a busy pause

 i don't know what switch off meant yesterday when i wrote it, but i was still messing about (on and off) with my side project and a new minigame [stops writing to prompt the AI to improve rotation behavior]. 

most of yesterday evening is a blur to me now, but we watched a great episode of spider-noir over dinner, and after mr smear went to bed* i spent some time driving myself crazy playing cook, serve, delicious!...

* a process that began at a relatively reasonable hour, ended around midnight, and at some point when i went in to turn off the lights again and tuck him in he was offended because i didn't do the bedtime ritual and he'd forgotten that i'd already done so much earlier :P

i went to bed late, but not too late, and i guess i slept alright. on my way to bed i had a revelation about the change that came over me since last week's game meetup talk - i got so excited about the potential for making money with games that i lost focus, and i need that focus and excitement for the raw components of the game before i can start making something that's lucrative. every single thing i'm building, or failing at building, is a lesson, a dot to connect when i'm ready.

i woke up to the stress of reading a post i shouldn't have looked at before coffee, another oleh really struggling economically. one of the things i did after coffee was creating a facebook group to help olim network and build things.

my morning started quietly, a little meditative outside time followed by getting back into history of western art in comics, and then finally settling down and taking care of a bunch of admin that i've been putting off for about a week now. after mr smear completed his chores, he asked if we could play something together, but neither of us could agree on what. eventually he sat down to play valheim, and honestly, it did me good. first, because he made a point of chewing gum** the whole time, and second because he was playing something outdoorsy and really getting into it. it's like that "the children yearn for the mines" meme 😂

** "training": both exercising his jaw, and practicing dealing with the fact that it doesn't keep the taste for more than a couple of minutes.

our big adventure today was going to find some kitchen items and something we could use as a low coffee table for when we're sitting on the beanbags. on the bus, we encountered the old man who took a dump next to the bus stop a while back, and as soon as we recognized him we all quickly and quietly agreed to slide over to the back of the bus.

the sales lady at the kitchen store was stunned by gd's hilariously disorientating description of how normal it is for her to cut herself in the kitchen (or while cutting hair), she helped us figure out what we need to buy (it's a chain-link glove) but we've had to order it in gd's size. then we caught a bus to the hardware store, almost getting run over a few times by wolt drivers, where we found what we were looking for but everything felt like far too little value for money.

we walked up to the square with all the restaurants, and sat down to two delicious bowls of hummus, one with vegan shuwarma, and then headed down to osher ad to be amazed both by the prices and quality of their products, and by the lengths of their queues during the holidays. we'll go back there another day.

we were planning on coming home but ended up in azrieli mall instead. i had a coffee and mr smear and i milled around waiting for gd, crowded by surges of mall people, but fortunately not being pushed beyond my usual limit. i mean, it was exhausting, but it didn't put me into fight-and-flight mode like it usually does.

we found *exactly* the coffee tables we were looking for at the dollar store, very cheap and absolutely perfect. we caught the bus home, and halfway there i jumped off to take a call from the dermatologist i'd been waiting to hear from for two days - she's not concerned, she agrees with my assessment - and after having a bit of a rest (taking out one of the tables, lying down for a bit, then hearing gd out as she described how she's selling some of her childhood toys she's been carrying around because she's come to understand that she's holding on to nostalgia for really dark times, and then sitting down to edit the haircut recording from yesterday.

i've done very little development / AI whispering today, and that's okay. i've just had it out with mr smear over his piano practice (i wanted him to practice a new thing he's just learned before stopping), but otherwise things are good.

sideways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the first day of fall

 things that upset me in the middle of the night: looking at my phone's notifications, and then finding myself scrolling on instagram, and coming across these two self-hating jews discussing the ugliness of a rigged system that is everything anti-capitalists claim capitalism is: the opposite of a free market.

...

i'm regretting taking a puff before bed last night, partially because i'm feeling totally exhausted right now and it's almost 8pm and i'm drinking a fourth cup of coffee in order to be able to go rollerblading, partially because i passed in and out of conciousness earlier while listening to my new client's all-hands and i realized at some point that i'm not breathing with my whole lungs and when i do, it feels... smoky. like, tight and sticky.

i hope i don't regret this coffee.

mr smear surprised us by getting up and being ready on time for school, and then away he went. i took care of a bunch of first-of-the-month admin, and then suddenly it was time to go to work.

overall, i'm really impressed. the offices feel good, everyone i met seems relaxed and organized, even though they all described the work as anything but. during my first daily with the team mr smear called me, twice, while i was introducing myself - turned out he was worried that he couldn't find his meds, when he finished taking them yesterday already 🙄

i spent most of my day setting up my new machine and accounts and beginning the onboarding process, and talking to people, and i was *really* surprised to learn that my client offers catered lunches that include vegan options that are pretty darned good.

in the all-hands, i was literally amazed to hear them discussion employee retention and training, and making their approach very clear, and their approach is stellar. to go from a company continually laying off good workers to one making a point of developing theirs is quite a relief!

i guess mr smear and i shouldn't have eaten when i got home, because we also ate at dinner time and we both stuffed ourselves on gd's sushi while watching an episode of the simpsons that irritated me because its premise revolved around everyone in town being a total moron.

yes, yes, i know.

anyway, here we are. mr smear apparently had a great day at school, i'm going to at least try to go rollerblading tonight, and gd seems to be doing alright herself, so... 🤷‍♂️

shorter notice

 t'was a weird day. first and foremost, because i received a kickoff email from my employer informing me that i'll be starting work at my new client in a week, when on thursday my current client assured me that we still have a month together. i inquired, but i haven't yet got a response.

