locking down

another lockdown. we're praying that mr smear can go to school tomorrow, but that's still not clear. thursday and friday were pretty much lost causes as far as work was concerned. i was a total mess until thursday afternoon, and a partial mess until this morning. on friday evening my hackathon team made the deadline by about fifteen minutes. yesterday was basically spent playing videogames, either with mr smear or by myself. i was still very fuzzy, and i'm amazed at how successful i was with braid and super meat boy (i didn't have headspace for much else). i was really impressed with crossover (to play 32-bit games on my mac), but disappointed by how much they're asking for it. mr smear slept over at my mom's last night. gd and i gave up on lawnmower man last night and finished watching blackspace instead - the former is not a good movie. the latter is a powerful, superbly-told story. i *think* my cough / sinus / etc. situation is finally starting to clear up; this morning i woke up and took care of a few things, not least of which being that i put together the outline for pages 13 and 14 (the new A3 whiteboard helped, though i'm not certain how much of that was psychological). my mom, mr smear and i went up table mountain this afternoon, it was pretty cold and windy but we all enjoyed it immensely. after mr smear went to bed this evening gd had a bit of a breakdown - being stuck in south africa is taking its toll, and we're praying that our year-long slog through the swamps of bureaucracy pays off. i've finally made some satisfying progress on my side project for the first time in weeks. omg it's approaching 1am already.

still hacking

 i'm *still* struggling with the coughing. i went to the doctor again today, this time armed with better information after looking up decongestants and "rebounding" yesterday morning and learning that gd and i have been unwittingly maintaining a decongestant addiction because we thought that infrequent low doses were fine.

they're not. we've been paying the price for months. and these past few weeks we both just happened to blow up at the same time :(

i'm on different meds now, not sure how i'll sleep tonight but at least i don't feel as wired as yesterday.

...

mr smear was so excited to go back to school today, and we were overjoyed and relieved to hear that he had a fantastic time. i didn't get much work done today, mostly because of my doctor's appointment and a "quick" visit to the bank (the ticket said "estimated wait time: 5 minutes" and it lied). we tried playing unstable unicorns before dinner and i think we both enjoyed it :)

...

the last two work days felt oddly productive considering the mess i've been. it's funny, but as my role's never been very clearly defined i find myself straddling both management and development in an interesting way.

...

back to the hackathon stuff.

around the world

 i think we're all starting to feel better, to varying degrees. mr smear still isn't ready to go back to school yet, but *knocks wood* his cough seems to be subsiding a bit and we're hoping he'll get a good night's sleep for once. gd's exhausted and has actually gone to bed already.

i didn't get a lot of hours in at work today, although i did get through some stuff i wasn't looking forward to and i did manage to fix our shower door, so... winning. gd had a busy day with two visits to the dentist - the first to get a temporary crown (neither of us are convinced that it was worth the trouble) and the second to get the broken temporary crown fixed.

otherwise, it looks like her canadian document might actually be on its way to us, so that we can send it back again to be certified. because we, like all the other immigrants, are rich and can afford to throw thousands upon thousands of dollars at couriers and a wide variety of government agencies.

mr smear and i had a couple of altercations today, but we're mostly fine. this parenting stuff is hard.

i'm finding myself drawn more and more to steamworld heist. a part of it is that i need a break, and it's giving me one. a part of it is that it's a gorgeous, atmospheric game with a cool story and great mechanics.

right. back to the hackathon stuff.

father's day

 today was a great father's day. i played quite a lot with my boy, he was excited for a boxing lesson and actually did really well, he picked a weirdly father's-day-themed movie (bambi), i picked a weirdly father's-day-themed movie (stardust), we all felt sorry for our super-allergic selves together and generally enjoyed each others' company.

in other news, gd participated in an online "aliya fair" this morning and there's a possibility that we could handle the rest of her process from within israel, which i expect could make things considerably easier for us.

after putting mr smear to bed i jumped on a hackathon call, but there were only two of us and we just ended up have a great chat about a million different things for quite a while. then gd and i watched the second episode of blackspace, which is brilliant.

...

otherwise, i'm a little nervous about going to bed now as my sinuses are starting to feel blocked again. i've been on five different kinds of medication (antihistamines, prednisone, antibiotic, cough syrup and mometasone furoate) and i'm not really feeling like it's all making a huge amount of difference. i mean, it's definitely helping, but not as dramatically as i would expect this whole routine should.

so much hacking

it's friday night, i'm still coughing. and this morning i woke up before dawn and coughed so violently that i injured my throat. it was initially so painful that i was worried that maybe i should be heading to a hospital, but over the course of the day it's calmed down considerably. this evening it was still sore, now it's a mild discomfort.

gd's still not feeling good - looks like she may have gotten food poisoning yesterday, but at least her lungs seem to be doing better. mr smear's super snotty and stuffy, so we haven't sent him to school in a couple of days (or been outside at all, how very "lockdown"), but aside from that we've been fine and mostly in good spirits.

things that have gotten me through the week:

work: we've successfully published the new release with days to spare.

the hackathon: whatever happens, i've successfully completed an enormous share of the work and almost all of it worked first time.

my tattoo healing: the harry potter (sonnet 13), titan ae (14) and groot (15) tattoos are healed, and my chest is still a bit itchy from the hair regrowth but it's bearable now.

steamworld heist: good lord, what a sweet and fun game! a very firefly feel for a turn-based platformer, and interesting without being too demanding.

mr smear helping me put together the new shelves today? awesome. the new shelves making an enormous difference to my "corner office" of the living room? awesome. picking up chickpea fudge at the chemist and both of us absolutely loving it? awesome. his enthusiasm when i picked up a discounted copy of spongebob squarepants: battle for bikini bottom - rehydrated this evening and we played it together for a bit? awesome.

more hacking

 i can't tell if it's allergies or not, i'm feeling like it may have been a bug (not covid, pretty damned sure about that at least). it was hardcore sunday night and all of yesterday, then last night it kind of calmed down and it's been on / off today.

half of today was spent doing paid work, which was surprisingly productive, and the other half working on the hackathon project. i at least felt like i was making progress, but it's a much bigger piece of work than i anticipated. like, a LOT bigger. so i'm really, really pleased that i've just deployed a basically functional version of it and if i don't go to bed really soon it'll be because i'm enjoying some "me time" :)

*sits down with a fresh cup of hot chocolate and a box of rusks*

otherwise, project mr smear has been running pretty well even if there have been a few hiccups along the way. gd's feeling a bit better even if she's still struggling to breathe. the directeur l'etat civil charged us for her documents this evening, now we're just praying they'll ship them to the right location.

for now? i think things are okay.

hack

 i would feel much better about today if my nose and throat hadn't been doing a thing for the last few hours. i'm praying it's just allergies and doesn't turn into anything worse.

praying.

this weekend was pretty good, barring having to drop off gd at the hospital this afternoon on our way back from a really nice world of birds play-date. my tattoo artist cancelled yesterday so i ended up watching big hero 6 again with mr smear, and today i woke up super early and made lots of progress with my part of the hackathon project - although i was hoping to have something deployed before going to bed, but when i finally had some alone time this evening i got stuck troubleshooting global secondary indexes instead...

 mr smear convinced my mom to play toy story 3 with him this evening. hilarity ensured.

