sideways

 last night gd and i started watching dark matter. we continued this evening, and it seems appropriate; i feel weird. like, i'm in an alternate reality kind of weird.

yesterday was a work-from-home day, which began with one of my new teammates outing herself as a nose-picker while centered on on our team call, which led to me recording gd's hilarious response which gd doesn't think is that funny - mr smear agrees with me - and which neither my mother nor my sister were able to watch because of the subject matter :/

then another teammate outed herself as a "meat proxy".

i'm new, i didn't say anything.

mr smear was home "sick", and according to him the reason he didn't have any real symptoms all day was because he was entertained (screen time)...

after hours of onboarding and an awkward demo in which nobody else spoke either, i took mr smear for a walk to the comics library to pick up some books for the high holy days. i still can't believe that's in a couple of days!

oh - he learned about "stippling" from a youtube video and drew a really impressive looking ghoul / zombie.

i tried out the new astra model yesterday evening, it burned through my tokens but i'm not confident it did a good job 🤷‍♂️

in fact, it feels like all the models are chewing tokens more rapidly than usual. i've been half-assing two projects (one for my boss, and my auto-doc) and i feel like i'm spinning in circles.

...

in spite of his cough, we sent mr smear off to school this morning, snapping a photo of him with his toolbox and his portfolio as he headed out the door for his first full arts track day. he appears to have had a great day, and made a new friend, and he came home with a really cool couple of pieces ^_^

i continued with my half-assing this morning (i'm kinda doing it in the background now, but more like a quarter-assing), then went off to the office. today was more onboarding, but with a few surprises:

1. almost two hours talking to a monitoring expert about their lack of vision, who was really excited to hear my ideas

2. today i discovered that my division manager is the guy whose offer i rejected when i joined the defense startup, which turned out to be a dodged bullet because his replacement was unpleasant to deal with.

3. i forgot my headphones at home, and nose-picker offer to lend me hers. nuh, uh 😂

4. one of the guys keeps trying to prank the girls, and one of them almost fell for it but asked for confirmation (he was out of office). they turned the tables on him, and he's now convinced that she fell for it and feels bad, general hilarity ensued

5. i began to realize how powerful my client's solution is, and that it's used internally by default. zero privacy - all intra-org calls are recorded and reviewable by anyone in the company - but the benefits are enormous!

6. i think i'm dong a good job of getting some of my teammates on board with new AI best practices :)

7. there was a big "do" for rosh hashana. not only did i witness some surprisingly antisocial behavior by a couple of people, but the vegan option was malabi and it's the first time i've ever eaten malabi that wasn't enjoyable. i don't know why i finished it, and it took a while + another coffee (decaf) to get rid of the bitter aftertaste :(

after coming home, taking down the recycling and running into big data kicking a rubber mouse and dealing with a bicycle that doesn't belong to our building, mr smear and i played a game of cthulu fluxx before dinner that got absolutely ridiculous - he'd play draw 2 + doom and kept pulling creepers, by the last round he was literally holding half the deck in his hand!

we watched another episode of spider-noir over dinner, i really enjoyed gd's polenta but she didn't :(

it's late, i have a big morning (our company status), which was the retroactive reason for not rollerblading tonight...

almost boring

 it was a bit of a weird weekend. i guess i slept okay, i got the balcony pretty clean yesterday morning, mr smear had a very long and screen time-filled hang out with his friend on his last day in israel, and i managed to make a little progress on my tarot game, though a lot of my time spent on that was understanding that my initial ideas didn't really make as much sense i thought they would, and subsequently thinking very hard about what could and would work.

i've nailed the experience of getting into and out of a "level", and i've understood that i need to figure out the relationships between tarot, astrology and alchemy in order to put something coherent together... and i really didn't have bandwidth for that...

in the evening i took mr smear out for a walk, which was great right up until the last five minutes or so. at that point, he got into fight mode and started pissing me off (the trigger was him being too precious to drink from a water fountain, and asking me to stop and buy something instead), and when we got home he went into a downward spiral from which gd lost her shit.

it got so bad that we agreed he wasn't welcome to eat with us, and the situation wasn't improved by him coming out of the kitchen to tell us he actually quite enjoyed eating alone in there and could he please do it every night 🤦‍♂️

anyway, we had a family meeting after dinner that went late, but very positively.

i've spent this morning uncovering things that need to get done, but not actually doing anything (aside from a little tarot game polishing), and now i'm off to by mr smear a lock for his toolbox (he appears to have thrown away the lock i bought him last year, jesus fuck) and then go to work.

achievements unlocked

 alright! we had fun last night, yohay sponder's show was brilliant (even though it was very different to the one i went to with the same name), gd had a good time, we both laughed hysterically many times, and then we returned home to find mr smear also in good spirits, having spent the previous couple of hours playing video games without his parents to bother him :P

i don't recall what i did between getting home and getting into bed (aside from showering, brushing my teeth and spending half an hour on the spec library i've been working on for the last few days), but i ended up going to bed around midnight after taking a puff.

i slept pretty well.

i woke up earlier than i would have liked this morning, started my day with my morning ritual which included reading more of doomsday clock on the balcony, but relatively quickly arriving at the conclusion that i really don't want to read any more of it.

i really want to like this. the artwork is superb, and there's clearly a will to do something interesting, but the result is an incoherent mess and i just cared less and less as the panels wore on. this feels stuck somewhere between a cash-grab and an attempt to recreate something that was truly groundbreaking but without offering anything new.

instead, i spent the next couple of hours working on the spec library, then we all walked to the book / stationery store to buy what mr smear was missing for next week, and to the cobbler to pick up my sandals (expensive, but he did a great job), and then we took a bus to fox to learn that nobody stocks shorts in my size this late in the season (it's still mid-summer), and then another to dizengoff center, stopping along the way to eat really good hummus.

most of that story took place under a bit of a cloud because mr smear was being shitty, but by the time we sat down to eat things were fine. so lunch was great (except for the bit where i unwittingly dipped pita bread into gd's hummus, completely forgetting her need for sterile gluten-free environments, and then had to scrape out anything that might've made contact and hope for the best... so far, she seems fine.

