hyper-real

 i slept remarkably well last night. i got up a little before my alarm this morning, and took to my office instead of the balcony so as not to disturb the kids sleeping in the living room. i began my day by writing up the article about what AI teaches us about human consciousness (leading to a new appreciation to the insights of the movie memento), and did some work on the auto-doc, then headed out with my sister to meet up with our cousins.

...

i'd managed to get the wrong address from google maps - i just checked, and the address in google maps is simply incorrect - and that led to some confusion as we first walked the right way, then turned back because the address was wrong, then doubled back once we arrived at the wrong place. so we arrived a bit late to the beachfront coffee shop. then ordering coffee turned into a thing (apparently the guy behind us was being weirdly stressed about me speaking to the cashier), and then we sat down at the table to discover that the chairs have all been bolted in place.

weird fucking place.

anyway, i spent most of the hour making my pitch, primarily to our younger cousin but it was a good conversation all round. i was very grateful that my sister was with me because she definitely contributed, and also grateful for our older cousin pointing out that our younger cousin has been looking for something meaningful, and by the time i had to run i believe i'd managed to put all the pieces together into something coherent.

i walked out of there buzzing after having been thanked warmly and told he was already thinking about it.

...

my phone went off informing me that i had a newly scheduled meeting that my manager had arranged with one of the data guys (they'd been ignoring my request for assistance for a day or two), and i rushed through the shuk, getting properly turned around, in the search for a quiet place to get online, all the while discussing the meeting and the idea with my mother on the phone.

with a couple of minutes to go, i sat down on a bench under a tree, sweating in the already-heavy heat, actively context-switching into the meeting and nervously praying that i or my computer didn't get shat on by birds. that was when i realized that it wasn't an online meeting, there was no link, and i had been expected to be physically in the office.

that was also when i saw that i'd just been contacted about the work i'd been doing the day before, and learned that by fixing the nine year-old bugs in the golang service, i'd inadvertently caused an incident 🤦‍♂️

fortunately, reverting was easy (because i'd fixed its CI a week or two ago) and i quickly made my way to the bus. on the way home, i continued to apologize and explain and reassure the poor on-call that the incident was over and that i would provide the post-mortem.

i was hungry by the time i got off the bus, and stopped at home to pick up a sandwich from gd and then walk it to the office. it was more than just a sandwich. it was a heavy, delicious sushi filling on good bread, and by the time i was done i felt a combination of deep satisfaction and a sense of having eaten more than i needed.

i arrived at the office just in time to see the guy i was meeting with leave for lunch. and, also, just in time for my elevator pitch to my employer.

...

the call was fifteen minutes long (it had been scheduled for half an hour), and he got the idea pretty quickly. he asked a couple of good questions, and then told me he wanted a PRD. so 🤘

then he informed me that he'd considered my request for a raise, and that these weren't good times for it but he does appreciate my situation, and offered me a very respectable bonus instead... on condition that i don't leave the company within a year.

i was very grateful, both for the bonus and for the implicit additional positive feedback.

...

writing an AI-assisted post-mortem is a treat. it put all the facts together, i edited and added a recommendation, and it was started and published within 25 minutes and without any stress.

my recommendation: protect the bad / broken client-facing behavior, but disconnect it from actually trying to do anything.

i was asked for help by one of my previous client team, and i hope i've managed to onboard him as a new (replacement) dashboard-as-code champion.

i bumped into the other contractor, and we talked about our employer's new market shift, and invited him to join my "async game jam" experiment.

i tried to discuss the incident with someone from the old client team, and ended up down a rabbit hole with another AI specialist and demo'ed the auto-doc. now both he and my manager want to see the one-pager, and he gave me some pointers as to what specifically he wants to see, which is encouraging!

i finally sat down with the data engineer, and discovered that the problem i've been needing help with was a bit simpler than i'd thought. we both spent some time working on the fix in parallel, hopefully it'll be in early next week.

i then had a one-on-one with my manager, which turned into a very long, very interesting debate because we have very different ideas about what to focus on when building out our harness. there are some things we clearly agree on, though, and i was pleased at the end when i made a suggestion that he was happy with, and even more pleased to speak to the AI specialist again and discover that he'd already implemented something similar that i can use to make it happen :)

the happy hour was good, and i continued my earlier conversation with my fellow consultant before my client / the boss pulled me in to a meeting with the previous client team's lead - he wants me to do another job for them next week, between other jobs :P

i worked another hour, then left the office feeling pretty darned good about how my day went.

...

gd, on the other hand, had not had such an easy day. she was traumatized by mr smear's friend from the wrong side of the tracks, and having to parent him in ways that one would hope a ten or eleven year-old wouldn't need. ultimately it sounds like she handled the whole thing excellently, but it was difficult and concerning. i discussed it with mr smear as we strapped on our rollerblades - he'd been supporting gd in trying to help his friend, and for the most part had behaved very well himself - and he seems to be a lot more appreciative of the parenting he's gotten having witnessed the alternative...

