eye rubbing

a friend of gd's, part of her closest circle, who just gave birth a couple of months ago and has another child about two years old, suddenly had a seizure a couple of days ago and died. we're all reeling and heartbroken.

...

 i finally got a real night's sleep on thursday night for the first time since we started moving, what a pity it was flooded with nightmares.

the end of the work-week was strong, although mr smear and i both appear to have picked up some kind of bug that's going around ("stomache flu" for both of us, and a throat infection for me). pure joy. it was a great excuse to have some me-time yesterday while gd and mr smear joined my mom at her friend's pool, i finally watched the entirety of harlock: space pirate. it's a great movie, really convoluted plot twists and turns but i guess the nature of illusion and manipulation is kind of the point.

certainly, it was more satisfying than don't look up. gd and i watched that during the week and it's pure horror (too real) with zero catharsis. i'm still glad i watched it, i guess.

i guess while i'm writing about my media consumption i should mention that we watched the latest hotel transylvania movie yesterday morning* and i was mortified to see genndy tartakovsky's name all over the credits of such a completely trashy film. i *hope* it's the low point of his career.

* in spite of mr smear being "grounded" for hitting a kid in his class yesterday - i guess it doesn't matter if you're not violent with your kids when other kids are :/

...

we've been granted audience with the consul next week to sign and notarize the lawyer's documents, i'm trying to prepare myself for meeting her because we have some things to say that need to be said very carefully about how they've been treating us.

...

we finally met my nephew's girlfriend on friday night, we had dinner at my cousin's who i managed to meet with during the week for a coffee - he's finally accepting that his divorce is actually happening and i was able to provide him with some measure of relief, so i was happy for the opportunity to help.

...

i'm VERY excited about the latest two pages of the graphic novel which we managed to finalize yesterday! they came out even better than planned due to a slight misreading of my script, and the visual clarity is so good that even mr smear knew exactly what was happening when he saw it ^_^

moved

 well, that was an intense week. gd, my mother and i were all terribly misaligned when it came to our visions of how we would leave the apartment. the root cause being that until very recently, we thought we were going to pack up our lives into a container and meet them on the other side... but then we got a bunch of quotes in and learned that it would cost us more to ship our things than to put them up for auction and buy them again on the other side*.

* as opposed to how we moved from montréal, where we just left most of our stuff and had to buy everything again. that took years (and one delores umbridge) to recover from.

so *i* thought that come tuesday morning (the 25th), we'd have everything cleared out except for a few pieces of luggage and we'd either take that luggage to my mother's, or to the airport.

on monday we confirmed that we would not be going to the airport. the consulate is being obstructive and treating us really badly, and they really aren't interested in providing any sort of assistance. on tuesday, we started moving. we moved every day. we moved multiple trips every day. we had the auction house come in on thursday to take all the furniture, and realize that we hadn't agreed on what wasn't going to be sold just yet :(

finally, a week after displacing my mom (again) and sleeping here, we grabbed the very last of the things and handed over the keys and said goodbye to our home of three and a half years - just as long as i lived in montréal in total. and now we're here. the place is still strewn with black bags and boxes and tons of stuff that needs triage, but slowly but surely things are coming together and making sense, and in a weird way we're almost grateful for the unwanted delay...

speaking of which, after some uncomfortable negotiating we've engaged a lawyer and are now attempting to get the consulate to let us sign documents before a notary...

in the meanwhile, mr smear is loving his first weeks in grade 1. my mom's place is getting a little more TLC than it's used to. i'm finally able to focus on work again after weeks of feeling like i was making a fool of myself (anxiety matters, y'all). i'm starting to consistently beat sudoku at the expert level without guessing. and the next pages of the graphic novel are looking really good.

deep breaths.

breathing and sneezing

filing years of documents is dusty work.

also: wanna know how i've lost ten kilos in six months (almost exactly) with no exercise? intermittent fasting, combined with incredibly high stress levels.

this past week became more and more stressful and frustrating, both work-wise and bureaucratically, and i spent friday afternoon trying not to let me heart explode.

we have no control over our situation.

while the jewish agency has determined my family to be jewish enough to migrate, misrad hapnim is blocking us and there aren't any humans to talk to. after a long chat with the lawyer who appears to be the right one for us, she ended the conversion saying "you're going to go through all this whether you like it or not. you can do this 'in chill', or you can make yourself sick".

something i needed to hear, i guess.

this weekend has been BAKING hot. my brain was melting before the temperatures rose. i picked up cardboard boxes yesterday morning and got the car valeted, and we've spent a large chunk of the weekend sorting and triaging and packing. and trying to breathe. and even breathing a bit.

also, gd and i watched a lot of cobra kai last night and it's so well-written and cringy that i'm not sure i can handle any more of it. certainly not with all the other stuff going on in our lives.

shaky

was today tuesday? jesus. two intense (and largely frustrating) work days disrupted by a chat with the consulate during which it became apparent that the woman i've been dealing with is a giant spoke in our wheel, it's just not clear whether that's due to incompetence or malice. we're trying desperately to get permission for mr smear to travel next tuesday. we have no idea whether or not we'll be getting on that flight. in a way, this is all considerably more stressful than leaving montréal, and that was hella stressful...

otherwise, mr smear had a meltdown this evening followed by what appeared to be authentic regret, although he did admit to me later that he was hoping an apology would earn him his privileges back... and tomorrow he starts grade 1. if we're lucky, it'll be for only four days and then we can spend the next while fighting to get him into kitah aleph instead.

this morning i commented on a friend's post about flashbacks not being a thing, i spent ages putting it together in a way to make it clear that i appreciated what he wrote regardless of the specific detail i took issue with but what i subsequently learned was that i really should have just left it. *sigh*

rollercoaster (sleepless)

 i feel like i survived the whirlwind that was today. i've been talking to lawyers since thursday, talking through plans that seem saner or more mind-bogglingly mad depending on the number i times i talk through them, each strategy making less sense than the one before and each path at the mercy of organizations and factors out of our control.

i didn't sleep much last night. i spent a good chunk of it pacing up and down, exhausted, working through conversations i was praying i would be able to have in the morning and dreading the continued silence from the people we thought were on our side. or listening to strangers sharing their stories in series' of voice messages, gleaning little bits and pieces of experience that may actually help us.

this morning i shakily got up, my stomache churning and my heart* thumping in my throat, and called someone who i thought was avoiding me.

no answer.

i subsequently tried calling her second-in-command.

no answer.

and then, suddenly, a call back from the first with a sense of compassion. she appears to have heard me, explained to me why nothing's happening as fast as we need (primarily because everyone's come down with covid, funny how south africans discovered the new strain and got blacklisted but we all seem to be relatively functional), and has agreed to plead our case to the decision-makers. my anxiety's far from gone, but it is dramatically lessened.