 ...

i'm excited that netanyahu's finally on his way out, but i worry that his style of politics has already infected so many in government that the new crew might just be bringing in more of the same.

i hope not.

acceptance

this week has been... much better. it had some ugly parts to it, but i'm learning yet another important thing that i really wish i'd learned long ago: to let go of stuff and prioritize relationships i care about over my ideas of right and wrong. this week i've pulled back on anything even remotely discipline related and focused on making good memories, and things seem to be better.

...

this week my chest has been itching just as badly as last week - post-tattoo regrowth is not a joke. it's been fine if i've been shirtless, but it's either been very cold or i've been at work so that hasn't helped much.

work-wise it was a very interesting week. it took us the entire week to take a basically solved problem and render it release-ready, with a lowlight of our efforts being updating a golang package version to indicate a breaking change, which proved unnecessarily complicated. i also got pulled in for a two-day investigation that left a bunch of us a lot more knowledgeable and with a few interesting ideas of how to move our project forward.

side-project-wise, i got side-tracked by a mid-week emergency when one of my clients forgot his password and i realized that i hadn't implemented any kind of password reset feature yet... the back-end changes were almost trivial, but it cost me two nights of fighting with react before i was able to give them something that not only looked decent, but wasn't going to fall over if something breathed too hard.

hackathon-wise, we've had a couple of cool discussions and made a lot of progress. no idea how far we'll get in two weeks, but the fact that there are three of us who have drive to make this thing happen long-term is satisfying.

gd's been coughing again, apparently she's landed up with yet another chest infection. mr smear's also been coughing a bit, but we're convinced his is just a result of post-nasal drip and bad allergies.

...

it's friday evening, and for the first time in a while it really feels like erev shabbat.

bottoming out

 life is good, but my relationship with my son is not. today was a really rough day after a lot of other rough days, and it's clear that he just doesn't give a damn what i think and that he doesn't like me. it doesn't matter how good my intentions are, clearly i've screwed this up. and he's not even six years old yet.

so today i've decided to take a step back and keep a bit of distance between us. i don't know what direction things are going in, but i know it's not a good one and something needs to change.

...

the thursday night meeting and presentation was brilliant, there's a lot of enthusiasm for our idea.

on friday afternoon my coworker and i finally figured out a big chunk of the elusive bug that's been plaguing us, which is an enormous load off as we now have over a week to tighten up related code and test the crap out of it.

gd took over my tattoo session yesterday, i'm a little surprised (her new ink runs all the way down her arm and into her fingers) but it's definitely cool. my latest one seems to have calmed down, and my regrowing chest hairs from the previous pieces are giving me a bit less grief than they were (they were thoroughly distracting for days).

this evening i went for a stroll with sailor along the promenade - good exercise, great company, but damn, he lives in a different time zone from the rest of us and i keep finding myself synchronizing with him... i got back much later than anticipated.

...

 i finally got some work done on my side project this morning, and a little bit this afternoon - i was going to continue now but i really, really feel like shit at the moment.

the joys of parenting

it's so hard to have conversations with our five year old. in some ways, he's just so darned clever and in others... he can be a real dumb-ass.

we've been going through a really painful time with him lately. he's got such a good heart, and he loves connecting with other kids, but there're a bunch of behaviours he's modelling from the little bastards at his previous school and he keeps doing things that turn other kids off... we're doing our very best to help him but it feels like it's out of our hands, like we just have to leave him to figure this stuff out the hard way.

it's tough watching someone you love make mistakes. it's even tougher when you know that it's not their fault. it's even tougher when you know it's kinda yours. if i'd had understood how much damage being in that school was doing him, i'd have pulled him out instead of trying to deal with unqualified, uninspired seat-warmers.

and now the new school's switched the teachers because the school's running out of funds, and they've clearly made an enormous mistake. his teacher for the first few months was AMAZING. the new teacher? she's mediocre at best.

can't we just catch a break for once?

...

things have been a bit overwhelming of late, i've been worried that i'm burning out. or, burning out more than usual. at the same time, i have to Keep On Adulting and the universe just keeps throwing more stuff at me. half of those things are opportunities that i can't refuse but don't have the bandwidth for.

case in point: there's a new hackathon going on, and my teammate and i came up with something so cool that even people outside of the hackathon are getting excited - i don't even know what to make of that.

and i had a chat with a university friend who's now a game developer, and he's on board with this educational thing i've been talking about for years now.

otherwise, work is work and i don't feel that my downtime is nearly enough. i've just given gd my next tattoo session so i can get over the latest one, which was insanely painful for an interminable hour and a half, no matter how brilliant it may be (although it will need a bit of a touch-up). it's right underneath no. 16,  exactly on my ribs and i yelled and wailed and moaned a lot.

we got page 12 out the door, though. so that's good.

the crest of the wave

 it's been a wild few weeks, i've been feeling overwhelmed even since work pressure eased off just over a week ago. last week mr smear brought home a cold, so that was a bit of a scare, and last tuesday's tattoo session was so intensely painful that i was suffering from shock for two days afterwards (saturday's also hurt a lot, but nothing like no. 15).

i've been stressed about my side project (not that i haven't made any progress, but it's been hard to make headspace for it), i've been stressed about gd's documentation (after giving us the runaround for a couple of weeks, they informed us that the form they'd given us was invalid and that the lawyer who's helping us isn't lawyer enough), i've been stressed about pushing out the graphic novel (although we did just complete a really cool page), and i've been stressed about the awful stuff going on in israel almost as much i've been stressed about the world's ridiculous response to it.

it's funny, though, that through all the anxiety and the day-to-day trials and exhaustions i'm sitting here typing this and feeling pretty okay about the world.

