detour

 there was a lot of kitchen stress last night, and some very serious (positive) conversations with mr smear about life in general in its wake. gd had ridiculous trouble with the gluten-free dumpling recipe, but the ultimate result was much better than the store-bought frozen ones...

i did nothing of value between late dinner and climbing into bed a bit after midnight. then i woke up, restless and sore, and for about two hours lay in bed, distressed but too tired to give up on trying to fall back to sleep. eventually i got up for a couple of hours of mindlessness, then finally returned to sleep for a couple more hours.

i didn't feel great this morning. i read some watchmen, i napped a little, and then i was going to start getting into the things i'd been intending to do today* when my alarm reminded me that i was going to one of ze germans' daughter's bat mitzvah...

* i'd intended - like most people - to put down money for claude in order to have access to the fable model to do some experimentation. i woke up to the news that that wasn't on the cards any more.

i had a long chat with horseman about AI and middle east politics before and on my walk there, broken only to get dressed and make coffee, and when running into our old neighbors and learning that there're a lot of kids in the building now and they've managed to force the building management to renovate the bomb shelter. too late for us, but i'm very relieved for them!

the bat mitzvah was really simple and tastefully done, all i consumed was liquids (only one alcoholic drink, though) and a little bit of the fruit salad, and i had a good time chatting with ze other germans (irish/swedish + austrian).  i got a ride home, realizing only at that point just how late in the day it was.

i'm now having a late coffee, mr smear's just completed a second hour of "productive" screen time (making animations) and is now having a bite to eat, and then we're going to head out for a bit more rollerblading.

sleep journal entry

i spent most of the night coughing and barely able to breathe. i did get a couple of hours' sleep before waking up.

gd's unwrapped her nail and is soaking it, the pad seems to have fused to the wound, though, and isn't coming off :(

i'm now trying to rush mr smear out the door after he did another negative test. and then i have to head to the clinic to get a doctor's permission for my work (first time in my civilian life), and inform my client that i'm sick, and that i was sick yesterday.

and i already sent a message to our old neighbor that we ran into yesterday to inform her as well :(

more than rough

 firstly, i've been so thoroughly exhausted today as to be dysfunctional. to be honest, i can't tell if this is because i didn't sleep last night, or because i'm just through-and-through sick.

in retrospect, i shouldn't have hugged our old neighbor when we bumped into her at the clinic.

oh gods.

after sending mr smear off to school, i accompanied gd to the clinic. the doctor was very understanding, and we booked an appointment with a surgeon. we went home, had a visit from our upstairs neighbor, who amongst other things informed us that they're going to get started working on building a metro station under our building and we're going to need to replace all the doors and windows for soundproofing.

after breakfast, i crashed for a very short nap and tried to get some work done, but was constantly distracted. some of the distraction was about my previous employer; the lead i felt betrayed by has apparently left the company (though he got some of his options), and someone i served with asked me about an opening so i told him what had happened.

then i was time to accompany gd to the surgeon. aside from his poor bedside manner, he didn't convince us that he understood the problem, nor that his solution made sense, so we thanked him and asked the receptionist for advice. she was very kind, and made gd an appointment with the surgeon i had been *hoping* we were going to see.

i'm going to remember his name this time.

so back home we went, i napped again, and got a little work done before we headed out a third time.

the surgeon immediately knew exactly what was going on - there were two possibilities, with the same treatment - and i advised gd to take his offer and get it taken care of immediately rather than wait for it to continue to fester.

we waited for a while, but he eventually arrived. he was clear in his explanations, and made me feel confident; unfortunately, when it came to the procedure itself things went south. the local anaesthetic did not anaesthetic, and i've never heard gd scream like that before. it was painful and nerve-wracking just going through it holding her hand, so i can't imagine what it was like. except that i would probably have fainted very quickly.

he bound up her toe, and sent us on our way. every step was agony, and only got worse as we proceeded towards the street. fortunately, we managed to order a taxi and jump in very quickly, and the toughest walk was getting her from the parking area to the couch.

in retrospect, i don't know how i managed to get any work done before dinner.

gd didn't manage to keep her dinner down, so that unintentionally accelerated her getting her teeth brushed and ready for bed (or rather the couch, i suspect), and fortunately i came up with the idea of wheeling her around in the office chair, which has made all the difference.

as the afternoon and evening have worn on, my nerves have worn thinner and thinner and my throat and my brain are clamoring for bed and threatening to keep me from sleeping again.

and it looks my mom's not doing so great either, health-wise, but at least she got back to cape town safely.

oh! and just prior to gd's procedure, my boss - my actual employer - called to ask me how i'm doing. i asked how he thinks i'm doing, and suggested that we schedule a sync. i hope i'm not in shit...

the time cluster bomb

 today was weird. the deployment didn't go smoothly, but was ultimately successfully.

a religious family came downstairs to present us with mishloach manot, which i explained was very much appreciated, but as we've got a dairy allergy and we're vegan we simply can't accept. an hour or so later they knocked again, with a whole different arrangement, including baked goods with the ingredients handwritten.

