vacation required

i'm, uh... i'm a bit tired. and stressed. and in need of some time off.

playing a couple of hours of hacknet doesn't count.

i'm pleased to report that the "one job" i was supposed to do yesterday was quick and painless, but we then ran into issues with our build server (atlassian products don't like to enable developers to do things that developers normally need to do without a fight) and it took a lot of trial-and-error before we understood the nature of the limitations and could put a viable-but-ugly workaround in place. on a tenth of our builds. so it will require a fair amount of time to implement the rest tomorrow.

that was for the old team. for the new team, every step along the way we've been uncovering more urgent blocking stuff, it's kinda like shaving a yak except everything is a real dependency. at least i've been able to feel like i'm contributing, which i guess is nice?

today was mr smear's last day of term, so he's on vacation for two weeks. some of this afternoon, with the three of us in the same space and all trying to do very different things, was entirely infeasible and gd's "encouraging" me to go work at my mom's over the course of the next couple of weeks.

oh, geez.

 between my neck and my brain, sleeping is work.

in contrast to yesterday, today was a nightmare. it started with a rushed morning (i can't even blame mr smear like usual, *i* made us late), and then the one (paid gig) job i had to take care of got sidelined by very weird bamboo behaviour.

convinced that everything would go smoothly, i finally sat down with my client to import the data and give a quick tour. well, that didn't go very well... after a couple of hours of high stress debugging, interrupted by my wife slicing off her thumbnail and needing to be rushed to the hospital (that literally, and very dramatically interrupted the meeting) and needing to pick up mr smear who was *not* interested in listening to anyone today, i finally discovered that an update that i pushed last night had broken the import. the fix itself was trivial, so all that drama (well, the client drama) was entirely unnecessary.

at least, once the import was done everything else worked beautifully. 

so i eventually got back to work, spending my afternoon performing a lengthy code review and discovering that my manager left for parental leave without posting important credentials to our secrets server, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because while recreating the credentials we realized that we have some critical administrative functionality that only works in dev. so tomorrow's surprise priority will be figuring out what needs to be deployed and deploying it before friday...

in the late afternoon my mom arrived to show us something amazing: while sorting out my late great aunt's apartment with her cousin, they discovered a small store of documents from my great-grandparents, in particular their travel documents from lithuania at the turn of the 20th century!

also in mom's news, she's justifiably excited to have won a golf club event yesterday that got her name on a trophy that my granny's name is on too :)

...

this morning i showed mr smear the dawn of man sequence from 2001: a space odyssey, now he wants to watch "that silly movie" :P

we started watching the golden compass, he began with his usual "i don't wanna" and ended up with his usual "i don't wanna stop" at shower time.

right, i've been up for an hour or so, and all i've done is post this and watch random stuff over gd's shoulder. additionally, catching up with an old friend and trying to figure out what i called him (i think it's overclocker), but getting a bit lost in reading my old blog posts from a particularly rough period...

one day at a time

 that's the only way to navigate my world, these days. we still haven't received word regarding gd's canadian documents, and juggling between paid work, my side project, the graphic novel, the tattoos, trying to be a good husband and father, dealing with neck and nerve issues, and not being completely sedentary is proving a little overwhelming, so i'm kinda just rolling with things as much as can and hoping i don't screw up or neglect anything too important.

yesterday was a rough but successful work day - at one point i only almost cried out of sheer frustration, but a coworker jumped in to the rescue and was able to solve the mystery with secret knowledge (it turned out he'd broken the thing a while back and we hadn't figured out how, then subsequently got distracted and forgot about the entire incident).

i was ready to deliver my side-project yesterday, but my client was forced to bail on our meeting so we're doing it tomorrow. which is nice, because i've taken today off for sukkot and it's given me a chance to add some nice little improvements.

speaking of sukkot, today was our first hybrid prayer service and it was a great success - i was not expecting to feel emotional but hearing a bunch of people singing together today was really nice. and then i ended up hearing live music for the first time in ages, which was fun. even if the music itself was a bit crap. mr smear's class (including the parents) was treated to a live band before they put on a little show of their own, and i was lucky to be able to make it (gd arrived late, after mr smear had performed, because she'd been getting her neck examined).

the weather's been lovely and it's been a great day so far.

oh! back to yesterday: mr smear and i finished his lego technic alt-build and it was really cool, and we also received a "frog robot" that needed some "man of the house" assembling - it's such a cool little thing (it's a very simple design, but it's behaviour is very sweet) that mr smear took a while to grasp that it's not a voice-activated servant :P

either way, wins for dad.

chag sameach!

check, check, check

app and portal ready for delivery? check.

spending a good chunk of the day watching the *new* new he-man series on netflix with mr smear? (it's legitimately excellent, far superior to the kevin smith reboot): check.

convincing mr smear to go five rounds of dance dance revolution with me because neither of us had done anything remotely physical all day: check.

getting started on an alt-build for mr smear's lego technic kit: check.

