wtf wednesday (ceasefire?)

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

...

yesterday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

today (so far):

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

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

a power day

 well, the next part of the day was pretty rough - but in a fun way, i guess? it certainly was an experience. 

firstly, mr smear is now full-on into counter-strike, and it's nice to see him not giving up and getting excited by his successes. so it was a cool tone to set before we head out to his regular allergist checkup.

but we headed out right in the heaviest part of a massive thunderstorm. fortunately, we both had our big-enough rain boots on, the water levels were high everywhere and my waterproof shoes would have been flooded from the top. and we had a time avoiding cars spraying water onto the sidewalks, and we got pelleted with hail (his first time outside in hail), and the walk from the bus to the hospital was just ridiculous - a real urban jungle adventure - and of course, the sun came out just as we arrived at our destination.

from that point on it became impossible to close my umbrella...

there was a bit of confusion (which was to be expected) at the reception, but we made it through the bureaucratic gauntlet and went upstairs to the allergy clinic. it was war-time very quiet and there were only two other kids there, surprisingly calm and extremely cute children, so off the bat it was a much less stressful time with mr smear. at that point my tiredness and lack of caffeine began catching up with me, but the allergist and her nurse were efficient and mr smear managed to distract himself from the prick-test itching with games on his phone, and pretty soon we were discussing the results.

it seems like, sadly, his allergy level is stabilizing rather than going away, we'll know better in the next year or two. but even so, the level it's stabilizing at is far less dramatic than before, so while he'll still need an epipen and to be careful not to consume dairy, we don't need to be so scared of accidental contact.

it's / it should be fine.

we went through the hospital mall, where i picked up an emergency coffee just as the attack warning sounded. considering the fact that the roof is made of glass, i get why the safe area was three floors below ground... there was nowhere comfortable to sit, so the two of us walked around the parking lot full of people occupying themselves on their phones and amused ourselves playing word association games.

then we returned to pick up a couple of things at the supermarket, and a couple of bottles of sublingual b12 at the pharmacy (while waiting in the uncomfortably crowded aisle for the self-service checkout, gd called twice while i was holding an umbrella that refused to stay closed, a cup of coffee, and two bottles of b12. i was not in my happy place.

mr smear and i took a bus home - to his chagrin, he always wants to walk these days to get some exercise - and he signed on to his remote classes while i finally got wednesday's code review approved and got started on the follow-up improvement. gd has managed to schedule me a haircut, so a short while late i headed out to catch a bus to sheinkin.

i had some time to spare, so i got a little more work done and drank a coffee that i must assume was soy milk (because they said so, and i honestly can't tell). i arrived just on time for my haircut appointment, and another attack warning. everyone headed across the road to a hotel shelter (the same hotel my cousin threw his farewell party in on mr smear's birthday), which was an interesting experience, and then we returned to get into it. i thought the coffee would keep me from nodding in the chair, but...

... i'm really happy with the haircut. gd's happy with it too. i'm very enthusiastically grateful that i'm no longer sporting my jew-fro / isro :P

it took a long time to get home (i shouldn't have gotten off the bus when i did), and while i waited for the connection mr smear had an accident while helping gd and the two of them had to deal with a smashed plate. so that happened.

the evening was me completing the work and studying a bit (data engineering), and mr smear playing more counter-strike, and then a pretty intensive training in which mr smear admirably demonstrated that he not only could STFU when being given instructions, but that he could redirect his anger and frustration energy into the drill we were doing (a liver shot combo) (even if he did feel the need to tell me that he was imagining that he was hitting me), into continuing the work through discomfort, into stepping into his first impact training (feather-light touch from me, but a big deal for him), into pushing himself through difficult post-training exercises (like planking, diamond push-ups, crunches and burpees), into taekwondo-style stretching.

all the while holding himself in check, even when it was clear he was emotionally at the edge. when we were done, his pride was quiet but visible, and he didn't argue with me the first couple of times i told him how proud i was (he did a bit later, though :P).

a great dinner (double yo-egg, both types as a very successful pre-pesach experiment), and everyone into the merch episode of strip search with lots of pausing to discuss. shower-time and tooth-brushing time were very positive (gd and i were loving him singing along to my playlist at the top of his voice), and his bedtime was earlier than it's been for a while and much more peaceful.

after saying good night, i went on a hunt for vitamin d resources that someone asked me for regarding testing / screening and dosage:

there're a lot of studies that discuss the unreliability of testing - this one's pretty clear - check out the "sources cited" button beneath this video (it's really worth watching). 

see also the "accuracy of screening tests" section of the US preventive services task force report.

and then i watched a whole lot of youtube videos (war news interspersed with random shit), and now this, and then... maybe i'll go to bed soon.

[attack warning]

making a molehill out of a mountain

i woke up around 10am this morning having slept a fair amount, and i woke up feeling a bit shocked and confused as a result.

today was a lot less nice than it should have been. it involved playing tekken 3 and counterstrike 1.6 with mr smear (no other versions run on the windows machine, and no versions run on a mac), and there were some glorious moments. but there were also lots of shitty emotions that came out - some borne of miscommunication, some of mr smear exhibiting a shitty attitude and me taking it more personally than i should have), and as a result the day was not full of joy.

on a different note, i spent a *lot* of time today - mostly between other things - finishing the work i started yesterday on my telephony side project.

i guess i feel a bit more productive, at least more than i've felt all week.

in war news, it was a pretty quiet day today, gd's stomach seems to be feeling a bit better than it has in months, and we had a massive electric storm this afternoon.

t-4

 there's so much stuff happening, i'm sure i'm forgetting important notes along the way.

today began peacefully, with dishes, and moon knight, and interesting conversation* with mr smear.

* although we did have a serious argument when he told me i'm a hypocrite. i'm a lot of things, but i'm pretty sure i'm not a hypocrite. and besides, i'd only just explained to him what a hypocrite is.

it ended peacefully, with mr smear laughing until he choked multiple times while i read some more of the colour of magic to him (i'm thinking he's finally ready for it), and completing my employer's onboarding, and dishes, and having gd wake up to my howl of distress to advise me to put a glove on to retrieve the sink filter that i dropped into a particularly gross bin situation.