*phew*

we found no shorts in my size at the mall, or nothing that i'd be interested in wearing, at any rate, but we did pick up mr smear's new glasses, so it wasn't a waste of time.

we came home, immediately began preparing the challahpeño, and i dived back into the spec library. within the three hours that i spent on it before leaving for shul, i achieved the following:

1. completing the main work, and figuring out how to interact with it.

2. testing it out on my other game project, very successfully!

3. writing up most of the article that i'll publish along with it.

i fired off some screenshots to dx, and he's excited too ^_^

i took mr smear to shul. this evening's service was weirdly short because a lot of stuff was left out, but that was because it was dedicated to the kids going back to school and (apparently) a conversion class graduating. mr smear was generally cool, he handled the babies well, and i was fascinated by the child-like mentally handicapped guy in front of me who's extremely muscle-y, but was so freaking cute as he kept jumping up and down whenever there was singing and his mother had a really hard time explaining to him that he was too big to join the little kids for their little ceremonies.

...

well, here we are, getting ready for kiddush at the end of the summer holidays, the shabbat between having finished strong at my previous client and looking forward to a new client with interesting potential, having completed the exciting work i embarked on at the beginning of the week...

shehecheyanu vekiyimanu vehigiyanu la'zman hazeh

sleep journal entry and post-hosting

i had severe lower back and hip flexor discomfort just before going to bed and had to stretch for quite a while.

i woke up at 6.40am this morning, read stranger in a strange land for a while, then went back to sleep for another hour and a half.

now my back's hurting because mr smear decided he needed some "roughhousing" and i wasn't stretched and ready to chase him around the apartment :P

...

gd posted the following yesterday, based on our experience hosting mr smear's friend the other day:

Many will hate me for this, but IDGAF anymore. I'm starting to wonder about children going through actual clinical burn outs being diagnosed as autistic. I have to ponder this, but after a certain experience I had recently (with a non autistic child in a toxic environment), certain behaviours can very much be mistaken for autism. Burns outs are very real and they don't only affect grown ups.

someone responded with "just because you're autistic doesn't mean you can't also be an asshole."

indeed - but also, just because you're an asshole doesn't mean you can't also be hurting and flailing about, it's a vicious cycle. in this case in particular, i don't care what this child was diagnosed with officially, i think the root cause is a severe lack of boundaries.

and as a parent who took a hell of a long time to learn how to establish boundaries in a healthy way (i'm still learning), i'm not unsympathetic to how hard that can be, especially in a time like now with an overload of awful parenting advice and far too much media and social media influence.

the resting restless

 am i okay? i did sleep easier after my previous post. i still got up pretty early, though. i started my day on the balcony, doing a bunch of random things* before getting to work on the auto-doc and its write-up.

* including resetting the theme of the sonnetcomix website, which has been bothering me for a while.

i managed to make a fair amount of progress before we left for the shuk. it felt like a long bus ride, we enjoyed a pleasant walk down the now completed king george street, we walked through nahalat binyamin, then back to the shuk, and i immediately split from gd and my sister gathering groceries and took mr smear for a (very expensive) fruit juice and to stand in a spot of shade away from the crowds.

today was hot.

we met up with the girls, took a short walk and said goodbye to my sister, then the three of us went to find a bus home.

apparently i was the only able-bodied person on the bus willing to stand up for a pregnant woman. it's kind of distressing.

aside from a very pleasant nap on the couch in the air-conditioning, and later going with my sister and mr smear for a last-minute shopping round, i've spent my afternoon and evening playing games (balatro and slay the spire 2), and watching youtube videos, and just generally quieting the noise in my brain as much as possible.

i've just scolded mr smear for having ignored his screen-time alarm (as usual) and sent him to shower, and i think i'm going to just continue to be "off".

nerve bump

i managed to get a surprising amount of work done yesterday, especially considering a couple of rounds of parenting drama revolving around my son being sneaky and dishonest about his screen time violations. dinner was nice - we're continuing with chocolat, and i was very pleased to hear mr smear commenting about what a great movie it is "even if it is really calm and slow" - and then we were invited upstairs for some fluxx.

a lot of the hour or so we were there was fun, but for two things: big data being mean to his youngest (he's really impatient with him), and mr smear being a really bad sport :(

i actually slept really well last night (i only had two coffees yesterday, and i forgot to take my magnesium supplement), but i was woken at 6am by mr smear's traumatizingly loud and aggressive alarm. which turned out to be a good thing, once my nerves calmed a little, because i have to go in a couple of minutes and i had a fair amount to do.

...

tahoma sent me a link to unfortunately, you need to know what the jevons paradox is yesterday, which i happen to have seen the day before. it's absolutely brilliant.

politely backwards

 today was f***ed. it began alright - i slept okay, had a peaceful morning, and got to the office in good spirits in spite of my trepidation regarding the weirdness i experienced yesterday before leaving.

i spent some time arranging to go to a game dev convention in a couple of weeks, which i'm excited about, and then dived back in to troubleshooting. then i received a concerning message from one of the data guys, and i headed over for what turned into a kind of intervention.