so now i feel bad that we haven't reciprocated - we had no way - and we've had way too many sweets today.

also, mr smear's molar fell out.

he spent most of the day dressed up as harry potter, he did his own scar amazingly well, and was very disappointed that it wasn't a school day and there was no one to show his costume to but us :(

we literally walked around the block twice today for exercise.

i eventually managed to complete my investigation into whether my screw-up last week had any undetected impact, and spent an hour talking to a new coworker - both at my employer, and my client - about both of them and giving him the details i wish i'd had. i then followed that up with a complaint to the woman who brought us both in because he was also supposed to start both jobs on the same day, like i did, and that's messed up.

my most productive time today was spent on my phone control solution, which i've gotten to a point that i can start playing with the more interesting ideas.

thanks to AI.

the war goes on. it looks like however the next couple of weeks play out, we've essentially already won: the IRGC is effectively finished, the middle east has realigned itself. the attacks today were fewer and further between, but louder and scarier.

mr smear was a bit difficult today, on occasion, but also a lot easier to get through to (eventually). on the one hand, he's been cooped up, but on the other, he's refusing to leave the apartment to do anything social, and gd's sick and unavailable and i'm working and unavailable.

i'm tired. but also antsy. i barely have bandwidth for the stuff that needs brain, but distractions? i don't even register time passing.

babysitting

 i'm starting this post at almost half past midnight, and i've just managed to resolve an issue i've been struggling with for hours on end, herding an AI cat to solving a problem that's entirely out of scope but very much interferes with what is in scope.

i've been thinking a lot about context, lately. it's my job, but it's also a new frontier with... ahem... many different ways to skin a cat. i've also been thinking a lot of the AI vampire, the death of the craftsman engineer, and why replacing developers with AI is going horribly wrong. while i've been neck-deep in context engineering rabbit holes and side quests, and pondering how much of this experience might shape my own concept for an IDE.

it took far too long for me to realize that i needed to hack the LLM loop and make it more robust, which i did by instructing it to document the state of the code, then document each attempt to fix it, and append lessons learned to the end of the document to be used for the following iteration.

from there, it took eight iterations, at the end of which i instructed it to add an epilogue to the documentation explaining why it took eight iterations after restarting with this technique. and that epilogue was the first part of the entire process that i was actually able to understand, because it had been looping over and investigating interactions between a bunch of "black boxes" interacting with each other, at one point even going so far as to dive into multi-dependency byte-code.

all of this wrangling, while running a whole bunch of other small code and configuration changes, each of which requiring its own AI babysitting.

i didn't have a headache when i finally got home, but my brain hurt. and i still wasn't done, and i was still bothered by the main obstacle, so i couldn't let it go.

...

ironically, all of the above was done because i didn't have the credentials to run the test scripts i wrote this morning (also using AI, because now there's no reason to write a simple test script when i can just specify sample generators, test scenario generators, test runners, validators and clean-up scripts that all work nicely together).

...

this morning was a big one for gd; she's had a really rough few days (after a rough few months, to say the least), but we got her to the examination having followed all the instructions and procedures, and afterwards i got her follow-up appointment booked (post-biopsy) and got her home safely.

in the evening, i left the apartment almost as soon as i arrived to go looking for a frying pan, because ours is warped and gd's not handling (especially not with everything else going on). that hunt turned out to be a) not fruitful and b) very, very far. so i got back not only with an exhausted mind, but also physically tired. and then i took the recycling out with mr smear, and received an intense (but justified) talking-to about using the neighboring building's recycling bin (because ours has been stolen, twice), which was embarrassing to say the least. and then, just as i got back upstairs, big data sent a photo of some serious harry potter gear for purim so i launched out the door again to walk to the other side of the neighborhood to pick up the bag of goodies.

and then we ate (dinner was delicious), and then i had way more dessert than i should have, and then it was shower and bedtime, and then it was the extra AI babysitting accompanied by loads of youtube videos.

i wonder if i'll sleep tonight?

double onboarding

 i'm exhausted, psychologically as much as physically, but i have to get this out before i head to bed.

yesterday:

the mold treatment needed was much bigger than anticipated, the bloom was unexpectedly large.

i left for the session later than intended, arrived later than i should have, and struggled throughout because i kept distracting myself with my side project. the guy i'd partnered with the previous week told the boss he didn't want to work in pairs, and later the boss caught me out with a question while i was typing furiously at an AI agent...

we ended earlier than planned, and i came home in time to deliver the lovely flowers my new employer had sent me to our very sweet elderly neighbor, and discuss mr smear's new school with a single parent whose kid's apparently in a worse school than mr smear's old one.

mr smear had reading homework, it was really hard but i worked through it with him. i've only now discovered that the reading was only part of it :(

dinner was delicious, it was late but mr smear had helped prepare it. my shower was almost cold, because gd had turned off the boiler at the mains instead of putting it on the timer :/

i went to bed early last night in anticipation of the big day today.

