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".

banana drama llama karma farmer trauma

 today was a better day, even though that's obviously off a pretty low bar. i actually slept through to my alarm this morning, and began my day reading some more alice in borderland - it's good, but the main reason i'm getting through it is because mr smear's read it already and i'm not sure if there's anything problematic in it :P

i prepared a message for the office manager regarding the whole vegan options debacle, but gd and my mother both agreed that it was a terrible idea, and that next time there's an upcoming event i should just tell her not to bother.

just after i arrived at the office and joined my team daily, i saw that i'd missed a bunch of messages from early in the morning - an incident, with me as the primary suspect. fortunately, it didn't take long to figure out what had happened, and while i was the trigger for the issue, neither the action itself nor its resolution were on me.

i proceeded to spend all day fighting with AI to figure out what i was supposed to be doing. the model i used cost a lot more money than usual*, and i'm not convinced the results were significantly better...

* i've seen the company "leaderboard", today, and the top four spenders are my two teammates, and two of the guys i work next to :P

gd packed me a sushi and pancake lunch, which i ate on the balcony, kind of admiring the view while listening to interesting youtube videos. very social.

in the afternoon, while waiting for an AI investigation, i saw an email come in from someone claiming to be a university grad. i had to verify their identity because i initially thought it was one of the usual phishing attacks i received, but it seems like a researcher is legitimately interested in my comic adaptation and wants to ask me about it!

my two primary intentions behind the project are to get the sonnets into the mainstream via teenagers and young adults, and to manipulate the ivory tower of academia to engage with my interpretation. so this has potential to be an important beginning!!

my client's happy hour was far superior to my employer's, the vegan food was so delicious i had to double check the ingredients :P

i came home, picked up mr smear and the book we bought unnecessarily on tuesday evening, and we walked back to book store, experiencing the titular banana drama llama karma farmer trauma that my BDLKF son generates.  on the way we ran into the dad of one his previous classmates, and in our smalltalk i found myself joking that "we can use a few rocket attacks just to give us a sense of stability" and making us both uncomfortable :P

we couldn't get a refund, but we could exchange it. they didn't have any english books for kids or young adults, they didn't have drawing equipment we were interested in, their toys and games selection was pretty shitty, but eventually i found something - a book for gd entitled the mammoth book of bizarre crimes.

...

we paid, left the store, and i decided to take a short detour to look for supermarket / pharmacy underwear (it's the best value for money IMO). while waiting at a red light, an arab wolt driver rammed into the guy standing next to us, then immediately yelled at him to get out of the way. the american oleh immediately prepared to throw down by removing his shirt*, then pointed and laughed out loud when he realized that the delivery box on the back of the wolt driver's electric bike had a his number on it, which he immediately started memorized as the driver tried to get away.

* which i later explained to my son was an enormous tactical error - if he'd done that to intimidate me i would have knocked him out while he was struggling to get it over his head 🤦‍♂️

while we were exchanging details so that i could bear witness, the driver came back and threatened him with a large plank of wood with a nail in it. this big american dude kicked off his flip flops and ran towards him*, and i started recording. when the two of them disappeared around the corner, i felt sure that the guy was going to get murdered.

* yet another terrible tactic, as i explained to mr smear

when i realized they were moving further away*, i followed and told mr smear (who'd been following me) to wait for me. just then the driver started throwing rocks - massive rocks, double-fist sized, one of which whizzed past me and another broke just in front of me and a piece skipped towards mr smear.

* at this point, the american yelled the phrase "yesh li mispar shelcha, dickhead!", which is a simply wonderful catchphrase 🤣

he chased the mad wolt driver away, and another witness (also an olah) came to exchange details and help him call the police*. he asked me to wait a bit for his girlfriend to arrive, he needed someone else to tell her he hadn't started it :P

* some old guy came past and tried to convince him to "let it go", which pisses me right off. 

mr smear and i came back home, discussing everything that took place, with him telling me the story from his perspective and including some particularly funny takes. the first he saw of the incident was the guy taking his shirt off, and then he noticed that he'd removed his shoes, and he immediately thought to himself "what, are you gonna take off your shorts as well?"

later, he quipped: "he has balls of steel. and a brain made of the same material" 🤭

...

we had dinner watching more of splash, though we had to turn it off to get mr smear to actually eat. then he told the story to my mom, and the shower and bedtime routine went relatively smoothly. now that i've got all of this down, gd and i are going to watch some ludwig. ludwig is good.

dead battery

 winding down... i messed around, including playing balatro, until way later than i should have. i'm guessing i went to bed around 1.30am; i lay down, closed my eyes, and that was precisely when the air raid sirens sounded without the usual pre-warning (it turned out to be from lebanon) and i rushed to mr smear's room to drag him back into ours.

bearing in mind that i didn't get much sleep the night before, i got practically none last night. between him being in our bed, and a sore back, and needing to pee at least four times before daybreak, i was a wreck by the time our alarms went off. and then, after the night's excitement, i had to figure out whether mr smear was really expected to go to school or not.