now - to bed. a little later than planned, as usual, but with waaaay less on my shoulders.

cold 'n wet sunday morning

 good. yesterday was the last tattoo of season 2021, and although the tattoo itself went well i'd forgotten that the first night generally doesn't. it was a night full of nightmares, discomfort, and thinking about stuff i could do nothing about. i'm not quite feeling my best this morning, though it seems to be starting off well (i've played through a hacknet mission - i started from scratch a few days ago because i wanted to continue and, years later, had absolutely no context to work with).

thurday:

after a generally constructive yom kippur (though i did need a nap due to the lack of caffeine), we went to my mom's for the breaking of the fast and had a jolly evening. the main takeaway - from my six year old's perspective - was that my sister and cousin have potty mouths.

friday:

i really struggled to focus on work, my morning was very much wrapped up in a visit to the doctor (looks like i'm going to need antibiotics for my sinuses after all) and the hairdresser (omg so much better), and by late afternoon i'd done relatively little and was thoroughly over the week. so i dived back into steamworld heist when mr smear was busy with other things, and the two of us constructed a lego technic birthday gift together and that was a fantastic experience! especially figuring out together how all the gears interacted.

saturday:

a pleasant temple service, steamworld heist, then taking mr smear to the promenade with sailor to take advantage of the surprisingly hot and sunny weather before heading off the the tattoo parlour. i was saddened by the large numbers of antivaxxers protesting vaccines, and at some point just couldn't handle being within 50m of them and we skedaddled just as mr smear had decided he was ready to go home.

my favourite part of the morning - we were struggling to get mr smear out of the house while i was on the phone with sailor, so he suggested i tell mr smear that if he hurries we'll introduce him to a mermaid. this worked for about a minute, and then suddenly backfired with a loud wail: "i - don't - WANNA - meet - a - mermaid!!!", and we then had to convince him that if he would cooperate we would cancel the meeting.

...

the new tattoo is beautiful, though there's a weird line that gd noticed and that's now impossible to unsee, but overall it's all good and i'm now ready to dedicate my sunday to figuring out these android issues and trying to make the website feature complete before the new week begins.

reflection

a theme ran through last night's dreams - i'd returned to israel to discover that a bunch of coworkers from my tech support days and fellow students had been involved in producing a zombie movie, and it was a pretty good zombie movie.

this past week has been laser-focused on work and my side-project, with very little space for exercise or fun.

side project: as much progress as i've been making, i discovered yesterday that i've only been testing with the ios emulator and for some reason my android phones are not behaving the same - but in ways that are thoroughly inexplicable. i'm a bit stressed about that because i basically have a hard deadline of monday to get the current state (plus additional functionality) out the door...

paid work: my manager has left for parental leave a couple of days earlier than anticipated, i feel like he's left us well-prepared. one of my team members has been pretty ill the past couple of weeks and i'm a little worried that it may be more serious than it seems. otherwise, i've been working (a long and arduous slog) for works against a deadline of tomorrow, and yesterday managed to complete all my tasks which is quite a relief.

my nose is still bloody since covid, so i've finally booked a doctor's appointment for tomorrow. my neck's been in a bad way for the last week, i'm praying that the physio beating me up yesterday will help. mr smear is thoroughly enjoying his newfound skill: sharpening pencils. i'm nervous about getting a tattoo on saturday because the weather's starting to get warmer; it'll definitely be the last tattoo of the season, this year i've already managed nine tattoos so far but ten's a nice round number...

oh! i think i've forgotten to mention - this past year has been a year of separations, from my cousins separating to my sister finally divorcing my passive-aggressively abusive brother in law (it looks like the only step left is just a formality) and her daughter finally getting through her insane divorce proceedings against her disgusting i'm-rich-but-i-won't-help-with-my-kid married-my-beard trash.

anyways, today's yom kippur and i'm very grateful for my family, and for my family putting up with me as i slowly unravel and unlearn my "sharp" behaviour. i've lived forty years as a  consistently angry guy, and that's made me rough even on my good days...

not with a bang, but a whimper

 that's how my weekend's ending, although to be fair it was mostly excellent in additional to being wildly successful on the mobile app front. it took me most of today but i've finally got the thing working really nicely and now it's just a couple of features shy - and i believe they're minor ones.

friday was a great and satisfying work day, saturday was a very sabbath-y sabbath and after my mom picked up mr smear in the late afternoon gd and i headed off to protoplasm's where he and his partner had put together a phenomenal vegan meal for a few more people than actually arrived. we had an awesome time, we ate too much, we got home just before curfew and we both passed out soon after (i did try to watch primal, which looks amazing, but i fell asleep on the couch).

today had a couple of rough patches but was primarily about mr smear discovering that he could make stop-motion videos while i made slow and steady progress, and when the miserable weather cleared up the three of us went for an enjoyable walk in the company gardens.

i'm a little disappointed in the tattoo artist, who had forgotten to put me in the book for yesterday, but i'm actually relieved 'cause it would probably have messed up my evening.

gd's just gone to bed, i've just pushed my last changes for the day, and i guess i need a cup of tea and a little decompression before i crash 'cause my brain's still buzzing.

