queues

thursday:

i've been meaning to post this since thursday evening, now i'm confident i've forgotten some interesting things... most of the day was spent managing a couple of rabbitmq queues, i really didn't get much done otherwise, and i was very happy to get out of the office and into the weekend.

of course, i'm on-call today :P

yesterday:

gd and i went looking for a tumbledryer. we were standing there on the showroom floor, struggling to figure out how we could make it work, both physically and financially, because there's no way to put it on top of our washing machine (which travels) and no space anywhere else in the apartment, when the floor manager asked if he couldn't interest us in a combo washer/dryer.

which costs the same as a dryer, and takes up the same amount of space. i don't know how we never encountered a combo machine before, but holy shit it would have saved us so much headache and money and apartment space if we had! so it's being delivered on monday, and hopefully we'll find someone to take our current machine off our hands before then.

we did some grocery shopping, and ran into my previous team lead / department head on the way, which was cool.

we came home to drop everything off, then went to pick up mr smear and his friend. the afternoon was them playing their games, me playing crying suns (i've been doing a lot of that, lately), and then downtime / naptime for everyone once his friend left.

we were supposed to go with sailor to friends for dinner, but they literally cancelled at the last minute. so we ended up going to a vegan restaurant in neve tzedek, and the experience was mostly great.

i say mostly, because mr smear choked on a kebab and gd had to perform the heimlich manoever on him. let's just say that it was an emotional, scary experience for everyone.

it was also somewhat corrective, for me. i was thinking about my parenting a lot over the course of the past week, and i had a chance to put what i've learned into practice, and it helped.

we came back home, sailor hung around for a while to chat, and then we all said goodnight.

today so far:

i had some trouble sleeping, and got up pretty early. then everyone else followed suit, and we began the day watching the tyson vs paul fights. i mean, we watched taylor vs serrano, which was an absolutely infuriating insult to everyone. then we watched tyson vs paul.

now, i know that it was extremely unlikely that tyson would win, but i hoped for it anyway. and the fact that he went all eight rounds? the man is 58, that in itself is amazing. i found the way they ended the fight quite heartwarming, and some of mike's post-fight interview was hilarious.

now i've taken care of a huge pile of dishes, and we just had an explosion with mr smear being uncooperative about logging off his game, and on that sour note, i'm off to take sailor to the airport.

not as planned

yesterday evening:

we took a cab to tahoma's, and were absolutely blown away by the quality and attention to detail of their halloween decorations. they turned their little apartment into a legitimate haunted house, and it was so effective that mr smear - who's obsessed with making creepy and gory things and tries really hard to be scary himself - refused to even look at the rooms because they scared the shit out of him.

smh.

some of the evening before the party actually got started was awkward, but mostly it was cool and we met some really nice people. one guy convinced me to explain the word "trolling" to him, and by the second sentence i began to suspect he was trolling me but he was so convincing i just carried right on, and i was quite impressed with myself for describing it as clearly as i did :P

there was a hilarious moment when a guy was translating mr smear's english for his five year-old, and asked mr smear what he was dressed as. "a killer clown!", mr smear said with pride. "a scary clown," the man translated for his child. mr smear was shocked. 

"i said a KILLER clown!"

"i know what you said."

"a KILLER clown!"

"i KNOW what you said!"

at that point we were all in hysterics, and i took mr smear aside to explain what was happening 🤣

as more grownups arrived, we caught a ride home, made kiddush and ate insanely delicious challah and broccoli schitznel sandwiches. by the time mr smear climbed into bed it was probably around 11.30pm.

today:

i think i slept pretty well, but i woke up very early with enough anxiety to realize that i needed to get up and start writing an open letter. i wrote and i wrote until my family got up - not too late, either - and after running through it a couple of times with gd, i pulled the trigger and posted it publicly on facebook with my email address attached. in it, i called out the pro-palestinian rabbi and his wife by name, and after a lot of introduction that includes both a summarized history of the conflict and a brief history of our experiences with the congregation, i made the following statements:

• Stop listening to people who rely on your political ignorance to propagate malicious disinformation that is designed to harm you.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that you don’t have the right to live in the only land you’ve ever been indigenous to, the land in which you have historically been its indigenous people for thousands of years.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that there’s an occupation, or that there are “disputed territories”.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you about the plight of the Palestinians in a way that suggests it’s anyone’s fault but the league of Arab nations and the UN.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that violence against Israel, or Jews in general, is justifiable.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that this is Netanyahu’s war.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that believing that Jews should live in the only land they’ve ever called home, the only land that promises them protection, the only land they’re free to be Jewish, is wrong.

my anxiety immediately switched from that of feeling frustrated and ashamed for not having said anything, to that of having said something so undiplomatic and confrontational that there's absolutely no going back. it was validating to receive messages of appreciation from members of the community, including gd's fellow graduates, and also from old schoolmates who've been involved in the battle but unable to affect change.

i don't know what's going to happen next - although i was disappointed that the executive blocked me on facebook and messaged me to make it clear that we could no longer talk - but i feel like i've discharged my duty, and if i have to have uncomfortable conversations i will do so. as much as we owe to the executive and the rabbis, and as grateful as we will always be for them helping gd with her conversion and us come home, our loyalties are first and foremost to the community as a whole.

we've put our own oxygen masks on, and played nice and diplomatic until they were secure. now it's time to help others.

...

while scrolling down my whatsapp messages i realized that swordschool had sent me an important message some time in june, and i hadn't responded 😱

so i called him up, and we synced for at least an hour. it's very comforting having someone like that in my corner. in addition to discussing his new dice mechanics and desolation jones, amongst a thousand other things, i was shocked and saddened to learn that before the tragic incidents he'd been through just prior to us reconnecting a few years back, he'd been through an even more tragic family disaster... i feel awful for him, and also exceedingly grateful for what i have.