* which reminds me, i've lost a fair amount of weight over the past months and i've hit 85kg consistently for the first time in many years. i think my skin's responded at a slant because my AURYN (sonnet 19) seems a bit skew and it didn't before.

after that, a half hour chat with an israeli cousin who's disgusted by what's happening and trying to lend a hand. after that, a chat with the second-in-command, who seems very sympathetic.

in summary: the court process will almost certainly take a lot longer than we can afford - two people have reported stories taking eight and nine months, even - and our quality of life with all the stress and uncertainty is already quite low and will only be lower if we're forced to stay here or go to montreal. we need them to make an exception for us, to let us get there and take care of the details once we arrive. the irony is that nobody disputes whether mr smear should be living in israel, only whether his right to do so is by birth or as an immigrant, and them preventing us for moving because they're not sure makes no sense whatsoever.

my mom came over for a bit, and after we discussed the container quotes we've received we've all agreed that it makes far more sense to send all our belongings to an auction house and buy new things there - it'll certainly be cheaper, and it'll also be less headache.

i spent a good chunk of the day shuffling paperwork, trying to sort out some of my documents, and i took mr smear down to the pool for a break which was fun until i realized that he had been developing a real cough so i rushed him back upstairs...

i don't know what happened, but i was buggered. probably exhaustion from the stress and not sleeping, possibly virus-related? who knows, these days. not only did i feel weak and dizzy, but my phone kept pinging... i finally got up around the time my mom came over for dinner (including an unfortunate and unpleasant outburst by gd about my godmother, triggered by our johannesburg cousin's sister doing something ugly), made another call to a lawyer, had a brief text chat with vfmp and made a call to horseman, got dragged off for dinner. then horseman and i resumed our chat and an hour or so later we said goodbye full of inspirations: i do believe he's invented his own branch of the sciences, a "psychematics", if you will. an exciting idea that thoughts might operate according to mathematical principles.

...

yesterday:

"zoomagogue", trying to shabbat and failing with all the stress

our rabbi friend coming over to swim, pool time before it got too windy

chat with a johannesburg cousin (and the awkwardness of getting help from her and her husband when my own brother's visiting cape town and hasn't even bothered to say hi)

tron + abe's exoddus + tron legacy, mr smear loving all of it along with us

a good sync with vfmp (with some uncomfortable talk about the kid we've both tried to help)

the work week:

my work week was thoroughly disrupted by all the things, even though i managed to be relatively productive my manager did express concern that i'm making it difficult for him to plan availability and productivity and that if this keeps up we may have to take steps. that does not spark joy at all.

friday in particular was effectively a lost cause, i spent most of it on phone calls and emailing and generally freaking out. we had dinner at my mom's with cousins and nephew, it was a jolly fun evening and towards the end everyone learned some things about everyone else's relationship/histories with psychedelics which was pretty hilarious.

...

*breathe*

*remember to breathe*

we celebrated too early

 we're not just deflated, we're stunned, shocked, full of anxiety. i got a very rude awakening yesterday morning in the form of a call from the consulate - it turns out they've recognized gd as jewish, but they have *not* recognized me as his father. not only that, it turns out that the last time i tried to register his birth i was told something critically incorrect: that the paternity test couldn't be done here in south africa. so the good news is that the test can be done in south africa, the bad news is that it's only under very specific (and expensive) conditions and may take months.

months that i would have had in spades if they'd only told me this before.

so now we're in a race against the clock (gd's visa to remain here, her police clearance documents) and we've got to be out of our apartment by the end of this month. i spent all of last night (until 3.30am) hunting through documents and social media for any scrap of evidence i could find, but this morning the consulate called to inform me that almost none of what i found was at all relevant. we've spent today trying to piece together a plan for getting there, but this is extremely stressful and disillusionment is at an all-time high.

the one sliver of light in the darkness is that we've managed to get in touch with our landlord from when we moved in together, and he might be able to help us out.

...

and i had to work today. so i just signed off a few minutes ago after playing catch-up because my hours for both yesterday and today would have been very short otherwise. also, we've been getting quotes for moving with containers and they're expensive. like, big debt expensive, the kind that kept us chasing our tails for three years after we moved here from canada. like, we need to consider whether it doesn't make more sense to sell everything we can and buy new there.

mr smear, for the last while, has been much better behaved and more stable but we did have a few incidents today - although the recovery from those incidents on all our parts was actually pretty impressive. and the biggest issue when we went down to the pool with the neighbour's kid and her cousin was that he really doesn't want to get out of the water even when he's clearly too tired to keep himself afloat (－‸ლ) [does that look like a facepalm? really?)

i think i should go to bed now.

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powering into 2022

dec 26th: whatever else happened that day, hido and i met up for drinks with a couple of other people and had a jolly time, after which i picked up mr smear from my mom's.

during the course of the week between christmas and new year's, we tried to organize an aliyah interview but things became very complicated because the shlichim were all on holiday. however! after pleading with the local representative to find a solution - any solution - we were connected directly with the head of aliyah in south africa who happened to be holidaying in cape town! she agreed to interview us on sunday morning!

new year's eve 2022 was very quiet for us old people. we spent the following evening at "family playdate", with one of mr smear's friends - the kids were mostly good, but the adults enjoyed a delicious dinner and played exploding kittens.

of course, i didn't sleep a wink on saturday night, but on sunday morning we met with her for three hours, we had almost all the documentation she needed and she got to meet the three of us as human beings. although i subsequently spent the rest of the day locating and scanning missing documents, she'd already been convinced (officially) that gd is jewish and mr smear is my son, and on thursday morning we received an official letter to that effect so our rush now is to get them entered into the population registry and mr smear's passport produced. as soon as that's done, we can make travel arrangements!

shehecheyanu, v'kiy'manu, v'higiyanu laz'man hazeh.

the relief and excitement are both overwhelming.

work has been pretty great over the past couple of weeks, and by the end of the week our team was back together, bigger than ever (we've had two new hires in two months). i've made good hours in spite of many distractions, and i've actually managed to get some summer holiday time in with my family too.

so... things are good.

posting this was the first thing on my saturday to-do list, now i'm going to post something for my patreons, and then start rewatching Why Everyone Is Quitting Their Job To Play Call of Duty with an aim to provide subject start times and titles so that i can write a post about it. i've now seen 2.5 hours of it, and i'm convinced that it's the most important video ever uploaded to youtube.

happy new year!

merry christmas

as retribution for a few good night's sleep, the universe (or my neck) made thursday night a nightmare in which i was in so much pain that i couldn't sleep until about 4am, and i woke up yesterday still hurting and dizzy and exhausted. i got through yesterday (it calmed down after a few more hours) but i was still slow and basically took a full day to do less than half a day's work, which did not feel good. at all.