...

we arrived at the new apartment just before the plumber's brother did. we walked through the work that needed doing, and he pointed out that three taps needed replacing, not just one. and then he and his brother quoted me for the work, and my jaw dropped.

the landlord agreed to him taking care of the pipes, but didn't want to replace the taps... "right now", he said. so i asked him if we could make an arrangement, that i'd pay for the taps now and he'd pay me back later. and he agreed, and i rejoiced.

our friend/neighbor came down (she brought coffee) and joined us for a while, and when i felt i wasn't needed any more i headed to the office. when the plumber's brother was done and they were all heading out, she noticed something wrong with one of the kitchen windows - it doesn't latch, and we're currently in the middle of a storm with high winds and plenty of wet.

the good news (to my mind) is that the landlord's acknowledged this issue, so i guess it's clearly (again, to my mind) his fault if the floors get damaged. in the meanwhile, i managed to get our window guy from a few months ago to come in tomorrow afternoon, hopefully he'll come up with a solution that makes everyone happy 🤞

at the same time, while i was in the apartment i managed to get the electrician we used a while back to agree to come in and install three-phase under the hot plates. the "under" part will be tricky, but that's a tomorrow problem...

also, the plumber's brother came up with a great suggestion that makes installing our water dispenser much less messy.

work was crazy today. i got in 45 productive minutes after i came in, but then immediately had to return to the apartment to help gd with the unpleasant woman who came to take another look. i arrived to a not-unpleasant vibe, and after she left gd informed me that of all the details of her life to come into play, this woman grew up in the same neighborhood in turkey that gd lived in for a year. apparently, that's a reason to play nice with us. or maybe it's just because she's desperate for the apartment...

i paid the plumber (who'd become antsy), i ate, and i returned to the office. i had a long meeting trying to explain to my bulgarian teammates what i was doing to fine-tune the model's guesses and enable them to share the workload, and then a shorter meeting with my local teammates (kind of), and during that meeting one of the guys (the slipknot-not-synthknot guy) confronted me about the n-gram detection. we agreed to work together to see if maybe i'd missed something.

by the end of the day - an hour and a half later, because i had to go home again for another viewing - we'd determined that while the "gold standard" n-gram detection that i was using was as shit as i'd remembered, that there's another one he'd used before that was much less shit. but more important than that, he'd revealed that the company officially supports a very specific set of languages, and his n-gram detector proved 100% accurate (on our small sample set) for all of them!

so that's very exciting news, and tomorrow's mission is now to test this detection on as many production samples as we can to establish its "good enough-ness".

...

gd's done an incredible amount of packing and cleaning (even if, in my opinion, she really doesn't need to invest so much in the cleaning) over the past few days, but we're now getting to a point where there's not a hell of a lot to eat or eat with :P

it's very strange seeing the layers of our lives that slowly built up over the last four years being rapidly peeled back to eventually reveal an empty apartment that shows practically no trace that we were ever here.

adrenaline dump

 i barely slept last night, and i woke up absolutely exhausted. so much so that i thought i might literally be sick. but i revisited the messages, and the advice i got from our friend, and i effectively scrapped my original, well-thought-out but ultimately combative response and made nice, and the response we received was reciprocally positive. i also got a very positive response from the new landlord, when i was being cautious because i know he's not asking anything that isn't standard.

so this morning was a huge relief on that front.

gd and i did the grocery shopping, and then i hurriedly took photos of our big belongings for the mover (i really felt like i was casing my own joint), and continued adding on to the list of things that need doing, then i had to leave for work in the rain, only once on the way realizing i needed to be working from my employer's office.

i called our kibbutz cousin to wish her a happy 70th birthday along the way, then walked in to the office with a dripping umbrella (and nowhere to put it) and tried to warm myself up with a sequence of hot drinks.

i managed to make some progress in understanding the data pipeline project, but i had a lot of trouble staying focused. eventually i got up to take a walk and pick up an early lunch, and sync with gd along the way, who'd been dealing with a bunch of stuff herself.

after lunch, and a long chat with a kibbutznik coworker who travelled africa extensively in the 90s, i finally sat back down for an hour of focus-time. that was when i realized that the chairs in our office are the same as in the wework that i suffered in a couple of years ago. it got so bad i had to move to a couch.

both before, and after, moving the couch, i was having a lot of trouble keeping my eyes open. but i did learn some important stuff. i have to say, if it wasn't for the combination of half-decent documentation and ai i don't know where i'd be right now.

then it was time for the final session of the weekly agentic courses i've been taking. i understand what was being taught, but me and the tools did not get along. when things calm down i'm going to get back in the ring with opencode and ollama and see if i can get them to play nicely. in the meanwhile, no matter what i did - mostly trying to copy and paste the prompts that everyone was doing fine with - my ai agents were playing dumb and i couldn't get anything done.

it was a relief to know that as frustrated as i was, i wasn't the only person in the class, but i think that there might only have been two of us...

my brain was cooked by the time i got on the bus home, and i put on some psytrance and tried to get in some meditation time. it was working, my mental state was stabilizing, when a bunch of big, brutish bus conductors stormed the bus to check our tickets. aside from telling myself "this is fine", i didn't think much of it and carried on being in my head, but a short while later i started hearing strange sounds (the wrong kind of strange) and i paused the track to discover that one of the thugs was having a fight with the bus driver, a big, elderly man, and for too long it looked like they were about to come to blows.

eventually their fight climaxed (to my knowledge) with the bus driver confronting the conductor to take a photo of his badge, and that almost got physical, and then when the conductor asked him his name he responded, in a heavy israeli accent, "james bond".

and then we were all treated to the two of them calling their bosses at the same time to report each other, each one telling a different story and none of us having any idea what had actually gone down initially.

i got off the bus a stop early, even more on edge than before i got on.

i came home to a pile of dishes that needed doing, and i was going to work through mr smear's history test studying with him but he informed me (and it was later confirmed) that he'd actually completed the test earlier already. so we sat down to do his upcoming literature homework, which is the story of pompeii.

