wtf wednesday (ceasefire?)

 i really don't understand if there's really a ceasefire or not. or if it means anything or not. none of what's happening makes much sense.

...

yesterday:

we managed to get up at a reasonable time, and i woke up with an itch to reinstate public access to my comic pages and post an update to my patrons.

then i jumped on our daily call, and my manager reminded me that i was supposed to be on holiday.

i dragged mr smear along with me to the mall after learning that home center had not sent me the items i'd ordered. their in-store staff was just as useless. mr smear's friend met us there, and we paid a visit to the candy store, where i picked up a "hot mama" flavor of van holten's pickle-in-a-pouch, which still makes me giggle.

i dropped the kids off at home and continued on to the hardware store, but 100m out got trapped in a sudden heavy electric rainstorm. when it calmed down i jogged further on, arriving (wet) at a synagogue just as our missile alert system kicked in. i spent the next ten to fifteen minutes in their shelter, surrounded by people and animals with heavy smells, and i was half-asleep by the time we were able to leave.

i made my way to the hardware store, picked up a tape measure but not a garden hose, then paid a quick visit to a nature store to pick up a protein bar, passed one of my ex-bosses on the way to the grocery store (i didn't greet her, she didn't see me and i'm still sore about her and her co-founder back-stabbing me and not even having the decency to try to speak to me on my way out), picked up a bag of carrots and made my way home.

gd had let strangers into our mamad because she didn't know that it's safe enough for them to use the stairwell. weird people, apparently.

the kids had a great afternoon (mostly playing rayman: legends), we all tried the pickle (it wasn't that hot, but made for a great matzah sandwich) i had an emergency coffee and the put up two of our maps (a real world map, and our map of ankh morpork) in our office, and later i put up some clothing hooks too. and also managed to get our new sound system set up, and it's SO much better than our previous one!

i did, however, almost fall off the ladder doing that (i mis-stepped after forgetting i was on the top rung) and i managed to hurt my hip again, which had finally been feeling better :/

our upstairs friends came downstairs with wine, and we sat talking negligently late, which included some uncomfortable expressions by gd about some of their friends... not that she's entirely wrong, mind, but how one says stuff... :P

we had a nice dinner, chatted for most of it with my mom, and then watched the final episode of strip search. gd had had enough of the day (and parenting) by that stage, so i handled shower and tooth brushing, and i went to bed exhausted before mr smear had himself fallen asleep.

today (so far):

sleeping late, napping, reading and loving most of the importance of being earnest, eating a pretty good breakfast of matzah, peanut butter, banana, vegan nutella and tabasco. i tried watching jujutsu kaisen with mr smear but i passed out, and i woke up to spend a frustrating half hour or so trying to fix our microsoft / minecraft accounts so that i could reinstate his birthday present (the marketplace pass).

now we're heading out to try and make the most of what may or may not be a peaceful afternoon.

spikes

 the past two days were really hard, and i've told this story twice this evening so i don't really feel like getting it all down. can't i just upload my thoughts already?

yesterday:

i woke up with the same headache i'd went to sleep with, plus intense fatigue. it was a very tough day, the headache didn't go away, and then in the middle of it the snaky manager interrupted a perfectly positive discussion with her team to aggressively and unpleasantly interrogate me. it took everything i had to keep my responses even and then reset the vibe to continue and finish the discussion.

i kinda meant to call her aside to discuss it, but i didn't get a chance, and in retrospect it was probably for the best. but the cost of that was carrying that shit experience with me out the door, where it directly tied into my experience back when* because the more i thought about it, the less comfortable i was approaching her and the less comfortable i was approaching my boss.

* which i didn't understand at the time was the beginning of me being steered into a trap

i met up with gd and mr smear at home, began writing the message to my boss that had been burrowing into my brain, suddenly realized with horror that i'd been writing it into a message box that i could have easily sent accidentally, so i cut and pasted it somewhere else, and then we all left to catch a bus to meet up with kibbutz cousin's sister and brother-in-law for dinner.

the bus took us most of the way there, and we would have arrived at their hotel on time if i hadn't made a wrong turn... but we made it there not too late, and what followed was generally a very nice and interesting evening. and mr smear mostly behaved quite well, especially considering the fact that he was bored out of his skull and has lost all his screen privileges for the week**...