...

in the afternoon i met up with sailor and we did a couple of rounds of coffees (well, first macha tea and then coffee) and a lunch (he ate, between my nerves and the confusing menu i was fine). he accompanied me home, and remained with gd while i took mr smear out for a walk. it was fine, at first, but he was in such a good mood that he vigorously skipped for a couple of blocks - with me skipping along right behind him - and ended up having a full-blown coughing fit / asthma attack. so i gave him his pump, and we slowly walked home around the circle.

aside from my reacting to a barista milk alternative (that i was told wasn't barista, but then later informed was) and the occasional open letter-related intrusion, we had a pretty good evening.

after all the anxiety and everything, i'm exhausted, and i feel like i skipped a day of weekend. i did a whole bunch of dishes, wrote all this, and now... i think i'm going to drink this new cup of tea and hit the hay.

...

oh! on-call. i forgot i was on-call today. and then i realized that the reason i was getting confusing alerts that made me forget what day it was is that with all the scheduling changes for the holidays, i've ended up with four days of on-call in a row :/

pivot

yesterday:

mr smear's cough was better, and he went back to school. but he was having and sharing a remarkably shit morning. so that sucked.

i continued on to drop gd's shoes at the post office to be returned, then walked back home.

my neck and shoulder gave me trouble throughout the day.

it was a slow work-from-home day, and i was on-call, and most of the work i did was on-call stuff.

around noon i picked mr smear up from school to take him to his hebrew tutor, and he was in a much better mood. on the way back from the tutor we picked up a few bags of walnuts, because i only just learned that they're a viable source of omega3 and we haven't been eating gd's flax-seed pancakes for a long time...

...

during a conversation with our product manager in the afternoon, i saw something in our designs that bothered me and i asked him if i was reading it right, and if we were actually pivoting as a company.

"100%," he told me, "this is the direction we're going in."

i was disappointed, and i told him so, and after the call had a bit of a crisis because the new direction really doesn't interest me. i discussed it with gd, and came to the conclusion that i'm happy with my team, and i'm happy with my bosses, and i'm happy with my role and my employment conditions, so if i'm less happy with what the company is doing it's not the end of the world, but it will mean refocusing on my side projects for my source of meaning.

...

gd made vegan-shwarma tacos for dinner last night, and we really enjoyed them!

after everyone went to bed i started looking into rewriting my mobile app, and dived in to a rabbit hole around security issues with local browser storage. at about the point i started finding useful material to peruse, my eyes started shutting on me.

today:

last night was our first night sleeping with a duvet since spring, it was cozy and i slept pretty well.

we all had a much better morning, and after dropping mr smear at school i replaced the lightbulbs in his room and then spent some time reading about secure storage while gd left to have coffee with a friend.

i didn't make much progress then, and i'm starting to become drowsy now, so i don't know how long it's going to take me to get a handle on this stuff...

while i was trying to read, i got distracted by the fact that the "palm rest" of my very expensive dell XPS was - and has been for a while - feeling annoyingly sticky. i tried cleaning it in a number of different ways, and eventually ended up (unintentionally) removing some of the surface. it clearly wasn't meant to be removed, so later on i'd look it up and discover that it's a known problem.

i regret purchasing a dell computer.

i found a couple of recommendations to purchase stickers that are cut specifically for my model, so i found some on ali express and i'm hoping they'll do the trick.

...

it was a slow day in the office, and i wasn't the only one feeling the particularly relaxed vibes.

the day began with me learning about my new task, and syncing with the coworker who's leaving soon to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle are meant to fit together. at some point - because it was relevant to what we're working on - i mentioned the pivot, and his response stunned me: our project manager was describing his personal vision for the company, but he's already pitched it to the bosses and they've already explained to him that they're not interested in leaving the (awesome) core business they've built.

firstly, what a relief! secondly, what a shocking revelation, that i literally can't implicitly trust my project manager and that he actually caused harm with his delusion.

...

i started the task without a clear idea of what needed to be done, and it had been assigned six working days. i started making slow but steady progress, and then all of a sudden pieces of the puzzle - especially pieces that i'd put in place a few months ago - started coming together and by the end of the day i was effectively done!

it's a great feeling, but also rather unexpected.

i walked home, arriving just in time for dinner and some x-men. then my mom called, finally ready to try out the account i created for her a month and a half ago.

...

good grief.

it was impossible for her to log in without me signing in first, and it kept not sending us verification codes until i signed in, set up her phone number, and flagged her sign-in attempts as recognized. that got her into her account on her computer, so i wanted to set her up on her phone as well to make sure she's not dependent on me. but she's an iphone person, and apple makes it ridiculously difficult to configure new accounts and know if they've been configured correctly. so, after more than an hour and lots of feelings, we decided to leave it at a hope and a prayer and deal with any issues that may arise.

it could've been worse. we could've not succeeded.

