some of the surprises were good

 i had a rough hour or so last night with my hip flexors, but otherwise i managed to get some pretty good sleep (going by the fact that i remember that i dreamed)

i started the day with volume 2 of my favorite thing is monsters, and aside from that and grocery shopping online i don't recall doing anything interesting.

work began with two conversations about game development - dx has apparently begun trying his hand at it, and one of the other guys showed some interest as he worked on simulations as part of his degree - and a little bit of jumping between tasks.

at noon, i received a phone call from the immigrant employment woman - i'll call her pioneer - and we talked for about an hour, this seems a natural fit for a partnership and she appears to be on board with my vision for a digital kibbutz. immediately afterwards, i received a message from a high school teacher i met last week informing me that she might have found some interesting people to work on another project of mine, one that ties in with the former.

this is all very exciting.

unfortunately, i learned that a meeting i was trying to set up with someone at my alma mata isn't going to happen, and i'm pretty disappointed because it should be something totally aligned with their values...

i came home for an employer group meeting, some of which was quite enlightening, and after an hour or two of more work i called it a day and mr smear and i strapped on our rollerblades and went for a ride.

oh, i watched a couple of my more recent spoken word pieces [1] [2], and i have the strangest sensation of wonder that i wrote those, because for years i've been feeling less than inspired and capable.

dinner was delicious, and i ate plenty, and then i gorged myself on chocolate, liquorice allsorts and whatever the fizzer-like candies are called. then we had a chat with my mom, which included a big discussion about mr smear's barmitzvah plans, and after saying goodnight to mr smear gd and i watched a bit more of ludwig.

i was already in bed, but then gd walked into the fan carrying a cup of water which was somehow my fault, so now i'm cooling off and hoping to get back into sleep mode soon.

a skip and a leg day

 did i... did i skip a day?

yesterday:

i spent a couple of hours on mr smear's game yesterday, but the biggest event of the day was watching die hard together, which was the only screen time mr smear was allowed until dinner because he'd been pretty rude to me in the morning.

my son discovered liquorice allsorts and i discovered my sunflower seeds had the words "unsalted" written in large print on the packet that i hadn't registered when i bought them :(

the rest of my day was doing not much, but lots of it :P

oh, and i had a good chat with vfmp for the first time in ages. i'd come up with a prank to play on his antisemitic brother, and we both laughed hysterically as he told me a story of their sibling rivalry and the results of him exploiting a cheat in a game they used to play together 😈

dinner was sushi again (^_^) and more of the wonder years. each episode generates interesting discussions, necessary discussions that mr smear doesn't necessarily want to have :P

he got to play more thief after dinner as compensation.

today:

i slept pretty well again last night. i got a variety of stuff done today, but my work day was mainly me jumping between tasks and struggling to make real progress on any one thing. lots of small disappointments.

one of them being that after generating enough data at the end of last week, my cost estimates turned out to be considerably lower than i anticipated...

around 4pm i decided to get up from my desk and walk mr smear to the comics library and back. we picked up my favorite thing is monsters vol 2 and doomsday clock, along with volumes 4-5-6 of attack on titan for mr smear, after discovering that the books on the shelves are doubled up and we hadn't noticed all this time!

i advised mr smear as he signed up for an account on a website that asks you to confirm you're over 18 (it's a monster wiki, i'm pretty sure i'm doing the wrong thing), while i played around with agent frameworks and specced out some more work on his game.

dinner was delicious, not-quite-sushi but similar, and we watched an episode of the wonder years that we essentially had to force mr smear through as he died inside from "14th hand embarrassment" - yes, 7x as worse as 2nd hand - but he survived the trauma in spite of his protests 😂

between then and now, i came across a post on facebook from a woman who seems to have the same idea i do about employing immigrants, it looks like we might have some common ground we can cooperate with so i'm quite excited!

...

i'm feeling my hip flexors getting irritated again, i had a couple of days' reprieve while my back hurt and now i'm uncomfortable :/

vicarious horror

 holy shit, inside is not something to play when you're getting ready for bed. absolutely, awfully beautiful limbo-like experience with a lot more holocaust trauma than i was expecting.