...

the rollerblading went well, though it got off to a frustratingly slow start, and we had a good time and it was a beautiful (if hot and humid) evening. it took mr smear so insanely long to get showered and ready for dinner, though, that by the time we sat down my sister had already returned home from ra'anana after having had dinner herself, but she sat with us to chat.

it was pretty late by the time we were done, and i didn't last long after putting mr smear to bed. i suspected i wouldn't sleep through the night, though, and i think i lay awake for at least an hour before getting up almost an hour and a half ago.

perhaps i'll sleep easier having gotten all of this down.

the king of the upside-down

 it's monday evening, just about two days have passed and it's been wild.

saturday night:

i spent the following few hours working on my hackathon project, troubleshooting github actions and eventually getting to the point where i'm ready to give the first iteration a try. then i went to bed, and caught a few (about three) hours sleep.

yesterday:

i woke up feeling less than stellar. but i got up, and had a coffee, and then accompanied mr smear to his first day of summer day camp. the first time was a bit complicated, but he managed just fine by himself this morning, so 👍

from the bus to the school we were accompanied by one of his buddies, and it was interested shadowing them and hearing them discussing how much happier they both are at the new school ^_^

i lurked a bit while mr smear registered himself, then made myself scarce and headed back home. the camp is a version of "the academy", the post-apocalyptic survival LARP, and i think that's pretty cool :)

i paid the municipality fees yesterday morning, which are still on the landlord's account. quite frankly, i'd rather they remained that way because he gets a significant discount, and at this point i really don't want to go through the ridiculous circus of recreating our contract and pretending to be moving in...

my first meeting was long, and tough. the guys amicable enough, but my gods he makes me uncomfortable. he's clearly very knowledgeable, but we seem to have a communication problem and he doesn't solve problems quite the way i do. also i was very tired. i was quite amused when we finally came to the conclusion that whether he likes my approach or not, it's the only viable one considering the state of the data.

either way, it was a massive relief when the meeting was over.

i spent quite a lot of time poring over documents my client had sent me over the weekend, which led me to read welcome to gas town, which is completely unhinged.

i managed to complete the morning meeting's change by the time mr smear got home, at which point we sat down and had a serious conversation about his first day; he's bored, he says, because although a couple of the things they did were fun, there was a lot of physical activity that just isn't what he's there for...

either way, he urgently needed sports shoes, so we all went to the mall for what is arguably our least favorite family pastime. the first place we went to - a department store - had very expensive options we weren't thrilled by. the second only had the most expensive shoes, great quality but not for a growing boy. the third... had what we were looking for. aside from a little bit of i've-had-enough drama on mr smear's part, we walked out with a solid pair of shoes and an order for an identical pair one size up at a heavily-reduced price.

there was a little more shopping to be done, then we caught a bus home. gd and i dropped off the shoes, the groceries and the child, and then went across the road to do some more grocery shopping. it was poor timing, lots of customers, one cashier and one self-service, and it took sooo long to get out of there...

over dinner, we started watching guardians of the galaxy. the rest of the evening was a blur. i think i went to bed relatively soon after putting mr smear to bed.

today:

i actually got a good night's sleep last night. my back's still really sore, though.

...

there were a couple of odd threads to pull at work today, the main one being as follows:

a couple of months ago i worked on a small service that nobody else understands. it's written in golang, and nobody in the company works with golang (they fired the team that owner the service), and it hadn't been maintained for a very long time. so i upgraded it to the latest version, and made the changes that needed to be made, and merged them... but nothing happened. i didn't break anything - which i was very grateful for - but what i thought i'd fixed still wasn't fixed, and i had to cut and move on to the big project.

on thursday i had some spare time, and i returned to the service and made an important fix (a serious memory leak). this morning i got permission to push it. i pushed it.

nothing happened.

the AI i used to investigate the dashboards and the logs came to the conclusion that i totally fixed the bug. it repeated this a couple of times, even though the dashboards didn't seem different at all, and so i carried on trying to figure out what was going on.

eventually, i realized that not only were my changes not in production, but neither were my previous ones, nor those of the couple of people who also touched this service in between. that the CI workflow  entitled "build - test - deploy" that ran successfully only builds and tests, but does not deploy.

the CI/CD workflows have never been CD, the deployments have only ever been manual, and nobody responsible for this service knows this.

you can't make this shit up.

...

oh! and the other consultant working with my client came by my desk after putting some pieces of data together and determining that there are people being fired by our employer for not being able to find clients. it calls the "i have job security" thesis into question, it doesn't feel so good.

...

in the afternoon, i travelled to my employer's office for a group meeting. i got called up, unprepared, to tell a story about failures at scale, and told the story of me returning to work after paternity leave and having to rewrite the project from scratch, getting to the deadline with everything working beautiful and discovering a bug during the demo that the managers saw and terminating the project.

the barbecue wasn't my thing, but they'd brought in a serious quantity of good hummus and falafel so i was sorted. i made myself a few pitot, and bounced from vegan conversation to vegan conversation - most of them initiated by somebody overhearing the tail end of the previous one and inquiring. all of it was amicable and i think i got some people to think a bit differently about it.