...

as i said, i'm feeling drowsy - i think i'm going to go to bed now.

back to front

 yesterday was a bit shit, i'm really hating working with pure frontend and for the entire sprint every time i've resolved an issue another one has sprung up. i haven't been this unhappy with not-exactly-coding since i quit my job with mmf at the end of 2011.

anyway, it's not my usual job. and i had a conversation with my manager wherein i explained that i understand frontend dev enough to know how much i don't understand, and that while everything the contractor did makes sense within the confines of his employment the solution wasn't built in a way that inexperienced frontenders like ourselves would be able to make massive changes to its scope. none of us are really qualified to work on this, nor interested in it, and we're burning money and demoralizing ourselves. if we really feel like this is something we should be investing in, then we need to hire a frontend dev. if not, then we shouldn't be offering to build this stuff for our clients when it's far outside our competence.

in the middle of the day i left the office to pick up mr smear and taking him to his therapy session. while he was occupied, i tried to find a place with coffee that i could get some work done. the aroma's bathroom was unusable, and then i witnessed one of the kitchen staff walk out without washing his hands, so i noped on out of there. the next place didn't sell coffee, then the next place did have a place to sit and the employees were smoking right at the entrance. the next place, cafe taizu, doesn't sell coffee, and i finally landed on maafiyat lechamim. the atmosphere was cool, but the service was really shit and the coffee mediocre at best.

i'd spent so much time looking for a place that i got about five or ten minutes of "work" done before i had to get up and leave to pick up mr smear. i didn't really get anything of value done.

...

our financial situation's better, but not good, and i was really hoping to be able to put down the money for a proper keyboard for mr smear this month. and now i've been looking at vr video games and equipment as well. and gd wants a clothes dryer. fuck.

...

mr smear was only too happy to continue watching the original x-men series, but that's because he's seen the trailer for x-men 97 and he's really excited to see that... aaaaand i just realized we still have two more seasons we haven't watched, and everyone's groaning :(

...

i just went on-call ten minutes ago. hopefully it'll be a quiet day.

mostly calm

 i'm tired, i'm probably going to bed soon.

yesterday: 

it took most of yesterday morning to build up the willpower to do two of the things on my to-do list, but essentially it was a lazy morning. mr smear apparently had a very good day, he enjoyed both his "computers" class (they're making levels with kodu game lab, and he asked me to install it this morning so he could play around with it some more) and his frisbee class. so that's cool.

we completed his math test prep in the afternoon, and the rest of the day was spent playing games alongside each other. i spent quite a lot of time in shadowrun: dragonfall, and i can't help wondering how far i got last time because it's all very familiar :P

today:

i've been on-call today, and i managed to miss two incidents which my boss picked up on, so that's a bit embarrassing. now i'm dealing with a third, and i'm not sure it's correcting... [i just checked, it looks like it is]

i woke up at my usual hour, weighing a couple of kilos more than i have for most of this past week :/

it was a relaxing morning - i napped a fair amount - and in the afternoon, after i spent some time working on the graphic novel, we watched independence day. mr smear thoroughly enjoyed it, and we did too, but i can't see will smith and hear him swaggering through his "cool dude" lines without hearing the irony in his delivery...

mr smear and i took a walk (and lots of talking) through the park, down dizengoff, and the headed back home, stopping for sandwiches on the way. we may be at war, and with a looming threat of escalation, but i love living in such a vibrant, safe city. we got home just in time for showering, brushing teeth and bedtime, and while i was disappointed that he didn't want to read anything that i'd picked up for him, i was very pleased when i had the idea of reading treasure island and he agreed, and he seems to be enjoying it so far ^_^

heavy steps into ai wonderland

 the last try was somewhat successful. i passed out quickly, and i guess i slept pretty well, but once everyone else was up at 6.30 i was forced to get up too (mainly because mr smear was moving slowly again).

the biggest part of the deployment was successful, but i ran into SPA issues with the distribution (again) and the documentation for cdk is useless. after much struggling, and a pleasant break to walk mr smear to school, i decided it was time for cursor/claude to step in.

i got a bunch of unhelpful bullshit that didn't actually do what i wanted. i felt strapped in to an emotional rollercoaster, and every deployment managed to raise the bar on how much disappointment i'd been feeling. i just wanted it to end, but i also want things to be kind of okay before starting on my paid work.

by the time i was done for the morning, it was 80% there - that's a thumbsuck and a half - because after enough prompting and complaining i finally got a suggestion that did something positive. now that my workday is over, we've had a good dinner and mr smear is in bed, i'm just about ready to see if i can get the result i actually wanted.

...

the workday was long. i'm on-call, but i'm not sure that means anything today (the one incident we had was taken care of by someone else behind my back, i don't even know who :P), and the morning began with a nonsense devops side-quest that didn't lead anywhere constructive.

i took mr smear to his hebrew tutor, it looks like he had a good day in general but he was apparently struggling with a runny nose during their session and he's still stuffy now, so i guess maybe he is sick after all...

who knows. whether he is, or whether he passes the threshold for staying back from school, it's really not clear. gd's convinced that keeping him home yesterday was a mistake, though.

i had a hard time focusing this afternoon, and at some point i crashed on the couch. i woke up a short while later, not just feeling groggy as hell, but convinced that there was some kind of tremor happening. according to the latest data there wasn't? anyway, i caffeined up and got some good work done, by dinner time i was quite satisfied with my progress.

...

right. let's see if i can finish this.

getting shit done

today:

a pretty good start to the day. a new exercise.

light rail to pick up gd's sewing machine.

anger with gd after realizing how heavy the machine is, because i kept letting her carry it to her lessons in south africa and believed her whenever she said "it's fine".

a couple of hours of work before heading out to pick up mr smear.

listening to a recommended podcast on the way home.

hungry, stopping at home for a banana, walking in after receiving a phone call, gd screaming and scaring the shit out of me.

picking up mr smear, a pleasant walk home, a good breakfast.

back to the office, sitting with my clearly-sick coworker until we finally all had epiphanies together separately.

a healthy happy hour (fruit salad?!), and a productive last hour to close another intense week.

leaving the office, calling gd and being reminded that i'd forgotten the sewing machine ("you don't sound like you're suffering...")

getting on the bus, getting stuck in traffic and having to take a detour around the protests.

trying to help gd in the kitchen (lemon explosion: she had a fight with the lemons and i think everyone lost)

x-men continued.

