relief cancelled

 on wednesday night we felt relieved, thinking that our package had been found, but we were wrong. there is no record of the package ever being picked up, so we're back to square one on gd's first marriage certificate which will take months to sort out. and we have to reapply for her police clearance certificate - it's a very good thing i paid that extra $50 so the third-party fingerprinting company keeps her documents on file for a year.

last night i posted the summary post on social media, after lots of talks and planning yesterday we've given notice to the school and mr smear's swimming lessons, and at the end of the month we'll give notice to our landlord, and we're going to start making all the arrangements so that we can be out of her by mid-december.

gd's nerve block went without a hitch - or, at least, she was drugged well enough to not remember it properly. i got home on thursday to find her enthusiastically sewing again, which is exciting.

work-wise, we finally got the release out the door yesterday morning, and i'm immensely relieved that it's off my plate so that i can focus on (pretty much) one job. my team's retrospective yesterday afternoon left me feeling good about how things are going. another money chat with my local coworker also left me feeling positive.

i have a long list of things to do that are nagging me from the back of my brain, but it's shabbat and i need some balance.

i must remember to breathe.

the summary post

for the impatient, there's a TL;DR at the end of this post.

OUR STORY
---------

just over a year and a half ago, when the south african government responded to covid with steps that could only accelerate its downward spiral, we made the decision that it was past time to get out. we've discussed making aliyah on many occasions, and we decided that that's the move that makes the most sense for our family - we want to be with family and with our friends, we want our son to grow up in a jewish environment with (generally) good social values and an attitude of participating and contributing, fixing and improving.

we approached the jewish agency, and began gd's aliyah application. after half a year of expensive document production and deliveries, we understood the following:

1. the canadian government makes the production of documents (police clearance, birth / marriage / etc. certificates) for non-resident canadians very complicated, and requires third parties with high fees for every interaction, each interaction also costing high fees. not to mention long processing times (even before covid), expensive courier fees on top of the aforementioned fees, and complicated rules regarding who can speak to whom and when deliveries and pickups are allowed.

2. courier companies - we've used quite a few different ones - are generally very bad at picking up and delivering documents. one would expect the opposite, but one would be wrong.

3. canada is not a signatory of the hague convention, so the only authorities able to authenticate canadian documents are the israeli authorities physically located in canada. consulates cannot communicate between themselves or make use of modern technology like fax machines, scans or emails for authentication purposes. nobody informed us of this, so we paid and waited to have the documents authenticated by a south african apostille and then the local high commission of canada, but neither of those authentications were considered acceptable.

towards the end of 2020, my israeli passport was renewed, but only for two years. i can only keep travelling as an israeli if i come home - this lines up with my intentions to return, but does put pressure on us to get through a process that we have no control over.

by the beginning of 2021, we miraculously* had all the documents in order and submitted them to the jewish agency. a few weeks later, they got back to us to tell us that we needed one more document which had never been mentioned before. apparently the reason they needed this document was to make sure that gd's name - which is the same on her birth certificate, her passport, our marriage certificate, our son's birth certificate - hadn't changed at any point.

* thanks to my mom, who heroically managed to retrieve original documents that the israeli consulate had posted by regular mail in spite of our instructions and that had been stuck in a container in pretoria that wasn't due to be unloaded for many months.

...

as we've been outside of canada for more than five years, and gd's a temporary resident here (and doesn't have proof of residence), she's not authorized to apply for her own documents. so we had to find a lawyer to submit an application, then wait a month or two to discover that the directeur de l'état civil representative we'd spoken to had given us the wrong form and forgotten to tell us that the lawyer needed to identify themselves in a specific way. so we reapplied, and eventually the certificate (a few months later) was returned to the lawyer (it can't be sent to anyone else) and we sent it off to the israeli consulate in montreal.

we then applied for a new copy of gd's police clearances, because the israeli authorities don't consider clearance older than six months to be valid even if you haven't returned to the country it's issued by.

