spinning

 it's the middle of the night and i'm having trouble sleeping, but i did sleep a bit and - surprisingly - without the mattress topper i'm hurting less.

i woke up a short while ago, and have been lying in bed with my mind in a spin about mr smear's new school, and the sonnet comics, and spoken word...

...

i accompanied mr smear to the school in the morning, he insisted on taking the light rail. it takes a lot longer than the bus, but he much prefers it... i dropped him off, dropped off a form with the secretary, and on my way out the building bumped into an old friend whose daughter's in the same school! i only found out in the evening it was his birthday, but that served as a good excuse to determine that i still had his phone number :P

from there i went to the allergy clinic, and almost cried when they told me the next possible date for mr smear's dairy challenge is mid-december.

from there i headed to the office. i had an interesting and positive chat with our tech ops manager, and then got into work early.

i can say that my two primary objectives for the day were, for the most part, achieved. the first was supporting my coworker and getting my own part of the work done, the second was shutting out anything that wasn't the first part. i wasn't 100% successful on that score, but i was pretty successful nonetheless.

...

around lunchtime i realized that i needed a face-to-face with the school councillor, who refuses to communicate over anything other than email. so i ducked out and went to the school, and lurked around her office until she (luckily) appeared. we had a quick chat, put faces to our names, and she introduced me to the principle who laughed at me for being around so much this week :P

unfortunately, it doesn't look like mr smear will be able to get into the music track unless he's a student of a particular music school; and it's not clear to me how much that's going to cost nor precisely which music school that is because there're apparently a number of the with the same name (O_o)

...

i'd asked mr smear to wait for me because i was already at the school, but he was champing at the bit to get himself home on his own. i took the opportunity to interrogate him about his day; there were some minor incidents, but according to him he handled them well. i guess we'll see ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

additionally, i spoke to the woman in charge of the self-sufficiency group that's an alternative to the scouts, it sounds amazing but i'm not sure how gd will handle their approach.

...

by the time i left the office, my coworker had almost made good on his delivery that he'd assured everyone in the morning would be ready before lunch. and i'd managed to lay the groundwork for some big changes coming in. i arrived home absolutely exhausted, just in time to help mr smear and his friend make actual plans. gd - in spite of her neck still being in a horrible condition - made delicious vegan pizzas and his friend joined us for dinner.

it was relatively late by the time mr smear got to bed, and gd and i followed suit soon after.

doing it wrong

 i barely slept last night, (and) my lower back's messed up. gd's in an even worse state.

we got up at 6am in order to get mr smear to his new classroom by 7.30am. gd forgot that his dairy challenge was scheduled for wednesday, and gave him an antihistamine, so now we have to postpone that and it's usually months before there's a slot available.

gd wasn't able to come with to his first day in the new school.

he was very awkward, but the general vibe and other parents were cool, the school is (as is to be expected) completely different in every way. but some of the adjustments are hard. and me having to handle the admin side of things, and then walk into the office only to realize someone cruelly scheduled an interview on the first morning of the school year, broke me.

it didn't help that there was little oxygen in the room - i really don't handle the meeting rooms well at all.

i left the hour and a half interview and went straight back to the school to pick up mr smear, and then spend more than half an hour waiting in line for his books. then i taught him how to open his locker (i'm sure it'll be a struggle for a while, it's an old-school combination lock) and we went to the light rail together.

and then i got off at my stop and let him go the rest of the way home by himself for the very first time. that wasn't stressful at all.

the next couple of hours was mostly spent getting the team aligned with our new priorities, and then i went into another interview. more interesting than the first, but i still had trouble staying awake by the end of it.

the last hour was torture. and i think i made one of the new guys feel bad. i'm pretty sure i'm making a bad impression on everyone lately, because i'm just burned out and every interruption has become a thing and i'm finding it really hard to display a positive attitude.

i'm fucking tired.

but i'm also tired because i have to handle all the new-school shit on my own, which includes the parent groups as well as figuring out how to get mr smear into the music track, which until today we had no idea required a history of formal lessons.

godsdammit.

anyway, at least mr smear is happy so far. on the other hand, our friend's daughter / his classmate decided not to leave the school, and is apparently deeply regretting it.

just before dinner, i managed to get in touch with someone in his old school who didn't register for their book program, so he took over mr smear's books and i'm grateful that it didn't cost us double.