surprisingly, it was a "normal" friday morning. i accompanied him to school (because wtf), then returned home for a brief cup of tea to wait for gd to decide whether she was able to come out with me or not. we then headed to south tel aviv to hunt for rocking chairs and beanbags. it was a beautiful morning, and we went up and down florentin looking at a wide variety of stuff, and ended up buying some really arbitrary things.

we didn't find anything to sit on, but we did enjoy the morning.

a little before we headed home, mr smear called from the school, which caused me to panic a bit before i realized that he'd been invited to a birthday party and wanted to know if that was cool. so we were excited to hear that he was invited in the first place, and that he was interested in going, but later were quite disheartened to learn that he'd decided that he wasn't interested in tempting himself with birthday foods so opted to come back home instead :(

gods help us.

after gd and i hashed out our differences regarding beanbag ideas and i'd ordered them online - seems the thing to do - we spent the next couple of hours putting up some more of our pictures. the apartment's definitely looking more homely :)

i put a couple of hours into looking into comic publishing, and it's looking like the right way to do this is to use KDP again.

my throat's feeling a bit scratchy.

gd made a delicious dinner, we chatted a long time with my mom while eating it, and then shower / bedtime took forever. i picked up slay the spire 2 today, and have been playing it along with a bit of baba is you, which is insanely challenging.

i think i'm going to go to bed soon. please god let tonight be quiet and let me get some damned rest.

wtf wednesday (ceasefire?)

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

...

yesterday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

today (so far):

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

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

three for three

 we're in week three of our new apartment, and i'm starting this post in hour three of trying to sleep but tossing and turning in pain and discomfort. my two-week-plus old mattress is causing me suffering, and my lack of sleep is interfering with everything.

and we don't have a couch i can escape to.

...

grocery shopping, electricity shutoff anxiety (fortunately for gd, they started late and finished early)

misrad hapnim, a 10 minute wait (and failed attempts to use their "self-service" machine) for a one minute print job

phone calls there and back: clinic, municipality

client office experience: 100% of the time in a telephone booth, receiving praise from team lead for handling the previous day's deployment like a professional (i thanked her, awkwardly)

miraculously perfect timing for supporting my team between phone calls, because most of the day-long rollout meeting wasn't interesting to me:

receiving a receipt showing that the municipality owes me (so hopefully we'll get our deposit back soon), the representative recommending a pre-approved "forgery" in order to honor a reasonable request from our new landlord, my new mattress is ready for testing but i have to physically get there during their uncomfortable opening hours, the grocery store confirming that they charge differently to what's posted on the website (i'd used a voucher, it got weird)

discussing the past two weeks' organizational weirdness with my religious mentor, and his stunned silence followed by a heart-felt WTF 😂 half an hour writing an email to update my ("my" my) team after scheduling a one-on-one with my client

a bus to my office, pleasantries and small talk, followed by a class on docker that i didn't need to be in

forgery: doc editing and printing issues

on the way home, receiving a rejection response from the local comic publishing house. zero constructive feedback.

arriving home, completing the forgery (same pen and everything), submitting the request

celebrating a letter from yad l'olim with a double-shot of rum and reading its translation to my mother

a delicious dinner, overeating (probably compensating for nothing but healthy snacking all day)

more of the colour of magic at bedtime

trying not to wake myself up before crashing (but it was all for nought regardless)

...

the world is shifting. it's not subtle (even if you're trying to look beyond the hype), and it's fast.

• anthropic’s 7 billionaire founders just pledged 80% of their wealth (because they know what’s coming)
• openclaw: 160,000 developers are building something openai & google can't stop. where do you stand?

tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow

today went much better than it could have. in spite of a bit of a rocky start - gd realized at 8am that mr smear hadn't yet left the light rail station, and when i called him he informed me that "the trains had been too full for him to get on", at which point i yelled at him so loudly that i actually hurt my throat. i feel stupid for having lost my temper, and knowing he was right to put the phone down, but at least he got on the next train.

i spent most of the following hour sending my comics samples to the publisher, then gd and i did the grocery shopping, and i ate breakfast, and then i sat down and prepared for the afternoon's in-office workshop.

gd and i arrived just on time for the meeting with the principal (and councillor, and grade supervisor, and class teacher). it was a heavy meeting, but it looks like we got them to at least understand where mr smear's coming from, and how much we're invested in his success, and from their side they made it very clear that this is a critical time for mr smear to learn how to cope and cooperate, and that we need to get him back into therapy.

i just realized as i type this that it's therapy for a very different reason than before, for which we should be grateful.

i don't know why they asked us where mr smear's name came from, but i obviously explained it well because at least one of the women got emotional :)

gd and i split up at one of the light rail stations, and i went to his previous psychologist's clinic to ask about taking him back. unfortunately, the usual receptionist wasn't there and the one who was responded very bureaucratically. so i walked further along to a coffee shop, where i composed a message to his last psychologist asking for assistance.

