somniferous

 i'm making an effort to stay awake tonight. fortunately, after the weekend progress i made on my AI harness i'm inspired to move forward. there's a lot of stuff going on, and i'm definitely learning.

...

i accompanied gd to the clinic this morning, from there were went to the hospital, begged for an in-between in-between appointments appointment, and returned to the clinic to see a doctor who gave gd a referral that formally begs for an in-between in-between appointments appointment. later i received an email from the hospital that says "okay", with no further details.

it's all very confusing.

i was falling apart after we came home, so i made myself a coffee and napped for half an hour, sipping it before closing my eyes and finishing it soon after. i was still a mess for a little while after that, but i eventually managed to sit myself down and dive into the work.

i feel like i did some real work today, even if a lot of it was being told by the AI agents that none of what they said before made any sense :/

i called mr smear after school had ended, and was pleased to hear that he'd found the last missing book. he gave me a bullshit story about not being able to bring home a workbook without bothering the janitors more than he already had, which i decided to let slide...

today was a mix of healthy and unhealthy snacking.

my mom and i took a walk to the immigration lawyers' office for a free consultation. the weather today was weird, and there were a lot of detours, but we arrived on time for a very pleasant meeting, and we were assured that ours is a "slam dunk" of a case should the need to use their services arise.

we returned home, i ushered mr smear into the shower so that i could spend some time on my AI harness before dinner, we enjoyed a really nice dinner, and a smooth bedtime (i resumed reading the colour of magic for the first time in a while).

my brain's a bit foggy. i'm not sure how much constructive effort i'll be putting in, but dammit i'm staying awake.

brain fogging

 once again, as it gets later and i get ready to go to bed, my nose and throat situation begins to worsen... on the one hand, the antihistamines seem to be helping a bit. on the other, this really can't be just allergies.

i'm enjoying the excuse to accompany mr smear to and from school these days, even though it's awkward and getting more awkward by the day. are we at war? will the bombing resume? or should we be living our best lives?

limbo is uncomfortable.

i told my team what i've been thinking, and that i essentially needed to go back to the drawing board, and they were understanding. in spite of a fair number of distractions, i did manage to be productive today and i'm understanding considerably more than i did before. i'm not quite sure how to formally introduce AI tooling into what i'm doing - i may have to treat it as local harnessing only - but at least i'm feeling a little less lost.

a couple of months ago i began the process of setting up paybox for mr smear, and then a few weeks later got his account set up. since then it's been unclear whether he's actually earning interest, and today i got in touch with their support. after they initially lied to me, it became apparent that children's savings accounts do not, in fact, earn interest. so the whole exercise was one in futility, and i've now withdrawn all the money and we're going to have to find another option. and, just like every other thing we've tried, this has cost us; not just in cash, but i've now got two credit cards that need to be cancelled :/

assholes.

i snacked a lot today. today was all about snacks. even if some of the snacks were essentially just an extended lunch :P

the supplement routine is getting a bit ridiculous, though. it's complicated, and i've kinda given up on intermittent fasting the full 16 hours (though i guess i've been unofficially doing less for a while now) because it makes it even more so. i can't drink tea or coffee for an hour before or after taking my iron supplement (or eating something with a reasonable amount of iron in it), and i've got to take vitamin D in the morning with food, and magnesium at night with vitamin C (but not vitamin D), and i have to have my handful of walnuts (or pancakes, if i'm in time for gd's breakfasts) for omega 3, and not forget to regularly take b12.

after my mom and i picked mr smear up from school, we returned home and then walked across the highway to find the supermarket. it really is well-hidden! mr smear's whole thing for weeks has been hunting for lotus biscoff cookies, and i honestly wasn't expecting to find them there.

but find them there we did :)

on the way there, i'd charged him with paying attention to the route so that he can he gd find the place, to which he'd responded in a decidedly uncooperative manner. i warned him there'd "be a test", and on the way back i quizzed him, putting the lotus cookies on the line. he was not happy when i "failed" him and assured him there'd be no biscuits until i got a map, at which point i went home and my mother volunteered to accompany him to give him a hand.