...

i caught a bus to the mall to meet up with gd and mr smear, who'd been forced to wait in a freezing reception for more than three hours for the eye specialist. tomorrow we're going to start hunting for a new one, and then call up the fat-fuck receptionist and tell her we're cancelling because she's a selfish piece of trash (gd described to me in detail how disrespectful she was towards everyone, and that she wasn't the only one to beg her to raise the temperature).

apparently mr smear's eyesight has improved? hmm...

we bussed home, gd prepared a gluten-free vegan pesto and avo pizza (which was delicious), and we discussed mr smear's day camp experience and explained that there's no refunds and he's just going to have to make the most of it. fortunately, as much as he's disappointed that there's so much physical activity, it overall seems like a pretty good place for him to be. he's learning interesting things (just not as much of the day as he'd like), including woodwork (which he is enjoying), and apparently the kids are generally pretty cool.

i'm tired. i really, really hope i get some sleep tonight again.

blown fuse

 today was fucking miserable. i spent most of the company hackathon just wanting to be anywhere else, questioning my life choices and feeling very, very shit about myself and the situation i found myself in.

yesterday:

after significantly more effort, i managed to push monday's changes, and then follow that up with more changes. sitting next to the AI experts has become a legitimate challenge, because we have really interesting conversations all the time, and i need to keep awkwardly bowing out to get some actual work done.

i came home for lunch yesterday, gd made me more sushi, and it was a great escape from the office. just as i was preparing to head back, she received a phone call from a very worried mr smear - he admitted that he'd drawn IN MARKER all over the book we'd had to re-purchase for him a couple of months ago. the day before they had to return all the books.

fortunately, we had plenty of time to coordinate our responses, so we could keep on him on edge while figuring out an appropriate punishment that's harsh enough for his being on edge to be warranted, and for him to learn the lesson, of course, while still being fair enough to reward his being honest and upfront about it.

when i was finally able to get home from the office, i dropped my bag and immediately took him to the bookstore to purchase another copy. the walk there and back was long enough to have a bunch of conversations, including follow-up talks about what to do if he gets lost again, and the rest of the evening was another sushi dinner (and starting splash), and random mindless shit until climbing into bed.

today:

i woke up late, which was already a terrible start to the day. and my stomach was doing a thing. i left with mr smear, saying goodbye to him halfway to the school and walking to my office from there. i arrived having not had a cup of coffee yet, so i made one, immediately remembering how much i dislike their coffee options.

there was a large spread for breakfast, but i didn't see any vegan options so i found my team's station and started trying to get set up. of course encountering lots of weird issues that i hadn't had before.

the office manager told me to stop being a nerd (it was her expression for the day) and go eat, so i got up and asked her if there were vegan options. "of course there are", she said, and aimed me at one of the caterers. he walked me around, showing me that a) he didn't understand what "vegan" means and b) that the only options that seemed trustworthy were all buried in cheese. no, i didn't want him to wash them for me. that whole ordeal was worse - more insulting - than them just admitting that there weren't any options.

having started my day thoroughly on the wrong foot, i then began to meet my teammates. two of them were very clear about not wanting to be there, three of them arrived late, apologized, and then promptly fucked off for the rest of the day. that left five of us altogether, with exactly one guy being enthusiastic and two in total being productive (not including myself).

to be fair, though, the lack of productivity in the two guys who weren't interested in the first place was largely due to my lack of planning. it wasn't until a short while before demo time that we had the general architecture locked in, and at that point i learned that i was supposed to have been putting together the presentation and presenting our efforts to ~100 people.

this was a rock bottom moment for me.

there was nothing i felt right about presenting, everything was utter dogshit, after a lousy, miserable day that included navigating some pretty shitty attitudes. i was so stressed that i - only half in jest - tried to get anyone else in the team to take charge, and eventually one of the more experienced guys suggested that i ask the organizers to skip our team.

which they did, but then everyone seemed disappointed, the enthusiastic team member especially so.

most of the demos were really good, but i couldn't enjoy them properly because i was so nervous that they'd forget they agreed to skip us and call me up anyway. by the time i left, i felt absolutely disgusted with myself and with the day, completely demoralized, and full of bitterness.

i called gd and let her know how i was feeling, then i called my mom, and then i tried to get my head into a better place while on the bus home but to no avail. one of our upstairs friends walked into the building with me and made the mistake of asking "how are you?", and then i automatically responded with the truth and immediately felt bad for doing so. i sent her an apology a little while later.

our landlord and his handyman had been sending me voice messages all day, which i detest, and they became more and more confusing and annoying until eventually we spoke (just after i put mr smear to bed), and i went downstairs and discovered that the aircon has been on, and isn't dripping. he said some stuff that confused me, which i'm too tired to care about, and now that gd and i have finished the first episode of ludwig (which is really fun) and i've posted this, i'm going to try to wind down and fuck off into dreamland.

it pours

i'm so freaking tired.

it was another rough day, tweaking AI skills and configurations and my PRs, and going around in the inevitable circles.

i went out in the evening for a short walk (the excuse was to buy another double-adapter, but i really did need real movement and my hip flexors had been agitated all day), and went i got home i was surprised to find that mr smear hadn't arrived yet - he'd missed his stop, and gotten off when he was almost at the next city.

my son learned some navigation skills today, and hopefully a little common sense. i went to retrieve him, and he made me lose my temper while i was trying to locate him by not only not answering my questions, but by telling me what i *should* have asked him when those answers wouldn't have helped me in the slightest 🤦‍♂️

when we finally met up, his lip began to tremble and i thought he was going to laugh, which made me giggle, but then he burst into tears instead - he'd been legitimately afraid. it wasn't until we finally got home that i realized *just* how lucky we'd been: when we came inside, his phone battery was at 1%. without family link's location service and a whole lot of phone time, i might have been able to guess which general direction he'd gone in but i have no idea how we would even have begun searching for him 🤯

so that happened.

on our way into the building we bumped into big data, who subsequently came down and managed to clear the cement at the entrance to the drain. then he had a beer and we chatted, and then it was our dinner time. we watched some of the first episode of the highlander series, and then it was bedtime for mr smear...

