out of bed and on a ladder, slowly and methodically dusting all the surfaces of the kitchen. and discovering and cleaning chunks of revolting sticky grime on the top of the cupboards. it took over two hours to get everything clean enough for gd to be able to get mr smear ready for school.

then i dove in to a whole lot of admin, but at the same time posted about the ridiculous new obstacle that's been set in front of my mom's aliyah application. i've spent a lot of the day receiving advice and commiseration from strangers on the internet.

speaking of internet, we have fibre in our apartment now. gd oversaw the installation, and as long as the bomb shelter's door isn't closed we have decent wifi access from all corners. we should probably find a solution for when the door's closed, though.

apparently, begging for the technician to install the hob to be scheduled earlier worked, and he's coming on sunday instead of monday. in the meanwhile, our friends upstairs have loaned us a couple of small plates.

...

the window guy said he'd be here around 10-11am, so i marked my calendar for 2-4pm. he arrived just after 1.30pm.

he kind of fixed the broken cupboard. i'm not satisfied, but the doors are working. i didn't hide the damage from the landlord, but i didn't highlight it either, and he seems okay with it.

he fixed some of the bomb shelter window, but not the sealing strip which was gd's primary concern, and which he somehow convinced her hasn't been necessary since the 90s.

he totally fixed the broken, rotting board under the kitchen sink.

he fixed the kitchen window and balcony door, so they can both now be opened and closed. i say "fixed", but it's more like "patched". good enough for now.

apparently gd *really* pissed him off by insisting on compulsively checking for leaks, when he hadn't touched anything to do with the plumbing, and i'm still giggling at the thought of it. 'cause he was pissed before he arrived, which i'm assuming was a combination of having done a lot more work than he quoted for last night, and making an embarrassing mess, and having to clean up said mess.

that said, by the time he came to pick up his cash he seemed to be in a much better mood.

...

my work day was weird. it's certainly not what i'm getting paid for, but as long as it's short term i'm fine with it. i got reassigned to unblock my "customer" team by doing QA for their latest updates, and

a) it was an extremely long, complicated manual process.

b) i was falling on my nose from before i arrived at work today, and i had to have a lot of coffee to compensate. the lot of coffee wasn't as effective as i'd hoped.

c) i had a mojito at happy hour. half an hour later i got a little work done, and then had to bail before i passed out at my desk.

...

our neighbor's eldest came downstairs to take mr smear to get his first ever house key cut. now i need to find out about smart tags for android phones...

...

[yawns]

[gets more water]

i figured out how to update my cibus card on wolt, put up shower curtains, reported the courier for leaving the food without so much as knocking on the door, and we ate a huge hummus meal (for the second time this week) with both mr smear and gd enjoying the potato kubeh just as much as i did. then i went around the apartment replacing toilet seats.

i'm not 100% convinced that the seats i got are good, but they're definitely better than what we had.

[suddenly realizes he was supposed to take the old toilets seats out the building, they've been sitting outside the front door for hours]

[washes hands on return, hands are so messed up that washing them hurts]

once that was taken care of, and mr smear had been put to bed, i climbed in the shower and between the shower curtains, the shower head holder, the hot water and the good water pressure, i had a proper, decent, pleasant shower for the first time in... a very, very long time.

though i did feel a bit faint a couple of times.

now everyone's in bed, i've posted this, and i think i'm about ready to bundle up and get some rest.

breaking stuff

i'm finally in bed, it's really late, and i'm panicking because the window guy cut into the beautiful cupboard doors i promised the landlord i wouldn't touch.

and everything is coated with a super-fine dust.

...

the morning was okay, although it turned sour when the extra-insurance people got my details and i got cold feet realizing that there was every red flag in the book that i was being scammed.

i asked on facebook and apparently it's not a scam, just really stupid behavior that trains people to fall for scams.

at least, i hope that advice isn't wrong.

the ikea delivery arrived, just watching the huge guys carrying made my sciatic nerve twitch. and seeing that they damaged a corner of one of our units... and then i had to move them around a bit, and of course my sciatica is now up to a light burn.

my mom's aliyah story now has a new complication, so i guess it was a good day for yad l'olim to ask how we're coming along...

work was busy, but i was also really distracted. and i ended up embarrassed by a couple of PR comments :(i finally got into a flow after the plumber had returned and fixed two small leaks, but then the handyman was coming and i needed to be there to let him into the building.