which he apparently didn't need 🤦‍♂️

it really is all about motivation with this kid. he got home, drew me a map, took half a biscuit and promptly forgot about the ones i'd offered him as a prize, and then settled down to try and improve his previous solution in human resource machine.

that was effectively the end of my work day :P

while he didn't exactly post the correct solution himself, he did work through it really well, he made a real effort and stayed focused, made a bunch of modifications that he was pleased with himself about, and when i sat down with him at the end, he was clearly on board with me every step of the way.

this is exciting stuff ^_^

just before dinner his new teacher called me, and our chat was pleasant. funny, even, in a distressing kind of way, because the story she told me was that she'd loaned mr smear a book for the lesson, and he'd somehow managed to lose it by the end of class even though nobody had moved.

my child is certainly talented.

eventually, i got the full story over dinner and everything made sense, nothing had been lost.

dinner was really good, gd and my mom worked together to produce a lentil curry that even anti-lentils mr smear found edible.

bedtime was smooth, i finally read a bit more of the colour of magic to him (we're so close to the end!), and i've now spent a couple of hours doing nothing of value (including some spire slaying). now i'm taking my cough to bed and praying to get some rest.

🎶 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.

extra-innings

 we all slept late, though in my case "sleep" is an exaggeration. i slept poorly. again. lower back and such.

i woke up with a bee in my bonnet, and spent a day i needed to be full of downtime working hard herding AI agents to build me a game i concocted. i'm certainly not the first person to attempt combining scrabble and balatro, but as of a minute or two ago i'm at a point where it kinda feels like i've come up with a viable alternative.

we shall see.

otherwise, it was a pretty quiet (cluster bomb attacks notwithstanding) day, mr smear entertaining himself with a mixture of reading comics and watching solo leveling (he very kindly caught me up when i did sit down with him), and the biggest event of the day was us taking a walk to both stretch our legs and pick up snacks (and then eating a lot of said snacks, and then getting into trouble with gd because we're both bothering her with our weight sensitivies).

in unrelated news, gd managed to crack a temporary crown today, so tomorrow's going to be more interesting than planned :/

that seems to be all, hopefully tonight with be a little restful.

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.

the needle

[currently battling a mosquito and losing]

 well, i did sleep last night. i had horrible dreams, though. involving really gross public toilets, amongst other things.

i gave up on reading dragon ball. it's like a pre-teen fever dream. combined with dragon ball: rick & morty i'm now pretty confident i never missed anything important.

our subwoofer situation: i was so excited the past couple of days, because it looked like the subwoofer was finally stable for the first time since we bought it. but today? garbage. i finally bit the bullet and ordered a new one, which will hopefully hook in to the shelf in the same way 🤞

work ownership mystery: i asked my manager to investigate, and he managed to get someone to approve my pull request. but then we learned that they didn't have the authorization to merge, either. a bunch of us (virtually) ran around trying to find out who's in charge, and so far the answer appears to be "nobody".

in the afternoon, my employer team had to sign in to a presentation that went on about an hour longer than it should have. i had to turn my camera off halfway through so nobody would have to keep seeing me rubbing my eyes and yawning.

mr smear had a regression today, and homework turned into a massive, unpleasant thing that got him punished. as part of the cooldown, i took him to the park to use the exercise equipment (i was too pissed off with him to train him, and i'm pretty sure he wasn't in the mood either), and then we continued on to do some sweet shopping.

i'm not doing to well with my weight situation lately. something about war and lockdown and yada yada yada.

dinner (we were forced to order in because my employer doesn't let me use my food allowance to buy vouchers) was much calmer, getting mr smear showered and toothbrushed and into bed proved stressful and stretched our patience completely, and that was on top of two attacks launched in that exact window. and i still had a little more work to do after he went to sleep, so i was even more annoyed.

now i'm playing catch-up and calm-down, as i type this i realize it's already past midnight :/

...

gd's friend (the glassblower who made us massage tools and gifted us with some bitcoin a couple of years ago) has been contemplating suicide for a very long time, and gd's finally reached a point where she can no longer bring herself to keep trying to talk him out of it. she's upset about this, and she wants to be a good friend, and i told her to just make her feelings crystal clear and deal with whatever may come.

you can't help everyone.

terror storm

ever since i was a child i've loved electric storms, and found lightning and thunder comforting. but last night's lightning strikes were so close that every single one sounded like an iranian attack had caught us by surprise and that there'd been another impact nearby.

thanks a bunch, mother nature.

so, ironically, during a night with no actual attacks i got a whole lot less sleep and a whole lot more anxiety. fuck you, headless chicken that remains of the IRGC.

