2026 incoming

i have no idea what tomorrow will bring, or next week, or next month, but right at this moment i'm feeling flush with gratitude. in particular after this evening, which (so far?) has been nothing short of perfect. it included an onigiri dinner, and a celebratory glass of wine / shot of rum / cup of grape juice with a very expensive, but oh-my-god-worth-it chocolate egg from vegantino, and a beautiful moment with my son while reading the ocean at the end of the lane, and i have hope that tomorrow will be a good day.

...

mr smear had another good morning this morning. after he left, i got serious with gemini and produced a series of garbage pail kids cards for my family, including my mother who was a great sport about it ^_^

i spent a good chunk of the morning wrestling with AI on my side project, then i hopped on a bus to meet with a couple of ex-coworkers (skippity and lipgirl) for a coffee, where i got some more work done before they arrived. it was a fun coffee, but i was particularly glad that skippity arrived because i knew he needed support and we had a proper opportunity to talk about the big stuff.

from there i walked to dizengoff center, not realizing how much i needed to pee until i arrived there in a state of emergency :P

once i could think straight again, i found myself walking through the wednesday vegan market which i'd forgotten about! there was so much choice, and i was starting to feel quite hungry, but i ended up taking a couple of interesting-looking pastries (spinach and fake cheese) and the chocolate egg.

it was expensive, but i regret nothing.

i returned home and got a little more work done after mr smear arrived, i helped him through his homework (some of it a bit strained, but nothing too serious) and then played a bit of inscryption before dinner.

...

i'm scared for the iranian people right now, but hopeful that this is them finally mobilizing for real and getting the job done. and praying that we help them as much as we can. perhaps 2026 will be the year the entire middle east has been holding its breath for for decades 🤞🙏

...

may you all have a year infinitely better than the last one. a year feeling safe, feeling healthy, mentally well, with good relationships and fresh air and exercise.

chicken

 yesterday was intense.

i made it just in time for the yoga class, which was tough but fluid. the instructor asked me for my favorite bird, catching me off guard, and after taking some time to give it some thought i responded with "chicken". hilarity ensued. towards the end, he demonstrated a movement (balancing on hands with knees tucked into the backs of arms) and i just couldn't figure it out; at one point i was convinced that i just had the wrong body shape. when he eventually found a way to explain it to me and i got it right, i was surprised by how little strain it was on my spine and was treated to applause by my coworkers :P

the morning could be best described as a series of surprise events - it took me more than half an hour before i was able to sneak off for a quick shower between meetings.

during the meeting before my big presentation, i kept trying and failing to build an image that was being delivered to me, and eventually tried restarting docker, only to see an update pending. it looks like docker may have finally fixed whatever they broke a couple of versions ago.

from there i rushed into my presentation. i joked about it being prophetic that i'd inserted a quote slide at the beginning that said "everything is broken", because between microsoft's rug-pull with vscode extensions and our mitigations for docker's bugs made an absolute mess of everything. in spite of that, though, we got through an hour and ten minutes and there seemed to be a lot of interest, surprise and appreciation 🤷

lipgirl's lunch idea worked out really well. "i helped" (i just squeezed lemon juice), but she and another coworker put together a huge plate of really good salad; it wasn't just a good idea for us, but it looks like we might have some more people joining in on this.

soon after lunch, i headed to the warehouse to help our tech support staff on their first installation. while there, i received a call from someone i once served with who's interviewing with us, and by the time we were done i think he was convinced that joining us is a pretty good idea. i also ended up on a diatribe with my coworkers, describing some of my tokyo takeaways.

it was around 4pm when we collectively realized that we had three deployments scheduled for the next morning and they had no idea how to do them. i should mention that on a day full of pressure, our new star devops was nowhere to be found - he was preoccupied with the farewell from his previous employer. after scrambling to make space on the desks, and beginning to get the installations going (the tech support kid hadn't yet learned not to skip steps, so we had a restart at one point), we then began the process of preparing the deployments and preparing his machine to perform them.

it - took - six - hours.

