un-holy

 unholy shit. the past few days have been thoroughly exhausting, i've got twenty minutes to type this up before taking mr smear to shul and hoping for a smooth evening.

i've been playing a lot of slay the spire, as much because it's an awesome game as because i desperately need some kind of escapist meditation.

gd and i left mr smear at home with cubase and tinkercad and did a quick pharmacy run before rushing a lunch and packing and heading for the train to jerusalem.

for the past two days, it's been near impossible to get mr smear "present" in any sense, all he wants to do is play games on his phone.

the train experience: just great, although managing mr smear's phone addiction wasn't easy.

the light rail experience: omg, so many people. so many low-iq, unwashed, neglected/neglectful people.

mr smear became progressively angrier and more upset about moving between the masses on their way to the wall, and about us trying to help him navigate his feelings, and by the time we arrived he was pretty much a lost cause. but in a way that really tied in to all the shit we've been dealing with lately, the rudeness and the belligerence and the defiance and the anger.

the ingratitude.

oh, i left out the shitty experience at the armenian quarter museum where we just wanted to use a bathroom.

the way back to the light rail was better, the ride back to the train station less unpleasant, the train ride back to tel aviv a relief - although a lot of that was just mr smear knowing that we were on our way home :/

we had some talks, we had dinner, and then i said goodnight and headed to the mongoose's to chill and decompress. he called me a taxi to get home because i was falling on my nose, and it didn't even occur to me to just order one myself :$

today:

another couple of talks in the morning, but him actually finishing his hebrew book report. a shopping mission that only had a couple more incidents. a mission to find an english copy of munchkin (didn't find one), introduce gd to the teva castel, eat a nice little meal off our favorite vegan cart, and take a long, slow stroll home (we were too impatient to wait for the buses).

oh, and lots and lots of dishes between last night and today to make up for a few negligent days.

gritty

it's almost 2am and i just opened a pull request for something that i really felt needed to be done by morning so that other devs can get to work without us continuing to do the wrong thing immediately after holding a kickoff meeting and telling everyone that we were no longer doing the wrong thing.

mood: shit, after a pretty exciting day and a pleasant evening (though long, and with some shitty parts), gd and i had a fight. while mostly resolved, i'm left feeling really sad for her because she's making it harder for herself to build a community around her than it needs to be. in addition to it being really hard to do so when you're barely able to go out and do things and in pain all the time.

...

sunday:

after we got home, i decided to take him to dizengoff center to look at MIDI controllers. their cheapest was too expensive, but we passed the tabletop gaming store, grabbed a box of star munchkin and a table, and mr smear and i had a fantastic game which he thoroughly enjoyed in spite of the smell of unwashed teenagers surrounding us.

score!

gd was finishing up at the dentist (racking up a bill that literally left me in shock - most of a month's rent), so mr smear and i found a spot to eat a falafel and he was really happy with it.

yesterday:

the day started alright, with me getting up early and deploying something so as not to block anyone while on vacation. my coworkers apologized for disturbing me :P

gd and i had our parental guidance session and halfway through my neck spasmed. i spent most of the rest of the day in pain on the couch.

pain is exhausting.

mr smear started practicing ma nishtana, and i'm hoping he won't chicken out again at the seder this year :P

i also helped him get through one of his homework assignments, and in spite of himself he pushed through. by the time we were done he was refusing to only listen to the part of the podcast episode on harriet tubman they were asking about, and actually seemed to appreciate it in its entirety.

we started watching paddington over dinner. it's good.

today:

i slept a bit better, my neck is still threatening but it's been mostly alright.

it was a busy day in the office. the coworker i was talking to on thursday morning dragged me in to show me the direct results of our conversation; i only have a vague idea of what they're doing but it certainly sounds cool. my lead and i ran a kickoff meeting to get everyone onto our new tooling, and we prepared for an investors visit, and i had a 1-on-1 with one of the founders which was really great.

he liked my re-framing of what we're doing, and half of lunch time was spent pitching my vision to more people :P

pretty much the rest of the afternoon was spent setting up a devcontainer for my team, which was an exercise in frustration that had me stress-eating (my old boss called me out when he noticed). i then paused to pick up gd's new passport (accompanying and assisting my heavily pregnant coworker along the way), then tried and failed to find kala namak for a stretch before returning home for dinner.

as soon as mr smear was in bed (and after reading some more of the colour of magic), i resumed the devcontainer mission. i'm really glad i finally got it working, and i hope that the lessons i've learned will prove useful somehow.

...

there's a lot of random personal stuff that needs to get done all of a sudden, and i'm having a really hard time getting through it. like, picking up post and fighting medical bureaucracy is one thing, but it looks like our oven just died, and we have no idea what to do about mr smear's extramural and holiday activities...