...

apparently two of mr smear's friends got into an argument and one of them pulled out a knife 😭

oh, and we've agreed to let him visit another friend in a dodgy part of town on shabbat, a friend whose family makes us nervous...

...

the nice "junior" handyman who managed to do the job before the job grew, waiting for hours (doing a massive hardware store run with mr smear) for the window guy to arrive, who assured me there'd be no dust and that the work would only take a couple of minutes.

half an hour later the neighbors were getting upset, and then we said goodbye to him and his workers, and then we wiped and swept and discovered the damage.

good night

t-1 (shoes in the house)

 i'm sore, i'm tired, and i'm in awe of gd who's been getting through the past week and today and arguably carrying a lot more of the can the me or mr smear.

i woke up this surprisingly summery morning and booked a car for the day, which was very useful. after breakfast we began round after round of scraping walls, priming walls, cleaning, packing, taking loads of awkward or sensitive stuff to the new apartment, removing the projector shelf, and stretching because my sciatica is flaring up again - not debilitating, thankfully, but it's making things uncomfortable...

i've managed to cut myself on the tips of two fingers so far. the plasters are getting in the way and without the plasters i have two pain / infection magnets :(

some additional good news to the guy taking over our last two months' rent is that he's also taking the couches.

i think i'm ready to go to bed. tomorrow's moving day.

t-3

 the morning was pretty smooth, then we had a guy come over to look at the apartment, in a hurry to find a place to live by sunday and seemingly a decent dude. so with much enthusiasm, we all seem to be proceeding and i'm praying it "takes" and things go smoothly 🙏

not only would this relieve us of two months' costs, but he also might buy our sofa, which would make our lives easier.

the rest of the day was a back-and-forth between the new apartment, the current one, and the office; the electrician did a huge, really good job of installing a tri-phase plug underneath the hob (going over the entire cabinet to minimize drilling into it, and he sorted out a bunch of other things.

unfortunately, while he was working gd discovered a leak - unrelated to him, and apparently unrelated to the plumber. but the plumber had been in the day before, so it was a whole story getting him to come in again... at least it seems like he gave us a discount on the replacement tap (he keeps trying to upsell us, it's kinda unsettling).

i had a chat with the new landlord, and it was such a positive experience - in spite of the costs he's really grateful that we're taking care of his property, and he's shocked to learn what his previous tenants haven't been reporting. meanwhile, while the apartment still has a few things that need fixing up, it feels like all the urgent stuff has been taken care of.

tomorrow we're meeting there with the window guy (just for him to evaluate the situation), and then we're going to buy an electric hob, and then we're going to make sure we have all the primer/paint and equipment we need to ensure the (🤞) incoming tenant is happy, and then we're going to do an early handover with the landlord, which means we might even be able to get a chunk of the awkward-to-move stuff across over the weekend.

...

even though i spent so much of my day juggling between the apartments and the office, i managed to evaluate the n-gram package against a much larger sample set and was ready to report high confidence just in time for the status meeting. the "customer" team lead asked me to try to make sure i'm not going to come back on tuesday to any big surprises, so i had a sync with one of my teammates and we came up with a strategy that we're both interested in seeing happen, and he agreed to "do me a favor" and run some tests in my absence.

i also had a really interesting conversation with the slipknot-not-synthknot guy, who i learned was actually a film student originally.

after putting mr smear to bed, i sat down to try and log my hours for my employer for the first time. i initially did it accurately, but it looks like i won't get paid fairly if i do, so i've normalized my days and i guess i'll find out if i did something wrong in the coming days.

...

the only real choice i got to make today was taking mr smear out for a laffa. not only did we both enjoy the walk and the meal, but we had some interesting conversations along the way. which led to an hilarious moment after we got home: he'd asked me about estrogen ("is estrogen real?"), and i'd ended up explaining to him how fetuses begin both male and female. but gd didn't know that we'd talked about this, and the look on her face when he suddenly yelled from the bathroom "DAD! I CAN FEEL WHERE MY VAGINA CLOSED UP!" was absolutely priceless 🤣

...

gd has been doing an inordinate amount of physical work, and it's worrying me. i understand that she's very sensitive regarding hygiene, and that she wants things to be "just right" when we move, but she's also been doing all the packing and sorting and i'm worrying about her back and pain levels... and she's been struggling for a while with some of the medications she's been on :(

t-4

 there's so much stuff happening, i'm sure i'm forgetting important notes along the way.

today began peacefully, with dishes, and moon knight, and interesting conversation* with mr smear.