there was lots of complaining, lots of joking around, and a ridiculous incident where we detected a leak in the warehouse that almost took out some of our expensive and sensitive equipment. i could have just done everything myself and bailed early, but i'm no longer the only person who can do this stuff, we learned a lot, and the celebratory vibe before we shut everything down was very real.

i came home super late, did a mind-dump with my wife and mom, and then entered into a very difficult, tiring, but ultimately rewarding fight/discussion with gd.

today:

i eventually fell into bed around 2am, with a sore back and a mind all over the place. and then something happened shortly after i fell asleep that woke me up, and i don't know if i managed to get back to sleep after that.

it's been a relaxed morning so far, i'm about to go pick up a package on the way to work and hopefully it'll be a good day.

doing the right things

 thursday:

on the way to work i realized that what i needed to do was defer the presentation and actually prepare it, so i did that. the work day was packed, but not particularly interesting; mostly grind on my part.

our second monthly game hacking session started off quite constructively, with conversations about what gaming can do and why it's relevant as a teaching tool. one of those conversations inspired me to pick up a copy of war made new on kindle and read the preface to my wife and mom, who found it just as fascinating as i did.

we made an effort to put together a version of tetris that i'd come up with, but after a couple of hours (disrupted by an intense twenty minutes of debugging a server undergoing testing) we were all yawning in turns and called it a night.

yesterday:

i slept pretty well, i think, but i woke up tired. like, really tired. but it was gd and my ten year anniversary! i booked us a table at meshek barzilay.

we began the day a bit late, with a mission to dizengoff to order mr smear's new prescription lenses and pick up vegan cholent and lunch (i wasn't hungry, but mr smear didn't like his pad thai), and then walk a bit to the nature store, and then come on home so i could rest for a few minutes and drink two coffees because i was completely broken and had to go to the memorial service for my late coworker.

i met up with lipgirl at the office and made myself yet another coffee, and we headed out to netanya, which turned out to be an insane two hour trip because the highways around herzliya were shut down for invisible construction. we were so late that we ended up having to skip the cemetary and head straight to the memorial lunch, where i ended up being the only person to speak on behalf of the company.

i'm nervous about public speaking in english on a good day, so getting up in front of a large gathering of strangers to stumble over what i hope gave a good impression of our experience of him.

lipgirl drove back, and we had an argument over the impact of demanding coalition governments, and i think (i hope) that i managed to win her over by the end of it.

either way, post extra-coffee/eulogy/argument i arrived home buzzing, at gd's behest managed to update our booking, and we pretty soon ordered a taxi and headed south for dinner. we arrived a bit early and took a short walk, and just as we were about to turn around ran into botchman! it was great seeing him, and particularly great seeing him looking well! (he's been dealing with some health issues over the past few years)

dinner was fantastic. the service was great, the atmosphere was great, and the food was amazing. we all had a really good time - really celebrating our anniversary - we enjoyed every mouthful, and by the time the bill came around i felt that it was absolutely justified. we walked a good way home, then ordered a cab and were treated to a really entertaining cabbie who's big into 70s and 80s music.

it was an absolutely wonderful way to mark ten (eleven) years.

today:

i got up early, but spent most of the day alternating between napping on the couch and reading a few pages of death note. at one point i tried to get up and found myself feeling faint, but i'm feeling better now. in addition to all the resting, gd and mr smear and i played a fair amount of rayman: legends, and right now we're making very serious plans to walk to the beach to find ice cream.

"hummus thursday"

 "hummus chamishi" - lipgirl's started a pretty dangerous tradition. miraculously, i was fully functional during the post-lunch meeting in spite of it, and i only began to crash around 4.3pm when leaving the office for the weekend.

i taught mr smear how to construct beats in the morning.

it was a tough day, although less than the previous ones since my wednesday night achievement, and us agreeing that the other stuff on my plate was more "nice-to-have" than bona-fide requirements.

our friends' son's barmitzvah was intimate and pleasant.

[writing paused to write a complaint at the discovery that all the construction noise today is from a new project]

this morning so far has been mostly alright, although there was a bit of a meltdown over writing a mother's day card (i still haven't got a clear answer as to why there was yelling and tears). i woke up and used the massager this morning, and my neck's still tender but feeling markedly less so.

