sleep journal entry

i had a remarkably good night's sleep last night. i took an iron supplement yesterday, but not magnesium. i did have a drowsy period in the afternoon (during a meeting as usual, i struggled to keep my eyes open both in the booth and in an open space) but no nap. i went to bed after midnight, and slept through until just before alarm time.

i guess i have enough evidence to assert that i have developed a meeting (or presentation) sensitivity, possibly even an allergy.

also, that i'm not enjoying my work at all. and that i might even be depressed. i wonder if this is somehow a war thing, or an extended war thing, or perhaps if this just has to do with the past four years of work being mostly shit, and feeling trapped as a wage slave while constantly juggling constantly mutating family responsibilities.

maybe i should just finish my coffee.

sleep journal entry

 i made a point of staying up late* even though i was really tired. i took an iron supplement during the day, skipped the magnesium. during the night i experienced intrusive thoughts and hip discomfort, though not particularly intense.

* some development, and another failed run of slay the spire 2

i was traumatized by mr smear's alarm going off in our room at top volume, i was dreaming and the dream exploded into a nightmare of violated anger, with no recollection. so that's how i woke up. i combined my morning coffee with some starship troopers to calm down. it captures the concepts and atmosphere of basic training superbly.

and then i sat down to take care of the usual morning admin stuff and received an email that i'm being fined for traveling in a public transport lane even though i'd returned the car prior to the incident being recorded. dammit.

it feels weird to be going into the office today.

sleep journal entry

 it was a bad idea to go to bed so early.

i think i didn't take an iron supplement yesterday, only the magnesium at night. i went to bed really tired, but could not sleep, primarily due to lower back discomfort and general restlessness.

it was a horrible night and i'm tired.

untethered

 sleep journal entry: after two hours of fitful sleep, i woke up with lower back and hip pain again and it took 45 minutes of stretching to calm down. this is the first time since i began supplementing with iron and magnesium, and i woke up feeling particularly poorly rested

meanwhile, gd woke up on the wrong side of bed this morning and her temper's on a hair-trigger.

all that aside, my niece is supposed to be giving birth in an hour's time at the latest, and we're all in a weird state of wanting to be supportive while certainly not being supportive of the fact that she's having another kid at all. i feel bad for both the siblings and the little one hasn't even come out yet.

...

yesterday was a day. i took mr smear to school, deciding once i got home that i have been being paranoid. i guess i'll wait for the homefront command to advise.

i did get a bit of work done in the morning, and i had a great (short) sync with my mentor. the afternoon, however, was a complete mess as far as work was concerned. i managed to get a whole lot of personal admin done, and i had a half hour meeting about the urban kibbutz idea that went really well, and certainly gave me some food for thought.

...

mr smear made some drama yesterday. when i dropped him off at school, it was with instructions to find out what work he needed to catch up and to bring home his workbooks. i called him after school to remind him. he arrived home without doing either of those things.

aside from the bad vibes, he's now under threat of losing weekend privileges if he doesn't shape up. i got him to write up what he has to do today in a temporary diary, including the instruction to start using his actual diary, and hopefully today will see him more functional.

after he did his chores, and a whole lot of music practice, he fired up human resource machine before i could stop him. technically i've made it homework, but practically speaking it's a video game, so i kinda screwed myself on that score :P

he spent a lot of time staring - his usual "i don't wanna think" mode - and there was a bit of tension, but i refused to give him the answer even as i gave him all the hints he needed to solve the problem. when he finally put 2 and 2 together (or 8 by 3, in this case), there was much rejoicing!

...

dinner was delicious, shower / bedtime went pretty smoothly, and i went to bed shortly after he did.

brain fogging

 once again, as it gets later and i get ready to go to bed, my nose and throat situation begins to worsen... on the one hand, the antihistamines seem to be helping a bit. on the other, this really can't be just allergies.

i'm enjoying the excuse to accompany mr smear to and from school these days, even though it's awkward and getting more awkward by the day. are we at war? will the bombing resume? or should we be living our best lives?

limbo is uncomfortable.

i told my team what i've been thinking, and that i essentially needed to go back to the drawing board, and they were understanding. in spite of a fair number of distractions, i did manage to be productive today and i'm understanding considerably more than i did before. i'm not quite sure how to formally introduce AI tooling into what i'm doing - i may have to treat it as local harnessing only - but at least i'm feeling a little less lost.

a couple of months ago i began the process of setting up paybox for mr smear, and then a few weeks later got his account set up. since then it's been unclear whether he's actually earning interest, and today i got in touch with their support. after they initially lied to me, it became apparent that children's savings accounts do not, in fact, earn interest. so the whole exercise was one in futility, and i've now withdrawn all the money and we're going to have to find another option. and, just like every other thing we've tried, this has cost us; not just in cash, but i've now got two credit cards that need to be cancelled :/

assholes.

i snacked a lot today. today was all about snacks. even if some of the snacks were essentially just an extended lunch :P

the supplement routine is getting a bit ridiculous, though. it's complicated, and i've kinda given up on intermittent fasting the full 16 hours (though i guess i've been unofficially doing less for a while now) because it makes it even more so. i can't drink tea or coffee for an hour before or after taking my iron supplement (or eating something with a reasonable amount of iron in it), and i've got to take vitamin D in the morning with food, and magnesium at night with vitamin C (but not vitamin D), and i have to have my handful of walnuts (or pancakes, if i'm in time for gd's breakfasts) for omega 3, and not forget to regularly take b12.

