optics

 last night was reasonably quiet, as opposed to right now where i'm babysitting an emergency rescue deployment and my eyes have suddenly gone out of sync. to be fair, i've been continuing to play the final sequences (i think) of shadowrun: hong kong and i can't really tell if i've just spent too much time in front of the screens or if i'm having some kind of exhaustion-related ocular migraine.

anyway. there was some tension this morning due to mr smear needing help with some homework he'd forgotten about right before leaving for school, but this evening we continued it and it went pretty well - we're learning about interesting greek history while learning some pretty high-level hebrew simultaneously.

the work day was mostly a continuation of the previous evening's frustrations, but combined with me teaching a new guy how to be frustrated and troubleshoot. overall, we were successful and we both learned a lot.

yeah, my brain hurts. maybe i should call it a night.

failed to restart

 i'm tired. but my coworker was worse off than me today, he came in with heatstroke :/

mr smear left a minute or two before me today, and instead of waiting downstairs, he just left. without saying goodbye. so i followed him, walking at a fast pace, and caught up with him just after he crossed the highway onramp, so i got to see him handling everything alright.

i dropped him off at school, then headed to the office.

i'm having a hard time with names and faces now. like, a really hard time.

today was another day of one distraction after another. the new "team captain" has arrived, but he's onboarding so he hasn't really joined us yet.

i struggled to not snack today.

i came home a bit later than i'd like, but not for any good reason. we watched more twins over dinner, and then had a family meeting about the new math homework rules. shower / toothbrush time was smooth, getting mr smear to sleep was much easier... he at least tried what i was telling him about relaxing his body in order to relax his mind.

i guess i'll find out tomorrow how it went from his perspective.

i passed out on the couch, but woke up with bits of the jelly beads from mr smear's "prize" all over me. and then got stuck trying to solve a bizarre work issue.

i want to play a little shadowrun before going to bed, but i don't think i have the brain for it :(

common ground

 it's been a long ass-day and i'm exhausted, but i'm sure i won't have time to post anything tomorrow so i'm going to jot down what i can before i crash:

i accompanied mr smear to school this morning, then hopped on a bus to the post office to pick up a package for gd.

i was on my way home this morning from dropping my son off at school, it's a beautiful morning and the world feels a whole lot more right than it did just a few days ago.

and then, out of nowhere, my brain started pulling up flashes of trauma from the past two years. not the horrors of october 7th, not the endless sheltering from rocket attacks, not the immeasurable loss of our soldiers, not the endless defending ourselves from all the lies, but the "friends" who turned out to be evil scum. the traitorous jews who think that our enemies would spare them if they promote their evil agenda.

i don't know if there will ever be a reckoning. terrorists, jihadists? we know why they do the evil that they do. but those who support and are complicit in their evil? you're worse human beings than the terrorists. at least they have *some* integrity.

on my way to work i arranged for a technician to come and check out our washing machine, which has been leaking :(

i spent the work day jumping between interesting things, getting some minor stuff done along the way. the biggest and most surprising elements of the day were meeting a bunch of the new people and finding lots of different common grounds.

oh, and i reviewed and discussed the investigation results from our security company, it was satisfactory but we're still going to try to bring it in-house.

for a couple of hours between happy hour and me getting home i felt painfully bloated. but only for a couple of hours. i don't know why.

i rushed out a bit late for my hairdresser's appointment, i ended up five minutes late but it was alright. the haircut itself was good, and i only nodded off a couple of times (i tried really hard not to). the poor guy can barely understand english, never mind hebrew, so our attempts at small talk invariably resulted in him holding up his translation app to record me asking questions or making comments that really weren't important :P

although gd had a really rough day with mr smear and his homework, my experience in the evening was pretty calm. once he was in bed, i sat down to get some work done, which took about an hour and a half. i'm not quite sure what i've been doing for the hour since then, but i'm almost done with my chamomile tea so i guess this is it for now.

...

i'm a teensy bit paranoid because i either cut myself on, or got a splinter from, a hand grip on a bus this morning :/

busy

 i'm starting this while the day's still not over - it's almost 11pm and i'm testing a contractor's changes in the hopes i have a good answer for him by morning.

today was busy. i dropped mr smear off at school and went straight to work, and got stuck into an interesting hour of explaining my vision to one of our new product managers. then i discovered that it was one of our incoming devops guys' official first day, and spending the day with him, onboarding and planning, was generally much easier than our previous interactions.

the day involved a lot of management, strategy, and a lot of testing and fixing.

i guess i ate relatively well, too, but that wasn't out of choice, more lack of snacks in the office kitchens.

my only real break was picking up mr smear from the station and taking him to his final therapy session. tomorrow morning's our last guidance session with the therapist, too.

it took me longer to leave the office than i'd hoped, and gd's arm's so messed up that mr smear and i both needed to help her get dinner ready. we did it, but unfortunately so late that we couldn't watch anything while we ate (no screens an hour before bedtime) and mr smear ended up getting into bed much later than he should have, complaining about there not being time for reading and then about his "night light" (the air-conditioner). i eventually managed to get him to go to sleep by himself, but it wasn't easy. (to be fair, it wasn't that hard, but everything's relative to how tired one is)

at least the hole in his leg seems to be getting better.

i've spent the past two hours on the testing, and it's still not done. and i haven't even looked at facebook because i know there're a bunch of messages regarding the comic printing that i don't really have energy to go through right now...