...

there's some huge insect or something that was flying around our living room earlier, but it hasn't shown itself since. i'm going to bed now. i hope those two statements don't clash at any point.

failure

 we had a blowout at the fair. he wanted to sign up for animation again - even though last time he made everyone miserable until we took him out - but he steadfastly refused to even try the drum kit. we had a long conversation during which it sounded like he understood what i was trying to tell him (the usual mix of "you only fail if you don't try" and that one has to get out of one's comfort zone if one wants to grow, along with a helping of "i wish i had had such an awesome opportunity because you can't just buy drums and try them at home"), but after our conversation was over he reverted straight back to "just, no".

we walked to the bus stop and caught one to the shuk. around the middle of the shuk we found some vests, a grenadilla slushie and some coffee - i agreed to let him taste it, and he hated it 🤘 - and we proceeded to walk down allenby, up levontin, and then around to yuka monsters. the entire trip from bus there was really pleasant, it was a beautiful and quiet day and mr smear was being very cool.

we got lost in the store, and then gd finished her class and decided to join us, following my live location and walking down some dodgy streets. after she called, panicked, we left the store and met her halfway, then returned, where mr smear and i played some arcade tetris and gd and i went through all the books mr smear and i had been fawning over.

it's all incredible stuff, but very expensive and we wanted all of it.

from there we headed out in search of lunch. we weren't interested in meshek barzilay (not for a midday breakfast, at any rate) and we had trouble finding anything else, which is the point at which gd discovered that mr smear hadn't had breakfast and started freaking out. i picked him up a vegan onigiri from oomai, and we eventually made our way to cafe barzilay, which turned out to be a really good idea.

the two meals we went for turned out to be plenty of great food and an overall cool afternoon experience. then we took the light rail home, and the rest of the afternoon has been chilling, punctuated only by cleaning all the fans, and gd injuring her toe again (in the same way as before) that's finally been healing.

good grief.

so now i'm having a rum and hoping the rest of the weekend won't be dramatic.

...

watching mrbiscuitspeaks reactions to tool (starting with lateralus) is fascinating.

opportunity

 well, my shoulder's hurting this morning, but my eyes are feeling slightly less irritated and my teeth are feeling slightly less sensitive, so overall i guess i'm doing okay.

i'm feeling quite offended right now that putting money into mr smear and my shared compound account costs far more than we'll earn in compound interest over the next few years. i'm offended because crypto's been a big thing for so long already and it still doesn't make any sense for small players. and our physical banks don't have any incentive to compete.

mr smear just freaked out and dumped a really cool animation he made in flipaclip (after much struggling to determine that bluestacks still sucks and that flipaclip's pricing is extortion), but i got him to reattempt and learn what he should have done and he did. so at least one parenting win for the morning, not including him playing or singing iron maiden's two minutes to midnight every time he thinks something's going to be in two minutes :P

...

i walked into the office yesterday and sat down for a while with bigtalk to help him strategize. that was followed by a morning full of random shit, mostly frustrating, and i felt like my brain was melting (like i was maybe coming down with something, but in retrospect i think i was just tired and depressed).

the biggest downer was learning that bigtalk's definition of "fine-tuning" is completely out of sync with mine. he's been promising to deliver the Big Important Thing "today or tomorrow" since last week already and i'm just getting more and more frustrated.

the company retro was interesting, and i felt useful and needed. which makes me feel a bit weird about my position in the new org chart, where i'm just a devops and my "coach" is someone with less experience than me...

happy hour turning into an opportunity for a conversation about determining company culture (documentation and being remote-first), but that conversation led to someone even more important which was me determining the root cause for our algo team's difficulties and getting buy-in for my proposed solution from our de-facto tech chief.

and then i came home, without any issues with protestors (thankfully i don't have a car), and the evening was pleasant and we all went to bed pretty early. fortunately i was the only person who was awoken by the protestors flooding our neighborhood...

simple but stressed

 my eyes are blurry, but i've definitely levelled up in minesweeper. i've been listening to metal for the last hour or so and playing minesweeper and not really considering anything of value.

...

the workday was a bit weird. most of it was spent coaching a coworker and my boss through the installation process (my boss gave up once he understood how complicated the process still is), some of it was spent handling authorization issues. the highlight was an interview with a potential replacement for our late chief architect, who impressed the shit out of me and the other interviewer and we're hoping he'll be joining us soon.

i left the office a bit early, and mr smear joined me on a mission to pick up some more sophisticated decaf teas (pukka). the walk-and-talk was great and i'm very pleased with the results.