...

on the health front, it hasn't been such a great weekend. the back of my head's very tender and a bit swollen (apparently it might be related to my neck) and whatever's going on with my neck has been causing me pain down my left arm into my hand. which for the most part has been fine today, except now that i typed this out my thumb's hurting. well played, me, well played.

the scat man

 jesus, today's had some hectic moments. someone's... umm... been making a bit of a mess in the bathroom the last little while. and i got a very angry "I HATE YOU" today (after a couple of straight hours of lego harry potter i said it was time to go offline for a bit, which wasn't received well). that really doesn't feel good.

on the other hand, mr smear's birthday circle at school was absolutely great. we managed to score just enough mini-donuts (which are the perfect-sized donuts) from grumpy & runt and the kids and teachers made it a really special experience.

i spent all day reviewing other people's code, at one point just managing to log my time before literally passing out for fifteen minutes. it was a lovely day that i'd missed, so in the evening i went out for a walk and on the way ended up picking up a really nice falafel in a pita from nish nush that mr smear and i enjoyed together.

six episodes in, and mr robot is still excellent.

it's almost 1am and i'm a bit disappointed by how slow my expo app progress is going.

happy 5782!

 so far, so good. well, one minor hiccup (i need to learn how to handle mr smear more effectively and less negatively) over the course of the last three days, but mostly things are good. work hasn't been particularly thrilling but it's been good nonetheless, and this evening i made some progress with the mobile app in spite of the fact that i've spent the past hour yawning (and trying to watch riddick, and finding it a bit pathetic).

the rosh hashana services were good, our family dinner on monday evening was really nice, and mr smear stayed at my mom's which gave me and gd a nice little break. then, on tuesday afternoon, i put on my blades and mr smear got on his bike and we rolled around the promenade together, every now and then joined by my mother who'd taken the opportunity for a walk.

we definitely need to do that more often.

ready for the new year

 well, this weekend has been a surprisingly good one. a great one, in fact. i'm pretty stoked about it. the only downer this weekend is that gd's been struggling with neck pain since yesterday, but she seems to be doing better today and hopefully she'll be back to relative normal by tomorrow. as for my sinuses, they're still not 100% but seem much better than yesterday, so that's good.

yesterday was a miserable-weather indoors kind of day, perfect for discovering a fantastic humble bundle for kids, one with two titles of particular interest. so we installed pajama sam: no need to hide when it's dark outside and as soon as the morning service was over i jumped in with mr smear who absolutely loves it. i mean - to be fair - i love it too. it's a great game.

i was exhausted, and needed to rest quite a bit, but in the late-ish afternoon got sent on a errand and took mr smear with me. we walked to the shopping centre, and after a successful mission sat down to eat carob rice cakes and enjoy some drinks. my mom rocked up, gave us a ride home, and after dropping mr smear off upstairs i went through to sea point to join sailor - well, to record him, not actually join him - for his fifteen minutes in the rock pool. aside from the fact that it was a beautiful sunset and it felt really nice to be there in spite of it being a bit chilly, we also had a really interesting conversation.

i was exhausted after putting mr smear to bed, i crashed and ended up having a pretty decent night's sleep for the first time in many days - not being on prednisone probably had a lot to do with that.

today started off on a good foot. mr smear returned to playing pajama sam and i made great progress on my project. in the early afternoon i took him to the museum but there were too many people in line with too little distance between them, so we headed off to the aquarium instead. after an enjoyable visit - as mr smear gets older his experience of it changes dramatically - we then entered the super park for the first time since it initially shut down for covid. it was awesome. i cannot described how much i enjoyed seeing mr smear enjoying himself, challenging himself physically and learning new things (i was a bit nervous watching him figure out the zip line by himself for the first time, but after his first success his confidence and mine shot right up).

the car ride home wasn't great, as a demonstration of why sharing and kindness pay off (seaweed vs jelly tots, i don't feel like explaining) turned into a teaching moment or two. otherwise, the rest of the afternoon and evening were great, in addition to taking a bath i finished off the current phase of my project's website development (so i'm now back to working on the mobile app) while mr smear played little big planet 3 and then sailor and i continued yesterday's chat which we developed into an idea that we're both very excited about.

my mom is (via video chat) continuing to read harry potter to mr smear at bedtime, which is fun, and after saying goodnight i joined gd for the second half of the suicide squad. i'm usually not a big fan of the dc universe, but the reboot is fantastic - the story and action are excellent, the characters are wonderful and there's a great balance between cool and silly. we thoroughly enjoyed it!

and the meds weren't worth it

 i thought the meds were helping (at least, in contrast to how much they've been hindering), but after a couple of days doing much better i've just woken up with a stuffy, bloody nose again. i guess it's time for a face-off with the doctor...