after my mom and i picked mr smear up from school, we returned home and then walked across the highway to find the supermarket. it really is well-hidden! mr smear's whole thing for weeks has been hunting for lotus biscoff cookies, and i honestly wasn't expecting to find them there.

but find them there we did :)

on the way there, i'd charged him with paying attention to the route so that he can he gd find the place, to which he'd responded in a decidedly uncooperative manner. i warned him there'd "be a test", and on the way back i quizzed him, putting the lotus cookies on the line. he was not happy when i "failed" him and assured him there'd be no biscuits until i got a map, at which point i went home and my mother volunteered to accompany him to give him a hand.

which he apparently didn't need 🤦‍♂️

it really is all about motivation with this kid. he got home, drew me a map, took half a biscuit and promptly forgot about the ones i'd offered him as a prize, and then settled down to try and improve his previous solution in human resource machine.

that was effectively the end of my work day :P

while he didn't exactly post the correct solution himself, he did work through it really well, he made a real effort and stayed focused, made a bunch of modifications that he was pleased with himself about, and when i sat down with him at the end, he was clearly on board with me every step of the way.

this is exciting stuff ^_^

just before dinner his new teacher called me, and our chat was pleasant. funny, even, in a distressing kind of way, because the story she told me was that she'd loaned mr smear a book for the lesson, and he'd somehow managed to lose it by the end of class even though nobody had moved.

my child is certainly talented.

eventually, i got the full story over dinner and everything made sense, nothing had been lost.

dinner was really good, gd and my mom worked together to produce a lentil curry that even anti-lentils mr smear found edible.

bedtime was smooth, i finally read a bit more of the colour of magic to him (we're so close to the end!), and i've now spent a couple of hours doing nothing of value (including some spire slaying). now i'm taking my cough to bed and praying to get some rest.

bloody sunday

my allergies were more under control, but it was still a difficult night with a post-nasal drip so most of the night i was awake to some degree. between the iron and magnesium supplements, my lower back and hips haven't been causing me any real problems at night, although i did have some trouble during the day...

my last dreams were difficult: a massive attack on my armored corps unit with a zangief-like russian doing a lot of damage. then fighting to hold a vampire in a huge tank of water, assisted by an our-side vampire. something about making sure he didn't die, but not giving him enough oxygen to escape. and then she left me in charge, and aside from him wounding me in the underwater scrap, i accidentally gave him enough to get out.

i wonder if the vampire isn't AI.

...

after posting last night, my mother and i did our traditional annual try-to-find-out-what's-wrong-with-her-computer. i installed O&O ShutUp10++, and disabled all the recommended things, and it does seem to have helped. unfortunately, i then learned that she's still on windows 10 and her computer's too old to upgrade. so she either has to trade it in, or switch to ubuntu, neither of which are ideal.

and i can't give her my windows machine because the screen's too small :/

...

i woke up this morning to learn that there was a stabbing attack in our neighborhood yesterday by a south tel aviv gang of refugee / foreign workers' kids. i don't know how to break that to gd or mr smear.

i dropped mr smear off at school this morning, he's had a great idea for a front-door image!

i arrived home to learn that we're having hot-water cylinder troubles, which pisses me off not only because it's just another thing to deal with (i'm about to accompany gd to the clinic and hospital, her toenail issue has fast become an emergency), but because we just had a plumber in a week or two ago and he couldn't find anything wrong.

i'm so fucking over this week already.

sleep journal entry

my first two coffees of the day yesterday were decaf because i was still wired from the day before. the sleep i got last night felt broken, but i did dream, and i haven't been experiencing my usual leg/hip discomfort, which is probably due to the iron and magnesium supplements.

the last part of my last dream involved following someone to the "entrance" of his house, which included a terrifying jump around a corner at a dizzying height, and some kind of "bridge" which i couldn't see and didn't figure out before i woke up.

gd's other toe is looking scary. only this year (it was about this time last year), there wasn't any "accident" to explain why.

frustration + anxiety

 it's been a very frustrating day. gd decided that mr smear was too sick to go to school - he really wasn't - so that gave me a bit of extra time to take care of some adulting admin. unfortunately, not only did i need that extra time, but i had a number of highly aggravating encounters and that really set a tone for the day.

then i dove into work. work sucked. four hours of highly frustrating work, and i'm confident using AI has ultimately made this whole project (so far) take considerably longer than it should have. i feel like i'm wading through a pool of raw sewage, being led by a broken compass that keeps swinging in a different direction any time i get close to an exit.

i've also been hungry / snacking all day, and my stomach's been unhappy.

while i'm going through whatever agitation i'm going through, gd's been having a really hard time. apparently a bit of wine last night has reset any of the healing that avoiding gluten was doing, and to add to that her shoulder's locked up. she's (understandably) pissed off now that my mother forgot some of her meds back in cape town that she really needs right now.

...

by the time 2pm rolled around, i decided i was done for the day. it's been an absolutely gorgeous day, so i took a walk with my mom and mr smear through the park to get some exercise before turning back, picking up coffee (decaf for me) and a malt beer for mr smear at our favorite dog-friendly coffee spot, then passed a supermarket and did some shopping on the way home.

and then took another short walk to the 24/7 for the stuff we couldn't find at the supermarket.

after mr smear and i had some chocolate weetabix (not bad for a "boring" additional iron source), i lay on the couch and finally started reading the day everything changed. then i got up, antsy as all hell, to post this.

it's independence day (shortly), i've no idea what we're doing tonight, and i've no idea what we're doing tomorrow. it's a very confusing time. the ceasefire is supposed to be over tomorrow night, but i'm more nervous about it being cut short than i've been since it started, and i haven't trusted it in the slightest.

sleep diary / politically asleep

 i've been using the consensus sleep diary for the past couple of days, and i've just gotten stuck on the fact that you can review your sleep stats dashboard, but not the comments you made - unless you're adept with the developer tools. so, for myself, i'm copying my comments here:

i'm not sure how long before 6.30am i woke up, i feel like it was a long time though. yesterday was my first time using both iron and magnesium supplements and i didn't suffer from the usual discomfort, just a bit of restlessness

on multiple occasions throughout the night i giggled at trump's absurd and acerbic humor.

