sleep journal entry and post-hosting

i had severe lower back and hip flexor discomfort just before going to bed and had to stretch for quite a while.

i woke up at 6.40am this morning, read stranger in a strange land for a while, then went back to sleep for another hour and a half.

now my back's hurting because mr smear decided he needed some "roughhousing" and i wasn't stretched and ready to chase him around the apartment :P

...

gd posted the following yesterday, based on our experience hosting mr smear's friend the other day:

Many will hate me for this, but IDGAF anymore. I'm starting to wonder about children going through actual clinical burn outs being diagnosed as autistic. I have to ponder this, but after a certain experience I had recently (with a non autistic child in a toxic environment), certain behaviours can very much be mistaken for autism. Burns outs are very real and they don't only affect grown ups.

someone responded with "just because you're autistic doesn't mean you can't also be an asshole."

indeed - but also, just because you're an asshole doesn't mean you can't also be hurting and flailing about, it's a vicious cycle. in this case in particular, i don't care what this child was diagnosed with officially, i think the root cause is a severe lack of boundaries.

and as a parent who took a hell of a long time to learn how to establish boundaries in a healthy way (i'm still learning), i'm not unsympathetic to how hard that can be, especially in a time like now with an overload of awful parenting advice and far too much media and social media influence.

unroutine

 oh. it's 00.28 as i begin writing this. i went to bed about an hour and a half ago, and i've been lying uncomfortably awake for the past half hour or so trying desperately to claw back the unconsciousness. my belly's been doing a thin all evening (again in the evening, again no idea what's triggered it), and my lower back's been doing a thing since i stopped sleeping, and my brain's been doing a thing since...

yesterday (saturday):

i wasn't very productive yesterday, mostly on purpose. i thoroughly enjoyed witnessing mr smear playing battlezone on the PSVR, and i tooled around most of the day arbitrarily, and i enjoyed a good afternoon nap.

in the late afternoon - around 4.30pm - my sister and i dragged mr smear out ("i don't want to go to the beach!") and we walked, in the not-too-unpleasant heat, down to the beachfront golda. after the ice cream break, we walked back up to the hilton beach, and enjoyed a lovely evening; unable to get mr smear out of the water, of course, and dragging his feet to leave the beach :P

after catching an outrageously packed bus home, and showering in turns, gd treated us to a great dinner and we all crashed.

today:

another reasonable night's sleep (only tonight breaks the streak). very reasonable, in fact. my sister left really early again (she went to tour the gaza envelope and see the nova site), mr smear slept in until around 11am and was annoyed that i'd bothered him (twice) because i think he should have some semblance of routine in spite of it being summer holidays.

i began my day on the balcony, then spent my work day in my office. the actual meaningful work i did was minimal, primarily because the people i need to approve my work are either on weekend time or enjoying the fact that nobody's work is properly monitored on sundays.

i burned a ridiculous amount of tokens improving dashboards and making an ai status tool look cleaner.

mr smear and i - and then gd - had a massive fight about music practice*, which eventually resulted in him actually practicing with a good attitude in spite of the emotional rollercoaster and having lost hours of screen time for being disrespectful.

* that he has to put his heart into it, not just get through it. and that he needs to treat it like a rage game.

we side-stepped the punishment by going upstairs to play settlers of catan, mr smear's first encounter with the game.

he enjoyed it!

aside from being vengeful (really just against me) and myself having a pretty rough game, we all had a good time and played pretty well. there was one incident which i still think is hilarious, but awkwardly so: big data's son got confused and thought that his dad had moved the robber to block him and mr smear, when it was actually me. but he was unshakeable, so i piled on against big data, at which point - in spite of my laughing - mr smear got caught up. this went on for a minute or two before i put a stop to it and admitted that it was me, which threw both the kids completely 😂

we got home at roughly the same time my sister did, and soon settled down for dinner. post-dinner i was becoming a bit frustrated with getting mr smear into the bedtime ritual, but i made good progress with the auto-doc project (i'm having a much better experience with codex than claude) and then read alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, which put me to sleep more than him.

higher resolution

 i finally got to bed about half an hour after posting, then woke up with a jolt forty five minutes later from a nightmare in which mr smear had "pranked" me by leaving a bunch of dead insects in my bed, and then ignored me completely and became super defiant while i did everything i could to avoid resorting to violence, which all took place outside a door out of which burst the crazy mom from mr smear's class who was ecstatic to have caught me being aggressive, and taunted me by dancing around and wiggling her bum. i woke up furious with mr smear and having to suppress the urge to rouse him from his slumber and give him a thumping.