today:

i got up alright, finished the epilogue of the ocean at the end of the lane with mr smear, and after seeing him off spent the rest of the early morning keeping an eye on the news and taking care of the dishes.

i arrived on time to my new office for a few hours of onboarding, very positive. then i raced home, dropped off my swag bag (and second-hand computer that apple won't let me use without a fight), pick up a sandwich (gd won the day with her black-salt avocado toast) and walk across the bridge to the new office.

where i found my new boss waiting for me, having waited more than an hour for me because (i discovered this evening) our sales guy had forgotten to tell him i'd be in later than originally agreed 🤦

so not the greatest first impression, but the rest of the afternoon was pleasantly smooth. it's a massive corporate, though, so there's looooooooots of onboarding bullshit to wade through and i'm somehow expected to already be contributing on my first day 😩

i got home just in time to set mr smear up with his math (revision) homework while i jumped in the (hot) shower, then get through hebrew harry potter reading, eat dinner starting the third episode of the a-team (what happened to the second?!), a whole ordeal getting mr smear ready for bed and into bed, then (after some procrastination) dabbling in a bit more onboarding, and now drinking a final cup of tea before crashing and praying for a simpler tomorrow.

WFH

 it wasn't an easy day, but it was alright. there was some more drama between our incoming manager and the already-established (british) devops guy. i eventually managed to make my code do all the things, but put it through "unfinished" because the rabbithole it demanded is 100% covered by the other incoming devops guy, and he's just about done.

so hopefully tomorrow will see a success merging of the two.

our very sweet elderly neighbor knocked on our door today, and surprised us by delivering a nice, large bowl of roasted veggies because we'd told her we were down with the flu when we bumped into her yesterday morning at the clinic!

mr smear seems to have had a good day, and had a relatively calm, cooperative evening. i finally got in touch with the conversatory, we're trying to get him registered and it looks like an amazing program.

i ate too much at dinner, and my stomache's feeling bloated.

gd's neck and back are on/off these past few days, and we're both coughing a lot and gross.

[grabs reolin]

a good filling in a disturbing sandwich

 i just woke up a short while ago, and i'm sitting here nursing a coffee and a sore lower back. i barely slept last night due to a combination of physical discomfort and insomnia, i was just uncomfortable throughout. and when i did sleep, i had deeply disturbing dreams.

one of those dreams was like an action movie, where we were defending our company from terrorists trying to take over. i don't recall the precise reasoning or sequence of events towards the end, but i used the new sharp knife in the office and decapitated a few people, who then subsequently came back to life and convinced me that i'd lost my mind.

...

i was woken up yesterday morning by a sharp "tic tic tic" sounds coming out of the wall, and i grumpily, foggily posted a video to our neighbor's group. two minutes later, i opened the window and realized that it was the sounds of water dripping from upstairs, so i wrote in the group that it was dripping from above.

hours later, our upstairs neighbor sent me message saying there's nobody else it could have been, and that i could have just messaged him privately. i only saw that message hours after that, so i scrambled to assure him that i hadn't known where it was from at the time and hadn't intended to call him out passive aggressively, and i've been carrying that shit in my chest ever since.

...

aside from "the usual" random shit over the course of the day: i read some more nightwood (a few pages, and then passed out on the couch), gd beat me at battleship in spite of the fact that she dropped all her pegs (it was the third time she accidentally bumped the game 🤣), mr smear and i walked to the park and played frisbee for a while*, and we decided that mr smear's old enough and watched ace ventura last night. of course he's talking out of his ass now :P

* after yesterday's incident, i discussed with him that i think that a big part of a dad's job is to force a child through all the necessary small traumas in life so that they can grow up strong enough to handle the big traumas. and get over themselves and get good at things that don't come naturally to them.

i went to bed early, after taking a short look at some ideas for the interview i'm doing today.

...

i'm tired. like, burnout tired. i'm sore. i'm a little bit resentful that i'm not on vacation today.

conditioning

 we went out for a ride, and ended up at the pipe track. well, at the kids musical playground next to it. mr smear entertained himself, i made the mistake of sitting down in the shade for a bit and my brain and body decided i was done for the day... the way back was good, we stopped for him to enjoy an ice cream, and the only issue i had was that my shoulder and neck started giving me shit during the last stretch... just like it did the last time we went out...

gd tried to make onigiri tonight, and it came out... not onigiri. but it was delicious, regardless, and we all tucked in and did quite a bit of damage (considering she'd made rather a lot of food). and we got started on watching stargate. mr smear's first time and he is loving it.

i continued reading the neverending story when he went to bed, although the swamps of sadness scene was dulled by the fact that our upstairs neighbors are psychopaths and were drilling and hammering until recently. i watched some random stuff and played another round of slay the spire, and now i'm going to crash early in the hopes that i'll be able to sleep and the expectation that i'll be up in the middle of the night to work through bigtalk's PR...

gods help me.

unceasefire

 how the hell was yesterday only tuesday?

