t-minus 12

 i didn't sleep enough last night, but i did wake up feeling less wrecked than the past two days. after doing a ton of dishes, and exploding at my family because there'd been a whole conversation about mr smear switching art streams and nobody had thought it worth discussing it with me*,  i actually had time to read makoto yukimura's planetes over coffee.

so far, planetes is really interesting hard sci-fi, and the artwork is amazing.

* i feel horrible, too, because he wants to do music and aside from burning a huge amount of money on this move, i have no idea what we'll be able to afford once we're there.

after mr smear left for school, we had a brief window of quiet before our alarms went off reminding us of an important appointment about nerve blocks that we'd both completely forgotten about. thank god we had the authorization ready already...

we walked to the pain clinic, and the doctor was very understanding and sympathetic. it was good that i went, though - gd's communication issues aren't always around language :P

from there i said goodbye and walked to my client's office, arriving in time to make myself a coffee (every morning there's an issue with the coffee machine on our side of the building, so it's a whole thing) before my daily meeting with my bulgarian teammates.

i'm under a ton of pressure, and (along with a bunch of others) lost hours of work today due to wifi issues. i even went home thinking it might work from there - also taking the opportunity to eat lunch, and discover that gd's been using our supposedly vegan fridge to store eggs, which upset me because we explicitly agreed no animal products in our kitchen - and when i couldn't get it to work from home i returned to the office and found the poor IT guy and got in line and eventually got sorted out.

the rest of my day was investigation in ML models, and learning how to run opensearch instances locally, and syncing with the two teams (overcoming a massive, weird communication problem with the only team member with tribal team knowledge), and having a massive info dump with a new face (fortunately recorded), and being unexpectedly hugged by my client / boss when he saw me 🤷

[oh, yeah - there was an "incident" last night when he chided me for introducing myself in a chat as a contractor. but i'm definitely a contractor 🤔]

i called mr smear after school ended to check in because gd made me paranoid that he'd skipped / gone to the wrong arts class. he freely admitted that he might get into trouble for touching his teacher's computer, but he assured me that he'd received permission from another teacher. you'd better believe i messaged that other teacher to confirm, and i was relieved when she not only confirmed, but also praised his behavior 😌

when i got home, it was to discover that gd and mr smear had gotten most of the way through his history homework - alexander the great, and military formations - so i took over from her and we managed to complete it before dinner, with only one minor incident that involved me convincing him that procrastination is poison and that it would feel much better to get it over with as soon as possible.

i was amazed when he agreed, relieved and pleased when he finished the work, and then we could sit down and have a very pleasant leftover dinner before heading into shower and bedtime.

i don't know which i'm more excited about: mr smear getting on my psytrance vibe for most of the routine, or him asking me (just prior to toenail treatment time) to switch to tool - pushit.

his toenails. i don't know if they're getting better. they're so fucking damaged it's horrifying, it's been horrifying to do the treatment every night. i really hope they're getting better somehow.

...

after receiving a ridiculous quote from a mover this morning, gd and i spent a large chunk of the evening trying to get quotes to compare. now it's 11pm and i need to decide whether i should go to bed (i definitely should), or do something entertaining. lightly entertaining, because i've been (obviously) watching lots of streams about iran, and today i learned about the british government agreeing to install the CCP in london, and then about the kurds in syria which i can't figure out if it's good or bad, and holy shit the world feels scary and messy.

if there must be ballistic missiles fired our way, it would be amazing if they could hold off for another 12 days so that we have an in-apartment bomb shelter 🙏

cutoff

 omg what a day. i'm tired-but-wired, some of which is due to the excitement and some of which is due to my having looked for decaf coffee late in the afternoon, having found colombian coffee instead, realizing after preparing it that i didn't want more caffeine, but drinking it anyway so as not to waste it.