... and then, after i read to him for a bit and had had a shower myself, i saw that big data and another upstairs neighbor had done another experiment, and i saw that there was some water pooling above the drain. also, it turns out our A/C drips and had been doing damage downstairs.

FFS.

i had stuff i wanted to do tonight, but i'm so damned over it. i'm going to try going to bed now and i'm praying for a reasonable night's sleep.

girl drama claude drama

 hoooo boy, it's been a couple of days. i'm going to be rushing through stuff i don't want to rush through...

yesterday:

arriving in the office just in time for my meeting, then spending a good half hour trying to get my computer connected to the network. nobody knows why my vpn connection keeps dropping, and i lost a significant amount of ephemeral context - not just work time - resolving it.

i spent a good chunk of my day running test jobs to enable me to finish working on one of the changes, and then i had to leave early to pick up mr smear, grab a bite to eat (and a cup of coffee), and head south to his class end-of-year pool party at a country club.

not only did we have quite a time getting there, between bus line switches and an unhelpful transit app, and some drugged out guy aggressively harassing innocent bystanders (he came too close for comfort while mr smear was fiddling with his sandals, but i think he ducked when he picked up my vibe).

while we were trying to get there, gd had managed to get herself lost on the way to the dentist, and there was much drama as i tried to troubleshoot remotely for her...

the pool party was really cool. the kids in this school are a different culture completely, much less cynical, and there were a few "performances", a couple of nice speeches, and then into the water. only a couple of parents went in with the kids - myself being one of them - and i had a good chat with the mom of one of mr smear's friends. and then some fun with mr smear before getting out (he was disappointed, but he was having a good time with his friends) into a chilly post-water 28 degrees.

i sat with a couple of other parents and we really got in to politics, ai, economics and ideologies, it was an exhilarating rabbit-hole dive and i think we all enjoyed it. when we were thinking about leaving, the mom offered me and mr smear a ride home, which i gratefully accepted.

suddenly, mr smear came out the pool and declared that he was "bored" and ready to go, but i could tell by his expression that something was up. i walked with him a little and managed to get it out of him - one of the kids had told his class nemesis that he liked one of the girls, they all were chanting it loudly, and the girl in question heard and apparently seemed to quite enjoy the idea of mr smear liking her.

he was mortified, dying inside, and i gave him some calming advice... but also, when i asked him what her name was, had to inform him that we were going to be going home with them in the car!

both the kids were a bit distracted on the way to the vehicle, but she saved mr smear from the scenario he was particularly dreading by jumping into the front seat. but then, as we pulled out, mr smear let one rip - i don't think anyone else heard it, but he opened that window really quickly 🤣

the ride home was much less awkward, the little girl's very sweet, and he made it home in one piece :)

it was pretty late, we had an amazing dumpling-y dinner that gd's concocted, and a good conversation about relationships and responding to teasing at bedtime.

today:

i didn't sleep so well last night, i spent at least a couple of miserably hours lying in bed, not quite awake but certainly not asleep.

i received some good news this morning, and some not-so-good news: gd's physio treatments are finally being covered - half the amount, but considerably better than nothing - and my request to have the parking fine cancelled was rejected.

the main thing this morning before heading to work was switching my copilot subscription for a claude code one. i figured it made the most sense, not just because it seems better from a value-for-money point of view, but also because my client is switching everyone over to it and i have to learn how to work with it anyway.

so that was pretty much the story of my day: trying to get real work done while simultaneously trying to get claude code to work the way i want it to. it's not a trivial migration at all, and claude code does a bunch of things in an utterly infuriating way (and i'm not the only one in our area to feel this). that stretched the day into a particularly long and emotionally draining one - lots of "i REALLY hate claude" moments - and i got stuck on something at the end of the work day that made it take longer to get out of the office than i could handle.

i picked up some healthy snacks from the supermarket on the way home. i wanted to take mr smear rollerblading, but he was doing hebrew homework and i walked in just in time to go over it with him. we both learned some stuff, but overall i'm very pleased with how he's doing.

we watched some more grease at dinner, which is initiating quite a few interesting conversations, and after dinner we had a lengthy and heated discussion about an incident with the crazy mom's manipulative daughter at school today; i'm so grateful that he voluntarily let us know immediately after school came out, because that gave me an opportunity to text his teacher before the madwoman poisons things.

i managed to do a little bit of productive stuff since putting him to bed, but i had to stop to write this and now it's feeling like bedtime.

prophesy

i left later than i should have to pick up the car (of course), and arrived at the address to find no cars, having been explicitly informed by the app that no further instructions were necessary. i tried calling the car sharing service, but their lines were down, and it took a while (and some helpful people) before i happened upon the vehicle and realized that the directions were simply wrong.