when i told him the story in the morning - less than an hour later - he was thoroughly entertained :/

mr smear decided - unsurprisingly - that he's done with the summer camp. the organizer said she'd put in for a refund, which will be immensely helpful.

i worked hard on the auto-doc for the next hour or two, the AI taking so long on one of the activities that i ended up staying home for my daily meeting and only then heading out to the office.

i spent the next few hours manically working on all the things at once, and somehow managing to make good progress on the auto-doc, on my primary data pipeline project, and on the golang service i've been helping out with because it's giving me satisfaction to be doing housekeeping for something that carries quite a load and that's been horribly neglected for so long.

lunchtime with the team i used to be embedded with was cool, i shared my inspirations from yesterday's game dev conference and that triggered some very interesting conversations.

i thought my presentation was scheduled for 2pm, so when 1.50pm rolled around and i had just discovered something broken... that was quite intense and disappointing, but discovering the meeting was actually an hour later was a huge relief! i managed to be ready in time ^_^

i was properly nervous and wired for the presentation, but it went well and i got some decidedly positive and constructive feedback. at first it seemed like my team didn't really get what was happening, by the end they agreed that the value it brings is undeniable and i know what they want me to do to try to encourage adoption.

i had a very short post-presentation break to gather my thoughts, and then i jumped onto a call with my actual boss.

...

once upon a time, when i was in the army, i somehow developed "jeep driver's disease". nobody could think of how that developed, i wasn't able to get the recommended surgery done because my rights to a rehabilitation facility were denied as permanent forcers inexplicably give up their lone soldier status, and i was extremely fortunate that at some point it just went away. when i went to a surgeon to check me out, he put on a rubber glove, and i blurted out, twice, that i was feeling really uncomfortable with the examination.

the second time i said it, he lost his temper and yelled at me: "what, you think *I'M* comfortable with doing this?!!"

i thought about this story on my way to work this morning, and that perhaps i'd start my compensation conversation with my boss with it. in retrospect, i'm rather glad i didn't :P

i began the conversation awkwardly, but i managed to say what i needed to say and it was an enormous relief that he handled it very coolly and matter-of-factly. after explaining the industry situation (which i'm already well familiar with) he inquired as to mine, and he expressed understanding and assured me that he'd consider it. the impression he gave me was that he might acquiesce soon, or possibly in a few months during the annual reviews, either way it feels positive.

...

when i called my mom and gd afterwards to let them know how things had gone, i was shaking a little.

during the day i'd pushed an upgrade to the golang service to get better metrics and make their emission more efficient, and looking at the dashboards and reviewing with AI two things became apparent: the first, that the metrics gave much better insight into the constant crashing that this poor service has been undergoing for the past couple of years. the second, that i made the emission so efficient that the frequency of the crashing increased dramatically 😂🤦‍♂️

so i stayed a bit later than i'd have liked preparing the fix, and then i left the office, arguably in the best spirits i've been in a while.

gd sent mr smear to meet me on the way home and help me with a quick grocery run, and then he helped me take out the recycling, which turned out to include a side-quest of finding a bench to dump unused school books on, and then it was time for dinner. t'was a good dinner, and we resumed watching the simpsons (it's been a while, and the last time i mentioned it was a big, unpleasant day), and then it was shower and bedtime and read a bit of alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear (i starting falling asleep reading about the dormirouse), and i was going to jump into bed but i just had to get all this down first.

preoccupation

 the rest of my afternoon: my sister called, and we had quite a long chat about her plans for her visit, along with some distressing news that during the course of their divorce, her most recent ex-husband made a point of separating her from a bunch of old videos from her childhood.

i managed to get mr smear to play another session of math fluxx, and he was a lot more compliant and we had a lot more fun.

over lots-of-sushi dinner we watched infinity train, and between dinner and bedtime i was a *little* bit constructive vis-à-vis my autodoc side project.

i read some more alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, and then put myself to bed soon after.

