charging cycles

 these "two days off" are surprisingly good, and destabilizing, at the same time. and they're only really "off" from my client work...

...

yesterday started with some very positive, encouraging news: sfs sent me a video demonstration of what he's been working on, and it's really cool! it's also pushed him to do all the kinds of things that our employer wants us to be doing, and then to top it all off he informed me that he's not only excited about that, but about his kid (who's mr smear's age) being late for school because he was so invested in putting in the work on the game he's developing ^_^

...

yesterday was heavy on the extension effort, while at the same time involving a fair amount of admin. mostly healthcare stuff, like making an appointment for a consultation for the surgical removal of something that i think i was supposed to book half a year ago, and that i could only get a booking for february for...

i did take a serious, half-hour nap yesterday morning. that was nice.

at one point i took a cup of coffee and my laptop to the park for half an hour of working on a bench in a pleasant, green space. i was visited by a crow, and i was amused by a very sweet toddler learning to walk and play with a ball at the same time.

i had a short overlap at home with mr smear, and i explained to him that gd needed his help even more than usual so he needed to be more cooperative and proactive than usual. unfortunately, that fell on deaf ears and i understand that gd had to lose her temper and threaten him with punishments to get him to do his chores...

our class yesterday evening was good, although i was upset by two women sitting on either side of me who had coughs that clearly deserved to stay home and join over zoom :/

one of them walked to the train station with sfs and me [posting interrupted for a long call with mr smear's teacher, his behavior is making all our heads spin but i think the trajectory is okay] and i was embarrassed when she mentioned her kids and i realized i'd been so busy talking about mine that it never occurred to me to ask :P

i got home, ate, read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, then sat down to explore payment integrations. this is my life now 🙄

today so far:

i slept relatively well, and woke up to my wife freaking out about the "monstrous" field cricket on our balcony. poor think didn't move very fast, so i wonder if it was poisoned or something. my main focus this morning was revising my AWS / CDK skills after an agent dropped the ball on an architecture design, and i don't quite recall what else i did before i headed out to the museum to meet up with arnavot (a play on the name of an old friend scr and i worked with at the university), and we ended up talking for two hours before i realized i had stuff that needed doing. it was really interesting, and we're very much aligned on all sorts of big topics.

i picked up the second books of akira and kick-ass from the comics library, feeling silly for forgetting to return stuff, and then stopped by the pharmacy to awkward cut the queue to find out if gd would be able to pick up next month's prescription early (no). then i walked past a homeless guy deliberately lying across the entire sidewalk to catch a bus home, and on the way we got stuck in traffic and the girl driving alongside us was literally doomscrolling while driving. guess which one of those two i consider the bigger asshole.

my employer posted today about my AI specs library on their linkedin page, i'm feeling quite flattered ^_^

mr smear's hand-drawing is out of control. the teacher sent me a photo, i told her to explain to him that just like with the daily record, there will be consequences for not listening to his teachers. and then, against my better judgement but with gd's encouragement, i added "it does look pretty cool, though" 😂

i had a large lunch, i've made a little progress on my payment integration (in spite of the phone call and constant sirens and honking from the highway), and am now gearing up for mr smear's arrival (family meeting time) and then catching up with firefighter a bit later.

haphazard

 my tongue hurts, because i bit it. like, i managed to bite myself in the center of my tongue, somehow. it hurts.

i'm so tired, that i just crashed on the couch for ten / fifteen minutes. after having had a fourth cup of coffee earlier.

my wife - who's dressed up as a dark elf - just posted about how i called her the fairy fart-mother, i don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed.

mr smear and i played through a fair amount of day of the tentacle before dinner. good times.

i read through quite a bit of hellsing this morning. i'm enjoying it, but i kinda get why gd got bored.

sfs contacted me this morning, after our recent interactions he's finally started diving into game development and he's doing something so crazy that i don't have a clue what his descriptions mean... but it looks like he's about to embark on one heck of a journey and i'm really glad to have been able to get him to take the first steps ^_^

i let him play a bit of moon sweepers, after i gave it a try this morning. i can see the attraction (nystire gifted me a copy, i think he's trying to test my resolve on my side projects :P), but i wanna get stuff done. later i watched my son take it in a whole other direction by drawing in the moon sand instead of clearing it.

i spent a lot of time make improvements to my chrome extension, but went down a re-architecture rabbit-hole with codex's terra model that astra has spent the past 1.5+ hours digging me out of. i feel like we're all learning stuff together. at least, i hope that's what's happening.

i had a chat with my mom earlier (we weren't able to connect properly at kiddush time because she and krybabie's mother were out for a walk on the mouille point promenade), she broke down what happened at her apartment building's AGM last night after she's been working her ass off for the past half a year to a year to extricate herself from the board: the majority of apartment owners are idiots according to carlo cipolla’s behavioral matrix.

they voted off the three guys who've been doing good work because "they're too controlling", and between them and my mom's efforts over the years the apartments are currently valued pretty highly. i suggested to my mother that now seems like a good time to bail, and was both surprised and relieved to learn that she agreed.

if she sells, that's going to remove what is possibly the largest obstacle to her picking up sticks and joining us over here.

we're about to head off to tahoma's for their annual halloween party, for which i don't have anything to wear. we're leaving mr smear home alone, after having checked with our upstairs friends that they're okay with being leaned on in an emergency, and i think he's as excited for the home alone time as we are for the adults-only time :)

not-so-free will

i think i slept alright. the eczema seems to be calming down. i started my day reading a bit of hellsing on the balcony.

then i jumped into work, right after realizing that today was the last day i can use my monthly food allowance and we hadn't spent any of it yet.

i ran the test, it went well. i needed help from my buddy, and only understood - after being quite a nudnik - that i'd missed her message to the team earlier in the morning to say that her daughter was sick and she didn't have much bandwidth 🤦‍♂️

i felt awful, and i apologized profusely...