* he did lose an additional day later in the evening, though, which kinda sucked

the ride home was complicated by the tlv night run locking down most of the city, but we got home in the end. bedtime was a bit rough, though i kinda managed to rescue it a bit.

...

my cousin was found dead from a stroke / heart-attack in his car yesterday morning. after years of struggling, he was literally a couple of weeks into the process of finally turning his life around right before his 60th birthday. i remember stories of his shenanigans (he was notoriously a getaway driver from a botched bank job when he was younger), and a well-known clubbing personality (bar owner) in cape town, and it was partially thanks to him that i could never go down the cocaine rabbithole (when you see what it can do to some like that, you think more than twice). what a fucking crazy thing.

today:

i was tired enough to get some sleep, but i did spend a good chunk of the night lying awake running through scenarios with my boss and the snake manager. i woke up feeling shit, but definitely better than yesterday, and i'm still feeling quite weak and a bit faint. anyway, today was definitely better than the day before.

after handling some chores i walked to the post office to pick up another parcel for gd (another 70 NIS for customs for another item that we just learned needs to be returned :/) and then caught a bus to work.

i arrived at the building just in time for a meeting i hadn't been aware of, and just as two others from my company were discovering that the elevators were out of order. we spent the next few minutes arguing with unhelpful security guards, following directions to nowhere, and eventually jumping on an elevator in the hopes we'd get close enough to our floor to walk.

the two floors up was looooong. in my present state, i was completely buggered halfway up and felt faint at the top, but it took a while for a rescue mission to arrive.

the meeting turned out to be the two guys who displaced me teaching my teammate to use their magic new tools. one thing i couldn't shake was the new manager's bored affect with his chewing gum, very much reminiscint of megaman.

unfortunately for them, the new tools aren't really working, but more unfortunately for them my new manager came in and had to explain to them all the things they've been dismissing when i've tried to help them onboard and understand what we're doing. and then he found out that what they've been promising is very different to what they're delivering...

... i found out later that there was a very intense dressing-down from the boss that took place after, and i have a feeling that they're doing a little of the FOing after their FAing. as it is, i later found out that they've somehow managed to block most of the team's work for about three days already due to their lack of understanding of what they're working with, and i re-bonded a little with one of the other captains over our happiness at not being on their side of the complaints table :P

before lunch, i managed to catch my boss for a couple of minutes, but i didn't have a script and i had no idea what i was going to say until i said it; i just knew i needed to make sure that he understood that something untoward was happening and that i was trying to deal with it. and in a way that didn't project whining.

ultimately, things went awkwardly but - i think - well. unfortunately, during the conversation i learned that our tech ops guy has been fired, which really strung. we knew he was a junior when we hired him, and this dude has been working his ass off and grabbing every opportunity with both hands. he's also been a really fun person to work alongside.

i had lunch with the brit, who i'm sad to say may well be incapable of keeping his head down until everything sorts itself out. i've warned him with what the boss said, but he's really struggling and i totally understand him. i really hope he doesn't get himself shunted out, because he's professionally amazing both in technical terms and in bigger-picture wisdom.

the afternoon was constructive, and i eventually got a chance to take the snake manager aside.

now, i don't know how much of her behavior was performant, or real, but she claimed she had no idea what she'd done and that she hadn't intended any malice, and she apologized profusely for speaking to me like that.

whether it's honest or not, i accepted it graciously and i hope that's the end of it.

the end of the day was good. just good.

i came home, realizing on my way that i'd forgotten our obligation to the class picnic tomorrow. i quickly dropped of a plate of happy hour "leftovers" for mr smear along with my bag, caught another bus to the nature store, found what i was looking for and receiving embarassingly condescending responses from the teller, jumped another bus home, ate a little with my family, got mr smear through some more of his history homework, saw him brush his teeth and shower and get into bed in record time, and read a little to him until my eyes started shutting.

we spoke to my mom for a bit, and then i went hunting for a story that i saw on facebook (which means i have no way of finding it), and now i've done what i was kinda dreading doing and gotten all this down. and now it's late, and i'm beyond tired, and i'm going to be going to bed very soon.

an hour behind, a catch-22

 it's 2.50am, when yesterday it would have been 3.50am (daylight savings time). but i don't get to enjoy the extra hour because i can't fucking sleep.

my insides are roiling with the tempest of feelings: the new captain's first mate has been working overtime all weekend to deliver what he promised me would be in last week, and now i realize that he's probably been dragging his feet so that the new captain would be the one to look good on it. and that made me think of the new captain warning me - a month or two ago in private - to watch out because the other manager is a viper.