...

gd's documents finally arrived! and we *just* managed to catch our rabbi in time (before he disappeared for a week's vacation) to get another document updated, hopefully we'll get our interview invite soon.

...

i tried to purchase the ps3 king's quest collection today, but the playstation store website is broken. after giving up, i've just installed the king's quest series on my old windows machine and we'll find out tomorrow if mr smear is ready for a (relatively) text-based adventure!

...

this morning being christmas, and my child possessing the critical thinking faculties of a six year old, and my wife accommodating the santa klaus thing in spite of us all having had a very serious conversation about jews and christmas, we had two conflicting experiences: the first, him waking up excitedly to find santa's hat - convincing evidence, of course, that ol' saint nick had been here, eaten the oat energy bars and dropped off the present - and the second, that i was telling him about this week's parasha and we ended up watching joseph: king of dreams before "zoomagogue" which was surprisingly good in spite of the less-than-inspiring soundtrack (even my six year things the music is super cheesy and the singing is far from heartfelt).

speaking of which: gd was talking about having a heart murmur today and i told her she was heart-lithp.

we spent this afternoon with hido's family and had a really great time! and then came home and jumped in the pool, which was also great. now we're arguing over whether to put on the hogfather or the nightmare before christmas.

good, bad, either

good things: three days straight of taking mr smear to the pool, he's swimming nicely and we had a lot of fun. his behaviour's also stabilized, and i think all round our family interactions are healthier. i've also made generally good progress at work on a variety of projects.

i finally continued horseman's conversation with swordschool this morning, he's also in - i don't know how much i don't know when it comes to this sort of thing, but i'm excited nonetheless!

not so good things:

UPS managed to get gd's documents to cape town on monday, but have so far failed to deliver them to us. they've now effectively cost us a week, and we were already rushed.

gd's really been having a hard time health-wise this week.

not sure if good or bad:

the apocalypse came early to cape town - the city centre's power went out unexpectedly on monday evening and it took until the next afternoon to get sorted out. we had no phones and no internet, either. fortunately my coworker could accommodate me so i got a half day in at his place yesterday.

i've been going to bed early the past few nights, i feel like i've got so much to do but i also feel like i'm on the edge of burning out and that doing nothing (aside from my day job and parenting) is okay. the good part is that i've had a couple of nights of real sleep, which is very rare for me.

the week that was

there was much pain, and ugliness, but there were also some great moments.

work-wise:

the week began with a panic to ensure that our customers weren't affected by the log4j security vulnerability, and although our risk was minor i still ended up spending two days fighting with the only java components in our solution which hadn't really been touched in a couple of years. i don't like how some essential java projects don't subscribe to semantic versioning, and can't maintain internal consistency with their own packages. and i don't like javadoc.

otherwise, i managed to knock out some important work, complete some unpleasant tasks and prepare some long-term security measures. the week ended on a strong note, and then yesterday morning my manager sent me a note that our efforts a couple of weeks ago have secured us some new customers, which certainly feels good.

parenting-wise:

good grief. we had two disastrous nights this past week, and we've now understood that our poor kid simply doesn't understand that he *has* to do what his parents and teachers tell him. i mean, literally does not understand. that, and we're three people in this household who have difficulty regulating their emotions. i'm very pleased that we managed to get through those two episodes (and their fallout), but it's been heartbreaking and discouraging.

at least the weekend seems to be going pretty well.

health-wise:

we're fine, but on wednesday - mr smear's last day of school - our cleaning lady rushed off and two days later reported back that she had covid, so we've been exposed and have been isolating. again. this stinks. now we're trying to navigate a sea of (mis)information and figure out whether we should be isolating the 10 days our doctor told us, or whether we should be getting an antigen test tomorrow.

sonnetcomix:

the new page is posted, and horseman and i had a conversation about the project yesterday and he suggested something pretty amazing that is deep in swordschool's domain, so i'm hoping to get him on board with it.

game dev:

my son and i began playing around with unity today, because he wants to turn alphabit into a real game. this is definitely a long-term project, but we made some progress which was pretty cool

oh, the bureaucats!

 i completely forgot - it *looks* like gd's authenticated documents will be ready for pickup tomorrow. we're *praying* that vfmp manages to pick them up and courier them to us without a hitch. maybe we can move forward with this thing.

better, i think

this parenting thing has rough moments, especially for a decidedly imperfect parent like myself. mr smear was MUCH better behaved overall this week with his screen time reduced to almost zero, and in general things felt smoother between us, but yesterday he got his privileges back: some of it was great fun (we played around with the universe sandbox together, and then hit boomerang fu hard (he'd cheated being grounded by playing it at our neighbour's on friday evening), and things were good. well, until he threw a tantrum because he wasn't winning on the hard level by himself (he claimed the game was cheating).

that eventually resolved well, and the afternoon was fine: we all took the pikmin for a walk around cape town, encountered all the unmasked hordes with no concept of social space was unpleasant, but the falafel from nish nush was great and we levelled up until we unlocked the AR feature which was really cool - although gd got in trouble for squishing one of the pikmin while we were interacting with them...

last night was going great until shower time, at which point mr smear did something really ugly that i can only compare to lucy pulling the football away from charlie brown. this being the millionth time, i reacted badly, and then he reacted badly, and we all had an awful night as a result.

this morning he slipped into our bed and said some hurtful things, after a period of time with no response i eventually got an apology and some resolution. so far, we've had a pretty good day.

...

work was good, but friday was a weird emotional rollercoaster. we spent a few hours doing the annual "top 5", with everyone presenting their highlights of 2021 and some of the presentations were quite touching. what followed was a good day, and then our manager called us in to share a shit feeling about the awesome team t-shirts we made because he's concerned that others think that we feel superior... i've never been so offended by a perceived offence before :/

anyway, i think we'll all be fine, but it was a bit of a downer after an otherwise successful week (even if i didn't make my hours).

