circles

having barely slept the night before, and with my hip flexors threatening, i took a puff. i'm still tired from the sleep deficit, but i slept really well. it's weird to sleep well and not remember dreaming.

i got up, had a coffee, looked for an didn't find my last MRI, then i walked to the bus stop and went to the clinic for an acupuncture session. my body was profoundly calm for most of the duration of the treatment, though i did develop a random itch that made my leg twitch, and i've just gotten home (trying hard to stay in the "comfort" bubble in spite of the world around me, i think next time i'll walk instead of taking a bus) and am having a quick breakfast before heading to the office.

...

i made some progress on the map generator problem before going to the office, and the work day was mostly completing the backfill (it still required some fixing). i came home for lunch, then returned for a talk by a south african "CTO" that turned out to be a thorough waste of 45 minutes of my life that i'll never get back. the title of the talk had been misleading: i thought it was going to be around organizing a company's structures around AI, and instead it was about how a junior dev became a senior dev with a fancy title and how the south african tech industry is years behind us in terms of working with AI.

a little later i walked past my client team and inquired after the weirdness that was going on - my client / the boss was standing there with tears streaming down his face, and i was offered a piece of a little yellow pepper to try.

it turned out to be a reaper that the boss had home grown. the first little piece i took hit me hard in the throat, but i barely noticed it in my mouth. the second piece was substantially thicker and full of seeds, and i made a point of chewing it thoroughly. it had a delayed action, and i ended up regretting it. it must have taken about an hour to completely stop burning...

i had a good sync with my manager, and on my way out made a suggestion to dx for the problem he was stuck with, which i hope helped.

i came home early, and walked with mr smear to the library to switch out a couple of his books. while there, i had a fun conversation with the librarian, who lit up when i talked about how we'd just finished the eighth season of the simpsons and the importance of monoculture especially with regards bridging the communication gap between parents and their children.

the walk there and back was full of interesting conversation, and by the time we got home i'd put in 17K steps in addition to the hour and a half of rollerblading the night before. i stretched a bit before dinner, after which i had a little too much dessert and some arak for good measure. i was ready to go to bed, but i still had to wait about an hour for mr smear to shower and brush his teeth 🤦‍♂️

...

well, the calm has been slowly seeping away and i'm feeling my "wry neck" again. oh, well.

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.

subversion

 i've just gotten up after a night with almost no sleep, my usual hip flexor discomfort has been amplified severely and i was unable to stretch it out.

the first thing i saw on my phone was a notification to say that my shared ride has started, and as frustrating (and expensive for no reason) as it is to realize that i forgot to cancel my booking for this evening, it's even more frustrating to learn that my booking was captured incorrectly. now i have to wait an hour to call them and try to get them to cancel it without charge...

yesterday was bizarre. i arrived at the office, walked around setting the air conditioners to a reasonable temperature, and then found a phone booth for my meeting with the guy who'd stood me up the previous afternoon. we spent the following two hours together tweaking things and running things, and my very clear takeaway was that anyone who wants to touch their systems needs to do a full team onboarding.

also, i was totally freezing in the phone booth, and it wasn't until i returned to my seat that i remembered that i'd brought a sweater to work 🤦‍♂️

my meeting with the client: before i went up, i commented to the guy next to me that i might well be on my way out. that was the vibe i felt when i sat down across from the client, and it lasted a couple of sentences. and then everything was on its head, as he explained to me what the past half a year has been about from a leadership / business perspective and how me and my team fit in, and what changes are incoming, and how perfectly aligned my team's new mandate is with my personal roadmap.

then we closed out with a pleasant, interesting conversation about the misaligned between architecture and organizational structure and what we could or should be doing.

then i walked out with the strange sensation that either we're exceptionally well-aligned, or i'm being pranked.

i went out to pick up lunch, and ate with the guy who sits next to me, and then grabbed another booth to have a meeting with my manager. it was a different conversation, but not that different. whereas the client had been unsurprised by some of my suggestions, some of them clearly caught my manager off-guard and that was validating.

as much as i hated having to put together and deliver monday's presentation, i learned a whole lot of really important stuff while doing so and it's completely changed the trajectory of my week and how i think about things.

i spent some more time trying to make an AI agent implement metrics responsibly, then came home. i took mr smear out for a short walk, and to draw cash and pick up beers for the evening. on the way i told him all about my day, and when i got to the end he let me know that he hadn't been paying attention and had no idea what i'd said to him. then he told me a story, and when he was done i asked him to repeat it because i hadn't been paying attention. i don't know if he really cared enough to get the message :/

i walked over to my ride's apartment, and away we went to hod hasharon.