i tried to get something constructive done, but couldn't concentrate, so i took a walk to my new office, arriving just in time to be introduced to some people before the workshop began.

between the miserable weather and trying to make arrangements for gd to see my aunt before she leaves, i'd been regretting signing up for the workshop, but in retrospect i'm glad i did.

from there (it was running late, and when i left 15 minutes after the scheduled end of the session it was still ongoing) i fast-walked to a bus stop where i could meet gd and mr smear while coordinating with my aunt and cousin. ultimately, we made it pretty much at the intended time, and we had a great hour and a half with them :)

we quickly gave up trying to find dinner in the area, and took a taxi home (kinda rude driver, and took an extra-long route), and mr smear jumped in the shower and gd and i sorted out a grocery delivery while we waited for the food.

the rainbow burgers were amazing ("chunk" steak and perfect garnishing/sauces). we ate too many fries.

we got mr smear into bed, and then i called my sister, and we talked a loooong time about my niece's drama, and then about mr smear's drama, and i was starting to fall asleep by the time we ended the call. then i remembered i hadn't brushed my teeth, so i did that, then i called my mom to sync, and then i showered, and now i'm thinking that maybe it's close to my own bedtime.

it's been a day.

busy

 i'm starting this while the day's still not over - it's almost 11pm and i'm testing a contractor's changes in the hopes i have a good answer for him by morning.

today was busy. i dropped mr smear off at school and went straight to work, and got stuck into an interesting hour of explaining my vision to one of our new product managers. then i discovered that it was one of our incoming devops guys' official first day, and spending the day with him, onboarding and planning, was generally much easier than our previous interactions.

the day involved a lot of management, strategy, and a lot of testing and fixing.

i guess i ate relatively well, too, but that wasn't out of choice, more lack of snacks in the office kitchens.

my only real break was picking up mr smear from the station and taking him to his final therapy session. tomorrow morning's our last guidance session with the therapist, too.

it took me longer to leave the office than i'd hoped, and gd's arm's so messed up that mr smear and i both needed to help her get dinner ready. we did it, but unfortunately so late that we couldn't watch anything while we ate (no screens an hour before bedtime) and mr smear ended up getting into bed much later than he should have, complaining about there not being time for reading and then about his "night light" (the air-conditioner). i eventually managed to get him to go to sleep by himself, but it wasn't easy. (to be fair, it wasn't that hard, but everything's relative to how tired one is)

at least the hole in his leg seems to be getting better.

i've spent the past two hours on the testing, and it's still not done. and i haven't even looked at facebook because i know there're a bunch of messages regarding the comic printing that i don't really have energy to go through right now...

holy dad joke

hello darkness my old friend...

it's now 3.45am and i haven't been able to sleep for a while. but i'm really tired. i actually feel like i have legitimate reason to be, but in addition to everything else i believe that this morning (or during the night) the flu vaccine side effects kicked in and i spent most of the day feeling weak, slow and irritable.

i accompanied gd to the clinic for her flu shot (reading blindsight on my kindle app whenever the opportunity arose). we walked to the mall to try and get mr smear's school shirts printed, but they didn't have the correct logo so they referred us to a different branch. we headed to the bakery for a coffee and a sandwich, and picked up a couple of yummo's vegan protein bars (which are delicious!). we returned to the clinic so that gd could get a prescription made, then returned to the mall to pick it up. on our way out, i was inspired to write a post to my israeli "hive-mind" asking for assistance with the comic printing.

by this point i was long over the morning and feeling shitty and impatient.

we returned home, then almost immediately left again to get the shirt printing done at the other mall. and then finally return home, dragging in the delivered groceries when i arrived.

by that stage, mr smear had already finished school for the day. i tooled around until he got home, and the rest of the afternoon was a combination of napping (crashing), helping him with his reading and tanach homework (which went relatively smoothly), and doing dishes.

...

for years, i've been begging gd to make challah-peño: challah with actual jalapeño in it. this evening, in addition to giving her a hand in the kitchen because her shoulder's out, we actually made the thing and it came out beautifully. i'm extremely proud and excited: not only did we invent a fun idea, and actually execute it, but the execution was a raging success and the challah-peño is spicy and delicious ^_^

...

during the afternoon and evening, i began receiving some solid advice and leads regarding the comic printing, so i've got homework to do but it's feeling positive. amusingly, a friend put me in touch with someone, who it turned out i had a conversation with trying to recruit him to the project in 2012!

i also had a chat with our kibbutz cousin, who's finally given notice and is going on pension soon. and her eldest son (a few months older than me), with his severe learning disabilities, just completed his bagrut for a job which is pretty darned impressive.