...

then, first thing this morning, i woke up to respond to an instagram thread with a highly intelligent, educated man whose political extremism has been distressing me for years:

him: A blockade is an act of war. That's why during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis the US referred to it as a quarantine. Both the action, its intricacies and the specific wording were discussed and debated thoroughly. Oh well. Clip from Thirteen Days. I like it.

me: did you know that the irgc was blockading the straits up until a few days ago ? why didn't you post this then?

him: Of course I knew. I don't know of any historical analog, especially one with a dramatic Hollywood adaptation that includes the US principals discussing the blockade. Is there?

me: interesting - the timing of your post suggests that when the americans do it it's nefarious

him: nefarious means wicked or villainous. If you consider war as that, then yes. I don't. I think it's an act of war. Which requires approval from Congress.

me: ah, so it's okay that americans are using force to protect american interests, it's just an issue with protocol? cool, cool

...

[i'm] just perpetually curious how someone so intelligent and educated always seems to be pushing an anti-west agenda 🤷

him: Showing the lunacy and abhorrence that is the Trump administration is anti-West? Color me anti-West then.

me: if you can only see lunacy and abhorrence, then yes, you're anti-west. a pity.

him: I see much more. Terror. Abuse. Fascism. Sadness. Democratic decline. Mental decline, not to say dementia. Fear. Spinelessness. Systemic failure. At a glance.

...

what are you seeing that I don't? (I forgot grift and open corruption on an unprecedented scale, just came to mind as well)

me: a whole different side to the internet, and history. it begins before the end of the cold war, with the kgb inventing "active measures", and evolves into decades of unholy alliance between the russians, chinese, qataris and iranians to destabilize the west and create a massive, well-funded disinformation army that infiltrates western institutions and makes the media (traditional and social) push out propaganda at a terrifying scale. and that all rides on the back of social media algorithms that are financially incentivized to raise engagement by any means necessary, generating mass psychosis on all sides of the political spectrum as we learn that "folie à deux" scales. i recommend trying to balance out your media diet, the other side isn't all lies like you've been led to believe. also talking to your fellow israelis without assuming that everyone with a different understanding is either brainwashed or a bad actor (that's a general statement, i'm not accusing you of anything - it's possible you just don't happen to have people with different opinions in your circles).

the last opportunity?

 i went to bed late last night. i finished with the button a little after midnight, then climbed into bed and found myself entirely unable to sleep. i don't know why, but i was completely wired and spent the entire night miserably uncomfortable.

the 6.30am alarm was painful.

i accompanied mr smear to school - again, because i'm worried about when the war's going to resume - and we had a fun conversation about the drawing for our front door. on the way home, i stopped at the pharmacy to pick up something for gd, and had a chat with my mom about whether she'll be able to land here next week, and what we should do about her laptop (i'm thinking of giving her our windows machine).

i came home, and struggled to get started with work; primarily because in addition to exhaustion, my back and feet were really hurting. i eventually remembered our foot/back massager, though, and i have to say i'm quite grateful for it!

[turns it back on again]

i prepared a scary bit of work last week, and this morning i pulled the trigger. i nervously monitored the dashboards, but a half hour later i was convinced that a) the deployment had gone smoother than i'd hoped and b) i've discovered something quite bad (a memory leak) that's been causing disruptions, probably for years.

i also helped the team lead of my previous customer team navigate the airflow interface - that shit is hard!

in addition to working, i assisted gd with a wolt driver who couldn't figure out how to find our address on a map and was unable to follow directions. not only was he shockingly dumb and incompetent, but he had the nerve to tell me that we shouldn't be using our correct street address and should go for the (essentially) illegal one instead.

we also managed to figure out how to return a pair of shoes she bought online, and it was much easier (albeit much more expensive) than the other site.

in the afternoon i returned to the school to pick up mr smear, and managed to buy raisin brain (for the iron fortification) along the way. mr smear made me wait for a while, so i took off that same amount of screen time, but the journey home was mostly pleasant and once the timer began, he grabbed watchmen off the shelf and started getting into it.

i spent the next few hours drowning in a task that's heavy on the AI because i only vaguely understand what needs to be done. so while i'm constructing (hopefully) a mental model, i'm casting magic spells and praying they don't backfire...

and then mr smear had homework to do. fortunately, he worked through it pretty well, with only one short episode of me losing patience (he couldn't understand the problem, but wouldn't pay attention while i tried to help him), and he managed to score himself some game time before dinner.

dinner: delicious corn soup / corn on the cob combination, accompanied by the next part of ready player one. i've been avoiding spoiling the chest-burster scene from the alien movie because we're planning on watching it soon, so i was pretty bummed out by the disguise scene! at least i know mr smear won't be traumatized by it, though. he thought it was funny. (though he still hasn't plucked up the courage to continue with terminator 2, which he finds too intense)

we managed to get through shower and bedtime pretty smoothly. i didn't have energy to read to him (and it was late), but instead i recited the slam. the last time i recited something i received some pretty harsh feedback from him ("i HATE your poetry!"), but tonight? he was riveted, and actually praised it ^_^

...

i'm going to try to get to bed earlier tonight (ie. soon). it's clear that the "cease-fire" with iran is officially over, so if there's an attack we're moving mr smear back into our bedroom immediately.

gods, this is a really confusing time. strategically, it seems like the americans have really done an amazing job, but right now being in the moment and in the IRGC's crosshairs...

avoidance and procrastination

 i'm probably iron deficient. or maybe just exhausted. or perhaps a combination of the two.

