location matters

 i'm still feeling tired, after an hour and a half on the couch occasionally sipping my first coffee and almost passing out while reading stranger in a strange land. 

yesterday was a half-day of work for me, though a full day off for my israeli coworkers and my son. i spent it doing two important things: the first, determining that most of the current round of work i had tickets for could be safely discarded. the second, figuring out a way to share agent skills across different accounts and devices without checking anything in.

once i was essentially done with the work day, i took mr smear with me and we did a round of pre-chag shopping. there was a literal back-and-forth and we hunted down the more esoteric items on gd's list, but we got most of what we wanted in the end.

we came home, had lunch (and a really funny fight / battle over the mixed leftovers), and then big data came downstairs to help me install the blinds and shelf my mom and i picked up from ikea a couple of weeks ago. we didn't move very fast, but we did a good job, andwe now have good-looking blackout blinds in our living room and can consume media on our failing projector during the day 🤘

then the rest of his family came downstairs for a visit. gd wasn't too happy seeing us drinking beers - we need to find her gluten-free beers now, although in general we don't really drink beer at all - but we enjoyed a pleasant afternoon while the kids... well, their kids watched my kid playing video games. he begrudgingly gave them turns whenever i intervened, but i think he was just taking advantage of them being as desperate as him to have any kind of screen time whatsoever :/

the kids stayed over longer than their parents, during which time they entertained themselves playing fluxx, which mr smear insists that he hates (he's just not very practiced with it) so he antisocially read his kindle. meanwhile, i worked on an article describing my skill-sharing adventures, and then it was dinner time for everyone.

we watched - for the second evening in a row - infinity train, which is really fun!

mr smear's bedtime took a while and ruffled gd's feathers, but once in bed on a non-school night (it's shavuot, though, and i feel a bit weird about not doing anything special) i (finally) read some more of the colour of magic (we're so close to the end!) and then continued writing that article and researching better ways to sync.

i climbed into bed pretty late last night, just after 2am, after publishing a piece i was pretty happy with. and i may be tired, but i slept pretty well for the second night in a row.

this is good.

ikea day

 the first two pieces of furniture went smoothly, and didn't take long at all. the third one, i asked - nay, compelled - mr smear to be my assistant. that did make it take considerably longer than it should have, but i wasn't in a hurry and he actually participated and engaged; there were very few aspects of the build he couldn't handle.

but then we got to a part that wasn't machined correctly. fortunately, it was a minor piece of the overall build and we could try a workaround later. but then we encountered a metal bar that didn't fit correctly, which i hammered in to a point where it almost broke, after which the whole build failed and it was impossible to put the pieces together.

this was an expensive piece of furniture, and heavy, and i did not want to return it to the store for customer service. i called their number, and spoke to someone, who assured me that unless ikea workmen were doing the build, returning the item to the store was my only option.

i was upset, we were stuck, and then suddenly i had an epiphany: i deconstructed to before the bar i hammered, and switched two of the seemingly identical pieces around. and it worked! i'm not pleased that it was so easy to get it so thoroughly wrong, but i was hugely relieved that the build was salvaged without great expense.

once that was done, we decided that my mother and i would head back to the store to look for window blinds, and along the way try to get the poorly-machined part replaced.

getting there by bus was quick and painless, and after our previous visit it became immediately apparent that taking the train had been a mistake, so we didn't do that again. i was pretty tired when we arrived, so we picked up coffees, and i (in retrospect) probably made a bad call choosing a double espresso when i'd already had my three cups for the day...

we started off at the customer service desk, and they were very helpful once they established that our claim was legitimate, in spite of the fact that it's an item i purchased just over three months ago (and never got around to opening until now). we went upstairs to look for blinds, learned that the blinds were downstairs, and entered the lower labyrinth. not only did we manage to quickly find what we were looking for, but we stumbled upon a number of items we'd previously agreed were bonus finds and not worth the side quests.

from there, getting through the cashiers and back to customer service was unusually quick, and although it took a while to get the replacement part extracted from a new item (which enabled us to eavesdrop on the very angry, racist french women yelling in a combination of hebrew and french at each other and the staff) we we out of there in excellent time and boarded the bus home with everything we wanted precisely one and a half hours after disembarking.