...

i tried watching the charlie kirk and netanyahu southpark episodes with gd after getting mr smear into bed, but i passed out about three quarters of the way through the first one. in theory, i should have enjoyed a good night's sleep...

interrupt

yesterday began with a fun find - i didn't use up my food allowance, so i purchased a voucher with it. as usual, it took a few steps to add it to my wallet, during which i discovered that one of my phone numbers wasn't connected to my account. when i did that, i found that my first israeli employer had gifted me two vouchers on my other number that i'd completely missed! the big one's link had expired, but i got on the line with their customer service and they reactivate it for me ^_^

so i basically found some money that had been stuck in the couch since 2023!

...

the story of yesterday was basically me starting to do things and almost immediately being interrupted and pulled in a different direction. it was frustrating, and constant context-switching is overwhelming.

to make matters worse, i was planning on taking sunday off, but now i've got interviews lined up for sunday and monday, some important stuff on tuesday, and mr smear's dairy challenge on wednesday, so there really isn't a good day next week that's worth taking off...

[shifts it to the following week]

i felt stretched thin by the time i got home last night, we had dinner, showered, and i read a little of the neverending story to mr smear (and gd)...

... and then i got back to work for the next hour or so :(

i spent the following hour or two trying to understand crop marks for my comics and playing slay the spire, slept kind of alright, and now i'm gearing up to take mr smear to the extra-mural fair at the school.

break everything

 today was wildly not fun.

step 1: wake up after a sleepless, though somehow not unpleasant, night.

step 2: try to find a newspaper for mr smear's paper mache activity on the way to his shuttle. discover that there's no demand in our neighborhood for physical news, and walk quite far to pay for one. then quickly head home, pick up my bag for work and take a bus to the summer camp. getting out too early (about halfway there), but fortunately only having to wait a minute before the next line came to the rescue.

step 3: get to work early, become convinced to go to the print shop before the day gets really hot. but the day was already pretty hot. i had an awkward meeting with the guy, but eventually left with an understanding of what to expect. i don't quite know how confident i am, but i guess it's worth a shot?

step 4: the day began in good spirits, but we had networking issues. i tried to fix them, but instead took the entire office offline and would spend most of the next six hours trying to get things working again. including hunting for a "console cable" in our warehouse and in two stores, to no avail. we managed to borrow one from our neighbors, but we weren't able to figure out what to do once we finally connected. all the while, the tech support was less than useless.

the above included half an hour to an hour of a distressing discussion with bigtalk, who's upset that the incoming devops manager is technically less capable than him and that he's effectively demoted himself by signing on with us. it was a complicated conversation, and i hope my advice helps him.

also during the above, two of us went to the new sumsum and it's waaaay slicker than the other branches.

step 5: the (work) day ended with incessant random things, and me not getting my tasks done.

step 6: coming home to a much-needed gin & tonic, a decent leftovers meal, and the realization that mr smear's going to be ten years old tomorrow.

he was very excited about me buying volume 3 of one piece for him. they didn't end up doing the paper mache activity. his eye seems to be clearing up.

oh, yeah - my eyes have been driving me nuts since sunday. what i've been doing seemed to have stopped the infection, but i'm still anxious that something worse might be on the way...

step 7: reading more the neverending story to mr smear (and gd) at bedtime.

step 8: our security consultant - after i've been complaining about one of their unnecessary decisions that's been causing me to be locked out of our password manager - finally did something she should have done from the beginning and completely turned the terrible experience around.

...

it's almost midnight, and the technician's supposed to arrive at the office between 8 and 11 :/

the secret

 i've complained about the bullshit misconceptions regarding "the secret" before, but there's one aspect of it that is valid: if you decide you're going to have a bad day, you'll be sure to get it.

i began the day trying to disable avatars in zoom:

am i the only person who finds the idea of a zoom "AI companion" creepy, and am concerned by the fact that when i tried to disable it it warned me that that would mean deleting biometric data of mine??!

i mean, i've never heard of the AI companion features until i signed in to disable avatars so that my son's zoom class behavior would be less chaotic...

possibly related, by a bizarre sequence of events gd was forced to re-enact the scene from the dirtiest toilet in scotland this morning and we were all thoroughly traumatized.

most of today was spent indoors, alternating between random shit and napping. i finished reading danny the champion of the world, which was superb. we bought noita, which looks amazing, and i have to say mr smear gave it a very fair chance before he decided he was bored. he wanted to like it, but after going through some of it with him and then reading up on how long it takes before it starts being fun, we requested a refund.

oh, which reminds me - i started investigating entry level gaming PCs last night before going to bed, i think i might have found a good solution but i'm going to ask my coworkers to vet it first.

we also tried to get the MIDI controller working with garage band; it does work out of the box, but i couldn't for the life of me figure out the controls.

after spending some time trying to compile the sonnet comics images into a format for the printer. i was horrified to learn that i don't have all the hi-res images, and that some of the hi-res images are slightly different resolutions. fortunately, mr cat was quick to respond positively and he's going to (re-)deliver them soon.