...

i've been talking with these guys about what i'm working on for over a month now. i asked them for help, they basically told me to get on with it. i've worked hard - the heaviest lifting being constant fighting to make sense of how everything works, with AI helping but also hindering at the same time - and it's been rough. demoralizing. and i've been under big pressure.

but hey, i've gotten the work done. i've sent them tons of code to review, and they've (allegedly) reviewed it, and were satisfied enough with it to merge it. now they're saying that everything about my approach has been wrong from the get-go, and that these are highly sensitive systems, and that outsiders really shouldn't be working on them directly.

setting aside the surreal moment wherein the second guy made it all about "blame" and "shaming"*, i'm stunned by just how farcical it all is. to their credit, they both made an effort to behave professionally and tactfully after having thoroughly screwed me over.

* i seem to have successfully diffused the situation by explaining that if anyone was being shamed it was me.

then the third guy came in, and informed me that the reprieve i've been enjoying due to their unresolved issues might be turning into something else entirely. at this point i'm not sure whether this means that my work has been rendered irrelevant, or whether that speeds up my time-to-extended-deadline right into the past...

...

i kept my cool, but immediately left to come home for lunch, with a deep desire to yell my frustrations at the sky. i tried discussing what had happened with my mom on the way, and we both ended up irritated because she couldn't hear me and i didn't know she couldn't hear me. i arrived home to find my son standing at the entrance on his phone, having just arrived from the early ending of the last day of school.

he welcomed me home and informed me that he and "everyone else" had literally thrown all their books into the trash, which distracted me from my own nonsense and drove me totally nuts in a different way. i was gobsmacked.

we went over his end of year report while i ate lunch, and it was relatively good. the fact that he didn't get kicked out of the school, and that he appears to be welcome to continue in the next year, is simply amazing to us and we're very grateful.

omg he's going to be turning eleven soon.

i delayed returning to the office, going so far as to shave my beard before i went, and once there i spent the following two hours writing up reports of what had transpired and compiling a timeline, interspersed with strolling around the office and staring out windows or at the views from the balconies.

i came home, helped unpack the first round of groceries, then took mr smear for a short walk. then i did not-a-hell-of-a-lot until dinner. we had a nice dinner, finished watching zootopia 2 (we were entertained, but i don't like it), spoke to my mom, and mr smear has just convinced me to let him have screen time before late summer holidays bed time.

fine.

rolling two rocks uphill simultaneously

after a night of being wired and getting very little sleep, yesterday was a bit rough. the first thing i did, after mr smear went to school and i'd already done a little more AI harness work, was head across the road to the supermarket to buy some more containers.

i'm still feeling stupid for having bought one that was clearly broken, and removing the stickers before i noticed.

but the walk itself was nice. the weather was pleasant, and there was a certain... tel avivi something... in the air.

i did another hour or so on the harness, then finally - and unwillingly - sat down to work. i spent the rest of the day doing the dual sisyphean tasks of babysitting PR review / fix loops, each pass trying to update my agentic skills to avoid the next, and each time failing more spectacularly than before. my first omgihavetotakeabreak was spent washing the containers, the second vacuuming the entire apartment*, and the end of the day i was so antsy that i did something i haven't done in years - i got dressed and went for a long walk.

* i asked gd if she knew why i was vacuuming the apartment. "to help me?" she innocently responded. "hell, no!"

i walked up to the park, crossed the river, and stopped to try and get a photo of a really weird, interesting-looking bird that might have been a white-throated kingfisher. then i passed a pond, and noticed a crow and an egyptian goose parked on the side, with another crow sitting on a sign behind them. i walked up a little distance away to join them, as we all watched the pond in the bright sun on its way to setting behind the trees. moments later, what appears to have been a little egret landed right between us, and we all shared a lovely moment together.

i got home feeling a bit better, but still frazzled. we finished watching spaceballs over dinner, mr smear had been really cool all day (he did his chores without complaining, even though it took him a long time), and bedtime was pretty smooth.

gd and i coordinated and i took a photo of the water meter at 9.45pm, and we stopped using any water until i got up at 5.45am to take another photo, and i'm relieved to see that we don't have a leak. unfortunately, though, it made the night a little more stressed than it needed to be and i couldn't get back to sleep after waking up, so 🤷‍♂️

i began my day with a coffee and stranger in a strange land on our balcony, and it's a beautiful day. mr smear gave star birds a try after making the case that he'd gotten up at 6am and taken care of all the things he needed to, so the one-hour-after-brushing-teeth rule applied, and it seems like he's enjoying it.

i've paid our rent, and i've typed all this up, and now i'm going to sit down for breakfast before heading off to pretend to be a professional adult.

location matters

 i'm still feeling tired, after an hour and a half on the couch occasionally sipping my first coffee and almost passing out while reading stranger in a strange land. 

yesterday was a half-day of work for me, though a full day off for my israeli coworkers and my son. i spent it doing two important things: the first, determining that most of the current round of work i had tickets for could be safely discarded. the second, figuring out a way to share agent skills across different accounts and devices without checking anything in.

once i was essentially done with the work day, i took mr smear with me and we did a round of pre-chag shopping. there was a literal back-and-forth and we hunted down the more esoteric items on gd's list, but we got most of what we wanted in the end.

