the week is over

 today was pretty exhausting, and i'm probably going to go to bed soon. the work day was slow, and a part of it was due to the same cause i noticed yesterday... my AI agents were running full regression tests for practically everything, and i had to go through multiple iterations of instructions and skill tweaking to get it to stop.

i didn't feel good about the day of client's work went. not for the quality of the work, not for the quantity of the work.

...

i started the day with more evangelion (book 2), and i'm excited to see the episodes again. i took care of some admin, mostly paying bills, and then it was work, work, work until it was time to leave for my evening class.

i already know a lot of the stuff from the course i did at the end of last year, but there are interesting things i've picked up nonetheless. and it was an opportunity to play-test the daily challenges i've added to my sudoku. and i had an important couple of conversations with my coworker who's working two (or more) jobs...

mr smear had a good day, meaning that he enjoyed it and also that he behaved well enough to earn screen time. also, his "homework" involved shading techniques that turned out amazing. *and* he used a whole lot more of the page than he usually does ^_^

right, the only thing of real value i've done tonight has been building a scraper and a wrapper website for the darwin awards to make it navigable so that i can read them to mr smear :P

negative, i am a meat proxy

 i guess today wasn't great? from a work perspective, at least. i mean, i'm learning a lot and things are moving, but i missed my deadline and that doesn't feel good :/

i read some more evangelion this morning, asuka and shinji fighting together was really fun :)

i made some design progress on the game i'm working on, and put the finishing touches on daily challenges in my sudoku game. i'm really pleased with how it's feeling, and i've made design choices i'm proud of, some of which i think are leveling me up all-round.

as i arrived at the office, i received a phone call from someone from the transport authority, who assured me that we haven't fallen through the cracks and agreed that if we can get power of attorney from our landlord they'll have no problem interfacing with us instead. so that's a huge relief.

after lunch (which was preceded by a too-long group meeting followed by a rush on the toilets), i spoke to the coordinator for the arts track. over the course of the next twenty minutes, i managed to walk her through mr smear's story, why his behavior is understandable, and how we all need to deal with the situation. she was understanding and appears to be on board. immediately after we finished talking, she sent me an update from today's art class teacher who reported a dramatic improvement since he faced an actual consequence yesterday, and it was an enormous, validating relief.

i made the mistake of eating a "go" vegan yoghurt, and i'm now convinced that it upsets my stomach. i have to check its ingredients to see if i can figure out what, but i'm definitely not eating it again.

i applied for the license renewal on monday, and it was authorized and sent today! i'm still in delighted shock, that's another weight off our shoulders (and money in our pockets).

ironically, the money we save will go directly to paying the next person who contacted me. in may, we were asked to reach out to an psychology clinic to manage mr smear's inappropriate behaviors. in june, i asked for intervention by the school councillor because they weren't reachable. just over a month ago they finally contacted me and asked us to fill out forms. this evening they called to get a description, and direct us to one of their therapists. so i guess things are actually moving now...

i took mr smear to the park to play frisbee, though it was a bit dark and less fun. on the way home we had a serious talk about the stuff that's been going on, and i explained to him that our main focus right now is teaching him discipline, and that him doing stuff he doesn't want to is really the whole point of the exercises we're going to be giving him (specifically in art and music).

dinner and a weird episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins, and then getting mr smear into bed (still reading the light fantastic), and then having a long conversation with my sister, who i think might be struggling more than we are...

it's too late and i'm too tired to do anything functional, so i'm going to just chill a little and go to bed and try to get stuff done in the morning.

all in all, today was a pretty good day.

...

stupid thoughts for the day:

marching to the beat of someone else's drum

 i slept pretty well. i got up and sat outside (wearing a shirt, it's getting colder) with my coffee and starting to read the second evangelion book, a harsh reminder of how distasteful asuka's character can be. we sent mr smear off to school fully loaded with all the books he was supposed to have taken weeks ago, along with our usual recommendations to be a good student.

i sent a message to the woman i spoke to a while back about educational game dev, hoping for some advice on moving forward seriously...

i don't recall what i spent the rest of my home-time doing or working on, but i do remember suddenly realizing that i was late for leaving for the office.

the first thing i did was meet up with my officer's course friend - let's call him "hobbyist" - who gifted me a freaking awesome purple tentacle that's glow-in-the-dark and turns pink when heated!

it's so cool!!

then i joined my team for breakfast, they ate bourekas and i had stuffed vine leaves, which were pretty good. then we worked for an hour or so before heading out to our team activity.

i honestly expected our "drum lesson" to be sitting around in a circle with bongo drums or something, not a room full of proper drum kits (dampened) and a serious hour-long introductory lesson in which we got to practice the fundamentals - we had a really good time! drumming is awesome ^_^

from there we went to lunch at a restaurant in midtown. to be fair, the restaurant experience and its food left much to be desired, but the experience overall was nice. it would have been nicer if gd hadn't called me to deal with a school incident that not only wasn't urgent, but that i wouldn't be able to do anything about until i got home anyway.

so that kinda brought me down. never a dull fucking moment.

eventually we returned to the office - a few of us, at least - and i did a sprint to try and complete as much as possible before due-date, which is technically tomorrow, but it looks like the customer's fumbled something so i might have some reprieve.

i'm a little concerned that my team lead thinks that what my agent uncovered might be pure hallucination, so i have some early morning research to do tomorrow...

i came home and interrogated my son, grilling him for the details before the other kid threatened him with a glue gun. seemingly armed with facts, i messaged his teacher who quickly called me back, and explained what happened. one of the things we discussed was how ridiculous we both find it that mr smear still doesn't know his teachers' names, so she had to investigate... he figured it out about the same time she did, though. when she called me back, it was to inform me that mr smear hadn't told the whole story, but that they were taking his report seriously and promised to keep an eye on both of them.

also, that i can expect a call tomorrow from the head of the art stream, because as apparent as his talent may be, he's just not putting in the work 🙄 🤦‍♂️

god help us.

we got through the evening [i just realized i forgot to call my mom so that mr smear could say goodnight :( ] and i've spent the last while working on my sudoku game, which i guess can technically be considered warming up for the bigger stuff? probably not.

laid out

 i - did - not -sleep. holy shit. like, at all. i skipped my first coffee, sat outside scribbling furiously, apparently coming up with a pretty compelling game design. said goodbye to mr smear, reminding him to be a cooperative student as we usually do, and then dove in to a bunch of chores.

i seem to have successfully applied for gd's license renewal, which was no mean feat... at least partially because my password manager had the incorrect credentials for her account 🤦‍♂️

i didn't feel i had enough time to head to the bank and the phone repair place before my team daily, then discovered around the time of the daily that it had been cancelled a couple of hours prior. i got a good chunk of work done instead, and then left the apartment for a "long lunch" involving bus rides there and back, and 45 minutes waiting politely. i was still buzzing from last night's coffee when i sat down, but halfway through the wait i crashed. hard.

then, when the two old people ahead of me finally finished and left, my "personal" teller checked my ID, heard me out, and regretted to inform me that there was absolutely nothing he could help me with.