it - took - forever. and i honestly felt bad for him, because the language was very difficult (lots of dictionary lookups for me) and every time he got into it he'd start talking about it in wonder, or making jokes, or going off on tangents about things in the text, and on the one hand i really wanted to encourage him engaging in the text but on the other, we had a limited amount of time to get through it :(

we paused for dinner, and then resumed after, and i'm very pleased to report that the second half went much faster. i made sure to give him some encouraging words when i said good night after that, and he seemed pretty pleased with himself.

i was falling asleep myself by that stage, but i still had to shower. so i did, and then i wasn't feeling quite so tired any more. it's now an hour later, i have a ton of stuff to do, but i have to make sure i catch up on some sleep because tomorrow's also going to be a high-pressure day.

the big stuff

 i'm seriously on edge, feeling psychologically overwhelmed, and each step through my day feels less real than the one before.

at least my morning procedure lends some sanity to my days. i wake up, do dishes, then drink my coffee while reading a physical book. i'm about halfway through ping pong and it's getting interesting.

after mr smear left, i took care of the work i *should* have done last night (it only took twenty minutes, but it needed my brain to be online), and the rest of the morning was all about finding a new apartment to rent.

i was cold before i left our warm apartment and headed out into winter, walked across the bridge and arrived at the office just in time to make myself a hot coffee before meeting with my teammates and the manager i've now seen twice since he interviewed me.

aside from a couple of distractions - not least being a potential landlord who's understandably quite nervous about leaving his apartment empty - i spent most of my day on my bum, working hard, actually coding.

i feel pretty confident that the changes i pushed before i left the office were good. i really hope so. it's my first real java coding since 2019...

i've been developing a bit of a tic over the past few months, so i was embarrassed when the team i'm embedded in called me to the all hands and my automatic response was a loud, honest HAIYAA...

on the way home, i had to stop for a driver rolling forward with his eyes on his phone, and then i literally almost peed myself crossing a highway (with the light) wearing my hoodie and my coat hood up, so nervously checking behind me, when a car zoomed by honking full blast because someone in front of me went through the red 🤦

the evening went pretty well, although mr smear was moving in slo-mo for a lot of it, as was the poor delivery guy for the hummus (gd was struggling this afternoon), and then i ate too much, and then mr smear and i had a series of awesome moment listening and singing along to tool (lateralus - he informed me that he's now old enough to really appreciate it), and then at bedtime he refused to say goodnight because he was upset with me, which he relatively quickly explained was because i'd said (while treating his ingrown toenails) that i obviously didn't beat him enough as child, but then he (miraculously) gave me a chance to remind him that the words following that were "so you didn't learn to be afraid of not listening to me which would have saved you this horrible story with your toenails". and then we were cool, and he explained to me that as a consequence of me not beating him enough we have a good relationship, to which i agreed that that was an upside, though there are downsides. and then his humor and energy levels rose (this was after 9pm) and i had to pin him down to say goodnight, and that turned into a short bout of roughhousing, which fortunately ended without any further bad vibes.

i've been writing this post for a long time now, but mainly because that HAIYAA turned into watching hot ones with gd, and i think i might be going to bed soon.

i can't shake the feeling that i'm forgetting a whole bunch of important, urgent things somehow, but i can't and shouldn't do more right now other than put one foot in front of the other and focus on the big stuff.

still waiting...

 the threats from iran are escalating (while they're massacring the persian people), and there's been a (literal) storm brewing (i was supposed to meet with tahoma earlier, but cancelled when i realized that i didn't have an umbrella on me), and i'm supposed to finish a PR i started this afternoon...

...

mr smear left for school seeming prepared for his history test, which he reported went well. he's also reported that he behaved well at school all day, but we never know until the reports come in...

the biggest thing about this morning, aside from a whole thing about gd and her dentists, was that we finally started looking for a new apartment. which caused a fair amount of distraction throughout the day.

it was a mostly-positive work day (half work day), except for me forgetting my sunglasses in the office when i hopped home for lunch, and high winds were making little dust twisters all along the way, and then me getting back to the office late for a meeting with one of my teammates... and then the train station entrance i needed to get to my employer's office was closed, and i *just* made it in time for my meeting with my mentor, or would have had he not cancelled at the last minute...

the rest of the afternoon was a lecture, some vegan dimsum and a proper seaweed salad, an awkward "game" debating technology opinions with no context, and chatting with some of my coworkers before heading out.

...

i was very relieved to make it home without being rained on. mr smear's hebrew reading homework was good, dinner was great (mr smear impressing me with his improving heat tolerance after having spilled too much habanero honey mustard sauce), and the rest of the evening went pretty smoothly. now i have to decide whether i have it in me to finish the PR or leave that until morning.

i should probably leave it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

extra steps

 after getting home soaked yesterday, we took turns showering, after which i recall very little of the afternoon. i'm pretty sure i napped under layers of blankets, i read a bit of taiyo matsumoto's ping pong, and i helped gd prepare the challah-peño taking our neighborhood baker's advice.

it came out much better quality in terms of the challah itself, but it didn't taste quite as good (intense) as it smelled :(

dinner was really nice, and the late night was mostly due to watching iran revolution-related stuff and tool / a perfect circle reactions.

i slept alright.

this morning was a lot of reading, and watching stuff, and then mr smear woke up (late) and we got into breakfast time. did i nap before we went out, or afterwards? i don't know. but we did go out for a nice walk (we were going to join nystire and co. but they got rained in) without argument, during which i convinced mr smear to draw a comic he's been thinking of.

he did that when we got back - oh! that's when i napped - and the outcome was excellent (and funny) but he doesn't want it published and he won't tell me why... *pouts*

i finally sat down to work on reviewing a whole bunch of the AI-generated code in my side project, uncovering really strange hallucinations (eg. a nonce that's generated immediately before being checked within the same function) and fixing a few actual bugs, and then suddenly it was 3pm and mr smear and i geared up, grabbed the vegan hot dogs gd had prepared for us, and walked to my new employer's office for his friend's laser tag birthday party.

most of the parents dropped their kids off, but i'd walked so i hung around for the almost three hours chatting with mr smear's friend's parents (good talks) and at one point putting in a few minutes of productive work on my side project. i didn't actually go into my office, though, because i felt very uncomfortable figuring out the alarm system over a weekend when i had no real justification for using the office :P

it was a long walk there, and a long walk back, but those were two long walks with good father-son talks, and we both had an enjoyable day overall. also, it helped that it didn't rain on us.

we got home pretty late, which meant that after all the shower/toenail stuff mr smear got to bed very late, and i'm already feeling like i'm going to crash soon even though i know i've got tons of stuff to do and i haven't been doing any of it...

