not-so-free will

i think i slept alright. the eczema seems to be calming down. i started my day reading a bit of hellsing on the balcony.

then i jumped into work, right after realizing that today was the last day i can use my monthly food allowance and we hadn't spent any of it yet.

i ran the test, it went well. i needed help from my buddy, and only understood - after being quite a nudnik - that i'd missed her message to the team earlier in the morning to say that her daughter was sick and she didn't have much bandwidth 🤦‍♂️

i felt awful, and i apologized profusely...

i spent the next few hours re-evaluating the work i'd planned... or that my AI agents had planned... by the time i'd figured out my next steps, it was time to do a grocery run with gd to use up as much of the allowance as we could, on stuff we actually need. i honestly felt a bit sick, and tired, about halfway through the shopping experience. it could have been worse, i guess, but i just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

i got home, had two carrots with some hummus, and was about to do the thing i'd told my team lead i was going to do when an upstairs neighbor began heavy drilling. i had less than an hour to go until my meeting with my mentor, and if i'd done the thing the team lead wanted i'd have been stuck at home with construction site noises, which left me no choice.

i sent a message to the neighbor group, explaining how some of us work from home and doing any kind of construction without prior warning is inconsiderate (how do people still not understand this?!), then packed my bags and rushed out to catch a bus to my employer's office.

i had a little bit of time to spare to Do The Thing, and my mentor ended up being five minutes late, so i managed to pull the trigger before our meeting got started. of course, i ran into yet another surprising bug...

the roadmap meeting with my mentor was very positive. the feedback from him, and from my current client, was the same as my self-diagnosis two weeks ago: ironically, he informed me that while it's critical to focus and effectively communicate how focused i am at work, he believes that my lack of focus is one of the reasons why i'm doing as well as i am in so many different ways.

can those two things be true at the same time?

when he got to the point of asking me which technologies i wanted to focus on, i immediately thought of what i need to get my number one main personal side project i'm now working on to succeed, networking and security, but even as i said the words i was nervous about biting off more than i can chew. which, if i think about it, is kind of the point of this whole roadmap exercise, so...

i had some time before my evening course class began to do some more investigating, report to the team lead and work on a solution, all the while talking to coworkers / async game jammers, and a dutch coworker, and two guys who are essentially using our offices as a coworking space.

the class was full of useful information, but it started so slowly and with such basic material that by the time the good stuff came up i'd already checked out. i spent most of the class evolving my agentic skills, understanding that i've been dealing with a wild array of conflicting guidance, and a lot of the skill cleanup was being done by conflicting skills that weren't aligned with what i'd just corrected... so i had to figure out a solution for that, too.

i walked out with sfs and another guy who seems interested in joining our asynchronous game jam, and then split from them to go to the supermarket and try to spend the remaining hundred shekels. i got to the self checkout with a heavy load that i'd estimated would just about reach the limit, only to discover, after passing everything through that there were a couple of significant discounts! fortunately, the place was practically empty so i rushed to the dried fruits area and picked up some healthy snacks, which did the trick.

i waited a few minutes at the bus stop, and there were a few of us frantically trying to wave the next bus down as he skipped our stop entirely. i reported the fucker. at least the second bus stopped, and in retrospect it was actually a better route for me :P

i got home to a delicious meal - gd has outdone herself with her salads, and whatever it is she's doing with the potatoes - and we had a chat with my mom before putting mr smear to bed. mr smear didn't have such a great school day today; nothing dramatic, but his behavior wasn't good enough to earn him screen time. we talked a little about it at bedtime, and then about the girls in his class doing tiktok videos 🙄, and then i said goodnight and hit the shower.

he'd already gone to bed, so i had to keep my anger over his gouging the soap and leaving me with practically nothing to myself :/

i sat down at my work machine and continued with the skill evolution, which took me until almost midnight to get through... but i think i'm happy with it, and i'm hoping it's going to make a real difference to both my work environments ✌️

i'm so fucking tired now. i can't believe it's the weekend. even less that it's a long weekend, because my client gives everyone a mandatory two days off every quarter. that's pretty cool.

with what i have

 after watching bruce almighty this evening, now i just feel like god's taunting me.

first, today was pretty stressful - i'm behind on my project, which was particularly ambitious of them to assign to me from the get-go, and every step of the way i've encountered unpleasant surprises, obstacles, and it's a system that's remarkably complex by any measure. sprinkle on that a couple of misunderstandings - my team lead seems to think i'm investing time in things that aren't on the critical path, when i've literally done nothing but ask agents to take care of them on the side, but i've also been asked to do things that don't really make sense without more context and i only understood this evening (when it was already very late) that i could have done what he asked much earlier in the day... and then when i did finally do it, it was mostly good but buggy.

this is a really, really shit feeling. hopefully we'll be able to clear the air on wednesday.