...

i've now had two days to recover, i've prepped the script for the next two pages (the current one's looking really good so far), and i've done nothing towards the side project except maybe getting my head (mostly) back in order.

am i addicted to sudoku? i think so. is my son getting the hang of it? i think so. is he reading like a champ? i think so. is he writing nicely? i think so.

okay, it's potter time (movie 3).

the not-so-good days that followed

 wednesday: a nightmare of gd's visa renewal, not only did they leave important items off the checklist but she encountered an obstructive PoS who raised all of our anxiety levels (i was trying to work, my mum was accompanying her). they finally got hold of some sympathetic humans, but my gods, *my* nerves were shot after that and the experience really threw me off for the rest of the week. and by "threw me off", i mean that i felt completely wiped out and wouldn't feel right before the weekend. 

on wednesday morning i dropped mr smear off at school and witnessed an event that inspired us to teach him to handle stuff differently. i'm no longer a fan of jim jefferies, 'cause he's turned out to be more of a shit person than his on-stage persona, but he makes a good point that's directly applicable to my six year old's life. so we've been teaching mr smear to be super-kind to assholes as a form of revenge, and reminding ourselves to as well (gd even got good use out of that exact technique with the obstructive guy from before). it's not clear whether he's ready to put it in practice, but he definitely gets a kick out of the idea.

the consulate hadn't contacted me since i sent them my payment details last monday, they were passive-aggressive on the monday and didn't let up on the wednesday. a short while ago they finally gave me a time for the pick up - next week - so hopefully that'll go okay.

friday: dropping mr smear off in the middle of an intersection in salt river was a weird experience, even if it was with his class. they had fun!

on friday night i went to shul in person to commemorate my grandfather's yahrzeit, it was a good experience. after getting mr smear into bed, i spent some time practising leyning properly for the first time since covid struck.

saturday: i'm amazing that i managed to get up early, practice some more, get to shul, and (mostly) do alright (i needed a couple of prompts, but otherwise i was fine). i was feeling super awkward by the time we got to the end of the service, dunno why.

mr smear had excitedly agreed to go to a casting, and when the time came to get in the car he refused. it was with much drama that we eventually got there, and got through it. we have, during and since the incident, explained to him that it's all about the importance of keeping one's word and sticking to agreements (although him being rude to us also wasn't appreciated), and, except in certain, very specific circumstances, we've "cancelled" his screen time for a week. we had no idea what to expect, but in a mere two days things have become... easier. also, and in our opinion incredibly, today we heard that they'd like him to come in again, and we made damn sure that he understood that if he didn't want to do it he needed to tell us immediately.

he wants to do it.

i'm still in disbelief.

if i was wiped out before, saturday afternoon's episode exhausted me to the point of feeling ill. i spent the rest of the afternoon and the entire night feeling terrible and tired, in bed and sleeping fitfully.

sunday:

and then i woke up, and felt... better. not great, but pretty decent. i published the latest page publicly, and aside from that the biggest achievement of the day was installing pikmin bloom. mr smear came out for TWO walks yesterday, voluntarily, once in a light rain with sailor. sailor joined us for dinner, after which i put mr smear to bed (he insisted on switching from the neverending story to the ocean at the end of the lane, go figure), and then i napped for an hour or so before joining vfmp for an exciting game of thunderstone in which he utterly crushed me.

today:

huh, i guess i should mention that i've been playing a lot of sudoku recently. i find it intriguing that hard is sometimes relatively easy and sometimes really hard.

the first thing that happened today was me saying something surprising (to me) out loud: we're staying here until the end of january. if we don't have our shit sorted out by then, we'll have to live out of luggage for a bit (probably at my mom's), but if we get everything sorted out before then we're still going to stay here until then. it doesn't make sense to not know anything about our own timeline, it's stressful and unnecessary.

my cousin came down with covid, so i dropped off our covid kit this morning, filled the car (shocked at how expensive it was), drove all the way home and only then remembered that there's heavy construction work happening over our heads.

another half-day of work, not good.

during my lunch break (breakfast break, i guess? i'm still intermittent fasting) i took a walk to get t-shirts printed. the first place on the map was non-existent, the second place difficult to find (inside the golden acre, i tried three floors before giving up), the third and fourth places turned out to be the same.

i don't understand why so many businesses don't bother to fix their google maps details.

anyway, i was there for quite a while negotiating with the dude, who seemed genuinely grateful to me for showing him a new way of thinking about doing his job, and i really hope he manages to get it done the way i want it before thursday.

mr smear came out with me for another walk today, so enthusiastic that he was happy to go an extra bit just to grow one of his seedlings. he was excited to name the pikmin, and excited to enter their names himself. and then, when we got home, he was excited to drag me to the jungle gym for a bit, which he hasn't done in ages.

i'm tired, it's late, i'm going to bed. soon. after another quick game of sudoku. i feel better about having posted this. maybe tomorrow or the next day i'll be back into some kind of groove and figure out how to manage my "free" time.

a good day

today was my birthday. it was excellent. lots of people i care about got in touch, my work day was spent doing something straightforward yet satisfying, my wife made sufganyot for chanukah, my son excitedly made an effort to contribute to my day being good, we had a great dinner out.

...

the weekend was good. i spent a lot of it doing "me" stuff, either gaming, or doing small pieces of side-project work. and publishing the latest sonnetcomix stuff. the rest of the two days are a bit of a blur. yesterday i was... distracted. technically i got stuff done, but it sure didn't feel like it. i recall something was bothering me but i can't quite put my finger on it now...

final update for the day

i needed some "me time", even though the evening was good. before dinner i managed to get gold in a rayman: legends challenge, watching mr smear deftly navigate the same challenge was pretty amazing. after dinner i passed out watching ralph breaks the internet, eventually showering and getting mr smear into bed around 10pm and then making some tea and watching half of the first episode of electric dreams. so far, so good. then i made some more tea and played some more space haven which i picked up in a humble bundle yesterday, and i'm really digging it. the aesthetic, the concept, and the soothing vibes of the peaceful mode.

good night.

bring on the weekend, please

i'm feeling better, but my post-nasal drip / resulting cough hasn't entirely gone away and that's been upsetting.

not as upsetting as mr smear throwing the weirdest tantrum this morning - he was so excited to get out of bed for the school's field trip to the science centre, and then somehow got it in his head that this field trip and becoming a scientist in israel are mutually exclusive. and then, after making us late, waze threw its own tantrum and tried to steer us in the completely wrong direction, so i got lost in obs for five minutes before coming right.