it bothered me back then when he said what he said - at first i didn't understand why he would - but i've been watching him cozying up to her the past week and i now realize that i may well be in the process of being fucked. and connecting those dots with some others, i'm now quite convinced that he's been trashing me behind my back.

i have spent every moment since panicking, flitting between anger and terror, freaking out because if i address this and i'm wrong, i'm a paranoid asshole, and if i don't address this but i'm right, myself and my reputation are going to be in big trouble.

i might already be in big trouble.

at my mother's suggestion, i spent a good chunk of last night compiling all the things i should say, and possibly some things i shouldn't, and have since had my brain going full tilt on processing and reprocessing conversations that i have no way of knowing how they'll go until they're gone.

i might well be losing my job for trying to rescue my job. i might well lose my job if i don't. i literally cannot afford to lose my job.

...

in the midst of all that noise, i took mr smear out for a bike ride in the afternoon, which was very nice - except for when it wasn't. i think i handled it pretty well (it's all the same "i hate going outside" routine), but it does detract from the experience and the experience was already shadowed by my panic over all of the above.

...

he's really having trouble sleeping again :(

...

the morning was nice, though. i picked up a bunch of books on kindle (including the robert fitzgerald translations of the iliad and the odyssey, inspired by our talk around the hercules movie).

off script

 so there was a monday, and a tuesday, before today - but i only really recall the tuesday, so i'm going to work backwards and see if i took any notes...

today:

i did do a little work, in the morning and in the afternoon, but for the most part it was an admin day. on my way to the bank this morning i called the absorption ministry and made an appointment for gd to find out if she has cover for private hebrew lessons. at the bank, i signed off on the documents to open a savings account, one that i have to message them to ask them to deposit money into [i tried to locate a "scratch head" emoji and failed]

i walked to the mall and grabbed a cup of coffee, and then was joined by gd and mr smear and we got into buying his stationery for the fifth grade, which he enters next week 🤯

a religious woman overheard us working with the clerk to try and figure out what the list we had was asking for, and decided she knew better. the clerk was offended ("i'm not a retard!") and she didn't have much to offer that was actually helpful. afterwards, she tried to make smalltalk and i managed to drag gd out of there just as i heard her awkwardly transforming it into a real conversation...

we spent a few hours indoors, with mr smear playing a monster-eye-view of poppy playtime on roblox and promising that it wouldn't affect him.

we all went to the school together to pick up some of his books for the new year, then picked up a couple of things at the supermarket, walking home with our minds and tastebuds blown by the vegan cornetto ice-creams...

we then headed off to dizengoff center to try and find belts and sleeveless shirts for me, and a school diary (one that doesn't suck) for mr smear. we gave up on the shirts, but we did pick up new, smaller (better fitting) shorts for me, and then we went downstairs to the vegan market.

the burgers looked great, but i didn't trust the guy making them with his bare hands. mr smear wanted tacos, which was a great experience even if the filling wasn't amazing. we took barbecue seitan and quiche from the mom & son's random wares, and it was amazing. we made a terrible mess (mostly gd booby-trapping a drink and me and mr smear eating the tacos as best we could), but overall it was a good dinner and we ate too much. (we have untouched leftovers in the fridge)

we ran into some cousins on the way out the mall, hopped on the bus home, watched the second episode (episode 1) of ren & stimpy, showered and brushed teeth (i'm now using an ultra-soft brush, it's a weird experience), and read some more of the neverending story.

yesterday:

yesterday was supposed to be relatively relaxed. what began with me trying to finalize monday's fix (i'll get to that) turned into debugging bigtalk's build scripts, turned into me understanding that he literally built it from the ground up in direct opposition to what i'd instructed him, and in such a way that it would never work. i actually reverted his change before adding some stuff we needed to the original scripts, and every piece of code he wrote for us (or his imagined alternate universe version of us) has now been purged.

everything after lunch and until about 7pm was us scrambling to rescue a cloud machine that a) we have no way of interrogation for what went wrong and b) we had no idea was being treated as operational by our customer (officially it was a preview for testing). to make matters worse, in spite of my loud protests, one of the guys instructed the new devops to take it offline which made it impossible to recover. additionally, before bringing it back up they changed something critical about it, which broke my scripts.

