improved

i was still off on friday, it was difficult to focus but i did make some progress with work.

yesterday, for the first time since the monday night mistake, i woke up feeling tired but functional. after our temple service i spent some time fiddling with my arduino kit, took mr smear down to the pool for a most successful swim (he's now jumping into the pool and swimming off, or letting me launch him from my knees, and in addition to us having a great time i saved another kid from drowning).

we visited my aunt in memory of my late uncle's birthday, it was great seeing her, her boyfriend and tgtbt and we quite enjoyed the afternoon.

today started off with lego: marvel super heroes 2, which is amazing but some of the puzzles are quite frustrating. especially when playing with a five year old who occasionally bails on you in the middle of the action, or decides that attacking you is more interesting than defeating the bad guys...

mr smear is mostly pretty cool, but some things make me feel like i'm raising a villain...

the morning was great, but there was drama trying to get him to come out with us and when we eventually got home we had a "family discussion". it was an interesting experience, it seemed to have a positive effect but maybe that's just today ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i played some braid, we watched shrek, then wanted to watch the second movie and couldn't find it. except in a 17-movie collection (just over $1 per film) so we should be good for a while. we watched shrek 2, put mr smear to bed, i made my arduino board flash HELLO WORLD in morse code, and have just finished upgrading expo and cleaning up some of my project.

i'm tired, but feeling really grateful that i seem to be back to "normal".

two different nights later

 tuesday night: back to business with the hip flexors + whatever the opposing things are, so a couple of hours unable to sleep or stretch but otherwise getting some rest.

wednesday:

mr smear's first day with his new class! it's outdoors until the school's officially allowed to reopen, and our grade r year is off to a great start. after picking him up in the afternoon, we let in the exterminators, i dropped gd and mr smear off at the waterfront, picked up a falafel lunch, ate it at a small beach parking lot, then got an hour of work in at my mom's before they arrived and we rushed home to our physio appointment.

omg capetonian drivers are the worst.

our physio beat me up thoroughly and gave me a couple of exercises (and some advice to not sit so much), and mr smear made up a song about gd screaming in agony. it was pretty damned funny.

also, rehov sumsum is becoming a staple in our household.

still not quite functional, i went to bed early last night. the hip flexor thing? no issue! but my body couldn't let me get in a good night's rest, oh no, and i woke up halfway through the night with a post-nasal drip so bad i needed to throw up and i spent a couple of hours alternating between trying to sleep and reading random shit.

today:

second day of outdoors school, an easier start to the day even if i did have to drive there and back twice because gd forgot to pack a windbreaker.

omg capetonian drivers are the worst.

a long workday, somewhat successful, and i got in forty minutes on the exercise bike. the sun has just set, we're putting mr smear to bed, and while i'm not present enough yet to work on my own things i do feel up to pushing through on today's job and making up some hours before the weekend...

recovery

 today was long. today was hard. today was me tired and wired and dysfunctional and pretty damned convinced that i should never take any form of psychiatric meds at any dose ever again.

that shit done fucked me up.

i took mr smear with to meet my mom and deal with nedbank. the poor clerk had her work cut out for her, by the time we left she was becoming frustrated with their credit division but a few hours later she called to inform me that she'd finally gotten somewhere, it looks like it was a mistake rather than fraud and it seems to be resolved.

it would have been nice if the person who resolved it, in mid-december, had reached out to communicate all this before generating this drama.

we then went to mr smear's new school to pick up his uniform (which is two sizes too big, but we'll try to sort that out tomorrow).

by the early afternoon i could barely see straight, so i lay down for half an hour and began feeling a bit better. the afternoon was relatively functional, i'm still feeling slow now but i was able to make progress on a ticket and end the workday on a positive note.

i feel like i should get to bed now and try to sleep. i have a million things to do and i don't think anything's quite that urgent.

it made things worse

 my doctor convinced me to try a small dose (5mg) of amitriptyline to see if it would help me sleep. i meant to start it on the weekend, but finally remembered last night for the first time.

instead of helping me sleep, it made the hip flexor pain much worse for much longer than usual, my entire nervous system was jittering and i was restless the entire night. so i'm feeling horrible right now.

...

sunday was a pretty good day. we walked to and from my mom's coffee shop for a visit, we had a (much longer than i'd like) lunch at plant, and we played quite a bit of little big planet together (all three of us now that we have spare controls).

yesterday was a decent monday. i completed the task i've been working on for a couple of weeks, participated in my first sprint grooming / planning in over a year (we're introducing agile/scrum to our now expanding team), gd and i picked up our new bank cards, and watched kubo and the two strings (which is absolutely gorgeous). and mr smear and i played frisbee in the garden for a while, he was actually pretty good with the throwing but did catch the thing with his nose at one point...

two of his moments that had me in hysterics yesterday evening:

1. he sits down on the swing, and before i catch start pushing he says "dad - my back is itchy. i'm just saying."

...

"you can scratch it if you want"

2. in the evening, on my way past the bathroom i noticed him sitting in the bathtub examining himself.
"is everything okay?" i asked.
"i'm playing with my private parts," he responded, then raised his eyebrows, nodded meaningfully in the direction of the living room and suggested: "could you...?"

so i closed the door and left, grateful that he seems to have understood the "only when you're alone" instruction but amused that he didn't think to close the bathroom door first :P

hip flexor nightmares

this morning i woke up around 4am from a dream in which i was trying to solve an unsolvable problem, and although i recognized it as unsolvable upon (half) waking i simply couldn't get my brain to let it go. coupled with the fact that i was half-asleep and my hip flexors were in agony, and none of the usual routines made an iota of a difference, i was just miserable for however long it took to get back to bed (probably an hour).

i guess it didn't help that i had only gone to bed around 2am in the first place, having dragged my afternoon's "i'll just clean up some of my projects" into "let me just make a start on a python cdk guide" into "i realize my mobile app backend needs some refactoring if i want to be able to charge customers separately"...

wednesday:

i headed over to my mom's so that i could be focused for my company workshop ("hackathon"), and in retrospect i think that made it harder to concentrate as a) my phone didn't stop ringing and gd wasn't around to help me out and b) i was distracted by a letter from nedbank informing me of a new policy that i never authorized (i'm not a client) followed by an email from my new bank informing me that there's some sort of debit order registered for them as well. WTF.

the start of the workshop was kinda slow and boring, but its value became apparent later on. i was really pleased that my boss joined our team so that he could witness my performance (i feel like i've been a black box since we went 100% remote, we don't sync very often and it's almost never on details. i like that he trusts me, but i would like my wins to be more visible). by the end of the day i felt stretched thin, but i'd managed to condense the problems raised into a long-term solution as well as a strategy for the next day's prototype that everyone agreed on.

i had a (small) drink with my mom as we discussed our emigration strategy, and then came home for dinner, showertime and an early bedtime. i was exhausted.

thursday:

after wednesday's debacle i let gd talk me into working from home. the morning was high pressure as we worked towards the demo, and the great news was that we pulled off a functional tool that general management quite liked. the sad news was that i ate leftovers that didn't agree with me, and spent the afternoon purging my lunch and feeling awful. second time in two weeks.

i felt a bit better by dinner time. eating a few bites was a mistake, and the rest of the evening / most of the night was horrible.

friday: 

friday morning was a visit to the doctor and a full checkup, she's a bit pushy on the meds but i do understand where she's coming from so i'm willing to give it a go (she's more worried about my anxiety levels than anything else).

friday afternoon was a long, long series of repetitive test steps with slow but steady progress until it was suddenly 6.15 and way past time to walk away.

friday night was great until bedtime, massive drama over watching tv that left everyone unhappy.

...

aside from my cdk projects, i spent a good chunk of yesterday doing not much. i read the first volume of frank miller's sin city (which i'm almost certain i must have read before, but can't remember and it's so good i'm sure that i would have), got on the exercise bike, watched titan a.e. with the family and starship troopers after mr smear went to bed (sadly, gd's really not a fan).

this morning's been pretty good. a little productive, a little gaming, and we're getting ready to go out for a walk now.

won the battle, lost the war

i am a lot of steps closer to completion. i'm also two hours down on sleep and i have to be up and functional all damned day tomorrow for an company hackathon.

oops.

oh, and my shoulder's been hurting since my shower earlier. really hurting :(

chilling with the non-alcoholic beers

 and by that, i mean i haven't had one today :P

i got up early to ride the exercise bike, unfortunately mr smear got up around the same time and managed to interrupt quite frequently... but he was mostly alright. a little later he went with gd to our cousins for the day and got to spend it alternating between work and dealing with bank people.

i eventually made some progress with both.

my frequently interrupted workday ended with actual success, though, and i rewarded myself with a walk to the store to by tea and ice lollies.

in the evening mr smear and i played lego: batman together, which was actually quite fun until he started griefing me, at which point i griefed him back then shut off the machine. what followed was a loooooong story of bringing him back to reasonable behaviour, culminating in a fairly pleasant shower and bedtime.

i made some progress with the mobile app, watched the rest of bohemian rhapsody with gd (i understand why there were complaints about the film being "flat", but i do feel that it was reasonably entertaining and certainly more than just a romp through their songs).

now i'm fiddling with the mobile app again and will hopefully win the text entry war before going to bed.