half the evening was lovely, half of it was awkward. i had some really interesting, some even productive, conversations. i met some fascinating people. the vegan food only arrived at around 10.30pm, by which stage i didn't care any more. i went deep discussing the second lebanon war, i encountered an older soldier whose sister reminded me that my bnei akiva shevet was emunah. i didn't bother a couple of celebrity heroes of mine, though i did truly want to.

on the way back, i grilled my ride for his aliyah story and was blown away by how different it was from all the other mixed couple stories i've heard. i guess the law doesn't apply equally when you're rich and influential...

i showered, had a cup of tea, wound down and went to bed. i've just got my rental charges cancelled - thankfully - and i've finished my first coffee, and i'm not sure what this morning's going to bring. i'm feeling particularly proud of myself for having thought to shut mr smear's blinds when i got in last night; it's mighty peaceful this morning :P

pulling the triggers

 it's after midnight, and i've just spent the past couple of hours working on my AI harness. but using AI, so also watching random shit on youtube. some of it important shit, like ex-climate activist speaks out - lucy biggers on triggernometry. some of it like angine de poitrine.

my AI skills skills are leveling up. i've got skill evolution and troubleshooting baked in to my project now, and i'm feeling just how much it's making my life easier.

sleep diary / politically asleep

 i've been using the consensus sleep diary for the past couple of days, and i've just gotten stuck on the fact that you can review your sleep stats dashboard, but not the comments you made - unless you're adept with the developer tools. so, for myself, i'm copying my comments here:

i'm not sure how long before 6.30am i woke up, i feel like it was a long time though. yesterday was my first time using both iron and magnesium supplements and i didn't suffer from the usual discomfort, just a bit of restlessness

on multiple occasions throughout the night i giggled at trump's absurd and acerbic humor.

...

then, first thing this morning, i woke up to respond to an instagram thread with a highly intelligent, educated man whose political extremism has been distressing me for years:

him: A blockade is an act of war. That's why during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis the US referred to it as a quarantine. Both the action, its intricacies and the specific wording were discussed and debated thoroughly. Oh well. Clip from Thirteen Days. I like it.

me: did you know that the irgc was blockading the straits up until a few days ago ? why didn't you post this then?

him: Of course I knew. I don't know of any historical analog, especially one with a dramatic Hollywood adaptation that includes the US principals discussing the blockade. Is there?

me: interesting - the timing of your post suggests that when the americans do it it's nefarious

him: nefarious means wicked or villainous. If you consider war as that, then yes. I don't. I think it's an act of war. Which requires approval from Congress.

me: ah, so it's okay that americans are using force to protect american interests, it's just an issue with protocol? cool, cool

...

[i'm] just perpetually curious how someone so intelligent and educated always seems to be pushing an anti-west agenda 🤷

him: Showing the lunacy and abhorrence that is the Trump administration is anti-West? Color me anti-West then.

me: if you can only see lunacy and abhorrence, then yes, you're anti-west. a pity.

him: I see much more. Terror. Abuse. Fascism. Sadness. Democratic decline. Mental decline, not to say dementia. Fear. Spinelessness. Systemic failure. At a glance.

...

what are you seeing that I don't? (I forgot grift and open corruption on an unprecedented scale, just came to mind as well)

me: a whole different side to the internet, and history. it begins before the end of the cold war, with the kgb inventing "active measures", and evolves into decades of unholy alliance between the russians, chinese, qataris and iranians to destabilize the west and create a massive, well-funded disinformation army that infiltrates western institutions and makes the media (traditional and social) push out propaganda at a terrifying scale. and that all rides on the back of social media algorithms that are financially incentivized to raise engagement by any means necessary, generating mass psychosis on all sides of the political spectrum as we learn that "folie à deux" scales. i recommend trying to balance out your media diet, the other side isn't all lies like you've been led to believe. also talking to your fellow israelis without assuming that everyone with a different understanding is either brainwashed or a bad actor (that's a general statement, i'm not accusing you of anything - it's possible you just don't happen to have people with different opinions in your circles).

destabilized

 i did go to bed, but i barely got much sleep. certainly nothing restful. mr smear stayed in our bed until morning, and then we all got up early ("in solidarity" according to gd), although i ended up lying down for an additional hour afterwards.

the day started off alright, though. i sat down with mr smear and my coffee and introduced him to mad magazine - issue #295, back to the future part ii - and it was really cool. i had to explain a whole lot of stuff to him, which led to some interesting moments. i think i blew his mind describing the difference by how we all dealt with the CFC / ozone hole crisis as a species, but allowed the oil and animal agriculture industries to divide us all on global warming.