mr smear taking a long shower->bath, us using that time to close gd's credit card account. gd's mixed feelings about closing the account.

crashing early on the couch, getting up to post this, probably going to bed soon

(although with sore legs)

(to be fair, i *did* get in a lot more steps than usual today)

...

oh, i keep forgetting i'm on-call. i hope it stays quiet.

otherworldly

 today was a weird day. i was on-call, but fortunately the only thing i needed to deal with could wait until i was back in the office... mr smear and i accompanied gd to the dermatologist, deep in the heart of bnei brak. on the bus there we discussed - for mr smear's benefit - the differences and similarities between the ultra-orthodox and us, and he was fascinated.

we arrived half an hour earlier than the scheduled appointment time, and just as the electricity in the building began to flicker, which messed up the queue system. we walked a bit to find a store where i could get a coffee and gd and mr smear could get something cold to drink, and the two of them picked up parve (but not vegan) potato burekas which they both agreed was absolutely delicious.

fortunately, due to my not wanting to burn my tongue i took the lid off my coffee before tasting it, so i had the opportunity to see that they'd put milk in it and take it back for a replacement.

we ended up waiting quite a while for the doctor, but once we saw him he was absolutely worth the wait. he was patient, and thorough, and explained his thinking while actually doing something to help gd. apparently, what she's managed to develop is a "nail-shaped corn" driving straight into her foot. he performed the conservative treatment, and we're all hoping it's good enough and that she won't end up needing surgery.

getting back to tel aviv took forever, partially because the first bus skipped our stop, and partially because of the ridiculous traffic through bnei brak...

i was hungry by 2pm when i finally got into the office, but i had some challah and a couple of tiny pieces of mr smear's breakfast wraps, and a banana, and aside from that and a couple of energy bars i was very good about not snacking today.

i had a big dinner to make up for it, but all healthy stuff :) i registered yesterday that over the past week i've been getting flabbier again - not heavier, but definitely more "meaty" than i'd like :/

the work day felt marginally successful, and i walked home in time for dinner. we continued watching the seventh harry potter movie, and then it was mr smear's bedtime, and then i sat down for some more inscryption time.

i discovered the bone lord in act iii, which i hadn't heard of before, and i beat the mycologists in a way that scored me an *amazing* card even though i hadn't read how that mechanism works (i just got lucky).

oh, and i've started doing an exercise that i saw online today, seems like it might actually be good for my hip / waist issues.

stretched thin

omg it's half past 1am, i've spent the past couple of hours writing a "short" summary of our immigration disaster story for mr smear's friend's dad. i was going to start writing it this morning, but i've been on-call since 9am and it's been a heck of a day.

big things from the day that were work related: i had to convince a coworker of the value of a fix and became increasingly frustrated because he apparently literally didn't understand what i was fixing or why it needed fixing. i felt he was being obstructive, but in addition to "walking it off" one of his questions inadvertantly led to me finding something legitimately wrong and fixing that, so i couldn't be too mad.

big things from the day that weren't work related:

mr smear being rude on the way home from his hebrew tutor, i dragged him aside to a shady spot in a park and managed (somehow) to get through to him. not only did he handle it well (from that point, at least) but he took his punishment (an hour without screen time) like a boss.

he also decided that he'd rather go back to mma than keep up with the wall-climbing. sad for the wall-climbing, but great for the mma. we made a deal, and *he* insisted on recording it on our phones.

we also finally plugged in the guitar hero guitars and he's done some of the tutorial a few times - he's getting better. and he's persisting, which is big. even though the buttons seem to be jamming.

something big happened in the news today, big and crazy, and i only just heard about it now. so i'm going to try to sleep, and then try to wrap my head around whatever the fuck it is in the morning.

not down with the sickness

everyone but me (so far) has been sick, so lots of being stuck at home, not doing much of anything other than coughing. i'm praying i stay okay, and we're all hoping that everyone'll be feeling good enough to do a museum tour on thursday.

yesterday:

yesterday was a work from home day, and it wasn't easy. i think i've blanked a lot of it, because i'm sure we had some parenting issues, but work-wise i was on-call and struggling to get my own tasks done while trying and failing to understand what the heck was going on with the weird mysteries we're seeing in our logs.

oh, yes. i remember: mr smear was "very sensitive" (in his own words) yesterday and pissy about just about everything. i think gd and i had a fight about something as well, probably related.

oh, and handling finances: this has not been a good couple of months :/

in the evening i took a walk to the grocery store. i had an ulterior motive - finding a replacement LED bulb - but all the stores which might have had what i was looking for were closed.

after getting mr smear into bed, we settled in to introduce my mom to unchained. i don't know at what point i passed out, but when i came to and realized i'd fallen asleep on the couch i took myself to bed.

today:

woke up this morning to an already-awake mr smear, who's inflatable mattress sprung a leak in the middle of the night. he's going to have to sleep on the couch tonight, because none of us were able to find the leak (not even under water).

the morning was going alright, and then suddenly took a shit turn with mr smear. he recovered after a while, but i took much longer to get my own head right.

work was pretty good. i ate too much throughout the day, but i got the job (for the day) done and enjoyed receiving constructive feedback, both positive and negative. we had an interesting all-hands, too: sadly, our marketing wizard (witch?) is migrating soon, but the company's in a good place and i was surprised to learn that my current project is the central item everyone's betting on.

...

during the day gd sent me a video of mr smear's piano lesson progress: he seems to be making good. yesterday, when i was home, we had a talk about how to approach it and why it needs to be done in a certain way, and he seemed to *get* it.

as always, we shall see.