(i haven't been keeping track of all the costs, i'm honestly scared to go back and put it all together. the authorities involved have made certain that we've had to tighten our belts to make aliyah. suffice it to say that every single interaction we've had with a canadian authority or the israeli consulate in montreal has cost us a lot of money, the last round alone costing us thousands of dollars US)

finally, after half a year of waiting impatiently and trying to plan to move on with our lives, our two canadian documents were authenticated by the consulate in montreal and we scheduled a pickup.

did you know that consulates don't operate after 12 noon? did you know that couriers can't guarantee pickups before 2pm? we didn't.

so after a report of a failed pickup, we made alternate arrangements. unfortunately, before the consulate received my email informing them of those arrangements, fedex picked up the document (outside of that 12 noon window, it should be noted).

and promptly lost it.

TL;DR
-----

so now we've been set back by half a year on top of the year and half that this ridiculous sham has been dragging on, and we're totally over it. we're going to try a different approach. we're now winding up our south african affairs, and we're going to restart the process from israel. we *might* need to swing by canada to sort out the documents, that's not clear at the moment. but what is clear is that wherever we land up, we're outta here, before 2021 is out.

next year in tel aviv.

the relief

 today has been a rollercoaster.

let's start at the end, with the immense relief (but continued shock and disbelief) that after most of an hour on the phone with three different fedex representatives (the first call cut after 25 minutes because my finger slipped and hit the end button), we finally understood that the number we had been given was actually the fedex tracking number and the intermediary is a bit of an idiot.

sheesh.

aside from the immense stress / anxiety that caused (not helped by the fact that gd's scheduled for a nerve block procedure tomorrow and after her last experience she's understandably a bit scared), this evening included a positive adrenaline rush as the release - after weeks of sisyphean efforts to get the damned thing out - is finally ready to go out.

also, my coworker and i had a followup money discussion that put me at my ease.

other streams of work are progressing positively, so that's good, although it kinda sucked being stuck at a desk all day. again. my new monitor arrived, though - and it's gorgeous. it'll be even gorgeouser when the adapter arrives so i can plug it in. and today i learned that microsoft teams upsets my mother even more than me, and that i need to buy her a noise-cancelling headset.

this morning we had another blowout with mr smear on the way to school, although gd and i saw our usual good cop / bad cop roles reversed. we were about a minute away from the school when we finally had a breakthrough moment and fixed the day. a part of me wishes i'd been recording the experience for later analysis.

yesterday:

last night's bedtime had some rough spots (mr smear was "holding onto his poison"), but eventually relented. after posting, gd and i watched the first episode of doom patrol and really enjoyed it in spite of both of us crashing by the end.

the roughness

after costing us thousands of dollars and about half a year, gd's documents seem to have gone missing and i'm really trying hard to not let this get to me.

my eyes are frequently hurting, i just dropped a few grand on a new monitor that i hope will stop this from happening (it's due to arrive on friday). 

my car's been looked at for one thing (a false alarm brakepad warning) and now apparently needs to be seen by a gear specialist. 

two looong days without much progress. and then a repeat six-year-old argument that gd tried to help with, but no joy. 

i'm fucking tired. 

conflicting

 mr smear and i had a pretty mixed up day. it started with him being afraid of his shadow, this time claiming minecraft monsters and asking me to delete the game. then i took him out for a walk, which he didn't protest against too much, and on the way to visit my mom at her coffee shop we happening to be in time to go through the art gallery. he was still too scared to go close to the butcher boys, but he was absolutely riveted by sebidi's the child's mother holds the sharp side of the knife.

this gave way to a wonderful teaching moment about the function of art and the possibility of finding a painting beautiful but its subject awful, which tied in nicely to how he really doesn't like the butcher boys which is a really powerful piece.

we had smoothies with my mom - mine was unpleasant and needed to be chased by a chai - then walked home. it was a beautiful, hot day and everything was great until we were almost home, at which point we got into an argument about something really dumb (he was upset with me that i'd said something even though i hadn't said it) that rapidly escalated into an "i hate this family! i don't want parents" to which i responded, probably wrongly, with a pretty calm "come on, i'm taking you to the orphanage".

i guess i handled that badly, because he still doesn't seem to understand that i only said that in response to what he said and that i wasn't actually planning on taking him to an orphanage.

six year olds, amiright?

