friday, saturday, sunday

friday sped by really fast considering how slow i was getting into the one real task i had to do. i was ten minutes late to a half-hour meeting that ran so late that i was then forty-five minutes late to a one hour meeting, and i finally completed the day's work five minutes before my mother arrived to pick me up. i took mr smear to the temple, where i was in time for a quick whiskey before the service (and just finished it as mr smear decided he wanted to explore and threatened me that if i didn't come with him, he'd leave me there by myself).

the service was great, there were two kids around for him to play with, and when we got home we had a nice curry club dinner and then easily got him to bed.

yesterday was interesting, it began with me putting on peter, paul and mary's puff the magic dragon and when mr smear complained that it was in black and white, i explained that it's because the video was recorded so long ago that colours hadn't been invented yet, and that that's just what the world looked like back then. i was thoroughly amused, but then i felt super-guilty and had to come clean a minute later and explain the truth to him.

i spent my morning wrestling with instagram to set up a project-specific account, because instagram doesn't expect users to want to edit their pictures' descriptions from a desktop and certainly doesn't endorse re-posting one's photos to one's own accounts. but wait, there's an app for that! buffer. and buffer would be perfect if it didn't fail abysmally when i tried to post.

i took mr smear to the locksmiths next door expecting them to have patent screws (like they had before), only they were out and the two of us walked all the way across town to find the other locksmith's closed. i knew i should have checked first, but it was a good walk for mr smear. he then reminded me, at our furthest point from home, that i'd promised him a week earlier to take him up the mountain. and i always keep my promises.

so we walked all the way back home, i stopped for a cup of coffee while i ordered cableway tickets, and we proceeded to uber up to the base station. shortly before we stopped at home, i pointed up at the upper station and said "that's where we're going", and he went "we're going to castle greyskull?!", and i said "yes!". and immediately knew that there was no way for me to tell him it wasn't castle greyskull without disappointing him to the point of ruining the experience. so we visited castle greyskull, the real, real castle greyskull, and his little mind was blown and he was utterly thrilled. the conversation that made my day was my son talking through what he thought would happen if superman had to defend castle greyskull against skeletor, which led me to wonder: if superman incinerated skeletor, could it be that he-man would become a despot with no evil to keep him in check?

it was a bit of a mission to keep my new tattoo out of the sun, but mr smear had a blast and at one point i realized that if i let him keep walking we'd never get home at a reasonable hour, so i had to coerce him to turn around and return to castle greyskull. it's castle greyskull now. it is, and i suspect it always will be.

today started really well, with a slow wakeup, and then we weren't allowed to put the telly on because mr smear wanted peace and quiet to play with his toys. gd made pancakes, and then mr smear and i met up with our friends and hit their swimming pool for a while, then went inside for some more playtime (banana bread and tea), and then returned home. it was only as the uber driver arrived to pick us up that i realized that i was supposed to do some emergency grocery shopping, so after a shower and a cup of coffee i went to the mall to pick up meds and food, came home for some playstation time and watch one strange rock, and then get mr smear to bed. i had stuff to do this evening, but i'm not doing it and i don't care. it was a fantastic weekend.

[shit. i think we might need to get pest-control in here again. this feels like something we need to keep doing every six months and nobody's been able to identify the actual cause]

oauth 2

i can't believe how clunky google, facebook, and even twitter have made their oauth offerings, and how little useful documentation i've been able to find. thanks, github, for setting unreasonable expectations.

the pace is painfully slow, but helping out with my mother's new business website is almost therapeutic. there's something about doing these almost mindless things (like oauth) one at a time, small achievement after small achievement, without jumping to the million other things that need doing. i'm starting to feel like i'm finding that same groove at work, too. and that's definitely a good thing.

work seems good. mr smear had a horrible cough for a few days but was back at school today, and i'm a little shocked that in half an hour it'll be friday again. FRIDAY. wtf.

my new tattoo is itching the shit outta me. my wife upset me earlier by finishing my sentence about the new tool album in the worst possible way (she thought i was trying to say "it sounds the same as the others", and while it's borrowed a few phrases and there's a clear and present tool-ness going on, the more i listen to it the more i hear. so yes... just like every other tool album, but not in the way she intended).

oauth experience

setting up oauth with github was a breeze. setting it up with google has been a giant pain in the butt so far, and i'm only halfway there *if* i've configured things correctly so far. and three hours ago i thought i was going to go to bed soon...

a positive reset

i was nervous going in to work today, and i was pleasantly surprised when my manager a) confirmed that my new strategy / approach is good and b) relieved that toxic avenger had been cautioned over her hostility. i don't know how things are going to play out going forward, but out interactions today were mostly civil and constructive and regardless, the rest of the team and i seem to be on the same page technically which was validating.

and i even made some progress on the things i meant to do.

i walked home to drop off my bag and put on a long-sleeved shirt to cover my new tattoo, then headed to the hairdresser for a pretty decent haircut. i came back and watched dr horrible's sing-along blog with mr smear, put on thundercats for him after making a fun video to send to future him (something had inspired me to do that on my way home, and then he insisted on an out-of-sequence  episode that involved time capsules. wtf?!)

i got stuck in to something technical for half an hour while he watched, got up to sort out dinner and found him passed out on the couch. whoops!

it's about 9pm now, i think i'm going to try to make a little more progress and then turn in early again. it's been a big start to the week.

tool day 2019

omg, this world has been a slightly better place to live in since tool's old material became officially available, and with their new album's release it feels like my soul's giving a sigh of relief with a breath i didn't know i was holding in. i can't seem to get enough pneuma.

on saturday morning i went to bed with my headphones in so that i could listen to the rest of it, but it was muddled up with friday's trauma. i've been feeling that same heavy, deep exhaustion that i experienced the last time i was severely depressed, after leaving my first montreal job because of megaman. this kind of thing takes a lot of thought, processing, and planning, and that's a lot of what this weekend has been about. i'm just starting to feel comfortable with the idea of walking into work tomorrow, having a conversation with my manager and then proceeding to try to fix this shit.

otherwise, i took mr smear out yesterday morning for a bit, he silently stalked a couple of kids for a while before i could convince him to actually speak to them, and after he broke the ice they all enjoyed the short time they had together before i had to get us home so i could get ready for the new tattoo.

the new tattoo HURT. but it's beautiful, and i'm really excited about it. an advantage of it being tool day was that everyone at the tattoo parlour was happy to hear the album again :D

mr smear and i have played a lot of video games this weekend, and the experience has been mostly very positive.

today was corrective, after a pleasant wake-up i took mr smear to the gallery and the museum, for the latter i had to promise not to try to feed him to the great white shark he calls "sharkzega" again :P

we played toy story 3 for quite a while this afternoon, after which i took him to the gardens for a round of squirrel hunting (to feed them), and then we watched hook again.

i went to bed early last night (right after getting him to sleep), and i just said goodnight to him before writing this and then i believe i'm going to crash again.

the pregnant lady sings

today did not go as smoothly as planned... it went really badly, in fact. but in a constructive way? time will tell. my toxic teammate (toxic crusader) rolled her eyes at me again this morning, and i asked our manager to ask her to see if he could get her to dislike me less visibly. instead, he put us in a room together and told us to work it out, and in retrospect i think it would have been better if he'd hung around to hear what we had to say.

it's hard to hear someone tell you you're no good, even when you already know that's what they think of you. but she did admit that she felt that i'd improved a bit, and she said some things that tied in with what i'd been hearing from other sources but which came across more clearly. i felt like shit for a while after we talked, even contemplated some of my other options, but then i realized that this is an organization that i have a lot to learn from - in particular in terms of how i approach my work - and some of the things that have been getting under my skin are opportunities for me to bring value.

the way we frame things matters, and by the end of the day i realized that the work i'd been doing since yesterday morning was actually above and beyond what my original task mandated, and that the task i'd been stuck on for weeks was actually a long series of tasks the scope of which i'd naively assumed the creator had understood from the get-go. what comes next is not going to be easy, it's way out of my comfort zone, and in my little world of ideals it shouldn't be necessary, but here we are and here i need to adapt.

i also realized that the main reason my last two days have been unsuccessful is that toxic crusader screwed up months ago, removing a critical component of our project and replacing it with a hack, and now the original design no longer fits back in. it's satisfyingly disappointing :P

i came home, giving gd such a fright (she didn't hear me come in) that her response hurt her :(
my mom picked mr smear and me up and we went grocery shopping, came home for kiddush and dinner (delicious vegan dumplings bought from a coworker's wife's business), i read mr smear some alice in wonderland to sleep (it's really cool witnessing the exact moment he drops off), and i've been tooling around (playing exapunk, waiting for the new tool album to be released) since my mom left and gd went to bed.

thank f*** it's friday

thursday was long. i was somewhat successful with work that's been dragging on forever, but i left disappointed when the thing that was supposed to be the last thing didn't work. a meeting with my manager went south, i found myself feeling quite defensive because the way our code quality is evaluated by management sucks, but otherwise i guess everything's alright.

i've put in for some leave, which is cool

i was really tired when i got home, but at some point got back into working on my mom's project and aside from pausing to eat, put mr smear to bed (twice, first time failed) and do some of my exercises, i've been pushing through and have made some great progress.

now for bed. on the one hand, i have a busy friday coming up and i want it to be over. on the other, i'm excited to be continuing with my project to tattoo representations of sonnets 5 and 6 on saturday afternoon!

six hours of nothing

well. this morning went relatively smoothly, i got into work and after a short debate got stuck in to the seriously repetitive task of getting our infrastructure management software operating as expected. six... hours... with a break for lunch and a chat with my new mentor.