...

"the revolution is being streamed, not televised" - tousi tv, "pahlavi announces plan to return to iran - declares final battle"

firstly, "media" outlets like the BBC are exposing themselves clearer than ever as nothing more than propaganda shills for oppressive, tyrannical, anti-west* regimes like iran, qatar, russia, and china.

(also anti-semitic)

secondly, anyone notice how the iranian people, resisting after fifty years of REAL occupation and REAL oppression, aren't raping women or murdering children?

dump

 the comic recommendation session was fun! and i learned a whole bunch of cool things. also, i encountered an art teacher from mr smear's previous school who was amused to put together two and two and get four regarding mr smear's artistic influences :)

i was up late playing around with kubernetes tooling, and watching news on iran, and just before bed my heart sank as i came across a photo of my old team dressed-to-impress and opening the TASE.

i should have been there, ringing the bell, and i should have been able to start looking to buy a home. instead, i'm anxiously avoiding getting started on looking for our next rental, and being confused about the pittance of unemployment that social security is sending me.

[and then, today when i pulled off my previous employer's sticker from the back of my phone, the entire back of the phone separated from the rest of the frame]

...

today started off alright, after mr smear left for school i dived in to my kubernetes tooling experiment and ending up publishing an article just before leaving to do some errands. we stopped by the baker to get feedback on the challah-peño - he liked the concept but wasn't happy with our execution of the actual challah - and he gave us some really constructive feedback which we're going to try to implement today.

the supermarket refused to accept a return that their customer support had told us they'd take, and now their customer support is assuring me that they're in the wrong and that we should be able to try again. then gd and i found a quiet corner to consult with our paediatrician cousin about mr smear, which was fine until halfway through when an obnoxiously loud family started dragging chairs and talking loudly and playing music right next to us.

and then, while we waited for mr smear to join us after school, the skies opened.

we went around the back of the mall to rescue him and his friend, arriving just as the skies cleared. both myself and mr smear's teacher had told him to bring his history book home for a test they have next week, which he assured me he had, and we walked and sploshed back home, with me complaining that gd has misled me into wearing sneakers instead of galoshes...

we arrived home, absolutely soaked, and peeled off our wet clothing and prepared for a quiet afternoon indoors with the air-conditioning on. that was when i opened mr smear's bag to remove all the wet items inside, and discovered that he'd brought home his empty history notebook instead of the textbook.

he can't be that dumb. 🤦

i very coolly lost my shit, and we redressed in the wet clothing, and i put on my massive galoshes, and we rushed out in an attempt to get to the school before they locked the gates for the weekend. 

it was a long, wet journey by bus and light rail, and mr smear left his phone behind so i also had to pay for four extra fares, but we arrived at the school to find the gates locked.

so we turned around and headed back home. it was on the second leg of our return that it began bucketing down, with high strength winds trying to rip our umbrellas from our hands and successfully (thankfully only momentarily) turning them inside out. we were thoroughly soaked by the time we got back home.

...

have i mentioned that i'm tired? i'm fucking tired.

tempest

 i'm still in shock. whatever else happened today was entirely overshadowed by mr smear terrorizing the household from the moment he finished school until 11.15pm.

he took an hour and a half to get home, which is a thing he's been doing for a while, and it's now clear that he's doing it in an attempt to get out of homework.

he had actual homework to do today (technically yesterday, but he claimed to have forgotten what it was), due tomorrow, and after three hours of him FAing i told him - with gd's support for the very first time, which indicates just how over his behavior she finally is - that he wasn't eating dinner or going to bed until the homework was done.

lessons learned this evening: he really doesn't give a shit until there's a threat of violence, or violence. punishment doesn't bother him. and in addition to that, he has zero respect for anybody, least of all himself.

here's the weirdest part of it all, though: the evening was a complete nightmare, but any time that he did decide to focus and do what we demanded of him - actually try to answer the questions - the mood shifted completely as he understood the material and what was expected of him. even when he needed my help, our interactions were calm and positive, as if nothing horrific had taken place minutes earlier.

in my estimation, the actual time spent doing homework was probably between half an hour to an hour.

but the other six hours of "homework time"? just sheer bloody-mindedness and insanity.

and then gd made him dinner, and he brushed his teeth, and he went to bed peacefully as if it was just an ordinary night.

...

the early morning was alright, minus a bad vibe over something dumb on his way out, and i left on time for my new employer's end-of-year event, wearing my jacket, my new waterproof shoes and carrying my umbrella.

on the way to the light rail station, i traversed massive pools of water that even my shoes couldn't protect me from entirely. i arrived in petach tikva in serious rain, with quite a walk to the event. but i made it, everything was fine.

the event was a tad awkward as i'm the new guy and haven't yet fully onboarded, but i met a lot of nice and interesting people and mostly had a good time.

the food was good, too - even if i had to wait a considerable amount of time for the vegan plates to come out - and i was very pleased to discover that the brewery is vleishik so the only milks the barista served were plant-based alternatives :)

i left with my new co-worker who i know from two jobs back, and less than a minute after we left the building we got slammed with a sudden, heavy downpour and heavy gusts of wind. that lasted about a minute, and then everything calmed back down.

we walked to and boarded the light rail, and got to tel aviv pretty quickly. unfortunately, we discovered once we arrived that neither of us had validated tickets. that wasn't a problem for me - i just generated one from the app - but he had an issue with his rav-kav and had to ask for assistance, which resulted in him being fined. i advised him to appeal the fine - it's really unfair, neither of us saw anything on the platform that might have helped (not a machine, not a sign) - but he's so stressed about the time cost of fighting it that i ended up telling him to just let it go...