i don't know how much "work" i got done today, certainly nothing significant. in addition to my brain feeling wrecked, gd was on a cleaning spree and discovered (what then became unavoidable) a sewer smell coming from the office bathroom next to my desk which we have no explanation for.

between meetings, mr smear and i walked to the hardware store to pick up draino, and did some tea shopping on the way back home. we sat down for a "salad pita" lunch while out, which was nice, and explored a local toy store's lego selection realizing that we never got mr smear a birthday present.

it's been a year. or two, or three.

i just got off a long call with horseman, most of it discussion the terrifying state of AI-fueled propaganda and the last fifty years building up to the west collapsing in on itself because its people have all been brainwashed to love their enemies more than themselves.

now to drag mr smear away from spore and get some exercise.

outside

 last night was unnecessarily rough, because we could have booted mr smear out of our bed after the first siren and i would have had a much better night's sleep.

today was a bit weird.

i invested quite a lot of time in getting stuff to work on my home machine that i already had working on my work machine, stuff that - as usual - really shouldn't be that complicated.

gd had a phone appointment with our doctor, which resulted in me calling multiple clinics because ours was closed only to continue to run into dead ends. then we all went on a pharmacy mission, and a bit of a grocery mission on the way back home, and then we dropped everything at home and jumped on a bus to dizengoff center, with a little bit more of a walk than planned.

which was good. we've all been pretty cooped up for a week.

i couldn't find what i was looking for, but gd got sorted and i was inspired to upgrade her phone (she's been unhappy for a long time) and hopefully the new model will be a better experience. and then mr smear inherits her old one, and that gives us a way to manage his "banking".

we had a great hummus lunch, which i think was pretty brave considering nobody had any idea when the next attack would be, but we managed to make it home before the sirens.

mr smear convinced me to take the windows machine off facebook marketplace and reinstate it as "his" machine, and that led to me spending a good chunk of the evening (and our shelter time) on getting it set up, enthusiastically testing out shutup10++ and being pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to clean up the windows experience.

i'm also pleasantly surprised by the fact that i managed to get mr smear to do another training session with me this evening, and although the main focus was on boxing drills, i think the most important lesson was in shutting the fuck up and following instructions.

we had a bit on an incident with kevin, our little eight-legged boarder, who's been insisting on hanging out in our bed. i tried to get him out of our room, and i may have accidentally injured him :(

then he decided to scoot off into mr smear's room, so mr smear was very nervous about checking his bed thoroughly before going to sleep. but then he couldn't sleep, because he was feeling so bad for how unfairly poor kevin had been treated...

kiddush and dinner with my mom were nice, and the food was great, even though it was really late.

mr smear got siren'ed out of a shower - so much for canishower.com showing 11% - after that was bedtime and then my shower time, and now i've watched lots of politics and other garbage and i think i'm ready for bed.

...

if you want to understand what's going on with the war, and what its all about, this tom nash report is eye-opening.

everything on mainstream media - CNN in particular - is unhinged propaganda. seeing so much AI-generated slop of destruction in tel aviv is pathetic. who believes this shit?

ding dong!

 khamenei is dead.

it's been a looong day in and out of the shelter (our bedroom, thankfully), and exhausting. we had just enough time between attacks to clean up the kitchen and sort out dinner, and get mr smear showered, and then soon after bedtime we were back into it.

my back started hurting just after mr smear moved into our bed. we had some big hits earlier, and one woman is been killed :(

the combination of my back, and finally being able to transfer mr smear's google account to the "new" family so we're all on israeli accounts, is what got me out of bed. now i'm sitting here, stretching and watching news (real news from tousi tv, i tried a few other channels during the day and it's complete dogshit out there), and hopefully we'll get some sleep tonight.

we're off to a good start. hopefully the iranian revolution will be completed in short order 🙏

...

we watched half of flow today, the "camera" made me uncomfortable but it's gorgeous. a little too slow for my family, though. then we watched the second episode of solo leveling, which was unexpectedly hardcore violence and we all needed a bit of a recovery afterwards.

meditation marathon

thoughts for the day: everyone in the media is getting paid to keep everyone on edge, including themselves. i don't need to think about war with iran until it's actually happening. nobody does. STFU.

also, the global economy is full of shit, everything's being run by people who have as much understanding of how things work as small children. there aren't many adults around.

if i'm right, what's coming is AI weaning us off management bloat and enabling people to find and operate in tiny niches. kind of like pre-industrial societies.