...

firstly, a lot of stressing, but in the late afternoon the landlord finally confirmed that the apartment was ours. after dinner and mr smear's toenail treatments (during which time i discovered he's still scratching holes in his hands and legs, which is driving me demented), gd and i walked over to take measurements, and had a really wholesome chat with the guy (and his filipino caretaker).

gd's in need of a nerve block again, the walk there and back were tough for her :(

work-wise, i'm not sure how today went. i'm feeling a bit out of my depth with a tech stack i'm completely unfamiliar with :/

gd went to the dentist in the afternoon, and discovered that the issue is with a neighboring tooth, not the one she previously thought. this means she has three teeth demanding very expensive treatment plans, rather than two (one of which she finally just completed). jesus h. christ in a bucket.

after completing some important admin for my new employer, and putting more stuff on my moving apartments todo list, i went through the contract terms. it's mostly fine, there're a couple of minor clauses that are a concern, but then we came across a heartbreaking clause that states that no animals are allowed.

so i guess we're going to have an interesting conversation tomorrow. this has taken all the wind out of gd's sails :(

...

during dinner and shower time, mr smear was all about tool (particularly parabol and parabola). we discussed jimmy, because i suddenly realized today what intermission is all about - it's the innocent, happy childhood that's disrupted by the tragedy (his mother being left paralyzed after an aneurysm) - while his feet soaked, we sang along to ænema together.

yes, i know the lyrics are inappropriate, but he does too.

anyway, as a long-time tool fan, this is really special.

strange vacation

 yesterday:

i took mr smear to school, then came straight back home so i would be here when the window guys arrived. after i'd waited a while, i received a phone call telling me that the wheels they ordered were available - matching the ones that were currently installed and broken - but that the guy at the store had explained that the reason they'd broken in the first place is because they weren't designed for big windows.

of course.

on the one hand, they might have been "scamming" me for an upsell of 120 shekels. but, more likely, our idiot landlords skimped on the proper wheels because they're precisely the sort of people who would try to save 120 shekels when it would cost a thousand to have to replace them.

anyway, the work was done well, there's no way i would have been able to do any of it myself, and since they've left every opening and closing of the windows has been a pleasantly smooth surprise.

...

after cleaning the floors and rearranging our apartment, i spent the next couple of hours waiting for the air-conditioning guy, who never came. i took a break from waiting in order to go to the shoemaker to pick up my repaired sneakers, developing a craving for a falafel on the way there and grabbing one on the way back.

the weather was hot and dry, and the walk-and-chew was very pleasant. it strangely gave me the distinct sensation of being on holiday.

the only other time i left the apartment was to spy on mr smear, and i was grateful to find him not on his phone, so i didn't have to go through with the punishment. the homework went well.

in the evening, i received a message from the air-conditioner technician, apologizing and asking if we could do sunday instead.

i'll give him one more chance.

...

we started watching eddie murphy's dr dolittle over dinner - much more entertaining than robert downey jr.'s - and then had a long chat with my mom and sister, and then rushed mr smear into bed.

on my way out, i read a whole lot of missed messages in the school chat and learned that the school (and all the schools) are dealing with a really ugly "internet challenge" that is effectively sexual assault (kadisha), and that there was an incident in mr smear's class :/

i hopped on a bus to visit the mongoose. i don't know if i didn't know, or if i'd forgotten, that his partner's pregnant again 😳

we talked until quite late, then i got in a taxi and came home. and got ready for bed, and passed out.

today:

the day began with a very serious discussion about sexual assault, and us telling mr smear that if he witnesses anything like it he's to do everything in his power to stop it immediately - even if it's his friends - and to report it immediately. i think we successfully impressed on him the significance, the important and the potential consequences...

i took mr smear to school (at this point i feel 90% confident in his bus-taking abilities), and when i returned i tried to introduce gd to orgazmo, but she really wasn't interested and i feel like it's aged very, very poorly. like, the concept is funny, and some of the lines are good, but overall it's very flat.

gd and i headed to the nature store, stopping for a jusa nirvana and vegan chocolate alfajores* on the way. then we stopped at a pharmacy, where we bumped into the new captain's first mate and were trapped together in the queue for a while, making small talk and then discussing how things are going in the office, and how the job hunt is going...