...

now it's about two hours later, and i've gotten up after lying awake for a while developing indigestion.

good grief.

slop machines

 the highlight of my work day was coming home for lunch and being present for the transit company reps to evaluate the state of our external-facing windows and doors. it looks like they're going to replace them (or subsidize the replacement), and they were very pleasant about it all. apparently, the construction (whenever it takes place) is expected to last about six months, and shouldn't be noisy at night 🤞

[we're still suffering trauma from 2017]

i moved desks twice, i'm now sitting with the AI specialists - it's nice, but also distracting :P

i spent all day babysitting AIs and PRs. the thing i did that made me feel the most productive was this:

slop machines

oh, yes - and i had to suffer through yet another team presentation that was put together with AI (zero shame about admitting it), from a guy that's going to be in my hackathon team on wednesday. i would feel haughty, but just as i asked him a question my phone rang with an unknown number, and i was on video, and i was so worried about it being urgent that i asked my question, muted myself and answered the phone, and only afterwards registered just how rude that was :/

[i just figured out what the call was about - they finally fixed the uncloseable tap i complained about when we went to the rink]

when i finally did manage to extricate myself from the office, i rushed home and got mr smear onto his rollerblades, and we went out for a spin. HUGE improvement, really exciting stuff! and until he feel in the park we'd both forgotten that he was supposed to be keeping his arm safe... fortunately he landed on his other arm :P

we had a great sushi dinner, watching infinity train, i read some more of alice's adventures in wonderland and then settled down to try and be productive. my intention had been to be productive on my AI harness efforts, but instead i spent about two hours alternating between random shit (and spire-slaying) and babysitting that damned PR.

i really hope i'm done with it for this round. i'm also becoming increasingly aware of the fact that i'm not completely confident that i understand more than just the gist of it, so i guess i'm going to need to address that in the morning. i think i'd be less uncomfortable about the way we're working if we didn't have an entirely artificial deadline looming that management's taking very seriously.

sleep journal entry

sleep journal entry: i had some difficulty falling asleep initially, then suffered a combination of hip flexor distress and general insomnia that lasted most of the night. i was awake when mr smear  came sneaking into our room to take the kindle, i considered shooting out a hand to scare him but he was making such a good effort at trying to be stealthy that i let him think he'd succeeded.

i just finished reading watchmen, it's so full of genius, wit and wisdom and taste and cunning, it truly is a masterpiece.

now i'm free and have just over two weeks remaining to read the graphic novels we borrowed from the library about two weeks ago...

electric pukaloo

 our pre-hackathon talk was interesting, i was grateful that my wife had come home in time to keep me supplied with coffee and for our beanbags which served as both seat and stand.

in the background i was installing local llm models, one of which initialized and was so heavy it killed my computer and it took so long to shut it down (everything was unresponsive, and the audio was jittering) that i had to rejoin the meeting from my personal laptop...

over lunch, gd and i watched the first bit of the ludwig pilot, and it starts off really strong!

i struggled to "wake up", as i mentioned before, and by the time i was (relatively) ready to dive into my work i received a call from one of the juniors - the same jobs had died once again. i found what seemed to be a smoking gun, connected some dots, and it looked like a broken infrastructure upgrade, but later on (after finally wrapping my head around what i'm supposed to be doing) i got another call back to say it wasn't that, but rather a legitimate bug in the code. we hunted it down, and although it did eventually turn out to be the bug, i was mighty suspicious as it's a code path that hasn't been touched since the project inception and the likelihood of it "suddenly" becoming a problem is extremely low.

anyway, i helped out, essentially taking charge, and along with another of his teammates we managed to get it resolved. the boss / my client called me for an update, and once i'd made sure that the junior had it handled i was able to join my family for dinner.

i didn't mention that i'd taken a break earlier to go pick up some stuff from the shops - i made mr smear come out with me on his blades, though i was walking, and he was not in the mood. with that in mind, i think we were both pleasantly surprised by the end of it; not only was i very happy with his progress, but so was he, and he straight-up told me that he was wrong and that i was welcome to lord it over him, and that compared to the hell that is bicycles, rollerblading is heavenly.

so that happened ^_^

i was late to join mr smear and gd for dinner, and i ate arguably more than i needed to, and then mr smear and i ate the oranges i'd picked up earlier. everything was fine until we saw two highly active fruit fly larvae wriggling around the remains of his orange.

he's always had a thing about worms, creepy crawlies in general but worms in particular, and what followed was some serious high drama. and lots of googling to be able to assure him he'd be fine, and then i started feeling uncomfortable so i decided to try and throw up.