...

in mr smear news:

the past couple of weeks have been easier than before when we were going through a period of particularly difficult behaviour. he's been repeating to whoever will listen that i'm always working and never play with him (completely untrue, but not the point), even though he's (in the same breath!) told someone that i don't have a job. *facepalm*

twice over the course of the past week or so i've managed to get him to come down to the parking lot with his bike, and both times he's had a blast and made real progress. i hope we can gather enough momentum for him to be confident enough to drop the training wheels.

while things have generally been pretty good with him, tonight he pushed gd too far and for the first time ended up going to bed without dinner. to put it simply, he was being an asshole. i don't know how we correct this, but i think this evening was an important step.

...

 right. imma going to bed now.

happy mother's day

 today was an excellent mother's day: mr smear dragged me out of bed early and we made some nice cards for our mothers. we played through the first couple of levels of lego star wars: the complete saga which, along with the other lego series' we own makes me want to thank each and every one of those responsible for producing those games because the fact that they exist is AMAZING for me and my boy. they've hit on the perfect formula for making adult movie experiences interactive and appropriate for children while still being super fun for us bigger kids.

my mum picked us up and we went through to maker's landing to sample the wares of three of the vegan food shops - it was all fantastic! the vibe there was really cool and we had a great time. i was exhausted when we got home, so i crashed for a bit, then got dragged into a little more lego star wars before we all went out again to visit my great aunt, who we haven't seen in person since a while before lockdowns began. it was really nice spending time with her :)

it was quite late when we returned home, we ordered curry club for dinner and - for the very first time - managed to convince mr smear to dig in and he enjoyed it too ^_^

...

the past week was hectic, i don't know if my fogginess on tuesday and wednesday were due to intense allergies or if i had a cold or something, but those two days were hard. thursday and friday were a bit less stressful, and included a meeting with the programmable banking team which was very interesting and probably quite fruitful!

otherwise, on saturday afternoon i sat through the tattoo for sonnet 14 and in the evening gd convinced me to watch in the name of the father... i cried a lot after that movie, i would have been deeply moved by all the unjustice in the film (and the true story it was based on) but dad-me was utterly heartbroken.

a checklist that includes my first harry potter tattoo

yesterday:

new page's script off to the illustrator: check.

a lovely visit to the museum with mr smear: check.

a great 5km evening hike up the mountain with sailor: check.

a four-hour upgrade of one of my mobile app's components after putting mr smear to bed: check.

today:

a morning full of meetings, ages logging my hours and invoicing my employer, lots of context switching, and enjoying the walks with and waits for mr smear to and from school: check.

managing a git repo rescue and helping a coworker put out a release and leaving the house with ten minutes to get to the tattoo parlour: check.

getting an amazing tattoo done in about forty five minutes: check.

playing lego batman: the videogame with mr smear, then totally firing up his imagination with honey, i shrunk the kids at dinnertime: check.

learning all about push notifications while polishing off gd's oversized, delicious raspberry pie: check.

getting ready to wash my tattoo off before going to bed: check. check. check.

the blur

i went to bed after posting on wednesday night, i'm still not clear on why mr smear was sleeping in our bed but that and my neck were the least of my troubles - with everything else going on, my ear starting hurting and it felt like i was heading for an ear infection. i managed to get an appointment with the doctor first thing (well, first thing after dropping mr smear off at school and joining my morning meetings), and was relieved to learn that we'd caught it in time, so i could avoid antibiotics but still had to engage in preventative medication, which appears to have done the trick.

sleep-wise things didn't improve, though, as i've spent half the nights waking up around 1am with what seems like post-nasal drip-induced acid reflux, being too tired to do anything constructive so just resigning myself to hours of watching youtube (okay, some of it was educational, at least).

otherwise, the rest of the work week was arduous but much improved, i closed off the week with a new release candidate with which i believe the problem is resolved.

yesterday was fantastic. hido's down in cape town with his family and we joined them for a braai, it was wonderful seeing everyone and introducing all our kids ^_^

after an excellent day, mr smear and i played some biped in the evening (hardcore, absolutely brilliant) and after getting him to bed i jumped in to a thunderstone evening that was a little slower than usual, but between turns i figured out how to get my expo app working on an android emulator and by the time i got to bed i had moved all my TODOs out to a backlog board which seems a lot saner.

on the shakespeare front, on wednesday i received page updates for the nymphs' breast reductions but haven't had much bandwidth to publish them, so i'm going to do that now and then dive in to putting the page 12 script together for mr cat.

two down

work today and yesterday was extremely frustrating. after hours more than exptected spent getting my "quick win" friday task sorted out (mostly due to atlassian bamboo's specs reference being difficult to navigate and only partially correct), i then dived in to producing and testing a new release candidate and we still haven't managed to root cause why it's broken. and each attempt to try something different takes an excruciating amount of time to set up.

i've spent a lot of time walking away from my machine to avoid angry-crying.

on the home front, yesterday was a difficult day (mostly just sad), and gd's been really struggling with a bunch of things all happening at the same time (including having a wisdom tooth extracted yesterday morning). today we all had to get up early (failed) to get mr smear to the hospital to get the dressing for his stitches replaced, which turned out to be a pretty good start to the day.

in the late afternoon (when i gave up with work) i took him to the company gardens where he made friends with a gangly older kid, and things were pretty cool except for the bit where they got excited and he bashed his stitches into him while they were trying to hide from the other kid's mother... i really hope he's good.

 we've been having trouble with our apple tv for ages - gd's had it since before we met - and today our roku premier arrived. it was a welcome distraction around lunchtime, and after waking up a little while ago (after falling asleep reading to mr smear) i've been playing around with it and it's sooooo much better than the apple tv! it has exactly one shortcoming - that we can't install the prime video app on it - but that's covered by the ps3 and everything is working excellently.

my neck's been giving me a bit of trouble. i'm nervous about sleeping on it, but i guess it's time for bed.

sunday school

 ugh, it's almost 1am and i've just eaten (again) so i need to wait a bit before going to bed...

today was... well, it started off quite frustrating, with mr smear griefing gd while i bashed my head against a wall of react native documentation. things weren't working, and there was no indication of exactly where or that the broken bits were caused by me using an older version of the packages than the documentation was for.