but at least i walked out happy with what i'd done, i walked home for a mostly pleasant evening (minus a couple of tantrums) and after putting mr smear to bed i did some important groundwork for my mom's service, smashed a level of exapunks, and finished watching dave chapelle's sticks and stones.

keep trying, you'll get better

jesus, my physio exercises took me two hours on sunday night. fortunately i could entertain myself with hyperdrive, which is fun.

yesterday was a day heavy with meetings and very bureaucratic work. it wasn't a nice day weather-wise, either. i did some grocery shopping on the way home, and then playground politics for a spell: it took a while to get mr smear to talk to me about it, and we had a Very Important Talk about bullying that i hope was productive.

the theme of the evening was reminding mr smear that you don't become good at things without trying and failing. it took him a while (and an episode or two of daniel tiger's neighborhood) to get the idea, but by bedtime he'd gotten the hang of basic driving with disney's cars and crash bandicoot 3's hog and jetski levels!

today was less tedious, i didn't get mr smear out of bed in reasonable time but i was quite proud of myself for getting him completely ready and us both out of the house by 8.15. i dropped him off at school, and was saying goodbye when he yelled to his friend across the courtyard "hey! yesterday [bully a] and [bully b] were really mean..." just as [bully a]'s mother was walking right past us! if it was *my* kid i would have been super-embarrassed and stopped to say something, but she just carried on and i think that's quite telling...

i walked to work, had a mostly productive day, had a surprisingly candid lunch with a couple of my teammates, took the stairs for the first time, walked home to work a little bit more while the rabbi visited, patiently suffered my dramatic teammate wasting my time and making an ass of herself on our team channel.

my mom picked us up and we all went grocery shopping, then came home and mr smear got stuck into crash bandicoot and black hole apocalypse before showering, dinner, and then more crash bandicoot before bed. on the one hand, i now agree with gd that we shouldn't let him play before bed. on the other, it was freaking AWESOME to see him getting so into it and having such a good time! and his hand-eye coordination is improving rapidly ^_^

three short books and some poetry to bed (i love that he enjoys my poems), and aside from this i've been doing housekeeping... i'm really pleased that after my complaints from saturday's crypto experience the exchange has investigated and discovered a bug and a bunch of issues that they weren't aware of, and the toy company that tried to con us has admitted to receiving the goods back in good condition and they claim to have refunded the money.

early up

i woke up with a coughing fit at 5.30am, i can't believe this shit is STILL going on. i occupied myself for an hour and half (mostly watching james acaster) until i was ready to try to rest again, at which point my son yelled "DADDY!", and when i went to his room i found him pointing at the window. "it's morning, right?"

shit.

so up we got, beginning the day with peter gabriel's sledgehammer video (how have i never seen that before?!), followed by transformers so that i could rest my eyes a bit. kind of. for the next couple of hours, not quality sleep.

i then coffee'd up to take mr smear outside, we walked through the company gardens and ran into our friends walking the other way, so they joined us on a mission for vegan belgian waffles which was really nice. we then went to my mom's coffee shop, and my mom dropped me and mr smear off at home after a quick stop at the jewish museum. i put on labyrinth and passed out for a bit while gd took over, woke up with coffee and an interesting chat with nystire about encryption, spent the evening keeping mr smear occupied before dinner, shower and bedtime, then decided to do my exercises and go to bed.

well, it's now two and a half hours later, i'm not quite finished my exercises yet and it's after midnight. i'm going to bed wishing myself luck for the morning, but i do feel really, really good about how my weekend went.

a holy sabbath

a relaxed start to the morning (minus an extremely frustrating experience transferring crypto), taking mr smear to the company gardens to tool around on his skateboard, visiting the national gallery which he really enjoyed until we got to the room with the uncannily realistic demon sculptures (he was understandably terrified), lunch and random games at the big box, picking up adventure time - guess who? on impulse, bringing it home and actually playing as a family (although it took a while for mr smear to understand that it's no fun if you don't keep your choice a secret...), kind-of napping while mr smear watched adventure time, my mom paying us a short visit, finishing my coffee before taking him downstairs to splash our feet in the pool and kick a ball around, showering, feeding him and watching hotel transylvania 3, putting him to bed and finally publishing a new version of my encryption tool which enables file encryption... a little more progress after a week of small victories feels pretty awesome! doing some server housekeeping and playing exapunks, which is brilliant, and now it's almost 1.30am and i'm going to bed on a fantastic note ^_^

finally friday

two work days ending on a great note, last night staying up late to figure out how to funnel emails into a website, a really tough physio session in the morning, mr smear bravely entering the freezing swimming pool by himself, generally feeling good about the state of the world

whoa, nelly

it's only wednesday. i feel wrecked.

sunday:

the playdate was great, but i wasn't feeling too well and mr smear and his friend were both being annoying / demanding. i'm glad we all got together but i was relieved when we finally got home.

monday:

dropping off mr smear with the nanny
the relief of being back in the office

tuesday:

a 7am page followed by a two-hour confidence-crushing nightmare that coloured my day
a therapy session to review my mixed feelings of inadequacy (in some respects i feel like an imposter, in others i feel totally validated)
getting my own pizza for the all-hands because they never think to cater for vegans
positive meetings
finding a pharmacy that delivers!
a last bit of work after getting home and discovering that my team dragging their feet to deploy my code had caused havoc
my brother rabbit, more pizza and spaghetti and vegballs

wednesday:

being frustrated by the difficulties in getting mr smear's lunch together, not helped by my mother being rude when i told her i was struggling
a truly exciting school q&a, but only relevant for 2021
another day of meetings at work, a vindicating deployment to my team's rescue
good news from my mom about a business we've been discussing
booked my next tattoo appointment!
emergency shopping and a fight

home healing

i'm exhausted and about to crash. also, very grateful. friday was a long day, our team finally established credibility but about halfway through a meeting my phone started ringing and everything went sideways as my wife informed me that she was leaving the hospital. a few days early. everything became a blur, i ended up taking an uber to the hospital in the middle of friday rush hour to deliver juice and a banana, then rushed home to relieve our nanny and take care of mr smear until my mother could bring gd home.

...

we played my brother rabbit until they arrived. my brother rabbit is GORGEOUS. but as a parent, it's a really tough game to play with my son, mostly because he keeps being distracted by clever little mechanics when I JUST WANT TO SOLVE THE DAMNED PUZZLE ALREADY!!!

thank jobs i have a phone to play with while he's doing his thing.

also, i'm a bit miffed because he managed to make some progress while i wasn't paying attention and now i've no idea what i missed... i guess we're going to have to play this again afterwards :P

...

friday night was pretty chilled, my mom helped out a lot and we all tried to go to bed early. unfortunately, between gd's back and my allergies we were both up half the night, but it was as good an excuse as any to get into exapunks, which is excellent.

mr smear and i began yesterday with more of my brother rabbit, we played for ages but eventually got stuck on a difficult puzzle after clearing a level and i needed a break. i did some of my physio exercises, then took him across the road to the gardens to kick a ball around and "practice his taekwondo" (he's basically doing lunges, but it's fun so whatever). we had a pretty good time milling around, but on our way home to get some food he was unpleasant to a toddler who wanted to play with him and dealing with that just sucked the joy out of the excursion.

and then we got home and he did *not* want to eat anything, anyway. i really tried to get into elevator saga, but it's more irritating than challenging and i think i'm over it.

around 4.30 my mom took me and mr smear to the mall, i was just in time to pick up emergency stuff for gd and managed to do the grocery run pretty quickly. our friends met us there - all sick - and came home with us, we all seemed to have had a miscommunication regarding how long they'd be staying and instead of visiting for an hour or so they stayed for dinner. hanging out with the adults is always pleasant, but running after our two kids who constantly switch between playing nicely and fighting and keeping tabs on their kid who's... not very unhygienic... was utterly draining.

the curry club dinner was amazing as always.

i seem to have sorted out the new web service's email blacklisting (one day, if i ever have the bandwidth, i'd love to get involved in the email server projects and try to get them to be less inaccessible to normal people).

getting mr smear to bed: after showering and brushing teeth we were both enjoying the songs off the usual playlist, i picked him up to dance and he almost fell asleep in my arms. he's a bit too big for that, but so much nostalgia and i put him to bed reading the magic pudding and feeling really grateful.

i played exapunks until late,  went to bed, and mostly slept well. i'm thoroughly exhausted this morning, i was a bit resentful when gd decided she needed us to join her outside in the wind before breakfast but then got over it, and now we're off for a playdate across the road.

im-patients

my mom was surprised this morning to find that i'd gotten mr smear and his lunchbox ready for school before she'd arrived. dropping him off was fun (his friend had dressed himself and his outfit choices were highly amusing), and the first hour at work felt productive. i was planning on calling the hospital to find out when visiting hours were, but before i did i received a call from a visiting rabbi who'd decided to make an early round... turns out gd had had an awful night, and one nurse in particular had been downright mean to her (with witnesses, fortunately a really kind male nurse stepped in).

my team quickly stepped up to take over from my on-call duties, and i stayed with gd until i had to return to the office for an interview debrief at which point the rabbi was kind enough to come back and stay with her.

of course, the mean nurse was put in charge of the move from the ICU to gd's ward, and took the opportunity to remove gd's self-administered pain-meds which she was supposed to have for at least the day, and once removed they can't be re-inserted.