i spent the next few hours re-evaluating the work i'd planned... or that my AI agents had planned... by the time i'd figured out my next steps, it was time to do a grocery run with gd to use up as much of the allowance as we could, on stuff we actually need. i honestly felt a bit sick, and tired, about halfway through the shopping experience. it could have been worse, i guess, but i just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

i got home, had two carrots with some hummus, and was about to do the thing i'd told my team lead i was going to do when an upstairs neighbor began heavy drilling. i had less than an hour to go until my meeting with my mentor, and if i'd done the thing the team lead wanted i'd have been stuck at home with construction site noises, which left me no choice.

i sent a message to the neighbor group, explaining how some of us work from home and doing any kind of construction without prior warning is inconsiderate (how do people still not understand this?!), then packed my bags and rushed out to catch a bus to my employer's office.

i had a little bit of time to spare to Do The Thing, and my mentor ended up being five minutes late, so i managed to pull the trigger before our meeting got started. of course, i ran into yet another surprising bug...

the roadmap meeting with my mentor was very positive. the feedback from him, and from my current client, was the same as my self-diagnosis two weeks ago: ironically, he informed me that while it's critical to focus and effectively communicate how focused i am at work, he believes that my lack of focus is one of the reasons why i'm doing as well as i am in so many different ways.

can those two things be true at the same time?

when he got to the point of asking me which technologies i wanted to focus on, i immediately thought of what i need to get my number one main personal side project i'm now working on to succeed, networking and security, but even as i said the words i was nervous about biting off more than i can chew. which, if i think about it, is kind of the point of this whole roadmap exercise, so...

i had some time before my evening course class began to do some more investigating, report to the team lead and work on a solution, all the while talking to coworkers / async game jammers, and a dutch coworker, and two guys who are essentially using our offices as a coworking space.

the class was full of useful information, but it started so slowly and with such basic material that by the time the good stuff came up i'd already checked out. i spent most of the class evolving my agentic skills, understanding that i've been dealing with a wild array of conflicting guidance, and a lot of the skill cleanup was being done by conflicting skills that weren't aligned with what i'd just corrected... so i had to figure out a solution for that, too.

i walked out with sfs and another guy who seems interested in joining our asynchronous game jam, and then split from them to go to the supermarket and try to spend the remaining hundred shekels. i got to the self checkout with a heavy load that i'd estimated would just about reach the limit, only to discover, after passing everything through that there were a couple of significant discounts! fortunately, the place was practically empty so i rushed to the dried fruits area and picked up some healthy snacks, which did the trick.

i waited a few minutes at the bus stop, and there were a few of us frantically trying to wave the next bus down as he skipped our stop entirely. i reported the fucker. at least the second bus stopped, and in retrospect it was actually a better route for me :P

i got home to a delicious meal - gd has outdone herself with her salads, and whatever it is she's doing with the potatoes - and we had a chat with my mom before putting mr smear to bed. mr smear didn't have such a great school day today; nothing dramatic, but his behavior wasn't good enough to earn him screen time. we talked a little about it at bedtime, and then about the girls in his class doing tiktok videos 🙄, and then i said goodnight and hit the shower.

he'd already gone to bed, so i had to keep my anger over his gouging the soap and leaving me with practically nothing to myself :/

i sat down at my work machine and continued with the skill evolution, which took me until almost midnight to get through... but i think i'm happy with it, and i'm hoping it's going to make a real difference to both my work environments ✌️

i'm so fucking tired now. i can't believe it's the weekend. even less that it's a long weekend, because my client gives everyone a mandatory two days off every quarter. that's pretty cool.

jackals and mechs

yesterday:

we got up early, with gd having had another (as usual) rough night and being too out of it to join us. i've had a week or two of reasonably good nights - the caffeine trouble on sunday night notwithstanding - and i'm honestly finding it a little disorientating.

i had an amazing idea for a game while drinking my coffee [which i really should have been working on today].

we left at 7.30, walked to the supermarket, and found what we needed for the class picnic on our first try, so we headed straight from there to the park. with most of an hour and a half to spare, we walked instead of taking the bus, so i got in most of my day's steps in by the time we arrived, half an hour early.

firstly, my body didn't take that well and i was tired and sore by the time we arrived.

but secondly, the walk gave us plenty of time to have a real conversation, which was a fun dive into evolution and epigenetics, triggered by the sudden enthusiasm for darwin awards, probably precipitated by dumb ways to die.

before we arrived, we passed a jackal just chilling by the side of the path, minding its own business and unconcerned about ours. after a little while we walked up to some fields to watch the sprinklers and marvel at the architecture of one of the tall buildings nearby, and another (i assume) jackal trotted past and flopped down in the shade of a tree.

as we walked off the large patch of grass we'd been standing on, the sprinklers turned on and we narrowly avoided getting soaked!

there was some awkwardness at the picnic. mr smear's lice friend is sporting a short haircut, which i assume is related. i chatted with some parents i have no relationship with about not much, but at least a few of the others and i had things in common to discuss so it wasn't all bad.

with one of mr smear's friends' parents, i gave a scary recommendation to watch rick & morty so that they know what kinds of talk to have with their son... on the other side, though, i told the dad about what i'm trying to do, and described the game idea i'd come up with earlier, and a bit later he caught me to say that (after giving it some thought) it really was a great idea ^_^

mr smear made himself two rolls, and we snuck a cup from another class table (because none of us had brought any) so we could have a little to drink, we did a round to see school activities (some of the kids were dancing, some were playing really good music), and then we crossed the road to catch a bus home.

i made myself an iced coffee, and then the three of us headed to our new favorite supermarket for the weekend groceries. i was sooooo tired...