we woke up to sirens (i'd barely slept, i was feeling more broken than ever), and the fuckers slow-dripped the missile attacks so that we were all up and down the stairs for a couple of hours. the old lady across the hall was really, really struggling :(

we were in the shelters when we learned the disappointing news that we'd agreed to a ceasefire.

as much as it would be nice to have some respite from the missile barrages, anything short of total victory against their terrorist regime is a terrible mistake. they're ideological zombies, they will never give up trying to destroy us, they are incapable of surrender, and they will never accept peace.

anyone who thinks negotiating with terrorists is a viable strategy is a fool.

hearing tom nash's analysis does make me feel considerably better, though.

i crashed on the couch for an hour before dragging myself to the table for breakfast and heading off to the office, where our first actual devops guy was waiting. we spent the morning getting quite a lot of onboarding done, but by lunchtime (with two of my previous teammates joining me and my old boss) things were starting to go wrong.

i was there with a job to do, and everything was broken. what followed was a frustrating endless loop of trying to uncover the root cause with a few of the others. by the time i needed to come home for dinner we'd gone through a list of theories and found something that might have worked, but we couldn't figure out how to make it.

my break for dinner was pretty good, we did have some rough moments but not due to any malicious intentions. as soon as mr smear was in bed, i sat down and continued my investigation...

... i finally, after seemingly infinite iterations, found what i was looking for around midnight, and just before 1am successfully deployed a new release to our dev environment.

just in time to get a few hours of sleep (hopefully 🤞) before taking mr smear to school (🤞) and rushing to the office early to initiate a deployment before rushing to our test site to do a deployment...

... and all the while, urgent personal stuff has been piling up and i haven't had a moment to spare.

trade-offs (ceasefire?)

the psychological terror continues. now we pray each day for the (relative) well-being of the hostages that we're paying for in future blood as we release serial and mass murderers who have every intent on continuing to try to wipe us out.

i'm trying to not think about what we're doing and what it means but it's really hard, and there's no clear right course of action available to us. i hope our "leaders" have secured us more lives than we've already lost, and i pray we have a real plan for whenever this "ceasefire" falls apart.

...

if there's a silver lining to this shitstorm cloud, it's that otzma hayehudit has left the coalition. thank fuck.

yesterday:

it was a relaxed start to the day, but then there was another rocket attack by the houthis (who the fuck are these assholes?!) followed by a massive fight to get mr smear to come out with me for a ride, even though he'd already agreed.

what followed was gd sitting and talking him through things, for what felt like forever (probably about 20 minutes to half an hour), and then fifteen minutes of him calming down, and then...

... and then we were off. i pumped us his deflated front tire, we took a rather roundabout route to try and stay on reasonably good bike paths, and we stopped occasionally because he needed rest, but ultimately we ended up at givon square, where we stopped to have a bite - a very large bite - at schnitt.

not too far from the stabbing attack that took place in levontin :/

the food wasn't amazing, but mr smear was having such a good time that he actually - unsolicited, i might add - thanked me for taking him out on such a great day ^_^

the ride home was good too, including a long stop on a bench on rothschild to have a heart-to-heart.

the rest of the evening went really well, including a really fun session playing inscryption together, and bedtime was a riot.

then gd and i settled down to watch the end of the third venom movie. omg. the writing in the first part was weak, but by the end it felt like a parody of an eighties action flick and i turned over in disgust before passing out on the couch.

today:

i slept alright, for the most part. we had some trouble getting mr smear ready for school, but we left the apartment in good spirits anyway. when his friend and his friend's sister caught up with us crossing the road i hurriedly said goodbye so they could enjoy their walk together, then made my way to the clinic to try and figure out what they want in order to authorize gd's therapy sessions.

turns out... they don't really know. so they made me an appointment with our family doctor, who then sent me off to the hospital, where i had a bit of a back and forth before they sent me off. in the afternoon gd's therapist called and i explained to her what i'd understood, hopefully we'll get things right soon.

...

it's been a day full of distractions. i spent some of the morning working on the exercise, and managed to figure out how to get the thing running, and then some of the afternoon reading through their whitepaper to try and understand how all the pieces fit together. i spent a chunk of the day taking mr smear to his therapy session and handling him doing his homework. i've been made responsible for the keys to the bomb shelter for the building. i've been contacted by a company i interviewed for before taking my current (now-last) job.

it's been a day, so far. it's been a day.

the not-so-good doctor

 once upon a time, in 2018, gd and i were trying for another baby. gd's OB/GYN prescribed a medication that was supposed to increase her fertility, but instead triggered early menopause and obliterated any chances of her having more children.

i recently spoke to someone who's working in menopause studies, and mentioned this story, and she asked me what the medication was - but gd has forgotten and i have no records of it. so i've requested her medical records from her OB/GYN.

after two ignored emails, i called him up this morning. he knew exactly who i was, had all the details in front of him, and not only refused to release her records but directly lied about having prescribed any medications at all.

i was fuming - i'm still fuming - at his revolting behavior. although it's very clear to me that he's attempting to protect his ass from a malpractice lawsuit, but after making a mistake and hurting a patient he's now doing intentionally doing something that could interfere with her new practitioner's history-taking, even though we're living in a different country.

this evening i read the following. i don't know where this is going, but now i *know* we need to get hold of her records:

The Promotion of Access to Information Act 2000 gives everyone the right of

access to records held by either public or private bodies for legitimate purposes.