i ditched my day-job yesterday morning and spent some hours trying to make my project presentable. while jumping off the top of the live demo tree i - hit - every - branch - on - the - way - down. fifteen minutes before go-time, i found a showstopper that forced me to ask for a fifteen minute delay, and then it was too late...

halfway through a minor refactor, i demo'ed.

somehow, the demo wasn't an abysmal failure.

i was actually surprised by how well the system held up, i'd been so frantic all day (arguably not helped by the prednisone) that my mind was all over the place, and forgetting that i had no idea whether the import would work i ditched the existing data to demo it and clocked the onosecond. and then, doubling down, i hit the import button and - magic! - it performed.

ultimately, there were plenty of nitpicks and little improvements to be made but overall my client is looking forward to using this and i have more than a week to take care of the issues that came up.

for the rest of the day i dived into day-work, then called it a week and cracked open a hunter's that had been sitting in the fridge for months waiting for its moment*. i spent the next hour or so alternating between sipping and coding, and by the time i was ready to switch off for dinner i was feeling much, much better about the state of the world.

* this past week has been a "cheat week", i've gotten almost no exercise and i think i've managed to gain back all the weight i lost while down with covid :P

---

oh! funny story from the yesterday morning: i finally called the department of home affairs about the existing passport application that i never made. after waiting twenty five minutes for someone to answer from the department of home affairs contact center, i explained the problem and was asked to hold again... fifteen more minutes of hold music before she got back to me - she had sent an email to someone else and was keeping me on hold while she waited for the response.

+2

 two hours later, and i've actually managed to make a lot of progress that i'm really happy with. unfortunately, i now have much less time for sleep.

*sigh*

damned if you do...

phasing

 jesus, it's past 2am and i've spent hours lying in bed, too exhausted to do the things i need to do but unable to stop my mind from racing around a track filled with anxieties about where we are and where we're going and imagining random aspects of reconnecting once we (hopefully) (eventually) get there.

this week has been a mess for me, for two reasons. the first, that covid is the gift that keeps on giving and i've been forced to treat the ongoing sinus infection that started when the main symptoms ended and always seemed to be on the verge of getting better. the treatment - prednisone again, in an attempt to avoid antibiotics - has been effective regarding the sinuses, but has (as it does) completely messed me up. i've been wired and tired and for days, now, under the gun on my personal project, i've been forced to go to bed early but not really sleep.

the second, in two parts:

1. that at work (my paid gig) i've been trapped in an endless code review cycle because a *small* change that i started at the beginning of the week opened a can of worms, and between the conflicting opinions of my coworkers, massively time-consuming tests and annoying shortcomings of shell scripts and python i only managed to close the damn thing yesterday afternoon.

2. that after breaking the back of the changes for my personal project, and setting a delivery date to (today, as in less than twelve hours' time), i subsequently discovered more sharp react edges and my personal time has been consumed by a long slog of steady improvements, each costing much more than expected. and with the meds, instead of working until late at night and then getting some rest i've been restless at night and dragging myself out of bed at 6am each morning to be able to get *some* time in.

so here i am, trying to drop some of my mind-spinning experience into a post before maybe doing a little work before hopefully going back to bed and actually managing to sleep.

recovery

 the most important effort of the past few weeks was successful, mr smear had his birthday party today and it went well: a bunch of his friends and family came, everyone had a good time. he also loved all his birthday presents. definite win.

this past week just flew by, i'm still amazed that i actually got in a forty hour work week (possibly for the first time since i joined the company). that goes a long way to making up for the two covid weeks. my boss called me up mid-week to inform me that i would be switching teams (and to verify that i'm okay with it), and i admit i was a little bit nervous about my new manager (a guy i've been working quite closely with for the last year or so) until we had a chance to chat one-on-one on friday and now i'm feeling a lot more confident about the changes.

mr smear went back to school on thursday, and our cleaning lady came in. the world returned to its regular speed.

 i've been exhausted this week - he says, about to go to bed really late - but in spite of that gd and i have gotten through all but the last episode of season 1 of legion, and aside from one episode that was twice as long as it needed to be it's been exquisite.

i've made enormous progress on my side project, but today (this afternoon, since getting back from the party) was long and extremely frustrating and i only just (like, about half an hour ago) managed to figure out a hack around some of react's rendering behaviour. i'm loading and processing so much data into one page that i have to avoid unnecessary reloads, so i spent a day moving all the logic into its own module and then couldn't get it render even though i have another page and class doing exactly the same thing but working.

anyway, at least it's operational now and i can move on to what i initially thought was going to be the hard part :P

(not to mention that i spent an hour or two wrangling the client's data export during the week, the software they're working with does *everything* non-standard, including exporting to invalid csv, and apparently the vendor is being unhelpful with regards some other data that's not included in the export at all. what these idiots don't understand is that by making it unpleasant for their clients to walk away, they're breaching trust to the point where they'll never want to go back)

mostly post-covid

 this has been an interesting and busy experience. before i begin:

this last week we all got covid, and for a day and a half i was on my own taking care of my son and working and trying not to let the house fall apart while my wife rested. it's not the first time since the lockdowns started that i've freaked out about how insanely tough single parenting must be on a good day, let alone having to babysit/entertain/troubleshoot AND do chores AND get work done AND stress about whether you can keep your job / survive the pandemic along with your loved ones.