...

 today began with disappointment, but it was less disappointing than if it had come tomorrow: mr smear woke up and decided that he didn't want to go to the trance party, he'd rather just stay home and read all weekend ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i've been reading richard currier's unbound: how eight technologies made us human and brought our world to the brink, and while it's taken me forever to get into it, it's fascinating stuff.

mr smear had been waiting for the bus for a while before we realized that it was the tel aviv marathon today...

gd and i had a quiet morning, napping, mostly, and then we headed out to return the frying pan and find a solution for the ugly cables that were just installed. but, the marathon. so we walked around trying to get on a bus, then got on the bus which literally went in a circle and took us back one stop, and then we split up because i realized i'd have to walk all the way to the center and back.

returning the frying pan would have been less emotional had the woman not decided to try 'splain to me how the non-stick pan wasn't non-sticking properly because i was obviously cooking wrong 😠

at least i found cable hole covers. i'll try them sometime, i guess.

i finally found a decent-looking replacement frying pan on sale at a different store, i hope it's good. then i picked up garbage bags, and then i began my trek home.

picking up a coffee along the way, and syncing with sailor for a bit.

i had issues getting mr smear home today, again, and i realized (after we had a fight about it) that he and his friends are using whatsapp as social media. so there goes whatsapp - i've blocked it and he's down to actual phone calls and sms'es now.

at least he didn't lose more privileges this week - i mean, his screen time privileges have been pushed back another week now, but we were both excited about him getting his reading privileges back this evening.

i never in my life thought i would ever write a sentence like the above, but here we are. you gotta do what you gotta do.

i spent most of the afternoon upgrading my encryption package and updating my website, and then had a long chat with urchin, and now i've showered, and taken the garbage out, and shabbat has started, and gd's cooking a delicious dinner, and for a moment the world is just fine.

iran update

 oh, right! and ozdoc messaged me last night, once again inviting us to flee the potential danger of an iranian attack.

the situation really is bizarre. nobody knows what's going on. tousi tv is the only reliable source of information. everyone has theories.

hopefully the iranians won't attack. if they do, hopefully we'll have time to get to the in-apartment bomb shelter in the new apartment, and not have to go huddle in the asthma-inducing dust-and-stale-air choke room downstairs.

extra steps

 after getting home soaked yesterday, we took turns showering, after which i recall very little of the afternoon. i'm pretty sure i napped under layers of blankets, i read a bit of taiyo matsumoto's ping pong, and i helped gd prepare the challah-peño taking our neighborhood baker's advice.

it came out much better quality in terms of the challah itself, but it didn't taste quite as good (intense) as it smelled :(

dinner was really nice, and the late night was mostly due to watching iran revolution-related stuff and tool / a perfect circle reactions.

i slept alright.

this morning was a lot of reading, and watching stuff, and then mr smear woke up (late) and we got into breakfast time. did i nap before we went out, or afterwards? i don't know. but we did go out for a nice walk (we were going to join nystire and co. but they got rained in) without argument, during which i convinced mr smear to draw a comic he's been thinking of.

he did that when we got back - oh! that's when i napped - and the outcome was excellent (and funny) but he doesn't want it published and he won't tell me why... *pouts*

i finally sat down to work on reviewing a whole bunch of the AI-generated code in my side project, uncovering really strange hallucinations (eg. a nonce that's generated immediately before being checked within the same function) and fixing a few actual bugs, and then suddenly it was 3pm and mr smear and i geared up, grabbed the vegan hot dogs gd had prepared for us, and walked to my new employer's office for his friend's laser tag birthday party.

most of the parents dropped their kids off, but i'd walked so i hung around for the almost three hours chatting with mr smear's friend's parents (good talks) and at one point putting in a few minutes of productive work on my side project. i didn't actually go into my office, though, because i felt very uncomfortable figuring out the alarm system over a weekend when i had no real justification for using the office :P

it was a long walk there, and a long walk back, but those were two long walks with good father-son talks, and we both had an enjoyable day overall. also, it helped that it didn't rain on us.

we got home pretty late, which meant that after all the shower/toenail stuff mr smear got to bed very late, and i'm already feeling like i'm going to crash soon even though i know i've got tons of stuff to do and i haven't been doing any of it...

...

"the revolution is being streamed, not televised" - tousi tv, "pahlavi announces plan to return to iran - declares final battle"

firstly, "media" outlets like the BBC are exposing themselves clearer than ever as nothing more than propaganda shills for oppressive, tyrannical, anti-west* regimes like iran, qatar, russia, and china.

(also anti-semitic)

secondly, anyone notice how the iranian people, resisting after fifty years of REAL occupation and REAL oppression, aren't raping women or murdering children?

