is it art?

 we were excited for the end-of-year exhibit, and mr smear was apparently excited too, as evidenced by him phoning us from the secretary's office ten minutes before it started to ask us where we were.

but once there, he wasn't interested in letting us go through the exhibit - which is what we did last time - he tried to rush us through and made it quite unpleasant. eventually, we got to the very, very, very last corner of it and found his works. his class had three pieces up, and mr smear only had two of his on the boards, and of those pieces one of them was upsetting to gd because it involved roblox horror with a rabbit being chopped up.

so... not the greatest morning we could have imagined.

we bussed home, then went out to do the weekend shopping. about halfway through i suddenly felt ill, most likely caused by nerve pressure in my neck. the rest of the expedition was unpleasant to say the least - i despise friday shopping on a good day.

we came home, i lay down for a while, and felt a bit better when i eventually got up again. good enough to try taking apartment the shower head holder that's been bothering gd since we moved in.

it was gross, badly rusted, and it took a while for me to get it off the wall. leaving this:

but is it art?

see that shiny eye? that's the sharp remains of a screw that's not coming out.

i then returned to the store with mr smear to pick up a sixpack of water that i'd been in too much of a rush for earlier, and gd called me, distressed, because she'd bought the wrong kind of rice flour for the dumplings she and mr smear have been desperate for. a bit later, there were yells from the kitchen, which rapidly made their way into the office - gd had figured out how to turn the rice flour into sweet / sticky rice flour on her own!

and there was much rejoicing.

it's now erev shabbat, and i'm not quite sure what i should be doing, nor what i want to do. but i will post this:

AI slop, AI slop of horrors, AI slop, AI slop of terror...

heavy dust

it's the end of the weekend, and i'm feeling totally drained. my brain's pretty much offline, and i'm praying that i'll get some decent sleep tonight.

we had a massive dust storm today, so bad we put masking tape over the wonky balcony door. the only time anyone went outside was to take out recycling or trash.

today was, for the most part, about constructing two wardrobes. i started the first one by myself, mainly because i didn't feel comfortable asking big data for help before i knew what was required, and then i kinda got into the mode of doing it. i completed most of the build with a little help from mr smear, invited big data (and his son) to help, and the rest of the build and the next one went relatively fast.

with minor breaks, for vegan cookies his son made, and for gd to angrily wash the floor again after mr smear forgot to take his shoes off when coming into the house (in his defense, he's not used to not wearing shoes in this apartment).

gd and i had an argument over punishing mr smear for sneaking upstairs to play roblox (when neither of the kids was supposed to be on screens), and i compromised. i hope the two day punishment doesn't detract from the lesson 🤞

i have to say that in addition to making my wife happy and enabling us to move forward with the unpacking, it's remarkable how much space there seems to be in this apartment now that our stuff's in here. it felt much smaller before.

...

my legs are hurting in a way they haven't for a while. is my body regretting not maintaining last week's insane level of physical activity?

i'm a bit nervous about this coming week. financially (closing our accounts and getting our deposit for the old apartment back), health-wise (gd's going to the doctor tomorrow), and work-wise (i've got to figure out how to manage this weirdness, and i'm praying that the code i delivered was actually good enough).

...

i don't know if it'll help, but i've put the three sets of imagine (the amazing youtube channel that was deleted) AI covers up for torrenting. i feel like i've become the keeper of a sacred artifact from a parallel universe, like something out of the movie yesterday:

imagine - the battles.torrent

imagine - boogie sabbath.torrent

imagine - synthknot.torrent

child safety

 well, the "family meeting" yesterday seemed to go alright, but we've no way of knowing how much landed. at the very least, between yesterday evening and this morning, things are feeling much better between us.

in spite of mr smear dragging out his homework for hours (even with using google's translate to help him) when it could literally have taken him a few minutes. he spent orders of magnitude more time trying to get out of writing a couple of sentences and losing more screen-time privileges.

we've reversed ourselves on the "earning" screen-time thing. if we do that, we're left with precisely nothing in terms of leverage.