maybe i should chill with the non-alcoholic beers

 i mean, i was kinda starting to make progress with the weight loss, and i'm pretty sure alcohol-free doesn't mean significantly less calories...

i got in a good day's work today, although it was full of stop-starts and context switches.

mr smear had a couple of moments this morning which ended with him repeating "i'm a fool of me!"; the first when he angrily shut the lid of the computer when he became frustrated (some of the lego: batman 3 puzzles are quite hard for a little person) and was unhappy that that meant game time was over, and then just as i was entering a meeting i caught sight of him too-casually standing by the balcony ledge with an arm over and heard something land three floors below...

good grief.

gd and i got to the bank this afternoon, it took an hour and a half but we left with what we wanted and i'm still waaay more excited about opening a bank account than i should be. possibly because for the... tenth or eleventh time?... i'm in the middle of a battle to get my salary released into my account because my current "prestigious" and "exclusive" bank's forex department is just completely and utterly incompetent.

the mosquitoes are eating me. it's midnight-ish. we've handled load-shedding being cut short by watching a third of bohemian rhapsody (it's mostly fun, but i don't want to ruin by witnessing the impending darkness so i think i should just get back to listening to their albums), and i've done nothing with my mobile app project.

breathing

 friday:

"getting the job done" but not well enough to be proud of it. a walk to my old bank to open a new account having forgotten that i needed FICA documentation. mr smear griefing his friend in little big planet, which was deeply upsetting, but seeming to sort himself out after a little break.

we headed off to our cousins for a lovely friday night dinner, although the return home was a bit intense and we managed to arrive two minutes before curfew.

fortunately after learning that the police have been convincing people to sign admissions of guilt over curfew infractions. that means that these people will have criminal records that could only be expunged after a decade. holy shit.

yesterday:

yesterday was game day (mainly braid and guitar hero). and i read quite a bit (still re-reading mort).  we walked to my mom's coffee shop to meet with her for a bit, and acquired a very fancy sushi knife which gd made a point of using (mr smear and i both appreciated that). and i ended the day with a great thunderstone session with vfmp's brother.

today:

an early start this morning and submitting the layout / script for page 11 to the illustrator. playing a bit of lego: batman with mr smear. feeling horrible and throwing up, feeling better a short while later.

feeling like i had made progress with my mobile app just before heading down to the pool for an hour, which was mostly great. we then rushed off to meet with a couple of gd's friends on the promenade, mr smear (with a little motivation) got back on his bike and enjoyed himself (he did pretty well, too, although he did get tired pretty fast). a little while outside newport deli, and i ended the afternoon by spilling orange juice on gd's new dress (made, not bought) so we rushed home to put stain remover on it.

aside from visits from sailor and my mom, and the shower/bedtime routine, i've spent the past few hours totally focused on refactoring the mobile app and i *think* i'm finally at the point that i *thought* i was at earlier. and it's late, and tomorrow's a busy day, so i'm going to bed.

glorious

 well, today was busy.

1. a big, painful life lesson on how i express my frustrations

2. replaying the first level of braid over lunch and clearing it completely first shot (having a decent gamepad makes a huge difference)

3. apparently making good progress at work in spite of the fact that i was kinda flying blind

4. four hours after receiving the updates, realizing that we've tested negative for covid (apparently there's some kind of bug floating around, and we must have gotten it from getting a meal delivered over the weekend)

5. taking off work to visit our cousins and their pool to celebrate

6. a call from montreal - gd's documents are finally on their way! and i was absolutely right to get them reproduced.

7. a lovely memorial for my late uncle

 8. how is it so late already? good night.

learning the hard way

 is there any other way? after a long workday yesterday, a nice dinner (albeit with irritating entertainment, my wife and son railroaded me into putting on hulk from 2003 and it a) kinda sucks and b) was hard for a five year old to follow and his constant confusion wasn't worth it), and a straightforward shower-and-bedtime, i settled down to make some progress on what i thought would be the easier part of working with react native: the display of data that i've already acquired.

boy, was i wrong.

i eventually went to bed around 1.30am, quite frustrated, only to be woken up by uncomfortable hip flexors and stretching out in a wide variety of poses kept me miserable (not awake, but not exactly asleep) for a good couple of hours.

and then i woke up and immediately jump back into the fray with useless theories that had floated by while i wasn't sleeping.

now that i think i've got a handle on how to proceed, it's time for work. and my hip flexors are still doing a thing. and it's really hot and another fan's motor died yesterday.

out for the count

 yesterday was awful. it began sometime around 3am with me almost passing out any time i tried to use the loo, kinda like my experience a couple of years ago but actually worse. then it became really hard to breathe, i don't know how many hours i'd been gasping before i finally realized that taking a puff of gd's asthma pump might help (it did) and eventually that calmed down a bit. but i still felt terrible and for most of the day couldn't get up without severe dizziness.

so i spent all of yesterday and last night in bed, mostly drifting in and out of consciousness or reading mort for the first time in... two decades? this morning we all got up around 7.30, at which point my stomache was still in full grief mode but my mind felt clear for the first time in over a week.

mr smear and i went to get tested for covid, which was a lot less unpleasant that i expected (they're swabbing the back of the throat rather than going through the nose), and the worst part of the ordeal was missing an opportunity to take a video of a karen in the wild, who'd arrived without an appointment or a doctor's reference (everywhere explicitly stated as mandatory) and then demanded to see a manager (because she'd driven so far and demanding those things is clearly unnecessary).

i've got some work done today, which i'm happy with, and then after getting our new gamepad set up i played some shiftlings over lunch, and it is brilliant.

i'm almost ready to get back to work, so just one little mind-dump before i do so:

the other night i had a strange dream in which i watched a doll being torturously filled with fire ants, eventually having its mouth sewn shut and turned into a weapon.

i also had a dream recently in which sailor was trying to tell me something, but i couldn't hear him because i was laughing helplessly at a newspaper headline which mentioned the "wing bash shin hospital".

tired and sad

 in the middle of saturday night my uncle passed away. he was a truly wonderful man, and it makes me particularly sad that covid made the last year of his life so much harder and eventually took him.

in other news, it has been heartbreaking witnessing the effects of our current quarantine on our son. also, since sunday he's been exhibiting symptoms (including sporting a fever), so after a very confusing conversation with our doctor today we've booked him for a coronavirus test on wednesday and we're praying that the symptoms (which appear to have subsided already) are unrelated. otherwise we'll be in for a much longer quarantine :/

otherwise, the rest of my weekend was mostly spent hacking away at the mobile app and making good headway, it's not quite finished (i haven't completed the display of the data that i've now managed to sync) but i'm so tired, and the workday kinda took it out of me too, so i think i'm going to crash (relatively) early and complete it tomorrow.

after much noise in the news, we've begun the slow migration to non-whatsapp alternatives. signal's UX kinda sucks, so it looks like it's viber for now.

oh, and the transfer of my contract to a new employer is calling for its first contractual changes... right after i asked a kit-bag question this morning and might now have to go through the formal annual review process. probably not a bad thing, to be honest, but... i kinda don't wanna.

joyful tedium

 yesterday was friday. i mean, we're most of the way through saturday and it's still hard to believe that a) the week flew by so fast and b) that it did so while i felt distinctly separated from everything i was doing.

aside from my awkwardly ending of a friendly chat with a coworker at the end of the work day yesterday, it was mostly a good day. we enjoyed some game time as a family, my mom brought us challah and cookies (both appreciated), and the evening was pretty good (albeit with some minor five year old drama, and a very slow and worrying moment during the ending of the fellowship of the ring, but after reading a few papers i don't *think* we've damaged mr smear too much. having said that, i think we should skip all of these movies until he's much older).

i don't usually engage in work on shabbat, over the course of the past few years i've made a point of avoiding it, but i will do work-ish things that bring me pleasure. and this mobile app i'm building? good heavens, every small victory has been gratifying and i'm learning a heck of a lot very fast!

so it's now 3.30pm on saturday afternoon, and my mobile app's authentication management is complete. i feel really, really good about that, even though the process has been a seemingly infinite loop of renders and debugging. i don't know what i'd do without expo.

the loadshedding hour

eskom threatened us with loadshedding right about now, then cancelled, and here i am wondering if the cancellation was for realsies.

i made the mistake of chiming in on what i thought was a conversation about cancel culture, but turned out to be a most unwelcoming echo chamber. delete - back away politely - worry about whether or not i'm next...

i've spent these past few hours getting sqlite integrated into my app, and i feel like i've learned rather a lot today. i don't know if my "by monday" estimate is realistic, but i'm still hopeful...

less fuzzy, but definitely slowed down

 i managed to complete the day's task, but i didn't feel particularly present while doing so. and mr smear was wheezing a bit while excelling at dance dance revolution, so not sure if that's just excess exertion, covid, or the fact that someone's cigarette smoke was blowing into our living room while we were exercising (i was on the bike at the time).

anyway, mr smear cleared a song on basic and i managed to clear one on difficult so i'm actually feeling immensely proud of us right now.

we've been watching the extended version of fellowship of the ring for the last couple of nights (not consecutively, but whatever), i'm trying to decide if stopping for bed right after the balrog takes gandalf was a good idea. come to think of it, i wonder if reading from the magician's nephew before bed is safe... although we did that yesterday and it seems alright...

it's very warm, this summer. yesterday's addition to the fan-ily was a jolly good idea.