 ...

so i was a bit rough around the edges today. in spite of that, i feel like i got *some* good work done, and i helped mr smear through his programming "homework" (human resource machine), and he did (with a little bit of shouted encouragement) do a reasonable amount of music practice, and we continued to use in-shelter time-outs to learn zoology with ze frank, and while we didn't train this evening, we did do some serious stretching.

we received two deliveries today: a small care package from my client, and a slightly bigger couch. we're happy with the care package, but we're particularly happy about the couch.

the post office saga was embarrassing, the guy who i'd sent it to had to go twice to the store to pick it up, and i'd had to have a real fight with the representative who eventually ended the call because she was upset that i was upset and taking it out on her. specifically, because she started saying "the next time you use our services" which i immediately cut off with a tirade of why i would never (voluntarily) be using their services again.

what's it called, when you pay for a service and they don't provide it to you? it's on the tip of my tongue...

slightly more reasonable snacking levels today, but a big, late leftover lunch after the couch was delivered, and gd made latkes for dinner (for the flax), and mr smear and i had vegan nutella on the last of the marshmallows.

we watched another strip search elimination, unfortunately mr smear loved the sex-adventure comic and "sass" a little too much and it was an ordeal to get him to not repeat it all to my mother 🤦‍♂️

omg it's really late again. we keep eating late, and mr smear's been going to bed really late, and it kind of throws off my clock.

the counter-routine

 another attack, second time this evening. it's late, and mr smear was just going to sleep... we have an agreement that we're going to start getting up early in the mornings to reestablish our routines.

...

today was a - i want to say a weird day, but every day in wartime is weird. i know i had weird dreams again last night, though i don't remember anything, and while it was a quieter night than before it was still quite disrupted.

i was pretty relaxed about work today, spending a fair amount of time on tangential stuff that i hope ends up shaving enough time off our CI that we can get a lot more of the real work done.

i surprised myself by participating more in today's (employer's) meeting than i would have expected considering i was mostly focused on the aforementioned tangential work, but i had a good idea about AI and game development and the others seemed to like it, so 🤷‍♂️

gd did a lot of cleaning and sorting today - i helped by moving a heavy piece of furniture - and our apartment feels considerably more together. so that's nice.

mr smear was mostly well-behaved today, somewhat helpful and contributed a bit to gd's efforts, and we had a really good mma session before dinner. daddy is very proud of his little boy's liver punches, and he kinda got the idea of a kickboxing roundhouse eventually.

i feel like the exercise we're getting is at least offsetting some of the excessive snacking that's been going on during the days.

we've gotten into the beginning of the strip search drama snowball. everyone's invested.

less than minor disruptions

 so far today we've had two warnings of incoming attacks, one attack with a siren, and one without. but we got to go to south tel aviv, visit some furniture stores and find a couch we're excited about, order it, and learn that it *should* be here in time for pesach.

hopefully my mom will be too 🤞

gd wasn't feeling so good - it was pretty impressive that she managed to make the mission at all - so mr smear and i dropped her off at home, stopping for a siren warning and breakfast (we were both very hungry by that stage), and then took the (delayed due the war like all of them) bus to the apple store, where there regretfully informed me that gd's ipad is too old and too scratched to be worth much in trade :(

so i guess it's hail-mary time, we'll try to back it up and completely reset it in the hopes that we can ugrade its OS...

we had a very pleasant walk home, picking up liquor, running into an old colleague friend and his dog (abahd - a boy and his dog, referencing the movie he introduced me to when he learned i'm a fallout fan), and picking up a sorry-we're-at-war gift from my employer of half a kilo of ice cream for (theoretical) dinner tonight.