...

i finished reading the complete ballad of halo jones today. it's brilliant. with all the mr smear shenanigans, though, i didn't have much time for any of the stuff i'd meant to do :/

and now it's very late, and i'm starting to fall asleep.

home in the rain

 well, the day didn't get worse, so that's a thing.

although gd and i did have a bit of a fight about it - not for the first time on the topic - mr smear managed to come home from his friend's place, in the dark, in the pouring rain, by bus, by himself.

when he arrived, i wasn't just proud of him for a dramatically successful first time, but for how smoothly he came in, got himself tidily (as per instructions) undressed, and straight into the hot bath gd had prepared.

i was more than happy to read more of the ocean at the end of the lane (as per his request) while he soaked. then i did the toenail therapy (i'm not sure it's helping, the nails are so freaking deep), and jumped in the bath myself, and then we sat down to dinner... by the time we were done it was really late, and he had to go straight to bed.

i've spent the subsequent hour and a half doing nothing of value. i'm going to go to bed soon, nervous about what tomorrow will bring...

half-and-half

the runny nose seems to be calming down, but i'm still battling with the cough. i was dead tired when i woke up this morning. most of it went great - mr smear got ready and ate his breakfast without a fuss, and he and i had a talk about poor writing (telling instead of showing, creating completely impossible situations) vs good writing (using the example of hawthorne's intro to the scarlet letter) - but it went awry at the very last minute when he refused to rejoin our family whatsapp group, presumably because we revoked his admin privileges after he abused them by deleting a message from gd that he didn't like :/

i don't recall too much from the early morning, but at around 10am i was just getting into doing something constructive when i got a call from mr smear to say he wasn't feeling well. so i dressed up for the rain and caught the bus, on the way arranging for his teacher to give him permission to leave. i instructed him to pick it up from the secretariat, and waited outside the school gates.

fifteen minutes went by before i lost patience and called him, and discovered that he'd (allegedly) misunderstood the instruction and had instead sat down to read on his phone while i stood in the rain.

the return home was frustratingly long. he was being very dramatic, i wasn't quite sure if he was really ill, and i was feeling a bit resentful wondering if there's some other parallel universe in which i get to use a bit of this "unpaid leave" i had plans for for myself.

to be fair, he's pretty damned sick, high fever and everything.

i spent an hour or two working on one of my side projects (in preparation for another one), and then hopped on to a couple of video calls to meet my new "lead" and our "sales" guy. those quotes are because our company works very differently from anything i'm used to, and the more i understand the better the whole deal seems ^_^

i asked if it didn't make sense to bring my start date forward, and i was told that if any of my preparation for my first day takes significant time, to bill them for my hours once i'm on board.

i'm impressed.

afterwards, i sat with mr smear and gd and we watched some youtube videos, then decided to watch the dark night. 

👌

i rushed to do as much of the dishes as possible, then headed out (in the rain) to the comics library for a very interesting evening; it's kind of like a book club, but without the usual book club nonsense. and i ended up walking out with kitaro for mr smear (recommended after i told them about our difficulty determining age-appropriate stuff for him) and the department of truth, which sounds insane.

i've just got out of the shower after spending some time discovering interesting synergies in balatro, and i'll probably be going to bed soon. for all my griping this morning, i ended up having a pretty good day.

...

i've just learned from someone who's seen south africa's list of veterans, that i'm not on it.

surprisingly, that's quite a relief.

full-time unemployment

 i want to thank balatro, and the fourth percy jackson*, and a combination of slipknot and synthknot, for helping me maintain some semblance of sanity today. i may be unemployed, but wow yesterday evening and today have been taxing.

* i think rick riordan's editor must have taken a break after the third book, and maybe they were under heavy time pressure from the publisher, because the quality of the writing definitely drops. but overall, the story itself makes it worth pushing through.

we were told to come at 6pm, but to be prepared to wait. what we didn't anticipate from that instruction was that "be prepared to wait" meant that we weren't officially booked for 6pm, and that other families would be given preference. and that's after we waited more than an hour because the teacher was running hella late.

at least gd and mr smear were in mostly good spirits, and it was pleasant watching him playing around with a bunch of other kids (including a - ewwww - *girl*). he was very proud of himself for figuring out how to make himself squint, and entertained everyone with his newfound party trick :P

the meeting itself was a mixed bag, and a bit heavy. in some ways he's really improved, but he's still got a long way to go. and we discovered that the reason he got sent to the principal's office a few weeks ago wasn't because of the face painting, but because his teacher told him to go wash it off and he left the class and immediately returned without having done so 🤦

it was quite late, and a bit wet, when we finally left. we ordered rainbow burgers, got mr smear ready for bed, ate dinner, and were done for the day..

we had quite the thunderstorm last night.

today:

i managed to sleep better last night, though still not easy. i woke up into drama, because gd had forgotten that she was supposed to be fasting for her g-scope this morning :/

mr smear bussed to school by himself in the pouring rain, which is impressive.

...

on monday i posted my child safety opinion in the group, and the unhinged responded as follows:

<totalwaste> - i'm quoting you -

"and even adults can't understand where the boundaries should be and how to set them."

i think that maybe the root of the problem in our class.

i am an adult, and contrary to what you wrote, i know very well where the boundaries are and how to apply them.

perhaps parents who have difficulty with this should seek the help of the school counselor to get tools.

i didn't respond. obviously her response bothered me, but eventually i remembered that the only appropriate thing that can be said in a situation like this: "i envy your confidence"(the quiet part: and general lack of awareness). and i'm grateful that it's clear enough to the rest of the class what we're all dealing with.

last night we learned that the principal's father has passed away. this morning the unhinged mother responded with a comment that it's not sad, because what's sad is that the principal didn't support her daughter sufficiently when she needed help.

later, that wtf made a little more sense - though it's still absurd and gross - because we understood that the unhinged was referring to her daughter's father dying. which i guess explains her overcompensation and need to be the perfect mom.

i mean, she's still an intolerably toxic PoS, but at least it's a little more understandable.