it was as much miracle as effort, but we eventually managed to get it back up and running, and tomorrow i'm going to poke and prod everyone about doing a thorough RCA (even though i've already posted my recommendations).

we watched the second episode of ren & stimpy (to review it for appropriateness), but i started to fall asleep towards the end and i completely passed out while gd watched (until she passed out) the second season of the sandman.

monday:

i had difficulty getting up. i got to work, straight into a meeting with the new devops and incoming devops. and the meeting devolved into very severe unpleasantness - both in terms of cross-cultural communication (the incoming boss said something that our british devops understood as "your idea is shit"), and in terms of both me and the british devops losing respect for the incoming guys before they've even arrived. i ended up speaking to my boss about it, and his response to my saying that the drama "really isn't in my wheelhouse" was to chide me and remind me that in my current position, it's precisely in my wheelhouse.

anyway, at least the boss knows what's happening, and i'll worry about actual repercussions when the time comes.

the day was full of random distractions, but came to a head when a bunch of us sat down to troubleshooting the canadian contractor's code with him. we had no clear direction, but after an hour and a half we'd tracked down the issue and resolved it, which was a huge win because it's been hurting everyone in the team and preventing us from moving forward with a new release.

...

i tried to help my mother with her email issues after putting mr smear to bed, but i needed a nap. so i lay on the couch and set an alarm for half an hour, which i effectively snoozed over and over until eventually crawling into bed around 2am.

the good and the bad

 i don't remember how well or poorly i slept on thursday night, but last night was alright... until about 4 or 5am, when my hips started hurting but i was too exhausted to physically get out of bed and try to sort myself out.

bigtalk and i actually had a conversation about sleeping yesterday, he suffers from PTSD and he takes ritalin for ADHD and he was proposing melatonin, when i told him some of my stories about treating my RLS-like issues he was mortified - there's no feeling quite like winning the victim olympics :/

...

i woke up to a message from my boss letting me know that he's initiating a process to let bigtalk go.

i feel bad for him, but it's a relief. it's also scary, because the longer the week's worn on the less predictable he's become, and he's a security expert, and i'm nervous that might be able to do a lot of damage once he finds out. so when i got up this morning and spent twenty minutes writing up a protocol for his "offboarding".

still...

i really like the guy, but if you put a gun to my head i wouldn't be able to make a call as to whether he's for real or not. i want to mentor him, but at the same time i don't feel he's capable of receiving advice that doesn't already fit into his very narrow view of our field.

...

mr smear and i accompanied gd to the pharmacy on our way to the office in the sweltering heat. we moved from airconditioner to airconditioner, we took the light rail, and we arrived to find my vegan avo bagel untouched. so mr smear had a solid breakfast (parenting score!) and thoroughly enjoyed it :)

...

the big effort of the day was trying to deploy with bigtalk's new system, and trying to fix it, and becoming more and more convinced that this was an incredibly bad idea. the deal-breaker for me - the final, tiny straw amongst a host of others - was discovering that all of his work wasn't even based on our original scripts and didn't account for some very important behavior.

for anyone who works with code, the above is real, and it's not even the worst part.

that all came to a head - me explaining to him that we weren't going to merge, and that we were going to park his PR and rebuild a solution piece by piece that can hopefully salvage it for parts - while mr smear (remarkably patiently) waited for me to go and get him some lunch. the ensuing argument was painful, and went on for about half an hour, with him continuing to try to convince us that we were making a mistake.

...

mr smear put together a good salad, and enthusiastically demolished it. later, at our happy hour, the two of us hovered over the vegan sushi platter. at first, i handled feeding him with chopsticks, but at some point i managed to convince him to give them a try. he followed the instructions, and within minutes he'd got the hang of it!!

i don't know which of us was more excited ^_^

i didn't really get to participate in the game hacking event because it was a thursday evening and i was busy breaking our test site with a new release candidate. it was the perfectly horrible ending to a perfectly horrible day (for me), but mr smear had overall had a great time and even participated along with the two guys who were doing the game dev (although he got them into trouble with chatgpt because one of his proposed ideas wasn't safe for work :P)

we came home pretty late, and found gd in a rough state - she's basically been bedridden since yesterday morning due to nerve pain in her back that's radiating into her chest :(

after getting mr smear into bed, i played some slay the spire and then went to bed (relatively) early myself.

crash

 i woke up early to go to the hygienist. the experience was less painful than i anticipated. apparently i need to use a softer brush.