[stops to make another coffee, just writing about this is exhausting]

during the remainder of the afternoon, mr smear and i watched three more episodes of evangelion, and then i put quite a lot of time into generating images for a video for my spoken word piece, preacher. preacher is a piece that i have a very powerful memory of from performing it - it was getting a decent response (this was at divan orange sometime in 2013) and i was very proud of it, but about halfway through something special happened: one of the audience members got so caught up in it they literally yelled "YEEEEAHH!!!" and that's one of those magical moments when you feel you've elicited the response you wanted, even if there's delicious irony in the part that got the response being something that the poem is essentially ridiculing.

[goddamn, the lemon pie soya yoghurt is delicious]

we then made kiddush and had dinner while video-chatting with my mom, gd made an amazing sauce for the gnocci and the challah-peño not only came out great, but complimented it really well. in addition to the kiddush wine, i'd had a cherry beer that's 8% alcohol, and i was tipsy. the rest of the evening was basically me briefly passing out on the couch, then getting up to do a half-assed job of wrapping the remaining challah and brushing my teeth and dragging myself into bed.

today:

i slept alright. i began my day with evangelion - honestly, the manga is better than the series, but it's a shame to experience them as an either/or - and then i dived back in to the preacher video. omg that took a lot of work, and after pouring quite a lot of energy into it i gave up trying to improve the audio quality. i used audacity, but really, all the non-professional tools with non-professional experience just suck.

once i was done, mr smear and i watched another three episodes, and now i'm getting this all down and potentially doing something constructive before taking mr smear outside.

apparently this is the last week of summery weather for a while?

the week is over

 today was pretty exhausting, and i'm probably going to go to bed soon. the work day was slow, and a part of it was due to the same cause i noticed yesterday... my AI agents were running full regression tests for practically everything, and i had to go through multiple iterations of instructions and skill tweaking to get it to stop.

i didn't feel good about the day of client's work went. not for the quality of the work, not for the quantity of the work.

...

i started the day with more evangelion (book 2), and i'm excited to see the episodes again. i took care of some admin, mostly paying bills, and then it was work, work, work until it was time to leave for my evening class.

i already know a lot of the stuff from the course i did at the end of last year, but there are interesting things i've picked up nonetheless. and it was an opportunity to play-test the daily challenges i've added to my sudoku. and i had an important couple of conversations with my coworker who's working two (or more) jobs...

mr smear had a good day, meaning that he enjoyed it and also that he behaved well enough to earn screen time. also, his "homework" involved shading techniques that turned out amazing. *and* he used a whole lot more of the page than he usually does ^_^

right, the only thing of real value i've done tonight has been building a scraper and a wrapper website for the darwin awards to make it navigable so that i can read them to mr smear :P

negative, i am a meat proxy

 i guess today wasn't great? from a work perspective, at least. i mean, i'm learning a lot and things are moving, but i missed my deadline and that doesn't feel good :/

i read some more evangelion this morning, asuka and shinji fighting together was really fun :)

i made some design progress on the game i'm working on, and put the finishing touches on daily challenges in my sudoku game. i'm really pleased with how it's feeling, and i've made design choices i'm proud of, some of which i think are leveling me up all-round.

as i arrived at the office, i received a phone call from someone from the transport authority, who assured me that we haven't fallen through the cracks and agreed that if we can get power of attorney from our landlord they'll have no problem interfacing with us instead. so that's a huge relief.

after lunch (which was preceded by a too-long group meeting followed by a rush on the toilets), i spoke to the coordinator for the arts track. over the course of the next twenty minutes, i managed to walk her through mr smear's story, why his behavior is understandable, and how we all need to deal with the situation. she was understanding and appears to be on board. immediately after we finished talking, she sent me an update from today's art class teacher who reported a dramatic improvement since he faced an actual consequence yesterday, and it was an enormous, validating relief.

i made the mistake of eating a "go" vegan yoghurt, and i'm now convinced that it upsets my stomach. i have to check its ingredients to see if i can figure out what, but i'm definitely not eating it again.

i applied for the license renewal on monday, and it was authorized and sent today! i'm still in delighted shock, that's another weight off our shoulders (and money in our pockets).

ironically, the money we save will go directly to paying the next person who contacted me. in may, we were asked to reach out to an psychology clinic to manage mr smear's inappropriate behaviors. in june, i asked for intervention by the school councillor because they weren't reachable. just over a month ago they finally contacted me and asked us to fill out forms. this evening they called to get a description, and direct us to one of their therapists. so i guess things are actually moving now...

i took mr smear to the park to play frisbee, though it was a bit dark and less fun. on the way home we had a serious talk about the stuff that's been going on, and i explained to him that our main focus right now is teaching him discipline, and that him doing stuff he doesn't want to is really the whole point of the exercises we're going to be giving him (specifically in art and music).

dinner and a weird episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins, and then getting mr smear into bed (still reading the light fantastic), and then having a long conversation with my sister, who i think might be struggling more than we are...

it's too late and i'm too tired to do anything functional, so i'm going to just chill a little and go to bed and try to get stuff done in the morning.

all in all, today was a pretty good day.

...

stupid thoughts for the day:

marching to the beat of someone else's drum

 i slept pretty well. i got up and sat outside (wearing a shirt, it's getting colder) with my coffee and starting to read the second evangelion book, a harsh reminder of how distasteful asuka's character can be. we sent mr smear off to school fully loaded with all the books he was supposed to have taken weeks ago, along with our usual recommendations to be a good student.

i sent a message to the woman i spoke to a while back about educational game dev, hoping for some advice on moving forward seriously...

i don't recall what i spent the rest of my home-time doing or working on, but i do remember suddenly realizing that i was late for leaving for the office.

the first thing i did was meet up with my officer's course friend - let's call him "hobbyist" - who gifted me a freaking awesome purple tentacle that's glow-in-the-dark and turns pink when heated!

it's so cool!!

then i joined my team for breakfast, they ate bourekas and i had stuffed vine leaves, which were pretty good. then we worked for an hour or so before heading out to our team activity.