[passes out before completing the post]

our walk together to the store was as much exercising our game design legs as our physical ones. when we got home, mr smear played thief while i chatted with horseman, who's been building an interesting crypto protocol that i finally kind of understand. but then he spoke to me about a different one he's planning and everything got jumbled up in my head :P

we stuffed outselves on gd's vegan sushi for dinner, watching the wonder years and pausing to ensure that mr smear's familiar with the woodstock performance of with a little help from my friends, as well as the songs where have all the flowers gone and blowing in the wind, and closing with a conversation about the cringe that kevin arnold was so afraid of versus the intensity of the cringe that he generated in order to avoid it.

(i think it was during the first part of the dance scene that both gd and mr smear literally climbed under the table 😂)

and how teenage hormones make us behave like idiots.

...

by the time we got to dinner i'd managed to get mr smear's game starting with a randomly generated map, using a system i'm pretty pleased with and that's theoretically portable to my game as well ^_^

in spite of inside making my heart race, i managed to fall asleep pretty quickly and i slept surprisingly well. it's been a pleasant start to the day so far, i'm not sure what i or we are going to be doing but i suspect it'll be mostly indoors activities.

much thursday

 yesterday began with reading more of my favorite thing is monsters (volume 1 of 2, i just learned), which i just completed now.

it's sublime. between the phenomenal artwork, the gut-wrenching stories, and the real-ness of the characters, this is an absolute masterpiece.

the big story from yesterday morning was having the plumber - clearly a devout muslim, making his jewish blessings contrast starkly with his kneeling to bless his cup of water - do a great job of replacing the cistern and a not-so-great job of turning a small leaky faucet into an unusable one. now i've got to get him to come back for the latter before the weekend...

the work day was unusually calm. i had a big, healthy side-dish lunch from the shuwarma place that i picked up on the way to the office, i'd been feeling faint and weak again and i'm becoming increasingly concerned about possibly being anaemic. i got the backfill started, and it went pretty smoothly, and over the course of the afternoon i got the action plan worked out for the work my client team and i have been discussing, all using opus and all far cheaper than using sonnet.

let's pretend that makes sense.

by the time i went upstairs to join everyone for happy hour - a farewell pizzas-and-drinks for the AI team lead - i was ready to trigger the implementation and i left the agent with an instruction to document every step of it and make best guesses that didn't conflict with the established plan.

when i got back to my desk more than half an hour later, it was still running. after about an hour, it was done, and while i haven't evaluated the results yet - i was just waiting for it to finish so that i could go home - on the surface it looks good and i was shocked by how little it cost relative to what i've been spending on tokens since they introduced the budget a couple of weeks ago.

anthropic + bedrock = scam.

i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear for a walk, a lot of which was spent discussing his game design ideas. i've agreed to help him in a bit, when his first screen time kicks in, to start building his game with him.

what a time to be alive.

gd's chili took a lot longer to be ready than she'd expected, but it was delicious. we watched another episode of the wonder years, and then i worked on my tarot game until i couldn't keep my eyes open any more and went to bed.

...

over dinner, mr smear discovered that he was having another outbreak around his eye. it's been quite a while, and considering the fact that i'd been considering taking him to the pool soon i'm grateful it happened before that, and that we didn't once again worry that the pool was causing it...

i didn't sleep very well, so i'm tired still, but that's just par for the course these days 🤷‍♂️

low drama

 apparently mr smear's friend left us a gift... gd's currently cutting his hair in the bathtub because he's got an active lice infestation that a treatment earlier had no effect on. mr smear's been growing his hair for a long time and it just grew out long enough to be really cool.

but the treatments are seriously expensive, and we can't house lice, so...

i need a fucking break. gd, too, judging by the cursing that's been going on.

...

getting to work means walking across the bridge, and in this heat that's become a thing. i spent $0 of AI tokens at work today, but that's because i wasn't able to log in for most of the day and i ended up using my personal account for the little bit of work i did. and then, when i finally asked for a code review, one of the guys asked a question that made me realize that i probably didn't need to do this work after all 🤦‍♂️

i did learn how to do the backfill cost exercise, though.

my 1-on-1 with my manager was pleasant, but they're being really weird about not announcing to the teams that i'm leaving, even though i understand that quite a few people already know. it makes it especially awkward for dx, whose lead has quit and is leaving on thursday and now i'm on my way out as well...