*facepalm*

i walked mr smear through to visit my mum, she helped me put together an email i was supposed to send out weeks ago and then we checked out a cool bookstore and stopped at her coffee shop for a treat.

after we got back home i finally finished redesigning and refactoring (it's not perfect, but it's definitely far better than it was) and then did my stairwell exercise for the first time in a week or two. i found myself energetically walking that off and ended up doing some very basic boxing/taekwondo exercises in the park, which felt good until i was halfway back, walking slowly, and tweaked something in my back.

it seems to be okay, now, i hope it stays okay through the night.

our rabbi friend (who traveled to augrabies with us) came over for dinner, after which we put mr smear to bed and watched half an episode of invincible before gd bailed on me and i got back to the expanse. then i finished publishing my changes and celebrated with hot chocolate and youtube videos (chubbyemu videos are amazing).

lacerations, or "stitchnik junior"

 well, today was an interesting one. it started off well, pretty relaxed, and in the early afternoon gd and i left mr smear with our neighbours and hopped off to the waterfront to make a big purchase (a new ipad, it's been seven years since i bought the last one and apparently it's not handling old-age very gracefully). we arrived back just in time for the afternoon's excitement, as mr smear had just been demonstrating his breakdancing abilities and managed to bash into a drawer knob that opened up his forehead enough to need three stitches.

there was much drama, and way more screaming than i was ready for. trying to get him to breathe and do a quiet "big boy cry" didn't *ahem* cut it.

anyway, one parent only in the emergency room so after hanging around for a while i went to my mom's coffee shop to chat over a chai latte, and we both arrived at the hospital just in time to greet our war heroes.

the evening was pretty chilled, and after putting him to bed gd and i watched the new mortal kombat movie: surprisingly good, and great fun!

it's now 2.30am, and the only reason i didn't go to bed two hours ago is because i've been setting up the new ipad and logging in to all the apps etc. but that's done, i think, so now i'm free to crash.

 i'm tired.

breathe

 1. mr smear's behaviour improved, and one thing that he kept repeating that was worrying me was clarified: he claimed that me "using [my] body, not [my] words" was a factor in his misbehaviour - i discovered the next day that what he was referring to was me physically carrying him to his room for a time-out after he refused to go by himself :P

things seem much more settled now, but i'm still making an effort to be easier (and more patient) in general.

2. the feedback from thursday evening's presentation was amazing, even if i felt like i'd done a terrible job. some of the programme managers / investors were inspired enough to want to have a chat with our team next week to take this project further. of course, mid-presentation i found a bug i'd introduced the night before in one of the most important pieces of functionality :P

either way, very validating.

3. as i told my department in our morning meeting, yesterday was supposed to be "me time". so i subsequently ended up doing lots of code reviews :P

i did, however, manage to put a few hours into a ticket i've been wanting to take on for ages, and i completed it successfully! but not without taking down our build server, which we discovered at 5pm on a friday afternoon. i hope we can resolve this quickly on monday morning...

4. while struggling with our apple tv and airplay yesterday evening, it became apparent that our home setup is long overdue an upgrade. after a deep dive into all our options, it seems like the most cost-effective way to get what we need is to acquire a roku (to replace the apple tv) and get a new ipad for gd. considering the fact that her current one has (more or less) lasted seven years and that it's still much cheaper than the most basic laptops available, i guess it's worth it.

misbehaving

just in case i don't post soon, this is a reminder to myself that yesterday and today (yesterday, in particular) were troubling days with mr smear that needed hard conversations.

also, it's now 2am and i'm only just going to bed after spending all evening preparing for a demo of the hackathon project and doing a fair amount of refactoring and bugfixing.

otherwise the week began with devastating fires and everything still feels kinda slowed down. 

remember this day

 there's a scene in f is for family in which kevin shares a memory of his father, when he was much younger, telling him to remember that day as it was a really good one.

today, with that in mind, i said that to my son. in spite of the fact that none of us likes getting up early in the morning, and in spite of the fact that (apparently) neither do any of the other parents involved, we arrived at acrobranch at 8.30am and we all had a really good time.

we (sadly) drove past the beginnings of the massive fire that we only learned in the evening wiped out the UCT library, which was and is heartbreaking.

we came home, i napped, and mr smear dragged me out of the bed to ask for my help with opus magnum. firstly, he didn't actually need my help, just me sitting by his side asking him what he should do next. secondly, the solution he came up with was really cool and very different to what i would have done.

after spending an hour working on my budgeting app for a presentation on thursday, i took mr smear to sea point, picked up sailor, and we headed to queen's beach.

it was lovely. it was a hot afternoon, but the sun wasn't too harsh by the time we arrived (around 4.30pm), and we had a great time playing around in the rock pools and clambering around the rocks. we even stopped in at scheckter's raw on the way home to try out their vegan "twix", which is pretty darned close to the real thing!

i really, really hope mr smear remembers today.

some of the evening was a bit of a bummer after all that, but whatever. after shower / dinner / bedtime and an episode of wandavision, i sat down and hammered out the upgrade for the presentation and i'm definitely happy with the state of things. the only thing i need to do before thursday is create new accounts and import fake data so that i don't have my personal data exposed on the recording...

milestones

 this week was simultaneously long and went by in a flash.

it was manageable from a work perspective although i was... not very motivated.

two special things have occurred, though, that made this a weekend to celebrate:

1. since last year, i've been pouring a lot of time and energy into building a mobile app and portal and this week was the first time that i managed to put it into my client's hands. it's ugly as sin and i have understood now that i finally need to buckle down and learn all about css, but the client's (at least two of the users) first response was so enthusiastic and grateful that i'm feeling very validated and excited about the prospects of this app for the future.