i chatted briefly with my manager on my way out, he told me a horrorspital story about how he effectively saved his wife's from her surgeon and nursing staff's negligence

i picked up gd's pillow and returned to the hospital, helped her interface with the nursing staff for a couple of hours and then went back home to pick up mr and the nanny, drop her off at the bus station and bring mr smear to see his mother - for less than a minute, at our own risk because he's too young to be allowed in the ward...

my mom was a trooper, she came to pick up mr smear then turned around to bring cough syrup, agreeing to take mr smear to sleep at her place while i stayed to keep gd company, read to her from the ocean at the end of the lane, assist her, encourage her, chastise her, and spend the last couple of hours refusing to leave until she had some confidence that the night was going to be okay... which the staff did not make easy.

on the way home my uber driver, omar, told me about his daughter. born 810g in the wrong hospital, she needed to be transported to one with the right equipment and picked up a virus that prevented her from being able to use her hands. but she's clever, and she's a compensator, and by holding a pencil between her palm and her cheek she writes more neatly than any of the kids in her class. thank you, omar and mrs omar, for being phenomenal parents.

i'm exhausted, i'm wired, i'm still struggling with my sinuses and throat. oh! spring has arrived... it's quite possible my body's been telling me that for over a week already.

the key is in knowing when to stop

i can't believe i've only just finished my workday, it's past 11pm and i have things to do but i know i need to go to bed. so i will. but before that:

1. gd's big op seems to have been good, but i don't have real details and she was so drugged when i went to see her that i couldn't bear to ask her more than "are you okay?", which is such a pitifully meaningless question...

2. i'm still struggling with the sinuses and the post-nasal drip-induced coughing. i'm *so* over not being over it.

3. i've finally gotten a handle on receiving and forwarding emails using the server i spent the weekend upgrading... and the biggest lesson so far has been to leave smtp to the professionals and pay for someone else to experience the headache.

4. i'm still struggling to get the toy i didn't order back to the toy store that duped me. i'm praying they'll get it tomorrow so i can begin reporting them to whatever authorities will listen (including the authority of internet reviews)

right, it's now half an hour later and i keep being distracted by emails. i have *got* to go to bed.

the night is long and full of mucous

christ, *another* night being inexorably ground down by the snot monster. WHY?!

big

this past week has been intense. i worked from home on wednesday because i was sick, and while my cold seemed to get better by the afternoon it didn't really slow down until today, and i'm really hoping it's over because i've spent most of the past week struggling with my sinuses and throat, and feeling both exhausted and wired simultaneously because of the sudafed.

thursday afternoon i left work with a bee in my bonnet, and after mr smear fell asleep i continued working until 2am,then continued again in the morning. friday was a public holiday, i spent most of it helping my mom get ready for our big family dinner in honour of mr smear's birthday, which was a really nice evening.

i spent a large amount of the weekend putting together a website for my mom's new venture (which is unofficially mine), which forced me to finally - a year or two after i originally decided i needed to - replace apache with nginx on my server. it took a lot of work to get all my services up and running correctly, but i'm extremely satisfied with how everything worked out and it's given me a great sense of achievement.

i've been walking quite a lot with mr smear lately, and on friday i actually took him to the garden with a real soccer ball and the skills he demonstrated were a really great surprise!

a pity the waffle place was closing when we arrived yesterday.

oh! but i published the corrected page 3 on sonnetcomix.com! it feels good to be making some progress.

today was long, involved a lot of frustrating work, and i learned that the biggest issue i struggled with a couple of weeks ago was caused by me mistakenly following the damned instructions :/

another satisfying success this evening with my phone control service, a pleasant bedtime routine, pickle rick, and now an early bedtime again.

snivelling

i don't know what time i got to bed last night, but around 2.30 i was up and struggling to breathe and that's how i remained until our morning alarms went off and i could swallow a sudafed. that helped, certainly, but i still spent the rest of the day with a running nose and a mountain of tissues. it's just started calming down a short while ago, i'm praying that i'll be blessed with some rest tonight and can go in to work tomorrow. i probably shouldn't have gone in today, as it was i shadowed an interview and constantly wiping my nose did *not* feel very professional.

mr smear's birthday went well, the lack of a gift from us didn't seem to bother him, which is gratifying. i wrote a letter to the purveyors of the interim gift that we had planned, they responded saying that i had bought from an "assortment" without specifying. wtf is this "assortment" shit? i go to a website, i see a toy with a picture, i purchase the toy, and they get to decide what to put in the package? when did this become a common practice?!

tool news

i've been a gushing tool fan for about fifteen years now, i've bought all their albums - most of them twice because of all the moving around - and the fact that what is arguably the greatest band of our generation is finally, in mid-2019, available to stream legally makes me feel like a great wrong has been put right. add to that the idea that their new album is on its way, i'm little-kid excited to get my hands on it!

😊🤩🤪🥳🤸‍♂️🖖🏻🤘🏻🤙🏻✊🏻🙏🏻👏🏻👂🏻🧠💥🌋🔊🎼🎵🎶🎧🧫🧪⚗️🧬📡☢️☣️▶️

who's shakin'

me. jesus, these exercises are something else. for me, in my present condition. compounded by my difficulty breathing. but i've done a fair approximation of lunges, some serious stretches, the side planking was oddly easy and i'm now lying in bed waiting for my adrenaline to go down enough for me to sleep.

bum-mer

1. the new page (the redo of page 3) arrived today, with only one fix required: still too much bum showing...

2. it's my son's 4th birthday tomorrow, and we've been jumping through hoops to deliver the bumblebee transformer my wife so brilliantly promised him. on friday we were awash with relief when the miniature one arrived, but i just opened the package now and they sent us a goddamned optimus prime by mistake. f*** f*** f*** f*** f***.

otherwise, it was an interesting day, my nose and throat have been awful and it was strangely slow but for some reason i'm feeling like my credibility's growing with my teammates, especially the drama queen.

the highlight of the day was mr smear's eyes lighting up as we watched amazing taekwondo demonstrations on youtube. *this* i can work with ^_^

oh! and i've finally release an alpha version of my free anonymous q&a app.

itches and scratches

my throat's scratchy, mr smear's cough's a bit better but his lips are horribly cracked, and i've been meaning to go to bed for an hour or two now but i got caught up in finishing a release-worthy version of a piece of software i've been fiddling with for the last while. it needs lots of polish but it's functional and i'm satisfied with its progress!

this morning was great, mr smear and i got up early and we spent the first half of the day playing, listening to good music and building a really cool model-type toy he got, then gd got up and made slime with him. the big outing was going shopping with my mom, otherwise it was most definitely a pyjama day.

i just *know* i'm going to need to take sudafed in the morning :(

they call me drama

big: trying and failing to figure out how we're burning through so much money so quickly, and freaking out because it's money we don't have

small: office culture / management trouble, our team vs the world... also, moving desks to get away from my toxic coworker and missing my reminder for an interview i was supposed to be shadowing

other than that, mr smear's birthday party today went phenomenally well, the transformers cake was incredible and other parents loved my idea of putting puzzle pieces in the "pass the parcel" parcel. having said that, it cost us a lot, as much in stress as in money. it did spawn an important conversation with gd at 1am this morning that i hope was impactful.

i needed to rest when we got home - mr smear passed out on the way - and was woken up to unwrap presents. mr smear's haul was AMAZING, i don't think he has a real grasp of how grateful he should be.

humpday

good lord, three days down and my worldview is warped. backwards:

today:

good progress on a personal app.

dinner with our brazilian friends for the last time before they leave the country, carrying mr smear to bed after a late but enjoyable evening in the primi play area.

freaking out about taxes.

finally completing a project i've been juggling for three weeks! half a vegan cake slice to celebrate.

potential teammate's visit.

my drama teammate has made it abundantly clear that we are not going to be friends.

needing an hour to recalibrate after my physio hurt me.

yesterday:

finally getting my new visa card, lots of service updates.

new rule: never promise a kid something you can't deliver. my wife broke that promise and the struggle to acquire a bumblebee transformer for my son's birthday is real.

a weird day full of distractions.

a positive follow-up with my surgeon and finally taking off the brace.

another interesting therapy session.

monday:

money management, and discovering (one step too late) that we can finally use crypto currency for international transfers! which is a big deal because i've been forced to declare credit repayments as "foreign investments", and that's grossly unfair...

not a clue what happened, too far in the past.

the buzz

hah! sunday.

i woke up to two very strange dreams.

1. samuel l jackson is a megamind-like villain. i receive a clue but am too slow to figure it out and something bad happens. my team converges on his hideout and two of them who are particularly excited to discover that they have powers don't realize that they can't fly and launch themselves into a wall. i manage to sneak up on the villain, but suddenly, a few feet away from my target, i lose control of my bowels and i poop myself… thinking fast - i have to do something! - i reach down, grab a chunk of poop and rub it in that smug bastard's face, getting away just as he realizes what's happened.

2. i'm watching a youtube video of a teenager "recycling" AA batteries by swallowing them.

i woke up from the first worried that i'd actually pooped myself (i hadn't), and from the second feeling gagging from the mere *idea* of swallowing batteries.