i honestly expected our "drum lesson" to be sitting around in a circle with bongo drums or something, not a room full of proper drum kits (dampened) and a serious hour-long introductory lesson in which we got to practice the fundamentals - we had a really good time! drumming is awesome ^_^

from there we went to lunch at a restaurant in midtown. to be fair, the restaurant experience and its food left much to be desired, but the experience overall was nice. it would have been nicer if gd hadn't called me to deal with a school incident that not only wasn't urgent, but that i wouldn't be able to do anything about until i got home anyway.

so that kinda brought me down. never a dull fucking moment.

eventually we returned to the office - a few of us, at least - and i did a sprint to try and complete as much as possible before due-date, which is technically tomorrow, but it looks like the customer's fumbled something so i might have some reprieve.

i'm a little concerned that my team lead thinks that what my agent uncovered might be pure hallucination, so i have some early morning research to do tomorrow...

i came home and interrogated my son, grilling him for the details before the other kid threatened him with a glue gun. seemingly armed with facts, i messaged his teacher who quickly called me back, and explained what happened. one of the things we discussed was how ridiculous we both find it that mr smear still doesn't know his teachers' names, so she had to investigate... he figured it out about the same time she did, though. when she called me back, it was to inform me that mr smear hadn't told the whole story, but that they were taking his report seriously and promised to keep an eye on both of them.

also, that i can expect a call tomorrow from the head of the art stream, because as apparent as his talent may be, he's just not putting in the work 🙄 🤦‍♂️

god help us.

we got through the evening [i just realized i forgot to call my mom so that mr smear could say goodnight :( ] and i've spent the last while working on my sudoku game, which i guess can technically be considered warming up for the bigger stuff? probably not.

retrograde

i just read the disease of optionality: why smart people stay poor before dinner, i'm in that article and i don't like it. i've been saying for a long time that i'm constantly working on a million things at once, and this article has made me realize i need to stop and focus. especially now, this couldn't have been a more timely intervention.

...

emotionally, today was rough. i'm a mess. but in retrospect it was nonetheless a pretty good shabbat. i finished writing up an article on using AI to build models in freecad and blender, even though i'm not thrilled by how my print model came out.

then we headed out in the rain - with our broken umbrellas from last winter - to meet with a friend from cape town who's here on a program for a couple of weeks. she brought mr smear watercolors and a really good quality sketch book, which he showed genuine gratitude for, and we talked non-stop until she had to go, and gd had consumed too much caffeine :P

after we got home, ate breakfast and relaxed for a bit, mr smear - with a lot of patient harassment - helped me wash the floors, after which we sat down to watch akira.

the movie is not the same as the manga. there's a scene where one of the girls is "lightly" violated, and holy shit, we had to have a talk about what we'd just seen. the violence is intense, but after total recall, well... 🤷‍♂️

i took mr smear out to throw the frisbee again, and it was a fantastic opportunity to talk about some serious stuff; afterwards, we took our now "traditional" little walk over the bridge and around to return home, and mr smear confided in me that he doesn't know how to process the fact that as anti-sport as he is, he's enjoying rollerblading and frisbee 🥹

while doing a bit of cloud-watching, he also came up with something inappropriate that made me feel bad for laughing, so i made a meme of it (which he's not happy about, he doesn't like my concept for his joke nor the fact that i used AI to generate it):

anyway, i made a model of it, perhaps he'll be able to do something with it:

after showering, we watched the wonder years over dinner, and every episode just amazes me more and more that something of this calibre and this educational value ever made it on air for so long. it's magic.

we chatted with my mom, and then i read a little bit more of the light fantastic to mr smear, who called me a "weenie" because i started falling asleep while reading again :P

...

right now i'm not sure if i'm clearing my desk, thinking about focusing, or going to bed.

friction and the not-quite-nigerian scam

 today was messy. i slept pretty well, and loved reading some more of akira before screen time.

i'm really struggling with my various side projects, not only to make time to work on them, but to find mental bandwidth. add to that the stress of having paid the larger amount which adds pressure to make good use of it, and i'm... doing... great...

i fired off an email to gd's pain doctor regarding prescribed doses, and i'm hoping we don't have to go see him in person 🤞

the work day was long, and difficult. it felt like every round of PR reviewing and updating was backfiring worse than the round before, and it was only in the afternoon, having pitched my setup to one of my team, that i learned that my AI tooling setup was ignoring something critical that really could have made all the difference :/

so as much progress as i felt i was making yesterday, today i felt like i'd hit a wall.

the only positive work day experience was a tech circle meeting in which i actually was able to contribute. that was a huge relief.

...

a while back i received an offer of assistance with tax refunds, and this morning i responded. the guy called me up, and asked for a whole lot of my personal details, and i was starting to wonder if i was being scammed when he divulged that he's actually nigerian... nigerian iraqi, living up north, and according to everything i've seen his business is legit. but. he takes enormous percentages from his clients, so i'm trying to find someone whose terms and conditions are a little less unreasonable.

...

back and forth with the air conditioner guy, and this evening he was saying "it would only take ten minutes", and i suddenly realized we were not talking about the same thing. he then spoke to our landlord, and then the landlord sent me a flurry of upset messages because he's having a hard time financially too and he was not expecting such a huge cost, and he's (understandably) pissed off that he paid a lot of money for a mold clean that didn't clean all the mold.