...

i feel like my greatest achievement today was getting mr smear back into the neverending story (it's been almost four years, i think he's *actually* ready for it now), reading it to him after bedtime. he had another good day at his dog training camp ^_^

work off (art)

 work off art was amazing. i don't remember the last time i went to an exhibit and was blown away by almost all of it.

getting there went smoothly in spite of the already mounting temperature, but that was mostly a matter of luck in timing. and we had time to grab a coffee before going in.

on the way out, we sat at hummus ha'ben shel ha'suri for breakfast, which we all enjoyed, and then walked to the hospital complex where gd had an encounter with a disrespectful pharmacist* while i deliberated between reasonably-priced and comfortable sandals and unreasonably-priced but holy-shit-what-is-this-magic sandals. i ended up splurging and going with the latter, which i pray i don't regret.

* i'm proud to report that she held her own, and made her accountable to her coworkers

we picked up a traditional bread-and-salt gift for tahoma for tomorrow, then walked home humming and arguing over the exact tune of a specific bar towards the end of daft punk - instant crush (i was wrong).

after learning some of the history of the ac/dc back in black album and listening to it in its entirety while resting on the couch, i spent a good chunk of the afternoon making some progress with the language app i've been working on in fits and starts, discussing educational gaming with sailor, teaching mr smear how to play roblox snake properly, doing tons of dishes and watching two episodes of deathnote on the big screen.

gin & tonic & coffee (the latter separately) and getting ready for shabbat.

(professional) ceasefire

 yesterday:

on my way out the door i messaged my boss, who called me back pretty quickly and i explained the situation. he was shocked by what i reported, but grateful that i was proposing taking care of it, and then we moved on to discussing an upcoming reorg. after he repeated the phrase "you can go where you like" three times i stopped him to ask "you mean within the company, right?"

"oh, come on..." ^_^

i got to work and invited bigtalk out for coffee. the walk to the coffee shop was enthusiastic shop talk, but we got serious once we had our drinks. i started by getting a good sense of where he's at, which thankfully appears to be very much aligned with where i am / we are, and when i got to the criticism and strategizing he seemed very positive and receptive.

so that happened.

...

at lunch, over a funny conversation about hebrew accents, i discovered that my israeli coworkers had never noticed that shlomo artzi's lehatzil otach contains bad english 🤣

...

aside from a meeting after lunch where i had to be very active and involved while actively falling asleep at my desk, and aside from the morning drama, it was a pretty relaxed day and i managed to sort out one of the tech ops issues during deployment.

i came home to find that mr smear had had another good day at summer camp (although apparently the second meal had been physically too hot to handle). we had a good dinner and watched another episode of deathnote, and the evening was basically everyone passing out quickly.

this morning so far:

i slept terribly, or barely slept. i took mr smear to the bus stop, which we had to evacuate quickly because some fuckers decided that it would be a good idea to install giant screens for advertisements facing into the goddamned bus stop. there's no way mr smear would have made it onto his bus if i hadn't been there 😡

since getting home, gd and i have watched a bunch of random interesting things, and now i'm getting ready to roll out.

the secret

 i've complained about the bullshit misconceptions regarding "the secret" before, but there's one aspect of it that is valid: if you decide you're going to have a bad day, you'll be sure to get it.

i began the day trying to disable avatars in zoom:

am i the only person who finds the idea of a zoom "AI companion" creepy, and am concerned by the fact that when i tried to disable it it warned me that that would mean deleting biometric data of mine??!

i mean, i've never heard of the AI companion features until i signed in to disable avatars so that my son's zoom class behavior would be less chaotic...

possibly related, by a bizarre sequence of events gd was forced to re-enact the scene from the dirtiest toilet in scotland this morning and we were all thoroughly traumatized.

most of today was spent indoors, alternating between random shit and napping. i finished reading danny the champion of the world, which was superb. we bought noita, which looks amazing, and i have to say mr smear gave it a very fair chance before he decided he was bored. he wanted to like it, but after going through some of it with him and then reading up on how long it takes before it starts being fun, we requested a refund.

oh, which reminds me - i started investigating entry level gaming PCs last night before going to bed, i think i might have found a good solution but i'm going to ask my coworkers to vet it first.

we also tried to get the MIDI controller working with garage band; it does work out of the box, but i couldn't for the life of me figure out the controls.

after spending some time trying to compile the sonnet comics images into a format for the printer. i was horrified to learn that i don't have all the hi-res images, and that some of the hi-res images are slightly different resolutions. fortunately, mr cat was quick to respond positively and he's going to (re-)deliver them soon.