...

i left the office later than planned, then remembered that we hadn't done anything about a replacement mattress. i went to store after store (gas station after gas station) trying to find it, and after about ten places spanning (according to google maps) about 7km, i feel like i'd worked off enough of the office eating to enjoy a big, delicious dinner.

it looks like i've lost a couple of kilos over the past few weeks, so that's something.

i've spent most of the evening playing inscryption, now i've written this up, and now i'm planning on trying to get some sleep.

numbness

inscryption is hard. and kaycee's mod is even harder. but i keep playing, i keep tasting success, i keep getting crushed.

it's now 1am, i should probably be going to bed.

...

the school year ended on a good day for mr smear, so that's good. his day ended on a not-so-good note, which was entirely my fault, and i hope i managed to smooth it over. that was bedtime, but the rest of the evening together was pretty good, and we had a pretty good time playing table tennis together after i came home from work.

work itself was good. i didn't realize i was on-call until halfway through the day - so there's that - but i made good progress on my latest project and i'm feeling alright about its timeline.

oh... and our "face-picker" sat next to me today, and once i noticed i just couldn't unsee how long his fingernails are. i really, *really* wanted to say something, but i cleverly kept my mouth shut. there's no way i could have said anything that would've come across as kind and supportive...

...

otherwise, i'm generally feeling a bit numb. i'm avoiding anything political / war-related, and my head's not right for getting anything useful done right now. maybe i should focus? or maybe i should give my soul a rest.

i should probably give myself a rest.

at least the bass goes boom

tuesday:

my new headphones are AMAZING. i had to reign myself in to not literally start dancing on the bus on the way to work, and on the way home i walked all the way to have a few more minutes of good bass inside my head. unfortunately, the microphones weren't good enough to handle a conversation with sailor while at the grocery store, but overall they're an enormous improvement over what i've been using for the past year or so.

there was a bit of financial stress over the course of the day, even if we have had a couple of better months. it would be nice to not have to be quite so careful.

i had a hard time focusing on my primary task at work, but i did get a pleasant surprise in the morning that led to a quick experiment that led to a new and improved feature that i've been wanting to implement for months, so that felt good.

i wasn't up for joining the rollerblading group. there's always something, and lately it's been a general health and well-being thing.

yesterday:

in the morning, a journalist reached out to a facebook group asking for aliyah stories, and for her sins i gave her one. hopefully this project of hers will go somewhere.

i rollerbladed to work in a neon orange vest, and forgot to change into a "work shirt" before our first meeting - that was embarrassing :/

it was a few hours into the work day before i remembered that i was on-call, and it only a short while before leaving the office that i realized that there'd been a couple of slow fires burning all day. fortunately nothing serious, but that's not the point :(

i got precious little of my actual work done, but i did make progress. i also intervened by bringing in the boss when one of my coworkers continued to run interference on his own task, and judging by the ensuing constructive conversation i overheard i feel like it was the right thing to do.

out of the blue, i received a message from the team lead i interviewed with before bombing (i'm pretty confident it was the HR interview that did it) - he's left firefighter's company, and it was really nice that he thought of me even if i'm very happy with where i am right now.

during the day, i had a revelation: that i need to go to misrad hapnim in person and see if i can speak to a human being about my mother's situation. that led to me waking up about an hour and a half ago with my brain on fire, fantasizing about letting sausage fingers know that she's a mentally handicapped witch who's bringing nothing but evil into the world.

it felt good to be able to print and give gd her new cannabis license.

it felt good to help mr smear finish his end-of-year card for his teacher, and that this year there were no issues with sending positive blessings.

i spent a good chunk of the evening playing catch up on a wide range of political posts, and a lot of it was just too much to handle. i eventually made a conscious decision to shut down, and finished reading the first lightfall book and read a few more panels of the hobbit graphic novel before passing out.

alright, dawn is breaking. i'm going to try to get in another sleep cycle now.

it feels like the same (rounds)

 it's 26° 91% humidity and i'm sweating, but as much from the temperature as from the anxiety of having just posted some thoughts into a whatsapp group of "movers and shakers" that an old friend snuck me into that now includes a real celebrity hero of mine 🤘

yesterday was a mixed bag. mr smear's been on-and-off with his behavior, but on the whole he's recovering from bad vibes faster and more gracefully. while he was at school, we went to the hardware store and i finally upgraded the lock on the bathroom door. in retrospect, the original mechanism was fine, and a better fit, than the replacement - i might have to switch it back. but the inside of the door is rotting away in a manner i've never seen before.

i'm becoming increasingly confident that our landlords did, in fact, live here for a very long time before we moved in, and that they never cleaned / fixed / maintained anything and only left because it was clear that their home was falling apart around them.

i worked pretty hard yesterday - a little on-call, but mostly finishing up the pre-release work - and i got most of it done. i'm refusing to do anything that isn't on-call on shabbat, but there's an issue somewhere and i'm going to have to decided whether to look at it tonight or wait until tomorrow morning...

...

how the diet's going: i'm used to enthusiastically picking up a good bread at the supermarket and eating it on the way home (assuming it makes it all the way to the checkout). i picked one up yesterday, ignoring gd warning me that it wasn't a good idea.

firstly, i took a bite outside and immediately spat it into a bin. i don't know if it was stale, or if the baker's intended for it to taste horrible, but it was simply inedible. the woman at the manager's desk was kind enough to let me swap it for a different bread entirely, one that called itself a "baguette" but was more like a cousin of a baguette, that was a vast improvement but still wasn't a great experience.

and i ate the whole thing. and then thoroughly regretted having eaten so much that i didn't even enjoy.