* although we did have a serious argument when he told me i'm a hypocrite. i'm a lot of things, but i'm pretty sure i'm not a hypocrite. and besides, i'd only just explained to him what a hypocrite is.

it ended peacefully, with mr smear laughing until he choked multiple times while i read some more of the colour of magic to him (i'm thinking he's finally ready for it), and completing my employer's onboarding, and dishes, and having gd wake up to my howl of distress to advise me to put a glove on to retrieve the sink filter that i dropped into a particularly gross bin situation.

...

we arrived at the new apartment just before the plumber's brother did. we walked through the work that needed doing, and he pointed out that three taps needed replacing, not just one. and then he and his brother quoted me for the work, and my jaw dropped.

the landlord agreed to him taking care of the pipes, but didn't want to replace the taps... "right now", he said. so i asked him if we could make an arrangement, that i'd pay for the taps now and he'd pay me back later. and he agreed, and i rejoiced.

our friend/neighbor came down (she brought coffee) and joined us for a while, and when i felt i wasn't needed any more i headed to the office. when the plumber's brother was done and they were all heading out, she noticed something wrong with one of the kitchen windows - it doesn't latch, and we're currently in the middle of a storm with high winds and plenty of wet.

the good news (to my mind) is that the landlord's acknowledged this issue, so i guess it's clearly (again, to my mind) his fault if the floors get damaged. in the meanwhile, i managed to get our window guy from a few months ago to come in tomorrow afternoon, hopefully he'll come up with a solution that makes everyone happy 🤞

at the same time, while i was in the apartment i managed to get the electrician we used a while back to agree to come in and install three-phase under the hot plates. the "under" part will be tricky, but that's a tomorrow problem...

also, the plumber's brother came up with a great suggestion that makes installing our water dispenser much less messy.

work was crazy today. i got in 45 productive minutes after i came in, but then immediately had to return to the apartment to help gd with the unpleasant woman who came to take another look. i arrived to a not-unpleasant vibe, and after she left gd informed me that of all the details of her life to come into play, this woman grew up in the same neighborhood in turkey that gd lived in for a year. apparently, that's a reason to play nice with us. or maybe it's just because she's desperate for the apartment...

i paid the plumber (who'd become antsy), i ate, and i returned to the office. i had a long meeting trying to explain to my bulgarian teammates what i was doing to fine-tune the model's guesses and enable them to share the workload, and then a shorter meeting with my local teammates (kind of), and during that meeting one of the guys (the slipknot-not-synthknot guy) confronted me about the n-gram detection. we agreed to work together to see if maybe i'd missed something.

by the end of the day - an hour and a half later, because i had to go home again for another viewing - we'd determined that while the "gold standard" n-gram detection that i was using was as shit as i'd remembered, that there's another one he'd used before that was much less shit. but more important than that, he'd revealed that the company officially supports a very specific set of languages, and his n-gram detector proved 100% accurate (on our small sample set) for all of them!

so that's very exciting news, and tomorrow's mission is now to test this detection on as many production samples as we can to establish its "good enough-ness".

...

gd's done an incredible amount of packing and cleaning (even if, in my opinion, she really doesn't need to invest so much in the cleaning) over the past few days, but we're now getting to a point where there's not a hell of a lot to eat or eat with :P

it's very strange seeing the layers of our lives that slowly built up over the last four years being rapidly peeled back to eventually reveal an empty apartment that shows practically no trace that we were ever here.

the drain

 yesterday:

you know what's a surprisingly good feeling? when i arrive to pick up mr smear after 7.5 hours with his friend and he's clearly bummed out that their time is over.

the return home with was really fun.

it was an easy evening, i read some the colour of magic (we've restarted it, i hope he's ready for it this time) at bedtime and then the evening went into a bunch of random stuff, not least of which being writing up my earlier LLM experience into an article.

today:

i struggled to sleep last night.

the morning started off pretty well, and when mr smear left gd and i launched into removing the paintings from the walls and getting the screws / fisher plugs out. and realizing that *i* was guilty of mixing posidriv and phillips screws throughout the apartment :$

i took care of a bunch of other small things, and then left for the bank to organize a bank guarantee.