...

we're retaking gaza. we should have done this well over a year ago, instead of pandering to the american left and letting the situation get worse. all the land from egypt to jordan belongs to israel, it's in everyone's best interests that we reclaim it and put this jihadist's wet-dream of a  "palestinian" experiment to rest.

bad language

i slept a bit better last night, but still tossed and turned a lot.

mr smear was off school today for shushan purim, and i left for my blood tests, which got off on the wrong foot because i couldn't register my arrival, and i waited impatiently for very slow people before finally getting to counter and discovering that i'd been using mr smear's card instead of my own :/

fortunately the wait for the blood test wasn't long. the drawing itself was a bit unpleasant, not terrible but not good - the guy left the needle loose and it was mostly hovering around a 90° angle. then i went to the pharmacy, where i learned that one of gd's prescriptions was incorrectly entered into the system, and then back to the receptionists to find out that the message i'd received regarding mr smear's therapy authorization was meaningless.

anyway.

i got home, and gd and i confronted mr smear about his hebrew teacher's report. we were shocked to discover that mr smear hasn't accepted his new reality at all, and that he's still been holding on to the idea that he doesn't need to learn hebrew, that he's going to give up being jewish and go live in america.

what followed was a long and brutal affair, but eventually we seem to have gotten him to understand that a) we have nowhere else to go and b) you can't give up being jewish and c) without hebrew and good school grades in general he's not going anywhere, least of all america.

good grief.

work today was alright, it began with a chat with lipgirl about south african violence (i didn't know she'd worked as a stewardess and had naively walked from a hotel to a mall in johannesburg), then a fight with file.pizza as an alternative to scp (but it refused to begin downloading on multiple attempts), then a very pleasant walk on another beautiful morning to the hardware store to pick up a modern flash drive.

the rest of the work day (and another hour or so after mr smear went to bed) was spent getting a very important part of our installation working. i think i'm about halfway through at this point.

i picked mr smear up after his therapy session and brought him to the office, where he mostly did his homework (reading hebrew comics and a few pages of maths). he also made a funny comic which uses the word "motherfucker", and as always it's very hard to admonish a child for bad language while you're actively laughing both at how he's used it and at how pleased with himself he is for straddling the boundaries.

good grief.

we ran into one of his classmates' dad on the light rail home, and amongst other things we talked about the allergy drama and he was supportive.

dinner was good, delicious in dungeon is still going strong.

i'm tired now. i didn't take the alpha lipoic acid and tomorrow i'm picking up my "home sleep lab" kit on my way to work. i think i'm going to hit the hay soon.

relative

it's all relative. gd woke up at 4am freaking out about something and waited until i woke up to confront me with it. so our day began with a very intense talk about relationship stuff, some of which was very hard, but which ultimately ended up in a good place.

and then, on my way to work, i realized that i'd said something untrue. irrelevant, but still untrue. so when i finally got home, after a very long, very intense day, i told her and sparked a new round of freak out that also took a long and difficult argument to get through.

but we got through it, and we seem to be good, and the rest of the evening was fine.

...

well, it was fine until mr smear started being very aggressively scared of the dark. i'm grateful that gd went to bed and let me handle it, because although it took about an hour to get through, mr smear and i both went through some important steps together and he eventually turned in with a relatively calm vibe.

parenting is hard.

...

taking mr smear to school this morning was pleasant, gd and i had a good morning before i left for work. i stopped on the way to the office to pick up a bunch of meds at the pharmacy - half an hour of my life just waiting in a queue for the only pharmacist on duty - and taking those meds when i arrived but still struggling with being snotty all day :/

work today was, as i said, long and intense. i fixed an important typo that our AI copilot had propagated throughout our codebase, i participated in an important meeting and i feel like i contributed, i completed two important pieces of work, and at the very end of the day established that something we thought was working was, in fact, completely broken.

my lead was a bit distressed just before i left, we kind of agreed to figure everything out in the morning. and one of our coworkers was shocked when i couldn't help him with something in kubernetes, i wonder if i shouldn't take him aside tomorrow and explain that i'm still new to all this :P

i had stuff i wanted to do this evening but i've been... distracted. i think i'm going to go to bed soon.