then, as promised - after a cup of coffee, of course - mr smear and i went into MMA mode and i taught him taekwondo side kicks. which he did surprisingly well for a first time!

he's also - in fits and bursts - getting used to the idea of discipline, shutting the fuck up and taking instructions whether he agrees with them or has something to say or not. and it's really help that the motivation to do the work is coming from him because he's fixated on losing weight and we don't want him dieting...

i'm developing a karate kid fantasy of teaching him to a point where i can take him to my old master and see him holding his own :)

we took turns showering, and then there was an unannounced attack - lots of booms but no sirens - and now we're busy making dinner plans. it seems like the challah-peño's going to be good tonight ^_^

and i'm listening to moby - for the nostalgia - and figuring out what to do with my brain.

discomfort zones

 yesterday morning started off bitter, then got a little better (gd and mr smear had had a talk about being kinder to me). mr smear telling me i needed to stop clinging to bad feelings stung a little, but he wasn't wrong.

over breakfast, i read the veldt to him, which was an interesting experience. he was firmly on the side of the parents, and railing against the spoiled children, but there was just a moment when i was talking about how it maps to screen time and addiction that he got defensive - then i finished my thought that his entire generation was suffering from this stuff, as well as all the adults, and he was back on board :P

a little after he went to school, i completed the base of the chest of drawers and gd and i left for misrad hapnim. this time it was open, and we got numbers and sat down to wait, but immediately gd started feeling terrible and we soon had to leave and come home.

that was a very frustrating and disappointing experience, and also a complete waste of time.

i had breakfast and went to work, arriving in time for a lengthy discussion with my bulgarian teammates as i described my redesign while one of them diagramed it, and once we were done they were totally on my side - "this is how it should have been made in the first place" 💪

what followed was a few hours jumping between reviewing the results of the previous day's rollout - discovering later that i'd been instructed to look at an intermediate file, which explained the conflicting results - and reviewing large quantities of code (ultimately deferring to the AI review bots because i didn't have bandwidth and we were in a hurry), getting buy-in for the redesign, and then working on the redesign itself.

that last part was mostly - hours - me fighting with java tooling and an AI that helped in some ways, but for the most part insisted on "fixing" the problems by either breaking things, or injecting obvious security risks into the code 🤦‍♂️

...

on the one hand, i really want to impress my client and represent my employer in a way that makes them look good. on the other, my client is behaving in a disturbing way and it's uncomfortable for me. i'm working with technology that i want to be learning to work with, and it's an interesting technical challenge, but i'm working with a team whose only member with tribal knowledge is leaving in a week or two and whose other members were nowhere to be found during a week of a massive, highly sensitive rollout in the middle of which they handed everything over to a contractor without context and without any real guidance.

WTAF.

...

by the time i was ready to deliver my part of the solution to my teammate, in the hopes that it wasn't hot garbage because i hadn't had any way to properly test it, i had just enough time to go home, spend twenty minutes with my family, unblock a toilet, and head to the ozen bar for a surprisingly intimate (~50 people) show of yohay sponder, alone because gd was still feeling too ill to come with and mr smear's too young.

the show was a lot of fun. very awkward, both because of the crowd and because he was testing new material, but some of it was hilarious and a fair amount of things that amused me when he said them made me laugh later as i was on my way home.

when he got to the end and invited questions from the audience, things were a bit too silent for a bit too long, so i took a chance and asked a question that i thought he might find funny. i caught him off-guard, and was completely blown away that he didn't get the reference for the question (from his own set), and while he responded with a pretty clever comeback (after asking me why i had to bring the show down) i remain with the hope that he has a revelatory moment later where he suddenly gets it 🤣

i came home just in time to say good night to mr smear (who'd gone to bed much later than he should have), ate a lot (the leftovers from dinner were great, and yo egg on toast was a jolly good idea), and then had a cool shower (that was disappointing), and pretty soon after went to bed.

i guess i slept alright, relatively, at least.