i bussed (very actively enjoying my music) to work, where i made the regrettably awkward decision to not go for coffee with our CEO because i'd just been at the hygienist (like, i didn't have to buy anything).

my new coworker and i spent a good ten minutes troubleshooting the coffee machine, and i was shocked to discover that he'd been unwilling to toss the extra trial-and-error coffees so he was drinking them (O_o)

i spent a chunk of the day completing the 1am story, and for the most part it looks like i succeeded. and, for the first part, it looks like the work i was doing before i encountered that stuff was good. the central part of the work day was a meeting for our algo team that i'd initiated, which was generally productive. unfortunately, bigtalk kept suggesting solutions to problems nobody has, which was a bit awkward.

amusingly, i found myself unwittingly describing the act of connecting, enabling and disconnecting as "tune in, turn on, drop out". two people in the meeting laughed, for everyone else it went over their heads , which would have been fine but they demanded an explanation. fortunately that was only a little bit awkward and passed quickly enough :P

the salad group's salad was great. the post-salad leftover chocolate-and-peanut-butter cake was also great. i feel like i'm doing a pretty good job of getting others to help me with it.

the most important piece of the work was a bit intimidating, so as part of gearing up for it i made myself a non-caffeinated drink; the only one i could find that tasted good was a vanilla chamomile tea, and then all of a sudden (probably because drinking chamomile is my go-to i'm-going-to-bed-soon move) i felt really drowsy as the previous couple of days caught up with me all at once.

so i left early.

it was hot.

the tech ops guy called me as i was about to get home, already feeling faint, with more problems.

i was feeling faint, and in desperate need of a nap, but i was so sweaty from the ride home that i had to shower before i could nap. i napped to the first episode of hunter x hunter, and woke up to mr smear playing insanely difficult levels he configured for himself in spiderheck.

dinner was delicious. afterwards, while mr smear prepared for bed, i ran tech support for my mom whose old email address had suddenly stopped working. we eventually came right, but not without some big feelings. then i read some more of the neverending story to mr smear and gd, and then arsed around as an excuse to drink another chamomile before finally going to bed.

...

and then getting up at 3.30am after being restless for a fairly long while.

...

the incoming manager reached out to me for an update, and i found myself in the weird position of trying to explain to him that the situation with bigtalk isn't entirely straightforward. i think i have a pretty good handle on him, he's not a bad guy and his work - when he understands the requirements - is excellent. but his ability to understand the requirements is clouded by his ego and inexperience, and his second-languageness in both hebrew and english, and his attention disorder. while at present it's safe to say he's better off as a one-man show, it's not going to be good for him in the long run to not have proper mentorship.

drama flare

 oh. shit. it was such a ridiculously dramatic day (so far) that i didn't even remember having trouble sleeping last night :/

...

today was mr smear's last day at summer camp. i received not one, but two hilariously inappropriate animations from him. he made it through the summer camp, and in spite of his protests had a generally good time!

...

this morning was very stressful, primarily because although i started out relaxed and in good spirits, it soon became pressured, with the main source of pressure being an upgrade to brave that made online grocery shopping impossible. i left without completing the orders.

...

the day didn't begin well. we had a devops gathering with our incoming guys, and while some of it went well, some of it was a shit show and i ended up having to be the adult in the room (reigning in both bigtalk and the new manager). the new manager called me in to a private discussion afterwards, where he not only made it clear that bigtalk's not going to be around long but that the woman i had issues with a couple of weeks ago is a proper dolores umbridge...

... fuck me.

i then took the new guy in to a private meeting to explain that the tension we're experiencing is entirely out of the ordinary, and what precisely is bothering me. then i took bigtalk into a meeting, where i really had trouble keeping my cool but he responded in a surprisingly healthy way.

after lunch, i made him walk both me and the new guy through his code, and he did a pretty good job of convincing us that he hadn't gone totally off the rails like i'd thought. but what he's doing is irreversible, so we have to be very careful how we test it and how we roll it out.

...

i managed to grab hold of our UX guy to discuss some of my ideas from friday night, and when he'd heard me out he pulled me over to his computer and showed me that half of what i was talking about was already in the pipeline ^_^

he was impressed by my other suggestions, though, and i even managed to solve a weird design issue he's been experiencing along the way.