we came home, had lunch (and a really funny fight / battle over the mixed leftovers), and then big data came downstairs to help me install the blinds and shelf my mom and i picked up from ikea a couple of weeks ago. we didn't move very fast, but we did a good job, andwe now have good-looking blackout blinds in our living room and can consume media on our failing projector during the day 🤘

then the rest of his family came downstairs for a visit. gd wasn't too happy seeing us drinking beers - we need to find her gluten-free beers now, although in general we don't really drink beer at all - but we enjoyed a pleasant afternoon while the kids... well, their kids watched my kid playing video games. he begrudgingly gave them turns whenever i intervened, but i think he was just taking advantage of them being as desperate as him to have any kind of screen time whatsoever :/

the kids stayed over longer than their parents, during which time they entertained themselves playing fluxx, which mr smear insists that he hates (he's just not very practiced with it) so he antisocially read his kindle. meanwhile, i worked on an article describing my skill-sharing adventures, and then it was dinner time for everyone.

we watched - for the second evening in a row - infinity train, which is really fun!

mr smear's bedtime took a while and ruffled gd's feathers, but once in bed on a non-school night (it's shavuot, though, and i feel a bit weird about not doing anything special) i (finally) read some more of the colour of magic (we're so close to the end!) and then continued writing that article and researching better ways to sync.

i climbed into bed pretty late last night, just after 2am, after publishing a piece i was pretty happy with. and i may be tired, but i slept pretty well for the second night in a row.

this is good.

productive lazy afternoons

 i didn't lie down, i did have a beer, and i managed to finish the PoC for my AI harness in time to play some more slay the spire 2 before kiddush. and i just had another beer now, that's two down and too many to go :P

we watched some random videos over dinner, one of which led to us watching a bob ross episode in awe.

we ended up going to bed very late, with me getting into bed just after saying good night to mr smear.

then i woke up in the middle of the night for an hour and a half...

this morning started off alright, but turned sour after mr smear not only broke the screen time rules, but hid in his room to continue breaking them after he'd been given a warning. so he lost his privileges for the day, which led to drama... gd didn't agree with me entirely, but at least she understood (and explained to him) why it was important and i wasn't undermined.

then nystire messaged to say he and his family were going to the port, and i managed to herd mr smear out and onto his bike, and we arrived at the port in good time and with only mild complaints. until we crossed a bridge, at which point the complaints became a total meltdown. once he'd calmed down (a bit), i agreed that we can give rollerblades a try, but that he has to have wheels.

and if that doesn't work out, then maybe his bike just isn't a great bike and we need to invest in a good one.

the afternoon with nystire was very pleasant, we sat on the edge of the beach while his kids played in the sand and mine read under some shade, but unfortunately i never did get around to putting on sunscreen and i ended up getting pretty burned :/

after we split up, i took mr smear for a laffa, which we both enjoyed immensely, and then he - true to his word - walked his bike the entire gorram way home. walking on rollerblades gets painful, and i think he knows that, and i was done by the time we finally made it home.

so i showered quickly, cracked open that beer, and now that he's showered i'm waiting for him to be ready to help me wash the floors...

a day off

 according to dr google i'm at risk of developing a stroke because i used a massager on my neck. i'm not sure that's true, but i'm definitely scared off doing that again as the back of my head's been feeling a bit numb since i did it.

...

i got a relatively good night's sleep last night, minus waking up in the middle of the night with my neck / shoulder locking up and needing more than half an hour of work to be able to return to bed, but little-to-no lower back or hip discomfort.

mr smear, however, did not have a good night. he's clearly properly sick, regardless of yesterday's RAT outcome.

the three of us left him home alone as my mother and i dropped gd off at her physio appointment, then walked about florentin looking for blinds. we eventually found a place, but were rather put off by their charging approximately NIS 500 per small window, and double that per door. we have quite a few windows and doors.

as it is, i'm feeling decidedly financially unstable lately...

we met up with gd and went to meshek barzilay for a really nice lunch. speaking of financially unstable :P

we then returned home for a while - disturbing mr smear's full day of screen time - and a bit later my mom and i paid a visit to the library, where i checked out a better (though not pristine) copy of my name is asher lev. we meandered all over the place until catching a bus home, then meandered between the shops to find vegan marshmallows, then returned home for a relaxed evening.

i mean, it was relaxing for my mother and i, for gd and mr smear not so much. him because he's sick, her because in spite of a good physio session her shoulder's been locking up the whole afternoon.

my mother made - and taught gd to make - her pea soup for dinner, which was delicious ^_^

i've just put mr smear to bed, reading between his coughs, and i'm amazed to see it's 11pm already (O_o)

...

aside from contesting my parking fine, and opening an investigation into our bean bag purchase (after holding for half an hour to be told they'll call me back, after more than a week of trying to get hold of them to find out where our bean bags are), and holding for half an hour with social security to be told that i should just ignore the last message i got from them, i've been made very uncomfortable by the idea that there are authors warning other authors not to so much as quote a lyric of a song - even if it's clear that it's a quote - because that's not considered fair use. i cannot believe that's true, but if it's true, then the state of copyright law is even more awful and even less aligned with its spirit than i thought.

...

i saw a couple of disturbing things today: even "educational" tech is interfering with our kids learning, and this guy's quote is heartbreakingly powerful: "do you know how hard you have to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?"

we're in serious shit as a species right now.

downside up

 we were all relieved that mr smear made the sunset deadline yesterday!

it's day two of gd not consuming any gluten, and she's already starting to feel a bit better. we tried to make gluten free challah yesterday, it came out a bit like soggy rusks and i don't think we'll be doing that again. certainly not the same way.

we watched the second macgyver episode, which was a bit camp but mr smear was clearly into the experience :)

i don't recall too much after dinner last night, though it was definitely a late night.

what i do recall - because i'm now keeping a proper log - is that i went to bed just after midnight, took a long time to fall asleep, and then woke up about an hour later for about five hours of restlessness and discomfort.

i slept like shit.

in spite of that, i was kind of functional this morning. i started the day making an important firefly gif and sleep-journaling, then spent most of the morning playing slay the spire 2.

the afternoon involved finishing the first part (the colour of magic part) of the graphic novel, and sort-of napping for half an hour. it also involved finishing terminator 2, which was a much better experience due to the sound upgrade even though the projector  quality is garbage. after that, i sat down to learn how to make comics with kindle create, documenting each and every step along the way.