...

i planned to take mr smear to the charles clore park for an outing, which started off positively but he soon found things to complain about and became progressively more convinced that he was having the worst day ever. the fruit shake was great, the ice-cream was great, being on the promenade on a beautiful day was great, and having dinner at mexicana was great (although once he actually tried the food he remembered he didn't like the rice, goddammit).

on the way home his bike started acting up, so he decided he was going to walk. *i& didn't want to walk because i was on blades and moving slowly over long periods makes my feet hurt, and we'd already travelled pretty far. so i grabbed his bike and rolled with it, he jogged alongside me, and this was going great until he tripped on some sunken bricks and really hurt himself.

the limp home was painful for him, and i ended up having to "walk" anyway so it was painful for me too. and we had a few characteristically unpleasant moments along the way, although we both seemed to handle things better once we got home.

now it's just about 10pm, i've almost finished my strong tea and i'm about to get to work 🤞

bumpy ride

 wednesday:

waking up early and sending mr smear off to school, still broken from lack of sleep

arriving to the office really early (but still with time pressure) to discover that my installation station had been stripped of all its cabling (amongst other things), and it would take about an hour and a half to get that sorted out.

at least the installation itself went relatively smoothly.

one of the aussies gave me and another aussie's cousin (he's helping out) a ride to the test site, where the story of the afternoon was hours of set up for very little payoff - not only were there loads of hardware issues, but the issue that i'd resolved by midnight the previous night turned out to be not fully solved, and it cost another three hours to understand what was wrong and resolve it.

and then cursor started bugging out, because we use devcontainers and microsoft (fuckers!) are now preventing vscode clones from using their extensions.

i don't know at this point how much of the solution to the problem is an actual solution to the problem, or a workaround for ms (and docker) fuckery.

anyway. at least i figured out the cause of one of the other issues we had (aws syncing syncs impossibly slowly if you have debug logs being printed)

anyway.

after wrestling with a bad router/switch setup, and waiting 90's download times for an OS installation, we were finally able to leave one of the machines in a state where i should have been able to continue the installation remotely, and we hopped in the car and rode back to tel aviv.

i arrived home around 11pm. signed in to attempt to finish the deployment, and discover that the machine was offline.

very frustrated, i went to bed.

yesterday:

i feel like the whole city woke up feeling more rested. mr smear went off to school again, i took care of a bunch of things that had been piling up over the course of the week, went past the clinic to get authorization for gd's procedure next week, and continued on to the coffee shop where astérix gladiateur was waiting to be picked up.

of course, i had to pick up a coffee and nurse it all the way to the office.

it was an exciting day in the office. the two most significant pieces of work i did were recording an online demo from a contractor (who threw up a little in his mouth halfway through 🤢), and taking a couple of guys with IT / devops experience into the warehouse and beginning to get a workshop set up there.

another highlight (in addition to the workshop, as opposed to the not-highlight of the demo) was a department weekly with lots of enthusiastic new faces, and a happy hour making a new convert both regarding shakespeare's sonnets and my vision for our software solution.

after putting mr smear to bed, i had a call with my boss; i suspected that i was going to be answering for having been a bit miserable the previous day, but it turned out to be a discussion about how to go about doing a deployment we'd had to defer and arguing over when to do it. we ended up settling on tomorrow night, so 🤞

today:

i guess i slept alright last night, at least better than has become usual. i was avoiding screens before mr smear left for school, and reading a canticle for leibowitz, or trying to at any rate. some of it i've really enjoyed, but the last quarter is proving to be a slog and with everything else going on i've decided to give it up.

while going through that, i realized that even if i'm not on screens i'm still focused very close to my head, so i decided to walk mr smear to school in order to give my own eyes an opportunity to "stretch". surprisingly, gd had had a similar idea simultaneously so we all walked together, which aside from an  encounter with a brazenly irresponsible dog owner was an enjoyable experience.

i had some important stuff to take care of, which generated a fight with gd that put more shitty vibes on the morning, but eventually worked through it and we hit the mall to do some grocery shopping and upgrade my phone.

it turns out the issue with my (old) phone has been that it's only got 4GB of memory, and with my "new" phone (the display unit, i got a significant discount for that) it's clear why it was so unresponsive; my baseline usage with nothing open is 4.6GB, and that's after uninstalling and disabling every app i don't need on a daily basis...

i'm a little concerned about the battery usage, but i'll give it a few days before i decide whether to complain or not.

on the way out of the mall, an older guy came out of the retirement home and lit up a cigarette while still inside the mall. i asked him to please not do that, to which he made stupid excuses and then started calling me a quibbler (not sure if the translation is good). so i called him a jerk, but he continued to act like a jerk and although i succeeded in walking away, it only takes one asshole to ruin a good day, and i'd already had some shitty experiences, and he occupied more brainspace than he had right to for the next while.

it was hot (summer's here) and i was sweaty and tired by the time we got home, but i had to rush off to pick up mr smear and help carry home all the books from his locker. i spent the next while napping on the couch listening to the audiobook of the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, waking up to gd reading asterix to mr smear.

i spent the remainder of the afternoon and most of the evening getting the new phone set up, while listening to insane AI covers like system of a crown and neon maiden.

we went to our friends for friday night dinner, which was a really pleasant evening, both for the adults and the kids.

it's now almost 1am, mr smear has just gone to bed and i'm about to jump in the shower and probably also go to bed.

i might be coming down with something

i don't feel sick, i feel wired, but i feel like i might be in a holding pattern with a bug or virus waiting to land. then again, it might just be general fatigue, physical and/or mental. it certainly doesn't help that i've been having trouble sleeping the past few nights, nor that there've been a lot of incidents of emotional stress, both ups and downs.