2. aside from a week of rough mornings with an uncooperative mr smear, things have been generally good between us. then yesterday, i introduced him to opus magnum. i've now sunk in quite a few hours since last weekend, and it's amazing, but i realized when he showed an interest that it's actually a fantastic way to introduce someone who's (pretty much) illiterate to coding concepts! witnessing him "get" it, successfully making products, getting excited, and coming up with very different ways of solving the puzzles from me made for an incredible experience.

 otherwise, our little family is breathing a huge sigh of relief since monday, when we realized that a huge source of our stress (gd's in particular) was the idea of having to return to canada in order to make aliyah. so we stopped, reevalutated, and made a decision to stay here until our file is in order and approved. this will entail extending her south african visa again, but compared to the alternative that's not such a big deal.

ten?

 i don't get how ten days have gone by since my last update.

easter weekend: everyone else was taking the long weekend, so i did too. and i relaxed. and i breathed. and it was good.

extra-long "holiday": mr smear's school had an extra week of holiday, and i needed to work from home, so there was that. it may have been a four-day week, but it was a loooong week of complicated, sensitive, highly-repetitive work and the testing was even more so. the good part was ending the week satisfied that the work was (pretty much) complete. the bad part was standing so badly and so long on thursday and friday that i've been suffering from sciatica since.

i'm lucky it's not too bad, but it's not fun.

bad school news: we just received an email this evening that mr smear's amazing school is in financial trouble because too many kids have pulled out (apparently mostly due to relocations), and his (and our) favourite teacher is leaving at the end of the month. this is deeply distressing, but as i've just told gd: if the worst come to the worst, i would rather struggle with homeschooling than put him back in a traditional south african school system.

i've made some great progress on my mobile app today (resolved some thorny issues that came up during the week), and i'm now trying to add "one more thing" (and possibly do another round of opus magnum) before bed.

nipple ring no more

 well, it's been in for more than two decades - more than half my life - but its time has come and gone and i no longer have a nipple ring. i'm honestly not sure how i feel about it, but i'm glad it's healed.

speaking of which, gd helped me change the leg bandage this evening and it's finally starting to look better, so that's a positive thing.

it's late, i've done much less than i was hoping to do. for gd's documents we've had to change tack, hopefully the new tactic will be more successful. today was a really long day that was only partially successful, and tomorrow is the last day of the workweek (for my colleagues, at least) so i'm hoping to clear some things off my desk before it's over...

small revelations

it dawned on me, on saturday, that i've been depressed, and burned out... more than usual. i was feeling thoroughly defeated by the combination of the israeli minister of interior / jewish agency / canadian government and i was really struggling to get through normal things.

that realization helped, at least. i've spent a fair bit of time mulling things over and making backup plans for our backup plans, and shuffled things around in my head a bit. back to one day at a time.

the pesach seder was really, really nice. it's the first time mr smear's actually engaged, he had a great experience and eventually passed out on his granny's bed - we left him there, and got to have a very relaxed sunday morning to ourselves ^_^

i did make some progress on sunday with my project, although it was very slow going and debugging react native is a pain. but eventually things seemed good...

on sunday we had a call about a different project, it was a good call but i'm not sure what direction this things going just yet.

yesterday was a long day, but today felt longer. it began with me walking mr smear to school, only to realize when we arrived that it was a tuesday, and tuesday's an outdoors day. so we had to walk all the way back to get in the car, and about half that was mr smear whining loudly that he wanted to go in the car when i'd already made clear that we were going in the car. we had words, he sulked a bit, and by the time we'd got in the car he'd calmed down and was ready to admit that he was being a bit silly. we arrived *just* in time for him to join the others as they left the meeting point, and i arrived home too late for the morning's first meeting.

from that point on it was either grinding work (two days of highly repetitive, sensitive work) or hours of back-to-back meetings, but between my work day and gd and my experience with the paperwork i feel like we made progress.

oh! and my mom's last day at work is tomorrow, she's been on contract with her employer for a couple of years now and as much as they're all sorry to see her go, ageist policies. this is not her first rodeo :(

gd and i had great fun playing rayman: origins after putting mr smear to bed - it really is an amazing game and it's probably fair to say that it's her first "real gamer" experience :)

damn. it's past 1am and i've just done fixing a bug that only shows up on a real device. out of a corner of my eye i'm watching the end of se7en, which gd noted was released more than a quarter century ago. and my nipple ring seems to be healed after a few days of being infected (not a clue where that came from), and i'm trying to decide whether to keep it in or take it out for good... that's a more difficult decision than i expected it to be.

dazed and confused

 if puella magi madoka magica turns out to hold the answer to sonnet tattoo no. 13, and watching the first episode last night was my "homework" in that subject, and i've definitely seen that episode before... why did it not warrant a mention on my blog?

i'm exhausted. depleted. the week's social events were great, but i'm full of stress and anxiety caused by gd's aliyah documentation story, not getting enough work hours in, not feeling healthy (shoulder and neck and back and knee pains), and just in general feeling like i need a vacation.

i did make some exciting progress on The Project, though, so that's good.

midweek

my cousins joining me for a late 40th birthday celebration at rick's this evening was really nice!

yesterday's stair walk felt pretty good, in total i did 35 floors up and 35 down and my knee's definitely feeling stronger. i was a bit disappointed in the number of calories burned, though, i expected that much exertion to be worth more...

gd changed my dressing yesterday, it went better than before but the hole gouged from my leg is pretty big. it's a rather annoying spot and all the days between changes feel like forever. 

sunday was super frustrating, because working on my project felt like things were moving backwards and really slowed me down. but brunch at plant with cousins and dinner with friends at the curry club were both great!

it's closing on 2am, i would have gone to bed more than an hour ago if i hadn't been distracted setting up a new VoIP number. kinda.

saturday night

 overall, the last few days went well. the demo was a bit of a let-down, but nothing too bad and i learned a lot. paid work: we ended the week on a good note.

i've been pretty consistent with my new exercise regime, and the results are noticeable. like, i can walk up stairs without pain. and i'm definitely getting fitter.

mr smear: things seem to be smoothing out, there's been considerably less tension in the house. i enjoyed a wonderful breakthrough moment with him the other night when i discovered that the story of phaethon was engaging enough to get across a message that he simply wasn't interested in hearing otherwise, and that led to another great moment where he showed an interest in the sonnet comics for the first time! and today we read some of coraline together - which is a significantly different experience from the movie - and the past week i've been reading the ocean at the end of the lane to him and it seems to be going down well.

did i mention i've been growing my hair and beard out? i became irritated a week or two ago with the upkeep so i'm trying to see how long (literally) i can go.

the hole where the dermatologist took nothing interesting out of my leg last friday wasn't healing, so i went back to be informed that every time we've removed the dressing to clean it we've been tearing up the new tissue... so now it's a three day regimen with gauze instead of plaster and it's really quite annoying.

i'm about ready for bed. just one more edit...