any time i successfully throw up "on command" it blows my mind.

anyway, the rest of the evening post emotional-rollercoaster was fine, i read a bit of alice's adventures in wonderland to him at bedtime, and have been slowly gearing down and preparing myself to try and get some sleep since.

jumpy

 in spite of my stress and my lower back (which has been griefing me for quite a few days now in spite of my consistency regarding iron and magnesium supplements), i managed to sleep last night.

i started the day reading more watchmen* (my favorite chapter, where rorschach is caught, also omg my son just read this stuff and i'd forgotten what it included), then sat down at my desk to get productive and realized that my son had left for school having forgotten his sports class shoes. so i jumped to get dressed, caught a bus (traffic lights and bus timing perfect), and dropped off his shoes and grabbed his sandals with literally two minutes to go until the bell rang.

* oh, i totally forgot - on friday evening i discovered a massive collection of books and comics i'd bought over the years from humble bundle, so i've read a couple of battlestar galactica comics (specifically one about time warping into parallel universes) and watched part of a video about the original series, and it's really shed new light on the reboot. i love how it's all canon, while all very different.

i came home and have been struggling to get shit done, though i did managed to put in a claim and complaint for gd's physio sessions.

the tami4 technician arrived, wore his shoes into the kitchen, reconnected the machine and pushed the button. water flowed nicely. it was apparently an "air bubble", and we could have had a slightly easier weekend after all.

i washed the entrance and kitchen floors, and i've made myself a coffee, and in half an hour i have a pre-hackathon meeting. i'm really having trouble getting my head in the game, i hope i "wake up" soon...

homeschooling

 six day war... twelve day war... twelve hour war...

bizarrely, yesterday felt like a return to routine.

שמים את השיגורים בשיגרה 

we put the rocket launches in the routine

mr smear's biggest lesson for the day was helping gd clean the floors; the first half was a nightmare until i got involved, and once it was done we had to have a family meeting and discuss how we help others (mr smear) and how we handle provocations (gd). we then had a bit of a repeat episode when he was supposed to help her with the dishes before dinner prep, but for a different reason, and i found myself explaining to a ten year old techniques for getting off the toilet quickly 🙄

my workday was alright, and ultimately successful. i'm still really behind - way past deadline - but i'm making some progress and certainly learning things along the way. i don't really have a solid mental model for what i'm doing, though, not yet at least, but a big part of that is how uninvested i am personally.

i also "wrote" (AI) a bunch of bash scripts for a CI workflow, and now i'm thinking i really should rewrite them in python...

i got stuck waiting on others in the evening, and mr smear and i took our fluxx collection upstairs to play a couple of games with our upstairs friends. it was fun, but more than that it was intended to be an educational experience for the kids, and as many annoyances as there may have been, overall it went well.

mr smear and i came back downstairs for dinner and macgyver, and gd's mushroom-soup lemonade (she followed the mushroom soup recipe, it's a terrible recipe), and then a hilarious chat with my mom (cemeteries can be dramatic), and then a night of intentionally doing nothing of value.

this morning we woke up (myself a lot more slowly than everyone else), and sent mr smear off to school, and then i read a little bit (a mix of stranger in a strange land and watchmen), and now i've posted this while singing along to synthknot, and now i guess it's time to get moving and go to work.

...

i've been putting off a bunch of preparation work that i need to do for the upcoming hackathon, it's not feeling good. but having published my extension and the related articles, i feel like a weight has fallen off my shoulders.

revolving

 i ended up getting to bed pretty late, which i largely attribute to slay the spire 2.

mr smear's early alarm woke me up, and i had difficulty getting back to sleep. i woke up feeling zombified.

my day began with stranger in a strange land. i really wasn't into it at the beginning, and some of it feels really dated, but i pushed through that to discover that it's by design - as in it's at least somewhat satirical - and that considering the decade it was published in it shows such remarkable cleverness, both in its imagination and in its incredible ability to rewrite human experience from an outsider's point of view. it's also got a really dark feel to it. slow, ponderous, heavy, like watching a film through tv snow.

i had to force myself to put the book down and start my day.

adulting is stressful, especially unnecessary adulting. if i'm paying for additional medical insurance, i shouldn't have to work harder than them to get back money that's supposedly guaranteed.