* yeah, it hasn't been such a great week for weight-watching

gd and i walked home, picking up coffee at what used to be coffeeholic, and she seemed to manage it well post-nerve-block which is quite something. we did some more shopping at the local store, then mr smear came home, and after some snacking and napping we decided to put the matrix on.

so: the summary of our experience after the first half is that mr smear's mind was blown, but the existential terror proved too much for him and he asked us to stop because he's just not ready for it.

recovery day (1)

 i dreamed a lot last night, so i'm confident i slept. i accompanied mr smear to school (we remembered to take the bus), and then i made my way to the employment agency. "for adults" 🤔

the man who ushered us in spewed a stream of instructions at us, which led to confusion when we got to the ticket machines and they weren't finished booting up yet. then i followed the instructions and waited at the counter indicated on my ticket, but when the clerk showed up she was immediately pissed off with me and sent me to the waiting area. and as soon as i was seated, she called my number.

she didn't speak any english, which wouldn't have been a big deal had i not used an expression i'd translated from english. and she certainly didn't have any detectable sense of humor.

anyway.

after that, i returned home, where i found a delivery notice from the post office indicating that a package had arrived more than two weeks ago, which meant there was a good chance it had been returned to sender. again. i angrily rushed over to the post office, notice in hand, and confronted the manager... who assured me that she's also very frustrated with the delayed notices, and that there's nobody she can talk to about it.

good grief.

the good news is that they hadn't returned it yet, so i finally picked up our math fluxx and mystery fluxx ^_^

(and rain gear for mr smear)

i barely had time to get those back to the apartment before i had to leave again, and with a brief interlude discussing pre-dawn philosophy with horseman i arrived at the coffee shop to meet with the other firees. it was a good couple of hours spent discussing all sorts of things, but mostly supporting each other, and chatting about how to manage (or not manage) a business and what kinds of things we might be interested in building.

at least skippity joined us this time.

i made my way home chatting with swordschool, and we dived into the weeds of a book he wants to publish and i'm trying to help him edit. it's interesting stuff, and it might play into another side project i've been thinking about.

once mr smear got home, it was all about homework until i received a message from the unhinged, once again claiming that her darling innocent angel had been verbally abused by my son.

i immediately took him to task, and put the fear of god in him, and he told us the details and appeared to be suitably contrite regarding his behavior. but i didn't want to respond to the unhinged without some council, so i asked their teacher to call me.

while i waited (and in-between helping gd prepare dinner), i chatted with someone who wanted our windows machine for much less than i'm asking, leading me to re-evaluate my offer and raise the asking price again, but also format the machine.

when the teacher called me, i was pleasantly surprised, both because she's not usually so easy to get hold of and also because she was aware of the incident and supportive. and then, in addition to that, she informed me that mr smear really has been making an effort, that his behavior's no worse than any of the other kids, and that today he entirely voluntarily participated in her science class.

so while he's being punished for handling the unhinged's daughter really badly, we're also very busy praising him for everything else :P

when i finally responded, just as had been recommended, she responded with a flood of her usual disrespectful bile. i took a screenshot and sent it to the teacher so that she knows what's up, and successfully held myself back from responding.

we had a long and entertaining chat with my mom and sister after dinner, then put mr smear to bed (relatively smoothly), and i'm now trying to decide whether to try to be functional or not. i have lots of interesting stuff to read (swordschool homework), but i also have a very busy day tomorrow supporting the window fix and the air-conditioner cleaning, and the floor cleaning in between with gd only able to yell at me for doing a poor job because she's still recovering from yesterday's nerve block...

nerves

i barely slept last night, not sure why.

i was supposed to supervise mr smear on the bus this morning, but we were so wrapped up in our discussion of how to tell jokes across different mediums (and the importance of panel layout, he's got strong opinions on swamp thing) that we auto-piloted to the light rail instead :P

i spent a couple of hours preparing for my phone screen, after which it turned out to be just a non-tech introduction. but it was positive nonetheless, and immediately afterwards i heard back from the outsourcing form, who's skipping a step with me and has invited me to what might be the final round! i'm legitimately excited about this one, i really hope it all comes together.