i reached out to my new client, who quickly responded positively and said that i have an advantage if i like shuwarma. i asked if vegan shuwarma counts, and i got silence... for just over an hour... before he responded with a "lol" followed by a "no" 😅

i struggled today with tiredness, motivation, and caffeine efficacy. and snacks. i've been putting on weight again. in spite of all that, i managed to put together two strategies for one of the projects i've been working on, and ran an investigation to confirm my troubling findings from thursday, and took the next step in the big project i've been working on for months and now need to bring to a close even faster than i thought.

once i was done with work, mr smear packed his borrowed books into his bag and we walked to the library, along the way stopping to marvel at all the glass skyscrapers that are effectively being built on sand. my favorite part of our walk was having to assure him that although his hormones will make him think and do stupid things when he hits puberty, all he has to do is be aware of them and try not to make things worse than they need to be :P

i did a little more work on the map generation for mr smear's project, then we had a good couple of math fluxx games before dinner, and then we watched a couple of episodes of the simpsons, and then - post shower and toothbrush time - i invested more time in the map generation.

i'm just now discovering just how much of a waste of time a generic map generator might prove to be, as i'm struggling to make it make sense for both mr smear's horror game and my tarot game. this might just be one of those expensive lessons i've heard so much about...

boding

 omg i'm soooo tired, and as soon as i've eaten i'm heading out to tahoma's to celebrate his birthday. maybe i should caffeine up. [caffeines up. oh, great, organic soya drink full of cream-colored bits]

after i posted yesterday, we had dinner. mr smear ate so much - we split our meals, his "egg" salad sandwich was enormous, and i think we both agreed that my "shuwarma" was too delicious to pass up - that he didn't have space for dessert.

then the two of us played a whole lot of among us together, working together sometimes, and me backstabbing him a bunch of others, but in all cases we both were having fun and laughing at the ridiculous situations we found ourselves in / made for ourselves.

after he went to bed, i played out acts 3 and the ending of inscryption. mr smear occasionally poked his head around the door because he was having trouble sleeping, and that went on until very late, and then i ended up going to bed around midnight.

i had a couple of wakings during the night, but nothing major 🤷‍♂️

i don't recall too many specifics from this morning, but it did involve checking our finances and moving mr smear's pocket money around. if we can keep it together, we might actually be okay this month. *if* 🤞

i managed to leave at a reasonable time to go pick up our cleaning materials, which turned out to be considerably heavier than i'd anticipated. i lugged them to the sarona market, with a plan to pick up speciality halva as a gift, but the halva store was closed (hey, if you don't want to make money, don't open your store during your official hours) and i ended up picking up a few things at the asian market. the girl on duty was very sweet, and managed to find me a sealable bag with some ice in it to transport the frozen goods home.

i bussed home, had breakfast, then coffee, then a very serious nap, eventually taking mr smear out on a mission to find mugs and wine. we didn't find mugs, but we did get a lot of steps in.

it was pretty hot today.

i had a third coffee when we got home, mr smear got some screen time, and then we had a big fight because he wasn't ready to help me clean the floors. we got through it, but not without unpleasantness.

at least the floors are clean, i guess.

then it was shower time for both of us, and i tried to get some more work done with the auto-doc, but i'm just become more and more demoralized about AI output quality and costs and at the same time i don't - i mean i really, really don't - want to do any of the work manually :/

so that's the vibe that's been haunting me this whole week, and i made a conscious decision in the shower to turn it off, at least for the rest of the day. so i've read some more of inside moebius part 1, which includes some pretty disturbing sequences (in addition to being quite an inspiration in general), and tried to nap (didn't happen, even though i'm falling apart), and i guess...

... i guess i just need to chill. i'm looking forward to tonight, but i'm a bit sad about the fact that i need  a fourth coffee to even get out the door. come to think of it, i needed a fourth cup yesterday as well...

small accomplishments

we got shit done today. it took a while to get everyone roused, and gd and i had a bit of a tiff along the way, but the two of us abandoned our child to the screen gods and caught a bus to the shoe repair store where i dropped off my very expensive but now quite broken sandals, and she convinced me to listen to him and do the decidedly non-vegan thing of repairing them with leather, which makes me quite uncomfortable :/

we hit the supermarket - which is a surprisingly good one - on arlozorov, and eventually got out of there with most of what we needed. we caught a bus back home, yelled at mr smear for having put the air-conditioner on when all the windows were wide open, and then mr smear and i went on another mission to the street north of us, which required three stops but we got pretty much everything that remained on the list.

then mr smear and i left for the mall, catching a very cramped mini-bus and mr smear managed to keep it together in spite of the small kids around him. we paid the optometrist a visit and ordered his new glasses (apparently his eyesight has improved a little), along the way happening to pass the second hand game store and asking on a whim if they had what mr smear's been begging for for his birthday - motion controllers for the ps4.

i'd called another shop earlier about that, and learned that nobody's selling them or repairing them (the mongoose left us a couple that seem to be broken or in need of battery replacement), so i was surprised to learn that they had one pair, and they gave me a bit of a discount (still quite expensive).

so mr smear was very excited.

then we did one last mission to pick up another fan and a kettle because ours died this week, and caught a bus home. on the bus, a conversation we had led to mr smear deciding that he really wants to write a diss track response to dan bull because one of his songs isn't as amazing as the others, and i have to admit i'm quite impressed with what he's got so far!

i was crashing on the way home - recalling that i didn't sleep last night - but i made myself a coffee and wrestled with the motion controllers. poor mr smear, standing there with the vr helmet on and the controllers finally connected and strapped on, and discovering that the games he was hoping to play with them don't support them :(

we should have done some research first... anyway, i tried.

i tried to do something of value, but ended up opening inscryption instead (i really wanted to play braid, but it doesn't work on mac), and i've just kneaded the challah-peño and can't decided what my next steps are. perhaps nothing.

sleeping powder

my sister suggested something last night, after we'd all gorged ourselves on vegan sushi and my mouth had been filled with regret after allowed mr smear to coerce me into trying a bite of vegan cheese with a marshmallow, which imparted a lasting taste of feet.

oh, and we watched some more of redline, and mr smear is INTO that stuff.

immediately after putting mr smear to bed, i brushed my teeth, made sure to empty my bladder, took a headache tablet and a puff from gd's vape. she didn't think i'd had enough, but i lay down, convinced myself it was going to be alright, slowed my breathing, and woke up this morning feeling a bit groggy, but having actually slept through the night.