...

mr smear went to a friend's after school today, which he said was a super-short visit and that most of their time together had been spent on the bus there, awkwardly not really speaking.

kids these days.

gd and i had to threaten him with pretty severe punishments to get him to finish his book report, but he did do it, and he did a really good job.

then it was dinner time, gd having celebrated us getting our stove back, with four hot sauces and two episodes of evangelion. it was a good dinner.

after showering and brushing teeth, i read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, then sat down in front of my computer to poke the AI and do not much of value.

now i'm drinking my last tea and planning on climbing into bed.

momentum

 whatever else is going on, i woke up feeling better this morning. i started my day reading akira, the artwork is stunning and the story is... a bit different from what i remember from the movie, but i haven't seen the movie in forever so...

i began my functional day ordering hand-vacuum filters off of ali express, and unboxing the reflective straps i picked up yesterday. we found our sharpies, but then i discovered that sharpies and white-out don't mix, and then gd realized that she could mix up acrylic paint and did an excellent job of color-matching on our bathroom tiles 👍

[pausing to go and watch gd eating sunflower seeds, i was honestly convinced that she was somehow doing it wrong and now i'm trying to figure out how i've never seen her eating them before]

i walked to work a little anxiously, expecting another cyclist/motorcyclist incident in the walkway and identifying more with the poor old guy who was so angry about it a couple of weeks ago.

there were no signs, nothing indicating that there was a problem with the road i normally cross to get into the office, and i splashed down into what was either mud, or cement, and it went into my sandals.

i - was - pissed.

i tried not to track whatever it was into the office, which was nigh impossible, and found myself awkwardly and embarrassingly standing on a bunch of paper towels while washing my sandals off in the bathroom sink. not the greatest start to the workday.

work itself was fine, though. i made progress, and am feeling a bit of momentum, i had a pleasant roadmap meeting with my mentor, lunch was good (my onboarding buddy and i had a long chat about the differences in professional culture and work/life balance between the big companies), and i'm feeling pretty solid about my dev setup and the task i'm doing.

oh, and i had coffee with my old friend from the officer's course, and learned that's he's doing really cool hobbyist stuff with home automation and 3D printing. like, really cool stuff.

...

i received a call from the medical cannabis people, apparently there isn't an issue with gd getting a larger quantity per month. i really, really hope that's true 🤞

...

it sucked that the air conditioner guy couldn't make it this afternoon - or tomorrow, either - but it did give me the opportunity to go and hear eli sharabi speak. holy shit, that was an intense hour and a half. the fact that he's doing what he's doing and is maintaining the attitude that he's maintaining is nothing short of miraculous. there's no detail of his story that isn't devastating and heartbreaking.

...

i came home in time for dinner, and after discussing what i'd heard we dived in to another episode of evangelion. mr smear actually ate most of the chili, i didn't cry when i took too much carolina reaper sauce, and then it was shower / teeth / bedtime and i read a bit more of the light fantastic.

i couldn't figure out how i was feeling and i certainly wasn't being focused, so gd and i watched another episode of fauda, and i think i'm going to try for a (relatively) early night.

adventures in uncertainty

 what a weird day. the only times i went outside were to pick up reflective straps i'd ordered online (i haven't even opened the packages yet) and to take out the trash. the sky dripped a few drops on me along the way, but otherwise my time outside was uneventful and insufficient to constitute exercise.

from a health and wellness point of view, i'm not okay. i'm convinced that it's psychological, and that i'm just burned out and depressed.

...

i finished the first evangelion book this morning, and it is magnificent. or... manganificent?

i came across this at the library, and excitedly brought it home - only halfway through did i fully register that it's an adaptation of the series, not the other way around, but it's an adaptation with so much heart and soul!

all the little shifts really pull the series' threads more tightly together and make it not just emotionally powerful, but much more intellectually accessible. i recommend watching the original series first, but either way this is a fantastic book.

we watched the third episode over dinner, it was awesome.

...

i worked from home today, and i sat too long in my office chair. which i'm still sitting too long in, i guess. i'd to say i worked hard, but that expression's been slowly losing all meaning over the course of the year. we had an interesting online group meeting with my employer this afternoon, and one of the questions was "what do you do between prompts?".

well, i had an answer, but it depends on the kind of work i'm doing. for personal stuff, i'm usually messing with other projects while waiting for the response, so i cycle between them. for paid stuff, i'm usually either upgrading my "software factory", as one of my group put it, by improving my skills and refining my tooling setup, or i'm reading through the previous round's changes to get "closer to the source".

i went through a lot of that, today.

on a silly note, i misheard one of the group as we were all saying goodbye, and felt obliged to produce the following:

...

mr smear seems to have had a good day. fortunately or unfortunately, gd came to me today with the book report on maus he's been working on, and it said some disturbing things about the holocaust. so when he got home, we sat down to talk about it... he explained himself pretty well, and we're not alarmed any more, but in addition to coaching him on the language he uses to describe things (he "got it" pretty quickly), we're now planning a family trip to yad vashem. considering the fictional darkness he's already been exposed to i think he'll be able to handle it, and we want him to see and feel the reality and the human faces behind the numbers and clinical grim details.

...

i spent a lot of time thinking about investments today, i'm nervous about having all of our deposit money in indexes that may or may not crash. i've learned enough about investment and economics to be well into the valley of despair, so i don't trust any advice or theories on the internet but both sides make compelling arguments.

after thinking out loud and talking through a plan with my mom and gd after dinner, i decided to pull a chunk of money out of the traditional indexes, put some of it into an israel fund that includes real estate, and withdraw the rest to my bank account... in another few days i'm going to go in person to try and put that money away (along with the bonus i received) in a way that makes sense.

...

gd and i seem to be okay, but i'm still having moments of disconnection, still processing my feelings about the other night.

...

i've spent the past couple of hours working on security for one project and blockchain architecture for another, and it's approaching midnight already. i think i'm ready to call it a day.

catching flies

 it's funny, i seem to be sleeping okay this week, but i'm tiiiiiired. mentally exhausted. emotionally drained.

i really don't want to - and can't afford to - miss the opportunity to build more, write more, find ways out of the financial hole and create the stuff that i'm excited about. but this morning? and yesterday morning? ugh. it's a brain-fog, probably depression, and i can't even focus for long on reading evangelion (which i'm absolutely loving, not least because its producer notes very explicitly answer All The Questions).

maybe i should go a little harder on the caffeine today. fight it. push through it.