*sigh*

i crossed the road, paid for my phone repair (mr smear's smashed screen couldn't be replaced), and came home.

i sipped coffee and lay down for a twenty minute nap, augmented with some dub. then i dragged myself to my desk and put in an hour's work, and then signed in to an hour and a bit of a talk by a coworker in thailand who's constructed a fascinating setup with grokbot that i'm thoroughly convinced is a dangerous, very expensive mistake.

i work with AI a lot, and i do not believe for one second that it's a good idea to take my eyes off the code entirely. also, my best senior engineer refused to use AI for one week. by friday, he said something nobody on the team wanted to hear.. i've been thinking about it a lot since i read it. i think it's spot on.

i was interrupted twice during that talk, for the same thing: the first was gd yelling at mr smear over the phone, the second was his teacher calling me to discuss his behavior. after the talk we had a family meeting, and things didn't seem too bad, and then his teacher got hold of me again and they seemed very bad. someone's apparently having a massive regression and doesn't remember how being a student works.

we have a lice protocol, now we have a behavior monitoring protocol. at least the teachers seem to be doing their part this time, actually making an effort to inform us and involve us 🙄

i took mr smear to the comics library, which was as much an opportunity for a little exercise and fresh air as to discuss his behavior, and gd's response to his behavior, and how i feel.

i'm excited about the books i took out: the second evangelion volume, the first volume of hellsing, and - hidden away from mr smear - book one of kick-ass. i flipped through it while there, it's hardcore.

we got home in time for dinner, with gd's delicious not-sushi rice-paper rolls, spoke to my mom, unpacked the groceries, showered, put mr smear to bed, and (after i spent some time thinking about stuff, after spending a little more time researching stuff) gd and i tried to watch an episode of ludwig, but we both passed out on the couch and i only realized it when i came around again and found myself aware enough to laugh at something, then noticed gd wasn't laughing :P

i've just finished my tea, i've written all this, and i'm going to try to catch up on last night's sleep.

buzz

 i started a course this afternoon, and slugged a fourth cup of coffee to get through it. i'm regretting doing that, now. it's around 11.30pm and i'm kind of getting stuff done, but i'm psychologically and emotionally tired and i know i should be trying to get some rest...

...

i slept alright last night, woke up pretty early again this morning. my morning was predominantly spent "clearing my desk" in preparation for heavy focus on - essentially - just one thing. i think i know what that one thing is, but if i'm honest with myself i'm kinda scared that i'm making a dangerous decision.

i also had a good idea regarding printing the sonnet comics, and i've just sent off a request to the illustrator accordingly.

in addition to desk-clearing, i helped gd out with making some appointments, and then headed out to work.

i feel like my work day was pretty productive. if nothing goes wrong, i suspect we'll manage the wednesday deadline. also, i've now asked two of my teammates to test my wrapper for the company's claude code harness - so my harness harness harness - and i'm hoping they have good experiences 🤞

one of my teammates has a hornet problem at home. jesus.

after years of pushing gd to post her thoughts online, she finally got started today, and IMO she's off to a good start ^_^

it rained today, so instead of going straight to my class at my employer's offices i stopped at home to switch to sandals and grab an umbrella. on the way, i read a report from one of mr smear's art teachers... i'm struggling to wrap my head around the fact that he has catch-up homework because he didn't work in class on a project that is literally the coolest thing he could be asked to do. when i asked him about it later over dinner, he had no answer.

anyway, the class was long but interesting. i didn't get an opportunity to speak privately with my coworker who's doing three jobs about how he's doing it, which i need to do because i need to understand how i can do it too...

i got home to the tail end of dinner (mr smear watching casual geographic), and we discussed the school situation, and then it was shower and bedtime. i read a little to mr smear (which always knocks me out), and now i'm done a bunch of random stuff and i think it might be worth me attempting to sleep.

this is me wishing myself luck...

a path less travelled

 maybe i am stupid.

i mean, this certainly isn't the first time i've mused on this, but the fact of the matter is that most of my life - honestly, some of the biggest moments of my life - is based on dramatic series of poor decisions. in most cases, i've kind of come out on top alright, but not for any particularly good reason. providence, i guess.

here i am, it's saturday morning, early enough that the streets are mostly empty and i'm surrounded by the blind-friendly ticking of a pedestrian crossing and occasional engine noises* and a glorious orange-cloud sunrise, the air calm and cool enough for me to be wearing a vest, and gd and mr smear (apparently) asleep.

* a surprising number of non-electric vehicles, which feels weird after yesterday's spectacular reveal of tesla's "flying" "roadster".

here i am, trying to do damage control and figure my way out of living beyond my means, struggling to make a decision because my resume can't handle me looking for a new job right now, but also i can't professionally and in good conscience leave a new contract i've barely begun without burning my employer, and moving apartments right now would be a nightmare, and it's unlikely to find a viable one in tel aviv that's cheaper anyway, and we can't leave tel aviv without pulling mr smear out of a school that's legitimately good for him both socially and artistically...

a sports car zooms by, a crow cries, and here i am, typing this up and sipping on my coffee and wondering whether i have what it takes to pull myself up by my bootstraps - an apt expression for the sheer impossibility that it seems to be - and find a way forward.

...

here comes the sun.

...

thursday:

thursday was a work from home day. while wednesday was fulling of hitting walls, thursday was awkwardly, slowly, sliding up and around them. my AI context seems a lot more reliable, but being thorough demands running a lot of long prompt sessions which means a lot of (human) evaluation, recalibration, and then a lot more waiting until the next cycle of the loop. it makes for long days, and an almost arbitrary level of productivity, but i did feel like i ended the day with a sense of accomplishment.