last year we were hearing stories post-hard lockdown about people with small children - frightening numbers of them - being forced to return to work before the schools opened and either leaving the kids with neighbours they had no relationship with or locking them in their houses and praying that they'd somehow be okay (physically, not even discussing the psychological trauma).

jesus christ, have we lost our way as a society... i'm no fan of john oliver, but watch the episode of last week tonight on maternity leave and tell me that's not scary.
i really, really hope that all the horrors of this pandemic lead to some more awareness and support. parenting is tough enough for two parents.

fortunately, i didn't have to take off last week, but i did do way less hours than i would have liked. it's tough to self-care under these conditions. there's some reorganization going on at work, but so far it's all feeling positive and i'm getting my work done at a good enough pace. hours-wise, at least this week's off to a good start, and although it's been a bit daunting my side-project progress has been slow and steady (i registered a major design flaw over the weekend and was very relieving when meeting my client today to hear that he's happy with my solution to it).

i lost some weight due to covid, but am slowly putting it back on. we're REALLY excited for thursday, when we can finally send mr smear back to school and start living our lives again. i'm particularly excited about the idea of getting back on my blades again.

over the course of the last few nights my mum's been reading harry potter to mr smear over video chat (we both have copies), and it's been a great experience. which reminds me of sad news, my mum's really struggling to get rid of her coffee shop and cut her losses and it's super frustrating to not be able to help in any substantial way.

...

dance dance revolution has returned to its spot as our only reliable exercise regime. i get the strangest feeling that the designers intended us to wear red/blue 3D glasseses while playing, it's trippy AF. additionally, i bought little planet 3 this weekend. our boy's been stuck at home for weeks and we all could use a little treat... this was a fantastic purchase!

boy, was i wrong. hello, covid.

 so it turns out i *did* have covid. and i've no idea where i managed to pick it up. runny nose aside, i was feeling fine until thursday morning, during which i was decidedly unfocused. then i took a walk with mr smear to drop off the rented video as an excuse to be outside, got back home and felt so utterly lousy i actually had to call in sick.

i proceeded to feel progressively worse, very "man-flu"-ish, and on friday morning i took my meds and slugged a cup of coffee and fast-walked ('cause i was running late) to a covid test so that we could be certain for mr smear's birthday party on sunday.

let me tell you, i was beginning to feel a little better on saturday morning, so when i got a call from the doc that afternoon informing me i'd tested positive i was stunned. frantic retracing of steps (with brain-fog) and reporting my test result to my contacts, followed by lots more time in bed and staying as far away from my family as is reasonable considering we all live in a tiny space together.

i was still feeling uncertain on my feet (dizzy and fatigued) until sunday night, but monday morning came around and three things had changed: 

1. i was feeling pretty good for the first time in days

2. my lower back nerve pain had fired up again for the first time in a long time

3. gd hadn't slept well and was beginning to struggle with her own covid experience

i spent a lot of yesterday working on my personal project, mostly because it was an unpressured thing to do and i'm still supposed to be resting and taking it easy. i eventually managed to put in a couple of paid work hours too, which was satisfying.

today was difficult. gd was in excruciating pain, so it was on me to manage mr smear while trying to take care of small things around the house and get a little work done. some of it was fun! some, not so much. we've been really fortunate to have a community volunteer looking after us, after this morning's report they sent a nurse to look at gd and she was heartbroken, we called the doctor together and i took gd off to the hospital.

while she was being treated there, i took mr smear back home and we did our things until she was ready to be picked up again. just as we were leaving his best friend's mother dropped off a huge bag of gifts, we picked up gd, and after dropping them home i had to go off to the pharmacy for an outside pickup.

the rest of the afternoon / evening has been a juggling act of working, chores, entertaining / exercising with / feeding mr smear, with the usual shower / bedtime routine ending just before 10pm.

lesson of the day: i'm a complete stranger in my own kitchen. i'm also tired and nervous about taking a week of leave that i won't get paid for. the downside to contracting...

thing that has helped the most to maintain sanity over the course of the last few days? alugalug cat 2.0.

dependen(ce|ts)

sudafed... is the real hero. at least whatever's making this happen (probably allergies?) isn't being made worse with a decongestant dependence, i've been off iliadin since the last episode and the symptoms really aren't so bad.

have i really not posted anything in a week? i know there've been a few interesting things happened, but i'm sure i've forgotten more than i've remembered.

mr smear turned six on friday, so for his birthday we got him a covid test and then isolated for 24 hours. as we thought, he didn't have it. i'm still not sure why his doctor was so insistent. fun times.

my mother and i had a conversation about a business opportunity that i'm praying she dives into.