❤️💔 🇮🇱 🙏

 gd's earliest alarm woke me up around 6am, and from that point i was unable to return to sleep, not least because i was thinking about the hostage release.

the next few hours were a mess of me watching the news, then deciding not to watch the news, and then watching the news anyway. it was an intense morning, and while our little mission to the pharmacy should have provided some distraction, our pharmacy is very close to hostage square where 65,000 people were crowded, waiting for updates.

we got what we needed (gd doesn't think i made a good decision regarding mosquito repellent, we'll see*) and returned home, then glued ourselves to news feeds until all twenty living hostages were in israeli-controlled territory.

שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה.

* i went with oil of lemon eucalyptus instead of the chemicals that come with scary warnings ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

hearing the helicopters overhead bringing in hostages to ichilov hospital was surreal. today's an emotional rollercoaster for sure - the hostages returning home, their families, their losses, the bodies that haven't been / won't be returned, the thousands of soldiers who were killed since the war started... and who knows what tomorrow will bring?

so we're breathing again and celebrating and mourning all at the same time. it's one hell of a time to say chag sameach

the rest of the afternoon was distractions (chores, shadowrun) while beginning to process, so lots of celebrating and lots of sobbing. someone said it beautifully: for two years now, it's been october 7th. with the last of the living hostages returned, today is october 8th. we can finally start grieving.

even though it's not quite all over. but between trump and netanyahu and all our arab neighbors, it's anyone's guess what's going to happen in the coming days, months and years.

but today was a good day. today we collectively breathe and celebrate the return of those who survived 738 days in captivity, tortured by orcs.

bother

🤦

today was a mix of me finally finishing nightwood, and being uncomfortably conscious of how i've been spending most of my downtime watching crap on youtube while doing minesweeper challenges, or playing relatively mindless games (slay the spire and hades), and not doing anything constructive that does my soul any good.

i've been becoming more and more disturbed by the influences of social media and AI, by the dumbing down of humans and by the geopolitics that are being shaped around these technologies. god help us all.

...

we had yet another big fight with mr smear today, which was exactly the same as yesterday's and exactly the same as we've been fighting about for the past couple of weeks. again ending in what felt like a breakthrough moment, but who the fuck knows?

otherwise, he did a pretty good job of putting together a miniature sukkah for school, i went outside with him to gather leaves and helped him with the construction itself, he did an amazing job of drawing the walls, and it was great watching him do it all with a good attitude and seeing him feel proud of his work when he was done.

...

i'm supposed to be on vacation tomorrow. assuming no work emergencies, after taking mr smear to school i'll need to take gd to the hospital to try and get her some help - her shoulder's really in a bad way :(

flu A

it would have been my second mum's 98th birthday today.

...

 this week did not go as planned. monday morning started with a cough, and a warning to my co-workers that i'd be working from home in order to keep it away from them.

just in case.

by the time the school called to tell me mr smear wasn't feeling good and that i needed to come pick him up*, i was already pretty sure that i was coming down with something real.

* they wouldn't let him go by himself unless i explicitly waived their responsibility, and after the previous day's attack in jerusalem i wasn't feeling confident.

i arrived at the school just in time to meet his teacher leaving it, and in a brief exchange she informed me that socially he's doing great (yay!) but academically he's not participating (oh, shit).

we made our way home, and aside from a masked family excursion to a pharmacy to pick up rapid antigen tests on thursday (and a rocket attack around 4am today) we haven't left the apartment since.

...

so far, this flu (A type) has been so hardcore i was confident i had covid again. gel in my sinuses and lungs. relentless fever temperature switches and ceaseless spontaneous heavy sweating (which doesn't even feel directly connected to the temperature switching), weird but consistent-over-hours hallucinations, muscle pain, fatigue and brain-fog, struggles with appetite**. it's just been horrible.

** it turns out that "feed a cold, starve a fever" is a myth and one should try to fuel one's body's fight against the invaders.

but, at the same time, we've been having parenting issues with mr smear, triggered by his academic report after he'd committed the week before to a new school with a new attitude. we've had really, really tough fights with him this week, and big, serious talks. i'm honestly not convinced that he's able to see the connection between him behaving badly, and receiving negative consequences, in general. but over the days his behavior seems to be getting better, he's much more cooperative, and yesterday we had some breakthrough moments in math and hebrew that i think he's just as proud of as we are.

...

it seems i got the worst of the symptoms, and mr smear's been feverish but apparently totally fine otherwise. but for the past two days gd's been coughing to the point of literally injuring herself***, and i think the fact that only her RATs are showing negative is a sign she's doing them incorrectly somehow.