...

in the early afternoon, the landlord's air conditioner guy arrived. he checked out the ducts, and arrived at the conclusion that we don't have a mold problem, just a dust problem, and i *hope* his assessment is correct. either way, his explanation of our experience made sense, so we're going to follow the new protocol and see how it goes: for heat, air conditioner only goes on *cold*, colder than outside and colder than 24°, and immediately afterwards we use fan mode to keep the humidity out of the ducts from condensing.

i still haven't received a response from the landlord after i sent him an update.

...

i still haven't received a response from the pain clinic doctor regarding the cannabis license renewal. i guess we're going to have to make an appointment.

...

the tax return situation: i acted on a couple of recommendations, and got good responses. it turns out the 15% fee the not-quite-nigerian scammer eventually settled on is a standard fee. i ended up going with dod's guy, hopefully they'll find something.

...

we watch the wonder years' "how i'm spending my summer vacation" over dinner, continuing to solidify what a remarkable, wonderful, helpful series it is. mr smear gets really upset by kevin arnold's behavior, so much so that he just wants us to turn it off...

yesterday.

... but then, like yesterday, it turns out to provide a perfect analogy to explain to him why his own behavior is problematic. halfway through the day i lost my temper with him because he started telling me off for not helping him with his chores, while i'm trying desperately to keep my shit together to find ways to feed my family. a little later, when i'd calmed down, gd suggested that it was kind of like how kevin was focused on his little problems while others' worlds were burning, and i sat down with mr smear to calmly discuss it. as soon as i talked about last night's episode he *got* it, and immediately thanked me (and gd) for making is clear :)

...

that was only one thing that upset me, though. i spent most of the morning and early afternoon upset with mr smear about something else... for years now, i've been telling him to keep his phone in his bag when he's not actively using it, and he's been refusing to listen. a few months ago mr smear cost us a phone by washing it after dropping it in a urinal - this was upsetting enough before we learned that we're in financial distress - yesterday morning his friend shoved him (or something) and he dropped his phone and it died.

oh, fuck :/

...

gd and i bussed to a supermarket in yad eliyahu (i don't think i've ever been there before) for friday shopping (and to use the gift card i received before the holidays), and i'm pretty confident it's the best one in the city. we had a pretty good experience getting what we needed, caught a bus home (a long ride, with stress after we'd been talking about potentially having to move house again), and then bussed to pick mr smear up from school.

i took with me a couple of our old phones, and after picking mr smear up (and being frustrated by him making us wait outside for ten minutes and then eventually go in looking for him) we caught a bus to a phone repair store, which turned out to be the guy from my old (pre-canada) neighborhood who i thought had closed shop, but had merely moved to the other side of the road.

of the phones i brought with, one didn't need any work done (it suddenly sprang back to life with 70+% battery after we plugged it in), two of them i left with him for evaluation, and the rest (i don't remember if that's one or two) he told us weren't worth the cost of trying to fix. what worked out well for us is that the one that came back to life was mr smear's previous phone (from before our experiment to use paybox before understanding that it's a scam), so after only a little bit if fiddling i was able to hand it to him, fully useable.

...

i spent most of the afternoon just processing and thinking, while experimenting with freecad and blender. by late afternoon i'd managed to hook them up to AI and gotten results that weren't amazing, but were pretty damned good nonetheless.

...

before sundown, i took mr smear to the park and we threw the frisbee around. with everything else that's going on, it was fantastic. we both got some exercise, we both had fun, and mr smear actually did surprisingly well. it was an experience to treasure.

...

after getting home and getting showered, it was time for kiddush with my mom. gd's gnocci dinner was great, we watched some interesting nature "documentaries" on youtube, and after we'd all eating our fill, we settled down to watch the original total recall.

i read through some of the other reviews, and apparently remembered this movie with less than total recall, because i decided my 11 year old could handle it.

let's address the sexual stuff first: there's so much, from the get-go, and it's SO inappropriate. not just inappropriate for an 11 year old, inappropriate for real human beings - from the hyper-sexual wife responding to her husband's nightmares and literally anything else, to the relationship between  ironside's character and his wife, to the cabby fondling the woman's breasts while waiting for quaid. it's weird, and boy, did that lead to a couple of conversations.

but then there's the violence. we're usually not that concerned with violence, but total recall goes far beyond what i remembered and is truly hardcore. gratuitous and extreme.

it's a phenomenal movie, really fun, full of iconic moments and with lots to think about, but i do wish we'd waited a few more years.

i put mr smear to bed afterwards; he wasn't that bothered by the sex and violence, but the mutants in the movie freaked him out 🙄

friction and the not-quite-nigerian scam

 today was messy. i slept pretty well, and loved reading some more of akira before screen time.

i'm really struggling with my various side projects, not only to make time to work on them, but to find mental bandwidth. add to that the stress of having paid the larger amount which adds pressure to make good use of it, and i'm... doing... great...

i fired off an email to gd's pain doctor regarding prescribed doses, and i'm hoping we don't have to go see him in person 🤞

the work day was long, and difficult. it felt like every round of PR reviewing and updating was backfiring worse than the round before, and it was only in the afternoon, having pitched my setup to one of my team, that i learned that my AI tooling setup was ignoring something critical that really could have made all the difference :/

so as much progress as i felt i was making yesterday, today i felt like i'd hit a wall.

the only positive work day experience was a tech circle meeting in which i actually was able to contribute. that was a huge relief.

...

a while back i received an offer of assistance with tax refunds, and this morning i responded. the guy called me up, and asked for a whole lot of my personal details, and i was starting to wonder if i was being scammed when he divulged that he's actually nigerian... nigerian iraqi, living up north, and according to everything i've seen his business is legit. but. he takes enormous percentages from his clients, so i'm trying to find someone whose terms and conditions are a little less unreasonable.

...

back and forth with the air conditioner guy, and this evening he was saying "it would only take ten minutes", and i suddenly realized we were not talking about the same thing. he then spoke to our landlord, and then the landlord sent me a flurry of upset messages because he's having a hard time financially too and he was not expecting such a huge cost, and he's (understandably) pissed off that he paid a lot of money for a mold clean that didn't clean all the mold.