...

the highlight of our day was dinner, and introducing mr smear to the wonder years. not only is it a wonderful series, but it's aged so well and it's so perfectly age-appropriate for an 11 year old!

alright, i'm fasting for tomorrow morning's bloodwork, it's late, i've slayed some spire while the drama's* been going on in the other rooms and now i'm going to bed.

at least we gave the guitar hero guitars away.

* oh, yes. and there's more plumbing drama too. the landlord doesn't want to spend any money and gd found a different leak in another bathroom 🙄

positive feedback

 i've realized that i don't suffer from very mild narcolepsy, there are just three specific situations which tell my brain it's safe to turn off and it's really, really hard for me to fight them. the hairdresser's chair, the dentist's chair, and meetings. those are my shutdown buttons. some people count sheep. i count shears, drills and droning.

...

yesterday morning began with a serious effort on my autodoc side project. mr smear left late and under tense circumstances.

most of the day revolved around the broken deployments, which became extra-specially sensitive the moment i realized that the running instances where last deployed several years ago and the "successful" manual deployments i'd seen had never actually done anything 🤦‍♂️

later, i learned from a couple of the more experienced engineers that this kind of thing is actually quite normal.

lunch with the lunch group was fun, although it began with me opening my soup in a way that sprayed it across the table and across one of the guys, which was quite embarrassing.

the big division meeting: i spent about two thirds of the meeting struggling to keep my eyes open, and praying every time i nodded off that i hadn't snored or something. i was very grateful to have come out of the stupor by the time we got to the big announcements, and it's now pretty clear what my new role is and how all the pieces fit.

i like (the idea of) my new role. a lot.

...

then i had a call with my mentor. he gave me some good advice regarding how i communicate with my manager: "i've run into <x>, it's going to cause a delay, i'm taking care of it" is a solid formula that i've used a lot, but i still find it interesting to think of it as a formal structure.

i told him about my role change, and how it fits in with my roadmap, and about my autodoc project. he was very excited about all of it, and offered me some very good advice about when and how i write about it.

and then he informed me that he has feedback for me, both from my client and from my employer: apparently everyone's quite happy with me. this is a huge relief, and it feels good.

long may it last.

...

the last part of the day was all about finalizing the deployment fixes, pushing them and monitoring them. by sheer luck, i saw from the git graph that someone else was working on the repo at the same time, so i got in touch with them directly to inform them of what i was doing and why. aside from blowing their minds, i managed to get them excited about dashboards-as-code and i had them on hand to approve my PRs, so when i left the office it was after making sure that the service is actually serviceable and nothing seems broken.

[quickly stops to flip open the work laptop and double-check that the image tags really were updated]

so i walked out of the office in pretty good spirits ^_^

...

my afternoon and evening were exceptionally gassy. i have no idea what i ate or when, but it went on for hours and was very uncomfortable. you know how "every 'no' brings you closer to a 'yes'"? well, my spin on it is "every fart brings you closer to a shart". fortunately that didn't happen yesterday, but it probably could have.

anyway, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear with me to the mall to pick up his second pair of shoes. notable moments: witnessing a bunch of hormone-drunk teenagers harassing a sex-shop worker, buying socks, and a fight over mr smear reporting a clean bus for being dirty. otherwise, we had a pretty good time. and talked a lot, some of which about the LARPiness (or lack thereof) of his summer camp.

we had a very nice dinner while watching a lot more of guardians of the galaxy, and after mr smear was in bed gd and i finished another episode of ludwig. then i went straight to bed, for most of a night's sleep.

preoccupation

 the rest of my afternoon: my sister called, and we had quite a long chat about her plans for her visit, along with some distressing news that during the course of their divorce, her most recent ex-husband made a point of separating her from a bunch of old videos from her childhood.

i managed to get mr smear to play another session of math fluxx, and he was a lot more compliant and we had a lot more fun.

over lots-of-sushi dinner we watched infinity train, and between dinner and bedtime i was a *little* bit constructive vis-à-vis my autodoc side project.

i read some more alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, and then put myself to bed soon after.