the morning began with a stupidly shit vibe (mr smear "intentionally" doing something wrong instead of just accepting a minor correction, gd pissed off at a person rather than a situation - although she came around eventually), and i completed yesterday's chest of drawers so i can now being on the last one before moving on to the wardrobes. i need new tools, which is another source of frustration.

anyway, i've had some relaxed time, and i'm shocked to discover that i'm down to 76kg, and i have a ton of stuff to do this morning...

addendum: anxiety diet

 the anxiety diet continues to be effective; i dropped below 77kg yesterday for the first time since my early twenties. scrapper's comment on saturday about expecting me to have learned to handle stress better is rolling around my head a lot.

oh, and i showed mr smear maynard taking down a drunk fan and continuing to sing. he's agreed that as long as he doesn't have to do mma, he's ready to get back into jiujitsu. i told him and gd that we'll look into that as soon as we're over the move.

jalapeño-powered

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

upgrades

 after teaching mr smear how to open hard plastic packaging and reset a modern combination lock, he left for school with the lock still on the table. i automatically ate the leftover half of his pancakes, apparently my body's still trying to make up for all the burned calories yesterday... i'm back up to 80kg again :/

i invested a bit of time tidying up my desktop and fleshing out a design for one of my side projects, and discuss (in broad terms) building a tarot deck with gd, and then headed out to draw cash, get an update about gd's scope appointment, pick up a coffee and order a tasting kit of carolina reapers (amongst other hardcore peppers), replace mr smear's watch battery, and then return home past the hardware store to pick up anti-mold stuff and usb-c chargers (now that i know).

i spent some time setting those up (rearranging things in general), then sat down to split up AI covers to add to my playlists (i've been obsessed with synthknot the past couple of days).

my new employer contacted me to set up work accounts, along with meetings to prepare for my onboarding. i mean, they could have just employed me a month earlier...

i passed out while finishing the incal, but i did finish it.

the unhinged ravings of a perverse amateur author with one of the most unlikeable protagonists i've ever encountered and a literal deus ex machina at every turn. BUT. fantastic artwork, incredibly psychedelic delirium at cosmic scale. as much as i might have been turned off by the writing, the overall experience was so good that i'm glad i didn't put it down.

i blocked youtube on the ubuntu macbook, but later caught mr smear using chatgpt thinking we wouldn't catch him...

lifting mr smear's toenails is traumatizing for the lot of us.

we've just finished eating an early dinner, i'm about to supervise mr smear's reading homework, and then i'm off to a "house party" that gco's organized...

strange vacation

 yesterday:

i took mr smear to school, then came straight back home so i would be here when the window guys arrived. after i'd waited a while, i received a phone call telling me that the wheels they ordered were available - matching the ones that were currently installed and broken - but that the guy at the store had explained that the reason they'd broken in the first place is because they weren't designed for big windows.

of course.

on the one hand, they might have been "scamming" me for an upsell of 120 shekels. but, more likely, our idiot landlords skimped on the proper wheels because they're precisely the sort of people who would try to save 120 shekels when it would cost a thousand to have to replace them.

anyway, the work was done well, there's no way i would have been able to do any of it myself, and since they've left every opening and closing of the windows has been a pleasantly smooth surprise.

...

after cleaning the floors and rearranging our apartment, i spent the next couple of hours waiting for the air-conditioning guy, who never came. i took a break from waiting in order to go to the shoemaker to pick up my repaired sneakers, developing a craving for a falafel on the way there and grabbing one on the way back.

the weather was hot and dry, and the walk-and-chew was very pleasant. it strangely gave me the distinct sensation of being on holiday.

the only other time i left the apartment was to spy on mr smear, and i was grateful to find him not on his phone, so i didn't have to go through with the punishment. the homework went well.

in the evening, i received a message from the air-conditioner technician, apologizing and asking if we could do sunday instead.

i'll give him one more chance.