2am

i didn't get much day job work done today, not sure why. but i did schedule a document pickup for next week, and i did take mr smear outside for twenty minutes, and i did get beaten up by our physio. also, i realized how tragically lopsided my trapezius is.

i spent the evening / until now struggling with tomorrow's delivery, it's really not where i wanted it to be but it's surprisingly functional considering i needed to redesign a major chunk of it due to dynamodb's write/read delays. i'm exhausted, but very happy with what i've built and i'm praying tomorrow goes well. 

closing in

 where do i begin? it's approaching midnight, and i've spent hours trying to configure nginx and this web portal i've been working on to play nicely together. and JUST as i typed this, i checked again and it freaking worked! i'm so stoked right now it's ridiculous.

*stops posting to defensively commit the code, backup all related configurations and document everything*

right. *phew*.

where was i? oh, yes. so i was supposed to deliver something to my client, who's been waiting very patiently for half a year now, over the course of the past few weeks... but it was only last week that things had settled down enough for me to actually get my head back into the game. over the course of the weekend i completed the backend half (the "real" half, at least emotionally), and made a lot of progress on the frontend but *just* couldn't quite get over the finish line. we've now pushed the due date to thursday, and while it's far from polished it's functional and i've just managed to deploy it, so that's a great weight off my shoulders. now it's small fixes and improvements and then i'm hoping they'll feel ready to install the app (via expo) and we can start working on serious features.

that's work. the day-job's been alright, i'm making slow and steady progress but i'm hardly feeling motivated these days... i'm certainly not unhappy, though.

family-wise:

mr smear's been really hard to deal with the past few weeks - primarily because he just doesn't listen without heavy "encouragement" and he reflexes says "no" to everything - but the last couple of days we seem to be getting through a bit better / more effectively / more positively. we were as surprised as his teacher when, during our term 1 feedback session yesterday, she informed us that not only has he decided that he wants to become a veterinarian when he's older, but that he wrote the word "vet" on one of his drawings, unprompted, after figuring it out itself. i think we're doing alright with the literacy thing!

gd's back has been giving her trouble, some days better than others. i'm never sure any more what's "normal" and what's not.

the two of them have been seriously getting into rayman: origins and mr smear and i have been digging ratchet & clank: all4one, and we're rewatching hunter x hunter again and loving it.

my fitness:

i've been really struggling to do any kind of exercise and my knee still hasn't healed. a few days ago i had a revelation, and i've now twice put in my headphones and spent 10-15 minutes walking up seven flights of stairs on the one side of the building, then down the other, and following that up with a walk to reset. it's tough (two stairs at a time), but i'm already feeling a difference.

there's a lot i'm forgetting, but i'm tired and i'm going to bed now. i'll just try one more time to get audible to understand that i've already signed up for one trial and i'm not interested in another.

the tooth fairy

today:

now that gd and i have done the thing (with gd giving a wonderful and woefully under-appreciated performance as a dancing tooth fairy), i can't help wondering what the idea of the tooth fairy teaches our children about organ harvesting...

mr smear's excitement about his first tooth falling out was infectious.

getting paid without friction, followed by a wire transfer completing in a handful of hours

jewish agency stress

a great chat with horseman

yesterday:

my mom's first outing post-isolation, a long evening with mr smear being difficult and quebec government services being impossible, a long wintery night's sleep

 monday:

my brain really not working, feeling like i was coming down with something

the last week including the weekend:

last week was recovery from the week before, everything a bit slower, and i needed to do nothing on the weekend (although we did watch the two wreck-it ralph movies, which are awesome).

achievement unlocked: vegan shakshuka

 gd just adapted a recipe we found online, replacing the eggs with black salt avo, and it was delicious ^_^

she nailed it first time, in spite of her feeling pretty sick since yesterday.

today: made sufficient progress on the web portal to be able to focus my energy on tackling the actual problem, took mr smear out for shopping + ice cream and spent *almost* too much time at the pool with him. mr smear's now swimming underwater and his diving's improving :)

yesterday: loads of ratchet & clank: tools of destruction for mr smear (i can't play it, i get motion sickness), some pool time, me playing ftl in the morning and... right now i haven't the faintest clue what i did for the rest of the day. aside from getting through some of my "watch later" youtube playlist after everyone else was asleep :P

friday: "take tomorrow off," he said. yeah. i tried and failed to replace the lightbulb in our bedroom (it's an awful design, and now it looks like it might be a wiring fault), gd accompanied me to send her document back to the israeli consulate in montreal, and my team and i spent the day very busily testing the release and finalizing it for delivery.

i delivered it at 5.45pm, with 6pm being my personal hard deadline so that i could stop for shabbat.  i played ratchet & clank: all 4 one with mr smear (that one is fine), and i love the fact that it forces you to cooperate. we were so wrapped up in it that we totally missed the temple service :P

phhhoooooooooooooo

 chag purim sameach! i'm starting this post while halfway through my post-rum cider, the megillah reading began at 7.30pm and i finally delivered a release candidate at 7.05pm. after a full, panicked day with five of my coworkers jumping in to help me in my battle against the broken things.

one of my coworkers strongly advised that i take tomorrow off, but we still have to deliver the actual release before the weekend and at the very least i need to figure out a way to script away some of the release process pain.

i was very grateful that another of my colleagues helped me rip out and replace his own code because it was giving us trouble, it's a relief to work with professionals who focus on Getting Shit Done over their egos.

the network device seems to have been a good investment, although i've barely worked from that corner of the apartment since installing it. last night was another late night, although not as bad as the others, and tonight's i'm feeling utterly buggered and i'm going to go to bed fairly soon.

the document saga: after spending a chunk of yesterday trying to communicate with the israeli consulate in pretoria, i realized that it will be quicker and cheaper to ship the document back to montreal. which is $#@!ing insane.

i jumped in to a game of ratchet and clank: all 4 one with mr smear yesterday afternoon, and felt really bad when i realized that my stress over a boss level (probably compounded by the work stress that needed venting) made him feel bad. he was super understanding when i apologized - why does that somehow make me feel worse? - and we mostly figured the stage out together which was cool.

gd had her first singing lesson yesterday, which triggered some eye-opening discussions.

 mr smear had his second ukulele lesson today, and that seems to be going well.