...

getting mr smear to school this morning was good, but then i got a message from his teacher that he wasn't cooperating in geometry. and he wasn't: he was insisting that drawing pixel art of a circle was geometry.

jesus, fuck 🤦

hopefully that was the only incident. while gd was at the doctor getting prescribed more antibiotics and meds because she's got a full-blown lung infection in addition to what looks like a virus, i was at home doing online chores (like reapplying for her cannabis license), juggling a bunch of recruiters, and trying to get something productive done.

it almost feels like the most productive thing i got done today was snacking a lot :P

i picked mr smear up from school, brought him home to switch bags, then took him to his therapy session. i headed to the cinemateque for a coffee and to work, the barista was curious about my tattoos and i ended up on a tear about the injustice of how shakespeare's sonnets are taught when her initial complaint was that she hates the sonnet form. i hurriedly scribbed sonnetcomix.com on a piece of paper, grabbed my coffee and hid behind my laptop :P

i picked mr smear up and we took the light rail home, where i got some work done but i also crashed and burned in a chat with a recruiter about expectations (which i'm still feeling a bit gross about). then gd needed help with the washing machine, and got angry with me because she thought i'd broken it while i was trying to help, and that made a pretty gross feeling too :/

anyway, my son's sitting across from me and playing beautiful melodies on the keyboard, and i've managed to complete a piece of work that wasn't trivial at all, and gd's making pizza for dinner, and i think i'm done trying to be an adult for the rest of the day.

groans, good and bad

what was next was me reading count zero in bed until i passed out, which didn't take very long. i'm enjoying it, but i'm not getting very far :P

in the middle of the night i awoke from a hyper-realistic zombie nightmare which began with me leaving a group of strangers huddling around a reservoir to go to a lecture in an underground facility with what looked like bleachers (grandstands), finding a seat at the back of the class and realizing that i wasn't wearing a shirt and the people in front of me were making a thing of it and taking (or pretending to take) photos.

then someone sitting a couple of meters to my left said something, and i responded by making a kind of popping sound with my lips, and unwittingly and accidentally spat at him. so that was awkward.

and then all hell broke loose further into the darkness, and it became apparent that some kind of riot was taking place, and i joined the people fleeing through the bleachers and up towards the light. i woke up just as i stumbled across a guy lying curled up on the steps, seriously wounded and looking like his guts had been pulled out of his ass.

i got up and spent a little time imagining what i could have / would have done for the poor guy under the circumstances (circumstance being trying to save my own life, not wanting to go near him but not wanting to leave him to die or be trampled).

i spent the next couple of hours researching printing services, compiling a table of costs and scaling, and eventually returned to bed having picked out two viable options.

the dream resumed from a later point in time. i was coming in from the outside, with someone else, and there was an enemy of some kind behind us. the compound seemed abandoned, but as i reached into a medical cabinet for a spray that would somehow serve as a zombie-repellent, i considered that the zombies must have been sensitive to light and that the "riot" may have been confined to the darkest depths.

i got up, caffeined myself, and began trying to put the test prints together. one of the services' sign up process is completely broken, so that leaves a single service, lulu. i tried reading through the guide, but as soon as i realized that i was out of my depth i sent it to mr cat to ask him if he can make heads or tails of it (in theory, it's his field of expertise).

mr smear has finally decided on a birthday present: battlezone gold edition. i played a little myself, and it's gorgeous.

collapsing

 well, the municipality doesn't do anything about threatening cats, nor the spca. but we did eventually learn that the cat does, in fact, belong to our shitty neighbors upstairs who fucking knew that it had gotten out when they left but decided to just fuck off and leave us to deal with it.

pieces of shit.

...

ultimately, i'm still feeling sore (emotionally) from thursday evening, and i don't have the energy to dig deeper than that. i'm also feeling sore physically, and my chest still isn't right, and i've spent a good chunk of today resting and then getting up feeling as tired as when i lay down. am i sick? or depressed? who can say?

...

so we eventually left the apartment yesterday and made our way to the shuk, with the intention of picking up a hat for mr smear. by the time we found decent hats the right size, he'd decided that he didn't want a new hat. so we got on a bus home, then did some grocery shopping and picked up some juices along the way.

the big fight of the day was mr smear getting his homework done before sundown, because he'd decided that it was third grade math and he's only capable of 2nd grade math, even though he's in the third grade. he finally got through a single page before sundown.

i don't have energy for this shit.

he decided this afternoon that he wanted to do more of it. i managed to help him through it, but not without a fair amount of frustration.

god damn.