...

i planned to take mr smear to the charles clore park for an outing, which started off positively but he soon found things to complain about and became progressively more convinced that he was having the worst day ever. the fruit shake was great, the ice-cream was great, being on the promenade on a beautiful day was great, and having dinner at mexicana was great (although once he actually tried the food he remembered he didn't like the rice, goddammit).

on the way home his bike started acting up, so he decided he was going to walk. *i& didn't want to walk because i was on blades and moving slowly over long periods makes my feet hurt, and we'd already travelled pretty far. so i grabbed his bike and rolled with it, he jogged alongside me, and this was going great until he tripped on some sunken bricks and really hurt himself.

the limp home was painful for him, and i ended up having to "walk" anyway so it was painful for me too. and we had a few characteristically unpleasant moments along the way, although we both seemed to handle things better once we got home.

now it's just about 10pm, i've almost finished my strong tea and i'm about to get to work 🤞

bumpy ride

 wednesday:

waking up early and sending mr smear off to school, still broken from lack of sleep

arriving to the office really early (but still with time pressure) to discover that my installation station had been stripped of all its cabling (amongst other things), and it would take about an hour and a half to get that sorted out.

at least the installation itself went relatively smoothly.

one of the aussies gave me and another aussie's cousin (he's helping out) a ride to the test site, where the story of the afternoon was hours of set up for very little payoff - not only were there loads of hardware issues, but the issue that i'd resolved by midnight the previous night turned out to be not fully solved, and it cost another three hours to understand what was wrong and resolve it.

and then cursor started bugging out, because we use devcontainers and microsoft (fuckers!) are now preventing vscode clones from using their extensions.

i don't know at this point how much of the solution to the problem is an actual solution to the problem, or a workaround for ms (and docker) fuckery.

anyway. at least i figured out the cause of one of the other issues we had (aws syncing syncs impossibly slowly if you have debug logs being printed)

anyway.

after wrestling with a bad router/switch setup, and waiting 90's download times for an OS installation, we were finally able to leave one of the machines in a state where i should have been able to continue the installation remotely, and we hopped in the car and rode back to tel aviv.

i arrived home around 11pm. signed in to attempt to finish the deployment, and discover that the machine was offline.

very frustrated, i went to bed.

yesterday:

i feel like the whole city woke up feeling more rested. mr smear went off to school again, i took care of a bunch of things that had been piling up over the course of the week, went past the clinic to get authorization for gd's procedure next week, and continued on to the coffee shop where astérix gladiateur was waiting to be picked up.

of course, i had to pick up a coffee and nurse it all the way to the office.

it was an exciting day in the office. the two most significant pieces of work i did were recording an online demo from a contractor (who threw up a little in his mouth halfway through 🤢), and taking a couple of guys with IT / devops experience into the warehouse and beginning to get a workshop set up there.

another highlight (in addition to the workshop, as opposed to the not-highlight of the demo) was a department weekly with lots of enthusiastic new faces, and a happy hour making a new convert both regarding shakespeare's sonnets and my vision for our software solution.

after putting mr smear to bed, i had a call with my boss; i suspected that i was going to be answering for having been a bit miserable the previous day, but it turned out to be a discussion about how to go about doing a deployment we'd had to defer and arguing over when to do it. we ended up settling on tomorrow night, so 🤞

today:

i guess i slept alright last night, at least better than has become usual. i was avoiding screens before mr smear left for school, and reading a canticle for leibowitz, or trying to at any rate. some of it i've really enjoyed, but the last quarter is proving to be a slog and with everything else going on i've decided to give it up.

while going through that, i realized that even if i'm not on screens i'm still focused very close to my head, so i decided to walk mr smear to school in order to give my own eyes an opportunity to "stretch". surprisingly, gd had had a similar idea simultaneously so we all walked together, which aside from an  encounter with a brazenly irresponsible dog owner was an enjoyable experience.

i had some important stuff to take care of, which generated a fight with gd that put more shitty vibes on the morning, but eventually worked through it and we hit the mall to do some grocery shopping and upgrade my phone.

it turns out the issue with my (old) phone has been that it's only got 4GB of memory, and with my "new" phone (the display unit, i got a significant discount for that) it's clear why it was so unresponsive; my baseline usage with nothing open is 4.6GB, and that's after uninstalling and disabling every app i don't need on a daily basis...

i'm a little concerned about the battery usage, but i'll give it a few days before i decide whether to complain or not.

on the way out of the mall, an older guy came out of the retirement home and lit up a cigarette while still inside the mall. i asked him to please not do that, to which he made stupid excuses and then started calling me a quibbler (not sure if the translation is good). so i called him a jerk, but he continued to act like a jerk and although i succeeded in walking away, it only takes one asshole to ruin a good day, and i'd already had some shitty experiences, and he occupied more brainspace than he had right to for the next while.

it was hot (summer's here) and i was sweaty and tired by the time we got home, but i had to rush off to pick up mr smear and help carry home all the books from his locker. i spent the next while napping on the couch listening to the audiobook of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, waking up to gd reading asterix to mr smear.