...

at least the rest of the evening was alright. i had a great catchup with vfmp, and otherwise have invested the vast majority of my day (morning, noon and night) in experimenting with encryption tools because  i just couldn't get what i wanted out of the decompilers. if i don't come right soon, i may have to give those another shot...

in other news, gd's been feeling sick.

oh! yesterday: my sister's birthday. we all went out to a restaurant in melkbosstrand. being in close quarters with a bunch of other people was weird. seeing my niece for the first time since she blocked me for unfollowing her on instagram was weird, even weirder that she actually seemed contrite. being disappointed by the vegan offerings was not weird.

another highlight of the day would have been taking mr smear down to the pool for a bit, but unfortunately there were a bunch of indian tourists with a bluetooth speaker smoking and drinking and generally being inconsiderate.

at least that was chased by a long and rather inspiring chat with horseman.

yesterday we gave season 2 of adventure time a go, and i'm surprised that we felt it inappropriate before. it's amazing. i think we got through half of it in one sitting.

i'm getting sleepy. i should probably go to bed soon.

we'll probably be hit by loadshedding soon. so over this country.

money ugliness

 yesterday, a coworker i get along with really well - who's in the middle of a salary negotiation - asked me flat-out how much i earn. when i was hired, our boss explained to me that everyone in our company plays with open cards, and although i felt uncomfortable sharing my hourly rate i also felt that it was the right thing to do.

it turns out there's a relatively large disparity between our salaries.

the conversation that ensued was awkward, and i said some things that i realize now were an emotional response and possibly destructive. they were said with good intentions, but the reality is that he's earning a very decent salary for his experience, capabilities and output. i feel uncomfortable talking about my strengths, and that made me say things that may have made him feel that it was unfair for me to be earning more, when in reality i do have a lot more experience, not to mention a broader role, than he does.

and now that that conversation's done, it's done. there's no way to take anything back and it's preying on my mind that i may have generated unnecessary drama.

needing this weekend, needing this rum

 good lord, today was relatively relaxed but it's been a looooong couple of weeks and i neeeeed this glass of rum followed by a weekend.

mr smear finally went back to school yesterday morning, which was a relief to everyone. the first part of the day was spent resolving our broken tool, and the moment we succeeded i actually had to walk away and scream silently. i wrote an article about it.

after picking up mr smear with gd and paying grumpy & runt a visit (gd got her "fakin and feggs", mr smear got a soft-serve), we returned home and i spent the next couple of hours experimenting with debian package installers until finally arriving at the conclusion that they don't actually support our needs. i wrote an article about that, too.

it's intriguing me that two of my articles have been earning me enough money to cover my medium membership fees, and they're not articles i was particularly excited about.

our neighbours' kid joined us for dinner, and we watched the first few episodes of adventure time. and now i realize that one of the things mr smear does that kinda annoys me, he copied from the ice king. it's our own gorramed fault.

i went to bed early, but i was less sleepy than i was tired and i didn't sleep particularly well.

this morning i got up early, and one of my first achievements was learning how to make gifs from youtube videos (replace youtube.com in the video's url with gifyoutube.com). i dropped mr smear off at their forest school, then got to my mom's just in time for the morning meetings.

my morning was interrupted by a cousin calling me for help with his exam prep (comp. sci.), and we spent an enjoyable hour going over a problem together. then i continued working until it was time to pick up mr smear, dropped him off at home, and was going to return to work but my #$!@ car showed me a warning that i couldn't interpret and i couldn't find my owner's manual so i had to take it in to the service centre. fortunately that was a quick visit, it's booked in for a quick check on tuesday and it's not displaying the warning any more, so i guess i'm safe?