...

now it's about two hours later, and i've gotten up after lying awake for a while developing indigestion.

good grief.

getting it over with

a lot more presentation work, and then lunch with the AI guys relating all the things i've been learning about to my client's systems. very interesting stuff.

then a couple of hours trying to make sense of my project work, but ten minutes to presentation and discovering a glaring issue with my slides.

getting through the presentation by waffling poorly for the first half, only picking up steam towards the second. i feel bad for everyone i was talking to.

leaving the office late on a bit of a low note, as i was stuck on stuff that really doesn't make sense.

i ate a lot of dinner in spite of arriving home without much appetite. zootopia 2 is awful writing, but the jokes are excellent.

drama at bedtime: gd struggling to make her peace that we might not be able to afford a dog.

most of an episode of ludwig, absent-mindedly watching and playing for a while, now considering going to bed soon.

movie rink

i spent most of my weekend recuperating. playing slay the spire 2 and avoiding any mental heavy lifting.

i got up late yesterday, managing to salvage some actual rest. the meaningful stuff from yesterday is as follows:

1. watching a good length of blade runner. mr smear got a bit lost in the plot at some point, so we stopped for now (perhaps he'll be ready for it in another couple of years)

2. watching a good length of avatar: the way of water. i think we all got bored, the writing is atrocious.

3. taking mr smear rollerblading, spending some time at the rink. overall we had a good time, and he's making really good progress ^_^

we finished watching splash over dinner, it's a strange movie to say has aged well, but there you go.

gd and i watched some more of ludwig and then i crashed, going to bed early. the penance for which was spending most of the night suffering from lower back and hip flexor discomfort, too tired to get up but too uncomfortable to sleep.

i got up this morning, made myself a coffee and sat reading judge dredd: the small house on the balcony until mr smear left for school. now i have a lot of work to do.

trapped in the nothing

 i passed out watching ludwig, then dragged myself into bed. i didn't sleep well, though, oh no - i woke up in the middle of the night with my neck having seized in a way that triggered a massive headache, and even though i managed to massage it enough to get it to settle down, it's still hurting and causing flashes of intense pain every so often.

did i mention that i had a lot of stuff to do today? i'm so freaking dysfunctional right now. i have bandwidth for bullshit, nothing more. gd and i did a shopping run, big data came down to give our balcony a colonoscopy (his endoscope works well enough, but wasn't able to thread it anywhere too interesting), he and his way hung around for a little while, and now...

... now i'm feeling broken and useless and idon'twanna.

oh, i finished the alice in borderland book this morning, it's pretty good.

it pours

i'm so freaking tired.

it was another rough day, tweaking AI skills and configurations and my PRs, and going around in the inevitable circles.

i went out in the evening for a short walk (the excuse was to buy another double-adapter, but i really did need real movement and my hip flexors had been agitated all day), and went i got home i was surprised to find that mr smear hadn't arrived yet - he'd missed his stop, and gotten off when he was almost at the next city.

my son learned some navigation skills today, and hopefully a little common sense. i went to retrieve him, and he made me lose my temper while i was trying to locate him by not only not answering my questions, but by telling me what i *should* have asked him when those answers wouldn't have helped me in the slightest 🤦‍♂️

when we finally met up, his lip began to tremble and i thought he was going to laugh, which made me giggle, but then he burst into tears instead - he'd been legitimately afraid. it wasn't until we finally got home that i realized *just* how lucky we'd been: when we came inside, his phone battery was at 1%. without family link's location service and a whole lot of phone time, i might have been able to guess which general direction he'd gone in but i have no idea how we would even have begun searching for him 🤯

so that happened.

on our way into the building we bumped into big data, who subsequently came down and managed to clear the cement at the entrance to the drain. then he had a beer and we chatted, and then it was our dinner time. we watched some of the first episode of the highlander series, and then it was bedtime for mr smear...

... and then, after i read to him for a bit and had had a shower myself, i saw that big data and another upstairs neighbor had done another experiment, and i saw that there was some water pooling above the drain. also, it turns out our A/C drips and had been doing damage downstairs.