a little bit fuzzy

 both gd and i have been really tired and occasionally dizzy, we're praying that this isn't us being nudged by covid. mr smear's friend's father has tested positive, so we're definitely right to be self-isolating, but godsdammit, we don't want it. on a related note, my uncle's over 90 and has been in the hospital for a couple of days with covid, and his idiot son hasn't sorted him out with a smart phone yet so he's been forced to go it completely alone :(

 two days back at work, the first being a struggle to get anything done and the second making some progress in spite of half a day's worth of code reviews...

our yard time yesterday was about half an hour in the pool (nobody else was there), but today the pool was packed (all day on a wednesday?!) so we resorted to a short walk through the company gardens. it's better than nothing. although, from an exercise point of view i was very proud of myself for starting my day with half an hour on the exercise bike.

after a chat with our doctor i think i've pulled a muscle or something in my abdomen. and i think i may have pulled it simply by being overweight.

oh! i had a long chat with the mongoose yesterday for the first time in forever.

right, i've made some progress with my app, and i've posted. to bed! (i finally bought the killing joke this morning on comixology, looking forward to reading it until i pass out)

so, how was the last day of YOUR vacation?

 well... today started off nicely enough, i dropped mr smear off at his friend and made some progress with my mobile app, got some exercise (on the bike while watching titus - 5th annual end of the world tour)... and then received a call from the other kid's parent to be informed that they'd just been informed that their kid had spent saturday with a kid who's just tested positive for covid. which means that if he got it - which he likely has - then he's already infectious and mr smear spent all morning with him in close quarters.

so. this is now our third $#!@ing ten-day isolation inside of two months. when the weather's finally nice enough to be outside and to swim, after he's barely been outdoors and has had so few social interactions since before the school year ended, and when he's *just* getting a handle on swimming.

and with another month of summer holidays to go.

here we go again.

...

i spent the afternoon either struggling to find a way to use an encrypted database with expo (eventually coming to the conclusion that it's unnecessary as long as my app's not being used on a jailbroken device) or working through the architecture for the first feature.

and now it's 11pm and i'm exhausted and off to bed. i'm not unhappy about going back to work... but i do feel like i kinda need a vacation...

deep sigh

 in only a couple of hours this morning, i managed to follow this tutorial series which a) makes sense and b) required only a minimum amount of hacking to bring me to a useful starting point for my app. over the course of the day i fiddled and tweaked and am now at a point where i have a healthy authentication flow and the user's credentials are stored securely. i'm still in a rush to get something usable into my client's hands, but as soon as i've delivered something i'm going to have to put some of my learnings out there...

otherwise, mr smear joined me and my mom on a hardware shopping trip, i took apart our exercise bike to oil it (which apparently didn't help much), we spent another lovely afternoon by the pool, enjoyed a lekker vegan dinner, and loved seeing the iron giant for the first time.

it's the littlest things

 i'm super stoked right now, it's 1.30am and i've just cracked the following optimization on a particularly nasty level (good neighbors year #58) in 7 billion humans:

(never you mind what made my previous solution was so awful, it's not the point! and i've just seen a faster optimization, but mine actually operated with a relatively simple algorithm)

i'm also very happy that i made it home in one piece this evening, as sailor and his friend railroaded me into going much further up the pipe track than was prudent and we had to hike back down in the dark after curfew. gd was as upset about that as i was. after wishing mr smear a good night, i put on titus' born with a defect which gave us a few cathartic laughs [good lord, i just located that link when not signed in and i was completely thrown by seeing my first youtube ad in many months].

new year's eve: wonder woman 1984 was spectacularly mediocre, but we did enjoy the evening.

i spent a chunk of my first day of 2021 completing the react / react native tutorials, and i am rather irritated that a) i didn't go with react before and b) that i'm going back to work in two more days and i've essentially achieved nothing on the mobile dev front.

today was great - it began with mr smear rushing to tell me about this crazy dream he'd had, and i managed to get him to repeat it while recording so that i could send it to his future self :D

gd and i both participated in the shabbat morning service, but for once she got a taste of her own medicine as she's been laughing at me for months about how nervous* i get and now it was her turn...

* there's an enormous difference between performing my own memorized poetry on a stage and reading from a parchment without vowels and cantillation

it was a beautiful day and we spent a good couple of hours by the pool. the hike up pipe track was pretty good, especially considering how self-conscious about my flab i've become. it's a thing, now. it's a really irritating thing. but i have learned that fat does float better than muscle, which is something i never realized before.

the end of the year that turned

 tuesday:

a long morning getting the car sound sorted out, but with no internet at the access park coffee shop  so i read a bit and didn't make any progress. also, i forgot we'd scheduled a meeting with mr q but fortunately we were able to get together (virtually) after i got back and he flooded us with inspiration while bringing us in to a project he's working on. timing, though! it's really hard to avoid distractions as it is...

a fun sushi evening with my cousin and his girlfriend followed by another early night

 wednesday:

gd left me alone with mr smear in the morning, so we finished watching babe (beautiful)  and watched a bit more of david attenborough: a life on our planet.

the physio beat us up for the first time in a while.

mr smear and i brought our neighbour's kid into the dance dance revolution fold.

starting lord of the rings.

today:

it was a big relief meeting our neighbour's cleaning lady, she worked well and with a good attitude. the tension diffusion was palpable. otherwise, it was yet another day of getting very little done, mainly because i've been thoroughly exhausted.

today we watched big hero 6 for the first time! it's glorious. it's glorious. it's right up there with into the spider-verse. sailor came over for a bit, we argued about what constitutes scientific evidence. it's tough discussing something like that with someone who's day-job is manipulation...

mr smear is in bed, gd is sore, i'm exhausted. but we're going to try to watch wonder woman 1984 now anyway. good or bad, i feel like we're bringing in 2021 the right way.

happy new year! i hope and pray that this will be a year that brings real change to how we prioritize and organize our lives on this tiny planet.

For auld lang syne, my jo,
for auld lang syne,
we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.

so over flutter

ye gods, the amount of stress and mindless debugging that's gone into getting something somewhat functional in flutter... only to have it failing intermittently with creatively unhelpful error messages.

i have now spent days of my vacation time struggling to get to grips with flutter. i'm now thoroughly unsatisfied with the available resources, and as certain as i am that flutter and dart are fantastic tools for mobile development i'm also convinced that it's simply not an appropriate choice for someone with no mobile / frontend experience.

so it looks like it's going to be react native for now, and in particular i'm quite liking my first contact with expo.

that was a pretty good summary of my past two days, though there has been some intermittent gaming and we have been dealing with some weird eye problem of mr smear's that saw us visiting the ER on saturday night and is keeping us out of the pool. and now that it looks like we're going back into lockdown...

we did just buy our neighbour's exercise bike, so that's good, and tomorrow morning early i'll be taking my car back to access park to see about getting a radio installed. otherwise, i've been exhausted for days so the fact that it's 11pm and i'm still awake is surprising. maybe i should hit the hay.

clear

 first off, two dreams from this morning: helping joe rogan to steal control devices for nuclear warheads, fending off a local kid reporter, hilarity ensued. afterwards, breaking in to a facility with a rapper and a drunk girl to disable something. i was super proud of my plan but we ended up failing abysmally as the other two just wouldn't stick to it.

in response to a comment about santa klaus: perhaps santa left, and for the longest time it's been krampus disguised as santa klaus, sullying kids' hearts with consumerism until they fall into his domain

big news from today: mr smear actually swimming from gd to me and back many times over! it's official, he can swim. i'm feeling immensely proud and greatly relieved.

thursday:

i holed up at my mom's place for a few hours and mostly completed phase 1 (simple login screen) of my first real app, as well as making good headway on the backend (every cloud app i've built has required a completely different approach to security, i had quite a bit to learn for this one and a lot of working around the fact that bcrypt must be compiled for the correct platform in order to work with lambda functions).

mr smear and i joined sailor for a walk along the pipe track, which ended up taking a good couple of hours and we were both exhausted when we got home.

friday:

christmas 2020 - grocery shopping, completing phase 1 (with its backend), watching part 1 of the hogfather, making page 10 public, visiting my mom and a pleasant friday evening.

today:

a great service this morning, spending some time answering questions about sonnet 104 and being inspired to resume the podcast episodes, part 2 of the hogfather (and being reminded why it's arguably the greatest christmas movie ever), a visit from my mom and an hour or so by the pool, followed by a chilled afternoon that included watching vegan 2020: i'm fascinated by this review of 2020 - i really wasn't expecting it to be this optimistic. i'm really sad that it's taken this much tragedy to jumpstart people questioning the impact of their dietary choices, but there's a glimmer of hope that humanity might be able to pull itself out of this mess and end up much stronger for it.

right, time to continue with the final installation of harry potter, and hopefully this evening will include some gaming.

doing stuff

 aside from fighting with my bank, we had a very productive day! it started off with spending some time with cousins visiting from london, it was wonderful seeing them. then i helped gd with our kitchen disaster, introduced mr smear to the chronicles of narnia: the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, delivered one of my books that's been bought as a christmas gift, hit the gym for an intense twenty minutes on the watt bike (that shit was *hard*), came home to shower, finished watching part 1 of the seventh harry potter movie, and now we're struggling to get mr smear into bed so that i can sink my teeth into flutter.