in the afternoon, my mom returned to find her and gd's south african police clearance certificates, which was great news! not so great, though, was discovering that the tracking info for gd's canadian documents hadn't been updated and that the courier service had tried to make contact with me at 11pm last night. after a stressful back and forth via email, i eventually learned that they hadn't picked up the documents at the scheduled time and i've now cancelled them and need to figure out an alternate route - hopefully vfmp will be available, and if not horseman's back in montreal so maybe he could help too.

in spite of the stress, i finished the day with an achievement - the new release candidate is ready and if it makes it through our tests then i won't have this monkey on my back any more and can focus on the tasks that have been piling up in my new team...

i made it home in one piece, and now that i've dumped all this i'm taking a breath...

interminable

whoooooo.

yesterday:

after another (relatively) early night,  i woke up early to get some work in before we all headed out. mr smear wasn't cooperating and we were running late for our dentist appointments, things got dramatic. maybe he'd forgotten that i can still carry him over my shoulder?

i managed to get half an hour in while waiting for gd, then it was my turn. it felt good to hear that i've been doing a good job of taking care of my teeth in the years since i last paid a dentist a visit. getting the mold made for my new guard (last one i used was probably almost two decades ago) was a lot less unpleasant than my first one.

we picked up mr smear, who'd calmed down by then (and helped his granny bake crunchies), then returned home. my presentation went surprisingly well, after which i went through to my mom's again for testing... leaving my flash drive behind, but at least i could buy a cheap new one next door.

i finished my workday on a positive note (completing the almost-complete refactor of my coworker's code), then returned home.

everything was fine until dinnertime, mr smear triggered some more drama just as my mom came over for a visit and the next hour or two felt interminably long. at least, we figured one thing out - there's a behaviour that's really not mine that gd's been anticipating from me since the very beginning of our relationship, maybe recognizing that will help us going forward...

mr smear's attempt to "get revenge" by putting together a "trash pile" of things we've given him made for a good teaching moment, but it was pretty effective even if we won't admit that to him.

fighting is exhausting.

today:

another early morning at my mom's. today was the third in a series of "we should've released friday, hopefully by today's end" that ended with us finding a new bug (with debian installation scripts, the documentation is pretty much useless and they seemed to work before). this is demoralizing.

even more demoralizing was, for the second week in a row, being hit by a malfunction (this time, in the tools we use to test an important product) that after hours of investigation only became more mysterious.

forty five minutes before my physio appointment, i packed everything up and was preparing to take a ten-minute walk before driving home when gd called, asking me if i was coming home for my appointment, which i was already late for. d'oh!

after my half-appointment (which kinda helped) i did some more work, then managed to convince mr smear to join me for a walk on a pleasantly warm evening. we walked a reasonable distance, enjoyed each other's company, and ended up at the pool where our neighbours were so we joined them for a while before returning home for a shower and a good dinner.

all without drama.

shadowslight, muadib and i spent an hour trying to get a discord "watch party" going, it looks like we finally figured it out and we'll try again in a couple of weeks.

lol i said productive

 yup, last night was the exact opposite of productive - i couldn't even manage two pages of reading to mr smear before i had to say goodnight and crawl into my bed, but i did get a fairly decent night's sleep.

oh! i woke up on sunday morning from a disturbing dream: wartime, off to the front of a far east war, had to jump off the train to get a woman and her kid to safety and drop mr smear off with a stranger before racing to catch the train at its next stop.

my neck's been wrecked - not nerve pain, just really stiff, kinda stuck in a bad position, for days now.

i got up just before my alarm this morning and went straight to work, thinking i could knock off early and take mr smear somewhere fun in the afternoon. not only did i get trapped until 3pm, but he's come down with a cold and when i got home he told me that he'd like to play a game with me but he really wants to play minecraft (which i can't play, gives me motion sickness). so i ended up working instead.

my biggest achievement today was managing to postpone the dreaded presentation i hadn't started preparing, instead i'll be giving a talk on testing tomorrow. i still needed a couple of hours to put the presentation slides together.

we watched zootopia this evening, for the first time. it's an awesome film in spite of it being sandwiched between two renditions of a really crap song.