[stops to witness a large mosquito being zapped and going up in flames in the zapper behind me. and be dismayed to see what looks like a crispy flea.]

it's fun to see the guided view experience take shape, though!

between working on that and dinner, mr smear and i did some boxing training for the first time in weeks. not only should we be doing it consistently anyway, but today was another dust-stormy indoors-only day... i'm actually quite impressed with how well my post-workout stretching went.

we started watching dead poets society over dinner, not speaking to my mom because she was on a flight to ethiopia (she's staying there overnight), and tomorrow after dropping mr smear at school i'm going to go set myself up to work at the airport so i'll be there when she lands.

...

please lord let me sleep tonight 🙏

hopping from one foot to the other

 i think i slept alright last night, or at least better than the preceding nights. i woke up mid-dream, so i needed a few minutes to shake it off, and the day began with some mixed emotions over riddles and mr smear's breakfast habits.

i accompanied mr smear to school - i'd still rather be foolish than sorry (better silly than sorry?) - and continued on to the sleep clinic at the hospital. my appointment started on time at 7.30, and i walked out of there an hour later feeling pretty confident that the doctor had performed a thorough investigation into every relevant aspect of my potential narcolepsy (and potential rls, and possible anemia) and i felt very well understood.

i left with a recommendation to take iron supplements, keep a sleep journal, and exercise more.

by the time i closed in on the clinic, it was too close to my daily so i picked up a cup of coffee from "our" bakery, and tried to find a quiet spot for my meeting. unfortunately, something was blocking traffic and i ended up hiding out in a random building's parking muting constantly because multiple directions of cars were all honking furiously.

and, of course, our usual ten-minute meeting took half an hour.

from there i crossed the road and entered the clinic, where i was informed that i could only make the appointment by phone, so i dutifully informed the lady that i'd spent half an hour on the phone yesterday to be told it was an in-person only thing. so she said that it was probably an in-hospital thing only and not an in-clinic thing only, but that in any event the referring doctor had already requested permission and she had a response in hand: denied.

floored, i read the response and learned that they won't let gd do the recommended examination unless she's done a course of iron supplements too. i booked her a repeat visit to the same doctor, and the earliest appointment i could get was for july.

i left the clinic quite demoralized.

bus routes from the clinic are lacking, so i fast-walked home and arrived five minutes late for my quarterly roadmap meeting with my mentor. it was interesting, and while i was disappointed with myself for not achieving my goals, he was disappointed with me for being unnecessarily hard on myself considering what i've been through these past few months.

so that was encouraging, i guess.

i scarfed down a quick break, anxious that i hadn't yet called the plumber and clueless as to when would be an appropriate time for him to come over, when he called and asked me to take a video for him to assess. a few minutes later, his brother called to say he was on the way. i couldn't have planned the timing any better!

within two minutes the smell trap was installed, which was completely anti-climactic. the idea that there wasn't a smell trap installed before was and is blowing my mind!

gd, who had been struggling all morning* somehow had the presence of mind to ask him to check our hot-water cylinder, and we did, and it looks alright. then he left, and was just out of the building when gd had another bright idea, and we called him back to check under the kitchen sink.

* she suffered so much this morning that she was finally willing to try avoiding gluten to see if it would help.

he obliged. within two minutes, he'd found the source of the leak, and it wasn't the sink. we realized that there was a long gap at the back of the countertop, and water was splashing down the back of the cabinet 🤦‍♂️

(apparently, he'd warned me about this when we moved in. i don't recall this at all.)

between him and gd, and the special silicon we'd already bought to fix up the shower, the gap was sealed quickly and cleanly and i was able to grab my bag and head to the office.

what a day, so far!

[plugs in and turns on the fan for the first time this summer]

i got some work done, and then had to head out (again) to pick mr smear up from school. i managed to get there much faster than before by walking to the light rail, and that made it clear to me that the way back needed to be the same after losing a ridiculous amount of time to the bus ride yesterday. i got there early enough to catch up on instagram messages, and he came out pretty quickly for once, and i took him straight back to the office with me.

my desk-neighbor's dog was in the office. on the one hand? awesome! mr smear and him got along great ^_^

on the other? i've been feeling things (or imagining feeling things) since we got in, and i'm super-paranoid about fleas since the other night.

gods help me.

i barely had five minutes to work before everyone had to join a meeting about formalizing AI management, and mr smear came in with me and sat quietly in the corner reading. after an hour we adjourned to the main kitchen for happy hour, and there was delicious vegan ice cream! so that went well (mr smear has a penchant for coming to my work for good happy hours!).

i grabbed a beer and got some work done while mr smear put together a cool animation using flipaclip, then realized how late it had become and we packed up and walked home. walking across the bridge over the train tracks i pointed out an oncoming train, and the train driver tooted the horn and waved to mr smear, which was pretty cool! or, it was a pretty cool sentiment, at least, because mr smear didn't notice at all 🤣

i put in some more work while mr smear did or pretended to do his homework - i don't know if it's going to be complete by the weekend, and his weekend screen time depends on it - and then (finally) forced myself to file some of the stacks of papers that have been piling up.

over dinner, we watched the pilot macgyver episode, which was thoroughly enjoyed by all ^_^

(except for the kissing bits, which we all felt were inappropriate. but i kept dropping recently-learned trivia that made it even better)

it's been a pretty peaceful evening, and i think i'm going to be ready for bed soon. just one more cup of tea.