so *i* started the day needing a stiff drink.

the good news is that halfway there he decided he was going to try to enjoy the trip, and when we picked him up later he'd had a really good time.

i spent the majority of my day figuring out how to test my changes from yesterday. i didn't finish off the day with a good feeling - i'd picked up a code review that i really wasn't in the right headspace for - but i'm at least confident with my changes and desperately in need of shabbat.

laundry list

yesterday:

finishing up my primary task for the sprint

mr smear coming home from school saying he wants to keep a diary. mr smear generally reading very nicely and even gaining confidence writing

snacking during an insanely long PR for outsourced work

making time to hit the pool

aladdin

switching cars with my mom

watching more arcane (which is amazing), but having trouble staying awake

today:

waking up exhausted, not enough coffee in the house

asking my manager for feedback

wrapping up the insanely long PR for outsourced work

making time to hit the pool

getting some good (and satisfying) work in before dinner

wreck-it ralph (director's cut, it's even more amazing)

delivery of the latest sonnetcomix pages (one edit, one new)

...

we've been playing a lot of rayman: legends again lately, mostly the daily and weekly challenges. they're freaking brilliant.

recap

my post-nasal drip has been getting progressively better, though i'm still not 100%. i am feeling loads better, though.

i dropped mr smear off today, drove to my mom's, sold his old balance bike, and tried to square things away so i could get some work done.

the first order of business: docker. i spent forever troubleshooting All The Things, eventually it turned out that window's firewall was silently blocking it without any kind of notification or monitor logs. fuckers.

then something bizarre started happening, and it took me a long time to identify exactly what was going on: whenever something was running with administrative privileges, the mouse and trackpad would be completely disabled. i spent hours searching and trying things out, to no avail, but eventually started shutting things down in desperation and lo! the holdkey app that i've been using for a year was the culprit. clearly i hit a bad setting, and once it was closed my system ran beautifully.

over the course of two work days, i've managed one day's worth of billable hours. i have enjoyed exactly none of this whole ordeal, and effectively lost four irretrievable days of quality of life that i sorely needed. the biggest lessons learned? a bit more patience with some of windows' worse flaws, and that i'm most definitely a windows person - at least until the millions of well-meaning asshats who make linux products for money learn that user experience is meaningful and begins at installation.

...

mr smear:

we had a pretty good start to the day, although as we were leaving for school he told us: "we were playing 'simon says' and one of the kids said 'simon says hit mr smear' so they did". i don't know how accurate/true that story is, but even if it's 100% true then he waited so long to tell us (he hasn't been at school in a week) there's not much we can do about it. the whole thing is heartbreaking.

he got himself into trouble with gd this afternoon, and we suspect that he has been having too much screen-time. he's usually okay with downtime but he wasn't today, though he did calm down eventually and got to choose our dinnertime movie as a reward: i'm glad he chose coco, we all enjoyed it immensely (again).

...

gd and i had a bit of a fight this evening, two rounds, and she said/did some really brilliant things (even though i was angry, i couldn't help but laugh at her legitimately hilarious impressions of me), one of which brought up something really powerful: she described me as operating out of a tiger's cage that i've constructed for myself. and i realized something crazy: my father, as abusive and mean and violent as he was, was not as consistently abusive as the kids (and some teachers) that i was forced to spend most of my days with.

i went to a particularly toxic school, where a culture of bullying has always been the norm - not just the students, but the parents and teachers as well - and i always made a great victim. i came from a home with constant fighting, and was socialized with constant fighting, how was i not going to grow up a big, angry baby? i'm embarrassed about my flailing about, but i still don't know how to handle my emotions, how to express myself in healthy ways. i might not be on the spectrum, but i do exhibit similar behaviours and tonight's little revelation makes me realize that i've spent the past two decades on a sine wave of resocializing. some days are better than others, unfortunately the ability to understand a behaviour or emotion doesn't directly equate to managing it properly.

back to my father: it's intriguing that there are some (positive) things i do with mr smear that remind me of him. i think he was very confused about this whole "life" thing, i don't think he was capable of really loving another human being, and i'm very confident that having children was something he wasn't too excited about, but amidst all the awful memories i recall a few fun ones. it wasn't all bad, and it feels surprisingly peaceful just remembering that.

and back

today was torture. the post-nasal drip made for a nasty day, it's still not great now but seems to be a bit better. and my head? didn't feel so good. it didn't help that i spent half my day struggling with my ubuntu setup even with help, and by the end of the day i was ready to throw in the towel.

which i did. and my new setup is already sooooo much cleaner and easier to deal with, and even the minor obstacles have been... not unpleasant.

my mother had an interesting idea today, which set some things in motion: first, that we've pushed back our notice on our apartment by a month (i hope they don't cancel our internet before we leave), and second that we've begun the application process for gd's south african visa, just so that we can stay long enough to get her aliyah status sorted out.

this is all such a nightmare.

...

the other half of my work day was spent prepping for a ten minute presentation that i've been dreading for months, i couldn't be less interested if i tried. also, i took the car in because we were concerned about a possible oil leak and i'm glad everything checked out.

we've been watching the reboot of cowboy bebop, and it's gorgeous. considering we own the original series i hope this gets gd to give that a watch, too :) 

it's late, i have to be up early to take mr smear to school and then sell his old balance bike.

squandered

i truly regret migrating from windows to ubuntu - after all that, the performance of my windows VM is pitiful the moment i try to use it for development and it causes my linux box to freeze irrecoverably more than host windows ever does. after spending most of my weekend on this, i'm feeling exhausted, frustrated, and confident that my coworkers (and all other users who love linux) are suffering from stockholm syndrome.

our day was a mix-and-match of emotions, good and bad behaviour, a visit to the mall (which at least two of us are never in the mood for), and spending some time with kibbutz cousin and her sister and brother-in-law. and then, after putting mr smear to bed, i finally decided to add a feature to my phone control system and discovered that the service had been down for a couple of days because of a certificate issue.

because linux, i guess. i figure it's high time i moved this this to the cloud, at least AWS and CDK take care of all the stupid stuff.

oh, and i've got hectic post-nasal drip.

i'm so over this. at least it looks like mr smear should be back at school tomorrow.

a long day

it's approaching 1am, after a long day spent backing up windows, installing ubuntu and battling with each and every installer along the way i finally have a functional machine (i'm actually very impressed so far with running windows on a VM, even if getting vmware installed almost pushed me to switch back to windows.