...

we started watching eddie murphy's dr dolittle over dinner - much more entertaining than robert downey jr.'s - and then had a long chat with my mom and sister, and then rushed mr smear into bed.

on my way out, i read a whole lot of missed messages in the school chat and learned that the school (and all the schools) are dealing with a really ugly "internet challenge" that is effectively sexual assault (kadisha), and that there was an incident in mr smear's class :/

i hopped on a bus to visit the mongoose. i don't know if i didn't know, or if i'd forgotten, that his partner's pregnant again 😳

we talked until quite late, then i got in a taxi and came home. and got ready for bed, and passed out.

today:

the day began with a very serious discussion about sexual assault, and us telling mr smear that if he witnesses anything like it he's to do everything in his power to stop it immediately - even if it's his friends - and to report it immediately. i think we successfully impressed on him the significance, the important and the potential consequences...

i took mr smear to school (at this point i feel 90% confident in his bus-taking abilities), and when i returned i tried to introduce gd to orgazmo, but she really wasn't interested and i feel like it's aged very, very poorly. like, the concept is funny, and some of the lines are good, but overall it's very flat.

gd and i headed to the nature store, stopping for a jusa nirvana and vegan chocolate alfajores* on the way. then we stopped at a pharmacy, where we bumped into the new captain's first mate and were trapped together in the queue for a while, making small talk and then discussing how things are going in the office, and how the job hunt is going...

* yeah, it hasn't been such a great week for weight-watching

gd and i walked home, picking up coffee at what used to be coffeeholic, and she seemed to manage it well post-nerve-block which is quite something. we did some more shopping at the local store, then mr smear came home, and after some snacking and napping we decided to put the matrix on.

so: the summary of our experience after the first half is that mr smear's mind was blown, but the existential terror proved too much for him and he asked us to stop because he's just not ready for it.

the mode

i couldn't keep my eyes open after posting, and went to bed pretty soon after.

i actually got some sleep.

i still woke up tired, though - even more than yesterday. i took mr smear to school, and joined him in being super awkward with his classmate who generally takes the same bus (and shares a desk with him).

i came home, watched another episode of jujutsu kaisen with gd, and then begrudgingly left to take my shoes for repair and accompany gd to the pharmacy. by the time we got to the pharmacy, i was feeling pretty bad (gd's also been feeling off the past day or two), so much so that both gd and i were worried i was going to faint. so i found a place to sit and a cup of coffee, and tried to recover in time for the HR interview.

we arrived home with ten minutes to spare, so i finished my coffee and gobbled down a protein bar (yummo's are really good) and logged in to the video call.

it was a good experience. i really like what they're doing and how they do it, and next up is a technical interview for which i *definitely* need to prepare.

i've spent the past couple of hours resting, watching made in abyss, and eating too many of the leftover pastries. i'm not learning. nosirree. but i must note that since the dramatic weight loss of the past couple of weeks, i seem to be hovering around 78kg which is amazing.

...

otherwise, it appears that mr smear had a test today that we didn't know anything about, and we're going to have to help him prepare...

the (big) little things

 today had some pretty important achievements.

after mr smear left for school, i had breakfast so that i could take some ibuprofen for the leftovers from yesterday's migraine and registered for unemployment for the first time in my life.

then gd and i walked to the pain clinic. it took a while to get to see the doctor, but he was in and available and he sorted us out with the recommendation we needed. afterwards, while advising gd not to see an osteopath for her shoulder issues, gd said something and he suddenly registered - apparently for the first time - just how disabled she is. and that was when gd's floodgates opened, because almost nobody we've dealt with really gets it.

i hung around and chatted with horseman while gd got a prescription, and then we walked to a copy shop to print a return label for a pair of shoes. i followed the instructions - sending an email from my gmail account to the shop's gmail account - but they claimed that "sometimes it can take a while" which doesn't make any sense. i half-jokingly asked if maybe their internet was disconnected, and the manager took offense and made a few snide remarks. while i was standing there trying to figure out whether it was worth being offended or not, i realized that the customer-facing computers were logged in to the same gmail account. so i hit "all mail" and lo! my email had arrived.

fuckin' idjits.

so i spent 10 NIS on poor service, a single printed page and a plastic sleeve.

then gd and i walked home, had a bite to eat, and after a few failed attempts to request her cannabis license renewal i made myself a turkish coffee for the road and walked the shoes back to the post office.