i spent the remainder of the afternoon and most of the evening getting the new phone set up, while listening to insane AI covers like system of a crown and neon maiden.

we went to our friends for friday night dinner, which was a really pleasant evening, both for the adults and the kids.

it's now almost 1am, mr smear has just gone to bed and i'm about to jump in the shower and probably also go to bed.

doing the thing (overeating)

mr smear helped me clean the window poop this morning. i sorted out a phone bill this morning. i booked mr smear for a dairy allergy challenge in september, and gd for a pain clinic consultation next week. i listened to some more of american gods.

i complained about the company breakfast, which was anti-vegan for the second time this week. then i ate four slices of bread, right before being reminded that we were being taken to an expensive lunch before they pitched us their services*. i ate a lot of really good food.

* we were pleasantly surprised and impressed by the expert recommending a competitor's solutions when he realized theirs wouldn't cut it

overall, it was a successful work day, but it included us making a decision that might well see us losing quite a bit of sleep in the coming week.

i got home in time to listen to mr smear practice on the keyboard, and do a good hebrew reading, and verify that he knew where to look in the book for his upcoming open-book science test.

it looks like we're dealing with dust mites :( gd and i have both gone over a lot of surfaces, hopefully we've gotten through the worst of it.

after shower / bedtime / lots of talk about mr smear's new/renewed interest in 3d modelling and game design (and me installing ableton live because the cubase trial is already over), i settled down to work on the language project and have been jumping between that (making good progress) and youtube/minesweeper since.

now it's after midnight, it's probably a good idea for me to head to bed soon.

beats

 it was a big day, it had ups and downs. big ups, with a sprinkle of frustrating downs.

it started with me waking up with a sore shoulder, and it's ending with me either being eaten by a mosquito or just imagining it.

we left reasonably on time, with only a minor mr smear hiccup along the way. the drive there was longer than i'd anticipated, but we arrived relatively early in the day. it wasn't quite what we expected - the party took place in an amusement park - but for a family-friendly trance event it was a pretty good space.

immediately, mr smear decided he was struggling with sensory overload and wanted to go home. we tried to calm him down, and make him understand that we weren't leaving anytime soon, with varying degrees of success.

for round one, we hit the main floor while he sat outside drawing, but soon the wind came up and he went upstairs to lie on a bench and watch the floor from above.

in retrospect, i feel really dumb for not having brought him earplugs or ear protectors. i'm guessing roughly half the other parents remembered and/or cared :P

between rounds, we ate the packed lunch in the car and then played foosball before returning to the main floor. something bothered him (i found out later it was people eating at the table he was next to) and he went and sat outside (reading on his phone, i let it go for today), and gd and i continued having a really good time dancing, enjoying a beer or three (i only had one :P), and being both amused by all the families on the floor and proud of all of us for doing precisely what our people fight and die to be able to do: live.

on the way out, mr smear actually joined us for a final dance on the second stage (a dj with a didgeridoo, mr smear wisely thought it prudent to step away from the bass bin because he was feeling the beats in his chest), and the long ride back was (long, but) very pleasant. coming into the apartment, gd made a comment about how we need to do that more often and my heart lifted ^_^

the rest of the evening was good, with mr smear and i playing some there is no game together. eventually, he went to bed. everything seemed fine.

by the third time he called for gd, i went to go and see what was going on. i was surprised to find him in tears, and i pushed him to tell me why he was crying... to which he responded that they were joyful tears, because gd had sung him a lullaby and he'd felt truly at peace for the first time in years 😭

i've spent a little time working on the language project, but it's late and it's been a big day and i think i should probably go to bed soon.

buzz

 yesterday:

i felt better, at least. made more progress on the language project. waited twenty minutes at the store to pick up my "neon-nazi"s only to discover that i was supposed to wait for an sms update, but they sorted me out anyway. had a pretty productive day at work, with the biggest achievement being a coffee walk interview with someone we've been courting and who signed later in the afternoon. good for him (as a new oleh) and good for us! ate too much cake at the happy hour, brought home too much cake and nobody else wants to eat it. went through possible summer day-camps with mr smear (whose preferences surprised us) and tried to book it, but we're now waiting for them to get back to us :/

the bug zapper in mr smear's room is super bright and may have been a mistake.

a couple of hours work in the evening (to protect us from a mysterious bug that we encountered during the day), a little more of the language project, then finally passing out.

this morning so far:

getting up early, catching and crushing a fat, slow cockroach, being blown away by the dor brother's AI short film. fighting with mr smear (but winning, apparently) because i'm taking him swimming but he wants to go to his friday computer class. more progress on the language project. now getting ready to head out...