i made the pickup, and told waze to get us to the airport, and it gave us all sorts of weird directions that neither my mother nor my son were able to read. so my stress levels were kinda high by the time we finally made it onto the highway going in the right direction. when we finally arrived and parked, the signage led us astray (it's incorrect on shabbat, at least, i'm not sure what happens during the week) and sent us in circles with broken elevators before we finally entered the terminal.

at least from that point things went smoothly, and we had time to be ripped off for coffee and sit down with my mom before her flight. after we saw her to the security checks, we made our way back to the car with only one incident (i didn't realize we could only pay for parking at the exit, and made the mistake of getting out of the car and walking all the way back to the locked up pay machines), and aside from the shock of how expensive an hour or two's parking was the drive home was uneventful (fortunately, because we encountered some really insane drivers on the way home). i dropped mr smear off at home, returned the car, and on my walk home managed to get hold of the service hotline and complain and was offered a voucher as compensation.

this afternoon, after returning from the car ordeal, we watched the starship troopers movie together. i've always loved starship troopers; it's not a perfect movie, but it's a fun action film with some interesting ideas. so i'm embarrassed to admit that it took me this long to finally get around to reading the book.

in addition to what i wrote earlier, it's also surprisingly prophetic, considering that it calls out the kind of irrational 20th century ideology that's infected the west and the movie producers who tried really, really hard to misrepresent, subvert and undermine everything the author was trying to say. that's not an adaptation, it's a deeply disrespectful bastardization. thank god the original ideas hold up so well that so many people didn't "get" the "satire".

we're about to enjoy a late dinner, mr smear and i have showered and taken out the recycling, and my nervous system is bouncing up and down because i keep thinking about tomorrow's tasks.

i guess i'm really grateful for having had a couple of days off, a lot of which felt like actual days off even though i was pretty busy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the sadness

 mr smear had a difficult time this evening, and he cries a bit while telling me about it, but i was confused because none of what he said sounded so bad... but it came out at bedtime that he'd lost his temper at his best friend, in a situation where he knew that it was unjustified and hurt their relationship.

he apologized, but he's not sure that the apology was enough :(

it also came out that they didn't take public transport home - they gave up and his friend's dad had given him a ride home...

post-birthday different-kind-of-special

 dinner last night was nice - gd's first home-cooked meal in about a week. a little slower to cook with the borrowed plates, but it didn't bother me or mr smear.

the rest of the evening was all about getting into bed as quickly as possible, the shower was amazing, and i crashed pretty much immediately after.

in the middle of the night, i awoke from a sequence of nightmares: nightmares of being trapped trying to get home from work in a cavernous escape room (that was part of the office on a bond-like villain's mountain fortress), then of living at the docks and catching mr smear skipping school to hide amongst cargo loading equipment to play on his phone.

so that was me getting up at 3.45am with my nervous system on fire, raging at the afterimage of my dream son fucking up his imaginary life.

i did get back to sleep, a bit, but then i spent most of the rest of my time until alarm o'clock uncomfortable, and ultimately woke up with a stiff neck and the dizziness that often accompanies it. i mean, i might just be sick - gd's feeling similar today, in addition to the stuff that's been messing with her for months already - but still.

i think she might have been right on friday, that i shouldn't have let the mattress guy convince me to give it another week or two.

at least gd's happy with her side of the bed.

over coffee, i started putting together an article about producing comics with AI, but then i spent a large chunk of the morning sorting out address changes. and struggling - not for the first time - with the fact that we have money in our bank account but are unable to use our credit cards because we can't pay them off whenever we want.

not right now, but i think we need to consider finding ourselves a new bank.

on the way to the office i called social security, who informed me that the unemployment office hadn't updated them as they're reported. at the office, i remembered that nobody goes to the office on sundays, and according to the cleaning staff there was some kind of power outage as well. on my way back from the office i called the unemployment office, who after a very long time informed me that social security was lying. so then i called social security again, and the agent told me that the unemployment office was lying, and then i got really upset. eventually i got through to a manager, who "helped" me by directing me to the website to request that they look into it 🤦‍♂️

all the while in pain and dizzy.

i spent the rest of the day - until now - fixing the first iteration of my changes and learning how to test them. and eating and snacking a lot; i guess after yesterday's exercise (on top of the past week's) my body really needed more calories.

aside from pain and dizziness, my only real distractions were the electric hob installation (hooray!) and getting mr smear and his friend to come home on his way to the comic library to return the books (today was the deadline), and on their way from here i managed to catch them heading to bat yam by mistake in time for them to turn around.

parenting in 2026 is hard. navigating screen time, inappropriate content, lack of exposure to nature…

… but holy shit, being able to see where my kid is on a map, and know that i need to intervene so that he doesn’t end up in a different city by accident? priceless.

it's dark, the two of them should be making their way back soon, god knows how i'm going to get his friend home 🤷‍♂️

...

i have to say, slowly but surely our new home's starting to make sense. and it's huge compared to our last one, or at least it's much, much longer, because i've discovered over the past day or two that it's more sensible to call gd on whatsapp than to try to yell to each other, or get up from whatever i'm doing :P

moving day

moving day was yesterday , and a bit of today as well. it began with a long walk to the (actual) 24/7 for mr smear's breakfast and lunch that should have been a bus or a taxi ride. then coffee, saying goodbye to mr smear and launching into a day that was full madness.