...

otherwise, i began my day with coffee and kick-ass, and then sat down to spec out the first part of the networking system that i need to test if the game networking package i came across and the mental model i'm building in my head are actually viable. whatever happens, imma learn some shit.

i think i ate too much today. the rest of the leftover gnocci in particular.

gd and i had a follow-up conversation to what we discussed yesterday, and she's going back to sewing lessons. i really hope this works out✌️

...

in the middle of the workday crescendo - around 6pm - i rushed out and literally had to sprint to catch a bus to the pick-up point for the vacuum filters we ordered. i arrived at the place (a really impressive little-bit-of-everything store) pretty quickly, but found their service less than stellar. it took me a couple of tries to figure out where the postal pick-up area is, but nobody was there. i asked a worker close by if someone was there, and after a couple of non-responses he said yes. i went into the package area, i called around, no answer. then i went back to the unhelpful cashier at the front of the store, who assured me that someone was there, but under a lot of pressure.

up until that point i'd been the only one trying to pick up a parcel, but now there was a queue forming. i went behind the "obstacles" again, called out a few more times, and then, as i walked back out, the guy from before who'd said that someone was there showed up, and it turned out he was that someone.

asshole.

fortunately, i made it out of there with my package and got to the bus stop just in time to catch a ride back home.

...

that was went i engaged in the evening's finale, with spectacularly disappointing results. fortunately, my "buddy" was available to help me find and understand the logs, and i got a breakdown from claude that... seems confident. the last words from the team lead felt heavy, he wants me to explain the bug to him on wednesday.

i feel like a thunder cloud is over my head right now.

...

while i was out, i received a message from an ex-coworker, a wedding invitation. considering our financial situation, i wasn't sure that it was a good idea to go, but i discussed it with gd and then my mom, and we thought it'd be a good idea and a fun thing to do. then, just after we finished watching the movie and i said goodnight to mr smear, i sat down and opened the invitation, and discovered that it's limited to one person with no plus one.

that kinda sucks. but i'm also sure that none of the other coworkers' partners were invited either. so now i'm damned if i ask him to invite gd and damned if i don't :/

...

i'm so freaking tired of things not working out, or working out badly. and on top of everything else i'm not entirely convinced the cream for the eczema is working properly, which is just another layer of discomfort on top of everything else.

gratitude, right? i should be practicing gratitude.

proper gander

i didn't sleep well last night, i'm dealing with eczema again, it's off and on... i booked appointments with my doctor and a dermatologist, the earliest for the latter being in january :/

the time shifted in the night, giving us an extra hour of not sleeping... whatever. i started my day with reading kick-ass, which is legitimately good and absolutely not appropriate for mr smear. neither is hellsing, which gd just got bored with.

the work day was frustrating; my team lead wants me doing things that i don't have authorization to do, and nobody can tell me how to obtain the authorization, with IT and devops being bureaucratically obstructive. at the same time, i keep surfacing weird things, and today i understood that there's a team - much like my previous team at my previous client - who's supposed to be supporting my current team but is doing work they need in unexpected ways and without communicating and documenting as they go 🤦‍♂️

i'm also a little frustrated that the very sweet guy who was volunteered to test my tooling before the team lead allows me to pitch it to everyone else is... a bit slow? i don't know if it's a capability thing, or an attitude thing (i'm inclined towards believing the latter).

we're not supposed to talk politics in the office, but there were only three of us in and the team lead wasn't there so we ended up really getting into it. there was significant tension in the room, and anxiety, and i hope i didn't unmake friends (even though in general we're all politically aligned, some of the stuff i was saying about democracy, national identity and the judicial reform really didn't land well).

i caught the light rail to the other office, and the class went pretty well. i caught a ride to the train station afterwards, and got into the weeds of south african crime when i probably shouldn't have. it was just that sort of a day, i guess 🤷‍♂️

i got home to a huge platter of sushi, and i had shoveled a whole lot into my mouth (one after the other) before realizing that i had no reason to be eating it all so quickly, nor any real desire to, and that aside from being unhealthy i also wasn't really enjoying my food nearly as much as i could have.

i had a strange idea about our financial situation which i discussed with my mom on the way to the office, and by the time we put mr smear to bed i'd figured out how to approach gd with a strategy. we're already on the edge, so playing it safe isn't much of an option, and if she can pull in some money with her sewing skills that would definitely be something.

well, i managed to put together the comics that i generated for the preacher video, so i'm pleased about that. and i spent some time "cleaning up" large files on google drive, some of them videos i moved to youtube.

it's just turned midnight, i think i'm ready for bed.

a busy pause

 i don't know what switch off meant yesterday when i wrote it, but i was still messing about (on and off) with my side project and a new minigame [stops writing to prompt the AI to improve rotation behavior]. 

most of yesterday evening is a blur to me now, but we watched a great episode of spider-noir over dinner, and after mr smear went to bed* i spent some time driving myself crazy playing cook, serve, delicious!...