...

the rest of the afternoon was a bit messy, but i think i finally got a piece of work done that i've been trying to finish for a week already. which would be great, but deploying it took forever and then i ran into the same bizarre issues that a couple of the other devs have been loudly complaining about for the past few days. that really messed up my evening plans, and i ended up leaving the office way later than planned.

and after having succumbed to temptation and polished off another slice of the cake from thursday's happy hour. right before dinner.

...

dinner with the family (and the simpsons) was nice, mr smear's shower time was far too long and frustrating, and there were some bad vibes around bedtime caused by him actively not getting into bed, when i was prepping for two different meetings. at least things were a little calmer by the time i was ready to say good night.

...

my elevator pitch to our product chief seems to have gone down well, and again, there's a lot of convergence going on - i've been invited to get involved in two closely-related projects.

between meetings, this post. in a few minutes, troubleshooting with our canadian contractor.

haunted birthday

 i've just been lying awake for a while unable to get back to sleep, with my brain running through a bunch of things from yesterday and unable to make sense of much.

first and foremost, our little boy turned ten yesterday! we've officially managed to keep him alive into the double digits, and his last year has been incredible in terms of how much he's matured and how well he's maturing. having said that, even yesterday he managed to cross some lines and that kind of put a damper on the way we ended the day.

second, work was ridiculous. it began with me arriving early so that i wouldn't have to rush to get to the office when the technician finally showed up, but then i received an email asking me to rate his service and i immediately started freaking out that he wasn't coming back had marked his job as complete.

it turned out, though, that a manager had decided to move his visit to a later slot. and not informed us. fortunately we managed to get them to switch the slot back, but WTAF? once he finally arrived, it took him and his partner an hour or two to get things working, but they refused to give us access to the controls without "proper" authorization... so that was a whole story. and once we did manage to get access back, we learned that we were in exactly the same situation as before i screwed everything up...

it took some fiddling and plenty of trial and error, but two of us eventually managed to get our internet working properly. and there was much rejoicing.

lunch was great, but i didn't realize that one of the founders' PA was in on the communal salad and i almost didn't leave her any :$

the afternoon was a series of distractions, the main one being the incoming devops manager and minion coming in for a chat. we sat for a very long time, and things were very positive, and i apparently sold them on our vision in a way they hadn't even considered before signing on :)

oh, and bigtalk hadn't come in to the office in the morning because he was feeling so shit about the choice of devops manager. which i didn't mention, and i'm waiting to hear how his sync with our boss goes this afternoon because i want to discuss it with the boss but i don't want to affect or influence their meeting.

i left a bit early because it was mr smear's birthday, and we had a bit of time at home before heading out to my cousin's farewell bash. it's an amazing rooftop venue in the heart of tel aviv, the company was great (he's made some very interesting friends, and another cousin's kid was there as well - the one who i advised a while back to follow his love interest to los angeles - and the food was great, and overall it was a very pleasant evening right until mr smear started making faces about the rest of summer camp :(

the way home was a mixed bag of parenting (he did something gross, and -

OH.

i got distracted by all the other details, i didn't write about something that's been haunting me since last night. on our way to the farewell dinner, there was a teenager on the bus. after asking him and his friend a couple of times to turn their music down, gd signed to me to let them be even though they were generally behaving antisocially (like shoes on the seats). but this one kid, he had a massive, disgusting pimple on the side of his nose. and a couple of stops before he got off, he started picking at it. and wiping his hands all over the bus. and as i became more and more disgusted, and didn't know how to even begin approaching this, he stopped a foot away from me, turned to face me, looked me dead in the eyes while aggressively ripping into the thing.

jesus fucking haploid christ.

i definitely should have handled that more aggressively, and my mind's been getting stuck on that revolting scenario on and off since.

double vision

 i slept pretty well, surprisingly, but i woke up with crusty eyes indicating an incoming eye infection. because things weren't stressful enough. we headed to the clinic early, where i got off on the wrong foot by taking two numbers instead of one, which offended the clerks. then gd decided we had enough time to go to the pharmacy, and it was only through sheer dumb luck that i overheard my number being called after mr smear's had already been missed.

the doctor examined him, did some complicated math, and prescribed pills instead of syrup which makes our lives much easier. and he prescribed me drops and a cream, which i'm about to use for the first time and i'm a bit nervous about it.