...

it's 2026 already. we have ai, robots, and a new evolution of CRISPR, but there i found myself, walking out of the bank after TWO HOURS signing arbitrary pieces of paper to acquire a document allowing me to promise my own money to someone else 😒

and then, OMFG.  just as i got on the bus to get to the office, i received an sms from the bank saying that my chequebook is available for pickup 😡

...

the bank experience really drained me. i got to the office, drank a coffee, and got back to working on my language detection model. i did that for an hour, then had lunch with the other dev who was working from the office, and then he left. i got some more work done before the only other person in the office, who was on the complete other side of it, lost his temper with someone on the phone. i tried not to eavesdrop, ending up suspecting that he'd been yelling at his kids :P

the work itself went sideways. first, when after two days of investment into testing this model, and some apparently good guesswork about some of the bigger languages (french and german, amongst others), i discovered that the model couldn't distinguish between english and russian. at that point, the mapping no longer mattered and i stopped what i was doing to investigate the existing solution.

that was when i learned that the elasticsearch language detection model isn't very reliable either, and that my client has a fair amount of garbage detections in its dataset. i also learned that i have a real advantage in evaluating language detections models because i'm familiar enough with quite a few very different languages.

so the model i've been evaluating is out, though i have infrastructure available to evaluate others (if i can find any reliable ones with labels), and i've established that there's no point in training our own model on our production data. i'm probably going to have to find out how n-gram language detection stacks up...

i left early myself and caught a bus home, authorizing mr smear to go with his friend to the comics library and on to his place. that made it easier for gd and i to go to the new apartment to sign the contract.

we were there for quite a while, it's looking considerably better, and this guy's really giving good vibes as a landlord. i didn't realize how hard it would be for him to grip a pen (he's very handicapped), and there were clauses that neither of us could figure out who should do what with...

we left with a key so gd and i can get started, cleaning it up and moving small things, and taking pre-inspection photos and organizing whatever fixes he missed.

i dropped my bag off at home, then walked to the square to wait for mr smear. he didn't need me to do that.

when we got home he dropped a bombshell - he and his friend watched the first episode of rick & morty today 🤦‍♂️

i fired off a message to his friend's dad - he's never seen the series - explaining that i understand that we'll never have full control, but that i'd appreciate it if his son understands that it's wrong and that he shouldn't share it with mr smear... he responded quickly and warmly, i hope we align.

mr smear has long hebrew homework due tuesday, so after a brief debrief on the rick & morty episode we got through a chunk of it and then had dinner, and then got through the shower/bedtime rituals (showering without a shower curtain again), and after getting mr smear into bed* i got caught up in getting gd's ipad upgraded, which led to some yak shaving in an attempt to free up enough space, which eventually led to an understanding that it's not possible to update the ipad software and apple's successfully coercing us to either abandon it or trade it in.

i fucking HATE apple.

* it took him forever to go to sleep, though

i'm absolutely exhausted, i think i need to go to bed. i hope i actually get some sleep tonight.

still waiting...

 the threats from iran are escalating (while they're massacring the persian people), and there's been a (literal) storm brewing (i was supposed to meet with tahoma earlier, but cancelled when i realized that i didn't have an umbrella on me), and i'm supposed to finish a PR i started this afternoon...

...

mr smear left for school seeming prepared for his history test, which he reported went well. he's also reported that he behaved well at school all day, but we never know until the reports come in...

the biggest thing about this morning, aside from a whole thing about gd and her dentists, was that we finally started looking for a new apartment. which caused a fair amount of distraction throughout the day.

it was a mostly-positive work day (half work day), except for me forgetting my sunglasses in the office when i hopped home for lunch, and high winds were making little dust twisters all along the way, and then me getting back to the office late for a meeting with one of my teammates... and then the train station entrance i needed to get to my employer's office was closed, and i *just* made it in time for my meeting with my mentor, or would have had he not cancelled at the last minute...

the rest of the afternoon was a lecture, some vegan dimsum and a proper seaweed salad, an awkward "game" debating technology opinions with no context, and chatting with some of my coworkers before heading out.