* a process that began at a relatively reasonable hour, ended around midnight, and at some point when i went in to turn off the lights again and tuck him in he was offended because i didn't do the bedtime ritual and he'd forgotten that i'd already done so much earlier :P

i went to bed late, but not too late, and i guess i slept alright. on my way to bed i had a revelation about the change that came over me since last week's game meetup talk - i got so excited about the potential for making money with games that i lost focus, and i need that focus and excitement for the raw components of the game before i can start making something that's lucrative. every single thing i'm building, or failing at building, is a lesson, a dot to connect when i'm ready.

i woke up to the stress of reading a post i shouldn't have looked at before coffee, another oleh really struggling economically. one of the things i did after coffee was creating a facebook group to help olim network and build things.

my morning started quietly, a little meditative outside time followed by getting back into history of western art in comics, and then finally settling down and taking care of a bunch of admin that i've been putting off for about a week now. after mr smear completed his chores, he asked if we could play something together, but neither of us could agree on what. eventually he sat down to play valheim, and honestly, it did me good. first, because he made a point of chewing gum** the whole time, and second because he was playing something outdoorsy and really getting into it. it's like that "the children yearn for the mines" meme 😂

** "training": both exercising his jaw, and practicing dealing with the fact that it doesn't keep the taste for more than a couple of minutes.

our big adventure today was going to find some kitchen items and something we could use as a low coffee table for when we're sitting on the beanbags. on the bus, we encountered the old man who took a dump next to the bus stop a while back, and as soon as we recognized him we all quickly and quietly agreed to slide over to the back of the bus.

the sales lady at the kitchen store was stunned by gd's hilariously disorientating description of how normal it is for her to cut herself in the kitchen (or while cutting hair), she helped us figure out what we need to buy (it's a chain-link glove) but we've had to order it in gd's size. then we caught a bus to the hardware store, almost getting run over a few times by wolt drivers, where we found what we were looking for but everything felt like far too little value for money.

we walked up to the square with all the restaurants, and sat down to two delicious bowls of hummus, one with vegan shuwarma, and then headed down to osher ad to be amazed both by the prices and quality of their products, and by the lengths of their queues during the holidays. we'll go back there another day.

we were planning on coming home but ended up in azrieli mall instead. i had a coffee and mr smear and i milled around waiting for gd, crowded by surges of mall people, but fortunately not being pushed beyond my usual limit. i mean, it was exhausting, but it didn't put me into fight-and-flight mode like it usually does.

we found *exactly* the coffee tables we were looking for at the dollar store, very cheap and absolutely perfect. we caught the bus home, and halfway there i jumped off to take a call from the dermatologist i'd been waiting to hear from for two days - she's not concerned, she agrees with my assessment - and after having a bit of a rest (taking out one of the tables, lying down for a bit, then hearing gd out as she described how she's selling some of her childhood toys she's been carrying around because she's come to understand that she's holding on to nostalgia for really dark times, and then sitting down to edit the haircut recording from yesterday.

i've done very little development / AI whispering today, and that's okay. i've just had it out with mr smear over his piano practice (i wanted him to practice a new thing he's just learned before stopping), but otherwise things are good.

the first day of fall

 things that upset me in the middle of the night: looking at my phone's notifications, and then finding myself scrolling on instagram, and coming across these two self-hating jews discussing the ugliness of a rigged system that is everything anti-capitalists claim capitalism is: the opposite of a free market.

...

i'm regretting taking a puff before bed last night, partially because i'm feeling totally exhausted right now and it's almost 8pm and i'm drinking a fourth cup of coffee in order to be able to go rollerblading, partially because i passed in and out of conciousness earlier while listening to my new client's all-hands and i realized at some point that i'm not breathing with my whole lungs and when i do, it feels... smoky. like, tight and sticky.

i hope i don't regret this coffee.

mr smear surprised us by getting up and being ready on time for school, and then away he went. i took care of a bunch of first-of-the-month admin, and then suddenly it was time to go to work.

overall, i'm really impressed. the offices feel good, everyone i met seems relaxed and organized, even though they all described the work as anything but. during my first daily with the team mr smear called me, twice, while i was introducing myself - turned out he was worried that he couldn't find his meds, when he finished taking them yesterday already 🙄

i spent most of my day setting up my new machine and accounts and beginning the onboarding process, and talking to people, and i was *really* surprised to learn that my client offers catered lunches that include vegan options that are pretty darned good.

in the all-hands, i was literally amazed to hear them discussion employee retention and training, and making their approach very clear, and their approach is stellar. to go from a company continually laying off good workers to one making a point of developing theirs is quite a relief!

i guess mr smear and i shouldn't have eaten when i got home, because we also ate at dinner time and we both stuffed ourselves on gd's sushi while watching an episode of the simpsons that irritated me because its premise revolved around everyone in town being a total moron.

yes, yes, i know.

anyway, here we are. mr smear apparently had a great day at school, i'm going to at least try to go rollerblading tonight, and gd seems to be doing alright herself, so... 🤷‍♂️

much thursday

 yesterday began with reading more of my favorite thing is monsters (volume 1 of 2, i just learned), which i just completed now.

it's sublime. between the phenomenal artwork, the gut-wrenching stories, and the real-ness of the characters, this is an absolute masterpiece.