[my previous ingrowing toenail from ages back is hurting again, suddenly]

i got to work, and found myself blocked waiting for the data team. during the four hours or so that i waited for them to get back to me, i continued to suffer in an infinite AI failure loop, which i tried to utilize as a test for my skill evolution. but when one of the data guys finally got around to me, he didn't agree with my approach and demoralization struck when i realized i might have gone through all that suffering for nothing (i mean, aside from the skill improvement).

...

at this point i received a call from the paybox retention team, who wanted to know why i ditched them and what they could do to make things right. i stood on the balcony, angrily describing their lies and how they've burned any trust i might have had in them, and by the time he heard me out he miserably acknowledged that he couldn't really make things right. then i hung up and went back inside, wondering if the people working near the balcony door had heard me... because i know that they heard me talking to mr smear earlier about why i'm not getting him a spotify subscription, as somebody came up and closed the door and i was quite embarrassed...

...

as we worked through the problem, though, we ended up hitting a wall that could only be resolved with the approach i'd been taking. so that was a relief. and then we ran into another wall, and the two of us split up to investigate alternate options.

i learned something today about connecting databricks to github, i figured out an undocumented way to use both APIs in way they didn't design for and it felt VERY good to see it actually work! it took a while to explain to the data guy how it worked, at which point he agreed that it's clearly the simplest and most correct solution for our use case, and that felt especially good after thursday's talks when i was so out of my depth that i could barely understand their questions, let alone answer them.

...

i came home in fantastic spirits. mr smear argued with me about discussing summer day camp because he already knew what he wanted, at least until he saw what the make camp is offering. we were sad to hear that he and his friend who's going aren't getting along so well - apparently his friend isn't friending much better than before they made up after their fight...

i slugged a 4th coffee in preparation for the night blade, then mr smear and i put on our rollerblades and went to the park and back. firstly, he's getting the hang of tying his laces intellectually, though his fingers are struggling. secondly, it was back to square one, he was very nervous at first, but we got there eventually and the way back was fine.

we came back to find gd with a sharp knife (always scary, and she was right nervous as well) and a delicious sushi dinner, which we ended by dipping unripe apricots into wasabi soy sauce with astoundingly positive results 🤯

i said goodnight to mr smear, then headed out to join the rollerblading group. just before leaving the apartment my neck twinged, and it caused me trouble the whole time i was out. i was already sore halfway to the meetup point, which was kinda sad, and i had to split halfway because i'd been feeling faint for a while.

most of my ride was fun, though it would have been more fun if i hadn't let myself get sucked into a really ugly political argument.

i came home almost in pieces, watched a crazy update from farzad about the coming robotic revolution while eating a second dinner, showered, and now i'm just trying to settle before climbing into bed.

rolling two rocks uphill simultaneously

after a night of being wired and getting very little sleep, yesterday was a bit rough. the first thing i did, after mr smear went to school and i'd already done a little more AI harness work, was head across the road to the supermarket to buy some more containers.

i'm still feeling stupid for having bought one that was clearly broken, and removing the stickers before i noticed.

but the walk itself was nice. the weather was pleasant, and there was a certain... tel avivi something... in the air.

i did another hour or so on the harness, then finally - and unwillingly - sat down to work. i spent the rest of the day doing the dual sisyphean tasks of babysitting PR review / fix loops, each pass trying to update my agentic skills to avoid the next, and each time failing more spectacularly than before. my first omgihavetotakeabreak was spent washing the containers, the second vacuuming the entire apartment*, and the end of the day i was so antsy that i did something i haven't done in years - i got dressed and went for a long walk.

* i asked gd if she knew why i was vacuuming the apartment. "to help me?" she innocently responded. "hell, no!"

i walked up to the park, crossed the river, and stopped to try and get a photo of a really weird, interesting-looking bird that might have been a white-throated kingfisher. then i passed a pond, and noticed a crow and an egyptian goose parked on the side, with another crow sitting on a sign behind them. i walked up a little distance away to join them, as we all watched the pond in the bright sun on its way to setting behind the trees. moments later, what appears to have been a little egret landed right between us, and we all shared a lovely moment together.

i got home feeling a bit better, but still frazzled. we finished watching spaceballs over dinner, mr smear had been really cool all day (he did his chores without complaining, even though it took him a long time), and bedtime was pretty smooth.