*** she's been having nerve pain in one of her shoulders for a while, and this has exacerbated it in addition to messing with her neck and back as usual. also, her coughing fits are scary. also, why is it she always only gets sick on weekends when getting medical attention is infinitely harder?

anyhoo, this is the first time i've been able to sit down and write something since monday. every day i feel like i'm probably through the worst of it, but every night has taught me a big lesson. i do feel last night was significantly easier, though, so... maybe? 🤞

...

and then, charlie kirk was assassinated. of all people, the man who lived (and died) by the idea of debating ideas freely and speaking to people as human beings regardless of their beliefs. the speed at which half the internet justified or even celebrated his murder is terrifying. as jameela jamil puts it: social media algorithms are driving us apart. they're doing it on purpose. we are in deep trouble as a society, and the western world is literally under attack.

RIP charlie kirk, your murder is as shocking as what it says about the state of america. you knew that america and freedom are under attack and you stood up proudly against lies and evil, and the world (israel in particular) will always remember you as a courageous hero.

small iterations

 well, the sleep like a baby trick did seem to help last night. hopefully it'll work again tonight.

i dropped mr smear off at school, and for some reason decided to pick up a copy of yisrael hayom on my way to the post office (after dropping my bag off at my office). it was an interesting read, not least because it informed me about tonight's lunar eclipse.

i picked up mr smear's new shoes, walked home, then returned to the office. it was a bit of a weird day, but i did make a bit of progress on my main task (each step forcing me to wait five minutes), convinced my boss to start looking for an IT guy, and got mr smear to his therapy appointment and encouraged gd to let him make his own way home (he succeeded without any issues).

in the evening, i rushed into the kitchen to confront one of my coworkers in a way that i hope he found amusing: "hey! are you a computer? no? then why are you adding items to lists in non-alphabetic order?"

[interrupted by jackals howling]

i came home, and what followed was a mix of good and bad vibes (helping mr smear with his math homework). then we rushed dinner and went out to see the eclipse, which fortunately we had a good view of from right across the road.

i was pleased that mr smear was interested, and nervously amused by a neighbor trying and failing to get his teenager into the spirit...

the bedtime routine was mostly positive, and reading about the time loop in the neverending story was fun.

the past couple of hours have been a mix of downloading random feeds into my brain while mindlessly playing minesweeper, and getting through a few chores that have been piling up. hopefully tomorrow will see me getting through the big ones that are still outstanding.

meat popsicle

 i didn't get back to sleep for another hour or two, and even then i didn't sleep very well, although i was able to get up later than usual.

my mouth guard is starting to fall apart :/

i was really tired today. really tired. like, possibly coming down with something tired. i arrived at work for another full team meeting (although bigtalk wasn't around), and it went on for a couple of hours, so we missed the daily with the rest of the department.

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

then i rushed out to meet up with gco and co, we ended up at the top of the building and had to rent a meeting room to get going, which was surprisingly expensive. getting sorted out took us about half an hour in total, but the hour that followed was very interesting and constructive. all in all, i'm very glad we did it.

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

i made it back in time to help out a couple of guys with random things, and then went into another hour-long meeting. at least this time i had coffee and a slice of cake with me :P

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

at this point, i was falling apart and i made myself a fourth cup of coffee. i needed to sync with some coworkers on our priorities for the next few weeks, and that was when i learned that bigtalk wasn't working on what we were working on, which is absolutely insane. i was completely stunned, and i lost my temper in front of half the office, and my coworkers ushered me into a meeting room where i explained to them why i was so deeply affected. they heard me out, and they were very supportive.

...

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

i found another meeting room, and sat down to be interviewed for a talent spotlight. i was still very upset about bigtalk, and i spent the few minutes i needed to wait just trying to calm myself down and get into an appropriate headspace.

i wasn't prepared (they'd only sent me the questions this morning) so everything was off-the-cuff, but by the end i felt like we'd all had a good experience and they seemed happy with what they had. i felt relieved because it went a lot better than i could have planned, and i feel like the resulting story they have to work with is good.

also, i left the meeting room freezing cold.

...

the next couple of hours were me trying to get work done with providing support to others, and eventually i left the office having encountered confusing errors with bigtalk's changes.

on my way home, i spoke to the incoming manager and informed him that i've completely lost faith in bigtalk's ability to function in our organization, and i made an appointment with my boss on sunday (when i'm on vacation, but he isn't) to let him know that this experiment is over.