...

gd took mr smear out early to a birthday party on a farm (what kind of a farm has lions?!?!), and i played hacknet for a bit before heading off to the "spiritual awakening" session gd signed me up for. my gods, i don't think there's any other game that gets my adrenaline so pumped up!

at first i was skeptical, but the dude pulled off quite a feat in a random room full of random people. about a third of the way through i realized two things, the first being that i was exactly where i needed to be, mentally and physically, for the third time this week. the second, that although i disagree with a fair amount of what he was saying, at the end of the day we're talking about the same thing but from different ideologies and with very different metaphors. i can deal with that. so i let myself go and did the exercise, which only took a split second because he used an expression that i understood immediately - the "life buzz" he was referring to is something i first became aware of on my very first lsd trip, while sitting in a tutorial about nuclear proliferation wearing an anti-asbestos suit and chewing on a fellow student's pen. it's a beautiful thing that once you tap into that sensation, you can easily share it with anyone around you who's paying attention - it's contagious and the room was full of that peaceful sensation that comes with being that present.

i returned home, got through half a cup of coffee when i realized i *really* didn't need another one, spent the next while doing meaningless things until my family returned home full of mud, emergency showered with mr smear, ate too much while he played on my computer and then watched two movies with him, rise of the guardians and the spiderwick chronicles, both of which made me a little emotional. on a related note, i'm amused to report that he's becoming a bit of a brony :D

i'm feeling a bit off, but happy with my weekend.

a good shabbos

we walked through the company gardens, we ran into someone who told us about a place nearby that makes vegan waffles, we returned home to pick up mr smear's epipen just in case, we had great waffles.

to be fair, though, he was considerably more interested in the sweet potato ice-cream.

he convinced me to go to the museum, but that turned out to be a ploy because he just wanted doritos from their cafeteria. he wasn't getting any, but we did end up having a fun tour in spite of his initial protests and he made a new friend,which was fun, funny and a touch embarrassing at times (he loudly insisted on the archaeopterix being "the king of the phoenix firebirds", for example)

i needed to lie down when we got home, and woke up later to make some good progress on a personal project before getting mr smear ready for bed. i was pleased when he insisted on picking a book and came back with a hebrew one ^_^

joining gd in watching a documentary about marilyn manson, then fiddling about with hackerrank. overall - a fantastic day!

serenity now!

the biggest lesson from this past week is "calm the f*** down". everything's super-stressful, we have tons of work and lots of time pressure and a million things interfering with me actually getting the job done. but i can only do so much, and sometimes - like yesterday - i need to find a quiet corner and stare out the window for a bit to gear up to do the thing.

also, my troublesome teammate finally informed us that she's pregnant, which validates my suspicions and explains why she's been so damned difficult over the last while.

wednesday and thursday were awful days at work. hours and hours of farting against the thunder, only to discover that every single issue i encountered had to do with broken dependencies - not with me doing things wrong. and then yesterday, i got some help with my dev environment that had been so thoroughly by monday's VPN outage, and the IT department resolved the issue that cost me two hours of my life being unable to connect to the network that i was already connected to.

it was that sort of a week. but it ended on a good note, with real progress along two vectors and a really interesting beer with a teammate.

mr smear was great at the temple service last night, although he made up for it with a quick pre-bedtime tantrum, and i went to bed early for an uncomfortable but long attempt to rest. today has begun as intended, installing gamemaker studio (of course, my free trial expired a month ago) and unity, with the intention of building simple games with mr smear and a less simple game that i woke up thinking about yesterday morning.

also, new ink on the horizon. also, it's looking like quite a nice day so maybe i'll take mr smear out for a walk now.

another week down

jeebus.

i'm sore and tired from doing my exercises at night. i did a crossword puzzle this evening after being inspired by joining teammates for a cryptic crossword last week.

i brought work home with me last night, ran into something that drove me nuts, still had to waste two hours of my life on it this morning and until i figured it out it made me really angry and frustrated. but then i sorted it out and everything was great and i spent the rest of the day just wanting to be anywhere else.

taking mr smear to the museum on saturday was really cool, right until gd arrived and my body went "you should have been back home an hour ago", sunday insanity trying my coworker's car and then hosting a super-intense playdate while gd taught my cousin how to make some great vegan dishes.

mr smear has an incredible book collection. and movies and tv series. i'd be jealous if i wasn't enjoying them so much with him.

going to sleep now with a dehumidifier.

sunday through wednesday

holy shit.

1. our neighbour. from scaring my wife to this morning's 4.15 hammering that woke us all up*, we're hating him so much right now. we bought into his bullshit (to a degree), sympathised with him, tried to be helpful and good neighbours, but at the end of the day he's a man-child with zero interest in anything that doesn't generate massive drama. **** that guy.

*it cost me an hour to get mr smear back to bed, he'd been having bad dreams and it took a while to convince him that it wasn't his bed's fault

2. bell mobile. i spoke to them for a bit, they're a bunch of assholes. the people themselves are just another part of the problem.

3. a long day monday demonstrating that my changes were safe, half a day defending them, giving up and restrategizing. then getting a surprise assignment that took a *long* time to get a handle on, but i think i'm good now.

4. physio's happy, pleasantly surprised by some things and disappointed by others. these exercises are HARD. my knees been hurting on/off the last couple of days, too.

5. money's tight. it'd be really, really nice to get out of debt, but every month just gets crazier than the last.

6. reinforcing my echo chamber by unfollowing, unfriending and blocking people who refuse to distinguish between capitalism and industrial consumerism. i can't understand how we allowed ourselves to be kept so dumb that marxism is on the rise again. also, antivaxxers and anti-5gers are really pushing my buttons. i need to live in a sane world. if i can't live in a sane world, i'm going to do what i can to believe i'm in one.

cueille ta vie.

low to high

i got through my rage relatively quickly on thursday night, and woke up on the right side of bed on friday morning. aside from having to slip a letter under our neighbour's door, although it looks like that's taken care of for now.

mr smear needed to stay home, i arrived at work with a bee in my bonnet about the fun stuff i'd started fiddling with the evening before, and i spent my day thoroughly engrossed and left the office on a fantastic, very satisfied note.

i've never heard of findbugs before. findbugs is awesome.

a pleasant friday night dinner with my mom, playing full throttle until late. generally awesome game!

we started the day lazily, i jumped into bootstrap for the very first time. it took a few minutes to get everything i needed together, and i've spent a few hours applying its capabilities and i'm extremely happy with how my little side project's turning out!

we all went to the temple to pick up something that wasn't there, then to my mom's to use her kitchen but her cupboards were bare, we returned home with mr smear loving the rasta uber driver's reggae, then walked to plant for lunch with our cousins which was really, really nice.

gd went to bed when we got home, i lay down on the couch next to mr smear and put on alice in wonderland (1951)... i dozed off on multiple occasions, and every time i opened my eyes i found his transfixed with him humming along to the music. so that was awesome ^_^

later on we watched most of a bug's life, mr smear's behaviour was erratic once we began the bedtime procedure, and other than those details i spent my evening fiddling with code. and now it's about 1.45am, i've done my exercises, i'm happy with my output, and i'm definitely, definitely ready for bed.

nuclear

on a day when our schizophrenic neighbour harasseses my wife while i'm at work, and right after my wife undermines me while i'm trying to deal with mr smear being really naughty, bell's collections department gets hold of me to tell me i owe them money. after i thought we'd cleared that noise up a year ago. jesus, i'm angry.

over humpday

two mornings of enjoyable wakeups (mr smear's difficult to get out of bed in the morning, but we're making a game of it)

yesterday:

a good therapy session, ending on a great note because my therapist was interested in my extrapolation from the idea of willpower being a finite resource

for the first time, i picked up horrible script work and got it done within a few hours. i came home for a pleasant evening, drinks with my tgtbt's boyfriend, and an interesting writing exercise with gd after putting mr smear to bed

today:

maybe a little too much coffee. i spent hours diving deep into documentation that all turned out to be outdated and irrelevant. brilliant. two conversations inspired me to want to write two children's books, so that's cool, and we listened to an interesting talk by a VP and i sent him an email afterwards in spite of feeling awkward about the now-ingrained "chain of command" reflex.

the evening was mostly fun, but i'm now pretty much done; it's 10pm and i need to shower and get into bed.

neck

oh, and my neck's been in trouble since the weekend. it's been a while and i don't know what i'm doing wrong.

******* hostile

holy shit. my teammate, ms drama llama? we had a meeting this morning and she was openly hostile, combative, condescending, and actually rolled her eyes at me. i was really upset, but took the high road, and when i reported to my manager was informed that she's having some "personal issues".

jesus.

a large part of my day was spent in a virtual back-and-forth, and her passive-aggressive attitude will be clear to anyone who sees our messages (the whole team gets ticket updates).

at least it was a somewhat productive day. kind of. and the anesthetist from my knee surgery finally sent me my bill, so i can finally claim from GAP insurance! only two months later! how the f is this normal in south africa?!

my mom picked me up, took me home to switch computers and then dropped me at the temple, where i discovered that the email from last week was about this evening's meeting being postponed. wonderful. so back home again, playtime, dinner, shower, some chores, and then an attempt to watch the second episode of stranger things season 3. i had to stop most of the way through because i was bored. so gd and i watched awful auditions instead, which was way more shocking, and then i had to palate cleanse with a random golden buzzer. on my way to bed gd confronted me with a bit of rage as our new mattress is terrible and the manufacturers still haven't gotten back to us...

so now it's time to play something quickly, then do my exercises and crash.

not quite as planned

i had every intention of finally making some progress with my podcast today. i was feeling pretty good, my head was quite clear and i was all-in-all rather motivated. it's been a while.

instead, my morning was burned by taking care of finances, i ate too much lunch (gd's not-eggs for the first time in ages), and then decided that what we all needed was a walk across the street to the company gardens. great idea, only about five minutes in my foot started hurting again, just like yesterday at the mall, and by the time we turned around the pain had spread to my hip flexor and knee, at which point it took everything i had to be able to get myself home and horizontal.