...

mr smear went to a friend's after school today, which he said was a super-short visit and that most of their time together had been spent on the bus there, awkwardly not really speaking.

kids these days.

gd and i had to threaten him with pretty severe punishments to get him to finish his book report, but he did do it, and he did a really good job.

then it was dinner time, gd having celebrated us getting our stove back, with four hot sauces and two episodes of evangelion. it was a good dinner.

after showering and brushing teeth, i read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, then sat down in front of my computer to poke the AI and do not much of value.

now i'm drinking my last tea and planning on climbing into bed.

momentum

 whatever else is going on, i woke up feeling better this morning. i started my day reading akira, the artwork is stunning and the story is... a bit different from what i remember from the movie, but i haven't seen the movie in forever so...

i began my functional day ordering hand-vacuum filters off of ali express, and unboxing the reflective straps i picked up yesterday. we found our sharpies, but then i discovered that sharpies and white-out don't mix, and then gd realized that she could mix up acrylic paint and did an excellent job of color-matching on our bathroom tiles 👍

[pausing to go and watch gd eating sunflower seeds, i was honestly convinced that she was somehow doing it wrong and now i'm trying to figure out how i've never seen her eating them before]

i walked to work a little anxiously, expecting another cyclist/motorcyclist incident in the walkway and identifying more with the poor old guy who was so angry about it a couple of weeks ago.

there were no signs, nothing indicating that there was a problem with the road i normally cross to get into the office, and i splashed down into what was either mud, or cement, and it went into my sandals.

i - was - pissed.

i tried not to track whatever it was into the office, which was nigh impossible, and found myself awkwardly and embarrassingly standing on a bunch of paper towels while washing my sandals off in the bathroom sink. not the greatest start to the workday.

work itself was fine, though. i made progress, and am feeling a bit of momentum, i had a pleasant roadmap meeting with my mentor, lunch was good (my onboarding buddy and i had a long chat about the differences in professional culture and work/life balance between the big companies), and i'm feeling pretty solid about my dev setup and the task i'm doing.

oh, and i had coffee with my old friend from the officer's course, and learned that's he's doing really cool hobbyist stuff with home automation and 3D printing. like, really cool stuff.

...

i received a call from the medical cannabis people, apparently there isn't an issue with gd getting a larger quantity per month. i really, really hope that's true 🤞

...

it sucked that the air conditioner guy couldn't make it this afternoon - or tomorrow, either - but it did give me the opportunity to go and hear eli sharabi speak. holy shit, that was an intense hour and a half. the fact that he's doing what he's doing and is maintaining the attitude that he's maintaining is nothing short of miraculous. there's no detail of his story that isn't devastating and heartbreaking.

...

i came home in time for dinner, and after discussing what i'd heard we dived in to another episode of evangelion. mr smear actually ate most of the chili, i didn't cry when i took too much carolina reaper sauce, and then it was shower / teeth / bedtime and i read a bit more of the light fantastic.

i couldn't figure out how i was feeling and i certainly wasn't being focused, so gd and i watched another episode of fauda, and i think i'm going to try for a (relatively) early night.

adventures in uncertainty

 what a weird day. the only times i went outside were to pick up reflective straps i'd ordered online (i haven't even opened the packages yet) and to take out the trash. the sky dripped a few drops on me along the way, but otherwise my time outside was uneventful and insufficient to constitute exercise.

from a health and wellness point of view, i'm not okay. i'm convinced that it's psychological, and that i'm just burned out and depressed.

...

i finished the first evangelion book this morning, and it is magnificent. or... manganificent?

i came across this at the library, and excitedly brought it home - only halfway through did i fully register that it's an adaptation of the series, not the other way around, but it's an adaptation with so much heart and soul!

all the little shifts really pull the series' threads more tightly together and make it not just emotionally powerful, but much more intellectually accessible. i recommend watching the original series first, but either way this is a fantastic book.

we watched the third episode over dinner, it was awesome.

...

i worked from home today, and i sat too long in my office chair. which i'm still sitting too long in, i guess. i'd to say i worked hard, but that expression's been slowly losing all meaning over the course of the year. we had an interesting online group meeting with my employer this afternoon, and one of the questions was "what do you do between prompts?".

well, i had an answer, but it depends on the kind of work i'm doing. for personal stuff, i'm usually messing with other projects while waiting for the response, so i cycle between them. for paid stuff, i'm usually either upgrading my "software factory", as one of my group put it, by improving my skills and refining my tooling setup, or i'm reading through the previous round's changes to get "closer to the source".

i went through a lot of that, today.

on a silly note, i misheard one of the group as we were all saying goodbye, and felt obliged to produce the following:

...

mr smear seems to have had a good day. fortunately or unfortunately, gd came to me today with the book report on maus he's been working on, and it said some disturbing things about the holocaust. so when he got home, we sat down to talk about it... he explained himself pretty well, and we're not alarmed any more, but in addition to coaching him on the language he uses to describe things (he "got it" pretty quickly), we're now planning a family trip to yad vashem. considering the fictional darkness he's already been exposed to i think he'll be able to handle it, and we want him to see and feel the reality and the human faces behind the numbers and clinical grim details.

...

i spent a lot of time thinking about investments today, i'm nervous about having all of our deposit money in indexes that may or may not crash. i've learned enough about investment and economics to be well into the valley of despair, so i don't trust any advice or theories on the internet but both sides make compelling arguments.

after thinking out loud and talking through a plan with my mom and gd after dinner, i decided to pull a chunk of money out of the traditional indexes, put some of it into an israel fund that includes real estate, and withdraw the rest to my bank account... in another few days i'm going to go in person to try and put that money away (along with the bonus i received) in a way that makes sense.

...

gd and i seem to be okay, but i'm still having moments of disconnection, still processing my feelings about the other night.

...

i've spent the past couple of hours working on security for one project and blockchain architecture for another, and it's approaching midnight already. i think i'm ready to call it a day.

the bubble

 i know enough about investment theory to know how little i understand, how little anyone understands. i know just enough to be helpless to make a decision when faced with a market full of noise, half doomsaying and freaking out that the AI bubble's about to burst, half calling for calm rationality and assuring everyone that things will get better, and that if there's going to be a crash it'll be sometime next year.

i don't know what to do about our deposit money. i should probably take half of it out and put it into something "safer". or maybe hedge it.

fuck.