...

gd and i took a long walk, stopping at the comics library, and the pharmacy, and the stationary store, and doing a little grocery shopping, and even managing to make an appointment for mr smear's next follow-up allergy appointment along the way.

not without a battle, of course; when i asked if we could schedule it for the new year, the receptionist told me i'd have to call back in february because their calendar isn't open yet. there was an awkward back-and-forth of confused questions until i asked her if their hospital wing was closed until then, at which point we finally came to understand that while i'd meant to book for the beginning of the year, she'd thought i meant the end of the year... good grief.

anyway, it was a long walk and the bags were heavy and gd and i were still sinus-heavy and coughing, and the next couple of hours were spent reading and napping.

interrupted only by a message from mr smear's teacher... the kids had to do an assignment on the computer today, and while all the other kids worked well mr smear took the opportunity to play games instead. to make it worse, he insisted on lying about it to the teachers when confronted, even though they'd checked the browser history and knew exactly what he'd been up to.

we had a long conversation about that when he got home. gd and i are extremely disappointed, and frustrated. mr smear seemed legitimately contrite, but we honestly don't know if that means anything.

the next couple of hours were homework. the same homework he struggled with yesterday, he struggled with just as much today, and it took a loooong time and some fighting to get him to do what i've been telling him to do for a much looooooonger time, which is to write down all the goddamned steps.

eventually, around the time we usually finish dinner, he finally got through it.

oh! i didn't mention that gd had a particularly difficult day health-wise, between her stomach ulcer and her shoulder injury and her neck and her cold, so with all that other stuff going on i had to participate more than usual in the dinner prep and serving...

dinner was alright, but it was late already and we still had to get him ready for bed and do the ingrown-toenail treatment (which i have no idea if it's helping or not), and it was pretty late by the time he went to sleep.

...

i'm feeling pretty emotionally drained right now. i'm going to try and relax, and then hope for a relatively restful night 🤞

steps

 surprisingly, i went to bed pretty soon after posting and i slept relatively well. and we all survived getting up before dawn, and mr smear and i caught the bus on time.

bussing through bnei brak in the early morning was an anthropological experience full of teachable moments.

the surgeon inspected mr smear's toes, and made it abundantly clear what terrible parents we are for making him responsible for his own toenails. it was a relief to hear her say that they weren't bad enough (yet) to justify surgery, and that she wouldn't want to perform the surgery even if they were because that would require putting him under general anaesthetic.  she gave us a prescription, along with a list of instructions, and hopefully in the coming weeks we'll see some improvement 🤞

we walked to the light rail and i took him to school, then returned home for breakfast (and lots of responding to emails and messages) before leaving with gd on a shopping mission.

first stop: printing out her cannabis license and picking up acrylic markers for mr smear.

second stop: the shoe hunt. we went through a bunch of stores, on the way purchasing waterproof timberland shoes for myself*, and eventually ordered boots from katalina.

* expensive, but it's a much more professional-looking option than my humongous wellies, which i'll save for the more dramatic days

having (effectively) completed our mission, we walked to one of our favorite hummusiot and enjoyed a really nice lunch. and then - because for once gd was feeling up for it - we walked home, past a stationary store where we picking up a new school sketchbook for mr smear (he's filled the last one already).

i rested and read a little, and then took off again to go to the dentist, missing the bus and needing to hail a taxi. i arrived on time, but the dentist was super late... and then he had trouble with the scanning machine...

but the great news is that i didn't need to do an imprint! instead, there's a new optical scanning device. it's a lot less intrusive than an imprint, and when he eventually (half an hour later) managed to log into it i was blown away by how cleverly it's designed.

i came home, already having exceeded 20000 steps for the day. mr smear was very excitedly drawing deadpool with his new markers. the evening went smoothly (although gd's struggling with stomach issues due to some medication she's on), in spite of the fact that gd made me responsible for the post-soak toe treatment which freaked us all out.

i read the final chapter of the neverending story to mr smear. the entire chapter, so he ended up going to sleep really late, but it was totally worth it. what an insanely intellectual and entertaining story!

i didn't cry.

(i almost cried. i choked up a bit. but i didn't cry)

...

today was a good day. gd and i essentially got to go on a "date" this morning, i got a fair amount of stuff done and mr smear had a good day. additionally, i treated myself to a copy of blue prince, and i'm going to give that a go now before i go to bed.

professionalism

 godsdammit, today's been long. i accompanied mr smear to school because it was threatening to rain and he had to take sports shoes (tied in an inconvenient way) in addition to his rainboots (i'm not entirely sure he actually switched them for phys ed, he says he did) and an umbrella. thank god i was with him, because he started freaking out on the bus about how the shoes were tied, and whether he should be taking shoes at all, and how to validate his bus ticket when he has an umbrella in his hand 🤦

anyway, we survived the ride to school and he seems to have managed fine while there.

...

i got home, and triggered the take-home challenge along with two or three other application processes. then i spent an hour or two doing some studying for the challenge, and then the airconditioner cleaners arrived.

look. they did a great job cleaning, the airconditioners are definitely, thoroughly clean.

unfortunately, half the mold and grime they removed from the airconditioners ended up on the walls, the floor, and anything we'd accidentally left too close to them.

before they left, i showed them that the flaps aren't working properly, to which they responded that "that's just a function of time" even though the flaps were working just fine before they touched them.

and they left us with soooo muuuuuuch cleaning to do. and we found a couple more mold blooms we hadn't seen before. we're still not completely finished. i'm fucking tired. the skin on my hands is all messed up from the cleaning materials and constant hand-washing.

i wanted to go rollerblading tonight, but i haven't even got started with the solution design.

and i'm going to have to figure out how to fix those damned flaps.