...

we just got an email welcoming us back to the fourth term. we thought school was only going back next week!

back

yesterday:

after a lot of nothing in front of my computer, i decided to take a walk and get some exercise for the first time since sunday. i passed kak lucky tattoos as my artist was enjoying a cigarette outside, so we had the chat we've been needing to have for the past week or two, and then i continuing on my way.

about two blocks away from the hospital, an inconsiderate PoS driver drove past and sprayed their windshield wiper fluid right into my gorram eye. fortunately i was close enough to the hospital to head over and wash my eye out, but wtf, man, that was horrible. i came straight home to put in the next-to-useless eyedrops we had. two kids had come over for an extended playdate, i hid in my room and finally finished reading the nao of brown. then i took one of the kids home, and the other stayed with us for dinner and a movie.

her parents had okayed jurassic park, we'd decided we give it a try. firstly: holy crap, between the two kids we were constantly pausing the movie to have discussions about e-v-e-ry-t-h-i-n-g. some of the discussions were interesting and fun, some of them really annoying. secondly, we hit 9pm just as she decided she was too scared to continue, which we felt was the perfect time for her to go home anyway :P
mr smear, on the other hand, was pretty cool with everything but had to cover his eyes for the raptors.

fair enough.

anyway, overall it was a great experience with lots of teaching moments (like why screaming and shining lights at a predator is really, really dumb) and the inspiration and amazement were (imo) worth the minor anxieties.

today:

i've just got out the shower and into a long, unexpected but important talk with gd who's had a bit of a breakthrough moment, all while mr smear enjoys a skrillex playlist that he's been begging for since we left home earlier for a very long promenade walk to try out the falafel guy's falafel (we must have walked about 9km, he was a trooper and the falafel was good, though not quite as good as nish nush one).

this morning was quite sombre - two consecrations, the first for krybabie (zoom) and the second for sailor's dad (i held the camera). mr smear played lots of minecraft, and after we got home from the cemetery (my mom babysat) i fell asleep next to him watching a tintin movie.

now it's dinner and movie time and hopefully i'll be somewhat productive this evening, but i'm not stressing about it.

nasty stuff

 the past two days were pretty horrific. the work i did on wednesday night was scrapped first thing thursday morning (turns out we didn't all agree on the way forward, which was unfortunate), and the day was long. i had a headache and felt horrible for its entirety, and it was filled with discovering more unexpectedly broken or badly made things.

yesterday i felt MUCH better, but work was a total cluster****. we discovered a bug in one of the releases that has delayed the release by another day (which messes with my plans for monday). testing the other one opened up a can of worms, but we HAD to release before the end of the day and everything that could have gone wrong, did, and did so thoroughly. by the time i finally managed to push out the release - which i'd pretty much been working on alone - i was completely buggered. i was also highly stressed, and i think everyone who worked with me over the course of the past two days was very aware of it and quite understanding.

plans for today: take a break from life. i finally defeated the red queen in steamworld heist, i've been occasionally encouraging mr smear to continue making cool stuff in minecraft, and i've dumped this post.

...

at least we've had some more good news regarding gd's documentation: it's been authenticated and now we just have to manage to get it delivered and then we can - theoretically, at least - finally proceed with the application.

follow up

and then, almost immediately after hitting the post button, i fainted. 

ugh

omg, i've barely slept tonight. between the 2nd jab slight wooziness and the work i was doing until just before i went to bed rattling around my brain this past six hours has been very uncomfortable indeed.

the day was a bit mental, too. a tad more excitement than i'd have liked for a release testing week, even if a fair amount of that excitement was positive. 

two down, two to go

 well, mostly down. i've spent the past two days at my mom's, very focused and making up as many hours as i can before month's end. omg it's almost october already. anyway, aside from my right eye inexplicably taking a *lot* of strain, it's been a productive two days and i've got quite a few hours under my belt.