*yawns in sad and lazy*

maybe shinji's attitude is infecting me. i guess i'm pretty susceptible to something like that right now.

themes

 it's getting close to... oh, it is midnight. fine. today was a weird, unhealthily weird day. i've been sitting too much, eating too much, and i literally never went outside :/

i was woken up by mr smear's awful alarm being shoved in my face because neither he nor gd could figure out how to stop it when the phone is in downtime mode. i couldn't get back to sleep, and i remained decidedly unmotivated for a whi^H^H^H^H^Hpretty much the rest of the day :P

i started reading neon genesis evangelion, and i've immediately arrived at the conclusion that a) omg the manga is awesome but b) it's probably not quite as awesome if you haven't seen the anime.

i spent a bit of time on the phone with the dental clinic, the experience was shocking (although not as shocking as gd's failed root canal and her dentist's negligence) and i found myself both yelling at the receptionist and appealing to her humanity at the same time. apparently we can see the manager to complain in person on sunday morning...

my consulting coworker gave an hour long presentation today for her team's hackathon project during our client group's bi-weekly, half of which i was confused because something distracted me early and i didn't realize that zoom was showing her screen in a different tab. dammit. fortunately, i was wowed by their project on the day so i didn't have trouble following.

...

i received my payslip today, which thankfully included my bonus. i thought i'd be less disappointed if i didn't expect half of it to be taken as income tax, but now i see that it was literally half of the amount and i am disappointed. it's obviously far better than no bonus, though, so...

...

around noon a technician came for our electric stove. the one that we bought when we moved in. he took it off to the lab, refusing to give us even a general idea of how long we'd be without it :(

we are extremely lucky that our upstairs friends had a spare, although unfortunately our socket isn't regulation so we can't plug it in. but it does plug the hole in the counter, and we do have their portable stove for now, so... 🤷‍♂️

...

in the news, frontier models have been doing amazing things. i'm not talking about missing the point of math problems, although that's certainly interesting, but rather the crazy new game merging trend and someone (or a group of someones) finally getting some justice for decades of greedy abuse by adobe by "freeing" their software.

what a time to be alive.

having said that, *i* spent most of my workday using anthropic's newest frontier model, opus 5.5, struggling to get it to help me import a spreadsheet into my client's platform without it going off the rails, inventing problems that didn't exist, and just generally behaving badly.

it was a grind.

...

i had a little trouble with mr smear's attitude when he got home, but i managed to handle it and we had good results followed by a good talk. i had myself a nice glass of araq and started burning tokens - deliberately, in light of the fact that i'm about to try downgrading my subscription - making some interesting progress and coming up with a really cool idea for my sudoku game.

i stopped for dinner - the fall and rise of reggie dinkins is really fun - and a chat with my mom, read a little more of the light fantastic to mr smear, and then returned to the burn. gd restarted watching fauda, again, and because i've seen the first episode enough times i continued burning the whole time, jumping between different games. i'm using openai's latest frontier model, gpt-6 astra, and i'm experiencing mixed results. but much more positive results than opus, at least.

i should probably go to bed soon.

cheat day

 i did *not* lose weight today.

mr smear woke up worse than he was yesterday, so he stayed home. i began my day on the balcony, cleaning up someone's cigarette ash (apparently it's the woman above us, she's promised to be more careful) and trying to read knights of sidonia, which seems cool but i struggled to make sense of what was going on, or care.

i've just read through some reviews, and i'm not interested in giving it more of a chance than i already have.

i hopped on a bus to herzeliyah, walked through my mom's favorite mall (most of the stores were closed, but in general it looks very much the same as it always did), then past the country club and the school i once re-took linear algebra in (and still failed to understand very much), and then to the company status.

"breakfast" was pretty good, pizza and a too-hot grilled chilli and a bunch of nice salads. heavy discussions about south africa, the state of the industry, and then my previous employer.

then we were given a motivational talk by omri rozenblit, which was really powerful, and then we had our status, which was... unsurprising, which is more than desirable. it's comforting to know and have known what's going on, and we got some clarity into how we're adapting to the rapidly-changing market situation.

i returned home, after waiting for a while in the sun, herzeliyah style, and stopped for a hearty leftover lunch. then i got mr smear to draw on two stickers for my work laptop, then i walked to the office.

my first meeting was with the guy who wanted to hire me at the beginning of last year, and it was pleasant, though i did make it a little awkward. the second meeting was with my line manager, and aside from it being a fun talk, i caught him off-guard when i spoke about conway's law and i enjoyed seeing his gears start turning.

aside from those talks, i had two meetings with a couple of my teammates, both of which gave me insight into what we're doing and one of which gave me some really cool ideas of how we could operate financial analysis in a similar way to how we write code.

i didn't need to snack so much in between all of those...

the end of the day was packing up our work stations for next week's move, my manager needed to remind me that this weekend is rosh hashana and that we won't be seeing each other in person until tuesday :P

i rushed home - stressed about tomorrow's acupuncture session in my calendar that turned out to be non-existent - to get onto a webinar about the metro works that are going to be starting in the next few months. it was a looooooong talk (i played a lot of minesweeper games) but with a lot of encouraging aspects, not least of which being how clearly the people responsible for public transport in this region understand their mission.

i coerced mr smear into giving star fluxx a chance, and we had fun, and then we started watching an episode of the wonder years which involved animal cruelty so we had to stop halfway, and mr smear and i watched an excellent talk on the history of sumeria while i not only cleared my very large plate of food, but also the rest of the bag of liquorice allsorts along with a few blocks of chocolate 🙄

...

dark matter upsets me. phenomenal writing, great concept, but i just can't deal with that level of darkness right now.

trapped in the nothing

 i passed out watching ludwig, then dragged myself into bed. i didn't sleep well, though, oh no - i woke up in the middle of the night with my neck having seized in a way that triggered a massive headache, and even though i managed to massage it enough to get it to settle down, it's still hurting and causing flashes of intense pain every so often.

did i mention that i had a lot of stuff to do today? i'm so freaking dysfunctional right now. i have bandwidth for bullshit, nothing more. gd and i did a shopping run, big data came down to give our balcony a colonoscopy (his endoscope works well enough, but wasn't able to thread it anywhere too interesting), he and his way hung around for a little while, and now...