after that, my eyes were giving me trouble and i was feeling quite antsy, and i decided to take a walk with my kindle. i found a nice spot in a nearby park and read a little, but after a couple of pages i realized i just didn't have the focus. i walked a little further, found a surprisingly nice little fountain hidden away next to the park that i've never noticed in the three and a half years we've lived right next door, and then returned home just in time for a call from swordschool.

jesus, fuck, he's been going through some difficult shit. we talked for quite a while, so long that i almost entirely missed urchin's visit (we literally had a couple of minutes to chat before she left), and we're going to continue the conversation tomorrow. i'm planning on giving him a boost with one of his ideas and hopefully we'll enjoy some quick success 🤞

mr smear arrived around the time urchin left, and we dove straight in to math homework. well, he did - he didn't really need my help, so i got some of the dishes done.

mr smear has been repeating some mightily inappropriate shit recently, directly from his new friends at school. i'm trying to impress upon him, just in case, that friends don't pressure friends into doing anything they're not comfortable with, and that if he does find himself compromised, he needs to tell us so we can help him out of whatever shit he gets into...

a short while later, we all left for the hospital complex, picked up some meds and then accompanied gd to the pain clinic for her nerve block. after getting her ready for the doctor - which took a while, but much less time than usual - mr smear and i went through his hebrew reading homework. he did really well, but there were a couple of moments that reduced my patience, and then his behavior afterwards (he didn't want to do anything that wasn't on his phone, including not doing anything at all) reduced it further.

getting gd home after the procedure was pretty straightforward, and after a brief chat with my mom i took mr smear with me to go pick up dinner. some of the walk was unpleasant - my patience had pretty much bottomed out by that point - but most of it was us talking. a lot of the talk was about heavy stuff (aging, illness and death), which was fine except for the bit where i said something so heavy it upset him and i immediately regretted it...

we picked up... too much food. like, two of the dishes we could've left behind, and it was quite an expensive meal. having said that, the meals were delicious.

there were some negative feelings around bedtime (the usual), but otherwise it's been a smooth evening.

tomorrow morning i've got an appointment with the israeli employment service...

script flip

 i got up early later, made myself a coffee and walked it to the bus stop. shortly into the ride a man came in and sat down across from me with a smell that made it hard to breathe. he got off one stop before me.

i walked in, picked up my repaired computer (i haven't tested it yet), walked out, and caught the bus home. an easier ride.

i got home just in time to leave for work. i arrived at work just before bigtalk, and didn't have time to worry about talking to my boss before he made me feel like he'd been working hard all weekend, and he explained what had happened on thursday, and i no longer felt like that was the problem.

what followed, though, was a day that felt very long, a lot of it me trying to align him with the task requirements. it was the middle of the afternoon by the time i felt he'd understood the requirements, and by the end of the day he was pretty much done, albeit with an insane bug that i feel pretty confident his reliance on AI support was preventing him from resolving 🤦

someone else said it yesterday: AI makes you feel like you're getting things done faster, but you're actually not. my experience is that i feel like it's slowing me down on anything more interesting than a trivial solution.

aside from that, i babysat an external contractor's efforts to migrate his cloudformation to pulumi - it wasn't easy, but i am pretty confident that pulumi is the right choice after all.

as usual, at around 5.30/6pm urgent things began to fall apart. some of my coworkers have been complaining about ridiculous build times, and suddenly i started experiencing them too. instead of the usual minute or two, my build took 35 minutes, and its subsequent deploy broke on contact.

frustrated, as much by the build time as by not being able to have dinner with my family, i went to our warehouse to be on the same physical network as the machine i was deploying to, only to discover that one of my coworkers who has a tendency to skip important steps [skippity] moved the server from our installation desks that i set up last week to a power point connected to the lights, and the cleaning lady had finished up and turned off the lights just before my deployment started 🤦

you can't make this up.

i was furious.

while waiting for him to join me, i tried re-logging in to werf on a whim, and suddenly the build times dropped back to normal. it turns out that instead of throwing an error like it used to, it simply runs retry behavior repeatedly and then fails silently. so even when we thought it was eventually working, it wasn't 🤦

omfg.

