weekend vibes

 i eventually got to sleep after posting, and was rudely (and bitterly) awoken to a rocket alert. it was my mom's first time in the shelter, and we encountered some new neighbors for the first time.

getting back to sleep for an hour or two was hard, not least because mr smear decided this was a great opportunity to brush his teeth so he could get screen time earlier 🤦

i had a meeting with my insurance broker which was supposed to take ten minutes, but by the time we were done a full hour had passed and i needed to join our daily meeting from home. the first few minutes turned into a private sync between me and the new devops guy, who's giving me weird vibes. he seems really antisocial and i'm feeling like i can't get him to focus. he told me he was also coming in to the office, but he didn't :/

on my way to the office i was presented with an opportunity to speak to the guy who'd called the evening before and who i thought i'd offended, so we cleared the air before i got to work.

the work day was... interesting. it turned out the drama the night before was due to something i did that we all agreed should have worked, so i had to write a script to reset my change. most of my focus for the rest was on developer methodology, and i was pleased to be a part of a whole bunch of things coming together, as well as feeling like an authority in our organization.

there are days (like the day before) that i have to deal with a sense of imposter syndrome, so it's nice to have some balance to that.

the last couple of hours were busy, but not too intense, and included an interesting theological discussion with a religious contractor.

i came home to a full house - mr smear's friend was over for dinner. we all had a good experience, some interesting conversations in english and hebrew, and then we all took a walk to get him home and chat with his mother. on the way home gd expressed frustration with me sometimes speaking to her in hebrew, which i'm conflicted about.

the evening went smoothly, minus me discovering a problem with one of my toes that definitely needs a doctor (i hope it's just an ingrown nail).

while trying to help my mother with her iphone (i detest iphones now), i was convinced to finally - after three and a half years - update my country of residence in steam. i did so by purchasing minutescape, the testing of which cost me a pleasantly entertaining hour of my life.

and (pretty much) then i went to bed.

today so far:

i slept surprisingly well, dreamed long weird dreams, and this morning so far has been good. in addition to visiting our kibbutz cousin tomorrow, we're making a stop by a cousin i spoke to a couple of weeks ago (the one with lots of kids) and we're collectively supportively shocked to learn that she's finally left her husband.

right: shabbat!

blame it on someone else

so the past couple of days have been all about imposter syndrome. i've been working very superficially with our tech stack, and i'm now knee-deep in shit with no idea where the shit is coming from. i did some studying today and i'm currently running scripts in the background, over and over, tweaking what chatgpt and claude have been giving me and praying that they're not running me in circles.

because today has not been a great day for AI for me. i tried making a simple game in the morning using claude - "vibe coding" - and all i got was a thorough waste of my time. i'm now repeating that attempt on base44.com, hopefully that'll be better.

thursday:

i slept poorly.

i went to work early, while gd went to get her foot x-rayed. it was a weird day, it included some really good conversations but not a lot of success. and by not a lot of success, i mean if i look back at the chats with my lead, i feel completely useless.

at least i managed to get something done before shabbat, though, and i seem to be understanding a lot more tonight.

happy hour was... happy. the big announcement was excellent news, but it's weird to me that we skipped another announcement that was just as big to me - my previous CEO has signed on with us, and if i understand correctly he's going to be my new CEO as well. that's pretty good news :)

yesterday:

i slept poorly again.

yesterday was exhausting. not only did i get up with a significant to-do list looming over my head (and it still is), but we had a couple of real issues with mr smear.

i walked him to school, talking him through which buildings to run to if a siren goes off and what to do if their doors are closed. then i picked up some snacks at the grocery store and came home, dropped them off and caught a bus to ramat aviv because that's where our clothing order ended up. so that burned an hour of my friday morning, and all the while i was stressed about how long it was taking because i expected mr smear to call me about his juggling class.

he called me *just* as i hopped off the bus next to our apartment. i grabbed a banana (to prevent hanger) and walked to the school.

he was sitting with his best friend and his little sister, and it was extremely difficult to convince mr smear to try a different class when the sister was doing her best to convince me that mr smear really likes being at home and i should take him with me 🙄

i eventually - magically, almost - managed to get him to try photography. he claims that he enjoyed it, but now that i think about it there's a good chance he might not have actually gone.

i say this because at the end of school, he called me to report that the kid who'd bullied him a couple of weeks ago had attacked him again. this time getting physical.

just before mr smear arrived home, he explained to me what happened and i sent a message to the boy's mother. she responded that it sounded like there had been an incident, but that it wasn't his instigation. his friend's dad dropped him off, so i scrambled downstairs and asked him if he could describe what happened... and the story came out, well, different.

family meeting.

it didn't take long to get the full story out of mr smear, at which point i was thoroughly embarrassed both by his behavior and by his lying to me about it and by having written what i wrote to the boy's mother. so we called them up, and mr smear apologized.

it wasn't the most authentic-sounding apology, but it was good enough.

...

the rest of the afternoon was alright, i guess. i managed to get him through a couple of pages of homework, and he came to shul without any fuss. the experience was pretty good, and the walks there and back were good. and we had a very pleasant evening.

today:

i slept a bit better, but not well.

it was a slow day, and it was another day of stomach issues. but we did re-watch the original rocky, and although most of it was too slow or adult-themed for mr smear's sensibilities, he did join us for the iconic training montages and the fight, and he really enjoyed those.

i took mr smear out for quite a walk this afternoon, it was almost all good and he agreed that the lotus cream and salted oreo ice cream was worth it :)

after getting mr smear into bed, gd finally watched the second half of the first slow horses episode (i've now seen the first half three times), and it's political angle that i'd successfully ignored on my first watch really got under gd's skin, and now it's under mine, and sonofabitch i'm out.

goddamnit.

...

it's past 1am and i'm still seeing red on my deployment attempts. i'm calling it a night. thanks for nothing, AI. or... thanks for not enough, AI. i should be grateful for all the assistance, but it would probably be better for me to just have struggled with documentation and tutorials instead of leaning on a perpetual sense of false hope.