...

i kinda slept last night. with a few disturbances, i tried sleeping on my back - or, at least, lying on my back until desperately tired - and i think that helped.

i began the day with a coffee and booth's sonnets, but my brain was pretty much offline. i think it's safe to say that i spent most of my day playing slay the spire 2, but i did read the balatro creator's story while trying to understand what the good card games are backed with.

the first attempt to talk to mr smear about making plans for the day - after it had initially gone sour - turned into wrestling, which was fun until i had to call a time out for a nap. later, when i came to (with a sore neck), we began the arduous process of getting him out the door; of all the suggestions i'd made, he found one i hadn't thought of, and we ended up taking the basketball up to the courts.

worst experience of his life, he says. he doesn't like sharing a court, and he's really not a fan of any kind of physical exercise. his neck hurt from looking up at the net, his fingers hurt from the one time he caught the ball badly, he was convinced he'd split his lip when the ball *touched* his face, the sun was shining, and his skin was threatening to sweat. but for all that, he put in the time, and he clearly had some genuinely enjoyable moments while we practiced stealing the ball (he's such a cheat!), so as much as he suffered, at least it wasn't all bad.

the sun is setting, gd's making dinner, he's playing minecraft, and i'm just... being. that's gotta be okay.

...

nope. the stovetop's not drawing enough electricity, and i have to find an electrician now 🤦‍♂️

...

nope, the whole apartment's electricity is behaving badly. jesus 🤦‍♂️

wtf monday

 wtf monday.

we all got up early (my hip's still locked, but not quite as badly as yesterday) so that we could accompany gd to her dental first aid appointment. we arrived on time. her dentist was running late. after we'd been there about an hour, gd decided she didn't really need to be there after all.

i raced to find an appropriate spot to join my team's daily, but realized too late that where we'd settled wasn't one. at least the coffee was good. i hope the little white bits falling all over the place weren't from dried bird poop.

we then caught a bus home, on the way doing a bit of hardware shopping.

once home, i was somehow dragged in to trying to diagnose an issue my teammates had been working on but abandoned due to their holidays. i spent the following hours trying to make sense of things - mostly asking AI to investigate a variety of things - and eventually i was able to suggest something that seemed reasonable.

only to be informed by the devops team that that's just what they'd been thinking. so why the hell didn't they do something about it without getting me involved?!

gd received her shoes, which cost half again as much due to customs.

i took a break to be assisted by big data, who began the work of installing proper ethernet outlets. it was very stressful, and i have no idea how he managed to get the clip wired up properly. finally, just before he had to run off, we discovered that one of the pieces i ordered was replaced by something incompatible :/

after closing up my work for the day, i headed out to the local store again, this time for a stack of dark chocolate, because apparently it's a good iron source. the more i try to do the math, though, the less sense that claim makes.

it gave me an opportunity to chat with my mom, though.

after returning home, it was time for dinner, two episodes of strip search (we're down to the last episode!), a family chat with my mom, shower and sketch time for mr smear, and now that he's in bed i'm posting this and getting my evening squared away before climbing into bed myself.

...

mr smear has seen some of the last halloween before, tonight i bought it and another book of abby's on kindle. i was a bit disappointed by the merch available, though. i wanted Stuff.

lackluster

 today was a weird one. not a bad one, mind. lots of it was comfortable and comforting.

i got up tired. i read a bit more of mairowitz and crumb's kafka (it's amazing, with a very interesting perspective of ghetto life), i worked, with shenanigans around code ownership, and i eventually ended the work day in the middle of making some progress but also ready to put everything down because i'm officially on leave for the next couple of days.

i left the house around noon to get to a blood donation site, but for the first time in my life was rejected because my hemoglobin count was too low. so there's that to stress me out now.

mr smear tried desperately to get as much screen time as he could even though he was under punishment from calling me a jerk yesterday. he did music homework - garageband, he's making cool stuff - and later we sat down on yesterday's human resource machine problem and had a positive experience.

i'm not sure if his "performance" of being sick just as we started training was real or not, but whatever. he's the one concerned about his weight.

actually, that's not entirely true. mine's been climbing a bit, too.

but he did join me for a very serious mission hunting down matzah meal and healthy snacks, which proved surprisingly difficult to find.

either way, we watched strip search over a delicious dinner, spoke to my mom, and then got through the evening rituals and a bit of the colour of magic before calling it a day.