... now i'm feeling broken and useless and idon'twanna.

oh, i finished the alice in borderland book this morning, it's pretty good.

banana drama llama karma farmer trauma

 today was a better day, even though that's obviously off a pretty low bar. i actually slept through to my alarm this morning, and began my day reading some more alice in borderland - it's good, but the main reason i'm getting through it is because mr smear's read it already and i'm not sure if there's anything problematic in it :P

i prepared a message for the office manager regarding the whole vegan options debacle, but gd and my mother both agreed that it was a terrible idea, and that next time there's an upcoming event i should just tell her not to bother.

just after i arrived at the office and joined my team daily, i saw that i'd missed a bunch of messages from early in the morning - an incident, with me as the primary suspect. fortunately, it didn't take long to figure out what had happened, and while i was the trigger for the issue, neither the action itself nor its resolution were on me.

i proceeded to spend all day fighting with AI to figure out what i was supposed to be doing. the model i used cost a lot more money than usual*, and i'm not convinced the results were significantly better...

* i've seen the company "leaderboard", today, and the top four spenders are my two teammates, and two of the guys i work next to :P

gd packed me a sushi and pancake lunch, which i ate on the balcony, kind of admiring the view while listening to interesting youtube videos. very social.

in the afternoon, while waiting for an AI investigation, i saw an email come in from someone claiming to be a university grad. i had to verify their identity because i initially thought it was one of the usual phishing attacks i received, but it seems like a researcher is legitimately interested in my comic adaptation and wants to ask me about it!

my two primary intentions behind the project are to get the sonnets into the mainstream via teenagers and young adults, and to manipulate the ivory tower of academia to engage with my interpretation. so this has potential to be an important beginning!!

my client's happy hour was far superior to my employer's, the vegan food was so delicious i had to double check the ingredients :P

i came home, picked up mr smear and the book we bought unnecessarily on tuesday evening, and we walked back to book store, experiencing the titular banana drama llama karma farmer trauma that my BDLKF son generates.  on the way we ran into the dad of one his previous classmates, and in our smalltalk i found myself joking that "we can use a few rocket attacks just to give us a sense of stability" and making us both uncomfortable :P

we couldn't get a refund, but we could exchange it. they didn't have any english books for kids or young adults, they didn't have drawing equipment we were interested in, their toys and games selection was pretty shitty, but eventually i found something - a book for gd entitled the mammoth book of bizarre crimes.

...

we paid, left the store, and i decided to take a short detour to look for supermarket / pharmacy underwear (it's the best value for money IMO). while waiting at a red light, an arab wolt driver rammed into the guy standing next to us, then immediately yelled at him to get out of the way. the american oleh immediately prepared to throw down by removing his shirt*, then pointed and laughed out loud when he realized that the delivery box on the back of the wolt driver's electric bike had a his number on it, which he immediately started memorized as the driver tried to get away.

* which i later explained to my son was an enormous tactical error - if he'd done that to intimidate me i would have knocked him out while he was struggling to get it over his head 🤦‍♂️

while we were exchanging details so that i could bear witness, the driver came back and threatened him with a large plank of wood with a nail in it. this big american dude kicked off his flip flops and ran towards him*, and i started recording. when the two of them disappeared around the corner, i felt sure that the guy was going to get murdered.

* yet another terrible tactic, as i explained to mr smear

when i realized they were moving further away*, i followed and told mr smear (who'd been following me) to wait for me. just then the driver started throwing rocks - massive rocks, double-fist sized, one of which whizzed past me and another broke just in front of me and a piece skipped towards mr smear.

* at this point, the american yelled the phrase "yesh li mispar shelcha, dickhead!", which is a simply wonderful catchphrase 🤣

he chased the mad wolt driver away, and another witness (also an olah) came to exchange details and help him call the police*. he asked me to wait a bit for his girlfriend to arrive, he needed someone else to tell her he hadn't started it :P

* some old guy came past and tried to convince him to "let it go", which pisses me right off. 

mr smear and i came back home, discussing everything that took place, with him telling me the story from his perspective and including some particularly funny takes. the first he saw of the incident was the guy taking his shirt off, and then he noticed that he'd removed his shoes, and he immediately thought to himself "what, are you gonna take off your shorts as well?"

later, he quipped: "he has balls of steel. and a brain made of the same material" 🤭

...

we had dinner watching more of splash, though we had to turn it off to get mr smear to actually eat. then he told the story to my mom, and the shower and bedtime routine went relatively smoothly. now that i've got all of this down, gd and i are going to watch some ludwig. ludwig is good.

recovery

 today was nicer, though not by too much. i didn't feel nearly as shit and dysfunctional, but my neck's still sensitive and i spent a large chunk of the day either lying with my neck at stretched angles or avoiding screens (i found a pack of playing cards and played old-school solitaire).

otherwise the day was very much spent indoors, we watched the first half of terminator 2 and the first episode (TWO HOURS OF IT?!?!) of the second season of the live action one piece.

there was some arguing over privileges, but mostly the day went smoothly. after kiddush with my mom we had a nice dinner and watched an episode of strip search, and then after all the kids were in bed our upstairs friends paid us a visit, and just left a few minutes ago.

now i'm going to play a little more balatro (i've been vascillating between balatro and full throttle) and go to bed.

the needle

[currently battling a mosquito and losing]

 well, i did sleep last night. i had horrible dreams, though. involving really gross public toilets, amongst other things.

i gave up on reading dragon ball. it's like a pre-teen fever dream. combined with dragon ball: rick & morty i'm now pretty confident i never missed anything important.