gd gave me a talk today about facing off with my issues with my father's memory, i wouldn't even know where to begin but i am certain that i'm not dealing with All The Things in a healthy manner, and i'm reminded of something profoundly true and painfully apt: "If You Don't Heal What Hurt You, You'll Bleed on People Who Didn't Cut You".

the end of the work week was alright, i guess.

though we learned that the missing documents really are missing - the idiot from SecureShip hadn't been looking for the documents, and was reporting on an entirely different package and wasting everyone's time (and money).

inside out

they're all mad. apparently fedex found the documents, but now they're denying it. apparently they were sent to toronto instead of cape town. the consulate representative i spoke to assured me that she'll do what she can, but also explained that they took our complaints about the documents going missing personally and now that they've been found they'd like me to contact the consul general and report that they did, in fact, give excellent service (perhaps sending our critical, sensitive documents to the wrong address is part of "excellent service"?).

and time marches inexorably on, and it's becoming more and more likely that we'll have to go to canada before we get to israel. this is all very nightmarish.

at least my current contract continues regardless of where i'm located. i cannot overstate how grateful i am nor how much of a difference that makes.

this week started with some bad news - the deployment was successful but exposed a problem that, now that we have useful dashboards set up, has been a long time coming. we scrambled to fix it and managed to get that out early on tuesday, and getting that resolved has left a very good feeling.

mr smear's really sick, just as our kibbutz cousin has arrived for a visit - hopefully we'll all be healthy enough to have drinks or dinner before she leaves.

i managed to help out my aikido friend this evening, while adding really useful functionality to my telephony application. and i also put together an outline for a really cool team shirt design and handed it off to my nephew (who's a graphic designer) in the hopes that he can make it beautiful and we can get prints done in time for our department's end-of-year presentations.

we(e|a)ken(e)d

saturday morning's service turned out to be a cousin's barmitzvah, interesting that none of the family was invited...

i spent a good chunk of the day trying to back up my home network controller configuration, which is the only real barrier to me reformatting my dev machine. i don't understand how such a critical feature to a piece of software that's intended for corporate professional use is broken, nor how a company that makes networking products produces software that can only be managed by a single device.

i've no idea what else we may have done - although we definitely watched a few episodes of adventure time - and i've gone to bed early both nights.

yesterday started off with some side-project progress and an excitingly positive pivot with swordschool.

yesterday's main events were shoe shopping and drama at access park, then swimming pool and drama. my boy's really struggling with some things and we're really struggling to help him manage his emotions when we've no idea what's actually going on in his head.

sailor joined us by the pool in the late afternoon and the two of us brainstormed a bit until dinner time.

and today is monday. not a clue how this one's going to go, but at least the weather's nice.

better

i slept last night, my neck's still a bit wonky but definitely more stable. and then i woke up this morning from a long nightmare of trying to escape pennywise's clutches with my family - he was throwing some kind of party at a hostel or daycare and the dream ended with me telling him he needed to love himself.

mr smear's class went to kirstenbosch yesterday, and he's been hypersensitive about bullying so he's perceiving it even when it's not happening - i've borne witness to this personally -  and i tried talking to him about it. after a while he shut down, and then later when i returned home he seemed to be doing okay, i hope he's been processing in a good way.

work yesterday was a mixed bag, but mostly good. one thing that's come up over the past few days is that it's become clearer and clearer that i need to reformat my dev machine to linux. so i'm going to do that this weekend.

worthwhile

neck and leg issues notwithstanding, the past two work days have been long but successful. we learned all the lessons we needed to learn during our staging deployment, and our production deployment was so smooth that we did an extra round of testing just because i was suspicious.

weeks of changes made everything significantly better, and that's feeling good.

sleepless

i wonder how much my quality of life would be improved if i didn't spend so much of my sleep time struggling to actually sleep. this morning i woke up with severe chest pain that turned out to be triggered by my neck, this evening it took hours for my neck situation to calm down and since then my legs have been giving me grief. and i'm really too tired to just get up and do something else instead. 

two-in-one day

 two days in a row sitting in front of my laptop for many hours straight (not including getting up occasionally to make tea). i managed to walk around the block yesterday, today not so much.

monday was super frustrating, because instead of starting the deployment we've been working towards, i spent most of it making nitpick changes to code that's going to be ripped out later anyway. having said that, the nitpicking wasn't wrong, and the code does look better for it. today wasn't frustrating, but highly irritating (i feel like there's a difference), as i spent most of it waiting for terraform / terragrunt and struggling to fix things that really should be taken care of by the framework.

having said that, my manager seems pleased with my efforts and i've definitely learned a lot from the experience. it also helps that i'm paid hourly wages.

we've been having conversations with mr smear, and are at a point where we're trying to teach him basic manipulation techniques: be kind to others and listen to them, so that you can find their levers to get them to cooperate with you. it's an odd lesson, one i feel i need to be working on myself.

...

stage 4 load-shedding on top of everything else is making me feel like south africa is not-so-gently shooing us away. i'm feeling a bit less anxious than i was before, having a list definitely helps. even if that list does seem to be constantly growing :P

monday already

thursday/friday:

long days at the "office" (my mom's), although not all the hours were paid for. at least one of them was spent brainstorming about a really exciting new ARG concept with swordschool, another was spent walking with sailor, who informed me of the awful things going on in ethiopia on the day i booked our tickets through addis ababa and then inspired me with an amazing use-case for the phone software i've been using/building over the past few years.

one thing about the paid gig, though - i seem to be the new expert for two critical elements of our solution, and my manager seems happy with this. some of the last week was frustrating, but a lot of the work was pretty gratifying. the last thing i was working on was so intriguing that i had to make a conscious effort to not work on it over the weekend.

saturday:

after the morning service i was absolutely exhausted, and passed in and out of consciousness on a number of occasions while playing little big planet 3 or watching avatar: the last airbender (the original anime, we didn't enjoy the movie) with mr smear.

i found the right screwdriver to fix my rollerblades without having to go shopping. win!

we expected loadshedding, and i used it as an excuse to get mr smear outside for a walk without a fight.

i watched pete davidson: alive from new york and was surprised by how much i enjoyed it in spite of his delivery... i mean, eventually he just won me over, delivery included.