In the latter case, people should be allowed access to “any information that is held

by another person and that is required for the exercise or protection of any rights”.9

This includes access to health records.

Either the patient him/herself, or someone authorised to act on the patient’s behalf,

can request access; ordinarily the request itself is made in writing and should be

responded to within 30 calendar days.

...

yesterday:

another rocket attack in the middle of the night. it took forever for us to get out the apartment, and i honestly don't know why. when i got to the bottom of the stairs i saw mr smear and immediately yelled at him for not entering the shelter, then turned the corner and saw that everybody was outside the shelter because some asshole had locked it.

mr smear and i stopped to watch the demolition guys begin their work yesterday morning on the way to school, and he's decided that that's what he wants to do when he grows up.

i totally get it.

i was tired yesterday - my boss asked me if i was sleep-walking when he realized that i hadn't registered his existence while standing next to me in the elevator. it was a long work day, though by the time i left i felt like i'd made some good progress.

i knew on my way home that i was in no shape to go rollerblading.

on my way upstairs i checked the shelter and found it open. nobody's admitting to being responsible, and we still don't know who has the key :/

gd was at the dentist, so i took mr smear out for falafel. it was a really good experience.

i passed out pretty soon after putting mr smear to bed, and although some of the night was spent restlessly tossing and turning i mostly caught up on sleep.

today:

after dropping mr smear off at school, gd and i met with the guy who's going to do his psychological evaluation over the next few weeks. i feel it was a pretty good meeting.

gd and i had a small fight about something on the way to the bus stop, so that sucked, but we were fine shortly after. the work day was pretty good, minus my phone call to gd's OB/GYN and its aftermath, although the rude people from my cousin's office tried to crowd us out of the kitchen at lunchtime again and it makes things really unpleasant.

...

before dinner, i realized that mr smear hadn't completed his math homework (matific). when he completed it suspiciously quickly, i took a look and saw that he didn't quite do it in the requisite spirit of the thing. i made him do a time exercise because it's one his weaknesses, and where he was struggling i coached him through.

right until he threw an absolutely wobbly because, in his words, "it's IMPOSSIBLE!" even though he'd already done exactly the same thing successfully in the previous question. what followed was a tantrum of note, with much unpleasantness.

after his shower, and a very grumbly start to dinner, he cooled off. after dinner, i wrote out the question i remembered and he sat down and breezed through it (the IMPOSSIBLE question). he then begrudgingly apologized to me for the drama, and to gd, and finally to himself (he needed a bit of coercion to do that last apology out loud, but it's fine).

he then sat down to do the actual thing. the first few questions he breezed through, but then he got stuck again on a question where it was obvious to me why: he was overcomplicating things and confusing himself to the point where he was effectively guessing.

let me just say: there was a LOT of arguing. a LOT of me attempting different ways to get him to approach the question differently. a LOT of me pushing him to "think out loud" so that i could make sense of the weird leaps of logic he was performing.

but, goshdarnit, we got it in the end. and i witnessed what appeared to be a lightbulb moment, eyes wide and mouth agape, when he realized that he was confusing the numbers 0 and 60 because the minute of an hour is effectively both.

holy fucking shit.

the rest of the evening went swimmingly. emotions and strategic arguments with my mom and gd notwithstanding, and now that i've written this all down (has it been half an hour already?!) it's time to try watching venom again.

...

scratch that. after pausing for a twenty minute discussion with gd about the ceasefire agreement and the hostages being released, how every surviving hostage is as much a tragedy as every dead one, and how traumatized we all are, and how we can move forward as a people... i don't know what i'm doing or going to do.

enter the wet season

what. a. day.

i dropped mr smear off at school with the usual pep talk, and it began raining just as soon as we said goodbye, as it almost always does when it rains. fortunately it was brief, and i had an umbrella, and i made it home pretty dry.

gd and i moved everything out the way for the delivery. the poor guy who wanted our old machine was upset that we couldn't wait, and i was upset that he couldn't make the arrangements in the (unreasonable) amount of time he'd been given. so that was a sad experience for all parties.

the delivery guys eventually arrived, and boy, did they charge us. but, to their credit, they handled everything from A to Z and left us with a combo washing machine/dryer ready for its first run. so far, so good 🤞

shortly after a bit of a breakthrough - i've been doing annoying work this sprint so far, and with all the distractions it's been harder to do the shitty things than usual - i picked mr smear up from school and took him to his math tutor. it began pouring down on our way there, and it was a joy to see him tooling around and enjoying the rain while we waited.

my usual coffee spot was washed out, so i went to a bakery and sat inside, warm and cozy, free wifi, nursing a really good latte that was significantly cheaper than the other place. i've think i've found my new place.

by the time i was ready to pick mr smear up, it had been bucketing down for a while and i struggled to get there without getting my feet wet.

it was wellington boot weather, and we were in our sneakers.

i made it just on time, mostly not soaked, but when crossing the next road with him we both stepped right into a deep puddle :(

the afternoon was a cross between me eating and snacking, trying to get work done, and being entertained by mr smear doing his keyboard practice.

and then his homeroom teacher called me.