tattoo 21 is the first that's right next to my belly button, pain-wise it was bearable but *damn* it's hard to breathe in a helpful way and i now understand why tattoo artists find the belly so tough to work on - because there's nothing to press against. especially if you're carrying a few extra pounds.

most of my weekend went to weaning off my google reliance, or documenting the process. i'm still updating things today, but i believe i've covered all the critical stuff.

saturday afternoon i took mr smear down to the garage with his bicycle and my blades, and we had a good time. i think it's time to remove the training wheels.

sunday evening mr smear and i went for a promenade walk with sailor, which in retrospect may have been a mistake considering mr smear's chest is still compromised. we did all thoroughly enjoy a ride on the blue train, though.

monday was a public holiday, and i joined the rollerblading group again - it was great fun! i definitely got exercise and had quite a few engaging conversations.

something's happening with one of my coworkers, but we're not quite sure whether he's leaving or being promoted. work has been going pretty well.

last night gd and i watched sof ha'olam smolah, which was not the movie i thought it was going to be (i somehow confused it with ahava colombianit). it's a brilliant movie almost entirely composed of cringe that we both enjoyed.

...

the other day i got a taste of a reddit post going viral. it's exciting, but it's work.

weird coincidence

 a few days ago i was walking somewhere when - and i don't remember any context for this - the following insult popped into my head "if i had a dog with a face like yours, i'd shave its ass and teach it to walk backwards". that's from gleaming the cube, a childhood favourite, with brian kelly (christian slater) insulting detective al lucero (steven bauer) in a particularly - at least for 8 year old me - memorable way.

so last night gd mentions something about a "thrasher film" - i presume she meant to say "slasher" - and i said that that reminded me of thrashin' and gleaming the cube.

a little later, and probably unrelated to her earlier comment, i noticed that she was watching primal fear. i loved primal fear, and after being surprised by the fact that i recognized it from the lawyers' interactions even before the murder scene, i saw pinero and thought "geez, that guy looks so familiar!". i couldn't place him at all, so looked him up on imdb, but there was nothing i would have recognized until... al lucero.

blank

 i'm tired, but no more than usual. gd and i managed to get the first of our vaccinations yesterday, both our injection sites are sore but she's also been thoroughly fatigued.

mr smear started a cough today, we're hoping he'll be well enough to not miss his "birthday circle" at school...

i don't know if i'm doing the intermittent fasting correctly. i'm having no trouble with the not eating part, but i feel like i'm compulsively making up for lost time during my eating window.

every time i look at my bank statements i'm forced to scratch my head and wonder where the heck all our money's going. it just doesn't make any sense.

gd got *all* the teensies in rayman: legends this evening! that game is insane and brilliant and i have a suspicion that we'll be replaying it quite a bit.

back on blades

 it's midnight and i'm exhausted, i just wanted to post this quickly before going to bed:

today i bought a second-hand pair of oxygen inline skates and they're really good, i was on them for three hours and i was amazed at how immediately comfortable i was and how well my knee / legs performed!

the last two days of the work week were quite frustrating, but life in general over the course of the past four days has been good. all the tattoos except the latest one have now been outlined, and the artist and i are both excited about the next one. our first double-pager is done (although there were a few last-minute edits required).

we've been having some very interesting conversations with mr smear lately, he seems to be slowly but surely gaining control of his fears. we've both enjoyed the new masters of the universe series but after seeing skelegod he asked me a question that i simply can't find the answer to: why does skelegod have an H on his chest that looks like he-man's?!

good night.

a very happy hump day

 i went to bed reasonably early last night, i was exhausted... but i barely slept, and i don't even know *why* i was so uncomfortable. then i got up early to make up some hours.

work today was extremely satisfying. i've been working on a devops task for a week that's been dragging (mostly due to unexpectedly having to upgrade dependencies to support it), and this evening i finally merged and everything smoothly turned green. i really, really like it when infrastructure-as-code does what it's supposed to.

additionally, our team lead is on vacation and - as always - something broke. two things, actually, but in addition to us mitigating effectively we also uncovered a couple of ticking time-bombs that need to be defused.

that reminds me! after dropping mr smear off at school this morning it popped into my head that i should add "software entomologist" to my resume.

today's physio session was rough. i really need to get myself a pair of rollerblades.

is it only tuesday?

it's been a very, very, very long week. it's involved some strife, which has been a bit of a learning experience but also kinda confusing. yesterday had some hard moments with some difficult decisions.

on sunday, after mr smear and i watched dumbo together, we went with my mom to boulders to see the penguins, after watching the netflix series penguin town (which is surprisingly dramatic). it was a good day. last night we watched the muppets from 2011 and mr smear loved it as much as we did.

work has been good, pretty gratifying. i've reviewed an incomplete upcoming page for the comics and it's really, really good. i have an idea of what sonnet 20 would look like in tattoo form. we had a hackathon team meeting last night and we have a good strategy for the next couple of weeks. i've made great progress with an aspect of my side project.