i was in so much pain it made me feel faint and sick, i've been in bed for a few hours now and i'm still feeling terrible.

this sucks.

a long week that flew by

it was a long week. highlights included

a) mistakenly seeing my physio a week early and now being off crutches, which is difficult but is slowly becoming more comfortable.

b) finally coding for the first time in ages and pushing out something that i'm happy with, and that my team is also happy with

i was wiped out after taking mr smear to the temple, even though it was a mostly enjoyable experience.

mr smear came to snuggle with *me* this morning, which was surprising but nice! gd slept in, we started our day with some of the dumbo reboot (which is really good, and mr smear *cried* when they took his mother away), then samurai jack (which the whole family loves, now), and finally bridge to terebithia. i don't know if i'd be this emotional if i didn't have a kid, but jesus, i was still having trouble speaking without sobbing after the credits...

otherwise, it was a day of cleaning my desk and installing updates on all my devices. it was all very "sabbath".

my mom took us to the waterfront and i finally bought gd a winter jacket for me (yes, you read that correctly, she doesn't like what i've been wearing for the past decade). after all the dinner / shower / bedtime stuff and a little bit of ffviii, gd and i returned to stranger things and i'm now struggling with acid reflux and trying to be somewhat productive before crashing. which will be soon enough, i can tell.

routine

another 2am wake-up when i need the rest. this one began with physical discomfort and has now morphed into anxiety over how my day is going to go... i suspect that my day would be improved considerably by me not starting it with a sleep deficit.

i was going to finish this post saying that at least it's still raining, but i think it's just stopped. i hope it starts again soon.

raining

today:

soft rain to put us to sleep, but this weekend had some great moments i really need to share first.

greatest moment? saying goodnight to mr smear, careful to only hug him now that he's made it clear he doesn't like kisses, and he grabbed my face and kissed me anyway.

dancing with him during shower time.

watching spider-man: into the spider-verse with him and all of us loving it

a long playdate with our friends and taking them to the buffet at plant, the food was delicious and mr smear makes us SO proud

yesterday:

fiddling with my new app until late after sailor made some suggestions 

going to see toy story 4 as a family, having a great time in spite of mr smear taking off the 3d glasses twenty minutes in.

unmeditation time

i wish i knew why my subconscious feels that 2am is the right time for wrestling with all the things that cause me anxiety. i've spent the past hour trying to get back to sleep - have i mentioned that i've been tired? - but instead i've been trapped in a dark and unconstructive loop dissecting the past week in context of the past four months, determining what went wrong, who's at fault, and where to go from here.

it's weird to be stressing so much after the week ended as well as it did. my workday yesterday was generally positive, taking mr smear to the temple for the first time in months was fun and highlighted just how much he's matured, dinner was nice, and playtime with his action figures was interesting because when megatron shot sideswipe we learned about the finality of death: mr smear was distressed, but has a new understanding of why the decepticons* are evil, and he recovered well once we established that our "game" had boundaries and that we could play again later.

* how is this not in my phone's default dictionary?

second night in a row reading alice in wonderland to him, and i was especially entertained when i realized that he'd fallen asleep with another book in his arms ^_^

the real llama

i posted before about the "drama llama" on our team, and here i am approaching 5am wrestling with how to deal with the fact that yesterday she literally couldn't hear what i was saying because she was so busy imagining me as an idiot, and when i finally got through to her she walked away with a condescending remark.

jesus.

but i also had a positive experience strategizing with a couple of people in our sister team which was cool.

this past week has been mostly good, but exhausting. doing my physio exercises is hard work and time-consuming, last night i couldn't bring myself to complete them. i'm supposed to be going to the gym today and i'm not sure how i feel about that.

a part of this week's exhaustion and stress is being back on coffee again and working long hours...

i've finally made some real progress this week on a personal project, so that's nice. i think it's in part due to our mornings being a little slower while my mom's away...

last night i went to say goodnight to mr smear while gd read to him, and he made it very clear that he didn't want kisses. then he clarifed: "mommy likes kisses. i like hugs." i can live with that.

supposed to be

wow, today was shocking. i learned just how wrong i've been doing my job, primarily because i've essentially been trained by engineers who aren't supposed to understand what my role is. i had my first encounter with my newly assigned mentor, and then shortly after with a co-worker who in no uncertain terms made it clear to me that my inability to answer his questions was disappointing.

so now it's time to back up, and switch modes. at least this has happened four months in and not way down the line...

better and worse

thursday was also tough, but i finally scored a win and was so excited i would have done a little dance if my knee was better.

friday was supposed to be a "hackday", but by the end of the morning i didn't feel i'd contributed much to the team and i really wasn't excited by what we were doing so i got back to work and handed over to my teammate, whose positive response indicated that the week's drama was over, even if only for now.

i enjoyed a great beer o'clock chat with my new teammate, friday night dinner was really nice, mr smear really enjoyed a new book with me.

the storm was incredible, but i couldn't sleep because of my knee.

yesterday was pleasant, my mom took gd and mr smear in the morning (after we rediscovered an old book) and i did my exercises and watched most of the big short which is literally amazing.

we had a big lunch at knead, dropped gd at home and hit the waterfront to find pants for me, mr smear passing out as we arrived.

i'm on crutches, they're visible, and on multiple occasions people walked right in front of me and stopped. wtf?!

i think i napped, coco, ffviii.

this morning started well, our friend came over with her son for pancakes, everyone left for the aquarium and i did my exercises watching captain marvel. i don't care what sparked controversy, the details bored me, but the movie was awesome!

a long nap, watching pinocchio until my mom arrived, a remarkably unpleasant evening but getting over it, getting back into one of my personal projects after two months, an episode of jessica jones and now i'm finally going to try to sleep.

oh. and my knee's been hurting unusually this evening, even though in general i've been adjusting quite well to a single crutch.

4.30am anxiety

yesterday was a LONG day. a lot of the tough stuff was due to following my teammate's instructions where she'd left out critical details that i couldn't have figured out for myself. hours and hours playing sisyphus trying to get something to build and run when she knew it was broken.

it's now clear to me that the drama we experienced before i left for my surgery wasn't all caused by the problem dude, there were two "drama llamas" tangoing.

well, so be it. i'm trying to calm down because i know, intellectually, that i don't need to play stupid games if i'm not interested in winning stupid prizes, but i'm going to have to be cool in the face of toxic behavior and that's never easy for me.

in other news, once i got the nameservers set correctly my services went up without a hitch, so i'm very happily off godaddy.

i finally got my new physio exercises (at 10pm last night i realized he'd sent me a new code in an email, so... whoops), some of them are tough to do and they take a LONG time.

a little ffviii, a little fighting ignorance online, getting to bed around 1am blissfully unaware it was only for three and a half hours... hopefully after dumping this here i'll be able to make the most of the next hour before my alarm goes off.

the dumbest shit

i wasn't going to post this evening, but it's half past midnight and i've been waiting for half an hour in the queue to chat with technical support for my new domain name registrar. and then, just as i hit first in line, my internet connection went down. which almost *never* happens.

everything about hover (please use this link for a discount) is better than godaddy, and i was all excited until the transfer went through this morning and my site went down. i've tried a whole bunch of different things, but i've finally learned - or at least i hope i have - what the problem has been: it doesn't update your nameservers, so none of my dns settings were in effect. phenomenal.

anyway, my tuesday was pretty cool: the surgeon's really happy with my knee, i'm now on a single crutch at home and the plan is to be on a single crutch outside pretty soon. i can carry shit! i actually got a bit emotional while practicing at the physio.

the evening was fun, after mr smear passed out i did my exercises, by the time i joined gd she was ready for bed and so i spent some more time playing ffviii. it is *incredible* how much i remember, how much i missed, and how well that story has aged. so far, of course, i never did get past the second disc...

right, bedtime.

wedding rings

literally and metaphorically.

a beautiful morning turned suddenly sour, a tense remainder of the day but with a few highlights, finally working on the article i'm being pushed for and coming up with a really feasible business proposal for my mom, a little bit more ffviii (totally back in the groove, those first few hundred hours of game time really made an impression), great bath and bedtime, finishing i am mother which is *excellent*

days going by

the week ended pretty well, although one of our team mates seems to be becoming progressively distant and i'm beginning to suspect that the problem engineer from before wasn't the only "drama llama" in that scenario.

amusingly, we both reported an incident to our manager and the outcome was very positive.

gd was well enough to go to the temple on thursday to help put talitot together, i had an easy time getting mr smear to bed and she enjoyed her evening which was gratifying.

mr smear's been learning hard lessons about politeness and listening, but overall his trajectory is very good. gd went to her course this morning for the first time since her surgery, leaving the two of us to an entertaining morning of psytrance, jungle oats, cool animations, playing outside for a bit and a little bit of final fantasy before she returned... i played again when it was her turn to read to him (after i spent 45 minutes reading him three books), and i'm really happy to be starting ffxiii again. i missed it.

oh. we finished the second season of happy tonight. i was attacked halfway through by a nightmarish episode of rls.

downs and ups

weekdays are easier than weekends for me, at present. this afternoon we received word of my teammate's promotion, which i'm especially glad about because in the evaluations i posted before my surgery i suggested that he's ready and that makes it pretty clear that we're all aligned. the past week or so of work has been a real struggle, today had some rough spots but a couple of productive conversations were had that (metaphorically speaking) made the sun come out. gd lost her temper with mr smear this morning, but the outcome of the unpleasant event seems to be relatively positive. i have a million things that need doing, but after a bit of mucking about i'm ready to do my physio exercises and go to bed early again. i'm not sleeping well, but i'm sleeping a bit and i'm grateful for it. gods, i really can't wait to be off crutches.