more sick, less slow

 today was a long day. it was hard, but i'm proud of my achievements. not least of which was convincing my coworker / lead to persist with aws eks and (it feels like) we're now almost done getting our convoluted system working.

mr smear woke up sicker than yesterday. we started the day with delicious in dungeon before i left for work, which started off weak but has become really, really good. i've had the opening theme stuck in my head all day, and i'm not complaining.

the work day was... fighting with someone else's git rebase (and a failure with .gitignore), shadowing an interviewer, learning about our business development strategy, and battling with werf and eks. we all had lunch much later than anyone had planned because we ran into a series of mishaps with lipgirl's order, for a while i thought *i* was the one holding everyone up and it was a great relief to discover i wasn't :P

i rushed home for dinner (we had just enough time for another delicious in dungeon episode), said good night to my mom, then said good night to my wife and son and headed to the school for a parents meeting about screen time.

it was an interesting meeting, and the only negative thing was sitting two seats away from mr smear's bully's dad dad and having to avoid looking at him to try to stay civil and drama free. i wasn't up for an hour and a half of whatever we were going to be doing, but that time surprisingly flew by and i made a real impact when i spoke about gaming and a bunch of the parents had no idea how unavoidable and serious a danger that could be. a couple of parents actually asked me to give a talk about that, which i guess i'm up for.

it's late, but i kind wanna try getting a guide repo together for cdktf, which i'm really beginning to appreciate. i also want to start reading of mice and men, which i've never encountered before but which came up in an office conversation about literature this morning.

oh, and thanks, sudden shoulder spasm. i don't know what i would be doing without you :/

stickers and scribbles

 okay, i'm tired. but i'm also agitated and frustrated - mr smear's school has been utterly unresponsive for more than two days and tomorrow's the deadline to register him for the art school. so tomorrow's going to be started with angry phone calls but, at the end of the day, it's really not in my hands...

i eventually climbed into bed after 6am, and the morning was really hard. so hard, in fact, that i skipped on taking mr smear to school - on the one hand i'm really impressed that we're at the point where he can go to school by himself, but on the other i'm rather disappointed because i quite enjoy the opportunity to chat on the way to school.

the office was really quiet today - one of the bosses kept repeating that, until at one point i offered to put some heavy metal on and she quickly assured me it was fine :P

i asked lipgirl if we had any stickers (swag), and she enthusiastically introduced me to the office label printer. omg i hadn't realized that label printers have evolved so much!

i learned stuff today, very slowly but surely. it's all about a crash-course in kubernetes right now.

i was so desperate for lunch that - believing that the order would take a while to arrive - i scarfed down the previous day's leftovers for breakfast. which was more food than i'd thought, and then a few minutes later a massive burrito arrived for me... and i ate it :/

gd called me in an angry panic, the new vaccum cleaner arrived and she couldn't figure out how to work it, so she wanted to take it back immediately. i've convinced her to let me give it a go first...

in the afternoon i returned home to pick up mr smear and take him to his final psych evaluation session (i sneaked photos of the school's form, that'll make for interesting reading). inspired by the morning's sticker session, i thought it would be cool if he drew something with a sharpie on my fancy water bottle, but he didn't follow the (very simple) instructions and started scrawling something inappropriate. both gd and i were upset with him, and to his credit he did feel bad, but at bedtime i proposed that we turn it into a bit of a graffiti project in the morning and he seems into it.

while waiting for him, i went back to the office thinking i'd continue working, but i had an issue with the coffee machine and ended up in an interesting 1-on-1 with someone i hadn't met before; i'd spent all day thinking that i just couldn't remember him :P

i picked up mr smear (he apparently did well) and we returned home, and between his shower and dinner i managed to get him through two significantly advanced paragraphs of harry potter. *i'm* learning as we go, and he's building confidence, particularly with the stuff that's more his level. this was definitely a good idea.

i had a salad (because of the overeating) and we watched the simpsons, then called my mom to say goodnight. once i'd showered and brushed my teeth i joined mr smear for calvin & hobbes, and i've spent the past couple of hours taking care of random items, watching youtube and ignoring a bunch of stuff on my to-do list.

i suspect that i should go to bed very soon, but i feel like i can't get my head into or out of anything right now.

wackier thursday

 i'm starting this post at 1.30am on a friday morning, after tiredly and restlessly flopping around on the bed for the past couple of hours unable to get comfortable. i'm so freaking tired, but so freaking wired, and lower-back sore to boot.