the big story from yesterday morning was having the plumber - clearly a devout muslim, making his jewish blessings contrast starkly with his kneeling to bless his cup of water - do a great job of replacing the cistern and a not-so-great job of turning a small leaky faucet into an unusable one. now i've got to get him to come back for the latter before the weekend...

the work day was unusually calm. i had a big, healthy side-dish lunch from the shuwarma place that i picked up on the way to the office, i'd been feeling faint and weak again and i'm becoming increasingly concerned about possibly being anaemic. i got the backfill started, and it went pretty smoothly, and over the course of the afternoon i got the action plan worked out for the work my client team and i have been discussing, all using opus and all far cheaper than using sonnet.

let's pretend that makes sense.

by the time i went upstairs to join everyone for happy hour - a farewell pizzas-and-drinks for the AI team lead - i was ready to trigger the implementation and i left the agent with an instruction to document every step of it and make best guesses that didn't conflict with the established plan.

when i got back to my desk more than half an hour later, it was still running. after about an hour, it was done, and while i haven't evaluated the results yet - i was just waiting for it to finish so that i could go home - on the surface it looks good and i was shocked by how little it cost relative to what i've been spending on tokens since they introduced the budget a couple of weeks ago.

anthropic + bedrock = scam.

i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear for a walk, a lot of which was spent discussing his game design ideas. i've agreed to help him in a bit, when his first screen time kicks in, to start building his game with him.

what a time to be alive.

gd's chili took a lot longer to be ready than she'd expected, but it was delicious. we watched another episode of the wonder years, and then i worked on my tarot game until i couldn't keep my eyes open any more and went to bed.

...

over dinner, mr smear discovered that he was having another outbreak around his eye. it's been quite a while, and considering the fact that i'd been considering taking him to the pool soon i'm grateful it happened before that, and that we didn't once again worry that the pool was causing it...

i didn't sleep very well, so i'm tired still, but that's just par for the course these days 🤷‍♂️

the birthday special

 omg i am PAINFULLY tired. as in, i don't feel so good tired.

...

mr smear woke us up to delivery the birthday card this morning, and from there we progressed to making the following (using a combination of gemini and gimp, because the AI guardrails for images are frustrating and the generated images are mostly garbage anyway):

gd loved it, and mr smear and i had a positive educational experience.

afterwards, i spent some more time trying to get notebooklm to make the cinderella reboot comics i was working on last week. i managed to get better results, but still a lot of weirdness. i suspect that i'm going to need to copy/paste across different attempts to get it to the point where i feel comfortable posting it.

i then proceeded to built some small units (i'd promised gd that for her birthday i'd put together as much furniture as i could), while mr smear got his first screen time at home in ages (he used his half hour on oxygen not included), and then suddenly it was noon and time to take mr smear to south tel aviv.

his friend's mother did warn me that it was very far. i didn't think it was such a big deal, but in addition to it very much being a big deal it was also unseasonably warm and very sunny with very little shade. i really hope this doesn't trigger an outbreak for mr smear :)

anyway, he handled the ride better than ever before, was rewarded with his favorite drink (sprite) without even begging for it, and after riding through proper poverty and squalor (and chickens in the streets) i dropped him off in good spirits.

i took a more direct path home, straight through a very busy predominantly sudanese populated area, and the vibe was very different from the other direction...

i only stopped to pick up a desperately-needed coffee on the way home, then arrived home to begrudgingly make good on my promise and begin putting together the first of four chests of drawers.

actually, i guess i must have done something else before then, but i can't remembered anything else and i can't believe it took me quite that long... anyway, i'd constructed the body and two drawers (out of four) before i realized it was 6pm already and i needed to pick up mr smear.

there was no way i was going to ride that distance again, certainly not when it was so late and i was so thoroughly pooped, so i tried to catch a bus (or buses) and was caught off guard by the fact that they weren't operating yet. so i called a taxi. the driver was cool, and i was very grateful when he said "no problem" to picking up mr smear and his bike, as opposed to me walking mr smear and his bike to hunt for a bus stop on the wrong side of the tracks.

it was a story getting the bike into the trunk.

i almost died when mr smear excitedly started listing the contents of his friend's home in front of the taxi driver, and there was nothing i could say to stop him that wouldn't have been insulting. but his friend's family is a true gamer family, with multiple systems online, and he's now extremely excited about their tekken 3 arcade cabinet.

i can't tell you how pleased i am that he's begging me for tekken 3, which is still my favorite of the franchise by far, nor how sad i am that it's so difficult to get hold of.

mr smear has got the chorus from ticks and leeches stuck in his head, he's been singing it on a loop.

i completed the chest of drawers, mr smear helped me get all the cardboard boxes downstairs, and now it's dinner time.

dog day halloween

 i'm still feeling tired, weak and fatigued. at least tahoma's halloween party last night gave me a proper excuse :P

...

yesterday morning started at the park with the school's "dog day". there were dogs, and it was a day. the sun was beating down (it was surprisingly bright and hot), and mr smear and i arrived a few minutes early, just in time for me to be awkward with a couple of other dads before everyone began setting up the picnic.

highlights:

mr smear's teacher sitting down next to us and reporting that mr smear has really turned things around over the course of the past couple of days. please god it holds.

the angry mother from the previous week refused to make eye contact. gd and i have been laughing about the fact that both of us were responsible for bringing a specific vegan cheese spread, so we  childishly brought two in order to "show her up" 🤣

i asked mr smear not to tell anyone that we were going to a private birthday party afterwards. he made sure to tell everyone. loudly.

everything on the table was vegan because of the allergy requirements, which was a first for us at a school event. cake for breakfast.