restless leg

i'm tired of being tired. my knee's generally doing alright but not when i'm supposed to be sleeping, and my hips and back are sore from the exercises and from compensating. i can't really get comfortable when i'm not in bed.

the last week was a bummer, i didn't get much in way of a sense of accomplishment and i fell off the caffeine wagon right back into heavy coffee drinking - which i suspect is partially responsible for my being on edge and restless. speaking of restless, i've been suffering from particularly bad rls the last couple of days.

the new bed was delivered yesterday, it's great but not enough to beat all these other contenders for my attention...

i'm actually finding weekends more difficult than workdays, to be honest. i've spent a lot of time alone with mr smear and it's frustrating not being able to play with him or take him out to do stuff. it's also hard dealing with a boundary-pusher who knows i can't chase him around.

having said that, i've found a few great games for the ps3 and he's been playing really well with me. at least that.

gd and i had a fight the other day that i found quite demoralizing, in that i've been re-evaluating since and i'm really not sure how to be effective in communicating the things that are important to me. i feel like nobody cares what i have to say, even when they know i'm right, and especially if they're close to me.

suboptimal

today was a long day. some of it was immensely gratifying - in particular gaming with mr smear* - and some of it was exhausting, in spite of me doing very little. i tried to be productive, i tried to make some progress with the next podcast episode, but when i wasn't trying to keep mr smear occupied or looking after my knee i found it very difficult to focus.

i did make a couple of health insurance claims, though, which was a big deal.

things that got me through the day: returning to braid, fiddling with a couple of levels of 7 billion humans, and a little bit more of a song of ice and fire. and the unframed ice-cream that my mom brought home. and a hot shower when i was freezing.

and now to do my exercises and go to bed. hopefully i'll sleep.

* i find it very sad that mixed-up mother goose no longer works on a mac. i really loved how mr smear responded to it and because we're forced to play the html5 port i was worried that we couldn't save our progress. while writing this i realized i hadn't actually tried, and lo! progress saved. i don't know how they made that work, but i'm very grateful!

back to the office

one week later. feeling better, we might possibly be returning to our home today. still barely sleeping, although last night was an improvement.

gd and i have had some frustrating fights over the past couple of days, but i think we're doing okay. she's been sick as well as recovering while i've just been recovering, which has introduced some unnecessary tensions...

... it looks like we'll be renewing our apartment lease, which is good. it was my mom's birthday this week, we took her to balducci's and had a really good evening. now praying that the spa i bought her a voucher for honours our agreement and lets her go whenever she actually wants to (if the voucher you're selling online expires, shouldn't you mention that before the purchase is complete?)

my physio seems to be going well, but some of the elements really hurt. and i've been promised that it's going to get a lot more painful before it gets better.

i've been back in the office since wednesday morning, and i'm SO much happier. not only does sharing the same physical space with my teammates make a big difference, but our temporary offices are beautiful and we have an excellent view of table mountain, in contrast to the view of my last three weeks (and right now) which is the buildings across the road. by tuesday evening i was starting to lose my mind and i actually had to hobble outside and spend five minutes staring at the sun. and being jealous of the beachfront joggers.

we got a message from mr smear's teacher on thursday morning that seriously upset me: not only did they have what was effectively an easter egg hunt for lag ba'omer - wtf?! - but "the dairy lady" is visiting the school on wednesday to indoctrinate the three and four year olds into believing that dairy is good for children, which it most certainly isn't. it's sheer insanity, it's 2019 and there's no need to push unhealthy, unethical and unsustainable habits on defenseless kids.

ah, mr smear and i have been playing old-school computer games together since yesterday and really enjoying ourselves! in particular, mixed-up mother goose, super solvers midnight rescue, pac-man and stunts.

most important takeaway for the week: i'm really, really happy with my new job. i've been doing it for three months already, i'm getting a bit more of a handle on things, and they seem to be happy with me too. i'm feeling particularly fortunate right now.

back to work

some of this past week went well! and some of it not so well. i've been generally exhausted but muddling through with work (with varying degrees of success), and been too utterly exhausted and uninspired to make any progress with my personal projects.

mr smear has been all over the place this week, we've had some successful moments and we've had some very unpleasant failures. gd's been getting progressively better, i've been feeling... i've started physio, so i guess that's something. i'm still struggling to sleep and this weekend i've almost exclusively spent sitting on the couch doing *nothing*.

and not for lack of trying.

the hatred i bear crutches

i've been recovering from my surgery for two weeks now, and for this past week i've been so uncomfortable and sore that i've barely been able to sleep at night. i've frequently been getting up wobbly, due primarily to exhaustion or being half-asleep, and about fifteen minutes ago i got up when i heard mr smear calling for me and lost my balance.

lost. my. fucking. balance.

i fell right onto my right foot and hit my knee with my full weight, suddenly and violently. the pain was extreme but pales in comparison to how devastatingly demoralizing it is that i might be set back, whether lightly by a couple of weeks or seriously by another surgery.

gd's never seen me ugly-cry before tonight. i'm currently sitting in shock, wondering how i'm going to be functional in the morning and praying with every fibre of my being that this doesn't mean more time off work and unable to be a functional parent.

weekend survival mode

friday 17th:

another sleepless night. getting it together to take the cleaning lady to the hospital to help get gd home, a long story with a very helpful uber driver and we were finally back at my mom's.

a delicious friday night dinner by gd's friend

saturday 18th:

gd and i both waking up around 4am with aches and pains and insomnias

starting the day with the lego movie - videogame, not sure whether mr smear was enjoying the experience as much as i did.

gd's friends taking mr smear to the park across the road and having a great time

a day of actual productivity (gd claiming it was hers for inducing me after her hypnotherapy class), working on my encryption solution and getting through a good chunk of research for the next podcast episode.

watching flushed away with mr smear - what a fantastic film!

sunday 19th:

finishing another episode of game of thrones before 1am, gd and i waking up around 4am again

a tougher day as neither gd nor i were ready to deal with mr smear's level of energy. starting the day with more research and experimenting with war thunder (amazing) and dota 2 (cool, not doing that to myself).

our cousin dropping off her son and picking up mr smear to take him to see his first movie at the cinema, and me giving her son some tips and tricks for examination-conditions programming and running him through a practice exam. my sister rocking up for a quick visit, and then my son being returned with a fantastic report about him being perfectly behaved and loving the movie - although, like everything i'm interested in hearing about - refusing to tell me anything about the experience. "no, only mommy and granny!".

an interesting rehash of a decade-old conversation with my mum, a fiery indian curry dinner (gd needed to have hers replaced, i just ate in tears), completing the podcast episode research and posting this and getting ready to get ready to return to work tomorrow.

busy

sleeping in a little, the joy of mr smear coming to play with me before going to school, gd's friend arriving to help out

taking an uber to the hospital, expecting to be there for a short time but ending up going to the pharmacy, waiting for a while with the rabbi, going on a mission to retrieve gd's belongings, eventually getting home pretty worn out

a giant delicious lunch while learning about the history leading up to the vietnam war on netflix, lying down for a bit while our cleaning lady picked up mr smear, her returning just as another friend came in to play with mr smear (with great success)

my mom coming in for dinner, then paying gd a visit (doing much better)

mr smear passing out on the way home, showering, messing about on social media for a while and then receiving a distressing call from gd (a sister had hurt her with an injection that she hadn't wanted)

now to try to sleep.

verge of tears

i have literally just spent the entire night trying and failing to sleep. different pillow configurations, even sleeping on my side, all abysmal failures. and now, just before 5am, i started settling and my leg started itching like crazy. i want to cry.

the past three days have been... rough. i tried to go back to work on monday, that turned out to be very ambitious and costly. the best part was trying to work from my late uncle's apartment upstairs and being locked out of my mom's apartment.

on tuesday i saw the surgeon, who assured me that he'd warned me that i'd need at least two weeks off. mr smear had been cagey and grumpy for a while, and tuesday afternoon he actually arrived at my bed and wanted to play with me which was wonderful.

yesterday gd went in to the hospital for her back surgery. i got some rest in the morning, and was feeling much better for the first time since my surgery, in the afternoon a whole bunch of things all happened at the same time (in particular an uber fail) which caused some stress, then gd's friend arrived to give us a hand just before mr smear woke up from his nap.

he wasn't just grumpy... he cried and tantrumed and behaved abominably for an hour and a half because he wanted his mommy, and it wasn't until my mother arrived that calmed down. i must have spent half an hour of that just consoling him, which was fine, but at one point he was behaving so badly that i literally had to chase him and put him in timeout - on one leg, which physically messed me up and set me back at least a few days.

we went to visit gd in high care at the hospital, apparently the surgery went well but she was very sore and uncomfortable. hopefully she had a better night.

happy mother's day

yesterday was long. the tough mission of the day was going to a family friend's kid's barmitzvah with my mom, i was really glad we went but about halfway through i felt like death, like the slow-release morphine has all released at the same time, and it wasn't until we eventually got back to my mom's that i started feeling less awful. and of course, we had to stop at home to see why people were complaining about us having clothing on our balcony - which we didn't.

it was a long, mindless day of watching videos and being uncomfortable. in the evening, mr smear hurt himself, and was afterwards lying next to me when he suddenly threw up all over the bed. this led to some real drama when gd gave me shit because i, heavily medicated and unable to put weight on my leg, wasn't jumping up to carry mr smear or clear the bedsheets. unfortunately, my angry response upset mr smear and for that i feel really bad.

my mom took gd and mr smear to the hospital to make sure there wasn't anything interesting going on, and the rest of my evening continued just like the day. at some point i realized that the quadriceps of my damaged leg are completely wrecked, i'm going to have to take that up with my surgeon and the physio this week.

most of last night was okay, i think? but there were still a few very difficult periods. i haven't been able to focus long enough to read, really, so for days now all i've been doing is haunting reddit and watching youtube videos.