...

after my previous post, i fired up inscryption, which turned out to be a big mistake. i got sucked in, and ended up going to bed a couple of hours later, which was way too late.

so getting this morning was rough.

i got mr smear to school, came home and updated my resume and sent it to my bosses, then shot out towards the train station to meet dod in ra'anana. trying to make sense of the train times via the app, i decided to chance taking the bus instead, and was given a stark reminder that tel aviv is the only city in israel that really *gets* public transport: an hour and a half by train(s), vs half an hour by bus. and when i arrived, dod explained how the train stations in ra'anana are effectively inaccessible to the people living there :/

travelling through my old neighborhood of gan rashal was a trip, seeing how the area's been completely renewed even though it's generally retained its layout, then seeing how shavit hasn't changed one iota. at least not from the outside. then seeing how the hillbilly farmland behind gan rashal was turned into a highway and train station, then entering ra'anana's ahuza and finding it looking pretty much identical to how i remember it.

the nostalgically gentle spring fresh-air smell of ra'anana as i stepped of the bus into the heart of suburbia was overwhelming.

we sat walked to a coffee shop where dod placed his order in french, and we had a good, long chat over good coffees. the relief of hearing that - by-and-large, in spite of his inability to find work in his chosen career - he and his family are doing alright, was big. we then aligned on the side project we want to build into a business, and our way forward seems pretty clear.

and then it was time to go home. i quickly and easily caught a bus home, and spent its entirety catching up on personal messages on instagram (which has recently become my answer to its algorithm). i had a hearty breakfast when i arrived, then walked to the school to pick up mr smear.

the plan was for me to take him to the first session of his evaluation, but as we arrived i suddenly felt sickly and faint, and i was grateful that gd could take him and i could lie down for a while instead. i eventually got up, made myself a cup of turkish coffee, and headed out in the wishy-washy kind-of-rainy-almost weather to meet with a friend of my CEO's who'd gotten in touch the evening before.

i thought i was running late, but as i stepped out of the light rail i found myself facing the sign on their build with five minutes to spare. thank you, light rail!

just before leaving the house, i noticed something strange - the invitation for the meeting had been updated by someone with the same name as lipgirl. i'd shaken it off, but when i walked inside their offices lipgirl was the first person i encountered! what a bizarre situation for a reunion :)

the boss man handed me a strong cup of coffee, and we sat down to chat.

what was supposed to be a 45 minute discussion ended up being more than an hour, and i cannot begin to describe how utterly amazing the fit would be if i could get this job, the alignment with my values and interests is simply unreal! i then chatted with lipgirl for a while, catching up* as well as diving into our ridiculous aliyah story, and she may have a contact who can help us expose it.

* there was an awkwardness talking about a friend of hers passed away half a year ago from cancer, i didn't remember her but i *think* she might have tried to set us up once upon a time.

anyway, in addition to how incredibly enticing the company is from a business / tech point of view, i have it on good authority that it's a great bunch of people to work with.

i left the office buzzing. partially from the excess caffeine, but in large part from what an amazing opportunity this is - i'm praying that i get through their evaluation rounds 🙏

i sent a thank you to my CEO, caught the bus home, unloaded the story on gd as i did the dishes, helped mr smear with his math homework, and then sat down for dinner, not once having looked at the exercise i was supposed to be dedicating the afternoon to... this exercise has become A Thing. A Heavy Thing.

hopefully i'll get it done tomorrow. maybe even over the weekend, even though i try not to do any form of work on shabbat...

we had a long goodnight chat with my mom after dinner, and after getting mr smear into bed gd and i finally finished watching beetlejuice beetlejuice.

it's... it's not a good movie? although it kind of is? from a plot and engagement point of view it's really meh, but at the same time it feels like a horror stoner movie that's parodying itself. and it has some redeeming moments. it feels like an art house movie, the kind that might have been produced by the character of delia deetz herself. in a way it felt more like a play than a movie.

i didn't enjoy the movie, but i also didn't not enjoy it.