...

this post has taken most of an hour to write, primarily because i ended up on a side quest to tag older posts, and secondarily to produce the gif above because i searched hard for it and it apparently didn't exist. now to start my actual day.

bully birds

 i'm very upset right now. i just woke up after a long night; the first part was hours of being too tired to get up, but unable to sleep (restless mind) and being mildly uncomfortable, the second part - or last part, i should say, it was probably an hour or two - was sleeping soundly, feeling pretty good, and then waking up from a dream pissed off at my mother.

we went out to dinner together, and she ordered something called "dinner service". it arrived as a tiny serving for one of something that looked like noodles but with meaty-looking bits in it, with a price tag of R1500. when i asked her if it was as she'd intended, she nonchalantly said yes and took a bite of it. while i was being horrified by the cost, i learned that it was made of some kind of exotically cruel meat (kind of like foie gras), and i told her she'd be paying for it before waking up pissed off about the whole thing.

i got up, brushed my teeth, made myself a cup of coffee, picked up my laptop, and stepped onto the balcony to start my day, only to find a pigeon standing on our little table, having left a giant, wet turd on it as well as having had diarrhea in a couple of spots on the balcony floor. so i had to spend a couple of minutes cleaning all of that up, discovering that some bird had vandalized our glass railings by somehow pooping on it at an upwards angle. i was completely disgusted.

then i started writing this, and when i got to "we went out together" the damned pigeon returned, landing on the balcony railing right in front of me and not caring when i tried to shoo it away - i had to get up and chase it away properly.

fucker.

...

i didn't get any side-project work done yesterday morning, i mostly just went through my employer emails and found myself quite satisfied with the monthly newsletter i hadn't realized i'd been receiving 🙄

i had a good breakfast, went off to the office, and started the day with a particularly positive team daily. 

that was followed by a sad consult with the other contractor, whose reorg isn't going nearly as well as mine - his new manager's doing some messed up stuff and he doesn't know who's now in charge of his contract, and i advised him to immediately update his mentor and our team, let them know what's going on and find out who he's supposed to be reporting to. he's really nervous because he's convinced that our employer's having a hard time getting new contracts and he's worried about being fired... which is fair, but in my opinion if you're facing the same risk either way, it's better to be proactive and get ahead of it as much as you can. also, considering the last few weeks, i have a feeling he's less aligned with and more disconnected from our employer than i am, so if *i* haven't felt totally safe then i'm confident he's not feeling safe *at all*.

my workday was, like the rest of the them this week, flitting between my main project and my golang service side quest. with an uncomfortable half an hour being pulled in to an incident as a suspect, only to discover that my changes had nothing to do with it 😅

i've been working on this main project since the end of april, and it's been a massive (and long) rollercoaster, and yesterday i finally deployed the end-to-end code and was able to start testing it. while i found a couple of bugs at the end of the day, the project is essentially complete and ready for whenever they miraculously figure out the pixel matching component.

i also deployed the final fix to the golang service, so it's officially in good shape and actually maintainable by on-call people if anything goes awry.

for the company happy hour, i was treated to vegan nachos. as the only vegan around yesterday, i felt obligated to consume them, and for the second time had to deal with the weird childishness of a couple of people who made a show of being offended by the existence of vegan food. that aside, i enjoyed them, had a beer, and an exciting conversation with a new friendly who works with AI from another side of the org.

oh, i almost forgot. with all that, a good chunk of the day was spent debating with my friend and coworker. who, btw, has been putting some effort into my blockchain project, for which i'm very grateful. we've been discussing a lot of the current politics and philosophies of AI, and yesterday i (we?) had a really interesting revelation about the nature of consciousness which i'm planning to work through in an article.

...

i don't know what triggered it, but after the happy hour my stomach became extremely unhappy, painfully gassy. it was like that for the next few hours, and i ended up working much later than usual to finish up a report for my incoming and outgoing managers before heading out and doing a shopping mission on my way home. quite a roundabout shopping mission with mr smear, but a successful one and at least our time together was pleasant.

my sister got a bit lost on the way home from her day-trip, but we all arrived just in time for a really nice dinner (at that point my system had mostly calmed down). we talked a lot, and by the time we got up from the table it was quite late and pretty much bedtime for everyone.

