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 🤞

kombat

 yesterday was pretty horrible. gd and i had a couple of fights during the day, the first one triggered by me losing patience with mr smear and telling them i needed my space for the afternoon. the second one because later, i was trying to get to the bottom of something she'd said earlier.

we took a break from fighting to go to our friends for dinner, and we all had a really nice evening. everything was great until we got home, and then things got explosive and continued to be full shit until about 2am.

today was spent... recovering? i dunno if that's quite right, we both still feel horrible. i spent a large part of the day continuing to read nightwood, and napping, but we did watch the mortal kombat movie this afternoon and i really enjoyed how much fun mr smear was having. later, we took the bike and blades for a ride... there was a bit of an emotional breakdown triggered by his brakes not responding fast enough, but we moved on and i introduced him to charades (it appears we've never played that with him) and the rest of the ride was really nice.

dinner was pleasant in spite of no screens (he took too long in the shower), i read some more of the neverending story to him and gd at bedtime, and gd and i watched a psychotic episode and a half of the rehearsal reality tv show which is unbearably disturbing.

quiet

 i've been having trouble sleeping tonight, after crashing pretty early (i finished watching the first episode of slow horses, sonofabitch i'm in). after randomly scrolling through reddit threads* i lay quietly thinking about stuff.

quiet in mind, as much as in body.

i've been thinking a lot about having to face the polygraph, and as i said to gd earlier - i don't know how it'll go, and i don't expect going through this to magically resolve anything from the previous trauma, but in a way i feel like it's facing something big and that in itself would be an achievement. i'm psychologically ready to face the music, and i'm at a point in my life where what will be asked of me really isn't much of a price to pay.

i've been thinking a lot about alignment recently, and how long i've been operating professionally from a baseline misalignment, and while i'm certainly stressed about integrating well into my new role and impressing my employers and coworkers, i'm in a better place than i've been in what feels like an extraordinarily long time.

* why am i still looking at reddit? mainly for inscryption posts, and i added a few movies to my watch list.

...

our day could have started well, because gd's back finally relaxed a bit. but our day didn't start very well, and that's to say that it started off pretty badly... but by the time mr smear needed to leave for school we were all in a better place for it. it feels like the theme of the last week, to be honest. i accompanied him to school, and that served like a really pleasant reset to the day.

then gd and i hurried to misrad hapnim to continue renewing her passport. the clerk we were supposed to return to was on reception duty so it took a little while for us to get to him; while waiting in line, a lady told me how it was my "lucky day" because there were relatively few people waiting, and i turned to gd and said that after everything we've been through, i feel like any day that we're here in israel, that we're able to come to misrad hapnim and expect service, is a lucky day.

the clerk gave us a name and told us to tell them that we'd been there the day before, which made me pause, but i shut my mouth and did as i was told. we found the person - i think she's a manager - and when i told her what he'd told me to, she said "yes, i remember, i'm the one who signed it yesterday."

i couldn't stop myself from starting to say "huh, but we..." before realizing what was happening and shutting my mouth accordingly 🤣

she sat us down in front of another clerk, and we were out of there about five minutes later. great success!

...

my work day was alright. i ran into trouble with cdktf - it's documentation is arguably worse than AWS documentation, which is saying something - and just set up what my coworkers needed manually and left "the right way" for another day.

startup life.

i wanted to go find the closest sumsum salad bar, but then got diverted to the hummusia equivalent of a dive bar. the hummus was alright - not amazing - but the atmosphere was excellent 👌

it was a troubleshooting / headscratching sort of a day. i left the office at a reasonable time, got through a page of maths homework with mr smear without any bad feelings, we continued watching the fifth harry potter movie over dinner, and - aside from navigating an emotional outburst from gd* - the evening was relaxed.

* it was about not getting treatment for her foot, and i think we're going to need to visit the clinic tomorrow and try to get her an emergency appointment. we've been so concerned about her back the past few days we completely forgot about it.

...

i've been up for a few hours now, and i'm not sure if i'm going to be ready to go to bed anytime soon, but every time i think about sleeping i hear the sirens going off in my mind. fucking houthis.

down but out

 the coffee was good, but i left a bit later than i should have, couldn't find a good bus to get home with, and ended up walking the entire way (in my heavy rain boots), arriving *just* in time for the start of the meeting that was then delayed by about ten minutes...

anyway, it wasn't a waste of time after all because he sent me a form i needed, which i then sent on to my insurance broker, which set the ball in motion.

i spent some time trying to rest on the couch, but finding myself invested in apple cider vinegar which gd was watching (i jumped in in the middle of the second-to-last episode).