...

after much drama and finally getting him into bed last night, i drowned in a flood of angry messages from the class parents - they're starting to notice the kids engaging in inappropriately sexual banter, and apparently one of the boys showed somewhat pornographic images to one of the girls.

i quietly lurked until this morning, until i'd had a chance to discuss the situation with mr smear, and then posted the following opinion:

> but neither the teacher, nor the administration, nor the parents know how to handle them

100%. And in my opinion, that's the main thing - the whole world is going crazy, the children are absorbing terrible things from all directions, and even adults can't understand where the boundaries should be and how to set them.

but first of all, we need to be aware that we don't understand exactly what's going on, and exactly where it's coming from, and that this is less relevant than cooperation in trying to protect and vaccinate our children as much as possible.

i tried to understand from my son this morning what happened, but he didn't see/perceive events as documented above. on the other hand, he came home last week and repeated phrases he heard from other children (not necessarily children from the class) and really didn't understand their meanings, and i had to have an unpleasant conversation so that he would understand why it's wrong without conveying age-inappropriate things to him

i think we should have a conversation, maybe in person, and set norms between us and try to find a way to manage the identification and treatment of events when they arise.

let's see if anyone actually wants to do anything about this.

...

right after posting, gd and i watched "get your kids off roblox" - why is the world's largest children's game banning vigilantes? and i immediately felt even better about our decision to ban roblox a few months ago, and set about generating a hebrew video presentation with notebooklm: רובלוקס: שאלה של בטיחות

i hope that lands.

(if you also didn't know about 764? you're welcome)

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.

out of air

 i didn't get much sleep last night. i've been having difficulty breathing and my stomache's been upside down all day from the anxiety.

i accompanied mr smear to school this morning, mainly for the fresh air and our usual banter, but also to keep him on track with his school council election slogan. apparently he ended up doing it properly.

my way home was essentially me running through scenarios with the team leads and running through possible conversations with my boss. by the time i got home and sent him a message asking him to call me, i was practically hyperventilating.

but he did call, and i said everything i meant to say and then some. because it turned out that requesting brutal feedback from him was a good idea, and i now understand the trap that i set for myself months ago: i took on all the shit, background, thankless work that nobody else is interested in in order to enable the rest of the team to focus on real stuff, and i've been managing the devops guys (some well, some not so well), and it now looks like i haven't actually delivered anything of value.

not only that, but nobody likes a policeman, and all the things i've been responsible for have required alignment from all the teams...

so now that i understand all that, i realize that how i've handled the situation was fundamentally flawed: instead of spending all day every day being interrupted by context switches, what i needed to do was dump the various responsibilities on other people so that each person would only get hurt a little bit.

i also made it clear to him that as much as i stand by what i said yesterday and recommend that we keep an eye on the new captain, as long as the current situation is what it is i'll be giving him all the support he needs to succeed.

unfortunately for the british guy, there's no way out of his dilemma; either he plays nicely with a manager he abhors, or he leaves. which makes me sad both for him and for the company.

anyway, i'm really glad that i spoke to my boss, both for the clarity on my side and because he was happy to hear what i had to say. having said that, i'm still processing, still running through scenarios, still struggling to breathe properly.

what will be will be.

...

perpetual anxiety aside, the rest of the day was great. i took gd to find a pair of shoes, and she found a pair she's happy with, we got decent coffee and waited for mr smear and another new friend to finish school. we all came home together, then gd and i left for a pharmacy / grocery mission (i would have gotten shoes, but the only ones that made sense were twice the price i was willing to pay), picked up some stuff from the bakery on the way home, and walked in to find the kids playing 99 nights in the forest :/

(they both knew that roblox was supposed to be off the table)

for me, the afternoon was a mix of reading, napping, playing shadowrun: hong kong. for the boys, it was computer games, card games (!), and then his friend convinced him to go outside to one of the parks (!!!) for a while. so that happened.

on his way out, mr smear told me that his friend's father was apparently a famous singer, so we checked it out when he'd left and holy shit he's a cultural icon :P

the late afternoon / evening was all about dishes, baking challah-peño (and finally understanding why some of them haven't been rising properly - too much flour), a little more shadowrun, and then dinner. which was going well - we're still watching disney's hercules - until mr smear started scratching another hole in his leg so his screentime is done until that's healed🤦

anyway, the last hour before bedtime was pleasant, bedtime itself was smooth*, and i've been playing shadowrun since... until i became overwhelmed by intrusive work-related thoughts again and had to stop to post this.

* he really wanted to read call of cthulu which i organized for him, but i wouldn't let him read it right before bed.