...

from there, the relevant parents and kids snuck out and the birthday boy's mom gave us ride to the country club. it was a perfect day for it, beautiful weather, hardly anybody else around. the downside was spending a fair amount of time fending off crows, egyptian geese and myna birds, but most of the afternoon was spent watching the kids have a great time together both in the water and out, having long and interesting conversations with the other parents (there were only three of us), and quietly recovering from the madness of the previous weeks (and months).

we were not expecting the gift giving, because our previous school and social circle culture is so different. the gifts were custom, and really impressive, and we're going to need to do something about that this week.

oh! and his eye seems to be clear, so i don't think the pool - certainly not this one - is directly contributing to his outbreaks.

...

we got a ride home, and showered, and immediately jumped in to some of the math homework mr smear hadn't done during the week. it wasn't all smooth, but it never got dramatic, and even for me it wasn't trivial (it's working with square roots and ranges of answers, neither of which he's used to). by the time we were done, we'd both had good exercise and i was quite proud of him.

we made an particularly potent challah-peño, my face caught a bit of it (fortunately not my eyes!) and my fingers burned for hours in spite of washing them thoroughly and even doing a whole sink of dishes.

but it came out delicious.

dinner on call with my mom was nice. afterwards, we did have a repeat of the usual fight about mr smear going out with me on saturdays, but at least it ended softly. then i left for the halloween party.

...

nystire and nyah nyah and partners, as well as the linguist we served with, were there, the place was packed with interesting-looking people and the decorations were really something. it was a really fun evening, there was lots of alcohol, and the conversations migrated from work to parenting to language as the night wore on.

by the time i left i was practically falling over from exhaustion - at least i'd made an effort to drink a fair amount of non-alcoholic liquids along the way - and i hailed a taxi home and climbed into bed. i got a particularly warm and fuzzy feeling from ending a night of good company and entertainment with a heart-to-heart with a taxi driver about the state of the nation that left him profusely thanking me for the conversation (which i'd very much enjoyed too).

it didn't take long for me to climb into bed (having thankfully received authorization from my wife that i didn't need to shower again first) and i mostly slept well, and late. it's been a slow and pleasant morning, we've talked and i've read (i'm halfway through blindsight) and now i've posted this, and gd and i are on our way to the shop quickly to pick up flour in honor of friends coming over for lunch.

the horror

 today began with preparing a document for mr smear (and gd) to learn the hebrew months, and getting mr smear out of bed to do math homework. there was some tension, but nothing too serious, and we got through it. i flipped our mattresses, did some dishes, (finally) checked that we had authorization for wednesday's allergy challenge, and left for work.

after a long chat with my mom about aliyah, i entered the office for a day filled with interruptions of interruptions.

highlights/lowlights:

a) finally getting in touch with a potential partner after being assured they'd been updated by their superiors, and they hadn't.

b) discovering that our outsourced security team had updated a policy without asking for our consent, or informing us, and it disconnected everyone in rnd, some of whom were engaged in mission-critical tasks. i lost my temper - i've never cursed that much or that loudly in the office*. i informed my boss that they'd crossed a line (not exactly for the first time) and we need to bring our security in-house. i think he heard me pretty clearly this time.

* and, oddly enough, in hebrew. i don't think i've ever done that before, i've always found cursing in hebrew awkward.

c) by the end of the day, after hours battling buggy docker behavior, i finally got to the bottom of our devcontainer / vpn issues. ironically, they were caused by a misconfiguration by my british coworker when he originally tried to fix them, but for some reason everything seemed to work well for almost two weeks before wigging out.

so at least i can move forward with my real work now.

...

i travelled most of the way home with our tech ops guy (there're two now, but whatever), and i was shocked to discover that he's a jewish israeli that was born and raised here but has zero connection or comprehension of judaism. i gave him a bit of a lecture on why i think it's important for non-observant jews to understand the history of our beliefs and practices, and he was totally shocked by what i had to say.

i arrived home, picked up mr smear, and the two of us went off to the mall to buy sleeping bags for the class camping trip this weekend. heavy cigarette smell in the bus notwithstanding, we had a long conversation during which i was shocked and dismayed to learn that he'd spent a good chunk of his day on youtube, behind gd's back, watching really disturbing horror videos.

i've now seen his watch history. i mean disturbing. thanks, youtube, for managing kids' content so safely. and thanks, also, for not enabling parents to block desktop youtube over family link.