after moving the installation back to a safe power point, i learned that skippity hadn't configured the router correctly and nothing would have worked anyway 🤦

finally, after a further half hour spent trying and failing to connect the machine through the router, i plugged in "directly" and began the deployment. that was when he stood up and announced that he had to go because his family would be upset with him... like mine wouldn't?

jesus, fuck.

anyway, i finally got the deployment done and went to pick up my bag. two of my bosses (founder and direct report) were still in, and i let them know what i'd just been through. i ended up having an open discussion with my direct report about bigtalk, we shared different concerns and i walked out feeling much better having said what needed to be said.

i came home, my mom prepared me an emergency gin and tonic and i at least got to say goodnight to mr smear.

...

it's demo day (no. 1), i've slept alright and i'm on my way to postpone gd's nerve block again and try and make an appointment for a surgeon for my ingrown toenail.

namaste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

instruction unclear

 last night's sleep was relatively okay, i guess 🤷

[i just burned the tip of my tongue on my tea]

image of the day:

after leaving a big note, and directly telling two of my coworkers not to touch the server under any circumstances, i discovered it had been unplugged and the entire office was treated to my very loud, very not-amused "WHAT - THE - FUCK?!"

some of the team found the story amusing, and one of them posted the above to the entire company along with the message "instruction unclear: unplugged the cable" 😂

...

i got mr smear through some basic math exercises this morning, and in the evening i worked with him on some of the matific exercises he'd been struggling with and which happened to provide great preparation for his math test tomorrow. and then he did some good hebrew reading before dinner, and all-in-all i'm relieved to see him not only improving his general attitude but gaining in math confidence as well.

...

aside from the unplugging incident, work today was memorable for an unusual but mostly positive interview, and an unspeakably unpleasant bathroom incident.

...

my wife is now bugging me about the language project, so i spent some time working on it this morning before leaving for the office and i'll probably do a little bit more now. tomorrow's a big day - gd's got another nerve block procedure in the afternoon - and i can't help feeling i'm forgetting something important...

slow but steady

it was a long day.

mr smear woke up sick and stayed home, but wasn't impressed that he had tons of homework to do. aside from an incident or two, he apparently did quite well in spite of himself. unfortunately, he had a hard time going to bed and i don't think i handled it as well as i could have.

gd hurt her neck somehow, and her leg hasn't recovered very well from her treatment last week. this sucks.

i went to work early so that i could join the parent guidance session from there. it felt constructive.

our kubernetes expert managed to do what i was supposed to be doing, and i turned my attention on integrating cdktf and eks. it was a lot of small obstacles, but i got the basics of cdktf worked out and we'll find out in the morning if my eks efforts were worthwhile. it felt like a constructive day.

additionally, i'm about to start shadowing the interviewers.

i didn't want burgers for lunch, because while they're good burgers, i'm trying to stick to my diet and the previous three days were cheat days... so i walked to the sarona market to pick up hot sauce, but the store we usually get it from doesn't stock it any more :(

i couldn't find anything there i wanted to eat (that didn't cost twice as much as it should), so i ended up picking up hummus instead. it was a good lunch.

i think i'm starting another cough.

it started raining when i was almost home, wearing my new shoes :/

...

i've finally walked away from a toxic comment thread with a jewish woman living in israel who's completely taken up our enemy's propaganda and made it her own. i find it disturbing and absolutely revolting 🤮

the first day

 i managed to sleep alright last night, but i was pretty anxious this morning. i made sure that mr smear understood what the meeting was going to be about, and i'll be honest, by the time it was done i was quite relieved that i hadn't posted anything on social media.

after quite the interrogation - including a hilarious part for which i had to bite my tongue* - we ascertained that the social boycott we thought was happening isn't really happening. but we also established that the bullying and violence is very real, and that they need to make a move on dealing with it. additionally, they pretty much convinced me that moving mr smear out of the class right now isn't the best move (mainly because his current teacher and her incoming replacement are, to their minds, the most sympathetic / best suited to deal with mr smear) and that it's worth waiting for the recommendation from the evaluation (which should be concluding this week).