...

at least i can say that i'm loving shadowrun: hong kong. i'm playing it on easy so i can focus on the story, but even easy isn't that easy and the story and mechanics are great as always.

overload

it's past 1am, and i'm just slowing down from high-frequency vibrations, most likely caused by a couple of hours in the bloodlines mission that was ridiculously intense for the entirety of the run.

at one point i switched to my browser and read about the mission on the shadowrun wiki, and it became quite apparent that as invested as i am, and as successful as i've been so far, i'm really not particularly good at this game.

meanwhile, i've become convinced that a shadowrun: dragonfall tv series would be epic.

...

i had a hard time getting up this morning. mr smear wanted me to keep my distance on the way to school so that he could prove (to himself) that he can handle the roads, but on the way out the building he started a conversation about roblox that clearly took priority. roblox - to my mind - is much like oasis in ready player one - and the scale and range of games available is simply mind-boggling.

roblox might just be the future. i feel confident that there's a way to make roblox games in which players do real work for real pay.

i came home, and gd and i wrote rosh hashana cards for mr smear's teacher, their class aide (who used to follow him around to make sure he didn't come into contact with dairy), and for him. i was super awkward about writing them, because i'm always super awkward about writing cards or birthday messages or dedications.

it used to be that when i got embarrassed, my face would flush and heat up, but as i've gotten older, my flush has moved down to my armpits. it makes awkward things even more awkward, but at least it generates endless amusement for my wife :P

work went pretty well today. we toasted the new year with a plate of dried fruit and really nice baklawa. i had lunch with the CEO, who jumped both times my phone went off and so i changed the ringtone from the x-men theme back to a soothing track from rayman: legends. the afternoon was super productive.

...

midway through the afternoon i had to rush off to the paediatrician to get a referral for an "attention examination". after expressing relief when i assured her that we wouldn't be medicating mr smear regardless of the result, the paediatrician had quite a story to tell - when she made aliyah, they tried to force her to put her kid on ritalin and she ended up going into debt in order to fight the authorities in court.

what was particularly tragic about that story, is that she did what she could to protect her son, but still wonders if she did the right thing. i explained to her that, having read robert whitaker's anatomy of an epidemic, unless her son struggled through life and wasn't able to succeed in anything, then 100% she made the right call.

she definitely made the right call. on my way out i called gd, and when she expressed concern (again) that doing the test would enable the authorities to force us to medicate our boy, i explained that under no circumstances would i ever let that happen. and beyond that, i believe that taking anyone who tries to court, and making the case public, would be an exquisitely constructive way to take a stand against a system that promotes drugging kids instead of adapting teaching practices.

...

in retrospect, it would have made more sense to go straight home afterwards, but i returned to the office, completed the task i've been working on and geared up for an argument with my boss, to convince him that it made sense to change an API that we have that's really poorly designed.

the boss is being moved sideways (we're not quite sure what that means yet), so he delegated to my coworker... i mean, i guess he's now my boss? i'll start referring to him as my manager. so he delegated to my manager, who heard me out and then immediately responded with "do it".

that was easy.

i left the office on that note, walked home, spent half an hour kind of helping mr smear with his prep for tomorrow morning's math test, and then signed on to a zoom call about sailor's idea. sailor was fifteen minutes late, and the tension that generated was palpable.

we love him, but he really has no respect for other people's time and he has no idea how much it hurts his relationships, personal and professional. i feel like i need to say something, and not in a friendly hinty sort of way.

i left the call feeling like my brain was melting, just in time to wish mr smear a good night.

now, four and a half hours later, it's time to say good night to the rest of the world.

restful

 i got some more sleep, then woke up to a quiet morning. including resting a little more, and reading some naruto, and playing more the hex.

i've played a lot of it today, it's really gotten in my head. it's... well, it's a daniel mullins game. it's real art, real subversion of expectations, and loads of fun.

mr smear had a video "playdate" with our old neighbor's kid, and then two of them ended up playing roblox together for a while and it seemed like they were having a really good time.

in the late afternoon, we all took a walk (the weather's been quite pleasant), ending up at vaniglia for really nice ice cream.

...

i've spent a lot of the past couple of days feeling grateful that we're here in tel aviv. that we had the privilege of being able to go into the debt we needed to in order to fight the canadian and israeli authorities and escape south africa. i've been remembering how trapped and scared we were, and i remember visualizing just being here.

we're very, very lucky to live in a place like this. even with the war going on. very, very lucky.