...

i was very relieved to make it home without being rained on. mr smear's hebrew reading homework was good, dinner was great (mr smear impressing me with his improving heat tolerance after having spilled too much habanero honey mustard sauce), and the rest of the evening went pretty smoothly. now i have to decide whether i have it in me to finish the PR or leave that until morning.

i should probably leave it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ginger rum

 i didn't get any real work done last night. i did manage to get a lot of busywork done, upgrading my macbook and installing and configuring useful apps, and the macos upgrade was a great opportunity for me to lie down and catch forty winks.

and then i completed the installation and went to bed. i mostly slept through the night.

...

right until around 4am, when i woke up from an odd dream about having to have mr smear's bar mitzvah in a mosque, and then leaving over a large boulder next to a platform with a gap between them; i woke up in the act of trying to catch him just as he stepped off into the abyss while i was telling him that he needs to be conscious in his life.

...

at least the video for our kibbutz cousin's 70th birthday came out well. in general the morning went alright, i got some more onboarding work done before leaving for the office.

i was decidedly anxious going to work, feeling overwhelmed. i started my morning warming up in the sun on the balcony again; by the time i came inside i was overheating - as was my equipment - because it was a much hotter morning than we've had for a while. i had a few meetings, which went alright, and then i put together an update to my new boss/client informing him of my progress and of the issues i've encountered. i was a bit anxious about pulling the trigger, but i knew it was the right thing to do and hoped that it wouldn't be unwelcome.

the rest of the morning was studying / reviewing documents, and then i had an unpleasant experience with granola (i thought it was just granola, but then i had a couple of bites and realized it had dairy chocolate chips in it, and then i had the taste in my mouth while getting rid of the stuff without making a mess), and then i came home for lunch.

gd and mr smear were busy cleaning the apartment (we've realized we need him to be good at cleaning because that might be the best he can hope for, career-wise), so i ate quickly and scrambled back to the office, barely making my second meeting with one of my bulgarian teammates.

TWO... HOURS... LATER...

that was a hardcore intro to getting our environments set up and working with a whole suite of new tooling, and by the time we were done i felt much less stress overall, but also i felt like my brains were bleeding out my ears.

fortunately, i managed to write all the good stuff down.

i took a tea break on one of the balconies with an amazing view of the rush hour traffic, called gd to show her, and the two of us decided it would be hilarious to send my terrified-of-heights brother a video.

i hope he took the video in good humor 😈

i spent the next hour tidying up my notes, practicing what i'd learned and bringing some of it into team-friendlier tools, and then joined everyone upstairs for happy hour. happy hour was pleasant, nice people and good chit-chat, and i had a very nice rum and ginger beer that had more of an effect on me than i'd anticipated.

 interrupted my new boss/client and one of my teammates to say goodbye, and i got a really good vibe from them both :)

now that i've come home, unloaded the day's stories on my wife, heard some good news about a cousin who might be able to help us with mr smear, and seen my son's lego helicopter that he built without instructions, and unloaded the day's stories here, i'm about to sit down for dinner, and then go to the monthly comic-book meetup to recommend the complete ballad of halo jones.

a change in the weather

 i woke up still in a dream-state this morning, i moved from the bed to the couch (under layers of blankets) and half-slept for a while longer, listening, amazed, to mr smear actually getting up and getting ready without a fight, and then - to his amazement - being able to read without anyone bothering him because he'd done all the things we always have to bother him about.

to be clear, this is exactly what we explain to him almost every day...

i started reading hakim's odyssey, and so far it's really good. it's politically problematic, though. no matter how this one man's story goes or ends, it doesn't change the fact that the majority of refugees are not interested in living under western conditions...

i did some onboarding for my client - monday's going to be complicated, because i'll be onboarding with both my employer and my client on the same day - and i helped gd with dishes while she rearranged our wardrobes and did a triage of our old clothing.

i took my computer and found a coffee shop near mr smear's school, where i worked* for half an hour before going to meet him and hunt down his history book. he was right, it wasn't in his locker, and we found a history that he thinks is his friends, and apparently his friend might have his, and i don't know what's going on but at least for now he's sorted.