...

it's friday morning, and gd's just joined me on the balcony, and my sister and mr smear appear to still be sleeping. i've just run through the plans for the day with gd, and now it's time to get started.

gameis 2026

 the gameis conference was nothing short of inspirational. up until a couple of weeks ago i was convinced that the israeli gaming industry was all about gambling; i arrived a little before the crowds, and i was really impressed by the local games set up to play; extremely high quality, both the studio and the indie games.

a guy i served with sat down next to me during the opening talks, and we were both - like most of the people in the room - made very uncomfortable by the fifteen minutes of "saying the quiet part out loud" explaining how to take advantage of "whales". judging by the audience reactions to that and the marketing talk that followed, and the antithesis in the more sentimental talks that poked fun at the first ones, we weren't alone. the only other uncomfortable talk was by a hardcore liberal american jew, whose thesis regarding making games meaningful was excellent, but who couldn't stop himself from putting his TDS and anti-musk sentiments on display.

lunch was surprisingly good, really decent vegan options.

the rest of the talks i sat in on were interesting, enlightening, and motivated me to want to Make Stuff. i've captured a whole bunch more game ideas, and as soon as i'm done with integrating my auto-doc into my client's systems i'm going to focus on some of them.

there were some awkward moments during the day, but i had an interesting phone call with sailor and a couple of positive interactions (one with an old university buddy who used to be a part of ze germans). in general, i feel much better about the lay of the land. and, considering my current situation - and my anxiety over tomorrow's attempt to renegotiate my salary possibly going awry - i'm wondering if i shouldn't try to move in that direction.

during the day i learned - fortunately from mr smear first - that mr smear and his "friend" had had an incident this morning. i told his friend's mother about the on/off bullying that mr smear's been experiencing the past couple of months, and i think as parents we're all aligned and hoping for the best... but either way he really doesn't want to go back, he's been really disappointed by the summer day camp in spite of a bunch of positive experiences.

i spoke to an organizer a bit earlier, and it looks like they'll refund us if he stops now (which is in spite of their terms and conditions), so we'll ask him in the morning and take it from there. it'll certainly put us under less financial pressure for this month, even if it doesn't really affect the next ones so much...

mr smear and i did a quick grocery shop and then sat down for dinner. gd made home-made hamburgers that were delicious, but none of us was hungry. i ate all my food anyway, because it was delicious and i felt uncomfortable leaving it on the plate, and i kind of regret doing that.

we finished watching chocolat, and we all loved it, which is awesome.

at mr smear's bedtime gd and i had a fight that was triggered by an argument over whether she could be a receptionist in tel aviv if her hebrew isn't great, and it took a lot to get to a point where we both heard each other...

now it's late, and i really don't have energy to work on the auto-doc, so i'm going to chill and go to bed soon and try to get as much done in the morning to be ready for the demonstration 🤞

the king of the upside-down

 it's monday evening, just about two days have passed and it's been wild.

saturday night:

i spent the following few hours working on my hackathon project, troubleshooting github actions and eventually getting to the point where i'm ready to give the first iteration a try. then i went to bed, and caught a few (about three) hours sleep.

yesterday:

i woke up feeling less than stellar. but i got up, and had a coffee, and then accompanied mr smear to his first day of summer day camp. the first time was a bit complicated, but he managed just fine by himself this morning, so 👍

from the bus to the school we were accompanied by one of his buddies, and it was interested shadowing them and hearing them discussing how much happier they both are at the new school ^_^

i lurked a bit while mr smear registered himself, then made myself scarce and headed back home. the camp is a version of "the academy", the post-apocalyptic survival LARP, and i think that's pretty cool :)

i paid the municipality fees yesterday morning, which are still on the landlord's account. quite frankly, i'd rather they remained that way because he gets a significant discount, and at this point i really don't want to go through the ridiculous circus of recreating our contract and pretending to be moving in...

my first meeting was long, and tough. the guys amicable enough, but my gods he makes me uncomfortable. he's clearly very knowledgeable, but we seem to have a communication problem and he doesn't solve problems quite the way i do. also i was very tired. i was quite amused when we finally came to the conclusion that whether he likes my approach or not, it's the only viable one considering the state of the data.

either way, it was a massive relief when the meeting was over.

i spent quite a lot of time poring over documents my client had sent me over the weekend, which led me to read welcome to gas town, which is completely unhinged.

i managed to complete the morning meeting's change by the time mr smear got home, at which point we sat down and had a serious conversation about his first day; he's bored, he says, because although a couple of the things they did were fun, there was a lot of physical activity that just isn't what he's there for...

either way, he urgently needed sports shoes, so we all went to the mall for what is arguably our least favorite family pastime. the first place we went to - a department store - had very expensive options we weren't thrilled by. the second only had the most expensive shoes, great quality but not for a growing boy. the third... had what we were looking for. aside from a little bit of i've-had-enough drama on mr smear's part, we walked out with a solid pair of shoes and an order for an identical pair one size up at a heavily-reduced price.

there was a little more shopping to be done, then we caught a bus home. gd and i dropped off the shoes, the groceries and the child, and then went across the road to do some more grocery shopping. it was poor timing, lots of customers, one cashier and one self-service, and it took sooo long to get out of there...

over dinner, we started watching guardians of the galaxy. the rest of the evening was a blur. i think i went to bed relatively soon after putting mr smear to bed.

today:

i actually got a good night's sleep last night. my back's still really sore, though.

...

there were a couple of odd threads to pull at work today, the main one being as follows:

a couple of months ago i worked on a small service that nobody else understands. it's written in golang, and nobody in the company works with golang (they fired the team that owner the service), and it hadn't been maintained for a very long time. so i upgraded it to the latest version, and made the changes that needed to be made, and merged them... but nothing happened. i didn't break anything - which i was very grateful for - but what i thought i'd fixed still wasn't fixed, and i had to cut and move on to the big project.

on thursday i had some spare time, and i returned to the service and made an important fix (a serious memory leak). this morning i got permission to push it. i pushed it.

nothing happened.

the AI i used to investigate the dashboards and the logs came to the conclusion that i totally fixed the bug. it repeated this a couple of times, even though the dashboards didn't seem different at all, and so i carried on trying to figure out what was going on.

eventually, i realized that not only were my changes not in production, but neither were my previous ones, nor those of the couple of people who also touched this service in between. that the CI workflow  entitled "build - test - deploy" that ran successfully only builds and tests, but does not deploy.

the CI/CD workflows have never been CD, the deployments have only ever been manual, and nobody responsible for this service knows this.

you can't make this shit up.