i really, really want gd to try making vegan shakshuka this weekend. i have a theory about replacing the eggs, and i hope she's up for it.

miserable post post

my outdoors adventure was a hurried walk to buy ethernet cable, so that i could install the net network device which arrived. that installation took a while, lots of testing, and i *hope* it's going to do what it's supposed to.

work has been a real bitch these past couple of days, this is the second past-midnight day spent fighting with things that should just work. and i'm right now struggling with the only java project that is sorely deserving of a) TLC or b) being tossed and rewritten in the same language as everything else we maintain.

golang is better than java.

in other news, the israeli consulate in montreal didn't authenticate one of gd's documents, even though they could have, and we now have to go through an additional process to get them to confirm to the local consulate that *they* can authenticate it. or we can send the document back, or get a new one issued. that'll only cost us another couple of hundred dollars and a few more months.

post

 it's past midnight, i've spent the past... half hour?... trying to install python packages in order to run tests in order to go to bed having accomplished something work-wise.

...

okay, let me try that again. it's now just after 00.45, and i've spent the past three quarters of an hour coding to the point where i *think* my solution's code-complete and ready for testing. so now i'm going to finish this post and then go to bed.

saturday: the day was unproductive (as it should be), everyone had a chilled day and i played a fair amount of stellaris. i'm sure there's more but i can't recall much.

yesterday: i spent most of the day working on a portal for the mobile project, and was pretty successful. i also had a really interesting chat with someone who i met through a poetry performance, who pitched me an idea that i really, really hope moves forward.

today: gd's documents have arrived! it was a long day, the best parts of which were walking mr smear to and from school and taking him out for a bit in the evening, where we bumped into wp who was out for a jog.

hopefully tomorrow will be good.

i still haven't prepared myself for thursday night's leyning.

saturday morning cartoons

 omg my alarm woke me up at 7.30, all the lights were on and mr smear was watching the hulk animated series with no sound so that he wouldn't wake us up.

i'm very grateful *that* is what he was watching. it could have been anything.

we dropped mr smear off at the forest yesterday, and he had a great time "forest bathing". we had a few minutes to walk in ourselves when we picked him up,  it was really nice!

between lots of meetings and a team lunch, i barely got any work done yesterday. the good stuff from yesterday was mr smear's first ukulele lesson*, gd's documents being picked up, and my nephew getting the job offer he wanted. so it was a good day.

we did have some high stress over mr smear's swimming lesson, in that the receptionists and manager at the gym keep giving his nanny trouble when she wants to go inside and this is the third lesson he's missed half of. i had some angry words for the manager, but i have a feeling this isn't the end of the story.

* when asked what songs he knows, he regaled the teacher with rob zombie's superbeast and the goblin king's song from the hobbit - that's my boy! and although i was working in another room it was clear he was enjoying the lesson and doing pretty well ^_^

two exciting things that have been kind of happening over the past few days.

the first: i made a suggestion in a vegan group about crowdfunding a vegan food truck for a high traffic area that has generated some support, now we just have to determine the right mechanism to enable people to buy in without lots of effort.

the second: our temple council was extremely receptive to hosting a community networking / upskilling / digitalization workshop event and we already have one professional network on board. i feel silly only thinking about doing this almost a year into covid, but better late than never!

...

mr smear is watching the hulk animated series, i just heard the voice of brain from pinky and the brain and realized it was doctor strange. what an impressive resume!

right, i have to practice today's leyning and then continue my struggle to prepare for thursday's - the megillah cantillation is hard.

can't even

 these past two days have been overwhelming enough, thoroughly exhausting and full of context switching and stressful occurrences. but none so much as this morning's revelation that gd's original, certified documents, which have now travelled the world more times than we could really afford, arrived in south africa weeks ago but its container would take another few months to be processed.

which led us into a frantic scramble to begin reproducing the documents (a complicated and expensive procedure) and reauthenticating them (same), and planning for the possible eventuality that we'd need to move back to montreal temporarily in order to complete our aliyah process from there.

and then, a few hours later, my mother's efforts paid off and someone there miraculously managed to locate the documents in the unopened container! so we're praying that they complete the rest of their journey unharmed so that we can get on with all of this.

...

i've been sleeping a bit better lately (even if my neck's been acting up). so that's good.

the banking struggle continues, but we seem to be making progress. so that's good.

mr smear is loving his new school, and we are too. so that's good.

our cleaning lady managed to see the dentist and get a tooth extracted this morning (as opposed to her original plan of waiting a week for an appointment). so that's good.

i feel like i need/deserve a moment to myself. so i think i'm going to hit stellaris (timeboxed, though) and then *maybe* do something productive before bed.

i said i wouldn't but i lied

 i just dragged myself out of a serious stellaris session (another do-over, another completely different game). to finally sit down and look at the ten verses from megillat esther that i've agreed to leyn next week. which i now realize is going to be a lot more difficult than i expected.

today was super long, i spent it on my feet, and i was wiped out by the end of it. my live demo crashed and burned: turns out cdk doesn't play nicely when teams is presenting, and the moment i left the presentation it returned to normal. otherwise, i made some real progress in a number of ways today but the end of the day was discussing an internal customer's pain with him, and it was pretty bad.

family time post-work was great, though, as we finally got around to putting up a bunch more of our stickers and our bathroom's looking pretty darn cool. oh, and i managed to sort out our bank cards today (turned out they forgot to notify me that my credit card arrived at the branch a week ago). and mr smear was pretty cool about forest school.

did a week go by?

nope, just most of one.

today was a long, but pretty good day - the most satisfying part was raising an issue and getting buy-in from all involved both on its severity and on a resolution timeline. i'm pretty happy with the fact that page 11 of the sonnet comics is completed, too ^_^

there're a million things i haven't done today, and i'm not doing any of them now. now i'm going to bed. even if what i'd like to be doing is firing up stellaris again. that game is addictive.

the weekend was covered in muggy and miserable weather, my biggest achievements were writing up an article on saturday (which i apparently need to split into two parts) and building in account confirmation into two of my projects (at the same time, at least). 

i've been stressing a bit regarding gd's aliyah application and our timeline - we still haven't received her documents, and my mother reminded me the other day that august comes before september. my internal timeline's been all wonky, for some reason, and now i'm realizing just how close that is... and after a bit of research over the weekend i've realized that getting him into a school for first grade might be a bit trickier than i anticipated.