FFS.

i had stuff i wanted to do tonight, but i'm so damned over it. i'm going to try going to bed now and i'm praying for a reasonable night's sleep.

electric pukaloo

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

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

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

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

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

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

so that happened ^_^

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

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

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

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

sleep journal entry + the game of life

 i haven't finished my first coffee yet, it's 10.15 on a saturday morning and all that i've done so far is have a long family meeting that began about mr smear not following instructions, and clean the balcony from the masses of bird poop that's been piling up since the birds decided that our immediate upstairs neighbor's balcony is a great place to hang out.

the architect of this building most certainly did not take birds into account :/

...

i had a pretty good night's sleep, although i did wake up around 5am to stretch because my lower back and hips were giving me trouble again.

last night was pretty cool. mr smear sang with us wholeheartedly (and nicely) for kiddush, and we're all thoroughly enjoying the first season of infinity train, and after dinner mr smear and i had a long talk about the stories in the tanach and our history as a nation and what it all means, and then we ended the day with me segwaying into (re)introducing him to conway's game of life which blew his mind (and gave us some really cool inspiration for a game).

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.

complications

 last night was a bit rough. first, getting mr smear into bed at a reasonable hour didn't happen, after we finally did get him into bed i went to bed soon after, only to wake up a while later and find him out of bed. that led to some bad emotions, because we were already out of patience and we knew how difficult this morning was going to be.

we finally threatened him (one hour of screen time for any infractions) into bed, and i eventually managed to get back to sleep.

for a bit. but then i found myself awake again, sore lower back and hips, and indigestion. so i dragged myself out of bed and spent an hour or two playing balatro and listening to tousi making it clear that this ceasefire is bullshit.

i finally got a couple of hours' sleep before our alarms went off at 6.30am. getting out of bed was hard. my neck hurt.

to be fair, mr smear handled himself pretty well this morning. he got up, made his bed, brushed his teeth, and then sat down to do some of the homework. he made a good effort.

then i accompanied him to the school, early because i had two back-to-back meetings starting 45m before his first class. we arrived just in time for my first one, and he sat across from me reading on his kindle.

after my second one - by which stage he'd gone off to class - i made my way to a KSP to stand in line for half an hour for a couple of ethernet cables. then i picked up some groceries for gd, then i returned home.

i was at home for an hour and a half, struggling to get work done, then headed out once again to pick up mr smear, and then return home for another hour or so, before heading out with gd for her dental appointment.

in spite of the fact that her dental appointment turned out to be a few minutes - and that we didn't need to be there - i got an hour of real work in (jira tedium) and felt at least kind of okay about calling it a day by the time we started back home.

we stopped for an expensive visit to the grocer, then gd picked up more groceries, and then it was finally time to come home and unpack the other groceries that had been delivered.

so lots of groceries.

i had a good chat with sailor before dinner, over dinner we watched an episode of the littlest hobo (gd was bit upset that mr smear didn't love it, but i was impressed that he watched it through to the end without complaining), chatted with my mom, got through the evening stuff (including moving his bed back to his room!), and then i sat down to watch all the videos that were open on my work computer, set it up for the OS upgrade, and now i'm on my second cup of tea and winding down.

recovery

 today was nicer, though not by too much. i didn't feel nearly as shit and dysfunctional, but my neck's still sensitive and i spent a large chunk of the day either lying with my neck at stretched angles or avoiding screens (i found a pack of playing cards and played old-school solitaire).

otherwise the day was very much spent indoors, we watched the first half of terminator 2 and the first episode (TWO HOURS OF IT?!?!) of the second season of the live action one piece.

there was some arguing over privileges, but mostly the day went smoothly. after kiddush with my mom we had a nice dinner and watched an episode of strip search, and then after all the kids were in bed our upstairs friends paid us a visit, and just left a few minutes ago.

now i'm going to play a little more balatro (i've been vascillating between balatro and full throttle) and go to bed.

sleeping beauty and the last of the workday naps

i didn't sleep much on friday night, but i got up earlier than everyone and got to enjoy some "me time" catching up on newsy youtube videos over my first coffee. between the news coming out of iran and venezuela, these are insane, but insanely-exciting, times!

mr smear waking up, getting dressed, making his bed and brushing his teeth on a saturday morning because he wanted to go to the comics library

...

heading out to the library with him, giving me some focus time on my side project. oddly, the comics library was open but nobody was there, so mr smear initially sat down on a comfortable couch outside to wait for them to return. a bit later i checked on him and saw that he'd been using his phone, so i disabled his phone expecting him to come find me... i had been in the middle of updating something on my phone control solution, so i used a phone call to him to test that it was working. 