...

oh! and the other consultant working with my client came by my desk after putting some pieces of data together and determining that there are people being fired by our employer for not being able to find clients. it calls the "i have job security" thesis into question, it doesn't feel so good.

...

in the afternoon, i travelled to my employer's office for a group meeting. i got called up, unprepared, to tell a story about failures at scale, and told the story of me returning to work after paternity leave and having to rewrite the project from scratch, getting to the deadline with everything working beautiful and discovering a bug during the demo that the managers saw and terminating the project.

the barbecue wasn't my thing, but they'd brought in a serious quantity of good hummus and falafel so i was sorted. i made myself a few pitot, and bounced from vegan conversation to vegan conversation - most of them initiated by somebody overhearing the tail end of the previous one and inquiring. all of it was amicable and i think i got some people to think a bit differently about it.

...

i caught a bus to the mall to meet up with gd and mr smear, who'd been forced to wait in a freezing reception for more than three hours for the eye specialist. tomorrow we're going to start hunting for a new one, and then call up the fat-fuck receptionist and tell her we're cancelling because she's a selfish piece of trash (gd described to me in detail how disrespectful she was towards everyone, and that she wasn't the only one to beg her to raise the temperature).

apparently mr smear's eyesight has improved? hmm...

we bussed home, gd prepared a gluten-free vegan pesto and avo pizza (which was delicious), and we discussed mr smear's day camp experience and explained that there's no refunds and he's just going to have to make the most of it. fortunately, as much as he's disappointed that there's so much physical activity, it overall seems like a pretty good place for him to be. he's learning interesting things (just not as much of the day as he'd like), including woodwork (which he is enjoying), and apparently the kids are generally pretty cool.

i'm tired. i really, really hope i get some sleep tonight again.

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.

blown fuse

 today was fucking miserable. i spent most of the company hackathon just wanting to be anywhere else, questioning my life choices and feeling very, very shit about myself and the situation i found myself in.

yesterday:

after significantly more effort, i managed to push monday's changes, and then follow that up with more changes. sitting next to the AI experts has become a legitimate challenge, because we have really interesting conversations all the time, and i need to keep awkwardly bowing out to get some actual work done.

i came home for lunch yesterday, gd made me more sushi, and it was a great escape from the office. just as i was preparing to head back, she received a phone call from a very worried mr smear - he admitted that he'd drawn IN MARKER all over the book we'd had to re-purchase for him a couple of months ago. the day before they had to return all the books.

fortunately, we had plenty of time to coordinate our responses, so we could keep on him on edge while figuring out an appropriate punishment that's harsh enough for his being on edge to be warranted, and for him to learn the lesson, of course, while still being fair enough to reward his being honest and upfront about it.

when i was finally able to get home from the office, i dropped my bag and immediately took him to the bookstore to purchase another copy. the walk there and back was long enough to have a bunch of conversations, including follow-up talks about what to do if he gets lost again, and the rest of the evening was another sushi dinner (and starting splash), and random mindless shit until climbing into bed.

today:

i woke up late, which was already a terrible start to the day. and my stomach was doing a thing. i left with mr smear, saying goodbye to him halfway to the school and walking to my office from there. i arrived having not had a cup of coffee yet, so i made one, immediately remembering how much i dislike their coffee options.

there was a large spread for breakfast, but i didn't see any vegan options so i found my team's station and started trying to get set up. of course encountering lots of weird issues that i hadn't had before.

the office manager told me to stop being a nerd (it was her expression for the day) and go eat, so i got up and asked her if there were vegan options. "of course there are", she said, and aimed me at one of the caterers. he walked me around, showing me that a) he didn't understand what "vegan" means and b) that the only options that seemed trustworthy were all buried in cheese. no, i didn't want him to wash them for me. that whole ordeal was worse - more insulting - than them just admitting that there weren't any options.

having started my day thoroughly on the wrong foot, i then began to meet my teammates. two of them were very clear about not wanting to be there, three of them arrived late, apologized, and then promptly fucked off for the rest of the day. that left five of us altogether, with exactly one guy being enthusiastic and two in total being productive (not including myself).

to be fair, though, the lack of productivity in the two guys who weren't interested in the first place was largely due to my lack of planning. it wasn't until a short while before demo time that we had the general architecture locked in, and at that point i learned that i was supposed to have been putting together the presentation and presenting our efforts to ~100 people.

this was a rock bottom moment for me.

there was nothing i felt right about presenting, everything was utter dogshit, after a lousy, miserable day that included navigating some pretty shitty attitudes. i was so stressed that i - only half in jest - tried to get anyone else in the team to take charge, and eventually one of the more experienced guys suggested that i ask the organizers to skip our team.

which they did, but then everyone seemed disappointed, the enthusiastic team member especially so.

most of the demos were really good, but i couldn't enjoy them properly because i was so nervous that they'd forget they agreed to skip us and call me up anyway. by the time i left, i felt absolutely disgusted with myself and with the day, completely demoralized, and full of bitterness.

i called gd and let her know how i was feeling, then i called my mom, and then i tried to get my head into a better place while on the bus home but to no avail. one of our upstairs friends walked into the building with me and made the mistake of asking "how are you?", and then i automatically responded with the truth and immediately felt bad for doing so. i sent her an apology a little while later.

our landlord and his handyman had been sending me voice messages all day, which i detest, and they became more and more confusing and annoying until eventually we spoke (just after i put mr smear to bed), and i went downstairs and discovered that the aircon has been on, and isn't dripping. he said some stuff that confused me, which i'm too tired to care about, and now that gd and i have finished the first episode of ludwig (which is really fun) and i've posted this, i'm going to try to wind down and fuck off into dreamland.

weekend vibes

sleep journal entry:

i had four coffees yesterday. prior to my third coffee, i was falling apart, foggy and tired and sleepy and having trouble concentrating, for at least forty five minutes.

i woke up this morning from a dream in which i was arguing with schwarzenegger's terminator over how to approach an accounting problem.

yesterday:

i had some stuff to do in the morning, but i ended up having a long chat with urchin instead. i feel bad, because i think i made her feel bad about her new corporate employer when i talked about the trust issues in our industry that i previously posted about...