- finally getting to the van to find it with a flat tire just as the movers arrived

- the movers finding half the furniture they needed to move covered in items

- giving the movers a run for their money, i'm in better shape than i thought i was. but i am *really* tired and sore

- being dehydrated and particularly dry all day (i suspect i'm cooking something.

- dealing with cuts on a prominent finger of each hand all day

- lots and lots of stresses and fighting but also lots of calming things down and reconciliation

- the new mattresses arriving in time

- losing 100 nis but covering both movers somehow

- getting the paint mixture right the first time, but failing the second. doing a lot of painting. a lot.

- and mold cleaning. a lot.

- our favorite vegan cafe doesn't deliver to our new apartment, so delivering to our old and taking it back with us.

- gd discovering some horrible things about our bathroom. all the bathrooms have real issues. our plumber is an asshole.

- the electric hob never arrived, i called and they never called me back

- having trouble finding the next van at reading. GPS getting lost in all the detours at 00:55 with 10% battery and me miraculously recalling / figuring out my way without it

- a complicated shower, finally getting into bed after 2am.

now it's 6.30am and i'm about to arrive at the parking lot for today's van, we still have at least a full load to take care of before handover.

and gd hasn't slept a wink, in spite of her pain and exhaustion, because in addition to horrible bathroom smells we killed two... silverfish? millipedes?

distraction

 yesterday:

yesterday got off to a busy start, mr smear went to school on his own (on his own by bus, which we only learned later) and we headed to bnei brak for an appointment for gd. the doctor could handle speaking in english, but gd did a great job of breaking her teeth and i was barely needed :)

we got off at the hospital stop to pick up some things on the way home, after which i spent some time preparing for an interview. the interview went well.

i chatted with my mom for a bit (mixed feelings: pride in my nephew for telling my niece what's what, sadness that she's been neglecting her older child while planning on bringing a new one into the world).

i dropped a return package off at the post office and then paid a visit to another clinic to confirm that we'd done the right thing when trying to book gd a followup appointment.

i did some post-interview "homework" (playing around with temporal), and then when it started getting dark i headed to the comic library - which i'd never heard of before - where i found mr smear engrossed in tokyo ghoul.

the library has a lot of interesting stuff, and i was pleasantly surprised to learn that residents have an all-access library membership, so we picked up a copy of the incal and two tokyo ghoul volumes and made our way home, with me investing some time in getting mr smear familiar with the landmarks along the way.

i decided to tell mr smear that i'm leaving it up to him to determine whether what he's reading is appropriate or not, and to talk to me if he encounters anything confusing or disturbing.

just before dinner i discovered that the dinosaurs tv series is on apple tv after all! so after mr smear got through his math homework, we sat down to eat and enjoy the first episode :)

it was an easy bedtime, and i fell asleep pretty easily.

today:

i slept quite a lot last night, and had a lot of strangely unremarkable dreams.

everyone's morning was smooth and positive, and i accompanied mr smear to school "just because". i came home for breakfast, and then gd and i walked to get mr smear's school logo printed on his shirts. on the way back we picked up a lentil soup, then i stopped for a coffee while gd visited the pharmacy, and then we stumbled upon a good place to buy a comforter (it's starting to get colder).

since we've been home, we've chilled, had soup for lunch, and i'm now doing a terrible job of focusing and being productive. it doesn't help that gd's watching 28 years later while i try to be functional...

...

and in an hour or so i'm off to a (hopefully) final interview for the consulting agency 🤞

nature nurture

 this was a BIG weekend.

yesterday:

it was a very rushed morning. i dropped mr smear off at school, then took the light rail to the hospital mall where i picked up a bunch of stuff for the camping, especially the two bags of large vegan marshmallows. i carried the shopping home, then spent the next while helping gd knead the six large challot, including one giant challah-peño.

between rising/baking sessions, i rushed out to pick mr smear up from school, stopping at the office on the way to pick up my sunglasses which i hadn't been sure if i'd left there by mistake. i only had a few minutes to get out of there, so of course it was on me to discover that the alarm hadn't been set the night before and that there was some kind of issue with it... i managed to shift that off to my CEO before heading out again, arriving a few minutes late to meet mr smear at the station and take a walk to yuka monsters.

we picked up our copy of the day everything changed, then jumped on a light rail to return home, help gd with the last of the challot, and furiously pack everything. it was far later than planned when i finally went to pick up the car, return to load it, and get me and mr smear on our way to the "fairy forest".

mr smear was very excited about riding up front for the first time in his life, and he did a pretty good job as navigator keeping track of waze and relaying data. it's also been years since it was just the two of us in a car together, so we blasted his playlist, and overall it was a good ride.

minus us leaving the three coconut waters i'd bought for the trip in the fridge at home :/

the camp site was really nice. the tent we rented was way bigger than expected (it said "two man", but we could easily have fit four full-sized mattresses in there with space for bags). the tap water was potable, though it didn't taste very good, so mr smear didn't drink enough :/

in general, the class kids have a good energy together and for the most part mr smear gets along with them. with a couple of them better than the rest, which is positive.