oh! and i made some significant progress with the sandman the other day, i'm halfway through the third volume now. it's magnificent.

back

 if nothing else, i made up a new terrible joke while on vacation:

q. what do you call a country that's ruled by a lion, a witch and a wardrobe?
a. a banarnia republic

anywho. we're back, it was an easier ride back to cape town (and the views are better when travelling south), mr smear was amazing but gd's injured. the rest of our stay was surprisingly great - on sunday evening we enjoyed a really nice game drive (and fortunately didn't flood the engine driving through floodwater), and yesterday the weather was miserable so we spent most of it playing board games while the kids improved their gameboy skills.

the only real bummer was this morning, as i woke up at 5.30am with a weird bug crawling between my shoulder blades and we discovered that the rains had awoke a small army of these wormy insects and sent them marauding over and around our bed. i was unimpressed, gd panicked, and we spent the next couple of hours inspecting each individual item we had before packing it into the car... which we had to do cautiously, as the rains also brought some lovely red wasps and gd's got a phobia about those...

it's late, and we're up early tomorrow to meet with cousins before i head to the gym and then dive into my holiday project.

weight lifting

there's an awkward moment that just happened, during which i realized and admitted to myself that i am, in fact, fat. and that this isn't a sudden or temporary state change. while it's not a shameful thing - i'm certainly not uncomfortable with other people seeing or knowing - i'm definitely not comfortable being this way.

the sun has just set over the augrabies national park, we arrived just in time for gate closing yesterday evening after a solid nine-hour race against waze (with a couple of hairy moments that i'm still bothered by because i was making every effort to arrive safely), and today has been a mixed bag of relaxing / hiking / feeling quite muddled as i try to process where i am and where i've been.

hearing mr smear and his friend giggling almost constantly is fantastic, witnessing his awe and wonder as we immerse ourselves in nature is a pure pleasure. 

my favourite quotes of his over the course of the past two days:

"that? not so much."

"that's sick, man, that's sick"

"i make no promises. no promises."

i read 300 today, and started on the second volume of the sandman. our rabbi friend and i played a great game of carcassonne. i chased off a baboon who, after finding my mom's car locked, defiantly began chewing on the beesting aerial while maintaining eye contact.

i'm exhausted, but my heart is light.

not without my coffee

 ow, my aching back. and neck. and my distinct lack of sleep, too.

we spent yesterday running around shopping for the trip, with one stop at nude foods for their delicious vegan wraps and roti, dropped all the things at home then went out again to pick up all the stuff that we couldn't find during the first part of the mission, then came home to organize things and eat eventually get mr smear into bed and pack and have a few minutes to ourselves.

i climbed into bed around midnight, was woken for an hour and a half by mr smear complaining of a sore tummy, was kept awake by my (can't figure out what parts of my anatomy, ligaments/muscles at the tops of my legs/front of my pelvis) which wasn't helped by any form of stretching until i passed out hours later at an awkward angle on the couch and eventually woke up at 6.15 with my neck at a bad angle and hurting.

7.5 hour drive to go: let's ride!

off.

 my last work day for 2020 was pretty intense, and not as satisfying as i would have hoped, but no matter - it's been a fantastic year work-wise. i was just mulling over how corrective an experience it's been, so much so that i've actually been enjoying putting in development hours outside of work.

yesterday was our last day of quarantine, so of course i felt sick and threw up last night. other than that and a little exhaustion / nausea this afternoon, i've been feeling pretty good so i'm pretty confident that it's just my body recognizing that i'm on vacation. it's tradition.

after dropping mr smear off at a friend's this morning, i drove through to my mom's and set up a wifi repeater - and now her home network's working really nicely! i spent an hour or so on my banking project and housekeeping, including sending my boss my last invoice for 2020 with a note to say that i've thoroughly enjoyed working with him and the team and i'm looking forward to january.

and it's true.

gd and i watched the first half of akira until mr smear came home, we had a chilled afternoon watching hotel transylvania, spent some time by the pool with our neighbour friends, spent some time with my mom, and then did the shower, dinner, harry potter thing. mr smear passed out on the couch shortly after dinner, so it's kinda an early night.

 akira and bed, seems like a good plan.

one day remains

 tomorrow's my last day before i go on vacation, and it's also our last day of self-isolation.

i still haven't figured out where the days have been going, but i've breezed past my "max" hours for this month which is a good feeling. primarily because i've mostly enjoyed my work while doing so.

mr smear's levelled up in dance dance revolution, and what was particularly cool was that that was the first thing he wanted to do after getting out of bed this morning :D

over the weekend i completely rewrote the frontend for our hackathon project (which is now just a side-project, i guess), my primary motivation being so that i could use it to figure out where our money's been disappearing to. i'm still adding features here and there, but by and large it's now pretty damned functional and i was able to get a good sense of our spending in record time! it's ugly as sin, though. i'll worry about that later.

we've played a lot of games, watched a lot of movies. of note, i bought the ultimate laika collection because mr smear was going on about paranorman (which nobody's seen or mentioned since last year), and it was great that he finally got into coraline! the other two movies are fantastic, too.

and when mr smear was in bed, i introduced gd to rare exports. i loved it then, i love it now.

my knee's been giving me grief, according to our physio it's because i'm not extending it sufficiently. so i'm going to stop typing now, stretch for a bit and then go to bed. hopefully i'll sleep more than last night, although my insomnia did give me an opportunity to watch some random cool stuff (like kurzgesagt's can you upload your mind & live forever) and tom segura's ball hog which was brilliant.

couldn't make this stuff up

it's 1am, i went to bed early and woke up a little while ago. as gd climbed into bed, i smelled perfume.

i really don't like the smell of perfume, it really bothers me. so i asked, "is that perfume?" 

and this is how i discovered that for a very long time gd has been putting on perfume after i've gone to bed, because i don't tend to complain when i'm fast asleep. we both got the giggles, especially when she made it clear that she's been doing it for so long that she's almost out of the bottle i last bought her and is going to need some more soon. 

we're used to it

 the past few days have been a bit mental, but very productive. and it's chanukkah now! and mr smear is old enough to be into it, and gd made latkes and sufganiyot and i'm going to gain more weight. we really do need to buy an exercise bike.

though mr smear and i are becoming pretty good at dance dance revolution.

today's news: it looks like our company's being integrated into its sister company, which means that as of january 1st i'll officially have a new employer. nothing else is supposed to change, though, and i'm praying that that's the reality.

i'm tired. i've had some success with the mobile app development this week (for the first time in months), and i managed to fix an irritating bug with our hackathon entry over breakfast. i have no idea how we got to friday so fast.

ventilation

 i'm trying to be rational about this, but honestly i'm just looking for someone to blame for my own screw up. it was irresponsible to go to the birthday party on saturday night, even if we had an amazing time and met quite a few wonderful people. we didn't wear masks and we didn't social distance properly (even if the event was entirely outdoors), and all it took was ONE person to put us all in self-isolation again.

did he not know that he'd been in contact with someone who was infected? or did he not care?

no matter, here we are now. with our poor kid forced to stay home from the holiday school, and we're praying that we didn't contract covid because we really, *really* want to go for our little game park vacation in twelve days' time.

this sucks.

the great outdoors

 after a very indoorsy day, and finally clearing a bunch of things that have needed clearing for a very long time, i took mr smear down to the pool for a very entertaining hour or so that included getting to know our new downstairs neighbours a bit better. we returned to get dressed, have some food and then walk to the ice cream parlour (noticing my extra padding in my reflection along the way) for the treat i promised mr smear yesterday, which he thoroughly enjoyed. we hung around a bit waiting for sailor, then went up to the pipe track. it was a beautiful evening and we walked a lot further than mr smear and i are used to, getting back to the parking lot just as it grew dark and returning home to jump directly into the shower and get mr smear into bed.

now i'm ready for bed myself. i hope i've generated enough sleep debt to sleep through...

speakeasy vibes

 it was a friend's 40th birthday celebration last night, my wife reinvented herself as a gorgeous flapper, i failed to fit into my nice trousers and we spent a jolly evening drinking and socializing quite irresponsibly (pandemicly speaking) for the first time. we met loads of interesting characters and had a great time, and today has been heavily invested in recovery.

mr smear, in the meanwhile, has finally inherited my old laptop which i managed to set up yesterday, so while i sit here drinking coffee and cleaning up my desktops (virtual and physical, if i get around to the latter) he's fully engaged in lego harry potter...

it's not awful weather, maybe we'll go out in an hour or so.

why, yes! this is priscilla speaking

for two years, home choice (or its debt collecting representatives) have been harassing gd as they chase the wrong number of someone named "priscilla". this hasn't been a big deal until a few weeks ago, when the frequency of their calls increased to a ridiculous number per day, but this week i taught gd to handle it differently... if they can't be reasonable, then we shouldn't be reasonable either. so we've been messing with them for days, now, and deriving a good amount more entertainment from their calls than they have.