...

on my way into the office i had an idea: i think a lot of what's wrong with western society comes down to having been raised to believe that we can be anything and we can do anything, which, when taken literally, ends up with people who cannot bring themselves to accept and deal with reality. it's a societal illness.

...

the team i sit with was off volunteering, to it was a quiet morning in the office. it was still kinda quiet after they came in, so it was mostly a relaxed end to the week and i seem to have gotten a handle on the current phase of my project.

i came home for lunch, ate a couple of lotus cookies and fired off a troll message to mr smear thanking him and implying that i ate them all. when school ended, i received the following response:

both hilarious and scary - on the one hand, it felt like a "we need to talk about kevin" moment, on the other i was highly amused by his emoji fluency 🤣

we discussed the upcoming exhibit, and he told me he was only missing one piece that got lost a couple of months ago, and i asked him to recreate it when he got home. as much for me and gd as for him.

a while later, i received a picture of his recreation, and it was brilliant ^_^

the office happy hour started less happy because i inadvertently raised the issue of them not having any vegan treats when i, personally, wasn't interested in the temptation. but my boss is also vegan (apparently), so the organizers were quite stressed about it.

i grabbed a beer, and approached one of the AI gurus about my openspec experience (which we'd briefly discussed a couple of months ago), and he offered to sit with me for a bit. we ended up spending most of an hour and a half in a flurry of installations and experiments, and i was pleased to see his enthusiasm when he finally grokked what it is i want to build. i learned a lot from the conversation in general.

i had an awkward interaction with my boss on my way out, he wanted to know my project timeline and i began explaining what i'd already explained to my manager, "assuming no more surprises, and every step along the way we've learned new and surprising things"... and he cut me off: "first the estimate, then the disclaimer" :P

i came home, mr smear and i strapped on our blades, and i took him for a round. he was really nervous and scared, but we got through it and he had some really good moments. we also had two encounters with really sweet dogs; the first, a puppy who was peeing himself constantly with excitement, the second a huge, fluffy, very nosey girl. i very much appreciate the additional positive vibe injection into mr smear's early experiences ^_^

just before we got home, he tried to roll a bit on a downhill and hurt himself as he fell. he was upset and started sulking away, and i caught him and told him he had to show himself he could do it - i'd been telling him the entire ride that his body's capable, it's his brain that needs to be aligned. surprisingly, for the state he was in, he went "fuck it", turned and rolled and t-stopped beautifully!

i was so proud of him, not just for the physical success but for the attitude, and for not ending the ride on a negative note.

we finished watching little shop of horrors over dinner, and got him into bed, and then i sat down with gd and we talked about something that she's always done when we watched tv or movies together that's really unpleasant*. it feels like we got to the bottom of it - it's more a communication thing than anything else - and it was a relief.

* she just fucks off, while we're waiting for her to continue. anyway, it's a little complicated.

i did nothing last night, and went to bed relatively early because my eyelids were feeling particularly heavy.

this morning so far:

i got up late, finished another chapter of watchmen, and finally replaced the UV light and purifier of the tami 4. something went egregiously wrong, though, and now we don't have a tami 4 for the weekend and a technician is (thankfully so quickly) coming in on sunday morning.

now that i've posted this, pausing to tear up at the opening sequence of darwish - desert adventure 2025 (quoting udi kagan's הלם קרב), we're about to leave for the school for the end of year exhibit, very excited to see what mr smear's been up to!

not according to plan

 so! i have an explanation for yesterday evening, last night, and this morning. also, today, and still now to a degree.

i didn't mention that when i took mr smear out yesterday, my belly was doing a bit of aching. i didn't really think much on it, but in retrospect that was the warning sign. then last night's feeling horrible, and this morning still feeling horrible, primarily with a low-intensity headache and an unusual dizziness.

i was still in post-rollerblade "recovery" mode, and i grabbed a petit beurre from the jar on my way to my desk. i'd had a few yesterday; they don't always have them, but every now and again i help myself to a couple when they do. but yesterday, and today, it tasted a bit different... richer... and while i managed to put that aside yesterday, the way i was feeling today made me suddenly paranoid. enough to go back and look again, more carefully, and realize that unlike the standard petit beurre in israel (osem), this was a different brand. so i looked up the brand's ingredients.

dairy.

in the "vegan"-labelled cookie jar, looking almost identical to the osem one which is legitimately vegan.

so i had my answer - the tale of last night, in its entirety, was me eating a handful of dairy biscuits yesterday afternoon, and then feeling extremely heavy effects all through the night and most of the morning. then there was an hour or so's reprieve, before this morning's biscuit kicked in and set off a pounding headache.

a coworker gave me a couple of headache tablets, which eventually took the edge off but never quite managed to lift the fog.