...

i've engaged in three or four different, toxic arguments on facebook over the course of the past day. people are fucked. i've now watched a whole lot of random youtube videos (some news, some not), and now i'm going to play some more balatro and have one last cup of tea and then climb into bed.

a power day

 well, the next part of the day was pretty rough - but in a fun way, i guess? it certainly was an experience. 

firstly, mr smear is now full-on into counter-strike, and it's nice to see him not giving up and getting excited by his successes. so it was a cool tone to set before we head out to his regular allergist checkup.

but we headed out right in the heaviest part of a massive thunderstorm. fortunately, we both had our big-enough rain boots on, the water levels were high everywhere and my waterproof shoes would have been flooded from the top. and we had a time avoiding cars spraying water onto the sidewalks, and we got pelleted with hail (his first time outside in hail), and the walk from the bus to the hospital was just ridiculous - a real urban jungle adventure - and of course, the sun came out just as we arrived at our destination.

from that point on it became impossible to close my umbrella...

there was a bit of confusion (which was to be expected) at the reception, but we made it through the bureaucratic gauntlet and went upstairs to the allergy clinic. it was war-time very quiet and there were only two other kids there, surprisingly calm and extremely cute children, so off the bat it was a much less stressful time with mr smear. at that point my tiredness and lack of caffeine began catching up with me, but the allergist and her nurse were efficient and mr smear managed to distract himself from the prick-test itching with games on his phone, and pretty soon we were discussing the results.

it seems like, sadly, his allergy level is stabilizing rather than going away, we'll know better in the next year or two. but even so, the level it's stabilizing at is far less dramatic than before, so while he'll still need an epipen and to be careful not to consume dairy, we don't need to be so scared of accidental contact.

it's / it should be fine.

we went through the hospital mall, where i picked up an emergency coffee just as the attack warning sounded. considering the fact that the roof is made of glass, i get why the safe area was three floors below ground... there was nowhere comfortable to sit, so the two of us walked around the parking lot full of people occupying themselves on their phones and amused ourselves playing word association games.

then we returned to pick up a couple of things at the supermarket, and a couple of bottles of sublingual b12 at the pharmacy (while waiting in the uncomfortably crowded aisle for the self-service checkout, gd called twice while i was holding an umbrella that refused to stay closed, a cup of coffee, and two bottles of b12. i was not in my happy place.

mr smear and i took a bus home - to his chagrin, he always wants to walk these days to get some exercise - and he signed on to his remote classes while i finally got wednesday's code review approved and got started on the follow-up improvement. gd has managed to schedule me a haircut, so a short while late i headed out to catch a bus to sheinkin.

i had some time to spare, so i got a little more work done and drank a coffee that i must assume was soy milk (because they said so, and i honestly can't tell). i arrived just on time for my haircut appointment, and another attack warning. everyone headed across the road to a hotel shelter (the same hotel my cousin threw his farewell party in on mr smear's birthday), which was an interesting experience, and then we returned to get into it. i thought the coffee would keep me from nodding in the chair, but...

... i'm really happy with the haircut. gd's happy with it too. i'm very enthusiastically grateful that i'm no longer sporting my jew-fro / isro :P

it took a long time to get home (i shouldn't have gotten off the bus when i did), and while i waited for the connection mr smear had an accident while helping gd and the two of them had to deal with a smashed plate. so that happened.

the evening was me completing the work and studying a bit (data engineering), and mr smear playing more counter-strike, and then a pretty intensive training in which mr smear admirably demonstrated that he not only could STFU when being given instructions, but that he could redirect his anger and frustration energy into the drill we were doing (a liver shot combo) (even if he did feel the need to tell me that he was imagining that he was hitting me), into continuing the work through discomfort, into stepping into his first impact training (feather-light touch from me, but a big deal for him), into pushing himself through difficult post-training exercises (like planking, diamond push-ups, crunches and burpees), into taekwondo-style stretching.

all the while holding himself in check, even when it was clear he was emotionally at the edge. when we were done, his pride was quiet but visible, and he didn't argue with me the first couple of times i told him how proud i was (he did a bit later, though :P).

a great dinner (double yo-egg, both types as a very successful pre-pesach experiment), and everyone into the merch episode of strip search with lots of pausing to discuss. shower-time and tooth-brushing time were very positive (gd and i were loving him singing along to my playlist at the top of his voice), and his bedtime was earlier than it's been for a while and much more peaceful.

after saying good night, i went on a hunt for vitamin d resources that someone asked me for regarding testing / screening and dosage:

there're a lot of studies that discuss the unreliability of testing - this one's pretty clear - check out the "sources cited" button beneath this video (it's really worth watching). 

see also the "accuracy of screening tests" section of the US preventive services task force report.

and then i watched a whole lot of youtube videos (war news interspersed with random shit), and now this, and then... maybe i'll go to bed soon.

[attack warning]

liminality

 mr smear told us earlier that today was the first day he remembers enjoying school.

...

a mostly sane wake-up, dishes, ping pong (i'm just more than halfway through), and after mr smear left for school it was dealing with pension / insurance stuff, and beginning a response to my boss/client who finally replied to my first update with a whole list of questions.

i arrived at work a minute late for my first meeting (this is becoming a thing, i have to be more careful in the mornings), and it was another long, very busy day. some of it productive, but not visibly so, by me having conversations with the stakeholders that triggered some very serious "debates" between them. i'm going to have to be very attentive and careful to not step on anyone's toes... which is literally a part of the job description.

i joined a few people on a lunch mission, which ended up being to a shuwarma place - fortunately, they had a plate full of side-dishes on the menu which was vegan and delicious. on the way out everyone was shocked to discover i'm vegan, which triggered some very serious discussions. the woman who came with us - a mother of two - literally cried when i told her what mr smear had had to contend with in his previous school regarding his dairy allergies and bullying.

we had to stop talking about nutrition and food safety over lunch because the guy in the team i'm embedded in started losing his appetite :P

...

i left a bit early to meet gd and mr smear at our friends' neighbor's apartment to take a look. we were there for a while, the disabled landlord seems genuinely decent and the apartment looks great, but he's putting us under enormous pressure to take it from february 1st, ostensibly because he has another potential tenant and he's giving us a chance as a favor to our friends.