he initially told me that he was just sitting on the couch, then admitted that that was a lie and that he was in the unmanned library reading comics. i told him to at least turn the lights on :P

a little later, i dragged him out of there to go find lunch. he really didn't want to - he wasn't hungry, apparently - but it was a beautiful day. we walked to a couple of places, ending up at miznon. he still didn't want anything, so i thought i'd get myself something and let him try it.

i tasted their lavan. he tasted their lavan. he decided that he was hungry, after all. i let him have it and ordered myself another, and then spent the next far-too-long stalking up and down desperately waiting for it with its taste still on my lips.

omg it was delicious.

we returned to the library for another reading/focus session, eventually going home when they started closing down for the day.

we were almost home when mr smear thanked me for the awesome day, and told me he wanted to get me back - i didn't know what he meant at first, but then found myself explaining that he didn't owe me anything, because i'd really enjoyed my day with him too ^_^

...

finishing the first a-team episode over dinner, finishing the main story of the ocean at the end of the lane at bedtime, revisiting con man with gd and getting through six (very short) episodes before passing out.

a long night's sleep, though not a good one

starting the ocean at the end of the lane epilogue over breakfast.

discovering mold blooms (we've had a lot of rain the past week or two)

between taking care of a bunch of admin stuff, developing AI agent fatigue from my side project. it's discouraging. i was hoping to be ready to roll by tomorrow, but i'm not so confident any more...

general sleepiness and taking what might be my last workday nap for a while on the couch.

now i'm finishing my (only) second coffee, and then gd and i are going to do a mold treatment, and then i'm going to be off to our offices soon for the second session of our agentic course.

jalapeño-powered

 my knees are threatening every time i get up, and my lower back's sore, and my neck's been giving me trouble on and off today. hello, mid-forties.

...

i'm very excited to report that before leaving the apartment this morning, i was able to complete the work on my side project's auth flows, and i'm hoping to have the whole thing essentially ready to roll out before i begin my new job on monday!

our first stop was dropping off the first challah-peño at the bakery. we're looking forward to hearing their review, it seemed like the wife thought it was good :)

gd and i walked to the light rail and made our way to the school, where mr smear was waiting, alone, playing with one of the school cats.

i thought he was allergic to cats? i don't know anymore.

we walked to our cousins, with gd stopping by the pharmacy on the way and mr smear and i sitting down at a coffee shop so that i could have a coffee and he could eat his lunch, then show me some really funny drawings he's been working on.

lunch was long, and mostly really nice. our cousin appeared to be more restrained that usual regarding overriding our parenting, and i think a lot of what we said and did really pressed her buttons... but all-in-all it was a pleasant afternoon.

unfortunately, gd had been getting more and more uncomfortable because of the cold, so the beginning of our walk home (we couldn't catch a cab) was a bit rough until she warmed up a bit. mr smear and i discovered jalapeño pretzels on the way home, which are really good.

after we got home, it was time to bake another challah-peño for ourselves (that's a lot of carbs for one day), and while we waited for them i caught up with the class whatsapp group which had gone a bit off the rails over the course of the day, which led to some important-yet-fun family conversations.

over dinner and after, we watched most of the first episode of the a-team, which we apparently tried to watch with mr smear before (but i can't look up "a-team" on my blog) - mr smear was skeptical at first, but once it got going he was all in :)

after everyone else went to bed (around 11pm), i completed my (relative) speed run through botopia, and now i'm sitting with my chamomile getting ready for bed.

spicy

i type this post with burning fingers. i used gloves on the carolina reaper, so i'm pretty confident that it's the jalapeño i prepared before...

yesterday:

i woke up from a disturbing dream yesterday morning: my mom and i on a pier in a massive storm, me in the car and her standing about 20ft away. i yell "look at the horses!" and then realize we have a massive tsunami incoming, i yell at her to get in the car and she makes it just as the wave hits. and then the car is pushed right over the edge of the pier and i wake up as we're falling, trying to recall how to not get trapped in an underwater vehicle

i began the day publishing the article on git worktrees and devcontainers, then mr smear and i accompanied gd to the neurosurgeon to look at her shoulder. we had about an hour and a half to wait, which i used to finally start preparing for my client meeting.