...

the fight about homework notwithstanding, yesterday afternoon was okay. i read some more of the hebrew translation of lightfall: the girl & the galdurian, which i started on wednesday, and i'm enjoying it immensely. having said that, while the artwork is phenomenal and the story is solid, there's something about it that interferes with its readability as a graphic novel. i don't know if it's the panel layout, or the visual transitions, but i feel like there're little details i'm missing out on here and there.

...

i wasn't expecting my replay of inscryption to go so quickly. in what feels like three or four sessions, i've already reached the phase where i got stuck on my initial play-through. i think there're a lot of details that i didn't appreciate fully the first time because there were so many hours of play to make connections over!

...

mr smear definitely wasn't ready for hacknet, but he was very grateful that i decided that he's ready for inscryption.

entrances and exits

 friday afternoon is coming to a close. [as of me beginning to write this] we're waiting for the challah dough to rise, which for the first time i helped (inspired by the big family cooking showdown. some of the contestants made me feel that if they can do it, so can i). mr smear has just put together the most gorgeous pixel art sprites (he was originally going to try his hand and making harry potter, but got distracted), because we now want to make some kind of 8-bit harry potter game. we're still reading prisoner of azkaban, and he's now understanding just how different the book is from the movies. i had to explain to him why they're so different, and that it's okay, and i think he gets it.

i was also inspired to read the first book to gd, because she has difficulties reading for long enough periods of time. so far, she's also beginning to understand the difference and is really enjoying it.

my only issue with this arrangement is that i find it incredibly difficult to read out loud without reading myself to sleep. every goddamned time.

wednesday:

wednesday's workday began with an argument with my boss, and there was a lot of back-and-forth before we reached the conclusions that a) i need to tone down my enthusiasm, because every time i broke through a wall and thought i was almost done i reported that i was almost done and b) i needed to split my ticket every time a new required sidequest entered the arena and c) i needed to write more tests.

in any event, i finally managed to get the task complete by the afternoon. like, for reals. and it looks really good.

i did that while organizing a spa voucher birthday present for my mother, who spent her day on her feet volunteering (as usual) with the DA for the south african elections.

yesterday:

the morning started off rough, but mr smear had a good day in spite of it and was actually able to let go of it when he got home and remembered. the afternoon with him was positive.

it was my mother's birthday. mr smear made a really nice card, and by the time she got the voucher she was feeling the results of the previous day's on-her-feet-ness and the gift was even more relevant :)

on the way to work, i accompanied gd to the bank to pick up her new credit card, which went pretty smoothly.

i was on-call, and had an annoying task first thing. i left the office around lunchtime to have breakfast at home, and gd and i watched my cousin's funeral together on zoom. we now know that our original suspicions were incorrect, and that he got through his surgery and was recovering well. then he got up to go to the bathroom and collapsed, and that was the end of him.

at least he didn't suffer, but was a devastating blow to his immediate family, and to the rest of us.

in a way, it's kind of brought a lot of the cousins together (also literally, in a whatsapp group), and it's a little weird to be in a group with both my brother and my big sister. (it's funny how little things like cheating an inheritance can split a family)

the funeral notwithstanding, i found it very hard to concentrate. all day.

this morning:

i had a long chat with our kibbutz cousin, she's really having a hard time, especially as a travel agent in the current circumstances. they have about 25 displaced families on their kibbutz, so there are things about the war that are front-and-center for them which we aren't always thinking about down in our little tel aviv bubble...

i took a really big step this morning, and decided to just go ahead and post the videos i've put together on the war on the west so far. on tiktok, and on youtube. am i doing this right? i don't know if i'm doing this right, but i have to do something.

i'm really nervous about putting myself out there like this.

mr smear had a pretty good day at school, in spite of the fact that another kid showed him something scary and apparently he's now learned to stay away from the dark stuff (which is what i've been explicitly suggesting for days now). overall, i have to say he's doing okay. we're doing okay.

the world at war

the war on the west is in full swing. i participated in a psyops webinar on thursday evening, and it was horrifying to have all the pieces of the puzzle come together to draw a picture of what we are - and have been for decades - actually up against. it's a massive, coordinated campaign not just against israel, but against the west in general, and it's far more insidious than quatar funding western universities.

it's the BRICS countries working together, specifically iran, russian and china, to subvert western values and ideologies. it's the tools they're using - students, social media, and filling roles in western institutions with ideologues (like the UN, and the ICJ). the noise from the past week or two in the news is directly due to this.

it's distressing, mostly because it's hard to come up with ways to combat it. the speaker was quite pessimistic, and i personally can't abide by that.

...

thursday:

a pretty good morning, feeling less stuffy/allergic (i'm still not 100%, but i'm not feeling sick at all)

frontend magic, but with some concerning findings. leaving work with less enthusiasm following an argument with the boss

the psyops webinar, and all the while working towards proving my boss wrong (and, in my opinion, succeeding)

friday:

after three days of sticking to the fasting regimen, i broke and had breakfast early...

comics shopping, learning (again) not to ask mr smear his opinion. we picked up the second bone volume in hebrew, a miles morales comic in hebrew (although it doesn't have nikud), and הילד הכחל, which so far seems to be a winner.

picking up vegan cholent, being proved wrong about the plastic bag leaking but fortunately not losing any clothing over it.

intervening to prevent a fight on the bus (gd called out a woman with tacky facial tattoos for being rough with her dog, who in turn responded with a curse)

forgetting i was on-call, fortunately the incident that occurred wasn't too severe. spending a couple of hours investigating and putting together a runbook, but ultimately my boss had a few additional tricks up his sleeve that were needed.