it's a little further away from where we want to be than we are already, but it's on a corner with bus stops that work for us. and it's closer to another street we're happy shopping on, and the park. it's potentially a lot noisier than where we are, but the windows seem built for it. and winter. it's a big space with one more room than we're used to, but there's a poorly-conceived wall that divides what would otherwise be a wonderful open-plan kitchen and living area. there are multiple bathrooms, though each one has minor problems. not serious ones. it has an in-apartment bomb shelter. it's a little more expensive than our current apartment, but it's still very reasonable.

mr smear's very enthusiastic about it, and i made gd try and find faults but she's generally feeling positive about it. i walked out feeling very pressured, which i really don't like.

on the one hand, i don't want to make a decision under pressure - real or artificial - and this is a big decision. aside from the risks you take with any move to a new apartment, this is potentially burning two months' rent if we don't find someone to replace us. but at the same time, there's no guarantee we'll get a better deal than this if we don't take it. in fact, based on the past couple of days of looking, i'd be very surprised if we find something else even close to this good for us.

but there's no oracle we can consult, no human being on the planet who can guess whether we should take it or pass. there's no right or wrong answer.

i rushed through some of the dishes when we got home, then headed out to meet tahoma, and we went to rainbow for their sensational burgers. afterwards we took a long stroll looking for a dessert, and then i took my leave to get home in time to handle mr smear's toenails and put him to bed.

between discussing things with tahoma, and discussing them with my mother, i got most of the way home still very much undecided about what to do.

but then, just before i arrived home, i realized something important: if we don't take this apartment, there's a very good chance we'll have to use a real estate agent. and real estate agents - even though it's illegal - take an additional month's rent from the tenant as fees. which means that us taking this apartment is effectively only a loss of a single month (more than we would have lost anyway), and there's still a chance to reclaim some of that loss if we can find a replacement tenant quickly.

so now we have a plan. a scary plan, but a plan.

...

i read a bit of the beginning of sophocles i to mr smear at bedtime. he's into bits of it, but i don't think he's really ready.

accounting

 well... this morning could have gone better, mr smear was his usual uncooperative-in-the-morning self and our day began unpleasantly. although we did eventually have a (relatively) good talk, he was still unhappy for most of the walk to school. then i dropped him off and told him i was off to the doctor, and he very aggressively demanded that i tell him why which was kinda cute.

[jackals going mental, i've shushed them twice tonight already and i feel like they're not caring much]

i walked to the clinic and sat with our doctor. by the time i left, i had referrals for a sleep lab, a neurologist, a psychiatrist and blood tests, along with a prescription for alpha lipoic (supposedly for my pseudo-RLS hip issues, at least it's not psychotropic).

i came home, helped gd with some stuff (her back's giving her trouble), then got sent out to draw money for her. i was feeling a bit woozy by the time i got back up the stairs, so i hurriedly wolfed down an early breakfast and headed off to work.

i think my work day was pretty good, but it could've been better. i'm very excited by how we're performing as a company, though, the results of our weekend efforts were particularly exciting ^_^

i picked mr smear up from his therapist and he hung around the office - mostly pretty chilled - and i feel like the end of my day was alright. then we came home for dinner.

...

gd and i had had a discussion about his eating habits this morning, it's something i've been bothered by for a long time: he only eats symbolic amounts of the food he really needs. tonight i was proud of both of them; in spite of the drama (mr smear claims it was the most traumatic experience of his life) he ate three whole slices of zucchini.

...

we had a good chat with my mom and sister while mr smear got ready for bed. one of my cousins' kids is coming to tel aviv and we're making plans to meet up. and it was a little bit of a relief that it's his brother who was the jailbird and not him. we saw my nephew for a half a minute, and were shocked because he's not looking too good at the moment - his health situation's been terrible, he's been having a really hard time :(

after putting mr smear to bed, brushing my teeth and showering, i settled in for some phone calls to my canadian bank. it took a few tries, but eventually i got them to close the account and it looks like we're properly done with them!

it feels good to close the chapter on that.

i just realized how late it's gotten, i'm going to try going to bed now.

the perhaps not so big day?

yesterday was highly anticipated, but was less fireworks and more weirdness.

pharmacy elucidation: i went to pick up my meds, but the pharmacist's instructions were incomplete. so i took a look at the original script, and learned that my skin thing that i've been dealing with for almost a week is apparently an eczema thing...

i went through an architectural interview with two guys, which was fine, i guess? i wasn't feeling super-confident by the end (not unconfident, either), but two of us appeared to be caught off-guard when the third ended the meeting saying that we were going to continue the application process without any deliberation. i was expecting to be told "we'll get back to you", and i got "let's schedule the follow-up for next week", so i'm curious as to whether that's actually happening or whether there'll be a retraction :P

it was a positive workday, i managed to get most of my task completed although i was sadly surprised to learn that both javascript and python amqp instrumentation doesn't register single message consumption which really makes testing unnecessarily complicated :/

too much indian food for lunch - actually, it was more a case of eating too much breakfast too close to lunchtime, and even though the lunch was really good it was a struggle :P

the meeting: by the time the meeting started, i was no longer convinced that i was getting fired, but just merely uncertain. then the meeting began in a surprising and strange manner - my boss took a deep dive into my personal projects (specifically, the sonnet comics and the book), which was a really interesting conversation but after ten minutes i had to ask "so, what are we meeting about today?"

and we continued with an ordinary weekly one-on-one, everything's fine, he's very happy with how things are going, and he's impressed by my improvement relating to his feedback a few months ago. we synced on a couple of task-related aspects, and that was it.