...

trendslop and mediocrity.

*I* has the dumb

 well, today happened.

the dumbest part of today was sending a whole lot of money to an investment app without doing a test send first. i literally can't believe i did that. that's the second unforgivably stupid thing i've done in less than two weeks. now i'm nervous that - although i followed the instructions and everything "should" be fine - i might have made an extremely costly mistake.

...

yesterday i received the network appliance i'd ordered - and tried to cancel - and today i tried to figure out how to return it. but the post office. and war. i have no idea how to return it 🤦

work today was messy, i'm not sure if i got the job done in a way that my clients are satisfied, though, and by the end of the day my head was spinning. leaning on AI to understands codebases and system interactions can be a beautiful thing, but if you can't rely on the AI to get it perfectly right then it's all a giant waste of time. after three long and complicated iterations, i realized that i'm going to need to go in hard tomorrow to verify that it didn't miss anything, and that it didn't misidentify anything, which is basically the same thing as doing it all myself, but with extra steps.

mr smear had a LOT of screen time today, and that's in addition to his online classes. but it was mostly him figuring out how to use modrinth... when he complained that it was a waste of time and he wishes he'd never learned what he did, i offered to delete it. "you know what? pretend i never said anything."

with pleasure :D

...

i'm not bothering to link to news any more. earlier i went hunting through my old posts for something and i clicked a link, and then another, and they're all broken :(

we had a few attacks today, and then in the news we got confirmation that we haven't been imagining the increasingly scary number of booms at a time. and now they're threatening to lay mines at sea. what a time to be alive.

also, my mom's supposed to be arriving in ten days' time. we're all hoping nothing stops that from happening 🤞

...

while i've slept relatively well the past couple of nights, i've been snacking a hell of a lot more than usual. and i've got this "fried-brain feeling". and overall, i'm feeling decidedly distracted, irritable, demoralized. it could be the war, sure. being cooped up and all. or maybe it's just a general malaise, because it's been months of - how do i put this? - some really awesome things have happened, but most of my life has been feeling like death by a thousand paper cuts. the shoelace.

...

mr smear just woke up to blow his nose really hard, which always worries me because every now and then he blows his nose so hard he ends up with a nosebleed, and that goes on for days. so i explained to him what i just learned about the erectile tissue in our nostrils*, after this very evening we decided to introduce him to ze frank and had to explain "red rockets" to him 🤣

* which will from now on make suffering from a fully stuffed nose "nasal erectile dysfunction". you're welcome.

two for two

 i'm now two for two with the canishower.com app, i'm in.

i'm also two for two getting mr smear into short, but real, martial arts training sessions by rewarding him with screen time. my, how the mighty have fallen... but he did pretty well in yesterday's boxing drills, and was very pleased with himself in today's taekwondo drills. if this is what it takes...

also, mr smear and i made a fun little rage game during an attack today, capture the fly, sticklight's surprisingly good at what it does!

...

yesterday:

in a nutshell, yesterday was all about network disruptions; mainly due to misconfigurations, but also dealing with a lot of intermittent VPN disconnections that i've been experiencing ever since i got my company laptop.

it was extremely frustrating, and while i'm finally dealing with the provider's support directly... after an entire day of back-and-forth troubleshooting over email, i'm starting to suspect that their support team is a bunch of AI agents dressed in a trench coat 😕

who ever thought that the trickiest part of the turing test would be that humans can be so unexpectedly dumb?

the frustration of hearing a door buzzing just before a siren and hoping i didn't miss the delivery of the new network device...

gd cleaned the apartment yesterday, with mr smear and i helping occasionally. it's a big apartment, compared to what we're used to.

our early dinner, more like a very late lunch, was followed by me teaching mr smear boxing fundamentals, and then me continuing to work on the RCA that i was finally finished around 9pm, during another attack.

mr smear went to bed really late last night, and i read to him anyway, then crashed. and then half the night was spent with him in our bed after attacks.

i had a weird dream about him and his previous class, but they were much younger and in danger of falling out of these weird little cots.

today:

we all got up late, and i spent at least an hour tweaking the network until i had it good enough that it felt like maybe? we don't need the new network device. but after a day spent moving back and forth between the office, the bedroom and the living room, i'm pretty sure we need it to sit in the middle of the two wired points.

i struggled in a rush to get mr smear's account set up for his online classes, and then spent the work day feeling pretty useless and entirely unmotivated.

between yesterday and today, i got my first real taste of using MCPs. they can be extremely helpful, especially when it comes to understanding badly produced logs.

we received a very welcome voucher from my employer for a tub of ice cream. gd found a decent vegan salmon replacement (thank god), and brewer's yeast, that we could have delivered. and there was much rejoicing.

it's okay

i went straight to bed after posting last night. we only had two interruptions with attacks, but that meant about half the night with mr smear sleeping in our bed, which isn't terrible, but it's considerably less comfortable than him not.

another warning about an impending attack this morning, when i needed the toilet. so i held it in, and then suddenly it was a half hour later and no sirens...

i finally got up a short while ago, from a dream in which i returned to uniform with nystire: on our way into the base, nystire got bumped by a car driving out. it clearly hurt him, but when i wanted to stop the car and get him checked out he angrily yelled "i'm FINE!". then there was a large group of soldiers who'd just been sent off to a row of buses, and a whole lot of them had left behind bags and satellite phones. and then, finally, i was being briefed by a guy who - i only realized while he was literally climbing around on his desk - had no legs, and there i was, having been complaining about my boots not fitting (not to him, fortunately). after amusing him with a physiotherapy story, he told me about an experimental procedure he'd been denied because his operational capability wasn't impaired enough "by one point on the evaluation", and i woke up from the two of us laughing hysterically while he danced around his seat showing me how ridiculous that was.

now i'm back in reality, gd's sleeping, mr smear's reading (and trying not-very-subtly* to get to play oxygen not included like he did yesterday, in spite of his screen time punishment because of the extenuating war circumstances), and i'm having coffee and wondering how to approach my work day today.