joining a pre-shabbat call on antisemitism that turned out to be not very interesting, particularly after the previous psyops talk

watching the rest of ice age 5 (i've skipped a few). at this point, the characters are clearly a vehicle for a story that doesn't have anything to do with them or their world. it's a fun movie if you watch it fore-armed with the knowledge that it's just an animated series of irreverant and random jarring or subtley (sometimes not-so-subtley) age-inappropriate gags that doesn't care about making sense.

reporting a neighbor's dog stuck on the balcony

passing out quickly on the couch

the shoot

 another relatively unstressed morning

mr smear's understanding of how a cannot works vs his excitement when i explained a rifle's firing mechanism (after seeing a kid on the street playing with a belt of empty shells)

coming home to a haircut tweak

half an hour on the phone with credit card companies discovering that gd's card was compromised over a month ago and we didn't know it had been blocked (for internet purchases)

the baguette and vegan cheese and photo shoot morning, one of my yemenite coworkers' enthusiasm for the haircut (before telling his story of flying off a slide and miraculously not dying) and the photographer repeatedly exclaiming how "photogenic" i am. my boss' very sweet but timid dog, i don't approve of how he treats her even if i can see it's not malicious.

a mixed-bag work day, one of the highlights being helping my boss after he helped me and telling him "see? i'm not the only one whining today" :P

and another being getting a script working before leaving the office, in spite of the fact that python's datetime arithmetic is broken by design.

another highlight of the day in general was a surprise (and surprised) report that mr smear not only didn't argue about doing hebrew reading, but he dived into the spiderman comic i bought him and read far more than he's been asked to ^_^

a sync with urchin on the way home, who's shady potential new employer refused to countersign her contract until her starting date. wtf is wrong people?!

resolving a production issue, eating a delicious curry dinner gd tried out, and then jumping into the second middle east webinar. it was generally very interesting, and i was surprised at how real it's getting as multiple opposition groups make sincere pleas for assistance in toppling their regimes. they very much want to be allied to israel, and it feels like these are honest attempts to continue what the arab spring promised.

i ate better today, but although i could have used the exercise i realized that until my sinus / allergies thing is over it doesn't make sense to go rollerblading.

rest and remembrance

 ha! i forgot to mention wednesday night's meeting with dod and a friend of his, which was very interesting and extremely productive.

friday:

after mr smear (finally!) completed his homework, we had a short break before we all hopped on the last bus before shabbat to meet up with our cousin. we lit the candles and said kiddush in her hotel room, even though the sun hadn't set yet, and then ventured out to the clock tower in search of a good place to eat. we ended up sitting down at urbano, which was much pricier than i anticipated but the service and food were fantastic. mr smear enjoyed his meal, too, and was generally extremely well-behaved (having his kindle on him helped).

afterwards, we walked our cousin back to her hotel and then took a taxi home, and got mr smear into bed. i quickly showered, and made the mistake of laying down on the couch... after a lot, busy day with more than 18K steps after a very long week, i crashed and i crashed hard. it was about 3am or so when gd woke me up trying to put a blanket over me, that i realized that i had enough energy to shuffle myself into bed.

yesterday:

nobody did anything. it was a day of rest, napping, reading comics, and playing video games.

it was a good day. i got nothing productive done (aside from the dishes, which took a few rounds).

oh! i guess i did do *something* productive. i've signed up for a lecture series on the current situation in the middle east, which was inspired by a post about the emir of kuwait dissolving their parliament in order to prevent the country's democracy from being exploited by bad actors. i've been talking about this for years, and while i'm not sure i agree with the direction i do feel like it's a wake-up call for the rest of us "democratic" nations.

today:

wake-up was relatively peaceful, if hard to do. i dropped mr smear off at school, picked up medicine for gd from the pharmacy, did the last of the dishes and headed to work.

the work day was hard, but there were some successes.

before noon urchin informed me that she was in the area, so we sat down for half an hour with a coffee and celebrated the fact that she's just received a job offer she's excited about after she's been trying to leave her current abusive employer for ages.

i was on-call today, and some of the on-call duties sucked. we have a proper mystery on our hands, with a complaining (but cooperative) client.

i eventually called it a day, picked up some antihystamines* from the pharmacy and came home to an early dinner before the remembrance day siren and ceremonies began. the stories were fresher and rawer than usual. additionally, the speeches by representatives of the jewish agency and government representatives have lit a fire under me to put together an accusatory video in a day or two to try and raise awareness for how hypocritical these organizations and agencies have become.

* apparently the antihystamines i've been taking *do* cause drowsiness, and i've been taking them in the mornings. no, shit.

...

gd's been having a lot of trouble with her foot this past week, i'm pleased to report that today she's finally doing much better!

on a different note, i *completely* forgot about mother's day today (we don't celebrate it in israel, not on the same date and not in the same way). whoops...

small miracles

 saturday:

i managed to drag mr smear out on the bike, which ended up awesome - he "remembered" that he actually enjoys riding his bicycle, and now that the puncture and gears have been repaired it was much more fun for him :)

we finished watching american splendor, and it's really as great as everyone said it was. what an inspirational film! and it answered a bunch of questions i had from reading our movie year.

yesterday:

one of ze germans decided to bring his family to tel aviv yesterday morning, so a whole bunch of us rocked up and had a great walk about! it's very rare to be able to get my family out of the house spontaneously and quickly, so that in itself was amazing, and when mr smear was being relatively antisocial (he was actually pretty cool most of the time) he found a quiet seat to read the copy of naruto that scrapper gave us years ago, and he's really digging it ^_^

we left the group in search of breakfast, and finding pesach-friendly vegan food was quite a mission. we eventually settled on hummus abu dabi, which was just fantastic. we all ate too much, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

the afternoon was pretty chilled, and although there was some unpleasantness surrounding mr smear getting his homework done he did eventually get through it before sundown. i had to re-learn long division in order to teach it to him, which i must admit was kinda fun :P

netflix's baking impossible is a really great show. after getting mr smear into bed, gd and i watched an episode of the boys to remind ourselves (the warmup to the 3rd season finale), and then the first episode of invincible because neither of us really remember much.

