electric pukaloo

 our pre-hackathon talk was interesting, i was grateful that my wife had come home in time to keep me supplied with coffee and for our beanbags which served as both seat and stand.

in the background i was installing local llm models, one of which initialized and was so heavy it killed my computer and it took so long to shut it down (everything was unresponsive, and the audio was jittering) that i had to rejoin the meeting from my personal laptop...

over lunch, gd and i watched the first bit of the ludwig pilot, and it starts off really strong!

i struggled to "wake up", as i mentioned before, and by the time i was (relatively) ready to dive into my work i received a call from one of the juniors - the same jobs had died once again. i found what seemed to be a smoking gun, connected some dots, and it looked like a broken infrastructure upgrade, but later on (after finally wrapping my head around what i'm supposed to be doing) i got another call back to say it wasn't that, but rather a legitimate bug in the code. we hunted it down, and although it did eventually turn out to be the bug, i was mighty suspicious as it's a code path that hasn't been touched since the project inception and the likelihood of it "suddenly" becoming a problem is extremely low.

anyway, i helped out, essentially taking charge, and along with another of his teammates we managed to get it resolved. the boss / my client called me for an update, and once i'd made sure that the junior had it handled i was able to join my family for dinner.

i didn't mention that i'd taken a break earlier to go pick up some stuff from the shops - i made mr smear come out with me on his blades, though i was walking, and he was not in the mood. with that in mind, i think we were both pleasantly surprised by the end of it; not only was i very happy with his progress, but so was he, and he straight-up told me that he was wrong and that i was welcome to lord it over him, and that compared to the hell that is bicycles, rollerblading is heavenly.

so that happened ^_^

i was late to join mr smear and gd for dinner, and i ate arguably more than i needed to, and then mr smear and i ate the oranges i'd picked up earlier. everything was fine until we saw two highly active fruit fly larvae wriggling around the remains of his orange.

he's always had a thing about worms, creepy crawlies in general but worms in particular, and what followed was some serious high drama. and lots of googling to be able to assure him he'd be fine, and then i started feeling uncomfortable so i decided to try and throw up.

any time i successfully throw up "on command" it blows my mind.

anyway, the rest of the evening post emotional-rollercoaster was fine, i read a bit of alice's adventures in wonderland to him at bedtime, and have been slowly gearing down and preparing myself to try and get some sleep since.

waiting for the next one

 it's been quiet since the weekend, and it's very unclear whether we're done with rocket attacks for a bit or if this is just the calm before the storm.

saturday was pretty peaceful, in the evening we went over to friends for dinner and had a really nice time. we rushed to get home in time for an anticipated 9pm attack, but that didn't happen.

on sunday morning mr smear went to school (they're alternating days between grades to reduce pressure), and on my way back from dropping him off i happened to look in the postbox and pick up the invitation to gd's medical panel that we'd been told was cancelled. just in case, i called to check and they informed me that the medical panel had not been cancelled.

oh.

so what followed was a mad scramble to gather all our documentation - not realizing that none of it would count because we were supposed to submit it weeks ago - and find someone to take over my on-call responsibilities for a few hours, and someone to pick up mr smear from school, and hop on a bus (a couple of buses) to get to the hospital complex.

it's a good thing we arrived an hour early, because it took us almost an hour to find out where we needed to go and get there.

the medical panel seemed to go alright, although it's obviously impossible to say. at least we know the appeal process is somewhat reasonable.

about halfway home, mr smear's teacher called us to ask why nobody had picked him up. flat panic ensued, he'd been waiting for half an hour with the guard as his friend's au pair had forgotten about him.

fuck.

by the time we got to his friend's place (which was on the way to the school) they'd already picked him up and returned, and when i tried to apologize to him and explain what had happened he cut me short with "uh, dad - do you mind? i'm kind of in the middle of something" and asked to stay over for a bit.

uh... okay.

the rest of the day, including picking him up and taking him for an ice-cream, went smoothly.

yesterday: oh, shit. that was only yesterday. wow.

so... today:

i woke up this morning from disturbing dreams after having been woken up earlier as punishment for going to bed relatively early. i'm going to call it insomnia, but i really don't know what's going on with my brain and my body these past few months. or years. goddammit.

today was another zoom-school day, not as bad as thursday but not great. it was nice to not be on-call anymore, but it's now the third business day in a row that i'm working on a steaming pile of shit and it's very unpleasant and demoralizing. the progress is extremely slow, i keep bumping into nasty surprises, and the biggest question that keeps coming up is "how the fuck did any of this work before?!"

aside: a wasp flew into our apartment today. gd's got a serious phobia, mr smear's scared of flies and cockroaches, and there's me taking at least a couple of minutes to find something i could (relatively) safely hit it with. at one point i managed to knock it (with impact or with air, i don't know) and i raced to stand near the window, fully expecting a very angry wasp to come straight at me. it kind of did, but when i went to push/hit it towards the window it just continued in that direction and flew away. leaving me with my heart racing. i immediately shut the windows and we turned on the air conditioner for the rest of the day. ain't nobody got time for more o' that.

so it was a difficult day, physically uncomfortable, stressed. at the end of it i took mr smear for a walk to eat laffot for dinner, which was a great idea. we enjoyed the walk together, and the meal, 

the bedtime routine was going well until gd - joking around - upset mr smear and he decided he needed to get back at her, and he was so mean that he just stuffed up the evening for everyone :(

to be honest, i'm so used to the shoe being on the other foot that i didn't know what to do. i tried to fix things, tried to get him to fix things, tried to get gd to fix things, and then eventually just gave up. i feel bad for gd, but i'm also a tiny bit relieved that it's not me for once :P

i'm not physically tired yet, but i'm emotionally exhausted. i don't know what i'm going to do with my night. probably play some more crying suns like i did last night for a bit.

*jumps to retrieve all the groceries which have just been delivered after 10pm*