gd and i coordinated and i took a photo of the water meter at 9.45pm, and we stopped using any water until i got up at 5.45am to take another photo, and i'm relieved to see that we don't have a leak. unfortunately, though, it made the night a little more stressed than it needed to be and i couldn't get back to sleep after waking up, so 🤷‍♂️

i began my day with a coffee and stranger in a strange land on our balcony, and it's a beautiful day. mr smear gave star birds a try after making the case that he'd gotten up at 6am and taken care of all the things he needed to, so the one-hour-after-brushing-teeth rule applied, and it seems like he's enjoying it.

i've paid our rent, and i've typed all this up, and now i'm going to sit down for breakfast before heading off to pretend to be a professional adult.

his first (bought) wheels

 ye gods, it's been a long and busy day. i woke up tired as usual this morning - though i never napped, even though it was a friday - and i read some more of stranger in a strange land. look, it gets off on the wrong foot, but it becomes apparent (apparently) at some point that the author's writing is about a fictional society with extreme attitudes, as opposed to him simply sharing his opinions. and while it starts off a bit simple, his postmodern understanding and its delivery mechanism become far more interesting.

i spent an hour or so doing another agentic skills evolution (cleaning up the leftovers from yesterday's romp in AI frustration park), finally managed to give away mr smear's old jiujitsu gi's, then let myself be dragged out for a shopping run with gd. it was a fairly successful run, although by the time we got to the last shop i was already over it and feeling decidedly claustrophobic in a store with heavy friday morning traffic and very narrow aisles.

we came home, gd rushed something to eat, and then we bussed to the mall. mr smear was nervous (panicky) about meeting us there, and then ended up in the bizarre situation of being blocked "by nuns" (we think they were muslim women) at his stop and unable to get off, and then laughed at by a shitty bus driver who refused to open the doors again so he had to get off at the next stop and find his way back.

anyway, he made it eventually and in one piece, and by that stage gd and i had had a coffee and enjoyed quite a while watching a guy with his tiny puppy unable to take more than a few steps at a time before being crowded by women who simply couldn't resist the adorableness (not to worry, we encountered them later and couldn't resist either 🤣), and found the two stores we needed.

we began with the sports store, and although it wasn't a simple process, we managed to find mr smear a decent pair of rollerblades and a set of pads that should last him a year or two and the price was considerably less than i'd been worried about.

then we hit the shoe store, and for the first time ever gd had a very smooth process finding and fitting sandals that he didn't fight about. of course, they turned out to cost considerably more than the rollerblades 🤦‍♂️

in any event, great success!

we came home and i made him take his brake off first thing (no arguments, and it was awesome helping him doing it with his own two allen keys). we had a delicious leftover meal, with mr smear and i discovering a) that chrain works really well with shuwarma and rice, and b) that mr smear likes creme soda just as much as i do (i suddenly realized he'd never tasted any before).

things were calm and quiet for a while, i played some slay the spire 2 and watched some stuff, and read some articles, and then it was time for all of us to sort out the kitchen, which involved a hell of a lot of dishwasher unloading and loading, and washing the big stuff, and then washing All The Containers that i've purchased over the past few days. some of it was fine, but mr smear wasn't cooperating very well (his idea of helping and ours...) and at some point i properly lost my temper.

for a while after that, i was angry with him, and embarrassed for losing my temper, and frustrated that i'd yelled so loudly that i hurt my throat :/

anyway, things calmed down eventually and we got through it, and the challah-peño is in the oven and smells great even though it was hard to work with, and mr smear and i have showered, and i've had a generous shot of rum, and i think the world is kind of okay right now.

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.

burning down

 i'm replaying today over and over, and no matter which way i turn things over, i'm in shit. and it's absolutely my fault, regardless of context.

there's something magical about the accumulation of various anxieties and stresses, and bad decisions made under high pressure, and now i've just broken the cardinal rule of my employer by grossly misjudging my time estimates and having to ask my client for an extension, which i'm praying i won't need. this is literally me praying for a miracle, and lots of extra hours.

but my life doesn't allow for focusing. that's not how things go.

i spent most of my hours today laser focused, in high gear, generating reams and reams of code and then reviewing it with a fine-toothed comb to make sure i didn't miss anything with my own eyes. with one agent doing a fix-and-detect cycle, and another ensuring that the first agent's changes still fit into the grand scheme of things, a task that i thought would be quick and easy and had scheduled for sunday evening past, i finally completed its first subtask after 6pm on wednesday.

and this is just the prep-work so that i can get into the real stuff.