my eyes are really itching all of a sudden, please god don't let it be herpes :(

we came home, packed his bag, and all left together to catch a bus to the summer camp. we dropped him off, confirmed that the councillors understood the importance of getting him the medication on time, and then walked to the bus stop and caught the bus home / to the office.

the sync with the tech-ops manager seemed to go well. i really hope it did.

it was a weird day, lots of kids and a really sweet pug and odd jobs and a walk to see the new offices and a late lunch after a big department meeting. then a few more odd jobs and packing up our old offices before taking a few items across with my boss and being amazed by the new digs (the showers are particularly impressive).

i met up with gd and mr smear, introduced them to the pug, and then we (after washing our hands thoroughly because the pug is, to quote gd, a "stinky potato") walked to a hummusia for a big meal that i would've enjoyed as much as them if not for the intensely painful sensitivity of my new fillings.

otherwise it was a great evening.

we went past the mall to explore the harry potter store, sort out mr smear's phone, buy a new case for gd's phone (which she's promptly broken and is now my "new" case, i'm quite upset), and then rush (ha ha, wait forever at the bus stop while wondering who the protestors are yelling at) home to take meds and get ready for bed.

after putting mr smear to bed (with socks on his hands for the second night in a row), i did some work (about an hour and a half of it) and then watched youtube videos while playing minesweeper. and now it's midnight and i'm going to bed.

the good, the bad, the ugly

the good:

the swimming pool experience yesterday was just excellent. he followed instructions, and i came up with some new exercise ideas, and his swimming dramatically improved in front of my eyes. not only is his crawl technique significantly better, but he figured out how to get himself to the bottom of the deep end and we generally enjoyed our time together.

we both had a great time.

i napped well in the afternoon. in the early evening, we spent some time discovering bird flight simulators (such as birdz and aquila) - while the intention is to learn how to code them, i ended up feeling a bit overwhelmed...

while we were doing that, i installed starcraft ii (we're not really using our windows machine, so i was pleased to learn that it runs on a silicon mac!) and war thunder. the latter i tried out while mr smear was in the shower, but the former? mr smear and i have completed the tutorials and begun the campaign, with him playing each level first (and me kibbitzing) and me playing through after, and we're both having a blast!

we finished watching the boy and the heron during and after dinner, it's absolutely gorgeous and i was pleased that we all enjoyed it together.

i slept pretty well last night (until i was woken up by imagining the work conversations i need to have) and i napped a fair amount after everyone else got up.

more starcraft ii today, and we finally continued watching fantastic fungi which we started a few months ago. my late coworker had recommended it to me, and i was caught completely by surprise by the sudden shift in direction, and now it's too late for me to ask him what it is that made him recommend it to me. did i mention my opinions on terrence mckenna's food of the gods? or timothy leary's writings? did it have to do with veganism? or did he just happen to have seen it recently?

the bad:

on our way out to the swimming pool, we discovered that something broke the valve on his bike's front tire, so in addition to having to take the bus, we're going to need to get it fixed soon. that sucks.

my new filling is super-sensitive to cold. and it feels like i've been eating a lot of things that are much harder than expected - like the raisins in my muesli which are unusually small-rock-like.

i think my ingrown toenail isn't healing.

gd and i have unfriended some recently-added friends because they've gone from protesting the government to blaming us for the supposed famine in gaza and dressing their daughter in watermelon shirts. WTAF.

our afternoon walk this evening should have been good, but i left the house in a bad mood and returned in a bad mood.

the ugly:

as if the office politics from thursday weren't enough - they woke me up in the middle of the night and i never quite made it back to bed - while mr smear and i were at the swimming pool yesterday i noticed some redness around his eye.

it's herpes again. this time, there's a blister right on the edge near his tear duct, and i'm freaking out. and to make things more interesting, the timing couldn't be worse because now taking him to the doctor tomorrow and giving him his meds really interferes with his summer camp experience, which in my opinion is critical for him in terms of being a corrective normal-israeli-kid experience. (not to mention how expensive it is)

the tension

 my morning... did not go well. on the way to the office i talked to my mother about krybabie's wife whose been coerced into paying for and arranging an english police clearance for a child who was four months old when they left london, which makes my blood boil.

on the back of that, a couple of us spoke to lipgirl about the marketing lecture we'd been invited to on wednesday afternoon.