...

 the long tail of the hackathon - we finally were ready to submit on tuesday morning, but it seems like every day there was more to do as the operators get their bearings. i'm very glad the other dude in our team has been managing most of it.

dance dance revolution: it's difficult. i'm perpetually on the balls of my feet. i kind feel like it's the best exercise i've had in ages.

of course, there're side effects: the bad knee has been acting up as i get used to stressing it properly.  combined with gd's tendency to mishear things, phrase of the week is "i need to make a conscious effort to extend my meat" ("meat" = "knee")

my mom's good news for the week - her contract's been extended again.

i took a long walk with an old friend on... thursday, i think? we walked the length of the promenade and back, which was great, but i did come home with a nasty sunburned patch on the back of my neck :(

otherwise, it was a short but productive work week.

gd's sushi-making skills are improving and last night's dinner was glorious! not only did we all enjoy the meal, but mr smear was reminded of the second phase of the hunter exam so we watched the gourmet hunters episodes of hunter x hunter while we ate.

gd and i got a bit of a shock this morning, our cleaning lady / nanny has asked us for paid leave (in spite of the fact that we paid her in full all through lockdown) and has decided she wants to take december AND january off. i understand "no try, no get" but the sheer audacity has me totally stunned. *i* don't even get more than three weeks off as a senior engineer...

i spent thursday morning dealing with a complete internet failure, and in the process learned that the fibre guys installed our box upside down so the button's as inaccessible as it could possibly be. eventually it came right, but then this morning our connection failed again just as i was getting ready for my part of the torah reading...

oh! and a man called ove. i've been reading it on and off since my "vacation" a few weeks ago, and i finally completed it last night. i wouldn't recommend it in the glowing terms of the internet strangers who convinced me to try it, but i guess it was a nice read and my eyes did get a bit watery once or twice.

the dumbness

it's funny, the mistakes one can make when one's in a hurry. not only did i accidentally leave my personal transactions publicly available for a couple of hours, but a short while ago i realized that i'd accidentally checked in my mailgun api key to one of my repositories and the past while has been a mad scramble to rotate my keys and make it difficult for the casual cloner to dig in to my code history.

*sigh*

otherwise it was a really nice birthday. it started with me figuring out how to mount the new network device cleanly, and while i only worked two hours today they were at least somewhat productive. i finally finished up my hackathon rescue effort, and in the morning (jesus, another short night for me :( ) i'll record a demo and submit it and then... move on to the next urgent (personal) tasks.

pre-birthday birthday

 as my birthday falls on a monday this year, we celebrated it today. it wasn't a *perfect* day, but i honestly couldn't have asked for a better one! after completing my work for the hackathon, we headed down to the pool where mr smear demonstrated his newfound ability to actually keep himself afloat. we stayed just long enough for me to get a *little* sunburned, then went to the waterfront to pick up an ethernet cable (to save myself the trip tomorrow), purchase the illustrated edition of the second harry potter book, take a spin on the ferris wheel (mr smear loved it), have lunch and ice cream, do a little bit of shopping (glad we got it done, but at some point i just needed to get the hell out of the mall), and finally return home for another - even better - round of gd's vegan sushi and the incredibles 2.

all in all, it was an excellent way to celebrate my 40th time around the sun. i'm feeling extremely blessed.

unfortunately, it looks like i was right about being ghosted, so i'm trying to rush a couple of scripts before i crash so that we have something to show tomorrow. it's kinda fun and it needs to be done, so definitely not a day-ruiner :)

outside

the past two days have been much saner. or wait... have they?

yesterday was a whirlwind, i dropped off mr smear at school, then drove through to the waterfront to pick up an ethernet cable. i managed to beat the black friday rush - i'd forgotten it was black friday until i walked in the doors - but forgot to pick up a universal remote control while i was there.

setting up the new network cost me a confused hour and a half, and as excited as i was when everything seemed to be working much better than before, i was even more deeply disappointed when i needed to help a coworker from my "corner office" (the farthest little corner of the apartment from my wife and the cleaning lady) and the line kept dropping.

so i rushed off to my mom's, getting stuck in black friday traffic along the way. it's 2020. not only is black friday not really a south african thing, but most of our population has been unemployed for a good chunk of this year. where are all these people coming from? don't they have jobs? and if not, where are they getting the cash??!

anyway, i arrived at my mom's and immediately went to pick up lunch. the nori rolls were delicious, but i totally overate and spent the rest of the afternoon regretting it. in total i got about two hours of work done, which might have been two and a half if i hadn't taken a walk to pick up a drill bit so i can install the network device properly.

which i need another cable for, anyway...

aside from gd feeling horrible yesterday, it was really nice evening.

i've spent a good chunk of today finishing up my part of the hackathon project which is due on monday. unfortunately, i don't think my teammates are doing very well on their and the thing needs to be presented on monday :(

we all went to the police station around noon to file a complaint against a company that's been harassing gd for a couple of years, and which has begun to call her multiple times a day over the course of the past two weeks. mr smear was quite unhappy there and after giving them all the details we were finally informed that they couldn't help us, only the cyber crime department can and that's only open during the week.

huh.

after dropping gd and mr smear at home, i went on a mission that took me to gardens centre, sea point, and then the wellness centre. i'd shared an exciting video with gd about making plant-based sushi in the morning, and my reward was gd's first sushi making experience - the results were absolutely brilliant!

after my mom left, we watched the incredibles, put mr smear to bed and then i dived back in to the hackathon stuff. i completely sidetracked myself (not that i didn't have fun doing so), and i'm just finishing up a small piece and hoping to be able to complete my part first thing tomorrow so that i can jump in to the rescue on the other aspects.

i have a feeling that one of the guys has ghosted us already.

oh, and we've had a couple of issues with the new neighbour downstairs smoking on his balcony. i went down to have a chat, and the dude actually came up afterwards to give me his number so i can let him know if it happens again (not sure if it's his friends, tenants or flatmates, but whatever). hopefully we'll be cool.

normalizing

firstly: i hope i'm not being too eager, but i'm thrilled to report that the agency that arranged gd's police clearance IS able to request a new document without us having to do anything, and for a much lower fee than before will get it authorized and forward it to the israeli consulate. with the holidays approaching, i expect we'll get everything beginning 2021 and hopefully things will be much smoother going forward.

secondly: today involved a lot more sitting at my desk than is healthy, but it was ultimately very productive. like, excitingly so. and i feel like it went a long way towards improving my coworker's disposition.

thirdly: i successfully resolved the dynamodb issues a little earlier and can finally move forward with the hackathon project. i feel good about this.

our new, very expensive wifi device arrived so early this morning i had to get out of bed to take it from the courier. it requires two ethernet cables to operate. it comes with exactly zero. fortunately, it looks like we're back to "normal" as of tomorrow morning so after dropping mr smear at school i'll be heading out to find a couple.

i hope this thing works as advertised.

dance dance revolution is amazing. i'm as happy with what it's getting me to do as i am amazed at what a powerful (and engaging) tool it is for mr smear. the only thing it lacks is a larger library of music, but there's enough good stuff that we'll be just fine.

dammit

i've just spent hours struggling with something really simple, after a long and somewhat frustrating day at work, and it was a combination of what appears to be some kind of regional aws service outage and me misunderstanding a fundamental limitation of dynamodb.

at least there's an easy solution to the limitation, but it's been a long night getting there that i really didn't need. 

interrupted by a phone call from montreal informing me that we do, in fact, need to start the whole police clearance thing again because the jewish agency wasn't clear (i double checked earlier in case it was me missing something) about their documentation requirements. i'm praying that there's some kind of shortened process for recent clients.

oh, yes. and one side of my jaw's suddenly swollen and sore. is that a covid symptom? 

late to bed again

 why the **** is it SO hard to do such basic things? aside from an unproductive couple of work days, and some behaviour issues with mr smear (but also some great times, at least there's a balance), i've spent an inordinate amount of hours (ie i haven't been recording my time as usual) getting to grips with CORS support in CDK, integrating it into our hackathon project, updating other projects along the way and eventually giving up on publicly available tools and writing my own API tester that does what someone who's testing an API would need.

one major hassle is that my bedroom corner network, which i rely on to be able to work during lockdown conditions, has been acting up and i've now had to sink another couple of thousand rand into a solution that i *hope* will work as advertised. i'm so over bullshit products... why are the standards so substandard?

gd and i have watched a bit of the queen's gambit, which has a couple of annoying aspects but is mostly brilliant, and i watched a few episodes of cobra kai with half an eye this evening and we're both thoroughly enjoying it.

dance dance revolution is excellent. if i ever become good enough to complete tracks on difficult level i will be insanely proud of myself, that shit is hard.

stuck and tired

 i don't know if me feeling so wiped out is a covid symptom, or just general exhaustion. but here we are, monday morning, after what i guess was a pretty good weekend - good hackathon progress, next steps taken on the graphic novel, and my dance dance revolution investment is paying off nicely. and we finished the first season of the utopia reboot, which was GORGEOUS.

i feel like i'm forgetting something, but whatever, i guess.

quarantined

 today started off pretty well, then came to a screeching halt as we learned that our therapist has tested positive for covid. we immediately went to pick up mr smear from school, alerted everyone we've since been in contact with, and spent the rest of the day figuring out what to do (or not to do) and preparing mentally* for the coming week... hopefully not more.

* cursing a lot

 what we've learned from our doctor today:

1. it takes about 48-72 hours to become infectious, so even if we did catch it it's unlikely we passed it on in less than 48 hours.

2. while it's recommended that we self-quarantine for 10 days, people we've been in contact with (contacts of contacts) shouldn't be concerned unless we begin to show symptoms or test positive
 

3. there's a lot of conflicting info floating around, but it seems like getting tested less than 7 days after exposure isn't meaningful.
 