the intermittent fasting is going well, i'm generally feeling better although my legs are giving me trouble again for the first time in a while.

mr smear is loving being back at school, which is a huge relief.

gd's document story is once again stalled because of issues with organizing police clearances.

something, something, i forget.

fast and furious

this has been one heck of a week.

work was pretty good, i made a reasonable amount of hours and for the large part enjoyed it. side project progress is slow and steady, and satisfying. all the hackathon winnings have been paid out. it looks like the next two pages of the comics are coming along nicely.

at the beginning of the week we learned some details about the aliyah process that made some of our previous decisions suboptimal, but gd got her fingerprints taken, so we're at least a step closer to her police clearance(s) which we need for what we're praying is the final phase.

mr smear and i have had some rough patches but we've been mostly good, and today was especially good.

i'm proud of him for starting to learn to dive in his swimming lessons, even prouder that he was brave enough to plunge in and swim a little in ice-cold water this afternoon after insisting that he wanted to get in the pool.

the intermittent fasting is going well, although for some reason i've been a bit dehydrated the last day or two. i'm amused by my weight fluctuations and i'm pretty confident i've been eating the same amount of calories overall... at the same time, i'm hoping against hope that it'll help me with my neck, this week in particular i've been having nerve pain in my hands and a couple of days ago i woke up in the middle of the night with an arm in pins and needles :(

we've been big into rayman: legends lately, and gd was convinced that origins is harder even though i've been trying to tell her that we've been getting better. so i tried an origins level this afternoon just to see... and i was absolutely right :P

our cousins are getting divorced (although one of them doesn't quite understand that yet, he's in denial), and we had friday night dinner with her last night. her son has invited me to join a sunday rollerblading group... and i'll be damned if i'm not ready to get back into it. i'll take it easy, of course, and i think it would be really cool to take mr smear and his bike along as well.

mr smear's fears seem to be slowly abating, gd made him a talisman that he wears in a pouch around his neck and it seems to be helping. it still blows my mind that this is the same kid who drew blood caverns at school a couple of weeks ago :P

oh, and thanks, mom: she took mr smear to his swimming lesson yesterday and this morning he explained that she said "fsck" and it was okay :/

alright, i'm tired and it's midnight, good night world.

vaccine news!

i almost forgot! gd and i are booked for our first jabs. 

lions, tiger and bear

 most of saturday was great. i got a haircut, and mr smear and i joined sailor for a good walk along the pipe track. unfortunately, mr smear was very busy acting out and the walk turned a bit sour, the evening did not end on a positive note.

most of sunday was fantastic. i got some side-project work done in the morning, as well as taking a couple of steps forward with the next pages of the graphic novel, then my mom picked us up and we drove out to the drakenstein lion park. it's a beautiful place where they give safe homes to abused lions (and a tiger, and a couple of caracals), and it was amazing being able to be outdoors in a large area with mr smear seeing the animals and feeling safe enough to tool around by himself. their rescue-chimpanzee park was also pretty cool.

we stopped by fairview to pick up coffee, see the goats (that reminds me - mr smear's first comment at the lion sanctuary: "i didn't know goats were real!"), visit our friends (gd made it clear that my godmother was not welcome to photos of our boy), play with the dogs and swap stories of bureaucratic insanity.

everything was great except that something wasn't, and gd and i had a blowout after mr smear went to bed that left us both with an ugly feeling (less angry than confused, communicating can be absurdly hard sometimes).

after watching veritasium's how to slow aging (and a week of feeling fat - the pics of my last tattoo shocked me - and finally slowing down on the processed food/snacks) i was inspired to give intermittent fasting a try. i'm now a day in on 16/8 and aside from realizing that i was doing it wrong (tea and coffee are mostly fine during fasting, but not with even a little bit of the soy milk) i'm finding it entirely manageable. i even got a good day's work in, and a good night's work as well.

 my only concern from today was with a team-lead who had been upset by an argument we had on friday. i feel like the conversation went pretty well, considering, but i really do need to be careful with our discussions...

*sigh*
1am. fine. g'nite already.

waking up slowly

 it's a pleasant saturday morning, i've slept late and am feeling a little bit better than i've been the whole week. a part of it was the lack of sleep, a part of it mourning, a part of it mr smear's constant terror that's only just begun subsiding over the past day or two, a part of it is trying to shift my diet from lots of processed snacks to more whole foods, a part of it is still living in a country that's falling apart at the seams (and the world is starting to take notice) while the israeli and canadian bureaucracies continue to force us through flaming hoops.

i don't like being overweight, i don't like that i'm not making / managing to make time to exercise.

i'm exhausted by it all. depressed? probably. and trying not to let it affect my relationships but it's really hard. there are a few things that have helped me maintain sanity this week. one of them is our hackathon team's interview, one of the guys said something that was truly heartwarming (about how obvious it had been to him that he should join our team), and one of them is rayman: legends driving us completely mental (there's a special place in hell reserved for those evil bastards + i can't believe it was made in 2013).