...

gd and i both slept badly last night, for different reasons. i've now spent two nights on the couch again. this mattress topper is not doing the trick :(

...

my first on-call with my new employer is over, and it was fine. now i've got a proper day off for the holiday, and tomorrow's back to "normal".

...

oh, i tried to watch the mgmt - kids video with mr smear this morning, and that was a really bad idea. i don't know how i'd forgotten just how scary it is, and here i was trying to show him how scary it wasn't :(

speeding up before applying the brakes

 so... i didn't just feel that inspiration and go to bed... i ended up starting the original fallout game and realized about halfway through clearing out a cave full of radscorpions that it was 2am already...

whoops :$

the day started really well in spite of waking up from a bizarre and disturbing dream about cartoon depravity. i woke mr smear up, explained the expression "the carrot and the stick" (which already got him in a good space because that's how you ride pigs in minecraft), and informed him that the stick was no screen-time if he didn't participate in the fight camp and the carrot was a homework-free afternoon doing whatever he wants if he did.

he did. and not only did he, but gd quietly called me after picking him up at the end to tell me he'd said he had an amazing day! he wouldn't say anything other than "it was okay" when i eventually got home, but that's just how he rolls...

between dropping him off at fight camp and getting to the office, i spoke to dod who's not just interested in a project i've been cooking up for about a decade now, but who presented an interesting re-focus that makes it much more likely to get off the ground. he (digitally) introduced me to someone he knows who's in the industry i've been dreaming about disrupting, and i'm excited to see if we can push this forward ^_^

the work day itself was manic. by the time we'd safely tested my previous evening's fixes it was already thursday afternoon, which is a not-good time to deploy to production. the deployment was a bit tricky, though it went smoothly, but it took hours of general disarray to be confident that the patch had been deployed safely and successfully.

for our weekly end-of-week happy hour, i convinced my team to order from mr donuts. four vegan donuts and one not (i feel confident they got it on principle), and everyone agreed that a) they were great and b) the not-vegan option was the least successful :P

i ended up leaving the office late again because i wanted to finish up our first official runbook.

it was a pretty peaceful evening (arguments over what to watch during dinner notwithstanding, mr smear doesn't like giving us a turn to choose and we wanted to continue with baking impossible). i was soooo tired after putting mr smear to bed, but we started watching a little more fallout and then stopped when i passed out on the couch.

today:

i didn't sleep well, but i did sleep. i woke up with a sore neck and shoulder, which followed me around all morning. it's still not great but it's much better, at least.

i began the day trying to figure out what the attack on iran means - i still don't know, to be honest - and wondering if ze germans are going to get together or not while SxS is in town. after a quick breakfast, we took the bike - i mean, mr smear walked his bike alongside us - to be repaired, and i had a coffee while gd and mr smear enjoyed sandwiches at cafe eva. the woman i asked for a chair was extremely rude to me, in english - "take the chair and GO!" - and i think she thought we were tourists. what an asshole!

afterwards, we hopped on a bus to the ichilov mall, where i figured out our next steps in getting mr smear a cellphone and we did a grocery shopping. then we walked home, dropped gd and the groceries off, and mr smear and i walked back to the bike repair shop.

eighty shekels for a new tire, gears examined and a new rear brake. nice :)

we picked up a really nice wine for our cousins' seder on monday evening, and we came home for a lazy afternoon. mr smear's been human fall flat-ing, i've almost cleared my daily quests in bloons adventure time, and i even killed all those damned radscorpions before doing most of the dishes so that gd could bake a challah in time for shabbat.

so far, it's been a good day.

unusually me

yesterday:

a very positive start to the day, getting mr smear to his fight camp on time.

mostly meetings, with me forcing a retrospective that felt appreciated by most of the team. a good start to sorting out potential on-call rotation issues. very little time for my own work.

leaving the office early and coming home for an early meal with my family before heading south.

efrat gosh in levontin 7 with tahoma - an interesting catch-up, a very intimate performance that really blew me away, as i was simultaneously quite emotional about being in a show in levontin 7 for the first time in about twelve years.

getting home late, showering and snacking even later.

today:

3am mistakenly looking at facebook and seeing a post recommending that a tel aviv family consider relocating to cape town, finally going back to bed an hour and a half later

rough and rushed wakeup, but mr smear being pretty cool

a really good chat with his instructor when dropping him off

a surprising conversation with gd about spirituality.

meeting up with my cousin's kid for coffee to discuss career options, a sudden and dramatic plot twist into a romantic adventure story

arriving late for work, being dropped into an unfamiliar production issue for a customer. an emotional rollercoaster of an afternoon, with gd getting on the wrong bus and picking up mr smear late, and mr smear continuing his struggle to get out of the fight camp, and me getting lost trying to figure out all the pieces of the work puzzle, and then getting news that my nephew just received his british ancestral visa and is finally able to join his mother and sister in london, and then hours trying to decipher truly pathetic documentation (google's envoy) and figuring things out with trial and error (with the AI assistance being the opposite of helpful), finally being inspired to ask a different question and hitting the jackpot, then a loooooot of debugging implementing the solution and eventually leaving the office late, but in time to eat with my family, and feeling exquisitely exhultant.

the evening was great until bedtime, i tried to have a conversation with mr smear and it went south (for no obvious reason), and then gd and i watched the third episode of the new fallout series. it's full of fan service, even if i feel like the pacing's a bit slow it's really inspired me to get back into it.