...

gd's toe's looking and feeling much better, so much so that she decided not to see the surgeon today. let's hope it keeps getting better 🤞

...

mr smear had a good day today, although he's already doing his usual thing of latching on to any bad memory he can grab hold of and ditching the fun parts. his class went on their annual hike, a proper tour through the cave system at beit guvrin, and from the photographic evidence it seems like he had a good time in spite of himself.

...

i started my day today reading a bit more of stranger in a strange land. so far, it has not aged well. i'm now ending my day trying to make some progress on my AI harness, or climbing into bed at the earliest opportunity. i actually slept pretty well last night, which was amazing, and shocking too. but my lower back / hips were doing their thing all damned day instead, and i'm nervous about what tonight might bring. at least i was able to shower without triggering hell's itch again. i think i'm starting to peel now...

a lazy afternoon

 we took a taxi to the clinic, getting out early because the road was blocked and almost having an incident with a street cleaner. i decided to try reading stranger in a strange land while we waited, and was very busy nodding off just as gd was called in to see the nurse.

the nurse was very sweet and helpful, but the most helpful thing she did was inform us that her daughter had recently gone through a similar thing with a toe and the local anaesthetic hadn't helped in the slightest. so i looked it up when we got home, and discovered that it really is a thing, and i know what to suggest to the surgeon next time we encounter him.

after we got home i spent some time fiddling about with an ai side project (it's building right now) and learning about some more devious google nonsense, which introduced me to helium: i'm trying it out right now, so far, so good. i played an act of slay the spire 2, tried to nap (but didn't get in more than five minutes), and after mr smear got home i went out to do some shopping, which turned out to be quite a mission.

i'm tired, but i can't decide whether to lie down or drink one of the beers we bought for lag ba'omer. not because i particularly want one, but because it's hard not to have one just because i keep seeing them whenever i walk through the kitchen.

...

when he's not doing his homework, mr smear's been playing minecraft with stabbity-stab-stab, which is how gd and i have been calling his classmate who allegedly threatened another friend with a knife. and they're still friends. so either someone's lying, or everyone's mad.

...

i've been listening to if pink floyd played the entire ocarina of time soundtrack today, and it's amazing.

a calm before the farewell

my mom and i caught a bus to azrieli, we picked up a couple of things and then moved on to try and meet up with the mongoose. we got off the bus at dizengof center, walked up to the square to pick up a coffee, then walked all the way back to the square to meet up with the mongoose, only to end up having to leave again to meet him on the way back to the square again :P

at least we managed to see the baby and deliver her gift! the catch up was quick, and then we were off to do some last-minute shopping before coming home for the afternoon.

gd wasn't able to go anyway - isn't able to go anywhere, with her toe being so bad - so my mom, mr smear and i walked to an unfamiliar synagogue (relatively) nearby.

at least i wore pants and not shorts? i was hands-down the least appropriately-dressed there, everyone else was in white button shirts. the liturgy and nusach were familiar from my youth, and it was really nice not only to have a shared singing experience but to hear mr smear singing along as well :)

for mr smear, his reaction to the baby right behind us and the woman with tourette's on the other side of the mechitza was (relative, for him) admirable, my mother seemed comfortable enough from her side, and although i did feel like an outsider it was overall a good shul experience.

i'm not sure how gd would handle it, though. she's softened on the sitting separately thing, but i think she'd find following along a bit tough with her own marked siddur (she wouldn't be the only one) and i think the biggest obstacle is how far away it is.

kiddush and dinner were quite late, but both were lovely. even though my mom's been here for two friday nights, this was the only one where it was just us doing it our way, together as opposed to on a video call.

we were all pretty tired last night, but to keep things interesting my mom started getting sick and we have to take her to the airport in less than half an hour... FFS.

and gd's toe is only getting worse...

and mr smear still not 100%...

i just finished reading starship troopers:

"Controversial". I've read some suggestions as to why it may have been called controversial. I'd heard many times before how one of my favorite movies was intended to be satirical, and failed.

I've also served in the military, and am living through a crisis in the west where the people yelling loudest "for" democracy and "against" fascism have no idea that they've succumbed to communist, terrorist propaganda and are, in fact, begging for the opposite.