no drama, except for everything that had been in my head. amazing.

our meeting was followed by an all-hands, which i tried to join while doing grocery shopping on my way home. the first issue was connecting to the meeting, because zoom has a thing - desktop or mobile - that you can't join unless your app is up-to-date and it took forever to download. then it kept disconnecting me from the meeting any time i switched to another app (even for a few seconds) or locked my screen. wtf, zoom?!?!

i got the groceries home in one piece, all efforts of the bus driver to the contrary, picked up smear, and we headed to the climbing wall. it was a good session, overall, and he earned himself an "achievement popsicle" for making three real attempts on a new wall :)

the evening was a bit messy; making sure that mr smear eats fruit every day has always been a struggle, and last night the after-dinner fruit turned out to be... not good... and he made a point of eating it and its replacement so slowly that we couldn't get into bed until just before 10pm. for the second day in a row. holy shit.

i had a long catchup chat with vfmp, then found myself too tired to do anything and around midnight i crashed hard.

in an attempt to combat the recent increase in excessive late bedtimes, i woke mr smear up early this morning, and so far it's been a good morning from his point of view (he just got off a video call with my mom where he introduced her to his new lego action figures, he was very excited). gd's having a rough time post-nerve block, so a part of this morning is going to be looking at next steps...

hello darkness, my old friend

 it's the middle of the night, and i passed out on the couch a little earlier, waking up to brush my teeth and go to bed and then realizing that i needed a shower, and then realizing that the celebratory beer after a few days of enthusiastically hitting the scorpion pepper hot sauce had joined forces to make it problematic for me to be horizontal without suffering from acid reflux. so here i am, quietly jotting down some notes on a particularly intense end to a particularly hectic week.

today was the first day that i was "pretty much okay" as far as the sinusitis thing has been. still not 100%, but basically okay. each day this week got a bit easier, but today was the first day i would have been willing to step back into the office and in retrospect i'm very glad i didn't.

...

work-wise, this week was weird. AWS made an unexpected change to a header format that took us by surprise and blew us and all our customers out the water. we've spent this week scrambling to band-aid and do damage control, and while i wasn't involved in these efforts (i'm on-call next week) i did feel the effects in that all of my work lost priority. it's very frustrating begging for code reviews on work that you're excited about and keen to see the back of.

that changed this morning, though. just after 11am i got pulled in to write a Very Important Program to compensate from one of our most central tools' inability to provide one of the services we're paying for. it involved working with a bunch of disparate parts i'm not familiar with, and i found myself under time pressure while my body and brain were both pulling in separate ways. aside from picking up mr smear from school, i didn't really have any breaks and the final stretch was very stressful as everyone was nervous about the task going smoothly and there were a couple of last minute changes required.

it was very satisfying and gratifying to push the button on what now feels like a decent and solid interim solution, seeing everything green and working better than expected. i have to press that button every day for the next few days, and i'm confident i've built it well enough to make that easy.

additionally, we had an incident last week with broken deployments that cost us a lot of money, and although broken deployments are very rare for us i managed to put in a neat little circuit breaker a couple of days ago. just in time for the next broken deployment, and it was a pleasure to see it working beautifully in the wild.

...

mr smear's been having an interesting week. physical health-wise it looks like he might be sporting an ear infection, so we're keeping an eye on him and hoping he has an easy night. mental health-wise we had an episode yesterday that was sad and frustrating, but also gave us a bit of insight into how he operates when he's upset. it was a huge relief to wake up to find him in a better place this morning.

we tried in november/december to organize a consultation with a child psychologist - in addition to him suffering two crazy parents, we've all been through a very stressful ordeal the past few years - and they never got back to me. i finally got hold of them this morning and they informed me that they hadn't ignored my previous email, that they'd issued us authorization on the same day and that we were supposed to be informed by our local clinic. i contacted the clinic and they claim they sent me an email to that effect, but i never received that email. also, i don't think any of that little circle makes much sense. whatever.

in another, much worse bureaucratic bungle: other parents have been complaining that their kids haven't been eating in the after-school program, i didn't even realize until this week that mr smear hadn't been either. this week we had a zoom session with the two women in charge of the food program for our district, and it was eye-opening. out of appreciation for the importance of children getting fed sufficiently every day, the requirements for the kids meals are painstakingly measured and enforced. these people are not messing about. unfortunately, while they very carefully select nutritious foods that meet the macronutrient requirements, they pay no attention to what the food actually tastes like. the women were not interested in hearing the parents' concerns, but i lucked into a rare opportunity yesterday when i picked mr smear up from school as the vegan meals are pre-packaged (like tv dinners) and one of the child-minders had taken to putting the ones he refuses (which is most of them) in the fridge. so i got to take a sample home.

the food tasted surprisingly good, but it was exceptionally, unpalatably dry and unseasoned. mr smear agreed. so we did an experiment, and i mixed a little ketchup in the sample i'd taken out and heated in the microwave. mr smear enjoyed it. mr smear enjoyed it so much that he insisted on putting ketchup in the still-cold container and ate it all up.

so our new plan is for him to sneak ketchup sachets in his bag so that he can enjoy the food. also, i've got an appointment to meet with his regular school teacher in the morning to "discuss" this nonsense about him not being allowed to bring granola bars to school. i was hoping to avoid a battle but one of mr smear's classmates is a little piece-of-shit snitch who ratted on him because he saw that mr smear had a granola bar on him a couple of days ago.