...

last night's drama is still heavy, but i am (intellectually, at least) very grateful to my wife for everything she's been doing to take care of her boys these past few weeks. and i'm exceedingly grateful to my mother, it's been a long time since i was last completely useless and i don't know what we'd do without her.

where you gonna go?

omg, after an age of discomfort i literally got out of bed, hopped to the lounge on my crutches and then realized that there's no way i can physically escape these sensations.

whine

i hate morphine. and codeine. and imperfect beds (though this one *is* better than ours). i hate feeling like my hips are one complex interaction of a variety of cramps. i hate constipation (thanks, morphine), and that sense of uncertainty after five days that i even need to go to the toilet.

achievements for the day: paying some medical bills, completing and signing forms for gd's surgery, watching a large chunk of videos that were on my "watch later" playlist, getting more confident with my physio exercises, eating (gd's dinner was good, my appetite was not), and playing some mindless games with mr smear for a bit.

oh, and the itching. i HATE the itching.

better?

it's almost 6am, i think i've spent at least a few hours in agonizing discomfort trying desperately to rearrange myself, stretch, and not damage my new knee. not knowing what's actually going on under the brace and bandages doesn't help, every motion feels like i'm tearing something (even if i "know" it isn't), and these three pillows i'm raising my leg with feel insufficient to say the least.

i do feel better for having showered yesterday, although that was logistically a horrible experience and sparked some tension.

aside from gd's dedication and efforts, mr smear has been doing a bit of show-stealing of late. gd and i have been disagreeing about discipline over the past few years, and recently it appears that we've finally hit the same page just with different techniques, and it feels like we're onto a more optimal path.

one very long day

i started fasting on monday morning just before 7am, anticipating being wheeled into the theatre around 2pm. i hung around, uncomfortable, in my mother's office until 10.30am and then she drove me to the day hospital. checked in at 11.30am, learned that my 2-hour surgery was scheduled for 4pm. great start to the day.

at least i had a game of thrones to keep me company, i haven't made nearly as much headway as i should've but i'm enjoyed reading it at least as much as i enjoyed watching the first season.

the morning and afternoon dragged on, i chatted with the physio, with the doctors, with the anesthetist. that last one, it turned out, didn't give a damn what i had to say and ended up giving me a cocktail that thoroughly messed me up to the point where the other doctors were scratching their heads. instead of going home post-op, i scored a trip in the ambulance to the ER because i wasn't breathing properly. between a CT scan, interesting meds and clumsily trying to describe a doctor in a way that made the actual doctor feel like i was disrespecting her, i had a busy night - i was really grateful that my mom was there for everything.

and because drama, the ER team completely mischaracterized my entry in a way that if my mom hadn't caught it, would have cost us a fortune.

tuesday:

i was admitted for the night, hooked up to a monitor, and spent my hours painfully struggling to get some sleep. i didn't get much.

i was all excited by the hospital's vegan menu, right until they brought me butter with it which called everything else into question. ffs.

best part of the week: i was talking to gd on the phone and asked to speak to mr smear, and, for the first time ever, the two of us had an actually conversation over the phone. he even asked me how my knee was! it was amazing.

my mom's friend picked me up from the hospital, we had an adventure getting out of the parking lot, i got home and went straight to bed.

right now - on thursday afternoon - is the first time i've been home and in the living room since.

the meds have messed me up - i *really* don't like morphine or codeine - and i've spent most of the past two days either reading or on social media. it's been real. and gd's back's been hurting her a lot, and mr smear's been sick, so it's all been very interesting.

wednesday:

the big adventure yesterday was going to vote. i'm glad i was able to, and i hope this country starts moving in a positive direction.

gd's revelation that we actually have family, friend and community support was very gratifying. we're both extremely grateful.

today:

i've been less uncomfortable, though still uncomfortable, and i really hope i'm doing my physio exercises right. on tuesday morning the surgeon was happy with my progress but without knowing what's actually happening inside it's all very mysterious. i can't put weight on my leg for the next six weeks, my brain's going to be all fuzzy at least until the end of the weekend, and i kinda want to do productive things but i also know i need to relax and just focus on healing.

having said that, the reason i'm up is because gd's passed out and mr smear has been asleep since he got home from school, so if i don't wake him up soon tonight's going to be *very* interesting.

temporarily moving out

it was a stressful day. my morning was relatively easy because being on crutches makes me functionally useless for most tasks, but gd had a rough day of packing and moving and spent a fair amount of time being irritated with me and the unfairness of it all. meanwhile, i managed to edit and upload my latest podcast episode on a sunday morning, which felt great, until about ten minutes ago when i realized that because of all the interference from gd and mr smear (she wanted my input on packing, he wanted to play), i published it to my test website and forgot to push it to production.

amazing.

we arrived here at my mom's to find ours and mr smear's friends, the four of us went to the park across the road which turned out to be serious work for me on my crutches and my bruised palms were really, really sore by the time we got back. our friend / my teammate spent a good chunk of the afternoon discussing work (she was really glad to learn that someone had stood up for the women in the office, we've all been dealing with someone who's... difficult... and a big part of our thursday talks were clarifying where the problem lies.

her husband arrived around the same time gd and my mom did, the afternoon and evening were largely fun but with the kids presenting a fair amount of frustration as well. dinner from great indian curries was superb. bathing here is more difficult than at home, but eventually we got mr smear into bed and i got my phone ready for tomorrow (ie. loaded with books for me to read), i've spent far too long getting the television at my cousins' place upstairs working for my mom only to realize that it wasn't worth it, and now, just after midnight, it's definitely time to turn in. we've got to be up at 6.30am to be out of here by 7.30, and i have to start my pre-general-anesthetic fast before 7. so no pressure.

not a clue what the near future will bring, so not even sure if it's worth being nervous. i hope everything turns out alright.

sitting all day

between gd's back and my knee, we stayed indoors all day. i spent most of the day in front of my computer, putting together this week's podcast, starting to read a game of thrones, eventually sending in another GAP insurance claim and finally recording the latest episode. we also watched all dogs go to heaven.

oh! and i've chatted with the illustrator, i believe i've come up with a way to sanitize the nsfw pages of the graphic novel without compromising them.

sitting down for long stretches is uncomfortable. lying for long stretches is uncomfortable. standing on one leg is uncomfortable. rls combined with any of them is supremely frustrating. i'm going to bed.

pages and pages

wednesday 1st may:

woke up wednesday morning at 1.30am panicking and sat for an hour and a half putting together a document defending my teammates. continued to sleep badly until woken up early to go with my mom and mr smear to the waterfront to get the car cleaned and buy trousers that i could wear over my knee brace. i took forever to find pants that weren't awful.

returned home to meet the car purchasers (professional outfit), the drove around for ten minutes and then gave my mother an offer that she was happy with, then hung around while contract and payment were sorted out.

then we all went out to balducci to celebrate my mom's impressing her boss, their vegan menu is excellent and the red thai curry was honestly one of the best curries i've ever tasted. pricey, but i would rather go there once than to a lesser restaurant twice.

we were *exhausted* when we got home, the rest of the afternoon / evening was survival mode. reading rumpelstiltskin to mr smear was fun, though.

we crashed halfway through the battle of winterfell.

thursday 2nd:

slept badly, woke up to the new page of the graphic novel! unfortunately, i didn't anticipate how much the nudity would complicated things with patreon... and i also didn't consider that that would make it difficult to get the graphic novel into high schools. it looks like i'm going to have to produce a censored version or something.

a long day at work filled with meetings with my managers and coworkers, untangling the drama and eventually ending up quite emotional once it had been solidly established that i'm in a really good team with understanding and supportive managers.

hurting my knee badly twice in one evening, chased with utter disappointment in the terrible execution of the third episode of game of thrones. palette cleansing with the final episode of love, death + robots before bed.

friday 3rd:

a long, uncomfortable night with a sore knee, starting to actually get some rest about an hour or two before alarm, dreams of disappointment wanting to rollerblade for the second time.

a slow start to the day (surgery bureaucracy and meetings), a great team lunch at royale, a long afternoon struggling with tooling - not the most satisfying end to the week.

a surprising phone backup discovery

a nice friday night dinner, a couple of episodes of last week tonight / early bedtime.

today:

another tough night, sleeping a bit but with a lot of movements and positions hurting my knee. mr smear waking up angry with gd for being out of bed, starting the day watching sing (brilliant)

late to bed, early to rise

i finished recording and editing around 1.15am, went to bed satisfied, slept decently and dreamed crazy dreams.

we all woke up early, i posted the new episode, paid some bills and then scrambled to get to the doctor on time, slowed down by ten minutes of frustration because i couldn't get signal for uber unless i stood in the rain.

after days of successfully keeping weight off my knee, i slipped at the entrance to the doctor's office and jammed all my weight down on it. i then learned that if it wasn't so clear that i'm not a heart attack risk (i'm vegan), what i suffered on sunday night would've sent me to the ICU. it was an angiospasm, triggered by anti-inflammatories and my hiatus hernia.