...

it was such an emotional call that i had a hard time not crying on at least three occasions. it turns out the woman i wrote to yesterday wasn't the right address at all, but she did forward those messages to her and that saved a lot of time. it was a massively affirming to hear her confide that mr smear's class is a known problem case, and that the school's experience with the problem parents is the same as ours.

we don't have to prove anything to anyone.

it was also hugely affirming to hear that up until these past two weeks, during which mr smear has been making a concerted effort to improve his record, she'd been worried that he had an undiagnosed learning difficulty; but now, two weeks into him actively participating, it's clear to her as well that his only issue has ever been a motivational one.

i'm so freaking proud of my boy.

i asked her for her help in understanding the process of moving him to a different school, and while she's not happy that we want him / he wants to move to a different class in the interim, she's on the same page and is willing to do what she can. i think i made it pretty clear to her how appreciated she is personally, even while i expressed how little faith we have in the school as a whole.

...

i barely got any work done after that.

...

after dinner and most of the second men in black movie, but before mr smear went to sleep, my mom called to inform me that she's going to be hospitalized on thursday while they do some testing, it looks like the cholesterol problem she's been maintaining is starting to get worse.

her diet's been better than western standard, but still quite far from plant-based, and i really, really hope i can help her shift it further towards healthy. i sent her links to food choices and what the health, and i'm praying that she actually gives them a chance.

...

our conversation was interrupted by a rocket attack, which caught us out completely - mr smear and i only arrived at the shelter just as we heard the unusually loud explosions. we had a full shelter and it was raining, which was oddly cozy.

...

i'm tired, but overall i feel pretty good about how today went. tomorrow's the day gd's been afraid her - she has her dental appointment in the evening - so i'm praying that everything goes smoothly 🙏

quiet

 it was a very quiet day, aside from gd and mr smear being visited by friends. oh, and a false alarm of a "hostile aircraft intrusion" that sent us all running to the shelter.

i guess it was nice to catch up with the neighbors.

slow

it's getting late, and i have to be up at 4am to go fetch my mother from the airport - we're so excited that she's visiting!

yesterday:

after a chat with horseman, i went up to our elderly neighbor's place because i suddenly remembered in the middle of the night that i promised to visit her days ago and clean forgot. turns out she needed help with her wifi and an ipad her family bought her, as the neighbors who recently left had been letting her use their network.

she can't connect to ours through all the concrete, so she asked me if i could help her get internet installed. we then discovered that already did have internet installed, and we could upgrade her connection for less money than she was already paying. eventually, we managed to get her password sorted out, and her devices connected, and she was really happy.

she then informed me that she was particularly grateful because her husband and son both passed away many years ago, and the rest of her family is too far away to help with this sort of thing... so that was heartbreaking. it was interesting to learn that her daughter's a published poet.

afterwards, she gave me a super-sharp knife for gd and i came back home, gd responded by going to visit her and i took mr smear out to run errands. i asked the mongoose for advice and he invited me to join him and his daughter at dizengoff, so mr smear and i made our way there. stopping for an emergency breakfast sandwich along the way.

our mission at the center was really fun. we all had a good time, between the robotics and the games and the comics and the figures and the toys, although we didn't end up buying anything. and mr smear got a taste of a proper synthesizer at the music store :)

we ended up having lunch with them as well, even though that wasn't the plan, and after they rushed off for toddler nap-time we made our way home for a quiet, lazy afternoon and evening.

i started playing disco elysium. i'm enjoying it, it's brilliant, but after quite a few hours i still don't really understand what the game actually is. i mean, i want to solve the mystery, of course, but i get the feeling that that's merely a superficial element...

today:

aside from a midday excursion to discover a nearby park that tahoma suggested and pick up ingredients so that gd could make tabouleh for my mother, and an evening excursion to the climbing wall, today was very much spent indoors resting and playing video games.

the climbing wall experience was excellent, and mr smear got to the top of the really high wall he's been working on for the last couple of sessions.

it's now 11pm and i've got to be up at 4am to fetch my mom from the airport, so i think i'm going to go to bed pretty soon.

probably.

bigger miracles

 it's the middle of the night, and i'm sitting at my computer nursing a cup of tea and a skinned and bruised knee. also a lot of emotions.

1. getting mr smear out of bed this morning was difficult. it was just as difficult to get him to sleep last night - the direct result of the mgmt - kids video - and gd and i were frustrated because we were trying to watch the boys. mistakenly thinking he was asleep, about ten minutes into an episode where (obviously) lots of extremely inappropriate things had been said / yelled, one of the characters said "fuck!" and his voice rang out "I HEARD THAT!"