...

with that all happening, i had some important project work to do today. it took me a while to get into it properly - i had to deal with a few bureaucratic distractions, and i wasn't exactly operating at peak performance - and by the time i got started i was fortunate to realize that some else had overwritten my work yesterday before i triggered a mistake i might not have been able to take back.

i got in touch, and coached him through merge my changes into his (it's quite frustrating to have to guide experienced, intelligent developers through basic git manipulations because they refuse to use graph visualizations), and eventually we managed to get everything in sync.

but by that stage, i'd already been dragged into an investigation for an incident that had begun the night before and hadn't rung any alarm bells. suddenly, me the contractor who's working on a high-pressured over-deadline damage control project, had to take charge of the situation and lead the team through hours of resolution and troubleshooting.

so much for wednesday.

it looks like we did it in the end, and relatively well (i argued for combining mitigation with some elementary protections for the next set of surprises), and while monitoring the fixes not only fixed up the dashboards, but exported them to a versioned repo and demonstrated the advantage (apparently convincingly) to the others.

...

i left the office really late, stopped at the shops to pick up a couple of things, including soy milk for gd. you see, we found out months ago that she's probably celiac, and had some amazing success with her going gluten-free, but recently some of the symptoms have been creeping back. turns out, she's been drinking oat milk this whole time, thinking that it was gluten-free 🙄

...

dinner was excellent - gd made another large round of sushi and we ate the lot - and we watched some more of cool runnings. the evening was feeling like it was going great, so it was a rather undigestible surprise when the mother of one of mr smear's "friends" called to discuss him getting violent with her boy.

gd had suspected something had happened when he'd come home this afternoon, and he'd brushed her off, and it took a lot for us to extract even a little bit of the story from him. when i called the mother back to talk about it, it turned out that there was more to the story, but mr smear swears blind that that was everything. gd and i are extremely concerned, and we're both having trouble dealing with this.

...

oh, yeah - and this morning's AI usage, which was really basic, blew through more than half of my monthly budget. well, i've been complaining about the AI providers putting on the squeeze for a while now...

so all-in-all it's been a bit of a shit day, with only the slightest sprinkling of glitter over the incident resolution and the few minutes where i got to enjoy dinner with my family before everything fell apart for real.

i'm - fucking - tired.

a day off

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

asshole accumulation

today - post posting - continued with four assholes. i called the jewish agency to find out something for my mother, and was stuck with their hold muzak while running around the supermarket looking for a product that they didn't stock. as i gave up and arrived at the self-checkout, an agent answered and promptly refused to answer my general question because my mother wasn't with me. while i was being pissed off about that, the checkout assistant came over and insisted on interrupting my call to tell me about a special on one of the items i was purchasing, to which i responded sharply "i really don't care" but i really wanted to scream it. the answer i got from the agent was basically that the people in cape town are continuing to waste my mother's time. i tried to reset emotionally, but almost got run over by an irresponsible cyclist as i stepped onto a crosswalk (he was coming up behind me, and decided to go around in front of me instead of behind me. or slow down a moment, as i had right of way. a few seconds later the crosswalk was blocked by an impatient taxi driver while it was still green for me to cross, and he got angry with me for indicating that he was doing something wrong.

later, i'd learn that half the kids in mr smear's class are sick with covid so tonight's lag b'omer bonfire isn't happening, so that was all for nought...

working from the office wasn't unpleasant, though i was very frustrated by the coffee machine situation. not only do people move the pipes between the dairy and non-dairy milks without cleaning them, and leave milk pouring onto the grid our cups are supposed to go on, but there's no decaf coffee anywhere.

my work day was... well, it was successful in the sense that i eventually managed to run the tests i needed to run (and that i arguably should have run weeks ago). it was unsuccessful in that i uncovered even more of a hot mess beneath the surface than i already thought there was. i worked a longer day than usual, and my last findings before stopping for the night stressed me out. i've sent an update to my manager so that he's not surprised, and i'm overall feeling pretty shit about it.

...

anyways. i came home for lunch, primarily because krybabie's widow (what a weird thing to type, even years later) had come over to pick up some stuff my mother brought with her. it was nice to see her, and it seems like she and the kids are doing quite well.

it turns out she recently met up with some old mutual friends, and that they have pictures of teenage me at summer camp, so i've just awkwardly reached out to them to ask if they'd do me a favor and send me a few of them... i don't have much from before i made aliyah, a handful of photos from my party days is just about everything.

...

mr smear once again came home without having done what i asked him, and i gave him the twenty minutes it took for me to get home from the office to rectify the situation. i spent some of the walk home wracking my brains trying to think of an appropriate and effective punishment if he didn't, and i was deeply grateful that he managed to get his assignment off one of his friends and i didn't have to come up with a solution to the problem 😅

dinner was great, as was the evening in general, but he started coughing just at bedtime and i'm hoping he's not doing the covid thing himself. i actually suspect that that's what my last week was about, and that perhaps mr smear was patient zero when we sent him back to school a couple of weeks ago because he only had symptoms when getting out of bed.

...

i don't have energy or bandwidth to be functional tonight. i'm really enjoying starship troopers and slay the spire 2, one (or both) of them will suffice.

respite

sleep journal entry: i just got up a short while ago, after a terrible night's sleep due to acute sinusitis. i slept very little during the time in bed and got up frequently due to intense nasal and throat congestion.

...

my throat had ceased to feel scratchy, in fact i was feeling fine yesterday morning. it was a beautiful day. gd's stomach was giving her trouble so she couldn't join us, but my mom and i ventured to south tel aviv for a stroll with a shopping list.

we had a nice coffee when we arrived - both of us were approaching dire need - after which we meandered through the streets, eventually looping back to pick mr smear up from school. from there we went past yuka monsters so i could ask them (again) for a contact for their printing house, after which we walked past an ethiopian restaurant and decided to give their vegan "tasting plate" a go; not least because my mother had had to stay in a hotel in addis ababa at the beginning of the week and her culinary experience had left a lot to be desired.