i was feeling like crap, still, but gd's been in trouble with her neck for a while so i went to pick mr smear up from school. him and his "granny cane", according to the bullies in his class - they teased him that he didn't need it, and in their defense, i really don't believe he did ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

as he told me what transpired and what was said to him, i offered him some suggestions for comebacks and he was both impressed and sad that he hadn't been able to come up with them on his own. i suggested he practice - briefly describing eminem's tactics from 8 mile - and i'm curious to see whether he actually does.

i took him to his therapist - again, feeling really awful - and sorted out my insurance stuff while i waited. then i picked him up, we returned home, and from that point until dinner i was responsible for overseeing his homework.

he actually did pretty well in both hebrew and math, and i was surprisingly quite pleased by his attitude. i feel like choosing a translation of harry potter for his reading is working out well, the language is sophisticated enough that i have to keep looking up words but he understands the story very well so he doesn't get lost.

[holy shit, the jackals have just started howling - they've been doing that a lot the past couple of nights, and it sounds like they're hanging out right around our building]

as for the maths, this evening was the first time i've managed to get him to check his answers before submitting, rather than (effectively) guessing, and once he got into a groove of doing that his performance was pretty solid.

after getting him into bed, gd and i settled in to watch the season finale, and it was perfectly cringy as anticipated. afterwards we watched two minutes of the 60 minutes interview with belle gibson before i decided i really didn't need to see any more. then we watched random shit on youtube for a while before gd decided it was time to go to bed, and i've just finished a run of kaycee's mod and i'm now ready for bed myself.

hopefully i'll be better in the morning.

assemble!

 so, i introduced my boy to the avengers today. it was AWESOME. pure joy ^_^

the only thing that didn't spark joy was gd having another coughing fit just at the end of the movie :(

but she does seem to be feeling better overall.

oh, and we've been watching the simpsons from its first season, and really enjoying it.

it was a weird day. the weather wasn't great, so mr smear and i stayed indoors except for a short walk around the neigborhood. i spent most of it (i believe) playing shadowrun returns, and that's the reason i'm writing this post after 1am when i should have been in bed hours ago...

i didn't actually want to be on screens the whole day, but there wasn't anything i felt like doing that wasn't on a computer (including count zero, and i'm loving how much shadowrun is just lifted directly from gibson's sprawl trilogy). 

but anyway.

shadowrun returns is every bit as brilliant - and surprising - as i remembered.

i'm a bit nervous about what tomorrow will bring, between my current work and the job hunt and the school stuff. i'm also a bit nervous about going to bed because my mattress (+topper) and i aren't vibing.

...

i'm also feeling quite disturbed by the fact that fursan al-aqsa exists and is allowed to be published on steam.

back to front

 yesterday was a bit shit, i'm really hating working with pure frontend and for the entire sprint every time i've resolved an issue another one has sprung up. i haven't been this unhappy with not-exactly-coding since i quit my job with mmf at the end of 2011.

anyway, it's not my usual job. and i had a conversation with my manager wherein i explained that i understand frontend dev enough to know how much i don't understand, and that while everything the contractor did makes sense within the confines of his employment the solution wasn't built in a way that inexperienced frontenders like ourselves would be able to make massive changes to its scope. none of us are really qualified to work on this, nor interested in it, and we're burning money and demoralizing ourselves. if we really feel like this is something we should be investing in, then we need to hire a frontend dev. if not, then we shouldn't be offering to build this stuff for our clients when it's far outside our competence.

in the middle of the day i left the office to pick up mr smear and taking him to his therapy session. while he was occupied, i tried to find a place with coffee that i could get some work done. the aroma's bathroom was unusable, and then i witnessed one of the kitchen staff walk out without washing his hands, so i noped on out of there. the next place didn't sell coffee, then the next place did have a place to sit and the employees were smoking right at the entrance. the next place, cafe taizu, doesn't sell coffee, and i finally landed on maafiyat lechamim. the atmosphere was cool, but the service was really shit and the coffee mediocre at best.

i'd spent so much time looking for a place that i got about five or ten minutes of "work" done before i had to get up and leave to pick up mr smear. i didn't really get anything of value done.

...

our financial situation's better, but not good, and i was really hoping to be able to put down the money for a proper keyboard for mr smear this month. and now i've been looking at vr video games and equipment as well. and gd wants a clothes dryer. fuck.

...

mr smear was only too happy to continue watching the original x-men series, but that's because he's seen the trailer for x-men 97 and he's really excited to see that... aaaaand i just realized we still have two more seasons we haven't watched, and everyone's groaning :(

...

i just went on-call ten minutes ago. hopefully it'll be a quiet day.