otherwise, i wonder if anything interesting happened last week? i know i put a fair amount of effort into a new project - a rush job that we urgently need for work but that we're not authorized to build on work time - otherwise, i vaguely remember getting work stuff done and not getting enough exercise.

oh! and i was really anxious about not being paid on time, but once my team lead stepped in i was so immensely relieved by speed of the transfer (the next day) and the ease of accepting money with my new bank account (a couple of clicks) that i actually became emotional. now if only i could get my damned bank cards to work...

a good birthday

 sunday was really nice, we stuck a candle in a donut (although it took forever to light, but hey), we visited the sa jewish museum (the exhibit on the history of progressive judaism in south africa was a lot more interesting than i expected, i guess i will buy the book), the now-traditional toy shopping (gd's birthday presents are toys that she "shares" with mr smear, this year's are a (plastic) woody and buzz lightyear), a failed book shopping (when we actually shop for a book for gd, she can't decide), and sailor joined us for a swim in the afternoon (it was too cold, but we enjoyed chilling by the pool anyway while mr smear practiced diving).

monday:

i was super tired again. i really wasn't enthusiastic about what i was doing, and i'm still struggling to sleep*. drop-off drama again, very warm weather for walking, and in the afternoon the play-date was quite distracting. i did exercise bike, though. mr smear's loving the 1996 animated hulk series. i went to bed early, slept badly.

* here i am posting this at 2am after a couple of hours working on something because my hips were hurting. interestingly enough, the moment i gave up stretching and sat down the discomfort went away, so i guess my underlying problem is that i'm now so used to sitting that i can't lie down any more.

tuesday:

a much better work day, even if i'm not making a lot of hours. more drop-off drama, and gd's made it clear that i need to work from my mom's again. again with the exercise bike. the fireball documentary on appletv+ is pretty cool. here we are is absolutely gorgeous.

over the weekend i cleaned up my mobile app, which is now "good enough" to deploy. for the past couple of days (when i haven't been working, sleeping or busy with my family) i've been quite focused on a web portal to support the solution, and it's my first real react project as well as my first website in over a decade where i actually care about UI (as opposed to UX, i always care about UX): tailwind is superb. it's mostly been a good experience, with the usual minor grievances against poor documentation, but as of half an hour ago i'm pretty much done with the login process.

oh! last piece of news: the illustrator has sent me page 11 with lines and colours and it's looking pretty good :)

sunday morning shenanigans

i *think* my last post was on tuesday, but the rest of the week was a blur.

we had serious trouble dropping mr smear off at forest school - high drama farewells, even if he was fine right after - and thursday was an online school day and he behaved really badly from sunrise to sunset. but otherwise he's been pretty good, he even handled his MMR/adacel vaccinations on friday with more bravery than his mother. and his swimming's improving in leaps and bounds, literally as he's starting to enjoy jumping while slowly becoming less enthusiastic about face-planting.

my favourite moment from thursday: i overheard gd during one of the online classes:

"what are you excited about for your new school?"
...
"no, you're not going to get married and have a baby at your new school"

work-wise: after the week's initial frustrations we hit hump day, and when i say it was all downhill from there what i mean is that the last two days of the week were full of back-to-back mind-melting super-long code reviews.

wednesday evening: i joined a make event to put together a self-watering plant, but halfway through the evening went thoroughly pear-shaped and i've yet to figure out how to connect the pump.

and i suspect that at least a part of my deep exhaustion was due to my still recovering from the nightmare of the week before.

...

the marilyn manson story has been bothering me for days - yet another phenomenal artist has turned out to be an utter piece of shit and i'm pretty disappointed, in particular because ever since bowling for columbine he's been a bastion of rationality in a thoroughly corrupt industry.

and now, after a couple of days being bothered by this, all i can think of is how literally he has manifested the peter gabriel song sledgehammer

...

yesterday: a very relaxed saturday morning, i spent a couple of hours learning to play stellaris, went for a walk to pick something up for gd's birthday (yay! it was just opened and appreciated), and spent the afternoon swimming and watching wolfwalkers (passing out and being prodded awake by mr smear). a beautiful movie and a great story for kids, but the character of bill goodfellowe was so irredeemably stupid that it made it impossible to sympathize.

over the course of the past couple of days i've resolved almost all of the outstanding issues with the mobile app i've been developing, and i'm hoping that i'll be able to put together a basic management portal today so that we can begin field testing!

...

mr smear wanted to surprise his mother for her birthday this morning, i managed to convince him that if i hide behind my computer she wouldn't see me.

<whispering loudly>
"dad! we need it to be darker!"
"then turn off the sun!"
without hesitation, he drew the curtains. so proud.

early bedtime

superfreakonomics: a bit dated (some of the stated facts have been disproved), but mostly brilliant.

it was a relief dropping mr smear off with his class this morning, even if he was a bit disinterested at first.

gd has officially sold one of her dresses! 

the afternoon swim was fun, but the water's becoming colder... 

today was a very long, frustrating workday with only a partial payoff at the end. i spent a lot of the day eating my emotions. 

expo is mostly great, but the production builds and publishing are a bit finnicky.

small victories

 gd and i just watched the little things, which is pretty good. on a different level of little things:

• i've just made some more progress on my mobile app, at least enough to feel like i'm ready to give my client a trial run
• i finally got back on the exercise bike this evening
• aside from an embarrassing (public) brain-fart in the evening, and in spite of heavy distractions today, i actually managed to get some work done. those heavy distractions included:
• helping to manage mr smear's first virtual lessons for the year (my bad, he missed one of them)
• him and his playdate shrieking at the tops of their lungs in the afternoon
• a large herd of yaks that queued up for shaving
• mr smear and i had an unpleasant run in this morning while gd was out, but i managed to turn it into a calm conversation and improved behaviour so i'm feeling pretty pleased with myself

oh, yeah - and my day started with me waking up a stranger to inform her that in response to my complaints about their negligence, nedbank had sent me a copy of her personal details and private account numbers and balances and that she might want to reconsider which institutions she places her trust.

oh, and one more oh yeah: after a bit of back and forth, it looks like the illustrator and i agree on the concept for page 11 so i'm quite excited to see the results.

oh! one extra "yeah" - gd's documents have arrived in the country, we're praying they make it the last stretch in a reasonable amount of time.

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.