...

scr called me up today, and we had a long chat about a potential partnership. it's kinda scary, but if everything falls into place it would be an incredible opportunity...

...

we took a break from cleaning to go to the dentist, where mr smear and i argued over what constitutes an "i'm hungry" snack and worked on his geography homework* while gd finally got her new tooth installed. for real this time!

* he has to learn the countries around the mediterranean, so i had him sketch a map for himself so he can practice offline. an unintended consequence of this is that i told him about italy being a boot, and he saw a boot, only not the boot 😂

after we got home, i got back into cleaning (and reading the incal) while gd made dinner and mr smear did the math homework, dinner was pleasant, and we've changed our sheets (we're using the new comforter), and mr smear is reading deadpool before bed, and i'm about to get ready for bed and then hope i have it in me to spend some time on the design.

or... procrastinate and dive into it in the morning. did i mention i'm a bit tired?

social

a couple of days ago i bought a couple of games that seemed like they would be fun to play with mr smear. unfortunately, mr smear tends to be contrary when it comes to game time - he complains that i don't play enough with him, but he usually only wants to play games with me when he's on downtime. he straight-up refused to give the night of the rabbit a try, and while i didn't want to give him shit for not wanting to play a specific game, i was frustrated with him for approaching it with a negative attitude.

while he played something else, gd walked in and sat down next to me to make a show of taking interest in it. i thought it was a bit too obvious, but as soon as his screen time was over he was hovering over me, getting very involved in the puzzle solving and eventually insisting on taking a turn at the wheel :P

gd invited our friends over for late lunch / dinner, and that entailed a shopping run and a lot of dishes. it also resulted in mr smear getting a lot more screen time than usual... but he did a pretty good job of playing host when they arrived, and after everyone had enjoyed a good onigiri dinner and he'd entertained everyone with goat simulator, he pulled out goodcritters and three of them settled in for a very serious game.

i cannot overstate just how big a deal that is!

the kids played until i was past everyone's bedtime, and they rolled out in a hurry to get home before the skies opened.

unfortunately, the incredible downpour began a minute after they left...

mr smear got ready for bed and went to sleep without further incident, which was pretty impressive all things considered, including the fact that he's still a bit traumatized by a scene from jujutsu kaisen (yuji's fingers being burned).

...

i feel like it's been a good weekend, and i feel relatively rested. regardless of how i feel in the morning, though, i'm going to have to do some serious interview practice tomorrow 'cause i need to impress a professional python expert (as opposed to a regular developer who uses python professionally).

attitude

 the electric storm last night was incredible. i'm surprised i slept as much as i did, especially considering the fact that my lower back / hips are doing their usual horrible (literal) pain-in-the-ass thing...

it was a rainy day, so i accompanied mr smear to school, coats and umbrellas and huge puddles alongside the sidewalks making it quite the mission. i was very tired and slow, and by the time i got home it was all i could do to remove my heavy rain boots and lie down on the couch... only to be immediately caught by the default ten-minute alarm for a group parental guidance session i'd agreed to come to :/

[pauses to put mr smear to bed, and have deep arguments as to why his door has to be closed. and then configures default calendar alarms]

i walked to the gathering, which was at the parents of one of mr smear's new friends. while i deeply regretted signing up for the entire walk there, once the talk got started i was relieved to find it genuinely interesting and helpful.

it was very long, though.

at the end, a couple of other parents mentioned roblox issues, triggering me into explaining how toxic it (and a lot of online games) can be, and generating some interest from a few parents in dealing with parental controls, digital content and peer pressure.

after everyone else had left, i found myself with the parents doing a deep dive into our family's adventures, and then theirs', and it was a fun social experience in spite of the heavy subject matter. while i was there, mr smear called me and asked if he could go home with another friend, which was a huge relief because for some reason i'd thought i would need to pick him up :P

i came home and rested for quite a while (including watching another episode of made in abyss), then realized that it was getting late for a friday afternoon and that i needed to pick mr smear up. i left expecting to be able to take a bus, but i'd just missed the last bus, and decided to book a car instead. i got to the car, did the inspection, connected the bluetooth (always a story), and then found myself trapped in the parking lot because the security gate remote wasn't working 🤦

i then had to return the car, walk to a different lot (it was drizzling), and make the requisite adjustments for the new car before finally heading out. i got to mr smear's friend's apartment in good time, but i'd already lost almost half an hour of the hour booked, and then mr smear took more than ten minutes to come down, and then we hit traffic on the way back; we literally had one minute left on the clock when we finally parked the car.

aside from all that, mr smear had had a great afternoon. we came home, i did a lot of dishes and helped gd with the challot and some of the lasagne preparation, and mr smear and i watched a few episodes of jujutsu kaisen together.

it's been a long day, i'm tired (and my lower back's still hurting), gd's feeling sick (it's been on/off all week), and mr smear's actively not going to sleep. but i still feel like it's been a good day, and overall a surprisingly positive week.

first rain

 this morning started out alright. i accompanied mr smear to school, taking turns to carefully carry his miniature sukkah. i proceeded to the ministry of the interior offices to pick up a replacement cover for my id card, which went pleasantly smoothly.

i continued on to the electronics store with the intention to purchase a gaming machine, but halfway there realized that they weren't open yet.

i returned home, bumping into the irish ze german for a catch-up, and then accompanied gd to the hospital to make an appointment for her shoulder. we managed to get one for december :/

on the way back, we stopped by the clinic to secure authorization, and i headed up to the nurse's offices for a flu shot. i was surprised to not feel it going in at all!

almost home, the skies opened, and we got caught in a downpour. the first rain of the season was intense.

the afternoon was spent resting, and starting to read peter watts' blindsight (i had to skip the description in gomel's the end of humanism, part 2 because of spoilers), and then...

... we received a photo from mr smear, who on his way out of class found that someone had destroyed his miniature sukkah before his teacher even got to see it 💔

we never even thought to take photos of it before :(

we're trying to console him, and keep reminding him that at least we got to appreciate it, and that he did a great job. but that really sucks.