...

good news on the OB/GYN story! earlier we received an email from him directly, with a proper summary of gd's care along with exactly the prescription we were looking for and that he denied prescribing when i spoke to him directly. it was clomiphene. i've passed that on to my rollerblading friend, and i'm relieved that this rather uncomfortable little story doesn't have to been dragged any further.

birthday weekend 2013 - part i

friday night:

i headed off to vfmp's and from there we went together to meet his boyfriend at the theatre. before the lights went down i had an sms conversation with a girl i'm going on a date with soon, and was quite proud of myself for managing to transmit my sense of humour. apparently getting hit in the head wasn't all bad :P
in addition to the aggravation of having forgotten my antibiotics at home, my phone reminder went off loudly even though it was set to vibrate and that was horrifically embarrassing! paranoid, i held my phone's silence button at the ready for the next while and it felt like i was receiving tons of messages or phone calls... eventually i turned it off. after the movie, i turned it back on and there were no missed calls or messages. :S

out in the dark - it's an absolutely brilliant film, and does a fantastic job of portraying, in my opinion, a good deal of what makes israel tick.

like a time-bomb.

it's got an excellent story and covers the angles with deeply disturbing accuracy. every time security services opened their mouths i got chills! overall, i loved some of it, hated most of it and appreciated all of it. not the happiest birthday movie - not cathartic at all - but i'm very glad i saw it.

and then i had to rush home to take my pills.

---
saturday:

i wasn't ready to get up when i did, and the idea of snowboarding was too much. most of my morning (and it's barely stopped even now, three days later) was spent responding to birthday messages - which was awesome! i don't let people post on my facebook wall because i feel it's inappropriate and impersonal, and i've been rewarded by soooo many long catch-up conversations with people i care about and have been out of touch with ^_^

...

i read through wired's "guiltless gift guide":
i think they can drop the "guiltless" pretense, most of the items are just more stuff. it's cool stuff, to be fair, but very little of it is superior in any way to any other equivalents when it comes to being mindful of the planet. i'd have been very glad to see a real "guiltless" guide, but seeing a regular guide labelled "guiltless" is nothing short of offensive.
i'm also still very disappointed by their lack of a digital-only subscription and their physical promotional spam.

...

getting my opus card fixed / replaced at berri-uqam took about two seconds, i was a bit shocked when the woman turned back to me with a smile on her face and wished me well. "is that it?!"

as i purchased by bus tickets to saint sauveur i realized that if i wasn't going snowboarding right after brunch then i could have picked them up any time...

godmother picked me up from the station and we went to an awesome place in old montreal called olive and gourmandeau. it's super hipster funky with great food (two vegan options) and excellent atmosphere. after breakfast she took me to a skate shop to buy a bag for my snowboard - sweet! i quickly settled on a backpack with appropriate straps, so i can have the board on my back and only need a single bag for travelling ^_^

after another round of birthday messaging i stopped at subway for lunch on my way to the starbucks to work on my comics... the nutritionally well-endowed gentleman who works there always appears to be stoned, but this is the first time i've registered him making himself a sandwich as soon as he finished with mine. what a perfect job for a stoner!

on my way out i called fcmg to ask if she'd like to meet during the week, and she was all "sure! i can meet you in ten minutes!"
no, shit! so i flipped my plans, did some rushed shopping (subway's next to the supermarket), dropped everything off at home and then went downtown to meet her at cafe depot - i'm a regular there already :P

coffee and comics were great fun, with a lot of inspirational moments. additionally, she loves my space epic pitch (next project!) and was happy to discover that she knows someone who actually applied for mars one :)

one of the problems she had, and she was embarrassed to tell me this, was that she couldn't read one of the source texts because it's written in middle english. i'd told her that it's not easy, that you have to "relax" your linguistic rules, but while i can do that easily i failed to take into account that i studied literature for two years in addition to my being a poet...