* mr smear was pretty insistent on how unfair it was that his bully was recognized for doing good schoolwork, even after we'd all explained that it was irrelevant :P

the meeting didn't produce an amazing feeling by any stretch, but i walked out feeling like things were relatively okay.

the meeting ended much later than i'd hoped, so i scrambled to get to my new office as soon as i could. the morning was spent meeting lots of interesting people, getting the tour, beginning to get my computer and office access set up, joining my first standup, followed by a very long but surprisingly intelligible presentation on our architectural overview.

it's been an extremely long time since i was introduced to a system that just makes sense. it's elegant, and i feel considerably more at ease about what i'm getting into.

i went with my (for now) manager to get breakfast / lunch (it was around 3pm already), and until i tucked in i hadn't actually realized just how hungry i was. and i managed to stop eating a little after hitting the "too much" point, even though it was absolutely delicious.

after we returned, i made myself a (really strong) coffee and resumed setting up my machine, at which point gd called to inform me that she couldn't find the authorization form for her nerve block... so i sighed loudly, and rushed home to grab it and my family and walk to the pain clinic.

the process was, from start to finish, more straightforward than usual and much quicker than anticipated.

...

the taxi home, though, was completely ridiculous. we were picked up by an old lady taxi driver, who immediately took offense that she could smell that gd had just smoked cannabis, complaining that it would damage her lungs. this turned into a very weird argument, at which point i pulled out my phone and she said "you think google's going to convince me?!"

once we'd established that it wasn't dangerous, she went on a tirade about some (probably fictitious) bride in her wedding dress who refused to get in her taxi once because she smelled... weed? cigarettes? who knows. so i asked if this had occurred once, or if it had occurred many times. to which she responded: "if i told you only once, what would that mean?"

"that she had issues."

ooooh, shit. the taxi driver began berating me for daring to judge a stranger i'd never met. eventually, still very heatedly, she asked "and what difference would it make if it was many passengers?"

"that their behavior was somewhat normal, and therefore somewhat reasonable."

at that point we were approaching our street, so she slowed down very dramatically to share a "tip for life" with me: that if you're arguing with someone and they're starting to show signs of losing interest, you should stop arguing. with that, she dropped us off, and i gave her the single-star rating she deserved.

holy shit, some people should not be working in the service industry.

we got gd upstairs, mr smear showered, dinner served, discussed marijuana usage with mr smear (who'd understood most of the argument, and was surprisingly completely on my side), who assured me that he would never smoke (cigarettes) "because i made a vow to my dad", and who paid attention when i explained the risks of consuming illicit drugs while one's brain is still forming...

anyway.

we had a good good-night chat with my mom, and had enough time between dinner and bedtime for me to shower and join mr smear for some calvin & hobbes. i am soooooo glad i managed to get hold of those comics!

after putting him to bed, i continued setting up my machine, and also started a fantastic run in kaycee's mod abusing the fair-hand mechanic:

unkillable hooved tribe totem FTW.

and now it's half-past-midnight and definitely past my bedtime.

openings, closings, and in-betweenings

yesterday:

after another good morning getting mr smear to school, i synced with my mom and made what i hope will be my last big forex transfer to canada.

although gd has been hurting, she gave me a haircut in anticipation of the important meeting that was scheduled for this evening. she wasn't happy with it, but it's definitely respectable enough that i've got nothing to be embarrassed about.

work was tough, but i finally got the job done. then i ran into performance issues, and spent the rest of the afternoon (and some of the evening) tweaking until it was good enough.

at 5pm i met gd and mr smear at the pain clinic for her nerve block appointment. as soon as she went in, i took mr smear for our "usual" falafel laffa. the food court - and ordering in particular - was an exercise in cultural anthropology. even the team working the counter were having a hard time with the group of seniors ahead of us weaving in and out between the rest of the customers sowing chaos. when we finally got our order, i asked the girl sitting behind us with her mother to take her shoes off the chair, which she didn't. halfway  through our meal, i looked up and saw - and then couldn't unsee - that almost everyone around us was chewing with their mouths grotesquely wide open.

so that happened.