* why is that always such a difficult word to spell?!

"professional" is being professional when you really don't feel like it and nobody's watching.

meditation marathon

thoughts for the day: everyone in the media is getting paid to keep everyone on edge, including themselves. i don't need to think about war with iran until it's actually happening. nobody does. STFU.

also, the global economy is full of shit, everything's being run by people who have as much understanding of how things work as small children. there aren't many adults around.

if i'm right, what's coming is AI weaning us off management bloat and enabling people to find and operate in tiny niches. kind of like pre-industrial societies.

...

 today began with disappointment, but it was less disappointing than if it had come tomorrow: mr smear woke up and decided that he didn't want to go to the trance party, he'd rather just stay home and read all weekend ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i've been reading richard currier's unbound: how eight technologies made us human and brought our world to the brink, and while it's taken me forever to get into it, it's fascinating stuff.

mr smear had been waiting for the bus for a while before we realized that it was the tel aviv marathon today...

gd and i had a quiet morning, napping, mostly, and then we headed out to return the frying pan and find a solution for the ugly cables that were just installed. but, the marathon. so we walked around trying to get on a bus, then got on the bus which literally went in a circle and took us back one stop, and then we split up because i realized i'd have to walk all the way to the center and back.

returning the frying pan would have been less emotional had the woman not decided to try 'splain to me how the non-stick pan wasn't non-sticking properly because i was obviously cooking wrong 😠

at least i found cable hole covers. i'll try them sometime, i guess.

i finally found a decent-looking replacement frying pan on sale at a different store, i hope it's good. then i picked up garbage bags, and then i began my trek home.

picking up a coffee along the way, and syncing with sailor for a bit.

i had issues getting mr smear home today, again, and i realized (after we had a fight about it) that he and his friends are using whatsapp as social media. so there goes whatsapp - i've blocked it and he's down to actual phone calls and sms'es now.

at least he didn't lose more privileges this week - i mean, his screen time privileges have been pushed back another week now, but we were both excited about him getting his reading privileges back this evening.

i never in my life thought i would ever write a sentence like the above, but here we are. you gotta do what you gotta do.

i spent most of the afternoon upgrading my encryption package and updating my website, and then had a long chat with urchin, and now i've showered, and taken the garbage out, and shabbat has started, and gd's cooking a delicious dinner, and for a moment the world is just fine.

scratched record

it's almost 1am, and the last 4 hours have been a thorough waste of an attempt to sleep. partially because of indigestion - i'm still feeling the laffa i ate for dinner - and partially because of my hips :/

is this also not the mattress for me?

...

the day began alright, i left one time to catch a different bus to ra'anana than the one i'd planned on, and i ended up arriving ten minutes early instead of a little late. which gave me the opportunity to sit down with the older devops guy i'd been teamed up with during the course a while back, which ended up being fascinating as his mode changed from laughing about tailscale and bash to unpacking his entire life story.

then we were all herded in to the presentation, and that's when my phone started buzzing. mr smear complaining about me not unlocking his phone for his art class. then proceeding to whining and begging, even though i was making it very clear that he was disturbing me "at work" and that he was going to get punished if he didn't back off. then incrementally punishing him until he lost all his privileges (again) until next week, and then shutting his whatsapp down.

after which he actually had the nerve to call me.

when we went out for a break, i called gd to tell her what had been happening and then sent her screenshots. i was livid.

the second half of the morning was a lecture about body language. it was interesting, but towards the end i was literally falling asleep and having a hard time ensuring that i wasn't snoring, or falling off my chair.

i rushed out to catch a bus back to my client's office, having to run the last fifty meters or so, and on the way back to tel aviv i spoke to gd who was just as irate as i was about the unfairness of encouraging kids to use their phones in art class. i wrote a message to his teacher to inquire, and tomorrow morning i'll be writing to the school counsellor.

i arrived at work in dire need of coffee. i spent most of the afternoon in a seemingly endless loop trying to resolve a devops issue with AI, and beginning a set of test scripts to determine whether the issue my teammate identified yesterday is real, and then gd - who's been on a "white diet" the past couple of days and had been on a proper "liquid diet" the whole day in preparation for her colonoscopy tomorrow - asked me if i could take mr smear for dinner.

mr smear, who'd called me after school to tell me that because i'd been so unfair with him, and blocked his phone for no reason, would be stone-walling me until 2027. that's kinda funny now, but omg i wanted to throttle him at the time!

i fast-walked home (mainly in response to the retard rat mix - oh! youtube music has a history page!) and we sat down for a family meeting that went pretty well, which i understand to mean that gd had had an effective talk with him when he got home. by the time we left the apartment my mood had already improved, and mr smear was cool, and we had a very pleasant dinner before skipping home in the light rain.

i tried and failed to find the skipping bit from some random comic where he talks about saving time. it's not michael mcintyre or demetri martin.

the bedtime ritual and getting everyone into bed went smoothly. but then... see the beginning of this post.

compressed

 today was weird. i don't know if it's related to me getting more sleep than usual, but i felt buzzed.

after seeing mr smear off to school, gd and i had a conversation about whether he really needed a new round of therapy or not. i checked in with his teacher, who assured me that he's participating a lot more in class, and communicating much better, even though academically he's not doing so well*. all things considered, i think the incidents from the beginning of the year can be attributed to him adjusting, i really don't believe anything's nearly as urgent as the school team thought.