...

gd and i left the apartment along with mr smear, and made the mistake of following the transport app's suggested route. we arrived about fifteen minutes later than planned for our meeting with the head dentist, but it didn't matter because she wasn't there anyway. the woman who was there - the office manager - was a right bitch. rude, obstructive, and it took everything in my power to not lose my shit while gd looked at me out of the side of her eyes, warning me not to let her get under my skin but amused that it was me getting upset and not here.

we left with an appointment to return in the afternoon, meaning they successfully burned my morning pre-office work time that i really, really need, as well as a good couple of hours out of my client hours in the afternoon which i also really, really need...

at least the head dentist was there when we returned, and even better, she speaks english so gd didn't need me to translate. she heard gd out, examined her, and sent us off with a recommendation to book an appointment with a periodontist.

according to gd, this *could* have been taken care of when we were in south africa and had dental health insurance, but the dentist magnanimously decided that it wasn't urgent enough.

smh.

...

work was pretty good, though the office was freezing and i sat shivering in my hoodie for a while before anyone else decided it was a problem worth looking into :P

on the one hand i'm frustrated by how much time it's taking getting PRs reviewed (my usual complaint), on the other it's giving me opportunities to learn more about the system and make better decisions 🤷‍♂️

...

at work, i received a phone call from mr smear's math teacher. he'd hit a girl 🤦‍♂️

BUT.

the teacher had borne witness to the provocation that came before it, and it was clear as day that while he should never be using force unless he's defending himself, the girls were messing with him non-stop and his response was, at the very least, understandable.

aside from validating his usual claims which we're often suspicious of, something else happened in the aftermath of the encounter: he surprised his teachers, and his parents, by taking responsibility, apologizing, and acknowledging that he had better options like coming to a teacher for help. this in itself was big, but in his conversation with his homeroom teacher and the councillor - who's the one who usually freaks out the most about his behavior - he was very open and direct, and i received a second phone call to discuss how mature he was being, and how together they'd realized that the kids were conflating "asking for help" with "snitching" (so we can have a conversation about that), and how mr smear's keeping his distance from his friend with the mouth; this is precisely what we advised him to do a couple of weeks ago, and it presented an opportunity to talk with the teacher about how these kids are interacting.

so that was good. we held a family meeting when we all got home, and mr smear was caught off guard because he was expecting to be punished; we made it clear that he'd crossed a line with the violence (no matter how soft it was in effect), but our focus was on how well he handled himself and how proud we were of him. i think this is the first time we've ever witnessed him allowing himself to be proud of himself, and it was an emotional moment for all of us!

then, in the evening, he reported something to gd - his friend with the mouth had said something absolutely beyond all boundaries "as a joke" (as usual), and this time i fired off a message to his mother. i was pleasantly surprised by her response, she handled it immediately, and i hope the effects are long lasting.

...

i worked until dinner, even though my brain was frying. we watched another episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins, which is really great, and i encouraged mr smear to finish the carrots he'd removed from dinner by rewarding him with a video about uploaded consciousness (well, sorta. the fruit fly brain being uploaded). i read some more of the light fantastic to him at bedtime, which is honestly consistently more polished and funny than the colour of magic.

by that stage of the evening i was falling apart. i spent about ten minutes working on a side project - planning a security strategy because i'm terrified of becoming successful enough to attract DOS or DOW attacks - then chatted with gd about our finances, then had a long catch up with my mom, and now... it's already later than i thought. i'm going to wind down and try to go to bed earlier than usual.

themes

 it's getting close to... oh, it is midnight. fine. today was a weird, unhealthily weird day. i've been sitting too much, eating too much, and i literally never went outside :/

i was woken up by mr smear's awful alarm being shoved in my face because neither he nor gd could figure out how to stop it when the phone is in downtime mode. i couldn't get back to sleep, and i remained decidedly unmotivated for a whi^H^H^H^H^Hpretty much the rest of the day :P

i started reading neon genesis evangelion, and i've immediately arrived at the conclusion that a) omg the manga is awesome but b) it's probably not quite as awesome if you haven't seen the anime.

i spent a bit of time on the phone with the dental clinic, the experience was shocking (although not as shocking as gd's failed root canal and her dentist's negligence) and i found myself both yelling at the receptionist and appealing to her humanity at the same time. apparently we can see the manager to complain in person on sunday morning...

my consulting coworker gave an hour long presentation today for her team's hackathon project during our client group's bi-weekly, half of which i was confused because something distracted me early and i didn't realize that zoom was showing her screen in a different tab. dammit. fortunately, i was wowed by their project on the day so i didn't have trouble following.

...

i received my payslip today, which thankfully included my bonus. i thought i'd be less disappointed if i didn't expect half of it to be taken as income tax, but now i see that it was literally half of the amount and i am disappointed. it's obviously far better than no bonus, though, so...

...

around noon a technician came for our electric stove. the one that we bought when we moved in. he took it off to the lab, refusing to give us even a general idea of how long we'd be without it :(

we are extremely lucky that our upstairs friends had a spare, although unfortunately our socket isn't regulation so we can't plug it in. but it does plug the hole in the counter, and we do have their portable stove for now, so... 🤷‍♂️

...

in the news, frontier models have been doing amazing things. i'm not talking about missing the point of math problems, although that's certainly interesting, but rather the crazy new game merging trend and someone (or a group of someones) finally getting some justice for decades of greedy abuse by adobe by "freeing" their software.

what a time to be alive.

having said that, *i* spent most of my workday using anthropic's newest frontier model, opus 5.5, struggling to get it to help me import a spreadsheet into my client's platform without it going off the rails, inventing problems that didn't exist, and just generally behaving badly.

it was a grind.

...

i had a little trouble with mr smear's attitude when he got home, but i managed to handle it and we had good results followed by a good talk. i had myself a nice glass of araq and started burning tokens - deliberately, in light of the fact that i'm about to try downgrading my subscription - making some interesting progress and coming up with a really cool idea for my sudoku game.

i stopped for dinner - the fall and rise of reggie dinkins is really fun - and a chat with my mom, read a little more of the light fantastic to mr smear, and then returned to the burn. gd restarted watching fauda, again, and because i've seen the first episode enough times i continued burning the whole time, jumping between different games. i'm using openai's latest frontier model, gpt-6 astra, and i'm experiencing mixed results. but much more positive results than opus, at least.

i should probably go to bed soon.

annual review

it was the 7th of october today. i thought about it a fair amount, though i tried not to. too soon. too close. in some ways it's still october 7th. in a lot of ways, sadly.