...

we all went to the dentist together for gd's scan. afterwards, we opened a table at the hummusia, and then enjoyed a pleasant evening walk home. the evening went smoothly.

i've spent the past while re-watching bill hicks' sane man. now... probably going to bed soon.

pains in the neck

 wednesday was rough. i was fine in the morning - i took mr smear on an "outing" to pick up a parcel, which was nice* - and i was fine until i got into the office. but at some point something in my neck / shoulder spasmed and started pushing on a control nerve, which immediately triggered a painful headache, dizziness and nausea.

* he made a point of carrying something heavy because his new "resolution" is to not be lazy. that last all of a day, and then the next day he made a new "resolution" to be lazy again 🤣

and then i had to navigate two arguments with coworkers, mostly in a position of having to calm them down.

after a while i realized that i was on the verge of fainting, and i packed up and wobbled my way home.

i felt a it better after lying down and stretching and massaging my neck for a couple of hours, though i managed to bruise myself rather severely. i spent the afternoon / evening learning the hard way that my lead's warnings about never modifying git submodules directly were bang on the money.

...

yesterday was better, though i was still sore (as well as bruised) and my neck was threatening to go bad for its entirety. a coworker leant me a small but surprisingly powerful massage tool that i tried a couple of times, but that literally made my eyeballs bounce in my head and made me start feeling nauseous...

i started the day trying to read a canticle for leibowitz, which starts off well enough but i was still too sleepy to get very far.

on the way to the office, gd and mr smear joined me for a mission to the appliance store where we ordered a replacement oven (even with delivery it's cheaper than a repair attempt) and picked up a blender to boot. which i carried to work in the unexpected dribbles of rain that started when i left the building and only stopped once i found cover again.

it was a long and intense day, beginning with me moderating squabbles between my teammates and trying to keep everyone with eyes on the prize in spite of personal differences towards approaches. there were lots of feelings.

i warned everyone that we needed to rip the bandaid of our old tooling as soon as possible, and for my sins they complied. we're running into a lot of teething troubles, but rather sooner than later ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

my interview with one of the investors was postponed, which turned out to be a good thing because i spent most of my work hours running between people to give them assistance. or cheerlead. or commiserate, such as when my lead got irritated by a linter i'd introduced and somehow managed to deep-six hours of his work.

anyway.

we received some nice passover gifts from the company.

lipgirl had put me onto a midi controller (the akai mpk mini mk2), and i really wanted to pick it up before the weekend. at 19.45pm, i had just sat down to dinner when the seller contacted me to say he'd be at azrieli at 20.15pm, so i ate too quickly and scrambled to get there on time. in spite of the evening bus schedules and regular protests, i arrived with a few minutes to spare...

... and then had to hang around for another half an hour before he showed up :/

but he was cool, and i was happy to have paid about half price for a piece of equipment that looks really good and is in really good condition.

on my way to catch a bus home i walked past an old grocery store cashier who's always very kind (she's taken a shine to mr smear) and waved to wish her a chag sameach, and she called out for help - she's injured her leg, and was having trouble carrying heavy groceries to her bus stop. i gave her a hand, but as we arrived she suddenly realized she hadn't swiped her card when she left, so i quickly ran back to take care of that.

so it was with a good vibe that i caught an unfamiliar bus, with the driver making sure that i got to the right stop. and then i came home, chatted with my mom**, showered, put my son to bed, opened the gift bottle of gin and tried to continue watching redline. gd got bored, and wasn't interested in akira, so we ended up watching some of nightcrawler before going to bed.

** oh! my brother's oldest got married yesterday. none of us were invited :P

...

today: i think i must have spent about three hours trying to figure out how to connect the midi controller, create the requisite accounts, install the basic software packages... i'm sure there's a whole bunch of stuff we've yet to learn, but by the time we left the apartment for a gift-shopping run i'd at least managed to get mr smear able to play with samples in cubase elements, and he was making pretty cool noises.

[gd shatters a bowl in the kitchen]

we walked down to ibn gvirol, where gd got additional holes punched in her belts, we picked up a bottle of cognac as a gift for the seder, tried and failed to find someone to cut a new house key for us, gave up waiting for laffot, scarfed down sandwiches at cafe eva (and found black salt!), made it back to our local hardware store in time to pick up dehumidifying slabs, and have spent a cozy afternoon doing not much.

mr smear just got through his homework for the day without a fuss, and he did it well, and now we're settling in to skip shul and watch prince of egypt instead.

...

i just finished watching dave smith and douglas murray on joe rogan, which i found deeply disappointing. if nothing else, murray could have talked about the outrageous efforts israelis make to avoid civilian casualties, but either way he wasn't on form, and his manner rendered him less than effective. looking at the comments, he didn't convince anyone of anything.

slow but steady

it was a long day.

mr smear woke up sick and stayed home, but wasn't impressed that he had tons of homework to do. aside from an incident or two, he apparently did quite well in spite of himself. unfortunately, he had a hard time going to bed and i don't think i handled it as well as i could have.

gd hurt her neck somehow, and her leg hasn't recovered very well from her treatment last week. this sucks.

i went to work early so that i could join the parent guidance session from there. it felt constructive.

our kubernetes expert managed to do what i was supposed to be doing, and i turned my attention on integrating cdktf and eks. it was a lot of small obstacles, but i got the basics of cdktf worked out and we'll find out in the morning if my eks efforts were worthwhile. it felt like a constructive day.

additionally, i'm about to start shadowing the interviewers.

i didn't want burgers for lunch, because while they're good burgers, i'm trying to stick to my diet and the previous three days were cheat days... so i walked to the sarona market to pick up hot sauce, but the store we usually get it from doesn't stock it any more :(

i couldn't find anything there i wanted to eat (that didn't cost twice as much as it should), so i ended up picking up hummus instead. it was a good lunch.

i think i'm starting another cough.

it started raining when i was almost home, wearing my new shoes :/

...

i've finally walked away from a toxic comment thread with a jewish woman living in israel who's completely taken up our enemy's propaganda and made it her own. i find it disturbing and absolutely revolting 🤮