on our way home, we sat down for some really good falafel (and i awkward didn't realize why ze british german's wife looked familiar until she'd already greeted me and walked past), then picked up a sandwich for gd, and came home.

another late night for mr smear (his antivirals), but thank god getting him to sleep went smoother than anticipated. i've spent most of the night playing more shadowrun, and now i'm going to bed, trying - continuing to try, at least - not to think about the war / hostage release situation. and now that i've typed that, i'll probably check the news and fuck myself up a bit :/

breathe in

 i finally dived back in to shadowrun: hong kong. i ended up climbing into bed around 2.30am.

i woke up around 8.30am, enjoyed a cup of coffee and more shadowrun, and then took a pleasant, quiet walk to the pharmacy and back to get gd's meds. it was a beautiful morning for it.

a classmate of mr smear's arrived, with a foul-mouth and some interesting inherited opinions (when i said we're vegan, he unabashedly responded "cringe!"), and the two of them seemed to have a good time.

and then a weird thing happened - mr smear's friend convinced him to try watching forrest gump. in spite of the initial protests, we continued watching after his friend's mom picked him up and we all loved it (and i occasionally sobbed uncontrollably, at one point mr smear misread it as laughing).

i did some of the dishes, then took mr smear out for a very pleasant walk to and through the park, and we got home in time for dinner and futurama, followed by showering / brushing teeth / doing the rest of the dishes while mr smear entertains himself and gd reading trivia and garfield out loud.

half an hour to his herpes-meds bedtime.

...

i'm sad that mr smear has decided to stop doing the inktober challenge, but he got through a third of it, and he did so brilliantly.

the lesson

 today started off a bit shit, with a half-hour homework battle. on the one hand, it was exhausting. on the other hand, i managed to take it to a good place, and he was happy when he finally understood what to do.

he joined me in picking up a bunch of garfield books we ordered, and then continued on with me to work.

the work day was a bit rough, with the worst of it being the discovery - around 5pm - that the contractor's code i'd accepted in the morning had a pretty serious issue. i had to work on it before and after dinner, and i only got through the shit a short while ago.

otherwise, the tech ops guy invited us to join him on a mission to see the cosplayers at icon, which we all enjoyed, and mr smear and i both thoroughly enjoyed the bagels we picked up on the way back.

...

otherwise, mr smear's eye seems to be responding well to the meds, but gd's really having a hard time with her shoulder :(

chlorine

 godsdammit. we don't have anything conclusive to go by, but it seems like swimming in chlorine may be triggering mr smear's herpes :/

The authors describe the case of a highly stressed 36-year-old man who experienced ten or more painful episodes per year of recurrent oral-lingual herpes simplex virus 1, which were only partially responsive to acyclovir therapy for three years. A three-year diary of activities, personal stresses, concurrent infections, local trauma, and other possible psychogenic, somatogenic, and environmental events was used systematically to attempt to pair the stresses with the recurrent herpes episodes. Chlorinated swimming pool water seems to have been the triggering agent of the recurrent herpes simplex virus 1 episodes due to its temporal correlation and the greater than twenty-four-month asymptomatic period after the patient discontinued swimming in chlorinated water, but continued to swim in fresh and salt water, along with his normal pursuit of all other activities and habits. [source]

i guess we'll be more aware from now on...

...

otherwise, he was freaked out by the second episode of full metal alchemist: brotherhood and doesn't want to see any more. i guess i'm on my own.

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)

quieter

 i definitely slept better last night. it was weird, though - i got a phone call earlier with the results, and aside from a recommendation to visit an ENT for my snoring i was informed that my sleep was just fine. but i slept horribly. so i don't know what to make of that.

this morning went pretty smoothly in spite of mr smear's failed attempts to stay home. dropping him off at school was pleasant - lately i'm making a point of taking him because it's the best opportunity for us to just talk - and i managed to fix up one of my side projects that i'd neglected.

and then... take care of the massive crow turd on the external air-conditioning unit outside mr smear's window. and it's neighbor, the windowsill turd we hadn't noticed before. gd was gagging, and i was upset: there's a massive difference between cleaning up one's child, or picking up after one's pet, than doing the same for somebody else's. or somebody else. or something else.

i felt violated. it was about the size of a border collie poop and i had to scrape it off in multiple attempts 🤮

...

it was a bit cooler today (and it was quite rainy this evening), so i regretted not wearing a sweater to and from the office. the office vibe was totally different today, as most of the org was either in the field or working from home, and at peak there were four of us in a large open space. it was strange, but not unpleasant. very quiet.

at lunch time - while scarfing down a mixture of leftovers that gd had put together that worked out surprisingly well - i ended up talking about our aliyah experience and about the state of south africa. i don't recall how the conversation got there, but i really brought the guys down and every time i tried to spin into something positive i managed to make it somehow worse :/

i couldn't stop snacking all day. most of it was the fruit platter that i effectively had all to myself :P

work-wise, i left after getting really good results that i'm very pleased with ^_^ (although i literally couldn't believe it when i finally got everything green!)