one of the parents - a linguist - started telling mr smear that he didn't need to learn hebrew, which upset me... i tried to remain polite while making it very clear that she was doing something inappropriate, but she just didn't give a shit and it wasn't until this morning that an opportunity presented to share a bit of mr smear's history and make it clear that we (finally) actually have a handle on the language issue...

dinner was quite an occasion, gd's challot were a great success, and challah-peño received a lot of welcome praise. afterwards, mr smear's new friend's dad set up a gas stove so that we could toast marshmallows, which for mr smear was an amazing experience, while for me it was a mixture of excitement and trauma trying to fairly dole out a limited number of marshmallows to a swarm of greedy kids of various ages and cuteness levels.

and then, we realized that that whole time there'd been another family nearby with lots of marshmallows - non-vegan ones - so they could have handled a lot of the load instead :/

mr smear and i hit the sleeping bags relatively early (normal bedtime for him), and he was very excited to not be going to sleep alone. we both fell asleep pretty quickly.

i must have woken up half an hour to an hour later. the sleeping bags we bought are good. and warm. and i suddenly realized that i hadn't showered, and that i'd needed to shower. and then the restlessness settled in, and it wasn't until very late (i'm guessing around 2/3am according to what i heard later) when everyone else had finally gone to sleep that i finally managed to fall asleep again.

today:

so mr smear had a great night's sleep; me, not so much.

we got up with the sun, brushed our teeth, and i somehow succeeded in coercing mr smear to come shower with me. i explained to him that if there wasn't hot water, i'd be going first and have to suffer the longest, and when we entered the stalls we discovered that there wasn't any hot water, and i understood what all the previous evening's screams had all been about.

but the weather was good, so the moment i'd dried off the sun began heating me up. mr smear did not want to get in - i mean, neither did i, really - but he eventually did it and got through it, and once he was dry he also felt amazing.

great success!

i'm quite proud of myself for taking the towels back to the car and using them to ensure that the front seats and steering wheel weren't hellishly hot when we left - not only did that work well, but the towels were also bone dry by then.

he convinced me to start our day with hal's kettle-fried jalapeño chips, then it was breakfast / coffee / him and his friend inventing an activity that involved eating painful things (including the chips) that none of the other kids went for, then a pass-the-parcel game which he eventually joined (and took away a squishy-ball prize he was excited about), and then we assembled for a hike.

it was a much tougher hike than i expected, but it was good, and we got through it. it took a little while to break camp - mostly due to helping other parents and getting into a conversation about age-appropriate gaming - and then we were off.

our biggest issue on the way home was that the UX of the car radio is awful, and we couldn't charge the phone and listen to music simultaneously. so we charged it for the first half, and listened to music for the second half, and by the time we arrived home we were both exhausted, hot, and hungry.

the rest of the afternoon was spent showering, eating, and resting (or napping, in my case), dinner and more of twins was good, and then bedtime was a bit rough because last night reset all the bedtime ritual progress we've made 🤦

anyway, it was overall a fantastic first camping experience for mr smear, and an excellent bonding weekend for both of us, and hopefully i'll catch up on some sleep tonight.

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.

a hard day's night

 i'm really struggling tonight, though i guess there's an upside in that i've spent the past hour or two working on the language project and the frontend is starting to take shape.

i walked to the pick-up location, which was about 200m from where google maps said it was. the detour was fascinating because i didn't realize how much residential development has been done on the other side of the train station from us, and the guys at the store were grateful to be notified about the map issue and for me updating it. i walked to the closest light rail station and headed to work.

i arrived, sweaty, to a birthday celebration followed by a day that was predominantly me trying hard to balance letting the new guy do his thing and me (micro)managing him into making his thing actually help us. and trying to do it in a way that didn't feel shitty.

for the most part, though, the level of stress was so much less than the previous days that i found myself with a long list of things to do but a weird sense of being lost.

at 5.30pm, i decided to put my outside shoes on and go home.

precisely at that moment, one of the new guys arrived in desperate need of help. i had no idea how to help him, so i left, but i felt really shitty about it.

i arrived home, handed mr smear his new roald dahl books and enjoyed him reading me a story, then we had dinner, which was interrupted by someone calling to ask me for help. i literally didn't understand who he was or what was going on, and then suddenly i felt myself crashing and i rushed to brush my teeth and climb into bed.

where i spent a good few hours not sleeping due to a combination of dark thoughts and lower back pain.

interview with a zombie

 today was tough. complicated. all over the place.

[trigger warning on bathroom stuff?] i didn't get nearly enough sleep, but not just because i stayed up late for shadowrun returns, but because i spent the next hour or so feeling like i urgently needed the toilet with nothing moving. that went on pretty much all night until i left for the office in the morning.

...

gd wasn't feeling better after all, and she's still not feeling better. the occasional coughing fit is still intense and scary and she's feeling properly sick again. i think i might be sick too. and might have been, too. i don't know. it's hard to say when i could just be handling stress and a lack of sleep.

...

i took mr smear to school, we'd had a decent morning and he got there in pretty good spirits. we had a parental guidance session with his therapist over zoom, which felt pretty good right until it was over, at which point i received an sms from mr smear's teacher informing us that he'd consistently refused to cooperate with anyone all morning :/

so that fucked us up.