"yesterday":

i started my day early by documenting all the things that need doing before and when we leave. it's helped a bit with my overall anxiety. 

we were going to take mr smear to a friend of his' birthday party, but then realized that at least one of the group of bullies from the previous two years was going to be there and we agreed to just drop off a gift some other time.

we booked tickets, picked up my mom and went through to hout bay to do a seal island cruise. it turned out to be a great day for it, except that mr smear and i felt... a bit green... as the waves were really choppy. at least we all enjoyed the first half of the trip, and mr smear was really excited to see all the seals ^_^

we had a nice lunch at a market in hout bay, it was a bit of a relief to find a good vegan option and i was surprised by how much i ate (or the fact that i ate at all, considering).

i was so tired i actually misjudged the length of my car while parking and bashed into a pole. i'm VERY grateful that there doesn't appear to be any damage.

a bunch of us saw my sister off at the airport this afternoon, she's off to london to live with her daughter and i really hope she finds a new employer once she's there (her current employer's a real bastard).

shower/bedtime went very well.

i've just managed to deploy an updated version of my "side-project" web portal: hours spent upgrading one of the components because heaven forbid the react peeps would release a new version without significant breaking changes... anyway, the final version i deployed is working really nicely so i feel it was time well spent.

now:

it's almost 00:30. i'm going to bed.

overwhelmed

 it's very hard to function properly when you've got a million urgent things that need doing and no time for any of them.

i managed to spend all day in front of my pc, i'm very happy with the work i got done but i still feel like a lost a day.

i've been able to spend some time on my side-project (is it really a side-project?), in addition to getting some banking done, and it's just about midnight so i reckon i need to go to bed soon. my neck's been threatening me all day, i'm a bit nervous about sleeping.

crick

this week i've been exhausted and work's been quite frustrating (although yesterday did end with a great payoff). i've been going to bed right after mr smear, and last night i slept really badly and at one point had a scary incident where something in my neck "clicked" and my left arm immediately went numb.

i don't like this one bit.

the weekend flew by, i don't recall too much.

on sunday, i took mr smear to newlands to meet with a friend and his kids who we haven't seen in years, and learned that he's had a really horrible couple of years since his marriage fell apart. in the evening i joined the rollerblading group, and it was windy so we all got a lot more cardio in that usual. i convinced the guys to go down to the helicopters at the harbour, and we all enjoyed the (minor, but fun) downhills and great views.

my mom was supposed to done with her coffee shop by the end of sunday, but there appears to have been some accounting issue which will hopefully be resolved by now (i'll find out when i get to her place).

i've asked our travel agent to book tickets for christmas, which makes this madness feel a lot more real. i've solicited advice on where to stay once we get there, and someone made the observation that renting a place when we don't know if we'll be allowed to land might not be a great idea.

*sigh*

restless

it's been two hours now and i've imagined countless lines of code that would never compile to solve a problem i don't care about.

 

reminder: breathe

 today was mad. work-wise, this week was going pretty smoothly until my manager got hold of me yesterday and informed me that we're doing a quick "pivot" on our current plans, and in order to follow through on the new plan i've had to put in hours and hours of frustrating troubleshooting, which would have been bad enough but after finally being able to stop, eat breakfast and focus on getting some work done i then spent the next five hours in back-to-back meetings, some planned, some completely spontaneous.

my sister got divorced this morning, then went straight from the court to the hospital for a minor procedure that had her under general anaesthetic, and i finally got the call to pick up my car around 4pm which was just about the time that she needed a ride home so at least that worked out well - my mom escorted us as i drove her in her car, then dropped me off at the gearbox specialist so i could get mine.

i'm still buzzing with nervous energy, even if it's now shabbat and i'm officially off work, and i feel like i need to get quite a bit of work done on sunday which kinda sucks.

---

on tuesday morning gd and i both escorted mr smear and had a chat with his teacher. we weren't sure if we'd be leaving him there or bringing him back home - even if he was and loudly told anyone who might listen that we were pulling him out of the school - but she convinced us that things weren't as bad as we thought and now we're a bit suspicious but mostly okay.

in good news, mr smear went home with another kid this afternoon and they apparently had a really good time, so it's a pity it took half a year to arrange that but we're glad it happened.

...

the rest of this week seems to have flown by and i barely recall what happened. shadowslight, muadib and i watched dune together, but the experience ended up pretty much the same as watching it alone, except not as comfortably. it was still amazing - absolutely stunning, and a massive relief that villeneuve has done the book justice - and gd watched it the following night and i'm very pleased that she loved it too.

oh, and we finished watching the first season of gravity falls and the second season of adventure time. both awesome.

and i learned about debouncing, which is a useful trick.

toxic: round 3

we're angry. no, we're furious. we're distressed. we're feeling lost.

i was showering with mr smear this evening when he touched something and suddenly remembered a large bruise on his hip, which apparently was caused by a rock being thrown at him by a new kid who's been griefing him for weeks. this, after he came home today covered from head to foot in sand complaining that another kid had dumped it all over him after he'd asked him to stop.

we don't know what's going on, but we do know that something's very wrong if the people we're entrusting with our child aren't telling us things before he is. and we're obviously still smarting from friday's emergency.

whatever's happening, mr smear's been feeling unsafe and we haven't registered that until tonight, although in retrospect his recent reluctance to go to school should have raised a red flag. so tomorrow morning we're off to the school to confront his teacher, but there's already been a breach of trust and i don't know what the fuck she's going to say that's going to make any of this better.

one thing's for sure, though, if we don't leave with a good feeling then he's coming home with us, and that'll be the end of that story.

success

 today went well. mr smear slept at my mom's last night, so i got to wake up with no harassment (although not that much later than usual). i started my day diving into the calendar package i've been avoiding for months, and the deeper i got the more broken it turned out to be. so i tried looking for alternatives, and found one that works on all my platforms and is made for sane people! it still needed a little bit of trial and error, but by the time we were ready to go out i'd achieved what i set out to do and was feeling pretty good about my day.

my mom took me and mr smear to newlands forest - too cold, he said - so we continued on to kirstenbosch - too hot, he said. we all enjoyed a really nice walk.

i picked up a copy of prison architect and played for a while, then had a bath (i didn't know i needed that), then played some more until dinnertime. we continued watching gravity falls, then had some trouble with mr smear before bedtime... it may have taken a while, and lots of patience, but things got better and even though he didn't get story time we all said good night in good spirits.

our plan for this evening was to do a "watch party" of dune with shadowslight and muadib, but muadib was hit with loadshedding so we've postponed and i spent the evening tightening up my mobile app changes and fiddling with dependency versions. now i'm finding excuses to not go to bed while my macbook updates xcode which is taking forever.

mid-weekend

yesterday:

my son now has a certificate from the ER commending him on his bravery. somehow, after years of explaining to teachers that he has a dairy allergy, we ended up in a situation where a parent surprised the class with cupcakes, nobody informed us, and another kid convinced my son that the cupcakes were dairy free. this apparently happened just before i picked him up - how long before, i guess i'll find out on monday - and i walked/carried him straight to the emergency ward (my car's being checked, an uber might easily have taken longer than walking, and it didn't occur to me to get a teacher / another parent to drive us) where in spite of a thoroughly incompetent triage doctor we managed to get him inside and on a drip before anything too crazy went down.

so that happened.

otherwise, it was a mildly fun work day and quite productive. a highlight of the day was a surprise call from my manager who i haven't spoken to in over a month, and it was nice to find ourselves quite well aligned (i'd been a bit anxious).

anyway, it's somewhat relaxing about being expected to focus on only one project.