the doctor was pleasant, and he tried to be helpful, but gd left very discouraged and feeling like he didn't hear her (although, in my opinion, he did). i hope we get to the bottom of whatever's giving her trouble sooner rather than later, but it's already becoming a process...

after that we came home, and i spent the hour i had until my meeting preparing some more.

the meeting itself seems to have gone well, and i was glad to get good feedback from my lead. having said that, i was a little surprised to learn that i'm going to have to go through a proper technical interview with them on monday - i'm a little bummed out, too, because i didn't realize i'd need to spend another couple of my "unemployment" days doing work.

at least my employer's agreed to pay me for my preparation hours, but i was kinda hoping to have a few weeks off :/

after the meeting, i ate some food in preparation for the next big item on my agenda: the eating of my first carolina reaper.

OMFG. i just asked mr smear to record a reaction video to me eating a carolina reaper, i thought it would be a fun father/son activity. i survived - i only took a couple of nibbles, that was enough pain to convince me that eating the whole thing may have incapacitated me - and now that my system's calmed down (and i can breathe not-fire again) i just learned that he somehow lost the more than five minutes recording of me struggling 🤦😭

so... that happened.

it took an hour or so for my mouth and stomach to calm down after that, and between the meeting (and its prep) and the previous days' not sleeping enough and the reaper, i was completely exhausted. all i remember from the rest of the day was passing out watching an episode of jujutsu kaisen with mr smear, and gd deciding she doesn't like dinosaurs after we watched episode 7 ("family challenge"), and going to bed right after reading some more of the ocean at the end of the lane to mr smear.

today:

lots of weird dreams. it feels like it's been a while.

after a long chat with horseman - we talked about AI and game dev, but more about internet psychosis - we all went to the mall to pick up some groceries, and then the corner market, and then mr smear played among us online with his friend while i watched educational content (ha ha - most of the stuff i watched today was trash), and then i did the dishes so that gd and i could make the challot together; we have our first challah-lina reaper incoming :D

i was reading a bit more of the department of truth when i got the sudden urge to write this, so here we are.

i'm tiiiired. and we're going out to our friends tonight. i should nap a bit.

distraction

 yesterday:

yesterday got off to a busy start, mr smear went to school on his own (on his own by bus, which we only learned later) and we headed to bnei brak for an appointment for gd. the doctor could handle speaking in english, but gd did a great job of breaking her teeth and i was barely needed :)

we got off at the hospital stop to pick up some things on the way home, after which i spent some time preparing for an interview. the interview went well.

i chatted with my mom for a bit (mixed feelings: pride in my nephew for telling my niece what's what, sadness that she's been neglecting her older child while planning on bringing a new one into the world).

i dropped a return package off at the post office and then paid a visit to another clinic to confirm that we'd done the right thing when trying to book gd a followup appointment.

i did some post-interview "homework" (playing around with temporal), and then when it started getting dark i headed to the comic library - which i'd never heard of before - where i found mr smear engrossed in tokyo ghoul.

the library has a lot of interesting stuff, and i was pleasantly surprised to learn that residents have an all-access library membership, so we picked up a copy of the incal and two tokyo ghoul volumes and made our way home, with me investing some time in getting mr smear familiar with the landmarks along the way.

i decided to tell mr smear that i'm leaving it up to him to determine whether what he's reading is appropriate or not, and to talk to me if he encounters anything confusing or disturbing.

just before dinner i discovered that the dinosaurs tv series is on apple tv after all! so after mr smear got through his math homework, we sat down to eat and enjoy the first episode :)

it was an easy bedtime, and i fell asleep pretty easily.

today:

i slept quite a lot last night, and had a lot of strangely unremarkable dreams.

everyone's morning was smooth and positive, and i accompanied mr smear to school "just because". i came home for breakfast, and then gd and i walked to get mr smear's school logo printed on his shirts. on the way back we picked up a lentil soup, then i stopped for a coffee while gd visited the pharmacy, and then we stumbled upon a good place to buy a comforter (it's starting to get colder).

since we've been home, we've chilled, had soup for lunch, and i'm now doing a terrible job of focusing and being productive. it doesn't help that gd's watching 28 years later while i try to be functional...

...

and in an hour or so i'm off to a (hopefully) final interview for the consulting agency 🤞