...

afterwards, i received a call from the cannabis licensing people, to inform me again that they weren't happy with the recommendation. i told the woman i was speaking to that the problem isn't with our application, but with their process, and if it's not clear enough to her as a human being that our request is valid then she needs to send me a precise template for the doctor that he can fill it in to spec.

she consulted with someone else, and then agreed to authorize the request anyway.

sheesh.

...

i barely had time to sync with my boss and manager before i had to leave to help get mr smear to his therapy session. i didn't mean to walk all the way home, but i was very grateful to my mom for lending an ear to me venting furiously on the way there.

my avo/toast/kala namak/tabasco lunch was so good that it wasn't completely ruined by the difficult conversation i had with mr smear while chewing on it, trying to understand where he's coming from and make him understand that he's undermining my efforts to help him out of his awful situation.

as i was crouching behind the kitchen wall when the two of them entered our apartment, he didn't realize i was home. so i heard him tell gd that seeing as he's nine, he'd really like to take the bus to his therapist by himself. it was immediately obvious to me that this was an attempt to avoid having to discuss the morning's shenanigans with me along the way, which i may have found a little funnier than i should have.

but i did offer to let him lead the way. what followed was a pleasant, but awkward journey, and although he needs a little coaching he's kinda doing okay.

i returned to the cinemateque to work, and actually got something done. then i picked up mr smear and let him lead the way home.

step 1. get lost

step 2. guess and walk the wrong way

step 3. listen to dad and open up a navigation app on your phone

step 4. look only at the map, not at your surroundings, even if following the map leads you to almost walk into a giant pillar.

step 5. (surprisingly) listen to dad when he suggests that the light rail will be a faster way home than waiting for a bus across the street

step 6. successfully navigate home using the app even though you're literally across the road from the apartment you've been living in for 2.5 years already. also, make sure to walk very, very slowly whenever dad stops bugging you to move it because he's got to get back to his office.

...

as soon as he was on the same block as our apartment i spun around and caught the first bus back to the office. i was supposed to have called the woman from the municipality half an hour earlier, and i had half an hour to get to the office before the "happy hour" that they'd rescheduled so that i could make it.

i hopped on a bus with a broken back door. at the next stop, the driver stopped the bus, turned off the engine and walked outside to call for help.

a stop with no mobile reception.

it took three calls to finally be able to speak to her, but once i got started telling her what mr smear has been going through she was invested, and although she doesn't have the authority to intervene directly she really made me feel heard, and gave me helpful advice for dealing with the school team in our meeting on wednesday. and now she's in, so she wants updates :P

our happy hour was scheduled for 4pm. after pacing around the base of our building for the duration of the call, it was around 4.40pm when i finally sent up my apologies and raced upstairs for the tail end of it :P

...

the vegan offering was good this time, and i was strong - i left some for my family and brought it home with me. they enjoyed it too :)

...

i got a tiny little bit of work done, then realized that it was so late that i needed to move quickly to get back home in time for my interview with a VP R&D.

i was wired. i was overwhelmed and feeling a bit dizzy from the entire day. and i'd had zero time to prepare. sooo... it didn't go great, although apparently it was a total loss either. i guess we'll see, but i definitely can't show up without prep work again.

the rest of the evening went pretty well, in spite of gd having a coughing fit at the table during which she slammed something down hard and that made me jump and hit the handle of a very sharp knife that went flying in mr smear's general direction (O_o)

it's been an insane day. the rest of the week's looking pretty crazy already. here goes nothing...

end of school year

seven more sleeps until my mom arrives!

friday:

we had a busy but productive friday morning. we picked up small lamps for mr smear's bike, two minecraft comics in hebrews (without nikud, and he's reading them!), and we picked up a scale (not amazing, but does the job), i got some vests, gd got new shoes (which don't fit), and i had one of the most amazing sandwiches ever.

we had a quiet friday afternoon, although as usual getting mr smear to do homework was a bit of a struggle...

yesterday:

yesterday was mostly a quiet saturday spent indoors, lots of inscryption (i'm apparently really bad at kaycee's mod), a fair amount of resting and wondering about how one would make inscryption work in real life, watching home alone 2 together, and finally: taking mr smear for a ride to get ice cream. the ride there was great, and the ice cream was great, but then...

... on the way out, mr smear decided that we weren't heading in the right direction. after trying and failing to convince him, with him becoming angrier and angrier, i suggested that he lead. we went about four more blocks before he realized that he didn't know where he was. then, on the way back, he decided that he couldn't trust my navigation skills and that the only way to find out how to get home was to use the phone.

which i refused, because godsdammit i *knew* where the fuck we were. so we argued on and off until he got smart and agreed that we just shouldn't talk for a while, and when we finally arrived at a place he was familiar with he admitted that i knew what i was doing and that he should have listened to me.

so yesterday, mr smear learned the word "putz" :P

the rest of the evening was nice, and we watched what is now his new favorite show, run for the money.

today so far:

i got mr smear to his last day of school with a good vibe, and then went past the clinic to make sure gd has what she needs for her upcoming allergy challenge. also, my hand's been really hurting for the last few days, i've just made an appointment for next week in case it doesn't get better...

now i've enjoyed a chilled morning, and it's time to head out to work.

...

after a week feeling pretty shit, i rested well on the weekend. i didn't get anything productive done except recover, and i'm okay with that.