as i'd read in wired that morning: "any communication - is a problem of empathy. you have to imagine yourself in the mind of someone who doesn't know something that you do." that's hard, man. last night i spent a few hours on modernizing the text, and while fcmg responded enthusiastically to the results i'll refrain from publishing it until i've reworked it to a satisfyingly poetic translation. not that it doesn't sound good, but i'd like to maintain the metre and rhyme as much as possible...

after our meeting i returned home to lose more time to once upon a time... omg that series is awesome. the writing is incredible! over the last couple of days i've found myself consistently blown away by the series, and towards the end of the first season (i have two episodes to go) it's become one of my top-rated series of all time. i've actually shouted at an ending for being an evilly clever cliffhanger...

i was eating dinner while watching, and as has become normal over the course of the past week i was eating insanely slowly... we used to laugh at tahoma for eating slowly, but now it's me taking an hour to eat a bowl of salad :(

i was hoping to meet with sagirl who'd just arrived in montreal, but she couldn't get a fix on her plans so i went to vfmp's to play thunderstone instead. we had a great time :)

---sunday:

we enjoyed an epic finish *just* in time for me to catch the bus and metro, and i headed home. there's something magnificently creepy about a parked metro train with the lights off in the middle of the night.

i got home ready for the deepest sleep, but instead woke up soaked in sweat. i dumped the sheet, showered, and spent the next few hours trying out different methods of not overheating. eventually i settled on moving to a cold spot every ten minutes... this has happened every night since, and it's very frustrating.

...

in the morning i had a chat with lipgirl, who wanted to know why i didn't even want to visit israel anymore. i gave a few reasons, but what i didn't say to her - i wrote it out and then deleted it - i'll share here:
it's so hard to deal with the barbarianism and that begins precisely at the point at which you join the line for passport control at ben gurion airport.
...
the psychologist i spoke to prior to my release from the air force warned me to make sure that the terrible things i experienced don't become a great stone around my neck, but no matter how much i made good on my life afterwards each and every negative thing accumulated... it's the country, the government, the lack of national cohesion, not the individual that has brought me to this dark point where i cannot bear the thought of returning.

[continued...]

stressball part i

the last few days - minus yesterday's festivities - have seen me feeling like all of my internal organs are tightly knotted around my sternum. it's mostly to do with work, and facing the realities of my inability to comfortably bring in cash... and that's due to choices i've made, like studying again.
i really hope i don't end up having to compromise.

i began thursday morning at urchin's, having a cup of coffee and then continuing on to lipgirl's. i was on my way home to pick up shoes before heading to work when i decided that breakfast was in order...

---
coffeeholic's owner asked me if i wanted to rent out my apartment to her niece and her boyfriend.

wow! the thought of renting hadn't crossed my mind, and i asked if the amount that lipgirl's landlord wants for the adjoining apartment (almost twice the size of mine) was acceptable: indeed it was. that put me into a bit of a spin; the idea of moving to an area i like, to be neighbours with a girl that i want to see more of and to have more than enough space for myself even if i take in a flatmate (and then i'll be paying much less rent) is only offset by the strangeness of the idea of having other people live in my space...

i must choose. they came to look at the apartment, and seemed really happy with it - of course they did, it's a great apartment :)

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i spent the day playing with flex, coming home for a quick break and to pay the building maintenance fees. on my way out, chc asked me "is it really that hard to live with me?"
geez.

on my blade back to work i was annoyed by a taxi driver who couldn't take his hand off the horn - it began with a cyclist when i was still a ways off, but then he got onto me when i overtook him. i stopped at the end of the road to stare at him until he went past. i hadn't yet moved when a motorbike almost ran me over, shouting "be careful!".

be careful?! of what? i was standing on the side of the road, and i still don't understand why he had to come within inches of me. *shakes head*

my third night back at work, and our system was overloaded - that meant that i finally got to answer calls. i have now met the basic requirements for my return to the company, and all the rest is optional extra ^_^

during the night i was introduced to a free job search site, and aside from playing with that i found myself floundering a bit with the graphics book. i'll be playing with that tonight, i'm sure some practical application will make things clear.