* did i really need to tell her that if she lets me know where he's struggling, i can try to help him?

i lost my temper a little bit with the support agent who called to request further proof that the stove isn't working properly. as in, in addition to a photo of a quarter of an element clearly not heating up.

gd found my watch strap, but now we've lost the watch charger. she found the adapter for mr smear's keyboard, though! in addition to getting back into his music "homework", just before bedtime he was reading an illustrated harry potter book (the fifth one) and came running into the office to try playing the sheet music in one of the illustrations - and it was pretty good ^_^

i decided to start my work day by going past the hardware store (i picked up a shower head holder, but the other two items on the list were a no-go), arranged for a technician to install an internet point in our bedroom on thursday, then sat down* at a coffee shop for about an hour of work.

* i sat down after a disappointing service experience, being ignored for a while before i could order. then i sat down next to the coffee cup lid and sugar stand, which was close enough to smell the other patrons (one of whom i described to gd as "smelling like a heavy, sick fishy down-there infection", but fortunately out of line of sight of the large homeless guy who charged in demanding that someone buy him a coffee)

i downloaded gd's id thingy (sefach), then had it printed at the art supply store (all-round, it was cheaper than going to the ministry of the interior), then returned home to work a bit.

i snacked and ate too much today. surprisingly, my weight's been pretty stable lately, hovering around 77kg.

i wrestled both with and against my AI copilot today, and spent a lot of time thinking about the AI vampire article i read this morning.

i lost a half hour this afternoon to mr smear's allergy appointment being brought forward a week without anyone contacting me. and then, when i tried calling the clinic to resolve the issue, someone kept lifting the phone and putting it back down again 😡

i discovered that yesterday, when mr smear was in his room with the door closed, he'd been using the browser on his phone which gd has accidentally left unlocked :/

okay, look - it's not alright, but his reaction IS funny 😂

i took a bus to the clinic, had a funny altercation with the security guard (poor guy was only trying to help, but in a clumsy way), and managed to get gd's prescription and authorization sorted out relatively quickly before returning home.

more work, more of the same.

speaking to my mother after she received the email i forwarded her from yad l'olim, understandably and justifiably furious because they're continuing to mess her around, but making out like it's her own fault.

a "family talk" with mr smear, generally going well (explaining to him that integrity is doing the right thing when nobody is looking).

a very nice dinner.

chatting again with my mom, then reading more of the colour of magic to mr smear (he really enjoyed the gods playing dice with rincewind and twoflower), then showering (with the new showerhead holder), and now... getting ready for bed, i guess?

feedback

 alright, let's see what i can remember from today:

i did rest a bit after finally returning to bed, but obviously not enough.

i finished mr smear's pancakes this morning, surprised that they had vegan goat cheese inside. i still feel a little bit betrayed.

mr smear's been begging me to let him use google during his art classes for inspiration. i don't know why it took so long, but i connected all our calendars and set up his schedule so that i could set alerts before and after his art classes accordingly. and evening alarms to go through his browser history with him...

that was significant effort.

once again, i arrived at the office *just* in time for my team's daily. there were issues with yesterday's deployment, and i was briefed on them, and i met a new teammate. one of my client team brought his beautiful two year old giant puppy lab. most of my day was a mix of wasting time trying to get java tooling working for one of the projects, advising one of my teammates (apparently finding the root cause of the issue), tweaking monitoring dashboards, and mentoring a junior in the client team.

then there was the "family day" present. i was very confused when i learned i'd been registered for "fondue" (that doesn't sound vegan), then there was a whole story about whether the dark chocolate was actually vegan or not. and then i had to carry the basket home, which was awkward and heavy (oh, poor me).

i came home early after dealing with a discipline issue with mr smear over the phone - he'd been messing around with homework and gd was getting upset - and spent the next hour gearing up for the call with my client.

the call went surprisingly well. he thanked me for the direct and open feedback, explained the context for the craziness, assured me that we're aligned in where things should be, and informed me that i appear to be having a positive effect on my bulgarian teammates, which i take as high praise.

so that's good, and i feel grateful to be in a position where i have a team (my employer) behind me.

i immediately caught a bus to the mattress store - pausing only to report to the municipality what appeared to be a massive human poop about 50m away that was causing an eye-watering smell all the way to our apartment building - on which there was almost an incident as some big guy with a shit attitude got in someone's face, allegedly for staring at him.

i got to the store just in time, and lay down on the mattress. it seemed less aggressively anti-me, so i confirmed that i was willing to give it a try. the delivery guy arrived, and making arrangements for tomorrow got complicated, but i was pleased when he called me back from my way to the bus stop to ask if he could give me and the mattress a ride home right then and there.

i enthusiastically agreed, and we stopped at a gas station so i could draw the extortion money for the mattress and the delivery, and then we made the switch, and then a worker from the municipality called to inform me that the poop had been taken care of - he sounded traumatized, and sending me photographic evidence that it was cleaned seemed important to him - and mr smear completed his homework with much pride and joy, and then it was shower time [remembers to turn off the boiler because we had cool showers], and then dinner, and reading time / admin time, and a short attempt to rest, and now this, and then who knows?