...

i think that's the most interesting stuff. otherwise, gd's still having a rough time, not sure what we're going to do about that...

i really haven't had bandwidth for anything extra this week. i need this weekend.

oh, and we've been watching adventure time over dinner. we're just entered season five. so far, it's glorious.

tuesday wednesday

yesterday:

i managed to ignore all the noise and focus on an important refactor i've been working on / trying to work on for a while, and last night i managed to get it completed, reviewed and deployed in time to test it. i woke up this morning to see the results and they were heartwarmingly positive. that was a nice way to start my day.

i've been snacking constantly for a while, and not completing my daily fast, and not getting much exercise. last night i got home with a bellyache, and the belly in question was a lot bigger than it should be, and i've made a decision to reset and get back into the routine.

not every day can be a "cheat" day.

today:

aside from the fact that mr smear threw up at school while gd was at the doctor's and i had to jump on a bus to the rescue - he gleefully bounced out of the gate knowing that he was going to get to enjoy an afternoon off - i had a really constructive day and squared away a couple of important things. i left work on a good note.

i also had an opportunity to talk to ric, but as much as i'd like them to understand that they've done amazingly well in spite of fighting a series of uphill battles alone, the tone of the conversation was really sad. i'm praying that whatever happens, the next phase of their life is smoother.

i've been thinking a lot lately about our situation here. my aliyah was only successful because of the support i received and an incredible amount of good fortune. there's no way i could have handled any of the first twelve years alone, and there's no way in hell we could have handled last year's move alone. we have every - single - day of our israeli lives to be grateful for and amazed by.

...

i've been entertaining introductory calls, and it's weird. mostly because i'm not quite convinced i want to leave. some days are better than others.

...

i've been doing a lot of reading lately - newsy articles more than anything else - and i have to say that it's inspirational how much we're advancing technologically. it looks like we're fast approaching the singularity, and the curve is becoming more and more visible, in particular when looking at AI, VR, aerospace, genetics, robotics... these are certainly interesting times!

press my buttons

go on. do it.

i tried to back out of being harassed on reddit:

you might be surprised to learn that your opinion, based purely on a few lines of text written in a reddit thread, is missing a whole lot of facts and nuances that provide context. honestly, as enticing as it may be to respond with all the details, i don't feel that this is going to be a constructive endeavour as you're clearly not interested in learning anything that might change your mind, so i hope it's okay with the gods of the internets that i walk away from this encounter.

but the asshole was insistent. so i responded as follows:

damn, you're unpleasant - i'd love to have a chat with you face-to-face, see how ugly your behavior is when you're faced with potential consequences.

1. my wife has character, agency and backbone, we discuss everything and we debate constantly. you might not know this, but it is actually possible to convince people with data and by setting an example (until she got pregnant and needed me around more, i was in MMA training and in incredible physical shape... now i've been out of the gym for a few years and i'm just in good shape)

2. the tension during pregnancy was due to the fact that she insisted on eating things that are known to harm a foetus in utero. seafood, in particular - with the amount of mercury having long surpassed all safety limits, children whose mothers eat seafood during pregnancy are born with significantly smaller brains. pardon me if protecting my child's future cognitive abilities took priority over keeping the peace. i learned over the course of the pregnancy how to share data and then keep my opinions to myself, and we figured shit out, which is what responsible, mature adults do.

our son has two parents, i'm not just a sperm donor.

3. by the time our son was born i did not insist on him being vegan, and sadly that decision led to him developing a life-threatening dairy allergy. no, soy milk is not a replacement for breast feeding or formula. neither is cow's milk, so that's a strange twist you've got going on there. soy formula is as nutritious and much safer than dairy, but my wife chose to supplement breastfeeding with dairy initially until she realized there was a problem and from that point he became a soy-formula kid for the months it took for her to be able to breastfeed exclusively*. which was fine. i pretty much left her alone with the solid food decisions when the time came, until she eventually had her "ah-ha!" moment. once she understood that there was nothing in animal products that he couldn't get more and better from plants, that was when SHE decided that we should all be vegan. some important information that she learned in those documentaries were a part of that "ah-ha!" moment. if incorporating new facts into your life is "brainwashing", well, that's your problem.

* and because you're so *good* with parsing what i write, i feel like i need to specify here that she had a *really* hard time breastfeeding to the point where *i* was encouraging her to give it up, but she insisted and persisted and courageously pulled through

4. we have had excellent pediatricians, and we regularly do blood-work and check in with dietitians to ensure that we aren't missing anything. i came to veganism through a desire to learn - i was actually anti-vegan when i started reading research papers on nutrition because i began my journey with a b12 deficiency (on a decidedly animal-based diet) - and it was only after i realized that the more i followed an evidence-based diet the more plant-based it became that i was able to let go of the cognitive dissonance surrounding our food choices and started becoming vegan.
like most parents we care deeply about our son's health and welfare, and while he's the only vegan in his last three preschool classes he's usually among the biggest, toughest and most active. he's also really smart, constantly impressing his teachers and other parents, so i don't think we're completely failing.

5. if you're going to call the aforementioned documentaries brainwashing, i suggest you take a step back and consider where all your dietary information is coming from. who's informing you? who's informing your doctors? we've all been brainwashed by about a century of marketing, we have to train our kids to deal with the dissonance of eating animals that we'd otherwise befriend, and watching my non-vegan friends deal with these issues with their own kids has been eye-opening. it's easier to teach compassion when you're not being a hypocrite.

next time you're reading an article demonizing plant-based diets and promoting animal products, do yourself a favor: check the sources. and when you read the sources, read the abstract, and the conclusion, and then look at how the study was done. you might actually learn something.