with everything that's been going on, i've needed any excuse for a walk and think, even if there hasn't been a whole lot of thinking going on.

i arrived at the packed post office, and tried to set the package down because usually they don't make us wait for that. except that now they do, and the clerk made me feel pretty shitty for not waiting my turn...

when i got home, i sat down at my desk and cranked out some improvements to the language app i haven't touched in months, and although gd got a bit frustrated while testing it i feel like it's actually on it's way!

i went to pick mr smear up from the school to take him gift shopping, encountering the unhinged mother and making a point of neither looking at her nor avoiding her. then mr smear came out and we enjoyed a pleasant walk to the mall, where we found some posters but not the right one. the guy at the store had a south african accent, and we ended up talking, and i ended up learning that we could do custom prints! so we found a perfect image, got an amazing print made, and hopefully tomorrow i'll be able to pick it up with it's basic mounting.

the owner of the store told me some weird stories. i'm not sure i really understand what was happening in them.

mr smear and i bussed home, and settled in to homework. the hebrew homework went well. the math homework started off pretty well, had some rocky moments, and then mr smear took a toilet break and when he came back he was completely unfocused and uncooperative, and i got upset. and then gd got upset.

and then i started thinking about how i got called out for getting upset with skippity in the office, and about how i wasn't modeling well, and i explained to mr smear that i wasn't upset with his homework performance, but with his uncooperative behavior, and that even if it was reasonable to get angry after having all my patience worn down, i wanted to get back to the positive vibe from before when he and i were both so excited by his progress.

and between the two of us, we did it. his behavior over the next half hour or so wasn't perfect, but i managed to keep an even keel and focus on the good stuff and we both learned some cool stuff; he learned about exponents, and we learned how to use prime factorizations to make large numbers easy to reason about, and he was super proud of himself ^_^

dinner was... i overate.

bedtime went similarly to yesterday - the new plan is working, hopefully it'll keep working 🤞

finally, after putting mr smear to bed, i tried one more time to renew the license, and this time realized that i was using brave with its shields up. so i took them down, and voilà! done. what a thoroughly different experience (not using machon mor).

the cut

goddamn.

yesterday.

i got some shit done on my way to the office yesterday, not least of which being sorting out a pain clinic appointment for gd in the hopes to start getting the ball rolling with her cannabis license renewal.

i arrived at work in good spirits, but hadn't even managed to grab a coffee before being called in to a meeting with my boss and our HR woman. i didn't take it well - they listed their claims, and i told them that the claims are clearly nonsense - and i had some very awkward non-conversations (being "discrete") on my way out.

i feel the betrayal keenly. i would have felt a lot more like this was an understandable play on their part if it wasn't for two things: first, that a week ago they told me they weren't happy with me, but instead of firing me they moved me to a different team - a team that wanted me, and that i had a good chance of success in. second, they surprise-fired me along with five other people, about half of whom the decision makes zero sense.

i've received some concerned phone calls, not just concern for me and the others, but concern for all those who're left behind. you don't fire obviously competent people who lots of people have worked with and leaned on without sparking a panic. nothing about this play makes sense.

so obviously i'm not in a good place right now, the anxiety from the past week or so has now shifted to a new, differently-terrifying one. they're doing something ugly, dirty and counter-productive, and i'm walking away with a black mark on my resume in the form of an eight-month stint.

one for which i've made enormous sacrifices of my physical and mental well-being.

i don't regret doing what i believed in, and i'm proud to be walking away with my integrity. i'm also kinda glad that it's happened exactly as it has, in a way that anyone in the organization with half a brain can see through, can see that it isn't right and it isn't deserved.

now to find a new job. i'm praying that the guys who made me the competing offer are ready to make it again... i have a meeting with them next week 🤞

...

mr smear went to a friend's place yesterday (obviously just a pretense for extensive and inappropriate screen-time), and i went to pick him up (and pace and ponder while waiting) and take him to the mall to look for a belated birthday gift for his friend. i told him basically what was happening, and a bit later he needed some consoling because he literally interpreted it as "we're going to have to start eating worms" 🤦

we didn't find anything amazing, and then he very wisely said that he didn't want to get his friend anything that he might politely accept but be disappointed with, so we caught a bus home and he said he'd ask his friend what kinds of things he might want.

last night was dinner (half a dinner for me, the anxiety diet*) and a lot of phone calls. and eventually a chat with my mom, who made a very good suggestion that i write down what i'm going to say in the hearing. i now have a pretty solid statement prepared, and i think i'm just going to tidy it up, and then send it to my boss and the HR woman right before reading it to their faces.