sunday was another good day. mr smear made crazy things in minecraft (including building the minecraft letters and a few of the minecraft characters), and i spent a large part of my day hacking away at the database. it would take me until the middle of the night to understand that the script i found was actually working fine, and the field i was trying to extract actually *was* encrypted. kind of. using a variation of a rotation cipher, which literally amazed me (not least because they had the audacity to describe their encryption as unbreakable in their documentation).

seriously, hacknet just got *so* real for me.

i took mr smear out for ice cream but grumpy & runt had just closed, though my mom was in the area and we went through to mouille point with her for oreo shakes. she dropped us off at home just in time for me to grab my gear and drive back to sea point to join the rollerblading group, and then next couple of hours were really nice and heavier on the cardio than my body was expecting.

big news: it looks like gd's police clearance has *finally* been delivered to the montreal consulate, so hopefully we'll have her authenticated documents here within a couple of weeks. we're also expecting her local clearance to arrive soon, so we *should* be able to move forward with the aliyah process soon.

also big news: we've been discussing my mom's plans, too, and it looks like there are some pretty good options for her which is really exciting!

right, now to see if we can get mr smear into bed reasonably soon so i can jump back into one of my jobs. gd just got her last tattoos for the year, on her shoulders, so i don't know if she'll be able to join me and get vaccinated tomorrow...

the sigh

today has been a good day. yesterday was rough, but i guess it was also a good day.

yesterday morning was intense. it started with a cousin's kid's barmitzvah, it was nice to be able to join the family but aside from the highlight of the barmitzvah boy's reading from the torah the orthodox service was not very inclusive and it dragged on forever. i jumped straight from that into aligning our bamboo builds, which was simple work but required a high level of concentration and a "system" for making the changes and testing them, and after a few hours of that i finally completed the task but with my vision all blurry and the sensation of my brain bleeding out my ears.

so i took mr smear out for a walk and an ice-cream (which for me, at that point, was medicinal). the walk with mr smear was great, the ice-cream was phenomenal, but the people we encountered along the way were all a massive source of stress.

afterwards, i dived back in to one of the other team's issues, and although i didn't completely resolve it, i did manage to achieve some level of progress before hitting 6pm and calling it a [expletives deleted] week.

a quick-ish shower, and slow-ish getting mr smear out the house, and we were off to my mom's for a really lovely dinner with cousins. we left really late, mr smear was totally wired, and we were forced to fill up the car on the way home in a gas station filled with unsavoury characters, but we arrived home safely, just before curfew, and got mr smear into bed with relative ease.

i played a couple of hours of hacknet, then went to bed.

this morning i got up early to practice leyning, then after a pleasant shul service (gd helped us make a minyan after getting back from the hospital to get her bandages redone, but she really hasn't been feeling too well today) i was too curious and i started poking around my client's existing solution.

the weird thing was the sensation was very much akin to playing hacknet, only it was real life. i was worried that i might have to reverse engineer or decrypt things without knowing algorithms or secrets, but boy, was i wrong - it's 100% amateur hour with these clowns, and not only do i now have access to most of the data they've been trying to export for me, but i understand why they're unwilling to export the "special" fields: they don't know how. i've managed to find a tool to extract it but it's a bit buggy, and there're a couple of off-the-shelf solutions that might even be worth paying for if i get desperate.

the neighbour's kid came over to play minecraft with mr smear (that sounds like that was her intention, but it probably wasn't), and then let me take mr smear downstairs to try out her bike (that doesn't have training wheels). i'm embarrassed to admit that i didn't even notice that the chain was off and the back wheel flat until her mother pointed it out to me, and while i could fix the chain i didn't have a bicycle pump.

needing to go out and do something, the weather seemed nice and i suggested we head to kirstenbosch. mr smear argued that he wanted to hit the pool, i acquiesced, and by the time we got outside there was a chill wind blowing. we carried on anyway, and in spite of the wind it was surprisingly nice for a while and both enjoyed a very peaceful series of moments relaxing in the sun with our feet in the ice-cold water. then the sky clouded over and we returned to our minecraft and hacking, and i'm just feeling so much better about the world.

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.