regardless, mr smear and i enjoyed our meal together and we both ate a lot. after we got gd home, i walked to the cafe to pick her up a sandwich (and dessert), and the rest of the evening was pretty quiet.

today:

i got up a bit early this morning, with my neck still giving me some trouble. not a lot, but enough to be uncomfortable all day.

the day began with two Very Big Deals: the first, that after chasing down the canadian debt we generated migrating and getting settled for two and a half years, we finally were able to pay it off! we're not out of the woods yet - we owe my mother and our south african bank quite a lot of money - but it's a huge milestone and relief.

the meeting i was looking forward to in the evening? gco had forgotten about it and run into complications, so it had to be cancelled :(

the second Big Deal was a meeting with mr smear's teacher, principal and guidance counsillors. the first step to a corrective experience was that i made it very clear to the principal - twice, for two different aspects - where and why our last meeting went south, and she accepted it with a grace that really impressed me. the second was an actual discussion - much easier to have without gd, primarily because i didn't spend half the meeting translating. so it's a pity she couldn't make it, but it worked out for the best.

in short, mr smear has started the year on the right foot*, and we've received helpful advice, and he's going to be supported, and we're all feeling better about how he's handling.

* okay, not perfectly, as we learned later in the day, but definitely on the right foot.

my work day was a bit wonky. i fixed yesterday's code based on my boss' comments, partially at least, but i was supposed to be focused on a hugely important bug and it was a morning full of distractions (although the back-to-school sandwiches were very welcome). at lunchtime i walked to the school to pick up mr smear, walked him pleasantly back home, had a bit of a family fight when gd found out that he'd done something self-destructive that we've been warning him to stop doing, which i'm pleased to report i managed to diffuse pretty effectively.

i returned to work, right into a retrospective. afterwards a bunch of us went downstairs for coffee, where i bumped into one of my cousin's kids, who's just started working two floors up from us.

the rest of the workday was a mixed bag. by the time i left, i hadn't achieved what i needed to and i felt like my brain was melting out my ears...

i walked home, managed to rekindle the earlier fight, which we eventually seemed to have resolved, and dinner was great (we started watching the first x-men movie).

i've just put mr smear to bed - we're both really enjoying reading the goblet of fire so far - and we're about to call gd's canadian bank to ask them to close her account.

the birthday boy, the nerve block girl

still coughing. waiting on a new dermatologist appointment.

...

we managed to get up and make a card just in time to present it!

*whew*

it was a busy morning, rather productive in spite of the birthday message distractions. i received an amusing email from one of the companies i'm applying to inform me that they'd like me to meet a potential vp r&d, and if it's the guy i bumped into last week that would be hilarious!

in the afternoon we went off to dizengoff center to look at all the toy and robot and action figure shops, bumping in a guy i went to high school with. we ended up in the lego store, where i realized in-store that the budget i'd summoned into my head from nothing just made no sense, so after more than a little discomfort i explained how the budget would work to mr smear and he was beyond cool about it - we actually had to explain to him that he didn't have to worry, he could spend up to that amount and enjoy it.

i wouldn't have picked what he picked, but he walked out of their with his gifts and a giant smile on his face, and his excitement hasn't slowed down since - he obviously picked well, and it was great seeing him so happy :)

i got in about forty five minutes of work before we all left for the hospital for gd's nerve block, we arrived just on time and then sat in the waiting room for an hour or so, i worked on my laptop while mr smear watched some minecraft channel on youtube. then gd went in, and i took mr smear to the food court to eat dinner, picking up dessert along the way. he ate well, thoroughly enjoyed his dessert (a panda chocolate/coconut bar), we did a very fast emergency grocery shopping and then returned to the pain clinic just in time to see gd go in for the procedure.

it felt like a long time, but she came out doing alright. in shock, but alright, in spite of the nurse's concerns because it's unusual to do both sides simultaneously. we very cautiously brought her home, we had a really funny arab taxi driver who sang happy birthday to mr smear, and then we slowly got ourselves organized and ready for bed.

i'm tired, but i don't want to go to sleep just yet. so here i am, typing up my day and then figuring out whether to mess about or crash.

it was a big day.