* i was down to 77 kilograms this morning!

last night, gd and i started rewatching thursday. and passed out about a third of the way through. [i checked: good guess]

today:

the highlights of this morning were an hour long conversation with horseman, and taking gd to an ultrasound appointment.

horseman told me something very surprising about why he won't work with kids under fourteen, and it seems wrong but it also explains a lot of the frustration we experience with mr smear: at his age (and all ages before this age), he's very good at continuing the flow of a conversation and sounding like he's understanding. but he's not understanding. so we get all frustrated and angry with him but he's just playing along and not fully comprehending what he's doing wrong...

gd and i bussed through to south tel aviv, eventually finding the place and arriving with half an hour to spare. which was fortunate, because it took just over half an hour waiting on hold for the clinic staff to get authorization...

having had a successful adventure, we came home to do the dishes, and then gd made us really good toasted sandwiches and we completed watching thursday. still good.

the rest of the afternoon / evening (shit, it's getting dark really early already) has been mostly syncing with mr smear over his day and helping him with his math homework (algebra!). somewhat successfully :)

failed to restart

 i'm tired. but my coworker was worse off than me today, he came in with heatstroke :/

mr smear left a minute or two before me today, and instead of waiting downstairs, he just left. without saying goodbye. so i followed him, walking at a fast pace, and caught up with him just after he crossed the highway onramp, so i got to see him handling everything alright.

i dropped him off at school, then headed to the office.

i'm having a hard time with names and faces now. like, a really hard time.

today was another day of one distraction after another. the new "team captain" has arrived, but he's onboarding so he hasn't really joined us yet.

i struggled to not snack today.

i came home a bit later than i'd like, but not for any good reason. we watched more twins over dinner, and then had a family meeting about the new math homework rules. shower / toothbrush time was smooth, getting mr smear to sleep was much easier... he at least tried what i was telling him about relaxing his body in order to relax his mind.

i guess i'll find out tomorrow how it went from his perspective.

i passed out on the couch, but woke up with bits of the jelly beads from mr smear's "prize" all over me. and then got stuck trying to solve a bizarre work issue.

i want to play a little shadowrun before going to bed, but i don't think i have the brain for it :(

challenges

don't count your hostages before they've been safely returned. i'm hoping against hope, but god knows if any of what's supposed to be happening right now is real.

...

in addition to everything else, gd's eye's been giving her trouble, and today things got serious. so we began the day accompanying her to the clinic, and then i walked them most of the way home before heading to the office.

the work day was okay, calm but a bit messy. highlights included terminating our contract with a guy who's been on retainer for months but who's been occupying himself with stuff we never asked for, probably out of boredom.

i consumed far too many calories during happy hour.

the game hacking session never happened, but me hanging around did present an opportunity for a wild AI conversation.

• AI Slop Is Destroying The Internet
• It Begins: An AI Literally Attempted Murder To Avoid Shutdown
• Using AI Makes Your Brain Lazy, Even After You Stop Using It, New Study Shows
• and it's especially creepy hearing an AI describing how we're using AI wrong: Replacing Humans with AI Has Gone Terribly Wrong | Geoffrey Hinton Explains

i came home, we had dinner (and watched an episode of futurama), and i managed to convince mr smear to draw the amazing inktober concept he'd come up with in the morning. unfortunately, we didn't get to publish it because by the time he finished inking it - and he refuses to post it without color - it was already 11pm. and then getting him to go to sleep was a whole other story...

...

tomorrow's the day we go to the circus, but also a friday that gd needs to go to the emergency clinic. oh! and i got a call from the hospital today, mr smear can do his dairy challenge next week 🤞

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...