With that in mind, there's nothing "controversial" being peddled in this book. What is in this book is a phenomenally accurate depiction of military service, warts-and-all, a compelling notion of civic duty, and - barring one technically heavy pre-battle scene - it's a thrilling glimpse into what galactic war could be like.

...

someone proferred the name of the 2D side-scrolling aerial combat video game where you battle waves of enemies and shoot down ducks in between levels that we used to play on the ps3: minisquadron!

sleep journal entry

 the extra coffee was really strong, i was tired but had a lot of trouble actually sleeping for the first few hours. i didn't have trouble with discomfort, though. after getting up, drinking a decaf and reading starship troopers, i napped hard on the couch for most of an hour and just got up to write this down and start being functional.

mr smear had a better night, though he's not quite ready to go back to school (and certainly not be near any newborns). gd woke up with her toe in a lot of pain.

sleep journal entry

 i watched a couple of youtube videos, then played slay the spire 2 until 1.30am (i feel like i might finally on a winning run with the necrobinder, but i'll probably get my ass kicked by a regular monster soon).

between my brief wake up just after 3am and my alarm going off at 6.30am, my hip discomfort returned. the hour and a half i spent trying to get back to sleep was disturbed my son being loudly sick and lower back pain. all-in-all, it wasn't a great night.

i've just had my coffee while reading more starship troopers (it's always an experience reading something that gets the army), gd's just informed me that our balcony door is going to need replacing soon and my stress levels just spiked.

my only real, personal plans today are to build ikea furniture that's been sitting around. or do whatever my mom wants to do, and be sad that she's leaving this weekend already. not only is it great spending time with her, but in spite of the rare friction she really does make our lives easier even when she's just hanging around.

it's difficult to wage war on reality...

 ... because reality always has the home team advantage.

it's been a long day, but not unpleasant - bar the lower back / hip issues that usually plague me at night, which today, after leaving me in peace last night, came back with a vengeance and harried me all afternoon.

i generated a comic this morning that i'm pleased with, and another one this evening that i'm somewhat pleased with.

i arrived at work a minute late for my team's daily, and i regaled them with the tale i'd been planning on telling our manager, with which they could all identify. i very fortunately was able to keep my head down and work hard today, and ask the right questions, and by the time i had my meeting with my manager i not only had real progress to report, but also additional information that i'd luckily stumbled upon that made the required business decisions much clearer.

it's a mess, but it's clearly a mess, and my manager understands why i've been struggled and what our options are. i took full responsibility for "falling in the bin", as we say in hebrew, by being caught out again following documentation and paying attention to what other developers and managers say. the saddest part is that aside from getting through my own poor AI usage, the architecture, the data and the code are all completely misaligned.

i guess if there's one thing to be grateful for - assuming they like me and don't terminate my contract before i do - it's that this is one hell of a training ground for learning to work with AI when the stakes are low and the state of the entire organization's a complete disaster with or without me :P

my mother took our hypochondriac mr smear to the museum today, though he was "too sick"to go to the museum she wanted to go to (but managed to walk a while after they got lost on the way there). he just did a RAT and it came out conclusively negative, he spent a good chunk of his time before bed trying to convince us that the control line showing clearly means he's done for 🤣

my neck's been giving me trouble, i'm hoping my time with the massager makes a positive difference. it certainly feels good, at least.

dinner was great, progress with starship troopers was great, bedtime was particularly great - not just laughing at the colour of magic, but segwaying into a talk about sacrifice, cain and abel, and the value of the old testament (and our mission as a people to carry it into eternity, just like shakespeare's sonnets).

and now, physically and psychologically, i'm about ready for bed. which means another couple of hours of reading, gaming, possibly torturing myself by watching the news for the first time in at least a few days.

sleep journal entry

 i made a point of staying up late* even though i was really tired. i took an iron supplement during the day, skipped the magnesium. during the night i experienced intrusive thoughts and hip discomfort, though not particularly intense.

* some development, and another failed run of slay the spire 2

i was traumatized by mr smear's alarm going off in our room at top volume, i was dreaming and the dream exploded into a nightmare of violated anger, with no recollection. so that's how i woke up. i combined my morning coffee with some starship troopers to calm down. it captures the concepts and atmosphere of basic training superbly.

and then i sat down to take care of the usual morning admin stuff and received an email that i'm being fined for traveling in a public transport lane even though i'd returned the car prior to the incident being recorded. dammit.

it feels weird to be going into the office today.