i came home for a quick shower, then walked to meet up with a couple of the party organizers to pick up the weekend's tickets. i was invited upstairs, and a bunch of us spent the next three hours eating and talking and having a very relaxed time.

i arrived home at 4am, pleased that the door had been locked and distraught to find the telly on. it turns out that i have way more than two rules in my apartment -

• lock the door when you leave
• keep the parquet dry
• don't smoke inside
• don't feed the roaches
• try not to waste electricity or water (although that's a general rule, not an apartment one)
• knives sharp side down

are those unreasonable?

i definitely didn't get enough sleep before heading back to lipgirl's to check out the pad - now i'm excited about it. it's definitely big enough! only the shower's not ideal, everything else is great :)
i'd spent three days trying to organize a ride up north - with no luck. that wasn't helping my stress levels :/
i spent a few minutes on lipgirl's pc, trying to make contact and then trying to rent a car. it was too late for that :(

i returned home to find chc in the mood for a fight, and we let everything fly. how strange, then, to end it with seemingly mutual understanding and a hug!

i went to the sportec to meet up with scrapper and co for some frisbee. we had enough time before the others arrived to play for a bit, and then rest on the grass while discussing the issues of the day... mean grass - that itch is one hell of a defense mechanism :P

i was exhausted, and the heat was too much. i played well, but lethargically. i hadn't eaten anything all day... i was fairly certain i'd pass out on my way home. to circumvent that, i picked up a mars bar and a guarana soft drink on the way: not the best of breakfasts.

i made the last bus to herzeliya, unsuccessfully trying to nap on the way. i arrived there too early, so i stopped at a kiosk and bought juice and a beer - it was as i opened it that someone i'd messaged on facebook called me: "do you have a license?"
"yes!"
"okay, then you can come with us. the girls you're with - are they yours? or are you just travelling together?"

*instant suspicion*
i decided that i didn't care if they were arsim, as long as we had a way to get there. i was friendly, we agreed to speak close to midnight, and all was well...

soon afterwards my cousin arrived to buy cigarettes, and i returned with her to the apartment to crash on the sofa. the classical music was a bit loud for me, so i moved to the balcony and lay about appreciating the stunning sunset until kc's grandparents arrived for dinner.

dinner was grand - too much food, and it was all good. for some reason none of us had very big appetites, which was quite a pity, but the conversation was pleasant and the evening in general was very nice.

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time to go. time to head back to tel aviv to catch a ride with our "friend". we took a taxi to the shuttles, then a shuttle to tel aviv. we walked to my place, calling him up on the way to finalize the plans:
"hi! we're back in tel aviv, what time are you thinking of leaving?"
"who is this? what are you talking about?"
"am i speaking to kobi?"
"no."
"okay, well, we're going to the party with him. can i speak to him?"
"he's left already"
"what?!"
"yeah."
"and he left his phone with you?!"
"yeah, but he'll be back in twenty minutes."
*sigh*
"oh! okay, then i'll call back in half an hour."
"you do that"

asshole. we came in to find chc lurking about - after a few minutes of awkward semi-pleasantries, the girls crashed and chc and i had a long argument over whether or not she was justified in her anger with some guy she'd had a fling with. i tried to explain to her how attacking him would cause him to become defensive, and that his angry response was not indicative of him being unreasonable or crazy...

when it dawned on me, after about ten minutes of talking in circles, that she'd been looking to me for confirmation and not some attempt at objectivity, i asked if it would make her feel better if i told her whatever she wanted to hear. a few moments later things calmed down.

humans.

around 1.15am, after sending a message and trying to call twice, i gave up. once again: we had a winner. i sent an SOS to a few of the organizers, and one of them called me back - "how soon can you be in a taxi?"

we scrambled, we took a taxi to the central bus station. we arrived there too late for a regular shuttle, and were almost ready to throw our hands in the air when someone else rocked up and we were enough to make privately renting one feasible. we managed to get from NIS 270 (the regular taxi fee) to 200 (renting the special for three people) to 170 (the new guy dropped our price by thirty; it seems a little unfair, but there's no strength to negotiate at 1.40am). the short ride had us in hadera, and our friend was coming to pick us up ^_^

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