...

i hate the spice girls, abhor wannabe, but i've had it in my head the whole morning and am somehow enjoying the nostalgia of it 😶

namaste

i went to bed late, but i got up way earlier than i wanted to. the day started off well, i spent the pre-school morning coaching mr smear through some last minute exam prep - he did really well! - and then rushed through an online grocery shopping so i could leave on time to get to our yoga class.

no buses for a while, i ended up arriving *just* in time.

it was a good class, not easy, with some highly amusing moments. i didn't hurt myself.

we got a good company breakfast and i showered before settling in to work; getting in and out of the shower wasn't amazing, but the shower itself is worth it!

it was a pretty successful day. but the most successful part wasn't me: i asked mr smear how his day went and i could hear how pleased he was with himself, because he's pretty confident he aced the test. i am too, but i'm more excited about him not only getting a handle on the math, but feeling good about it too ^_^

i left early to meet gd and mr smear at the pain clinic for her nerve block, but we arrived there to discover that we hadn't sorted out authorization and it costs thousands of shekels, so we rebooked, did some shopping and went home.

i got mr smear to work on cubase for a while, but to be fair a lot of the actual work was done by me. *we* put together a pretty cool beat, and i hope he learned as much as he claims he did :P

then he read a couple of pages of hebrew harry potter - well - we had an early dinner and a pleasant evening. i spent a couple of hours ironing out issues with the language project, where user registration and authentication is now good enough to move on to the interesting stuff.

it's late again. hopefully i'll sleep.

"hummus thursday"

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

strikes

 jesus, another day of the teacher's strike. and tomorrow's another one.

i slept alright, i guess, but still needed some massage time when i woke up - i feel like consistently using it for long periods on my neck is helping. i did another page of hebrew reading with mr smear, and gd and i had an encouraging parental guidance session.

the work day was long, but alright. tough, pressured, but alright.

it was an enormous relief receiving my payslip and seeing that my broker was right - it was just the last one that was out of whack.

during the day i got a call from gd, who'd realized that mr smear wasn't doing the math homework he'd claimed to have done (fight, battle won). when i got home, i taught mr smear how to make beat in cubase before dinner (minor fight, battle won). at bedtime, we had an issue with closing his door (minor fight, battle mostly won).

i thought i might get some work done tonight, but no. youtube and minesweeper, a bunch of random admin chores, slay the spire, and now... back to youtube while i type this, and then... bed.

the rescue OST

it's bothering me a little that i've been so focused on getting through the days that i haven't done any of the hanging out with friends i was intending to...

tuesday:

tuesday was very intense. firstly, while waking up i heard that there was some kind of illustrator's fair happening in nahalat binyamin. it was obvious that we should take mr smear, but in addition to her injured toe gd's been feeling wrecked since the drive in our kibbutz cousin's car. and i had to go to work. but figuring out logistics wasn't enough, we also had to contend with mr smear deciding that he didn't want to go because - as always - it's not fair to make him leave the house (and screens).

like... ever.

we're explaining to him that while he's convinced we're terrible parents for making him go anywhere, we're already terrible parents for having raised a child who doesn't want to go anywhere, and we'd be terrible parents if we let him grow up to be a "basement boy".

once he got over his initial huff, we had a really nice morning, saw very cool art, had an awkward conversation or two*, and it was a great stroll through a beautiful morning in tel aviv.

* he complained to one of the illustrators that everyone "makes the mistake" of drawing aliens that are humanoid when they probably aren't humanoid. the artist admitted that his comic strip had been commissioned by an outlet that wanted aliens, but his original story was humans so he just redrew them to look weird 🤣

he came with me to my office. when he got bored, and gd wasn't able to fetch him for a while, i invited him to come with me to pick up lunch at sumsum. aside from an additional bit of a walk in pleasant weather, he loves making his own salads and we both enjoyed the meal together.

...

gd arrived to pick him up, and was very nervous about coming in to the office and meeting everyone. turns out she's been developing social anxiety, and now we have another Thing to deal with... anyway, it was a quick and uneventful tour of the office, and she met my old boss (apparently) for the first time, and then it was back to work.