...

i came home a bit earlier than usual, hurrying to avoid the rain, and there was just enough time before dinner to do some of mr smear's hebrew reading with him and a page of his geometry homework. he did it all without the usual battle, and it was actually a good experience for both of us!

so that was cool.

we watched a disturbing episode of delicious in dungeon over dinner (episode 23 - griffin soup), and we had a smooth shower / bedtime. gd and i watched an episode of two of seinfeld after i saw a relatively recent interview with michael richards - the standup bits aren't funny, but the stories are great - during which i passed out on the couch and woke up to her watching a show in which a kid gets arrested on suspicion of murder.

i've been watching random stuff, and drinking tea, and i think i'm going to crash soon. tomorrow morning's going to be intense - gd's applying for her proper israeli passport, after which i have to go to the school to administer mr smear's meds (he's having another outbreak around his eye) because she's got a doctor's appointment - hopefully it'll go smoothly.

...

this is jd vance saying something brilliant and obviously true: outsourcing manufacturing has hurt the west immeasurably.

and here's boston dynamics showing off a robot that's more athletic than an australian breakdancer

dreams and nightmares

 i slept horribly last night. like, way worse than usual. i was wired and restless, physically uncomfortable, and the entire experience sucked. i even got up in the middle of the night and faffed around for an hour or two, but the remaining hours of the morning before getting up weren't much better for it.

i vaguely recall the morning going alright. [gets to the end of the post and remembers that the ceasefire ended this morning. i'm grateful we got some of the hostages back, but we always knew that this was just a ploy by hamas to stall and survive and mess with us some more]

i walked mr smear to school, returned home, and then all of a sudden it was later than i thought and i had to rush to get to the sleep lab to return the equipment.

fortunately, i was only a few minutes late. i dropped off the gear, then hopped on an unfamiliar bus to work. it worked out fine.

...

my work day was intense, but overall great. it started awkwardly with me trying to help the new guy get his computer sorted out and not understanding that he was calling a thumb drive "DOK", proceeded with me starting to execute a plan my lead and i had come up with together, and before lunch we were treated to a surprise visit and talk by one of our customers. it was eye-opening.

after lunch, i finally got hold of one of the guys whose name everyone knows and we sat down to chat. his story was riveting, as is his job. mind-blowingly cool.

i got good work done in the afternoon, and was getting ready to go home when one of my coworkers caught me for a five minute conversation that turned into an hour-long intense discussion. although i was very eager to get out of there (which was duly noted), i feel like it was a really good discussion and that i managed to bridge two decidedly different approaches and attitudes.

...

i raced home, way too late for dinner, and scarfed down some of the leftovers. mr smear told me about some bullying that happened - on top of the fact that his best friend refused to go to school today because he's being bullied too - so that was that first bit of a shit feeling to bring me down from my work-high. then mr smear was a bit rude to my mom during their good-night chat, and another bullying incident surfaced that he'd handled poorly, which brought me down a bit more.

and then we discovered that he's having another herpes outbreak - it's been a year and four days since the first proper one - and that just brought the house down.

...

after saying good night to him i complained about how the evening had turned out, which gd misinterpreted, and then we had a fight. it took a while to get out of the fight, a part of which was gd remembering how distraught she's been since the morning news about the war resuming. we had a good talk about where we are and how the world looks right now, which turned to spirituality and religion.

and then a conversation about how the day went. and now... it's past 11pm and i don't know if i'm going to be able to sleep or not, but i'm pretty confident i'm not feeling like doing anything constructive right now. i kinda wanted to go to the purim (post-purim) rollerblade, but between all the emotions and the slight chance of rain i just couldn't.

and, of course, my eyes are feeling itchy now.

almost-weekend stress

 it's going to be an intense day today. on my way out my boss and i synced on how out-of-sync we were, so today i'm going to do what i can to achieve all the stretch goals before the weekend so that i can start something new on sunday and help him feel ready for his parental leave.

my scalp's already feeling much better after three days of shampooing, but i'm going to pick up the treatment on my way to work today anyway.

mr smear's definitely on the mend. hopefully he'll be back at school soon.

i slept on the couch last night. i slept well. i'm now confident that most of my sleep disruptions over the past years have been due to sleeping on the wrong beds. like, i'm actually feeling functional today.

holy shit: yesterday i suggested to a coworker that maybe one day someone will figure out how to remove herpes using CRISPR. this morning i opened my browser to look for something and this article on removing HIV with CRISPR popped up out of nowhere.

hospitalization

 an hour or two being bounced between offices until we gave up and went to the clinic, where they took pity on a miserable-looking mr smear and sent us up to the nurse who gave us the referral.

we did the ER thing from about 11am until around 9pm, it took half the day to get the PCR results from thursday and for a professor of infectious diseases to come and take a look at him: the diagnoses did end up being herpes, and he hadn't been responding well to the meds we were giving him, so we took him through for another eye examination before he was hospitalized for a couple of days' infusion.

i was already very sore and tired by then. around noon i'd had to rush home and back for medication, in the evening i rushed home and back for a t-shirt and underwear for mr smear and to pick up dinner for all of us, which gd really didn't enjoy, and for most of the day we were either walking around or sitting on uncomfortable chairs.

once we got him settled, i went home to shower and brush my teeth and pick up a couple more things and returned to relieve gd and let her go home.

it's been seven years since our last hospitalization, and it's much easier this time around. if it wasn't for a night full of alarms for IV occlusions waking me up during REM sleep it might've been the most comfortable night's sleep i've had in years.

i was a wreck after being woken up this morning, but i'm feeling okay now. and mr smear is happy because he's hooked into a bed with a screen that lets him watch youtube...