mission accomplished!

we got home pretty quickly, completed the build and moved things around and cleaned up. i also got the ball rolling with the landlord about getting the door replaced.

my son is going to be responsible for my aneurysm, or at least for accelerating it dramatically. he just told me unsainted is boring. BORING. not "i don't like it". this is even more disturbing to me than when he called led zeppelin muzak.

i complained to gd, and she was shocked too (and asked me to send her a link, we'll make a slipknot fan of her yet!)

i finally beat slay the spire 2 with the necrobinder against the doormaker just before dinner (they waited a couple of minutes for me), which was really exciting! dinner was nice, and afterwards while mr smear was showering i received a call from the mongoose which was very welcome; we'll try to see him tomorrow and give them something for their little girl :)

mr smear's bedtime was late, but smooth, and i watched a bunch of random shit and played through the plague inc: evolved tutorial. it *is* interesting.

it's half past eleven. i'm hoping i actually managed to sleep tonight. i'm still feeling a bit wired, but i *am* yawning, so... we'll see.

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

moving day +1

 okay, this is going to be a combination of point form and whatever-the-fuck, but i have to start with the fact that i'm typing this looking out over a major intersection that's been under heavy downpour for an hour or so, after three days of unseasonably warm and dry weather that was absolutely perfect for our move. i'm also nursing a throat infection (that i've clearly been cooking since at least sunday morning) and i might be nursing an eye infection that could be caused by many things over the past day, but probably dirty sawdust from me and - i think i'm going to start calling our friend from upstairs "big data" - big data attempting to use a jigsaw to cut out the bottom from the hob space.

...

which i'd forgotten i'd asked our landlord permission for already, so that was an embarrassing conversation. but not as embarrassing as the guy who delivered the electric hob this morning. by 8.30 - key handover time - gd and i still had quite a bit to do, and while we were scrambling, exhausted and sans caffeine, i got a call from the delivery guy saying he'd arrived. i told him i should expect to be back at the new apartment within twenty minutes, but twenty minutes later i called him to say i'd need more time and he wasn't answering.

meanwhile, we'd handed over the keys, i'd warned the landlady that "airing out the cupboards" wasn't enough to prevent mold from coming in through the walls and that they'd need to remove them entirely, and i'd warned her to deal with the pipes which miraculously held even as we held our breaths for two years, and gd was staying in the apartment to finalize the packing and finish tidying up without letting the auto-close door lock us out.

so around 8.50 i hopped in the van with a load, and on my way got hold of the guy. this time he was upset, and i reminded him that he hadn't warned me he was coming and he hadn't contacted me at all to set a delivery time. this was where the argument went off the rails, because he claimed he did arrange with me to meet at 9am, and i don't remember this happening.

okay, shit, now it's my fault. then i realize, to my horror, that my wallet is empty and i need to pay him cash. so i'm panicking, he's freaking out, he's waited half an hour for me and he's not going to come back later to get paid... i suddenly remember that we now live near a gas station, so i drove there and ran inside the shop asking desperately for the ATM. they told me where to go,  i went around the back, and... it wouldn't let me insert my card.

after a wasted minute with that, i came running back into the shop like a madman, begging them to let me buy something and give me a 100 shekel note as change. i don't know what they were thinking, but it was all very dramatic. the manager kindly explained that i could use their tills as ATMs, i went through an painstaking but brief identification process, got my hundred and ran out the door thanking them profusely.

i arrived at 9.05 - so technically only five minutes late, handed the miserably lug the money, took the plate, and thanked my stars he didn't want to fight me for yelling at him when i was at fault.

BUT.

later i checked my phone records, and now i think he was gaslighting me. i don't think we ever spoke the day before.

...

when i picked up the van, it had a lot of recorded damage, the most shocking of which was that the side-mirror and window controls sections had been ripped out. during the haul, however, emergency icons started lighting up on the dashboard, and then this message:

i still had one last haul to go. i prayed, and raced to the old apartment. i'd been carrying heavy things up and down too many stairs for too many hours over a span of two days, and my back was sore and my legs hurt and i was exhausted. every time i took the stairs they seemed to get steeper.

i picked up coffee for me and gd, regaling our neighborhood coffee shop owner barista with our morning tale as if she was a bartender, and returned to carry down two more heavy sets of boxes and items.

gd made a video of the apartment before we stood together in the hallway and locked the door for the last time, having spent a week slowly-then-rapidly peeling back layers of our last four years and thanking the apartment for providing us safe haven from the storm of early '22.