and then one of my coworkers dropped a bombshell - our tech ops manager is hiring someone to do a job that's essentially devops, in addition to "owning" the entire data pipel... nevermind the details. i tried to talk to her about it - this is after giving bigtalk a lecture about how we approach her - but she's a bit weird, and refused to talk face to face, and when i put everything in writing i tried to carefully step around the eggshells (and copied my text to my boss so he'd know what i said and how i said it), but i still managed to step on a landmine.

fuck.

so that happened. our boss has set up a meeting for the three of us on sunday, hopefully we'll resolve this.

it was a very busy day, with a few big meetings, but the end of it saw us quite successfully merging in the work from wednesday night and i got everyone excited about me interviewing the founders and first employees to start putting together our company origin story.

i happy-hour'ed a little too hard (from a sweets point of view), and i shouldn't have brought the knaffeh back home - i ended up being the only one to eat any.

about halfway through dinner one of my coworkers called me, and it took almost an hour to get him sorted out, by which time i was completely exhausted and had almost missed wishing mr smear a good night :(

the last thing that i recall from last night was a back-and-forth with a coworker who inexplicably refused to understand that the thing he did to solve a problem we didn't actually have breaks our deployments.

today so far:

i slept late, and relatively well. i've just finished my first coffee, helped mr smear enjoy his glow-in-the-dark lego that he just pulled out of somewhere forgotten, informed him that his bully's leaving the country before the new school year, and we're getting ready to roll our way to the swimming pool.

parenting (at home and at work)

preying on my mind this morning: overhearing bigtalk (apparently) badmouthing our tech ops' manager to him while simultaneously making him feel unappreciated. i literally didn't know what to do at the time, and then later the topic came up (partially) when we were talking to our boss. now i feel like i have to take him for a walk and discuss what happened, and i feel like i need to talk to my boss about it first, and i don't want to do either of those things.

monday:

i dropped mr smear off at his therapist and proceeded to work. i presented my roadmap to a bunch of coworkers, with the sharpest feedback being how i hadn't made the timeline clear. after an inspirational quote from my boss (churchill's "plans are of little importance, but planning is essential") so in the middle of the night, i spent an hour or two making a gantt chart that was received very favorably (and with surprise that i actually did it properly, thanks free online gantt chart software!)

the largest / most important effort went into setting up an installation machine, which provided some really tricky challenges and i ended up leaving without understanding how to connect two very important dots.

yesterday:

the houthi attack in the early morning proved a very effective alarm for mr smear's first day of summer camp. it wasn't the smoothest morning, but we arrived at the bus stop on time for the shuttle - a pity that the shuttle was about forty minutes late. but that did give me an opportunity to get a coffee from the bakery on weizman, which turned into quite a weird experience (from the confused cashier when i asked about their alternative milks, to the barista who didn't understand that "barista" wasn't a brand, to the french people standing and talking while inappropriately blocking anyone who needed to get to the counter, to the barista having difficulty letting me know that my coffee was ready).

on the way to work i spoke to my mom, who sounded pretty bad (and by the evening would sound terrible). we both expressed gratitude that none of us got sick throughout her vacation here, which was a first. i'm a little concerned by her always insisting that she feels fine when she's obviously really sick - serious patient-zero vibes :/

it was a very busy work day, with a highlight and a lowlight. the lowlight was the incident i described above. the highlight was figuring out, after a couple of hours, the ridiculous process of getting the installation machine accounts sorted out and operational. just in time, too: we had two urgent installations yesterday, and if it wasn't for that machine the tech op and i would have had to spend the evening in the warehouse.

instead, i made it to my dentist appointment on time. i hadn't understood that the pain i was having was due to a new hole, so it was a standard filling that needed to be done. the procedure was very uncomfortable, and it was very sensitive last night, but it seems to be a good job.

on the way home (the bus didn't arrive, so i had to walk) i tested my connection to the installation machine, and the successful test meant that i could have dinner with my family (when the two hours were eventually over) and watch deathnote and, most importantly, grill mr smear about his first day in summer camp.

there were a few hiccups and funny stories, but overall it sounds like he's managing well and having new and interesting experiences ^_^

the installation went on until almost midnight, and ended in a weird failure. but as i was reporting the failure, we received news that the deployment has been delayed. tech ops was really bummed out, but then i reminded him that a) we just got more time just when we needed it and b) that we'd been able to work from home and hadn't been stuck in the warehouse all night.

today so far:

i feel much better since finishing the course of antibiotics yesterday afternoon, they were really making me tired. my new filling seems to be settling.