4. it's not recommended to get tested unless we show symptoms. 

...

not that i needed much help with being distracted today.

i at least enjoyed some success with the hackathon project, and mr smear and i played some dance dance revolution before dinner.

my mom and i tried to use caribu again this evening - what an incredibly awful app! we eventually settled for a whatsapp video chat while she read, which worked out much better.

gd and i have been watching the utopia reboot, and it is *gorgeous*. about halfway through i remembered that our grocery store delivery today came with a free heineken 0.0. it's 0.03% alcohol, is called non-alcoholic, and... is not for sale to minors. gd's comment: this world is being overrun by stupid people. who are not, to paraphrase utopia, earning their place in this crowded world.

past my bedtime

 it's been a busy week, but relatively relaxed. gd's documents are on their way to canada, we had a really nice date night yesterday, work's been alright, i've just made some progress on the hackathon project, and i discovered today that i'm very lucky that i didn't brick this macbook i haven't finished paying off by updating to "Big Sur". it's an old macbook, but still very expensive.

the physio *hurt* me today, she focused on my legs and i ended up in shock and laughing hysterically. we suspect the reason my "rls" situation has regressed is because i haven't been standing and working as much, so i guess i need to start doing that again.

oh, and the new series of utopia is AMAZING. we're three episodes in and we actually prefer it to the original.

page 9!

 almost forgot! and we've finally produced page 9 of the graphic novel adaptation ^_^

the last of the staycation

 it's a lovely sunday afternoon, and i'm pleasantly drained after a really nice visit to kirstenbosch with my mom. i'm not not ready to get back to work tomorrow, but i must admit i've barely relaxed and i've barely gotten things done.

that aliyah application anxiety? we finally determined that we've been wasting months and money getting things authenticated locally when the only validation they'll accept is from within canada. so here we go again with expensive couriering.

last night i joined vfmp for my first among us experience - and it was fantastic! i now see what all the fuss has been about :)

the weird thing is that i was able to purchase it on steam and install it on windows, but the steam installer for mac is broken and the only way to play it is via bluestacks. at which point i - or my OCD, at least - decided to upgrade to macOS Big Sur, which apart from being slightly uglier has the simple but powerful feature of allowing me to prioritize wifi connections. FINALLY! this has been driving me crazy for months and i'm amazing at how much impact this little change has had.

indoorsy and outdoorsy

on sunday, i wrote down the following:

i mean, i *did* go outside yesterday to help my mom at her coffee shop, and i *did* go out for a short walk this afternoon which ended with me purchasing the gas station store's last marmite (there's a national shortage due to alcohol production being slowed down, and for vegans marmite has similar post-apocalyptic value to booze).

anyway, the weather's been miserable, and we've mostly been at home, i've read quite a bit (i was intrigued enough to buy "a man named ove" and i has to push through a few chapters before it became interesting), and i have no idea how many hours of ffix i played today.

i'd intended to complete that and post it, but i was distracted. this week has been a bit crazy, while i have had some respite it's mostly been filled with all manner of Things That Need Doing. we're having more trouble with gd's aliyah application, which is causing me a lot of anxiety, and i'd guess that i haven't done 90% of the things i had on my holiday to-do list... but i have resumed rewatching BSG, played some more ffix, read a fair amount, and generally had a good time. i've even napped at random times, and those naps have been good.

exhaling

 this past week was considerably more relaxed than the previous ones, but i still worked long hours with little to no exercise* or fresh air and was so focused on catching up on one system that i got practically nothing done on my main goal.

* although a few days this week the weather was nice enough to get in the pool for a bit.

and then yesterday morning, after consulting with my boss, i realized i need to publish the release we've been working on and the entire day was a mad rush to figure out how to do it and troubleshooting the process. with some much-needed assistance from a couple of coworkers and an encouraging amount of good fortune, it was finally published and tested by 6pm.

and now i'm on holiday for a week. i have a few things i'd like to do, but no pressure to do anything other than enjoy the now, read books and play video games. i'm kinda keen on getting back into ffix :)

gd's documents are finally on their way from pretoria, so one of the things to do this week is submit everything and try to get her aliya interview arranged. this has been one heck of a challenging process, i'm praying things go smoothly.

regarding the US elections: it's been hard not to follow the news on this, but i'm not exactly sure why as i don't know how significant it is which of these guys is elected. i have read a couple of fascinating articles, though, on why so many americans are voting for trump and these ring true: the americans have some underlying issues that they need to address sincerely, otherwise things are only going to get worse for them.

• why "trumpism" isn't going anywhere
• a culture of immediate gratification and cognitive dissonance
• tribalist tensions rising
• losing the technology war (which translates to a weakening economy, amongst other scary things)
  

celebratory chill

 friday was intense and full of surprises, but ultimately successful and we enjoyed a good few hours of real teamwork. i mean, what are the chances of our test server's certificate expiring halfway through our tests?

by the time we were ready to report on our findings, i was exhausted but satisfied. i'm excited for next week - we have uncovered a ton of friction points in our processes and this is the opportunity to reduce them - and i'll be handing back responsibility to the coworker who's returning from his month's leave and preparing to take a week off myself.

the weekend has mostly been good. yesterday morning i occupied myself with coding puzzles and guitar hero (i'm definitely getting better), an hour or so by the pool, then an afternoon relaxing and at some point picking up on ffix which i haven't touched in waaaay too long. mr smear was really getting into the battles, he loved the music :)

this morning was an early sunday, rushing to ready ourselves, pick up a gift and another kid and head out to a jumping castle birthday party. funny thing about buying books for birthday parties, is we find it impossible not to pick things up for ourselves. so today gd got ben brooks - the impossible boy and i grabbed a copy of the graphic novel adaptation of animal farm.

i've never read animal farm. i flew threw it in the afternoon and found it utterly brilliant.

the party was cool, much more relaxed than the previous year (bounce world was empty except for us), and the kids had a good time. we were taken by surprise when dropping off mr smear's friend and his mother offered to keep mr smear for a swim, we've never done something that spontaneous with him before and we enjoyed a plant lunch followed by a relaxing hour at home.

aside from an unpleasant meltdown in the late afternoon, the day has been great. we were able to watch my cousin's wedding on a live stream (much better than a hundred people in zoom), and we found the ceremony and their speeches really touching.

it made me realize that there're a number of us who've gotten married over the past few years without big family celebrations, and maybe we should all do something special together when the plague slows down sufficiently...

the fog of looming deadline

 this week has been mental. we came into it with a plan, and that plan fell apart yesterday evening after three days of grueling battles with bash and bamboo. i'm not sure if my head's feeling full of wool because of allergies, because i'm coming down with a cold, because i'm exhausted, because of my neck, or because of all the stress... or maybe it's a combination of a number of those. either way, my neck's been threatening to spasm and i really haven't been sleeping well.

but today, in spite of all this and losing two hours of my day to taking gd to the mall, we actually managed to complete a round of testing a day before deadline, giving us tomorrow to be more thoroughly certain that the release i'm responsible for is safe to go out.

and, along the way, we all learned a lot and have built some neat additions to our tooling. this is good.

aside from being relieved, i'm actually excited to complete this release cycle and write up all the lessons learned, and the big reward will be spending next week with the team making sure that the next release is a lot less stressful.

i think i'm just about ready to call it a night.

borat subsequent moviefilm

no way. but... i mean, of course. then again, no way.

sbc is not the hero anyone wants, but he's definitely the hero they need. and i'm just as impressed by maria bakalova who deserves at least as much credit!

remembering what nature smells like

i started my day writing up a couple of things i've been thinking about recently, then played some guitar hero before heading out. i took mr smear to kirstenbosch today for the first time in more than a year (according to my blog posts), it wasn't great weather but it was perfect for a light hike and we had a good time.

a migraine loomed on the way home, i'm pretty confident it's all in my shoulder / neck. i managed to keep it together, though, and it seems to have calmed down. the afternoon was mostly pleasant, i read some more of the swamp thing reboot (which is amazing) and lounged about. mr smear and i had a couple of turns at dance dance revolution - he's improving! - and everything was fine until dinner was over and it was time to shower.

i'm fast arriving at the conclusion that my son's pretty spoiled, and it looks like we're going to have to change tack quickly. it doesn't help that his behaviour upset both gd and myself, and then things escalated... now everyone's unhappy. a great way to spend a sunday evening after a generally good weekend.

mixed-bag saturday

 i slept alright last night, waking up at some point to write down the following: "why did the ambitious dancer join a studio for giants? because the bar was higher."

mr smear woke me up this morning and after teaching him to make a bowl of cereal for himself (he was so excited!) we played dance dance revolution and both had fun. afterwards, i tried to figure out how the DLC works, and while evaluating the options suddenly began a migraine. panado did nothing, but an hour of lying down and crying (just pain tears, so not crying per se) at various angles seems to have helped a bit.

i'm really feeling betrayed by my neck this past few weeks :(

stop.

 layer cake. a good, but deeply unsatisfying movie. i've just watched it as a fitting end to a weirdly unsatisfying week. my neck's still griefing me but i have this strange feeling like my mobility might be improving. i'm getting better at guitar hero.  i discovered yesterday that fifteen minutes of dance dance revolution on even the lowest settings is very real cardio.