*facepalm*

[stops writing to grab a piece of cake our elderly neighbor dropped off this afternoon]

anyway, at least i realized that mr smear was legitimately deeply asleep for the first twenty minutes this morning, as i didn't lose patience :P (i have a test, i move his lips and sing and he giggles the moment he actually starts waking up)

2. it was another difficult night, this time i started on the couch and moved through to the bed. i don't know what's what anymore.

[this is surprisingly good cake]

3. it was a rushed morning, but pretty good. i dropped mr smear off at school, helped gd with online groceries, and then hopped on a bus to my mom's bank. my reason for being there was a ridiculous bug that makes it impossible for their international clients to do anything, but the lady i encountered was helpful and everything was sorted out quickly.

4. work was work. some of it interesting, some of it frustrating.

5. i picked up some emergency groceries on the way home, and came back to everyone in good spirits. that lasted until we realized that mr smear hadn't done his homework, and then he refused to do his homework, and then we were doing A Thing.

5a. i'm actually feeling particularly proud of myself for how i handled The Thing. i turned his aggression on its head, which both frustrated him and entertained him simultaneously.

5b. gd lost her temper, and there were lots of feelings over dinner. but we somehow managed, together, to get through to him and by bedtime we were doing well, and he appears to have a newfound appreciation for who we are and what we're trying to achieve. hopefully this sticks a bit.

6. after putting him to bed, i debated whether to go rollerblading, and eventually decided that that was a good idea. i tried a new route to the meeting point, and i think it was easier. which is good, because although we only did 20km tonight (i mean, it's still a lot) the route was predominantly uphills and downhills, and by the time we were done i wasn't sure if i'd make it home without a taxi, and i'm still not sure if i'll be able to sit or stand tomorrow.

my bum hurts.

but more than my bum hurting, my knee hurts. on our first downhill i hit a deep crack in the asphalt that i hadn't anticipated, and i now have a video recording from one of the others of a pretty painful (but extremely lucky) wipeout. i landed face-down, my pads took most of the damage, and i honestly have no idea how my chest and belly are practically unscathed. i have some minor cuts and abrasions on my hands and arms, but the worst scrape is on my left knee, because my pad slid down on impact and exposed it.

fortunately, one of the crew had a spray that calmed the pain down enough that i could continue the route, but after getting home and showering gd put peroxide on it before bandaging it up and that HURT.

so i've now spent the past hour and a half recovering and snacking, and now i'm getting ready to go to bed.

i think it's been a good day.

collapsing

 well, the municipality doesn't do anything about threatening cats, nor the spca. but we did eventually learn that the cat does, in fact, belong to our shitty neighbors upstairs who fucking knew that it had gotten out when they left but decided to just fuck off and leave us to deal with it.

pieces of shit.

...

ultimately, i'm still feeling sore (emotionally) from thursday evening, and i don't have the energy to dig deeper than that. i'm also feeling sore physically, and my chest still isn't right, and i've spent a good chunk of today resting and then getting up feeling as tired as when i lay down. am i sick? or depressed? who can say?

...

so we eventually left the apartment yesterday and made our way to the shuk, with the intention of picking up a hat for mr smear. by the time we found decent hats the right size, he'd decided that he didn't want a new hat. so we got on a bus home, then did some grocery shopping and picked up some juices along the way.

the big fight of the day was mr smear getting his homework done before sundown, because he'd decided that it was third grade math and he's only capable of 2nd grade math, even though he's in the third grade. he finally got through a single page before sundown.

i don't have energy for this shit.

he decided this afternoon that he wanted to do more of it. i managed to help him through it, but not without a fair amount of frustration.

god damn.

...

we watched a bit of american splendor last night, but i passed out on the couch. i've been reading more of it, both mediums are really good.

...

when i wasn't resting today, i published the hi-res dedication pages of the comics, and i tried to make the website theme nicer before giving up. i did a little work on the next podcast episode, too. now i'm going to rest a bit more before taking mr smear out somewhere.

...

today i've decided that from now on, i'm referring to halva as "dry ice-cream".

off

 i took yesterday off. i wasn't planning on it, but i needed it. i'm still not used to taking sick days, even if i now officially have covid. having said that, gd and i both did RATs yesterday and hers came out negative.