...

we returned the van, complained about it's unroadworthy state, and demanded a refund and a small car to do our ikea run. they sent us a taxi, and after we arrived at the parking lot we walked to a coffee shop, used their facilities, and stopped for breakfast and coffee. then we drove to netanya, which didn't take too long.

but time dilates in ikea. we were pretty good, we didn't get distracted, we had a budget (the relief from getting our last two months' cheques from the landlady was palpable), but we also got turned around a couple of times and it was a while before we made it downstairs to the warehouse.

after everything we'd been through, that i'd put my body through, what followed was madness. three trolleys filled with HEAVY boxes, an insane workout even when i was in good shape. gd was worried i'd injure myself, or have a heart attack considering i was running exclusively on fumes and adrenaline.

...

after a long time in the line (making friends), we got hit with a new cashier. and an enormous bill, and i'm still embarrassed that i said the amount out loud to gd in front of other shoppers. and then both our credit cards were declined. twice. i called my visa service, and learned that it was simply a case of not having enough credit left, and what's infuriating is that in israel you can't just pay off a credit card even if you have the cash. and i was panicking, because mr smear was out of school already, we were in netanya, and it was the only day we had to do the shopping.

then i thought - cash! they had an ATM, so i withdrew my daily limit. then i thought, i wonder if gd can draw the same limit even though we share the same account? so she did, and it worked! just as i was being informed by the manager, after they'd carefully counted out a stack of bills, that over a certain amount ikea will only accept ten percent of the amount due in cash 🤦‍♂️

fortunately, after much drama, we could at least split the amounts so between gd's card, the ten percent cash, and my card, we managed to complete the purchase.

but then we had to run the customer service gauntlet.

on the one hand, if we'd had a van we could have just grabbed everything and left, on the other - there's no way i would have managed that without injuring myself, so it was a blessing in disguise that the van we'd rented had been in such poor condition.

i was terrified, because i know that customer service can take forever. while we waited, we texted and called furiously between mr smear and our friends upstairs, and all of a sudden our number was called!! i jumped to the counter, and was informed that if we wanted delivery, we had to pay upfront and take whatever time slot was allotted to us. and if that didn't work for us, then we'd have no recourse.

i don't understand how that can be a thing.

but also, delivery in one to two days, but helping construct everything up to three weeks? never mind that part, then. so i paid for delivery, and after struggling to get the illiterate cashier to find our address wrote it down for her, and then we were off, just as the weather was beginning to turn.

...

at this point i was afraid of the traffic into tel aviv, which i see every evening from my client's offices, and i was surprised and unbelieving when waze told me it would take 38 minutes. we let mr smear and our friends know that we were on our way, and zoomed through to tel aviv, arriving at our apartment literally about one minute before mr smear arrived!

i took a break for twenty minutes to charge my phone (it was almost dead), and stumble around with gd with neither of us knowing what we were doing, and then driving the car back to the parking lot. it took longer to get to the parking lot than it had to get home from netanya, and i was having a hard time keeping my eyes open.

i felt like i was driving home on a come-down after a festival.

after a ridiculous series of chaotic events, obstructions and miracles, i made it safely to the parking lot, took a light rail and a bus home, and we'd officially (essentially) gotten through the move. our apartment is complete chaos, and everything is going to be hard and complicated for a while, but we're home.

after a good hummus dinner, making more noise than i'm comfortable with with big data and the jigsaw (i felt like he was parenting me, which was cool but weird, but the experience itself was fun), showering and climbing into bed, i finally got myself a decent amount of sleep.

nose, throat and eyes notwithstanding. my eyes seemed to have calmed down a bit since i got up earlier 🤞, i've managed to get all this down, i'm trying to get hold of a handyman to do the hob preparation for me (i'm amazed i managed to find my old post for a handyman on facebook), gd's gotten coffee made and mr smear has just left for school, and the sun's coming out.