...

firstly, ge'ez smells really good. it's clean and has a nice vibe. the food took quite a while to prepare - which is fair, considering it was a whole bunch of dishes in one, and in retrospect i'm really glad we only ordered a "single" because we weren't that hungry and it was a decent amount of food for the three of us.

secondly, it was not only a "corrective experience" for my mother, but my son dug in, tried everything without any encouragement ("it looked really good!"), and we all left pleased, sated and in good spirits ^_^

...

we traveled to yehuda hamaccabi, and proceeded to do the shopping. the fruit seller had great stuff (we were responsible for bringing a fruit platter to dinner), and we found a decent food scale at the hardware store, and we managed to find everything else between all the supermarkets.

we did have some bad vibes with my mother insisting on buying a dairy gift and keeping it in our apartment until the evening. mr smear is still dangerously allergic, even if it's less dangerous of late, and we are a vegan household.

that mini-drama was compounded a little later by her discovery that a coke she'd put in the freezer and forgotten about had exploded. what followed - after the initial anger (mostly at herself, but merged with her frustration over the previous dairy issue) - was a full family effort to clean out the freezer, which became progressively more light-hearted except for when mr smear thought it appropriate to begin trolling me.

the rest of the afternoon was a mix of playing slay the spire 2, and another episode or two of tokyo ghoul.

gd still wasn't feeling okay by the time we left for our cousins', so she sadly stayed behind.

the evening was very pleasant, mr smear was well-behaved and generally quite complimentary about the food, and the only thing i'm uncomfortably regretting was telling the story of how i got fired. not because it was inappropriate - there had been a point to the story - but because i was halfway through the story when i realized that it's a very long story and there's no way for me to "get to the point" without adding so much more detail...

we came home pretty late. right before leaving i coughed for the first time, which was the first indication that something was coming. by the time we arrived home, it had progressed to a proper, troubling post-nasal drip.

after showering i played more slay the spire 2 until mr smear went to bed, which took him so long that i eventually agreed to let him shower in the morning. which i'm kinda glad he did - he jumped into the shower first thing this morning with none of the usual bedtime time pressure, he didn't take too long, and for the duration was living his best life with his music blasting but not waking gd up because there were two-and-a-half closed doors between them.

for all its issues, this apartment is such a huge upgrade from where we were it's ridiculous.

while he showered, i finished reading the day everything changed. the artwork is fantastic and the stories are powerful, but i feel like the writing doesn't always do the stories justice.

finding out

 i think i had plans for tonight. like, real ones, i was excited. but after a really long day - accompanying mr smear to school while practicing the sign language for FAFO and singing nant's ingonyama bagithi baba, trying to console gd who's stomach's messed up again, investigating weird messages from my mobile provider, long hours working with AI*, a huge, delicious vegan lunch from an unfamiliar place, more hard work, picking up mr smear while "participating" in an hour and a half zoom workshop that i didn't need, lots more hard work, losing my temper trying to help mr smear with his homework (him claiming to not understand a thing after successfully doing pages of the same stuff), sitting down with big data (and then his family) over a utility app he wants to build, a great dinner and ready player one followed by the terrible mistake of trying to eat 99% chocolate (why TF does it exist?!) followed by a rather shit bedtime, followed by more hard work.

* and understanding that AI is really teaching us to be better mentors and instructors to juniors

oh, and i saw and killed a fucking flea this afternoon. we have no idea where it could have come from. fuck.

i mean, at least i managed to sleep a bit last night. i wonder if i'll be so lucky tonight.

🎶 and i would walk 4 point 5 miles 🎶

 we walked up to the park, then across to the port, and we settled on babylon park even before either of us said anything. we had fun, though two of the games mr smear played (motorcycles and snowboard simulators) were remarkably unfair; if you win, you should get another go, no?

we looked for ice cream, but golda had removed their vegan indicators which was super suspicious. so we picked up a couple of drinks instead, and began our walk home. along the way, mr smear decided that he didn't want the traditional post-pesach pizza for dinner because he's watching his weight, which led to a lengthy discussion with gd over the phone because she was trying to be supportive and he... neither of us really understand what he was gunning for.

then, most of the way home, he decided he needed to stop by the candy store...

long story short, i "supported" him by not letting him go to the candy store, and we all thoroughly enjoyed the olive & mushroom pizza (with black salt, too, in my case). of course, gd ordered two pizzas when one would have done just fine :/

at least they were vegan. i'm never sure, and i *really* didn't feel like taking mr smear to the hospital this evening.

now to (hopefully) find out whether the kids are returning to school tomorrow or not.

lackluster

 today was a weird one. not a bad one, mind. lots of it was comfortable and comforting.

i got up tired. i read a bit more of mairowitz and crumb's kafka (it's amazing, with a very interesting perspective of ghetto life), i worked, with shenanigans around code ownership, and i eventually ended the work day in the middle of making some progress but also ready to put everything down because i'm officially on leave for the next couple of days.

i left the house around noon to get to a blood donation site, but for the first time in my life was rejected because my hemoglobin count was too low. so there's that to stress me out now.

mr smear tried desperately to get as much screen time as he could even though he was under punishment from calling me a jerk yesterday. he did music homework - garageband, he's making cool stuff - and later we sat down on yesterday's human resource machine problem and had a positive experience.

i'm not sure if his "performance" of being sick just as we started training was real or not, but whatever. he's the one concerned about his weight.

actually, that's not entirely true. mine's been climbing a bit, too.

but he did join me for a very serious mission hunting down matzah meal and healthy snacks, which proved surprisingly difficult to find.

either way, we watched strip search over a delicious dinner, spoke to my mom, and then got through the evening rituals and a bit of the colour of magic before calling it a day.

...

i've engaged in three or four different, toxic arguments on facebook over the course of the past day. people are fucked. i've now watched a whole lot of random youtube videos (some news, some not), and now i'm going to play some more balatro and have one last cup of tea and then climb into bed.