*shrug*

yesterday:

the wake up was not good. mr smear messed around until i carried him out his room, then insisted on claiming that he didn't know how he got from his bed to the corridor, and neither of us believed him. maybe he was telling the truth. either way, not a good vibe to start the day.

at some point on wednesday one of our main water pipes developed a tiny hole, and we began our day with unexplained flooding around the washing machine. we assumed it was the washing machine, and resolved to take care of it as soon as we returned from dropping off mr smear and taking care of some stuff at the clinic. on the way out of the building there was a distinctly unpleasant smell in the stairwell.

about an hour later, as we arrived at the entrance to our building, we noticed the source of the bad smell - our building's sewerage tank had clogged up and was leaking. i then wondered if the cause of our flooding wasn't the washing machine per se, but rather that the pipes were backed up all the way down.

then gd opened the (literal) water closet for the first time since we moved in, and we found ourselves looking into an absolutely revolting portrait of landlords' neglect. panicking, i tried to put insulation tape over the hole using chopsticks so as not to scratch myself on the mildewed rust, but the pipe was completely inaccessible.

it would take another three hours for the plumber to arrive, and the hunt to figure out how to turn the water off at the mains was more complicated than it should have been.

i interpreted each and every syllable out of the plumber's mouth from the moment he set eyes on the closet as "ka-ching!". he needed an assistant to patch the hole for the weekend, and he was nervous about it. we were (and are) exceedingly grateful that he'd arrived in time for us not to be stuck without water for a whole weekend.

i was feeling much better physically than i had in a week, but i was still struggling very much with the runny nose and coughing.

as the plumber left, i rushed out to pick mr smear up from school. i happened to see our neighbors - the ones with the neurotic dogs who left our building a couple of months ago - wheeling a stroller ahead, and i didn't want to get close but was happy to be able to send them our congratulations :)

mr smear came running to me when i arrived, and unfortunately our joyful reunion was marred by the fact that his teeth accidentally met my shoulder and it really hurt him. otherwise, we had a pleasant walk home.

the afternoon, just like every afternoon this week, involved long, drawn-out discussions and arguments about mr smear's homework. once he gets himself over the "i don't wanna", he does just fine, but getting him over the "i don't wanna" is really hard.

today:

woke up still not good in the nose and throat and chest departments. mr smear's wakeup went much better. after dropping him off at school, i came back for gd and we headed to the clinic to see if there was a nurse on duty who could help her out - we were worried she'd developed bronchitis again.

the clinic took a long time, but it looks like gd's (relatively) okay and we hopped over to the pharmacy to pick up meds. that took a long time too.

we picked up a breakfast bagel and a sandwich along the way, then came home and settled in to watch some of mivtza savta, which i'm very glad that gd is enjoying so far. then we went to pick up mr smear, and came home for a very relaxed day. at least until homework time, where we repeated the now-daily dance, but there wasn't a lot to do and he eventually did it well.

the sun has set, and i'm about to do the dishes. i really hope that i'll be clearer tomorrow.

...

today i completed all the free-to-play levels in bloons adventure time. i took the opportunity to sync my phone with my copy on steam, and ended up writing a review. that led to me looking up how many hours i've played, and it turns out that after an entire month averaging 2.5 hours a day, i'm on about 75 hours. and this is my second time playing, because i got pretty far in 2018/2019 when i first discovered the game.

huh.

all wet (again)

it's friday, i'm tired. my world is full of crazy things and people. i started a sinus infection last night, i strongly suspect i'm coming down with something. a cold? coronavirus? the flu?

one of those crazy people is my son, but i seem to be getting into a groove when it comes to handling him (or, he seems to be getting into a groove of being easier to handle). mostly.

work-wise, the week started off smoothy and i managed to get the "meat" of my task done in short order, but the rest of the week was consumed by writing and rewriting tests that continuously bumped up against bizarre brick walls. fastapi dependency caching: i see you. i don't understand you, but i see you.

monday:

skipping the clinic admin session because their ticket system was stuffed up. i was initially going to work from home, but then our neighbors started some construction and i bolted.

tuesday:

the second attempt at the clinic, and dealing with the unhelpful woman again:

"i can't just give out your family's details to anyone, do you know how many cases we have against us?"

and then she couldn't understand why i was angry after she made me coach her through the steps of identifying me and finding my family's records. good grief.

wednesday:

my first quarterly feedback session: very positive.

the bloody baron: it was not the easiest of days.

valentine's day - non-vegans ate the vegan offerings, and then i received a special gift pack from management to make up for it! and the only potential allergents were pecans and walnuts, which gd had tested out of on sunday... so i had something to take home to the wife ^_^

yesterday:

an uneventful pain clinic morning, except for the bit where we needed to convince the receptionist with the simpsons lips that what the doctor wrote down was what we wanted to book. good grief.

birthday lunch: people who piss you off live rent free in your head. people who behave like lunatics, though? i ended up walked away from an argument with a crazy soldier who wanted an apology for us taking his seat even though there'd been absolutely no indication that the seats were taken.

at least the frena was great.

a whole day lost to fastapi dependency caching shenanigans. then a fun-but-very-loud "happy hour" before coming home.

today:

dropping mr smear off at school, proudly remembering that electrical tape is called isolierband on my way to the hardware store, playing more - oh! have i mentioned my completely engrossing addiction to bloons adventure time? - bloons adventure time, a quick-ish shopping (i was dragging my feet and my body the whole way), picking up mr smear, heavy napping, and then watching whisper of the heart (perfect). then two rounds of overdue dishes. now...

who cares.