...

two big things happened yesterday, one interfering with the other. the first is that we've finally got security management set up, so a big chunk of my day was setting up vaults and helping others get theirs configured. the second was that our dev environment fell over.

this appears to have happened because we've switched to a new deployment system that the dev server wasn't yet prepared for, and my lead advised another coworker to use it even though i'd explicitly told everyone not to touch anything until we'd reinstalled it 🤦

what followed was a mad scramble that lasted into the evening, which i quipped was the kind of "real" incident to make me truly feel like a part of the team :P

by the time i left the office, we were up and running and with a functioning backup tool that had been sitting in my to-do queue for weeks.

reading i, robot to mr smear at bedtime, and slay the spire into the night.

yesterday:

anything not explicitly mentioned about my waking hours infers that i was playing slay the spire.

cubase success: figuring out how to record sequences with the MIDI controller, eventually figuring out how to record audio with the mic (hint: alway check if the mic is muted before frustration sets in)

homework battle: less about the homework, more about mr smear behaving aggressively / rudely and then responding poorly to the consequences...

...

the big event of the day was us receiving our new oven. gd was freaking out because she was worried i'd hurt myself lifting it, and i'll be gracious and admit that the old one was really heavy. and the new one needed to be lifted from the floor. but the biggest difficulty was in cleaning around and behind the old one before the new one arrived.

i'm becoming convinced that there's no way that our landlords lived here as long as they did, and also that they never cleaned or maintained anything, ever.

...

mr smear's "play therapist" arrived unexpectedly while we were having a fight about homework, and after i'd told him that we were going out soon. so that was awkward. but getting him out the house proved relatively easy, and we went on a mission to find oven trays because our old ones don't fit.  we walked, bussed, and then walked a lot (through pesach tourist crowds), and though we didn't find what we were looking for we did have a generally good experience and we finally found a place to pick up black salt along the way!

between arriving home and eating dinner (cooked in our new oven, great success!) i opened cubase and learned how to turn a recording into a playable sample ^_^

i continued reading i, robot to mr smear at bedtime, then passed out.

today:

it was an uncomfortable night overall, but i did get some sleep. now i'm waiting for my family to see if we're going to jerusalem today (i doubt it, in gd's current state). and i'm going to need to take care of some work this morning, which i'm honestly not looking forward to because it's interfacing with third parties i have no relationship with, while on vacation :/

functional

 i don't think i slept enough last night, and it's half-past midnight now so i guess i'm not going to sleep enough tonight, either. my neck's still been threatening, though substantially less.

the morning saw me pretty functional. i finally applied for the upgrade to gd's cannabis license, submitted authorizations for mr smear's therapist, and ran mr smear through some of his homework before leaving for the office.

the work day went pretty well, with a highlight being a walk and talk with an investor which was both pleasant and pleasantly surprising in our general alignment. later, one of my coworkers showed me something that forms another piece of the puzzle i've been putting together in my head, much earlier than anticipated.

i got home in time to take mr smear out for a good walk before dinner, and finished reading the first i, robot story to him at bedtime. i've played another act from slay the spire, and i'm really enjoying it.

mr smear didn't manage to figure out getting tracks laid down in cubase, so i guess that's what we're doing tomorrow morning...

pains in the neck

 wednesday was rough. i was fine in the morning - i took mr smear on an "outing" to pick up a parcel, which was nice* - and i was fine until i got into the office. but at some point something in my neck / shoulder spasmed and started pushing on a control nerve, which immediately triggered a painful headache, dizziness and nausea.

* he made a point of carrying something heavy because his new "resolution" is to not be lazy. that last all of a day, and then the next day he made a new "resolution" to be lazy again 🤣

and then i had to navigate two arguments with coworkers, mostly in a position of having to calm them down.

after a while i realized that i was on the verge of fainting, and i packed up and wobbled my way home.

i felt a it better after lying down and stretching and massaging my neck for a couple of hours, though i managed to bruise myself rather severely. i spent the afternoon / evening learning the hard way that my lead's warnings about never modifying git submodules directly were bang on the money.

...

yesterday was better, though i was still sore (as well as bruised) and my neck was threatening to go bad for its entirety. a coworker leant me a small but surprisingly powerful massage tool that i tried a couple of times, but that literally made my eyeballs bounce in my head and made me start feeling nauseous...

i started the day trying to read a canticle for leibowitz, which starts off well enough but i was still too sleepy to get very far.

on the way to the office, gd and mr smear joined me for a mission to the appliance store where we ordered a replacement oven (even with delivery it's cheaper than a repair attempt) and picked up a blender to boot. which i carried to work in the unexpected dribbles of rain that started when i left the building and only stopped once i found cover again.

it was a long and intense day, beginning with me moderating squabbles between my teammates and trying to keep everyone with eyes on the prize in spite of personal differences towards approaches. there were lots of feelings.

i warned everyone that we needed to rip the bandaid of our old tooling as soon as possible, and for my sins they complied. we're running into a lot of teething troubles, but rather sooner than later ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

my interview with one of the investors was postponed, which turned out to be a good thing because i spent most of my work hours running between people to give them assistance. or cheerlead. or commiserate, such as when my lead got irritated by a linter i'd introduced and somehow managed to deep-six hours of his work.

anyway.

we received some nice passover gifts from the company.

lipgirl had put me onto a midi controller (the akai mpk mini mk2), and i really wanted to pick it up before the weekend. at 19.45pm, i had just sat down to dinner when the seller contacted me to say he'd be at azrieli at 20.15pm, so i ate too quickly and scrambled to get there on time. in spite of the evening bus schedules and regular protests, i arrived with a few minutes to spare...