* i instructed the LLM copilot, in a more structured way than usual.

i gave him permission to join his friends on a library mission, and on the way to meet them he took me by surprise by asking me how my day went. after updating him, i asked him how his hebrew class went and if he had had to hand it in, and he responded that he hadn't, and that that meant that we didn't need to have such a horrible night last night. when i explained that it wasn't a waste because the homework was done (never mind the importance of him learning to be cooperative and following rules), and that none of us enjoyed the experience... he argued that in his opinion, i *did* seem to be enjoying myself 🤦

gods help us all.

anyway, the vibes were mellow, and i saw the kids off at their station, then returned home to get some more work done.

when i got home, however, there was a nationwide network outage. while i waited, i ate lunch and fired up inscryption for the first time in a while. after finishing eating, i realized that without any network access i had no way of working, or communicating with mr smear, so i headed off to the library.

i was about halfway to the library when i realized that without network access, i wouldn't be able to work from there either :P

fortunately, the network was back online by the time i got there, i could pay for something to drink with my phone and use my mobile hotspot to make some more progress on my project. an hour later, i verified that mr smear was on his way home (without him knowing i was in the same building :P) and then i packed up and returned home too.

homework today was different; his matific exercises have moved into trigonometry territory, so instead of trying to figure out all the things at once, i taught him pythagoras' theorem and we watched a youtube history (puppet history) on how weird the dude was (not exactly age-appropriate, but fine).

dinner was nice, the evening was uneventful. after chatting with our kibbutz cousin (i've been meaning to call her back for two days now), i jumped back into inscryption and a short while ago completed the first act again.

i'm not sure if i'm ready for bed or not, but i need to watch more about what's going on in iran. maybe things are going to (finally) change...

looming

 getting mr smear out of bed this morning was pretty tough. but we've had worse.

my back, on the other hand, threatened all morning to lock up. thank the gods we have the massage kit, it really helped. which reminds me that we still have the TENS NMES kit unopened on the table :P

[makes a note to unbox it tomorrow]

i've been reading the complete ballad of halo jones, which is amazing, and i got through quite a bit of it this morning before attacking the piles of paper that had been accumulating on various surfaces.

i did a lot of nothing, otherwise, and i didn't feel particularly good about it. i also did a lot of unhealthy snacking today. i felt antsy a lot today.

i did sign the revised contract, though, so that's good. and i discovered a bunch of interesting meetups in tel aviv, which i hadn't realized was a thing. and i filled out an onboarding questionnaire. and i redid the color on my not-so-white (and somewhat torn) shoes again.

in the afternoon, i took a walk to the library to get some work done on my side projects, but i spent most of that time onboarding. it's awkward joining chats before officially being welcomed. it's very quiet :P

i did get a little bit of work done on my "social" media project, at least, before i headed downstairs to pick up a graphic novel they were holding for me (hakim's odyssey), then return home via the mall in an attempt to find a grey sharpie (to make the white shoes intentionally not white).

i got home a little before mr smear, and most of the rest of the afternoon went smoothly. i made some side-project progress, he got through his music and quite a lot of the math exercises before breaking down, i did a lot of dishes, and by the time we were ready for dinner i decided that we could continue watching the highlander.

after dinner, i felt like the day had fallen apart. the thing gd went to the dentist to check is getting worse, so she's getting angrier and angrier with the dentist for being useless, and mr smear began behaving less than ideally... and i think a lot of my stress was due to the fact that the rest of the day had been positive, and my plans to go on a "date" with gd tomorrow morning were falling apart, and it was just a bummer.

by the time mr smear was in bed, though, i was ready to read some more of the ocean at the end of the lane to him. it was an even more horrific chapter than the one before, and i *had* to keep going until its end, which fortunately hit the turning point in the darkest part of the misery. mr smear had some interesting conversations along the way, and i think that helped because he went to sleep pretty easily afterwards, and in a good mood.

after saying good night i hit the shower, and then played balatro - finally earning the green chip! - and i think i'm going to bed soon.

probably.