...

 i burned some tokens this morning, but nowhere near interesting quantities. i put lipstick on my pig of a fairy tales game, i put some polish on my sudoku game, and that led me down a rabbit-hole of revamping my personal website and getting donation mechanisms configured.

i hope it was worth it.

work: during the daily we were informed about a production incident, and my first thought (i don't think i was alone) was "i merged code yesterday, was it me?!"

it wasn't me, and i was pleased to be able to contribute to the conversation. after the meeting my onboarding buddy ran me and another dev through the investigation process, which showed a) that the new tooling (dynatrace) is absolutely awful if you're not interfacing with AI and b) that opus 5.5 gives very, very bad advice when it comes to managing production incidents.

i spent the next few hours back-and-forthing with agents on a design that i'd expected to have less to think about, but i was satisfied by the results by the time i had to head out to my employer's office for my first annual review with the boss. i'm a little nervous about how long each section of work is taking, hopefully i'll be in a strong position by my meeting with the team lead tomorrow afternoon.

my review was approximately the same time as gd needed to be at the absorption ministry offices to discuss her ulpan voucher, so she had to go without me, and i was pleased to learn that she got herself sorted out very nicely without me.

my meeting went considerably better than i'd expected. in fact, i walked out feeling pleasantly surprised by how happy the boss is with my work and my contributions, and even though the whole thing was over within fifteen minutes we had a couple of interesting side conversations as well.

i must have spent almost an hour catching up with the guy i was on my last contract with, and then i sat down and got a chunk of work done before finally calling it a day and beginning to make my way home. on the way, i contacted urchin and we chatted for a while, and then i received a message from mr smear's teacher confirming that he had, in fact, done the work he'd said he'd done and that it was satisfactory, which was an enormous relief!

i managed to talk mr smear into drawing something - even if he wasn't in the mood - and although he refused to do it as part of inktober it came out beautifully and he seems to be almost as proud of it as we are.

we watched the wonder years over dinner, all of us very disappointed in kevin (square dancing), and while mr smear was preparing for bed i began working on my old blockchain project, which as of a few minutes ago is beginning to take shape.

i'm tired. i think. i hope? *yawn*

win some lose some

 on my way out, our upstairs friend arrived to rescue us with a portable electric hob! so that's awesome. and i was interrupted in the middle of my team daily by a phone call from the public transport company, hopefully they'll now reach out to the landlord.

it was a relatively productive day, i delivered the second part of my changes and learned a heck of a lot.

otherwise, i dived in to a conversation about parenting and content (games and videos) and freaked out my onboarding buddy, which i apologized for, but she was grateful for the advice and the insight, so 🤷‍♂️

then i got home to find out that my son had had an incident at school... instead of working on his assignment his teacher found him making his hand completely black with a marker, and when she asked him to stop he just carried the fuck on 🙄

he swears blind that he did the work, though... i guess we'll find out tomorrow.

at least he did his math homework well.

with a break for dinner and showering and mr smear's bedtime, i've basically spent the past few hours making up for lost time, burning tokens on my social media side project, on my sudoku game, and on the fairy tale adventure game. i'm trying to use as much as possible before i downgrade on the weekend, and the past two days i barely did anything because of all the stress and the gremlins...

gremlins

i took a puff last night, or two, and it helped me get to sleep but i still spent some of the night awake and uncomfortable. where did i see a video about humming affecting the vagus nerve and reducing anxiety yesterday? i don't know, but i tried it and i'm not sure if it worked or not.

yesterday's hospital mission went surprisingly smoothly, and mr smear was able to go to school afterwards. i worked hard the whole afternoon, mostly battling to make sense of the AI agents telling me contradicting things and revising my plans in a way that i hope makes sense.

i managed to have an actual conversation with our landlord yesterday, which may not have resolved all the issues but it was an enormous relief nonetheless.

in the evening i took mr smear rollerblading, it was an absolutely gorgeous sunset / twilight along the yarkon river, so that was great.

after reading more of the light fantastic to mr smear i napped on the couch before i went to bed last night. so i didn't get much done, and i certainly didn't use my token reset like i'd planned.

it's been a week.

this morning we woke up to find both our stove and our dishwasher not working. i managed to get an electrician in early, and he checked everything out and it looks like the wiring is fine, so gd and i have named the gremlins in our house and i'm struggling to get technicians in. the stove guy will come on thursday. that's a lot of meals without cooking... fuck.

a bundle of nerves

 i mostly didn't sleep last night. i was tired, restless, and struggling with anxiety all night. i did have a few brief periods where i slept deeply enough to dream, but for the most part i just lay awake, uncomfortable, all night.

my gods, life is hard right now. and it's Big Stuff. i'm riddled with anxiety and my stomach's roiling with it, and i'm struggling to catch my breath. i have so much to be grateful for, but i'm having a lot of trouble seeing the wood for the trees, and two trees in particular are beating me with their branches.

the first tree is my job. we're living beyond our means, and that obviously needs to stop as soon as possible, but the only way out is to find another job. as i'm a contractor and on contract, if i do find another gig i'm going to be screwing over my employer and my client. if i don't, i'm going to be living on borrowed funds (time). i've got to find a side-gig that makes money, or gd has to, but until any of those conditions are met we're basically a ticking time bomb.

the second tree is our home. gd turned on the air conditioner yesterday and we didn't smell anything, which was an enormous relief. then she turned it on last night and it was blasting mold smell everywhere (it's central), and our landlord doesn't want to spend more money and has been out of communication for about a month already. on top of that, he's supposed to authorize the fixes to the windows and doors that the transit authority is offering to protect us from the construction noise, and i don't think he's done that.