our subwoofer situation: i was so excited the past couple of days, because it looked like the subwoofer was finally stable for the first time since we bought it. but today? garbage. i finally bit the bullet and ordered a new one, which will hopefully hook in to the shelf in the same way 🤞

work ownership mystery: i asked my manager to investigate, and he managed to get someone to approve my pull request. but then we learned that they didn't have the authorization to merge, either. a bunch of us (virtually) ran around trying to find out who's in charge, and so far the answer appears to be "nobody".

in the afternoon, my employer team had to sign in to a presentation that went on about an hour longer than it should have. i had to turn my camera off halfway through so nobody would have to keep seeing me rubbing my eyes and yawning.

mr smear had a regression today, and homework turned into a massive, unpleasant thing that got him punished. as part of the cooldown, i took him to the park to use the exercise equipment (i was too pissed off with him to train him, and i'm pretty sure he wasn't in the mood either), and then we continued on to do some sweet shopping.

i'm not doing to well with my weight situation lately. something about war and lockdown and yada yada yada.

dinner (we were forced to order in because my employer doesn't let me use my food allowance to buy vouchers) was much calmer, getting mr smear showered and toothbrushed and into bed proved stressful and stretched our patience completely, and that was on top of two attacks launched in that exact window. and i still had a little more work to do after he went to sleep, so i was even more annoyed.

now i'm playing catch-up and calm-down, as i type this i realize it's already past midnight :/

...

gd's friend (the glassblower who made us massage tools and gifted us with some bitcoin a couple of years ago) has been contemplating suicide for a very long time, and gd's finally reached a point where she can no longer bring herself to keep trying to talk him out of it. she's upset about this, and she wants to be a good friend, and i told her to just make her feelings crystal clear and deal with whatever may come.

you can't help everyone.

getting out the house

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

...

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

...

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

life is like a permeable shower curtain

 aren't shower curtains supposed to be impermeable? why can we not find plastic shower curtains anywhere?

1. getting up early was rough - i was still in dream-fugue for a while after our alarms sounded - but getting mr smear out of bed was even rougher. at least, after the initial shock and resentment, things were okay.

2. accompanying gd to the dentist for the second part of her root canal, and taking mr smear for breakfast. i tried to get some work done while he read. the vegan breakfast looked great, but was mediocre at best. i mean, at least he ate the "eggs", which were more curry than eggs, and he doesn't really like curry. but we both had too much of the pickled garlic. a tiny amount was too much, and haunted us both for quite a while after.

pg's folks walked in while i was in the middle of my team's daily, and didn't get the hint that i was in a meeting and couldn't say hi, which was amusingly awkward both for me and my teammates. i had a very nice chat with them afterwards, though.

then gd joined us, met pg's introduced herself to pg's parents. gd had walked into the coffee shop carrying a broom, and pg's mom asked her where she was flying 🤣

3. we caught a bus home, getting off early and paying the hardware store a visit. we picked up a shower curtain. then we stopped by a nature store, and mr smear found a bag of panda's dubai-style vegan chocolate. which i've been wanting to try for a while. i also needed something to calm the garlic-ness.

it was great. i wouldn't pay huge sums of money for it, but it was great.

4. mr smear joined his last two online classes until the end of the pesach break, i tried to work. "tried to work" is the theme of the day, because i - was - a - wreck. i was tired, unmotivated, and everything was a struggle.

also, physically uncomfortable. and i snacked constantly.

i did finish reading ghost in the shell during a lunch break. it's fascinating. it's very clever. it's got 80's israel and mossad references that are as amusing as they are darkly disquieting.

i made mr smear outline a map of israel and hunt down major cities. he did a disappointingly half-assed job of it.

5. after mr smear completed his chores - he's been helping gd a lot lately - we took out the recycling and took a short walk to see if we could find a bath mat. correction - we took a short skip. i introduced mr smear to sheng wang's bit about skipping a while back and he's taken it to heart. also, it's hard not to smile as i let him drag me into it, because otherwise he gets too far ahead of me >D

we first discovered that gd had somehow missed an entire row of frozen vegan dumplings at the store. then we went to a supermarket and found the garbage bags gd and i like (this is how we know we're getting older). mr smear and i tired and failed to find the watermelon ice-creams we love so much, even at a weird new commercial ice-cream store. i mean, an entire store devotes to the ice creams that are sold at various kiosks.

finally, we went in to a container store. i didn't have much in the way of expectations, but we found a nice bath mat!

6. we came back home just in time for dinner. we watched strip search's fifth elimination, and then mr smear decided that we should try having the dubai-style chocolate with marshmallow. i thought that sounded ridiculous, but i decided to give it a try anyway. i didn't want to overpower the chocolate, so i took a bite of chocolate and then nibbled the marshmallow until the proportions were right.

a short while later i came back to reality. i'm glad i gave it a chance.

7. i used the "new" shower first. i preferred the overall experience - it's more comfortable than the bath in the awkwardly triangular master bathroom - but the water pressure's not as good. then mr smear got in the shower.

just before he was done, i checked in on him and found a large puddle of water outside the shower. immediately panicking, i checked the sides and i checked above, and i couldn't see the source of all the water! and then it hit me - literally - the water was spraying straight through the polyester shower curtain.

gd called it - we now know precisely how the bottom of the wooden doorway rotted.

8. after gd and i had a chat with my mom* - lots of drama surrounding my sister and nephew and my niece - gd and i had a chat about gd's friend, who's life-long battle with reality has left him suicidal. gd's really upset, and i explained to her that she's not doing him any favors by pretending that she's okay with what he's doing or planning on doing.

* i'd called her earlier, and my godmother was with her. i was waving to my mom, and then suddenly she was in the frame, and i think we were both equally uncomfortable. thank god gd wasn't with me.

it's not early by any stretch of the imagination, but i'm just finishing up a cup of tea and then going to bed, with a feeling like it's early.

these are strange days. the politics of this war and the noises from all sides of the media are distracting, confusing, and messy. we're doing really well, considering, and we're doing much better than a lot of people here, but my gods these days are taking a psychological toll in a middle different ways.