...

we watched a bit of american splendor last night, but i passed out on the couch. i've been reading more of it, both mediums are really good.

...

when i wasn't resting today, i published the hi-res dedication pages of the comics, and i tried to make the website theme nicer before giving up. i did a little work on the next podcast episode, too. now i'm going to rest a bit more before taking mr smear out somewhere.

...

today i've decided that from now on, i'm referring to halva as "dry ice-cream".

outbreak

 thursday:

i don't remember if it was wednesday or thursday, but there were hours of work spent hunting down bugs that were introduced by copilot. copilot certainly helped me get the code written faster, but that's the first time i've had to deal with a real bug hunt for a mistake i would never have made had i written it all myself...

early in the afternoon, gd took mr smear to the clinic to get his eye checked out - he'd been suffering from an outbreak for a day or two, we initially thought it was just a scratch and by wednesday evening it was starting to look worrying. the doctor wasn't sure, but she thought it might be herpes and i immediately became anxious - i've been nervous about herpes keratitis since my officer's course teammate developed it.

i sent off some photos for an online consultation with a dermatologist, and in retrospect it's pretty amazing how quickly one got back to me. by 4.30 i was on my way to meeting gd and mr smear at the hospital with a referral for the children's ER in hand.

it took about an hour before we got to see the triage nurse. after another hour in the waiting area with the kid with a scary cough who refused to wear his mask and a row of vending machines with exactly zero products appropriate for children, i approached the receptionist and asked how long the average wait was post-triage - one hour? two hours? she was immediately offended that i would ask such a vulgar question, and of course it would be less than an hour...

... mr smear's number finally got called another hour after that. the doctor examined him, and then sent us to an opthalmologist in a different building, where we waited again, but fortunately not for too long.

after the opthalmologist, we returned to the ER as instructed. after another half an hour of waiting, i approached the counter and asked if we'd been forgotten: "no, we're still waiting for the opthalmologist to enter the summary". holy shit, we could have waited until the next morning for that, and gd was starting to freak out because she wanted to get out of there in time to pick up whatever medication would be prescribed.

so they contacted the opthalmologist, who eventually did what he had to do, while i sat entertaining mr smear with random jokes from the internet and gd paced up and down. then we went around in circles between the doctors and nurses while they tried to figure out what to do about the four or five different possible diagnoses they'd come up with, and took a couple of samples.

it was just about 11pm when we finally left, all three of us completely exhausted.

yesterday:

we all needed to sleep in a little bit yesterday. mr smear woke up complaining that it was getting worse, and we were all in a shitty mood and totally over the day before it began. we (slowly) got moving and went to the clinic, where we were fortunate to find his paediatrician in her rooms. once we'd all figured out how we were proceeding, gd went to the pharmacy and mr smear and i went to get breakfast bagels.

i'd been talking to the guy at the counter for a minute when i turned around to find mr smear furiously rubbing his eye with the edge of his glasses, and while i want to say "it took everything i could not to freak out", the truth is i absolutely freaked out.

holy @#!$.

i rushed him off to gd, who thankfully had something to wipe his glasses and his face with, but it's been twenty four hours and i'm still not really over the horror.

i returned alone to apologize and pick up the bagels, then met up with them to eat breakfast. then pick up a treat for mr smear - the 14th diary of a wimpy kid book, the 13th wasn't available [though i just picked it up on kindle for him] - and then come home to try and get some rest.

by sundown i managed to put out the article i'd been fiddling with over the course of the week, so that was a relief.

today:

we're still trying to get some rest. we're just breathing into the day one moment at a time.

mr cat sent me the first draft of the dedication for the comics, and it's looking great, so today i'm going to try to get him the margin notes i promised i'd send "in a bit" yesterday :P

quiet

 it was a peaceful shabbat. after so many hours invested in bloons adventure time, i decided to pick up the three characters that unlock all the levels and i regret nothing. while mr smear playing human fall flat, gd and i started watching unchained last night, and we watched another episode today, and it's really good so far.

my favorite parts of the day were

1. getting sandwiches at our local vegan cafe with mr smear reading a book at a different table while we just enjoyed being there and doing nothing

2. mr smear and me putting together the free warhammer figure that he received yesterday

3. getting the original dedication pages to the illustrator and putting out the latest pages, only a month and a half after receiving them

4. mr smear and me playing rain world, first taking turns and then vs in the arena mode

i've spent most of the last few hours watching random youtube videos, overall not the greatest use of my time. now i'm regretting starting a macos update on my work computer because it's taking much longer to get to some kind of checkpoint than i was expecting...