...

yesterday was a monumental fuck-up regarding the holidays. i don't know where everyone else gets their information from, or if the holidays document i got was updated and i just missed the memo, but i only found out yesterday afternoon that mr smear was supposed to return to school yesterday morning. and this morning, he's missing school because i'm taking him to appointments at the hospital. so 🤷‍♂️

i also confused my workday schedules, and didn't realize until i joined the team daily by zoom that everyone was supposed to be in the office yesterday, so i scrambled to get there once the meeting was done.

the work day was pretty okay. i took the leftover challah-peño, which almost nobody wanted to try, and in the afternoon managed to guilt two of my team mates into trying, and then another became intrigued, but i still ended up eating most of it by myself :P

i merged my first PR yesterday, and then spent the remainder of the day buggering about with an indecisive/self-contradicting AI. my team introduced me to the spend dashboard, i was pleasantly surprised to find that my AI spend is very reasonable, and shocked to see some of the bigger numbers on the board.

after work, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear to the comics library, where we returned the broken judgement on gotham and i was relieved to find that it was clear to the librarian what had happened and that we weren't at fault. mr smear took a while to figure out which books he wanted to borrow, but i discovered akira and evangelion.

i don't know if i'll sound as dumb to you as i do to myself, but with all the frustration of being disappointed by the reboot and annoyed with the series revisions because i don't know what's canon, nor what any of it is supposed to mean, it never occurred to me to seek out the original text!

we watched another great episode of the wonder years over dinner - it's amazing how well that series holds up - and then i read a little of the light fantastic to mr smear at bedtime, but i started nodding off and he took over and read to me, and then he switched to reading from the grimm fairy tales, and at some point i realized it was late and that we both needed to get into bed.

which, for me, was clearly a mistake. i couldn't sleep in bed, so i moved to the couch, where i didn't sleep very well either, but also found myself constantly overheating and sweaty.

...

it's now just after 7.30am, and i'm going to have to take mr smear to his appointments today, so i guess i should get some work done before we leave...

sinking feeling

 mr smear got up early today without a fight, which was a relief and a great start to the day. i read a bit of my book on the garden of earthly delights, so my day began with some inspiration, and i took care of a little bugfixing before sitting down with gd to go through our budget again.

i don't know why, but last time we did it we missed a bunch of important things, and now it's clear: we're living beyond our means. but a couple of thousand shekels a month, which we weren't doing before we moved here. this was, in large part, hidden by the first half a year of moving expenses and refurnishing, and it's caused less by the costs in the new apartment and more by the drop in salary that i took after losing my job last year.

so this... this is a problem. the bonus my employer's giving me will ease things for a few months, but it's not a real solution. now i either have to find a new job, which i really, really don't want to do, or sort out some kind of supplemental income. or both. i'm freaked out by the fact that one of the guys i'm friendly with who works for the same employer is currently juggling three jobs because otherwise he can't make ends meet. this does not bode well.

my bonus, which is attached to the condition of me continuing to work for my employer for another year, is now looking more like a loan.

...

we walked to the pharmacy to pick up some stuff, and that's where mr smear began pushing both of our buttons. this would become progressively more serious until a couple of full-scale blowouts back home later, but the past couple of hours have been alright.

from the pharmacy we went to the mall, to pick up a couple of things and, unable to locate a water cooler in the mall itself, discover that you can easily walk across the bridge to the hospital and use the coolers there without getting wet when it rains.

oh, yes - it rained a bit today, and we got caught in it :P

this afternoon involved lots of thinking (employment), and building (my social media side project, as well as a traditional game that i'm hoping i can make a little money with), and cleaning the floors with mr smear.

now it's dark, almost dinner time, and i'm about to drag him out on our rollerblades while by back threatens to spasm before i'm even out my chair.

pushing on

i guess i'm on vacation for a week? i'm starting to write this just before 1am, while babysitting an agent working on my social media project and i *just* want to have a reasonably good result before i turn in for the night. also, i'm finally down to 6% of my weekly limit, which is good, i guess?

...

i slept alright last night, and began my day on the balcony, writing. i actually wrote something i felt was worth sharing.

i helped gd make a couple of appointments this morning and did a little more work on the project and the bird game, and then i switched modes and started working. today was mainly about managing my dev environment, fine tuning and troubleshooting and rediscovering that intellij is horrible software even on an m4 pro with 48GB of RAM. i literally almost burned myself holding my laptop because of the indexing, which was my primary complaint for more than seven years now.

visual studio code with claude code is a much better deal, and so much more effective.

i got my first PR out, and by the end of the day i had the second one ready to go. i had a pleasant one on one with my lead, and although i almost kit-bag-questioned my way out of vacation he assured me that it makes no difference to how much pressure this project has whether i take the days this week or the next, so 🤷‍♂️

i'm particularly pleased with how well my devex (that's a thing now) is now that i'm getting a handle on all the tooling, and getting the tooling to play nicely together ^_^

while i worked, mr smear and gd seemed to have a pretty relaxed day, but mr smear did give gd a hebrew lesson from the madregot book my mom delivered a while back, second day in a row and i'm proud of both of them :)

he also got through (with a little encouragement from me, some positive reinforcement and some not so positive) a tough piano lesson based on these boots were made for walkin', and practiced afterwards, and did himself proud.

otherwise, i ate a LOT today. lots of healthy food, but also lots of less healthy food (i've got a problem and i know it). once i was done with the work day, mr smear and i strapped on our blades and went on a mission, we didn't find what we were looking for (reflectors) but we mostly had a good time and got some good exercise.

we got back to great sushi, the second episode of small prophets (painful to watch, but we're all invested), and mr smear and i made great progress on the puzzle together before bedtime.

...

i hope i'm going to bed soon. i'll probably crash soon regardless of my dev state...

redirect

i took horseman's recommendation to heart last night, and as a result i went to bed particularly late and invested a significant amount of my energy (and tokens) on three different projects, in parallel with burning my client's tokens on the project they're actually paying me for.

then i discovered that the "reset" wasn't going to happen automatically, that we've been given an additional one to use when we like. oooooooooooooh.

but i got a hell of a lot of stuff done today, including massive improvements to the game (mr smear was overjoyed) and reviving the stalled social media experiment i've barely touched since december. i used a lot of AI back then, too, but i've leveled up considerably in the past few months and the experience is now completely different. also, the new models are completely different as well.