...

i think last night was the third night in a row that we tried to watch an episode of resident alien and both passed out halfway through.

today:

this shabbat's morning service put me in a grim mood, because hypocrisy. the same hypocrisy that's been bothering me for years.

blessed are you oh lord our god who authorizes us to employ willful ignorance as we encourage and support acts of extreme cruelty that bring destruction to our planet and ourselves for the sake of our gluttonous desires

otherwise, good service. i had breakfast, watched evangelion 3.33, then passed out for a while. mr smear and the neighbours' kid spent the day together and we had the afternoon to ourselves, i read a little bit of sláine: time killer, sailor came over for a short visit, my mom picked up mr smear and we enjoyed a date night. we watched free guy! aside from, like, three irritating hollywoodisms, it's an excellent and entertaining movie :)

i've spent the past few hours trying to migrate my services to an upgraded droplet, and it's been a slow and frustrating process. hopefully, i'll score more than one win before i give up and go to bed.

*SPOILER ALERT*: evangelion reboot

finally - after years of thinking about watching them - i've made it through the evangelion reboot (1.11 - 3.33). i loved the original series since watching it through in 2001, and the first movie was great. the second movie? also great, although the closing music missed the mark so badly that it left a bitter taste in my mouth.

i've now finally watched the third, and i was mostly bored by the pacing and lack of coherence. there were some cool bits towards the climactic end, and then, at the end of the credits... a preview so cheap as to make me utterly disappointed with and disinterested in the entire franchise.

a week that was

 parenting failure: it's really hard to wrap my head around the fact that i've engineered a child whose default response to anything i say is "no". he's wired to fight me and the only option i have is to just let go and focus on making good memories. this is not easy.

yesterday things came to a head at shower time, and while we managed to settle a bit as he went to sleep, i woke up at 3am deeply troubled. today was a good day. i feel like a recovering alcoholic - one day at a time.

...

how is today thursday? uhh... or friday, already?

this week has been mad. i've gotten in way less hours than i'd like, primarily due to tuesday's tortuous nightmare at the department of home affairs. i arrived late - 5.45am - and took my place about a block away from the entrance. sandwiched between people coughing, someone with a bullhorn would come out about an hour and a half later to insist on social distancing, but that only held for an hour or two. i was fortunate that my mother came by to drop off a cup of coffee just before 8am, and then a bottle of water at the 6 hour 45 minute mark just as i made it inside. it was a hot, sunny day with very little shade and no place to sit, and aside from a sore lower back and getting badly sunburned on my right arm and the back of my neck i also ended up with mild heatstroke and my brain has been foggy since. an hour and a half later - the torture continuing with no seating inside and an absurd ticket system - i stumbled out of my eight-hour ordeal with an invitation to return in a couple of weeks.

after much anxiety, we've applied for both of the documents that were lost to be reproduced. my mother managed to get in touch with the consul general at the ministry of foreign affairs of israel, but that unfortunately proved less than helpful. and of course, we've had to continue to be super-careful with the consulate as they don't appreciate frustrated responses to their unprofessional behaviour. it may not be their fault that fedex lost our documents, but as they don't require pickup documentation we have no way of being sure.

i had to drop my car off today for a gearbox inspection, not sure when i'll get it back.

*sigh*

although i haven't got much work done this week, it's still been a productive one. there's that, at least.

i should go to bed now.

checking boxes

we both felt better this morning, although still a bit tired. i managed to cross off a bunch of items on my todo list, including discussing our plans with nystire, singer and a friend from montreal.

this morning gd convinced me to buy a minecraft skin pack for mr smear, there was much joy for about ten minutes and then he decided he'd rather have something else. i'm not doing that again, for ten bucks i couldn't picked up a whole new game. or pay for another tree (we sponsor a tree monthly with greenpop, highly recommended).

to be fair, though, the skin pack *is* pretty cool.

i convinced gd to join me and mr smear on a walk during the one part of the day it wasn't raining, and it was an enjoyable walk. we ended up at plant for the first time in ages, gd wasn't too pleased with her meal but i had the bao buns and they were fantastic.

my mom came over for a visit (and read some more harry potter to mr smear), then we watched steven universe and gravity falls and aside from one very unpleasant moment (i did something that terrified mr smear, it took a little while to get him feeling safe and comfortable again and i felt a bit daft afterwards), the shower/bedtime ritual went well.

gd introduced me to resident alien yesterday, we're only about halfway through the second episode (she was too tired to continue) but i have to say that alan tudyk just keeps taking awesome roles and doing amazing things with them.

i'm finally watching the evangelion reboots, i'm halfway through 3.33 and aside from the ending of 2.22* it's been amazing.

* the music ruined its closing scene, the concept was good but the execution was distressingly bad

 ...

 the anxiety comes and goes in waves. there are some pretty big unknowns and i'm praying we don't screw anything up along the way.

dream capture

 this was from weeks ago, i guess i forgot to put it down (or i'm just failing at blog searching):

my uncle and i had to walk a couple of of kilometres and i suggested we take what looked like a shortcut, it rapidly became steeper until it twisted like a roller-coaster and he kept walking until he fell 40/50m into hard sand. i managed somehow to swing down in stages to reach him and then woke up wondering if he was still alive.

writing this down here just got super creepy because we recently learned that the uncle in question has developed a horrible degenerative disease - myasthenia gravis - that he's been battling with, and i think i dreamed this before we found out.

falling apart

 not sure if just exhausted from an emotional week full of anxieties, or if we've picked up a bug, but we had to cancel our dinner plans and do nothing this afternoon - after a mission to cavendish to fix something that wasn't broken, and i was having difficulty keeping my eyes open even before that.

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.