for about a week now, mr smear has been singing the chorus (correctly) of of monsters and men's little talks. it's awesome to hear him, it's a little annoying to be perpetually stuck with the earworm ourselves, and the timing of its subject matter seems a bit creepy.

i finally completed a chunk of work today, but it wasn't as interesting as a brief moment at the end of it when i demonstrated to our older, old-school and very set-in-his-ways linux guru the value of writing detailed comments above every regex string. meaning i typed the whole thing out myself, and promptly found a bug.

the geese have been pooping in and around our pool. it's getting hot, and i wanted to go for a quick dip... but no.

anyway, i haven't been feeling too well this past week or two, some of it due to my neck, some of it due to sleeping badly (as usual), and a lot of it due to the emotional swings brought on by krybabie's passing. i'm hoping that maybe this weekend will be easier.

deep breaths

this past week has been a real rollercoaster. tonight was the last night of prayers for krybabie, it's been an emotional week and it's far from over.

our physio left me feeling beaten today, second time in a row. i really need to figure out how to hold my head correctly. i'm failing at something we evolved for at least two million years ago. i'm pretty confident nerve pressure is the reason i've been feeling tired, headachey and queasy since friday :(

fingers crossed, i'm hopeful that our canadian documents will finally get to the right people in the next few days... we're very lucky that one of gd's conversion group works for a courier company and has offered assistance!

my work week's been a bit weird, i had plans but for three days have been caught up investigating a bug and (as always) trying to make sure nobody gets stuck with the same nonsense twice. at least i've learned a lot of different things.

our dance dance revolution mat arrived yesterday! so we're set for the next lockdown, which sadly looks imminent...

our programmable banking beta program has a hackathon going on with some pretty amazing prizes, and i'm actually quite excited about what we came up with this afternoon! not that i've had headspace for much these days...

tears for krybabie

 he was diagnosed less than two months ago with an aggressive variety of cancers, and passed away on wednesday a handful of days after his fortieth birthday, leaving behind a devastated mother, sisters, wife and two small kids as well as a massive hole in his community.

although our mothers have been best friends for ever, the two of us haven't been close for two decades... but as teenagers we were inseparable and the past few days are proving tougher to process than i would have expected. it's absolutely heartbreaking to think of what his family is going through, it's honestly making my head spin.

and speaking of things this brings perspective to, my sister has finally remembered that life's too short to put up with her horrible third husband.

so it's been a dramatic week.

 ...

i've been becoming increasingly frustrated trying to plan our holiday trip in december, and my last two workdays were thoroughly unproductive due to all the crazy stuff going on, so i'm feeling VERY glad and grateful that i made sufficient hours before hump day (which also happened to be invoice day for me). and getting our documents back from the apostille feels like pulling teeth, and there's really nothing we can do about that...

...

on a positive note, swimming season's pretty much here (even if we're contending with egyptian geese for use of the pool), mr smear is obsessed with minecraft (and on an even more educational note, i managed to find rehov sesame videos teaching hebrew letters that he enjoys), and whenever i get a chance to play guitar hero live: omg, it's hardcore. for me. and i'm only trying to play on "regular"... it's great fun! even if i do feel terrible whenever the crowd boos or throws things at me.

weirdness

 the week's half over and it's been a weird one.

sunday: i actually (finally!) put a couple of hours into strategizing a legacy app i've been thinking about for a year and a half already (it's what i made the simple free encryption tool for). nystire - aka the destroyer of dreams - has validated it and provided some helpful feedback so i'm pretty confident this is a good idea.

we also spent a little time by the pool, which was really nice.

 this work week so far: i've been deploying, rolling back and fighting massive serverless/terraform/terragrunt headaches, and while today's deployment finally looks good i'm still not 100% confident and i'm monitoring nervously. the best part was discovering that one of our production services has been down for over a month and it doesn't deliver error notifications O_o

*sigh*

it's the little things.

guitar hero live is awesome, i've received my copy of dance dance revolution and tested it with a regular controller (weird), and all that we're waiting for now is the dance mat for my early birthday present to myself to be complete.

we watched a couple of very interesting documentaries on izzy the other night: blues by the beach (heartbreaking) and israel inside (making gd even more excited to move).

now to get back to monitoring and then hopefully find some time to make bookings for the december holidays...

motion sickness

 twice. once watching kids playing minecraft when picking up mr smear, and now after helping mr smear out for a bit. i'm now super queasy :(

on a different note*, guitar hero live is amazing! it took me more than just the tutorial to get a handle on what i was supposed to be doing, and i've got a loooong way to go before i'm... whatever the expression is for playing well. shredding like a rock star? whatever. it's a lot of fun.

* sorry.

mr smear and i joined gd and her friends for a promenade walk, which was mostly nice with only a few stressful moments (mr smear almost rode his bike into a toddler at one point). at least i don't feel sunburned.

i've now published page 8 publicly! 8 down, loads more to go. but probably a bit less than the initial estimate of 64.

 [gets distracted by more minecraft]

a welcome weekend

 i'm off to bed, just quick notes:

1. my work week was all over the place, but ended on such a great note i'm still excited by it.

2. i've been to the gym three times in the past week, and already gained a couple of kilos.

3. i drove out to a scrap metal place to sell our broken tap, i was pleasantly surprised to receive R120 for its 2kgs.

4. mr smear's dairy allergy appears to be lessening. he's still got to have an epipen, but it is slightly less stressful for us. gd, on the other hand, has turned out to be massively allergic to marijuana - so much so that someone smoking around her could put her in the hospital :(

5. i don't know if i resent the jewish agency or the canadian embassy more. the jewish agency for demanding an apostille / signature on every document, the canadians for making it so hard (and ridiculously expensive, $80 per document!)

so now i have to get a courier to pick it up documents from the apostille in johannesburg and deliver them to the canadian embassy, *if* i can convince the embassy to accept my payment form via email.

$#%!.

6. i really, really hope the weather improves over the weekend because gd and i are finally both able to get in the pool!

7. mr smear's been doing cool things in minecraft so we bought it. guitar hero live has just arrived today! it seems like my birthday celebrations are starting early this year >D

hitting hump day

 it's past midnight, but i've done what i needed to do. which was write a piece of software that a day full of meetings had decided was necessary, and upgrade my vmware workstation version to a) determine whether it's actually worth paying double for and b) to buy me another 30 days to decide.

mr smear stayed home again yesterday, but finally returned to school today. for the moment i'm stuck at home because not all of my hardware's actually portable... yesterday was spent isolating a bug that's only producing errors for me, and even then only under specific conditions. today was almost all meetings, although i did make a point of heading to the gym for an hour or so, and i do feel a bit better for it.

mr smear seems to be getting a feel for minecraft, which is cool.

i met with my therapist yesterday, and there was a realization that stood out - my entire life has been a long continuous stream of incoherence and contradictions: i've been extremely privileged and ridiculously fortunate, but at the same time i haven't been through a single phase of my life that couldn't be comfortably described as a psychotic mess of strangeness and contradictions.

and all i have to do now is learn to accept the lie that always raised my hackles: "it'll be okay". i think i'm slowly starting to get it. even if it won't be okay, it'll be okay.

i feel like i'm missing something important. oh, yes. apparently my bank is investigating the disappearance of my money and the woman overseeing the investigation was shocked by the breadcrumbs she's uncovered so far. that's inspiring. in other news, the apostille still hasn't communicated with me regarding our vital original documents, but mr smear's passport appears to finally be on its way which is a huge relief.

one day at a time.

end, weekend

today started off a bit sourly, as i realized that i'd missed an important notification from teams on friday (thanks, microsoft, for making it so you only get notifications when you've pinned a channel), and struggled to figure out how to respond to the alerts because they didn't actually provide useful information. 

note: if you're sending an error message to a user, include a hint as to what may be causing it or how to resolve it.

one of mr smear's friends celebrated his birthday at deerpark cafe this morning, and overall we actually had a good time. the weather was gorgeous and i actually got a little sunburned, but the kids had fun and we only had one freak-out when one of the parents assumed a candy bar was vegan and gave it to him (he didn't have a reaction so it might have been, but when i looked up the product there were no ingredients / allergens listed).

some of the afternoon was tense, most of it was pretty chilled. i finally downloaded the minecraft demo, but mr smear was too busy with little big planet to try, and inspired by a conversation we'd had with another friend's mother i attempted to get hold of dance dance revolution or a wii. wii's don't appear to be available in south africa, so we ended up splashing out on the former as well as picking up guitar hero live. which, considering the dates everything's due to arrive, is effectively my early birthday present to myself :P

a saturday night for old people

i'm in bed, i've done my rls stretching, now just reflecting before shutting down for the night.

it was yet another crazy week, even if my work-week was only three days. i'm really glad i took yesterday off, it gave me an opportunity to go to the gym, play videogames, that sort of thing. today was finish-another-page day for the comics, and after two days of intense winds (we sorted out my mum's apartment just in time!) we all walked out into a cheerfully sunny day for ice-cream and gift shopping.

the two issues i last posted about haven't been resolved yet but i'm feeling a bit less stressed about them. and my mum'vs on holiday for the first time in years so i'm pleased about that.

the hunters: good heavens, the first season finale was deeply disappointing. utterly shite.

the boys: still incredible.

utopia (the UK production): brilliant, beautiful, with only minor criticism for an overwhelmingly entertaining series. 