...

i did manage to sleep last night, but instead of being kept up by the usual pain or discomfort, or just restlessness, it was a nightmare that i awoke from with adrenaline pumping through my veins, and it must have taken about half an hour to calm down enough to get back to sleep.

the nightmare: extremely vivid, with lots of grim parts, ending in a chase scene (i was in the back of a flatbed truck being shot at, and some of the bullets struck centimeters from my legs), followed by a narrow escape after being discovered (and abandoned by one of my "friends"), which involved a favor (some random guy deciding to look the other way) and then sneaking into a secret passage i was sure he didn't know about.

the morning dream: i woke up from another epic dream that ended in me cleaning an oven (and scratching it accidentally by using the wrong tool) then finding out i was covering for some kind of crime. the last person i encountered as my alarm went off was a cartoon daffy duck (à la who framed roger rabbit) but man-size, which was pretty intimidating.

aside from work - one of my biggest achievements being getting my client's environment playing nicely with my personal skills and sandboxed playground - and all of the token burning, i feel like a large part of my day was spent snacking, and trying to help gd get through all the food she's made (we both decided, spontaneously and simultaneously, that she should have frozen half of it), and in the evening she accompanied me to my haircut.

she's *not* happy with my haircut. neither am i...

dinner and the wonder years and me and mr smear working on the puzzle together until late, followed by this post and a cup of tea, and now i'm trying to decide whether it's bed time or more work time. my brain's feeling a bit fuzzy...

from fasting to hardcore hiccups

 the fast... went by quickly. i made it, albeit is very lethargically and with a caffeine headache. 

i listened to a bit of the shul service, but after the rabbi began waxing political i shut it down and took mr smear out rollerblading. it was awesome, we had a good ride, good chatter (in particular a quiet break on a bench staring at the stars and having a serious talk about something that was bothering him), and his biggest concern was that not all the highway roads are completely smooth.

i showered, but i didn't hydrate. we went to bed soon after.

i woke up pretty early yesterday morning, and i was sad and anxious to see a surprising number of vehicles on the roads. i can't imagine what could be so important as to be driving on yom kippur, but apparently tel aviv isn't the only city that saw a sharp increase in this happening, which is disappointing, and feels ominous.

my day was primarily spent napping, reading comics, and working on the jigsaw puzzle (we got quite far!), and the absolute highlights of my day were playing a full game of pokémon with mr smear (he beat me with a surprisingly good strategy) and him participating heavily in the puzzle ^_^

sadly, gd wasn't interested in it and barely so much as looked at it, which i'm trying not to read into too much...

i broke my fast on chili and dill rice (a fresh, better batch), and then sat with mr smear - regretfully not recording - as he playtested our bird game with absolute, unadulterated full joy for about forty five minutes straight.

i managed to sleep last night, even though i woke up multiple times i was able to get back to sleep relatively easily.

this morning saw me starting my day on the balcony, writing in my notebook, and what was intended to be another comic script turned into a journal entry that was slightly more prosaic than this one. my fingers are too tired to transcribe, though, so 🤷‍♂️

i went to the acupuncturist, the session didn't feel quite as productive as the previous ones and i struggled to not snore during the treatment. fortunately, i didn't have any problems getting home this time. i shipped off to the office, where my work day was essentially a lot of social interactions punctuated by investigation, and i think i've got a proper handle on using claude the way my client intends without losing access to my user skills.

i came home early, had an early supper (disappointed to be eating alone), then took mr smear to the comics library to return some books. i said goodbye to him before he got on the bus home, but he clearly didn't understand what was happening and ran out of the bus when he realized i wasn't on it with him, and in the time it took to re-explain and turn him around the bus driver had already closed the doors... fortunately, he let him on again.

i made my way to the game dev meetup, which was again quite constructive. i met some nice people, got some extremely good tips from an entire talk built around a single slide, and had some interesting conversations. then i came home, not expecting to find my family having just watched the daredevil movie without me (i haven't seen it! [oh, wait, i have. i guess i had better things to bother remembering]), 

i played a bit of aces of the luftwaffe - squadron while mr smear ate his late dinner as slowly as possible in order to watch me [stops writing to write down some ideas that game him, look up the binding of isaac and wishlist rebirth, learn from horseman that i should be burning codex tokens before tomorrow's reset, and develop a weird and particularly intense case of the hiccups]

i had a weird argument with mr smear over him wanting to write something down, but not enough to do so with pen and paper (he wanted to use google docs, and it was late), and then i told him he was being a schmuck and he responded with "no, you're being a schmuck" so he's down an hour of screen time tomorrow and i'm questioning whether i did the right thing or not. at least the next time i tried to talk to him about what happened (a few minutes later) went well, he got the upper hand by deliberately answering my rhetorical question in a way that was so incorrect that i had to stop for both of us to laugh, and then regroup, and then think up a different approach 😅

after putting him to bed, i sorted out some minor things on my work laptop, agreed to what appears to be the go-ahead for my project's action plan, read some news articles and then began posting this.

god damn these hiccups.

the opening gates

 we never got to pokémon yesterday, but we did make great progress with our bird game, it was a great experience both as a father-son bonding session and as a building-something-good session. then we washed the floors, which took a while but is always less work than i expect it to be, by which time it was getting dark and we hadn't been outside all day, so we strapped on our blades and went for a night blade.

overall, the evening was excellent. there were a couple of shit moments, though, the primary one being almost being crashed into by an idiot kid on an electric scooter.

we had a good, but late, dinner and watched random videos from mr smear's playlist, and then it was bedtime.

i guess i slept alright, if not enough. i began the day with the other ant-man comic, then did some random stuff, then tried to get some actual work done - my employer expects us to work on holiday eves, but not my clients :P - and the first hour or so was spent migrating from helium to brave and upgrading software. then i settled in to write up some notes about my project and put AI to work investigating the current state and poking around to surface the risks, and i think i have enough to have a sync with the team's product lead when we're back in the office to determine how much effort this is going to require.

from there, i went out with an already irritable gd and our already irritating son to do some shopping, and while she let me win the argument about which grocery store to go to first, she turned out to be right that they wouldn't have any vegetables and then she was doubly pissed that we had to walk much further to get what we needed...

at least the rest of the shopping expedition was somewhat successful.

when we returned, i sat mr smear down to play pokémon, but gd turned it into a family meeting first. then we resorted the cards and ran through the tutorial, and we both had a good time. then we moved to the computer and got back to work on the bird game, and although the AI has been dragging its metaphorical feet the game itself is at least fun to play.

now it's about to be yom kippur, and gd mistimed dinner so it looks like i might be starting the fast a bit late... and taking mr smear our rollerblading, so i'll probably be drinking some water too :/

but i've eaten plenty today, carbo-loaded, in fact, so i'll probably be fine. two bowls of rice, and pancakes, and gd's failed experimental baked potato chips, and choc-chickpea fudge... i'll probably be fine.