... and then had to hang around for another half an hour before he showed up :/

but he was cool, and i was happy to have paid about half price for a piece of equipment that looks really good and is in really good condition.

on my way to catch a bus home i walked past an old grocery store cashier who's always very kind (she's taken a shine to mr smear) and waved to wish her a chag sameach, and she called out for help - she's injured her leg, and was having trouble carrying heavy groceries to her bus stop. i gave her a hand, but as we arrived she suddenly realized she hadn't swiped her card when she left, so i quickly ran back to take care of that.

so it was with a good vibe that i caught an unfamiliar bus, with the driver making sure that i got to the right stop. and then i came home, chatted with my mom**, showered, put my son to bed, opened the gift bottle of gin and tried to continue watching redline. gd got bored, and wasn't interested in akira, so we ended up watching some of nightcrawler before going to bed.

** oh! my brother's oldest got married yesterday. none of us were invited :P

...

today: i think i must have spent about three hours trying to figure out how to connect the midi controller, create the requisite accounts, install the basic software packages... i'm sure there's a whole bunch of stuff we've yet to learn, but by the time we left the apartment for a gift-shopping run i'd at least managed to get mr smear able to play with samples in cubase elements, and he was making pretty cool noises.

[gd shatters a bowl in the kitchen]

we walked down to ibn gvirol, where gd got additional holes punched in her belts, we picked up a bottle of cognac as a gift for the seder, tried and failed to find someone to cut a new house key for us, gave up waiting for laffot, scarfed down sandwiches at cafe eva (and found black salt!), made it back to our local hardware store in time to pick up dehumidifying slabs, and have spent a cozy afternoon doing not much.

mr smear just got through his homework for the day without a fuss, and he did it well, and now we're settling in to skip shul and watch prince of egypt instead.

...

i just finished watching dave smith and douglas murray on joe rogan, which i found deeply disappointing. if nothing else, murray could have talked about the outrageous efforts israelis make to avoid civilian casualties, but either way he wasn't on form, and his manner rendered him less than effective. looking at the comments, he didn't convince anyone of anything.

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...

the good place

i think i slept okay last night, but i was a bit too warm under the duvet (spring is coming). my sinus situation seems a bit better, but it's still not great. i don't know what this means, but whatever it is it's been going on a ridiculously long time now and i'm quite over it.

i know mr smear can get himself to school now, but i quite enjoy walking with him. on my way home, i picked up some stuff from the grocery store. then i ran into one of the parents - i still don't know his name, but it's way too late to ask - and we had a quick chat during which i learned that he works in an adjacent field to mine, which was interesting.

[i've just spent about half an hour trying to find out his name on facebook and linkedin, and i've got nothing to show for it]

once i was back home and mr smear was at school, i discussed last night's shenanigans and gd and i are in sync about how it went down.

i saw that my coworkers were all busy for a lot of the night, and i made a point of enabling work notifications around the clock because i feel bad that i wasn't online for them. i fiddled around with my cibus card, and managed to write up some stuff for ze german, before leaving for the office. it felt good to get that off my to-do list.

the work day was busy, and pleasantly successful. my lead blew my mind describing how he worked around the bugs we'd been seeing - our code was fine, the tools we're using have some issues.

lunch was amazing (pasta via's "mythological vegan").

in addition to achieving another milestone on the project i'm working on, i've just (like, an hour ago) finished up two pieces of "side quest" work. it's fair to say that the lion's share of the work i did today was implemented by AI, and most of that was pretty good and only needed some minor tweaks.

mr smear's class went on a field trip today, and on the bus ride back he FA'd with his phone and FO'd when his teacher confiscated it. he was very, very upset - hopefully he'll learn from the experience :P

i came home "on time" today (for the first time this week, i believe) and helped mr smear with his homework. in general it was a great evening, and my absolute favorite part of it was during shower / toothbrushing time with the three of us singing along at the top of our lungs to kiss' i was made for lovin' you and queen's bohemian rhapsody.

mr smear went to bed without any drama, and then gd and i enjoyed another episode of monk before she went to bed and i got back to business.