...

my back's been hurting me a lot the past few days. i hope i manage to sleep better tonight.

i ******* did it

i'm starting to write this just before 2.30am, so the morning's going to be painful, but ZOMG i finally managed to get my CDK project to deploy a static website with an API reverse proxy and i'm so freaking relieved / excited!

additionally, i just managed to send the next pages description to mr cat. even though they're very simple, i've been somewhat out of it for over a month, and it was a big deal just to hit the "send" button on anything, really...

yesterday evening was pleasant, i started watching nausicaä of the valley of the wind but just wasn't as into it, probably because of my general mood and still not feeling great.

this morning started off with a bang, an unpleasant fight that took so long to untangle and resolve that i had to jump straight to work.

*sigh*

the workday was pretty average, i guess? in a good way, i guess? i did share an idea of mine with my boss, and i wonder if that might (ever) have any impact...

i stayed late, and finally joined a pilates class. it wasn't as tough as i expected, but i also wasn't expecting it to be as much of a struggle to walk to the bus / from the bus home. also, in retrospect i probably should have showered there rather than hop in the bath when i got home, the yoga mat i used seemed a bit... damp :/

mr smear seemed to have a pretty good day, although he had a really bad cough. hopefully he'll be better tomorrow. his teacher indirectly reprimanded us for taking him to school, after his previous teacher reprimanded us for not taking him to school unless he had a fever. make up your freaking minds, people!

i'm very happy to hear the latest tom nash report saying that it looks like hamas is effectively done, and in spite of the speaker being a royal piece of garbage i hope that people hear netayahu's speech at the US jewish leaders conference.

weekend shift

 none of us wanted to go outside yesterday, it was miserably wet and cold. gd and mr smear weren't feeling great, either, it seems like they picked up some kind of tummy bug...

i spent the day alternating between napping, and working on the simple-regex-builder package. in the evening i felt it was ready to publish a v1, and then write it up and go to sleep. today, someone with a similar package got in touch with me and asked me if i might be interested in collaborating.

i just might :)

it was a bit of a struggle, but mr smear completed his "dear buggy" homework last night. not gonna lie, the "graffiti" dinosaur he shouldn't have added was really cool :P

this morning it was decided that mr smear wasn't well enough to go to school. and as usual, this turned out to be an incorrect assessment... but i digress. he had plenty of homework to do, and for most of the day he apparently did quite well.

for me it was a busy morning, dealing with another outbreak of mold, and a suspected ceiling leak, and a grocery shopping, and a pile of dishes, and something else i can't quite recall at the moment.

then i went to work, to resume the battle with the github fails. a couple of hours in, and a coworker and i ascertained that the damn things had been broken the whole time, and a relatively short while later i had everything up and running. the stuff i was deploying (surprisingly) mostly worked the first time, but now i'm in the thick of the cloudformation jungle and every issue i resolve is raising another one right behind it...

i came home in good spirits, tried to help mr smear with his homework and that triggered a very unpleasant and ugly tantrum on his part - at the same time, gd hadn't been feeling well and the expensive meal we ordered wasn't delivered - as in, the delivery guy marked it as delivered without delivering it - so it was all very dramatic for a while. then gd asked him to get out of the bath so i could get in, and he refused, and the two of us had a very serious and constructive conversation about my role as a parent taking precedence over being his friend; the evening went smoothly from there, but a nagging little part of me is wondering how much of it was staged just as an pretext for homework avoidance...

gd and i watched some more freaks and geeks, i finally published the hi-res pages that mr cat delivered two weeks ago... and played some more bloons adventure time... and i think i'm past ready to go to bed.

the sting

 yesterday:

our first non-rainy day in a week.

i woke up with a literal pain in the neck, something that felt like a cross betweem a rash and nerve pain, and couldn't get back to sleep. i still have no idea what happened.

my fingers have been hurting, i think it's severely dry skin.

we had another mold scare yesterday. between my efforts last night and this morning, and our bi-weekly (every two weeks) cleaner this afternoon, it feels like we're treading water, but we're not doing better than that.

yesterday's workday was solid, it felt very productive.

gd had another nerve block last night, it was very rough for her and between hearing her cries, and getting her home, and getting mr smear showered and settled and into bed, i was completely drained and exhausted.

today:

i worked from home, and it was rough. mostly because of the hundred and one distractions*, but also because it took ages for me to understand what my opening question to my coworker needed to be and then ages struggling to reach the starting point. it was only because i had to connect via my mobile hotspot when i took mr smear to his mma class that i learned that the struggle was due to a misconfiguration in my home network, but i haven't the foggiest idea of where or what that misconfiguration could be.

* one of which being the finalization of the latest comic pages!

mr smear's mma class was good, except that a parent brought in an obviously sick child and now i'm praying that being openly coughed on didn't "stick".

money situation: i was freaking out monday because i thought i'd miscalculated and messed things up, and the more i've checked the more certain i've become that we're fine. now (as in, a minute ago) i just learned that they've collected transactions in a way that their default view makes very difficult to parse, but if i switch the sort order makes perfect sense. and all is good ( ˘ ^˘ )=3

i'm tired. mr smear and i watched more our universe and star trek prodigy over dinner, both great. and we had a really interesting conversation at bedtime about right and wrong vs legal and illegal.