...

i got home wired and overwhelmed, and needed to vent the day's stories to gd before i was able to calm down enough to eat. we had a good dinner, we enjoyed two simpsons episodes, and mr smear's bedtime (after putting in a few additional minutes of work) was pretty smooth with more of the neverending story.

the rest of the evening has been peaceful, not least of which being completing a fun run of slay the spire, and i think i'm just about ready for bed. caffeine-allowing, of course...

enter the weekend

thought for the morning: what we need is a modern-day roBEN yeHOODa to steal our kids' attention back from english tyrant tech by providing addictive hebrew games and localized tween/teen programming

yesterday:

it was a very relaxing morning, i feel like i got into weekend mode a little earlier than was safe :P

it was a very interesting work day, and almost entirely positive. not least of which being a conversation with an incoming devops who's making aliyah on monday, and a surprise visit by a guy who appears to be our incoming devops manager. and it turns out he's the one responsible for bringing in the star we interviewed a couple of weeks ago. we talked for a little while, and found really good alignment, and by the time he left he'd signed the contract, which is excellent ^_^

...

when i saw (we use google's family link) that mr smear was off the shuttle and on his way home, i gave him a call to ask how his day at summer camp had gone. "it was great!" warmed my heart, and then i had to laugh because he was extremely enthusiastic about how good the second meal had been 😆

it looks like he's making friends and having a really good time, i hope it continues like this.

...

in the afternoon our late chief architect's family came in for a demo of what we've been up to, and we had a happy hour (or two) in his honor.

...

i was amazed to learn that our office manager is one of the officers whose job is to inform families of wounded or killed soldiers. i accidentally overheard a part of a sentence that i wish i hadn't :(

...

i managed to get home in time for dinner and deathnote, and we spoke to my mom who seems to be getting better (but was very busy patient-zero-ing yesterday so i gave her shit about being irresponsible), and shower / bedtime was pleasant and smooth. i told mr smear how proud i am of him, and how happy i am for him, that he's matured so much over the course of the past year, and this experience is convincing me that if the art school places open up he'll actually be ready for it.

then i settled in to complete some work i needed to do for a couple of my teammates, and what followed was a series of broken deployments with me becoming progressively more sleepy until almost midnight, at which point i gave up and dragged myself off to bed.

today so far:

i slept so-so, but the last couple of hours weren't great. i got up, and after a while scrolled through my notifications, and then retried the deployment one last time with the intention of rolling back a version if it failed.

it succeeded.

mr smear's just gotten up a little while ago, i've got yesterday's main points written down, and today's big plan is going to an art exhibition (work off art) across from my old office and maybe helping tahoma and his husband move apartments.

six

 omg. sailor said if we could finish this war in under six days it'd be a new record, today's day six and already many iranians in the government and military are defecting and declaring for the crown prince. we just came back up from the bomb shelter, so it's definitely not over, but i'm praying that this is all actually real and that it's not too good to be true.

i cannot imagine how the iranians must be feeling. after half a century of oppression. no less the rest of the countries in the region.

...

my work-from-home day was mostly meetings, and supporting others, and not getting of my own tasks done. and occasionally helping mr smear, or getting upset with him for not respecting my work-from-home boundaries.

and watching a lot of news. i can't stop, but we perpetually stand at forks in the path, and each fork leads up into the light and down into the darkness, and i'm as anxious about someone somewhere taking the wrong turn as i am excited but slightly skeptical about the too-good-to-be-true outcomes we're seeing out of iran right now.

like a dream

 in the middle of the night, the pre-pre-alarms went off, and i jumped out of bed still in a dream-state and automatically woke everyone up before realizing that there was no point. three or four hours later, anothe pre-pre-alarm, only that one turned into a pre-alarm and we spent the next while in the shelter with no internet hearing lots of loud explosions.

mr smear did some fantastic drawing while i tried to stop one of the neighbors from enthusiastically pointing out all the flaws in the shelter and dreaming up awful ways we might die.

i don't know when the right time is to discuss urgent safety issues with the bomb shelter is, but i am  pretty confident it's not when you're all stuck in the bomb shelter in the middle of a massive wave of rocket attacks...

we did all get back to sleep, but when the 7am alarm went off along with a reminder that mr smear had a hygienist appointment, we painfully dragged ourselves out of our beds (i was the slowest and the groggiest) to get ready to go. i did try to find out if the appointment had been cancelled, but all avenues pointed to "go", and mr smear and i scrambled out the door and just made it to the bus stop on time and i just finished my take-away cup of coffee in time to get to the dental clinic on time to find it closed.

on the plus side, it was an easy, quiet ride there and back and mr smear and i both enjoyed the conversation immensely (kerbal space program has inspired him to want to be an astronaut).