although i missed a day and a half of work at the beginning of the week, i made great progress on the project i've just been added to (we're trying to break the siloing, and so far the new team feels like we're winning). it's very gratifying to join a project knowing nothing and being able to contribute tangibly from the get-go.

plans for today: enjoy the saturday. i'm gratified that mr smear has picked up opus magnum again of his own volition - even if he is missing the point somewhat (he understands the mechanics, but he's very busy "making levels" for me to do :P)

the passing of a matriarch

my great-aunt passed away this afternoon, just a few weeks shy of her 96th birthday. she hadn't been in great health for the past few years but she enjoyed a reasonable quality of life and she certainly had her wits about her. i'm very glad we went to visit her a few weeks ago and we all got to enjoy each other's company.

... 

we tried watching a babysitter's guide to monster hunting last night, mr smear was so utterly terrified by the creepy hand in the intro sequence that he had to sleep in our bed, and so none of us got much rest (he sleeps horizontally when not in his own bed). he was still scared tonight but we managed to get him back in his room so i'm now writing this in bed and crashing early. 

...

i got very little work done on friday, i was mostly tired and distracted by trying to sort out my budgeting cloud app so i could try to get a handle on where our money's disappearing. i ended up figuring out how to convert my pdf bank statements to csv, so i'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.

yesterday's tattoo, no. 19, was directly on my sternum. it generally hurt less than we expected, certainly less than the previous two, but by the time he got to the shading my nervous system was done and the last (i'm guessing) 20 minutes were really difficult. the tattoo came out beautifully, though, but i'm too tired to post it now.

otherwise, i'm making pleasingly steady progress with my side project and the quality of our family game time is improving (we navigated some insanely challenging/evil rayman: legends levels this evening, one of which may have taken 500 to 1000 tries.

we watched maleficent yesterday (beautiful), and the black cauldron today (surprisingly good) .

we're really struggling with the physical exercise. as in, to get any. this is not good. 

time flies regardless of whether you're having fun

sheesh, talk about getting older faster. this week has been insane, full of distractions and excitement, gratitude and frustration and anxieties. hackathon and side project going forward nicely, work is really good (but lots of context switching, which is not so good), and this evening i read an article telling me that multitasking is damaging my brain and i'm feeling personally attacked. 

i think i need a personal assistant.

also, i took the car in for a service and learned i need to drop R10K on it. this afternoon i got a call to say that there's a broken part (i presume they broke it) and the car's now stuck on their lift for the next three weeks.

good grief. i was feeling like i was bleeding money before that news.

anyway, i've been thoroughly exhausted since wednesday and every evening i've intended to get to bed at a reasonable hour and then...

6 years married

 today was our anniversary! some of it was great, some of it not so much, but regardless we're doing fine in the grand scheme of things. we spent a large chunk of the day playing rayman: legends, we took a symbolic walk around the company gardens, watched astro boy and some of ice age 2, put mr smear to bed and have since been making slow but steady progress with my side project - the front end stuff has taken much longer to get right than i'd hoped, the backend refactor has taken longer than i'd like but not unreasonably long.

having said that, it *is* 1.30am already. good grief.

18 down

some of no. 18 hurt a lot, but it was mostly fine. definitely less difficult than no 17.

today was divided into three chunks: waking up early to practice leyning for the first time in weeks, alternating between playing rayman: legends and sorting out my hackathon "trophies", and getting tattooed for the first time in more than a month.

this evening has been all about freakazoid and takeout, posting about my tattoo and playing steamworld: heist. now i'm trying to decide whether to go straight to bed or to watch something first.

decisions.

...

i've been really, really hungry the past few weeks. i know it was triggered by some of the meds i was on, but it seems to be going strong and i'm still not getting any physical exercise. it's very frustrating that i'm either too busy to exercise, or i don't think about it until the timing is inappropriate...

paydirt

well. let me tell you, i was completely taken by surprise last night when they finally announced the hackathon winners, we had no idea and it's been a joyful scramble since to ensure that we're all in agreement as to the values of our contributions so that i can divvy up the prize money.

it's very nice, very welcome prize money, and we're all super excited by the validation and the prospects of taking this project to the next level ^_^

...

in similar news, my employer engaged a bunch of us in a three-day workshop this week to produce a proof-of-concept, and we were as excited by our technical achievement as we were by the fact that our colleagues and bosses have a newfound appreciation for the value of our projects. and then today we learned that as actively invested as we are in improving the security of our infrastructure and our products, we're already noticeably ahead of our competition. this is obviously good for us, but i do hope they follow our lead...

...

things with mr smear have generally been better, but today was a mixed bag and i think i need to step back again...

...

today was the first day since quitting iliadin that my nose, throat and chest have been in decent shape.

...

i watched jane mcgonigal's ted talk a while back, and it's excellent. but i'm reading her book reality is broken and i'm simply inspired by the relationship between gaming and positive psychology.

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).