a positive morning at work, an easy lunch, a tough all-hands because until i shocked myself by visibly nodding off i just couldn't keep my eyes open. afterwards they served "snacks", just large quantities of three types of meat, and it made me so uncomfortable i just had to get out of there... i enjoyed a simple but exciting success, and then caught my teammate for a quick chat because she'd said something worrying last week.

a half hour or hour later i returned to my desk with a much better sense of my responsibilities in the team and with a really uncomfortable duty of taking measures to protect myself and my team from a really problematic situation.

my mom picked me up, we stopped at the pharmacy, sat over tea, and then she stopped over at our place for a bit. mr smear's bedtime was sweet (i need to properly translate goldilocks, on-the-fly was far from smooth), and after a brief interlude watching videos about venezuela we watched most of the second new episode of game of thrones.

stay at home dad

... everyone else got to go outside today. i barely got any sleep and while i'm definitely doing better than i was at 2am, it's still a bit difficult to breath and the swelling by the base of my skull is present and tender.

i spent today either working or lying in bed, half the time feeling worse lying down than the awful feeling i had not lying down. it was horrible. i'm glad and grateful that my office is supportive.

i had a chat with our neighbour, who took my news that we might not be interested in purchasing pretty well (not a good idea if we leave the country, and the more we think about it the more it seems like the right thing to do), and the hido arrived for a quick visit which was cool. a little more proud gaming with mr smear, then dinner; it took a while for my system to settle down to eat it. bath-time was good, we seem to be figuring out how to manage things, and bedtime was great (mr smear was really excited by my ending to the goldilocks story, but then a bit disappointed when he asked to see and it turned out she survived after all).

more awesome love, death + robots, and i've just finished recording the latest podcast episode. i'm not sure whether i should try editing it now or wait until tomorrow, i have a 9am appointment with the doctor...

pain x 2

on march 17th i posted about a band of pain around my chest, and between half an hour and an hour ago it just struck again, so intense i wasn't sure i wasn't having a heart attack. it seems to be a muscle spasming and putting pressure on the top of my spine and my neck, shoulders and chest into an intensely painful spin.

monday morning 00.15am stress

it's been a good evening, bath-time was manageable and mr smear's bedtime was fun. gd and i watched more love, death + robots and i made some exciting progress on this week's podcast.

but it's now past midnight and the israeli holidaymakers downstairs are making an insane racket and i'm a ball of stress trying to decide whether to hobble downstairs on my crutches or just leave it alone and try to get some sleep.

either way, they've totally distracted me from the sonnet episode and i'm pretty damned resentful.

later that day

1. i'm exhausted. inexplicably exhausted, even if intellectually i know that dealing with my knee is costing my body everything.

2. our temporary airbnb israeli neighbours insist on smoking on their balcony in spite of the rules, and it's really hard to deal with. i'm considering buying a vaping starter pack for each new tenant as a welcome-and-stop-that-shit gift.

3. lunch with sailor: it was a great lunch, but an important one. after discussions of buying the apartment next door and the general lack of community assistance when it comes to raising kids here - by this i mean that lots of parents here are doing a poor job and the schools don't intervene where necessary - couple with a few other things like personal safety and security, our lunchtime conversation did a pretty good job of convincing me that we need to pay israel a visit and see if moving there is a viable option for gd.

4. gd taking some of her conversion class friends for a "boot camp" downstairs was cool.

5. the hebrew version of "super wings" being taken down from youtube is painful. i bought it on itunes but it's english only :(

6. mr smear's proficiency with the new games and the trackpad is wonderful to behold. even more awesome was him suddenly getting up, going off to the table and coming back with the mouse - he even intuited how and where to plug it in (although i did need to show him which side of the connector faces up). 3 years 9 months ^_^

7. the princess bride in french

8. gd and mr smear on the floor playing with the new duplo blocks my mom picked up this afternoon.

complex like sunday morning

okay, to be fair it's been a pretty good morning so far, i've slept and for the second day in a row mr smear is showing interest and competence in computer games that are intended for older kids. i may be exhausted, but there's nothing like cheering on my kid as he blasts through letters and numbers games, and a short while ago he was playing ink and he destroyed all the rectangles on a level entirely by himself! for a three-and-a-half year old, that's an achievement unlocked in my book ^_^

4am yesterday morning we awoke to mr smear experiencing another night terror, we're convinced that he's still not over the shigella infection and are praying that that's the reason for the terrors. night terrors are really rough :(

yesterday morning gd went to her hypnotherapy course and mr smear and i played hide-and-seek or computer games until my mother arrived, at which point she walked in on him sitting on the toilet making devil horns and rocking out to rob zombie. i then put my swollen foot up for a while, was amused when everyone came back home to hear that gd and my mom were both playing hide-and-seek with mr smear outside, enjoyed an episode of ultimate beastmaster in spite of mr smear's protests that it was scary.

i managed to bath with mr smear before leaving for a dinner at friends in honour of sailor's return, but i'd been cooking a headache and started feeling really woozy while getting dressed and sadly had to call it a night. we got mr smear to bed fairly smoothly, and then proceeded to watch the trainspotting sequel: i surprised by just how much i enjoyed it, and pleased by how it didn't feel contrived and tacky.

i woke up this morning from a dream in which i'd done something political and had to run to a dentist's appointment and dispose of the evidence, followed by my accepting a new job and feeling stressed about leaving my current one after only two months when i'm really happy where i am. at the moment, i honestly can't imagine any job in which i'd feel as much at home.

tired and sore

my leg swells up terribly at work because i'm wearing a brace and i can't put my foot up. now i'm at home putting my foot up and i'm super uncomfortable. i'm so over this, and it's just the beginning of this little adventure :(

i made some good progress with my chat server last night and this morning, had a very busy day, and am doing my darnedest to avoid doing anything that feels like work right now.

i have to share this, though: this morning i interviewed someone who not only wasn't prepared for the interview (as in, hadn't gone over the material the recruiter sent them), but was being interviewed via video chat and i could see that he was looking things up. he was cheating, visibly, in an interview.

WTF?!?!

even if you could pull it off, wouldn't it worry you that you're not qualified for the job? that you'll turn your life around for a new job and then lose it almost immediately? or that your first contact with your new co-worker is having lied to him? i can't wrap my head around this.

wrong day

jeebus, i spent the entire day thinking it was either wednesday or friday, and nobody corrected me whenever i said something day-inappropriate.

it was tough getting up, but it was good - mr smear's usually unkind / grumpy in the mornings, and this morning he was happy to see me and when i sat down next to him he hugged my arm and didn't let go, which totally made my morning.

i got into work in time for an intern presentation, got back to the office just in time for the daily standup, then proceeded to a train-wreck of an interview. i worked through some things and then went off to another interview, which compared the previous ones was a breath of fresh air, and then ended up working pretty late because my mom was picking me up and got stuck in bus-fire traffic. because setting fires to buses is a thing in cape town.

my leg brace felt loose for about half the day, and i got home to a really swollen leg and foot. this sucks.

the evening was going pretty well until mr smear, sitting on my lap, peed. it didn't appear to be an accident, and it was apparently the second time today, which was intensely upsetting and led to a fair amount of drama. it seems to be learned behaviour from our friends' kid and until they sort him out i don't want mr smear hanging around him any more. wtf, man, we're doing our best to raise a solid kid and this other child's really bringing him down :(

at least by bedtime we had him proudly stating the rules of (pee) engagement, so hopefully we're going to get through this shit quickly.

more work on one of my chat server, a little progress on the insurance claims. a bit more love, death and robots (DAMN it's awesome), and now back to the chat server before bed.

that tears it!

seriously, though, i've partially torn my MCL, torn my ACL completely, and i have tears in the miniscus. surgery's scheduled in a week and a half and i've got no clue how we're going to manage... mainly because gd's got *her* surgery 9 days later so we'll both be out of commission and in need of a lot of community help.

mr smear's going to have to step up, three's a good age to start cooking and cleaning, right?

...

amazingly, i actually slept last night! hopefully i'll sleep tonight too.

i spent half my day at the hospital, almost stuffing up the MRI because after 20 minutes of excruciating pain my body began involuntary twitching. then i had to get fitted with the serious brace, obviously the instructions i got from the well-meaning secretaries were to go through an area that was literally impossible to traverse on crutches...

... the workday was long and progress was slow, the highlight being discovering a bug in my first deployed code that forced a rollback! well, not so much a bug as an untested side-effect :P

i've made some progress with the insurance claims, which is a long, tedious process, i've optimized the level i was aiming for in 7 billion humans, found a bunch of cool images to use for stickers, watched some more love, death and robots (freakin' awesome), and it's now past 1am and i'm off to bed.

all the CLs

ha ha ha ha - i thought i was going to sleep last night, but BOY was i wrong! i spent most of the night writhing in agony, and only finally got to sleep a bit about an hour before alarm time. of course.

it was a blustery day, and work was slow and arduous. or was it? maybe it was just where my head was at. the day was split by a visit to the orthopedist, who informed me that my brutalized MCL looks like it's healing on its own, but it appears that i've torn my ACL. which is EXACTLY what i needed to hear :'(

so tomorrow morning i'm going in for an MRI, and then we'll see where that story goes. it's particularly bad timing as we're gearing up for gd to have back surgery... i don't know how we're going to manage all of this. and poor mr smear wanted to be carried this evening and that's just not happening.

my mom helped me home (with a big stack of books for mr smear), i spent the evening editing and posting the latest episode of the podcast, sorting out medical bills, and now... now i'm praying that i'll manage to sleep a bit tonight.