...

when we returned home, i called the dental service to complain, and the woman who answered was disagreeable right from the get-go, which pissed me off, and although i continued to try to explain to her that the clinics should be cancelling appointments if they're not going to honor them, by the time i got through her gaslighting and dismissing i totally lost my shit and i yelled and swore at her.

then i spent a furious little while navigating making a complaint, the process of which honestly made me even madder.

someone called me back a while later, and i explained what happened and told her to listen to the recording. i was satisfied when she took me off hold to agree to handle the complaint with that asshole's manager.

...

we had an interesting all-hands today, our company's in massive demand and things are heating up. this is good. but it's also exhausting right now specifically :P

...

my cheek seems to be healing alright, but it's still very fresh and i'm nervous about it. i'm grateful i didn't bleed on my pillow.

...

while i managed to get some work done today, i'm not satisfied and in spite of my current desperation to return to bed there's a chance i might try to dig in some more.

mr smear was pretty good about doing his homework, with only one emotional outburst that he turned around on so quickly that i'm still feeling really proud of him. he also helped me do the dishes this afternoon, and we actually had a good time of it. he's definitely growing up.

...

both of the people i communicated with yesterday regarding my mother's aliyah got back to me positively. i hope they can help me. i just wrote myself a reminder to contact whoever i contacted last year.

...

there's so much news happening right now. i was actually in a media briefing earlier, though i didn't hear anything new i was pleased that the people involved aren't missing the point of what's happening. and from the looks of things...

holy fuck, it looks like our forces are doing what they're now used to - going from suburb to suburb cleaning up, but there's no actual army to fight. just lots of terrorist cells with missile launchers (my thoughts after watching this tousi tv video about khamenei trying to flee to russia. what remains of the IRGC is absolutely psychotic)

... holy shit. this was only day four. in october last year, i wrote:

i've been fantasizing about us going all out against tehran for months, i keep thinking about how the US went into iraq in 2003 and how everyone was expecting it to be a serious war, and then the americans walked right through them. i have a feeling that if we hit tehran directly, we could be looking at a post-ayatollah iran which would immediately change the face of the entire region... so that's what i'm praying for.

 just sayin'.

history unfolding

 not gonna lie, it's hard trying to figure out what all this means, but a lot of it seems amazing and is almost too good to be true! at the same time, i'm not not to think of the casualties so far, a few residential buildings brought down and while relatively low numbers of dead and wounded so far, still a whole lot more than we're okay with :(

spending lots of time in the shelter hasn't been too terrible, though gd seems to be developing an allergy to something down there :/ and there's a really loud autistic kid. but for the most part, we're just doing our thing, singing along when the kids sing and mr smear has taken to pulling out his sketchbook and doing cool stuff.

...

it wasn't clear whether our pharmacies would be open this morning, so it was a relief when we got to both of them. i was a bit pressured for time, and ended up taking a taxi and then running to get to my neurologist appointment (for the insomnia), which turned out to be the appointment that i'd moved to the end of july 🤦‍♂️

anyway, getting there early worked out well. the procedure (removing something from my cheek) was quick and only incredibly painful for a moment, but it didn't stop bleeding for a long while (they wanted to avoid using stitches) and my hand went numb from pressing onto the wound.

anyway.

mr smear apparently behaved well during his zoom class, and aside from one dramatic homework moment (which really wasn't as bad as the previous times) he was cooperative and did what he had to do.

for me, it was a difficult work day to get into, but i did put in a few hours and by the end of the day did get the main job done.

...

i also had a productive conversation about my mother's aliyah with an ex-saffer who works in the absorption ministry, as well as sending off a request for assistance from yad l'olim. the more i think about my closing paragraph, the more pleased with myself i become:

Any assistance you're able to provide will be greatly appreciated, we have been deeply distressed for years now that she is unable to come home. As someone who is financially secure, I am happy to provide any guarantees she may require to satisfy the authorities that her aliyah will be successful. As an officer of the IDF and who is currently working in our defense industry, I am happy to provide any guarantees she may require that she is not an undesirable immigrant.

...

i'm now very tired (i mean, i haven't stopped being tired since friday), and i'm a little nervous about sleeping with the wound not yet healed, and i'm a lot nervous about being woken in the middle of the night by more rocket attacks... but on the whole, our army and intelligence are doing us proud to an unimaginable degree and it looks like the future i've been fantasizing about since last year may actually be coming to pass right before our eyes.

it's very hard not to get stuck into the news loop. i'm trying and failing to tear my eyes away, but we're literally watching history unfold.