... gd just arrived, it's coffee and breakfast time.

outbreak

 thursday:

i don't remember if it was wednesday or thursday, but there were hours of work spent hunting down bugs that were introduced by copilot. copilot certainly helped me get the code written faster, but that's the first time i've had to deal with a real bug hunt for a mistake i would never have made had i written it all myself...

early in the afternoon, gd took mr smear to the clinic to get his eye checked out - he'd been suffering from an outbreak for a day or two, we initially thought it was just a scratch and by wednesday evening it was starting to look worrying. the doctor wasn't sure, but she thought it might be herpes and i immediately became anxious - i've been nervous about herpes keratitis since my officer's course teammate developed it.

i sent off some photos for an online consultation with a dermatologist, and in retrospect it's pretty amazing how quickly one got back to me. by 4.30 i was on my way to meeting gd and mr smear at the hospital with a referral for the children's ER in hand.

it took about an hour before we got to see the triage nurse. after another hour in the waiting area with the kid with a scary cough who refused to wear his mask and a row of vending machines with exactly zero products appropriate for children, i approached the receptionist and asked how long the average wait was post-triage - one hour? two hours? she was immediately offended that i would ask such a vulgar question, and of course it would be less than an hour...

... mr smear's number finally got called another hour after that. the doctor examined him, and then sent us to an opthalmologist in a different building, where we waited again, but fortunately not for too long.

after the opthalmologist, we returned to the ER as instructed. after another half an hour of waiting, i approached the counter and asked if we'd been forgotten: "no, we're still waiting for the opthalmologist to enter the summary". holy shit, we could have waited until the next morning for that, and gd was starting to freak out because she wanted to get out of there in time to pick up whatever medication would be prescribed.

so they contacted the opthalmologist, who eventually did what he had to do, while i sat entertaining mr smear with random jokes from the internet and gd paced up and down. then we went around in circles between the doctors and nurses while they tried to figure out what to do about the four or five different possible diagnoses they'd come up with, and took a couple of samples.

it was just about 11pm when we finally left, all three of us completely exhausted.

yesterday:

we all needed to sleep in a little bit yesterday. mr smear woke up complaining that it was getting worse, and we were all in a shitty mood and totally over the day before it began. we (slowly) got moving and went to the clinic, where we were fortunate to find his paediatrician in her rooms. once we'd all figured out how we were proceeding, gd went to the pharmacy and mr smear and i went to get breakfast bagels.

i'd been talking to the guy at the counter for a minute when i turned around to find mr smear furiously rubbing his eye with the edge of his glasses, and while i want to say "it took everything i could not to freak out", the truth is i absolutely freaked out.

holy @#!$.

i rushed him off to gd, who thankfully had something to wipe his glasses and his face with, but it's been twenty four hours and i'm still not really over the horror.

i returned alone to apologize and pick up the bagels, then met up with them to eat breakfast. then pick up a treat for mr smear - the 14th diary of a wimpy kid book, the 13th wasn't available [though i just picked it up on kindle for him] - and then come home to try and get some rest.

by sundown i managed to put out the article i'd been fiddling with over the course of the week, so that was a relief.

today:

we're still trying to get some rest. we're just breathing into the day one moment at a time.

mr cat sent me the first draft of the dedication for the comics, and it's looking great, so today i'm going to try to get him the margin notes i promised i'd send "in a bit" yesterday :P

just thursday

 groovy start

getting shit done

mom work disappointment and phone / bank hack war declared

what a beautiful, crisp and sunny morning, the last seagulls wheeling their goodbyes and i'm grateful to be alive today

only i'm hating my face as my ear spreads to my beard. timing is everything, i guess it's partially a result of saturday's laser intensity.

it's been a year of decades, i feel. my father's death, and now my first real outbreak since i contracted it ten / eleven years ago. at least i can finally relax about being asymptomatic. i'm clearly not.

meeting room with hotel breakfast muzak

more studying

easy ios update

swiftkey sucks. because privacy invasion with no explanation.

no energy for poetry, gorgeous sunset

pinched nerve returns after a day off

iphone imovie experience pretty impressive!

my little twilio project versus the wolf of wall street. it took me two hours to realize that i was watching an intensely amusing three hour movie that brought absolutely zero added value to my life. five minutes later i'd done something very, very cool.