double jeopardy

oh, yes - and my fancy, exclusive bank managed to double charge me when transferring a large sum of money last week and they still haven't resolved it. i really don't know what to do at this point. 

breaking of the fast

i not only fasted this yom kippur, and not only did i fast about an hour longer than mandated, but it was a) an easy fast and b) a generally good day of services that ended on an inspirational note. in the rabbi's closing sermon yesterday he alluded to (or perhaps said so explicitly, i heard most but not all of it) the idea that yom kippur serves as a sort of annual near death experience, one wherein we're encouraged not only to be introspective about our behaviour but all to reevaluate who we are and what our priorities are.

as for the fasting being easy, gd and i have both picked up a little weight we're not proud of and i think my having a spare tire helped. (i think a lot of my spare tire blew up from around mr smear's birthday celebrations, we did eat a LOT of cake and donuts. also, living right near an amazing vegan donut shop is definitely a part of it.)

work-wise, thursday and friday were legitimately exciting and today was overall pretty great. the code changes i made amounted to a handful (okay, perhaps even a double-handful) of lines, but the amount of changes we've made peripherally to our testing and deployment process have put me in a much stronger position to take over from next week so we're both feeling pretty good about things.

i dragged mr smear out of bed and took him to school this morning, not realizing that the calendar changed due to the pandemic and he's still on school holiday until next week. if nothing else, we had a good time singing and dancing along to some good rock on the way :)

...

i've been wading through bureaucracy lately and seeming to claw my way up to breathe, which is a nice feeling. now that gd's eligible for permanent residence, we've looked into it and it turns out to be completely meaningless to apply - we'll be gone before the authorities grant it, and once we're outta here it's very unlikely that we'll be coming back any time soon even for a visit. my mother's admitted that she'll be following us to israel, and i'm really hoping that as many of our friends and family as can manage follow suit.

the only disturbing news of the day has come from gd's aliyah application, after a short back-and-forth via email i'm quite worried that the apostille has mislaid all our documents and those things are a) expensive and b) take forever to acquire and c) are preventing us from actually making real plans for our migration.

anyway, it's mr smear's bedtime and i'd like to finish the first season of the hunters AND get some sleep tonight.

middle of the road

wednesday night, in bed after a long but pretty successful day that included two meaningful achievements at work, a pleasant lunchtime walk in the sun and another excursions in the evening (the weather's improving).

there's pressure on, but it's okay.

hopefully i'll sleep well tonight. our physio finally worked on my legs a bit this afternoon and it was torture, she's got a theory that this whole rls thing i've been struggling with for the past decade might just be rooted in a lack of a good stretch or two. we'll see. 

a calm storm

 this week has been a whirlwind. it was a lot more relaxed than the previous one, but not necessarily good. i was mostly unfocused, and the one big job i had i never got around to because i was busying myself with everything else. uh, anything else, if i'm being totally honest...

mr smear finally went back to school, which was a bit of a relief. i've been doing what i can to circumvent resistance and at this point i've got no idea what's working and what's not.

i've had zero time and headspace to work on anything outside of my main gig, and have been making a point of catching up sleep. i'm not sure it's helping.

taking care of my tattoos has been annoying as always, but this time the aftercare has been a lot more time consuming and going over each individual line has become an interesting little ritual. i'm really stoked by how good my arm looks, now, and i'm really glad i got this done before breaking for swimming season.

it's the tail end of rosh hashana right now, i'm not sure this has been a great couple of days but i'm hoping that it's the start of a much better year than what we've all been going through. that would be nice.

"one moment"s

i began this post while sitting here listening to our friday night temple service after a painful and exhausting week, thinking about All The Things and being really grateful for the right now.

two new tattoos, and a beautiful sketch for the next page of the graphic novel in hand.

a beautiful family.

enough space to breathe, even if i'm desperate for a holiday.

a rough plan for the coming year, both in work and in where we'll be.

one small step at a time. details are just details.

one foot in front of the other

i cannot believe it's wednesday night, i'm completely buggered and i'm finding it very hard to be effective and productive.

the big changes this week are about mr smear and independence; setting things up so he can do as much as possible on his own seems to be making a bit of a (positive) difference in his behaviour. it's not all roses, but another side-effect is that we're somehow managing to bring his bedtimes under control and this is the third night in a row that we've gotten him in bed at a more reasonable hour.

other good news: gd's police clearance is ready! we're waiting for the courier to pick it up and then we're one step closer to getting all her documents apostilled...

i found this ted talk on posture and movement fascinating, and it seems to be helping a bit.

i'm a bit sad that the past couple of months have been devoid of new tattoos, but i'm excited to have completed another one yesterday and i'm looking forward to my friday and saturday sessions!

the end of a good weekend

 i'm tired, and i've been very tired for a long time. this weekend was relatively restful, though. yesterday afternoon i took mr smear to my mom's and helped her hang paintings and set up a micro-ups for her router, and last night gd and i started with season 2 of the boys - we've just finished the second episode now, and i'm not disappointed.

oh! and mr smear and i started playing the gardens between yesterday, it's beautiful but it goes from kid-friendly to wtf in only a couple of levels... beautiful game, though, and we can play it together.

this morning was a slow-starter, i did spend a fair amount of time learning flutter things before we headed out to bakoven to meet a cousin and hike a bike trail... it was a beautiful day, and we all really enjoyed the outing! we then headed to plant and sat down to enjoy the buffet, the food was great and i definitely had more desserts than i should have.

the afternoon involved a nap (for me) while gd and mr smear played video games, i joined for a bit before getting motion sickness (toy story 3's sunnyside daycare area and way too much with the driving / riding), then the neighbour kid came over for a couple of hours and i spent wasted most of that time trying to point a subdomain at my api gateway. yee gods, why is it so damned hard to find an explanation as to how to do it? (i think i've figured out everything from the aws side, but my domain host's dns settings are clearly doing something wrong)

tonight's struggle with mr smear was about getting him to practice eating with a knife and fork. ffs, it's the things we expect to be easy in this parenting shit that always seem to be the hardest.

i'm tired, i feel like i should just call it a night.

de/motivate and going up

thursday:

thursday was a bit mixed up. the good parts involved an exciting consultation with my tattoo artist and booking three sessions for next week, a little bit of success at work, a couple of pleasant short walks outside in our first spring weather and some great moments with my boy. the bad parts involved having difficulty focusing on work, realizing i've only done half my hours this week, and a moment over spilled coconut water that triggered a painful talking-to about my anger issues...

the big news from thursday was shocking and a bit surreal: my israeli passport has been renewed, but only for two years. they're literally giving me two years to return before i lose my passport. we were tentatively planning on moving before 2022, but now there's external pressure and that's made everything a lot more real.

after getting mr smear to bed i worked with SxS until late. i'm sad that the issues we're having are with the deprecated solution that's still being sold (silverlight is awful), but i enjoyed seeing what's become of the replacement project i initiated!

yesterday:

 a general sense of the day being out of control, working at my mom's, a weird dmv experience (none of us could figure out what we were waiting for, and i somehow picked up my new license ahead of the handful of people who'd been waiting longer than me), eventually getting through it and back for breakfast-lunch (i hadn't eaten a thing until 1.30pm, and then i ate too much) before diving in to strange mysteries that we only managed to resolve about an hour after i'd planned to leave for the weekend.

...

loadshedding didn't quite happen to us last night, but it did drop our internet connection:

MY ISP: "press 1 for support"
ME: *presses 1*
MY ISP: "press 1 for support"

because that's what i'd rather be doing on a friday night than watching a movie.

...

this morning:

it's been a chilled morning, except for the bit where a stripe support agent effectively deleted my account (intentionally!) because i'd complained about receiving 30 copies of the same sms. wtaf.

*yawn* second coffee and try-to-continue-doing-nothing time.

a-flutter

 godsdammit, flutter IS awesome. i've got a good grasp on which components i need to Do The Thing, and i'm pretty sure that i can produce functionality incrementally in a way that solves the real problems from the get-go.

it's also been nice to receive positive-seeming feedback from our rabbis after i mailed them all a letter regarding kashrut and veganism. we really need to start moving forward.

gd's new tattoos are hardcore, even if i had to go out in the rain to pay for them (they're only accepting cash payments now) and i was ten blocks from home when i realized that i'd forgotten my mask :S

i've got another consultation tomorrow - i'm a bit bummed that our artist hasn't been communicating with me but he seems enthusiastic enough whenever i get hold of him...

i've had a bit of a head-cold (it seems) the past couple of days, but at least mr smear seems to be better. he's really loving the activity books i picked up yesterday, just in time for miserable weather :)

1 kilo off my shoulders

 two passport applications, lots of bureaucratic details, loads of double-triple checking, and i finally couriered off two half-kilo bundles this morning. not that i didn't know these things were stressing me, but i didn't realize how much until they were gone and i could fill my lungs again.

yesterday and today were both less-than-half-days at work, so i'm not feeling entirely constructive. but overall i feel like things are okay.

yesterday i had a horrible experience with mr smear that was triggered by a failed attempt at a martial arts lesson, we all learned some shit and i think our dynamic's shifted a bit. i kind feel like it's for the better, but i guess we'll see?

i was going to work with SxS this evening but he delayed, so i've been watching steve hofstetter instead and am very soon on my way to bed.