kind-of breathing

immigration

gd's been hilariously cute about her new status as an israeli citizen, everything she's doing she's doing for the first time "as an israeli" and she's super excited by it :D

in spite of how sick we've been - the last couple of days have been particularly bad, though we're both feeling a bit better this morning - having finally gotten through this non-stop nightmare has put us all in fantastic spirits! we've also had some very serious discussions about trauma and what we've all been going through, and for how long.

for example, i haven't been "home" since i left israel in 2012. when pg and i moved to canada, we spent six months living in limbo - uncertainty and anxiety - and after she left and my work environment became toxic and i was forced out for reacting i spent the next few months terrified that i'd run out of money before finding new employment and getting a new work permit. even though gd and i were making a home and starting a family for the following two years, i was still a foreigner on a temporary visa and the government institutions never let me forget it.

and then we moved to south africa, where for six years gd was never guaranteed residence and i didn't really want residence, certainly not long-term (even though for a while we were hopeful that the situation would magically improve). four years of water shortages, electricity shortages, fearing for our personal safety, followed by the last two and a half years of trying to leave to the only place we've really felt made sense for us. having planned to arrive here last september, even mr smear struggled with half a year knowing that we weren't where we should be.

it's been rough.

but now we're here, and slowly but surely we've been breaking through each wall until we're finally home. we finally have three of us living in a country we have the right to be in, where we have community and family and safety nets, where have a sense of permanence. this is where we are, this is where we'll be, and for the first time in forever there's nothing looming over our heads, no threats of deportation and no need to accept mistreatment or abuse from anyone in authority.

work

yesterday was relatively successful, but i'm fully aware that i'm being judged on this project and that i need to impress. on a deadline, slow and steady does not win this race.

mr smear

i'm trying to teach my boy not to invest care / attention / emotions on people he doesn't like. gd went to pick him up yesterday and she witnessed his bully harassing him non-stop. the parent of one of his friends was there, too, and she informed gd that until mr smear joined the class her daughter had been the target of this malicious little shit. at one point gd confronted him in hebrew - she yelled "enough!" and stared him down. it wasn't enough, but soon after the teacher caught on to what was happening and made this kid cry.

and nobody cared.

it's REALLY hard to get these concepts across to an almost-seven year old. now we're off to a birthday pool to see how successful we've been. at least we'll both be there too.

surreal

after two and a half years of losing battles and frustrations and mini-victories and setbacks and fear and anxieties and stress and living in limbo... we made it to our meeting. we arrived with what we were asked to bring: gd's passport and her passport photos. i also brought all our documents, just in case. mr smear brought his spongebob squarepants comic.

those last two items? turned out we really needed them. we were there for ages, with mr smear entertaining himself and anyone within earshot as he read all the stories out loud, doing voices and accents and generally being both adorable and out of the way. we had documentation issues, and i was able to resolve them with my magic folders of everything.

but we didn't really believe that we would be getting through the meeting until gd was asked to take photos and give her fingerprints, and we had her temporary id handed to her along with some instructions for the next couple of months.

it's done. the great adventure of the past few years has been completed, and we can finally begin our lives proper. there's plenty more in the way of bureaucratic challenges to overcome, especially in the coming weeks, but the most important item has been taken care of and it's literally amazing and surreal to finally be on the other side.

...

aside from finally celebrating the real win, it was another nasty day as far as being sick is concerned. a week into this, absolutely desperate, my brain suddenly went "omg! wouldn't it be good to use sudafed?" and then "holy shit, we have some!". and i took it. it didn't completely dry me up, but it helped a LOT. and i'm so desperate at this point that i've decided that i don't give a shit if i can't sleep, as long as i can breathe. i mean, i'm not really getting much sleep anyway, so whatever.

also, my back and neck have been mostly fine for the past week but this evening spasmed without warning and i'm just a tad bit miffed about it.

we had to pick mr smear up early from school today - another incident. we've spoken to a bunch of teachers by now, and it looks like he's getting more and more frustrated with not being able to express himself in hebrew and so he's expressing himself in other ways. we've *very* excited that he got into the hop website / content the other day, i've been meaning to sign up for ages and he was loving the games and watching his favourite shows dubbed and i think it's a great step forward.

all things considered he's doing amazingly well, but still - it's hard for him and hard for us because we haven't found a strategy yet that works.

finally, it was a surprisingly good half-workday for me. my team lead came back from sick leave and was very happy with the work i've been doing, and we had a discussion about technology choices for a project that i'm creating and we seem to be well-aligned.

i'm still feeling really grateful to have signed up with these guys.

...

right, it's closing in on midnight, we've had a big day / week / couple of years. i'm going to lie down and either sleep or read, and pray that my nose and chest give me some respite over the next few hours.

***** ******* ******

again. i woke up an hour or two ago with my nose completely blocked and massive pressure in my sinuses. i tried for ages to unblock myself but eventually gave up and used otrivin. that helped, but as a consequence i've just spent even more ages blowing my nose and coughing sporadically.

i'm really, really hating this.

yesterday was another long and chaotic day.

1. trying to help my mother with her foreign banking issues, losing my temper with a tech support agent because they refuse to help us in the most remarkably stupid of ways. different bank, same morons.

similar story with gd's tourist health insurance.

2. gd dropping something off at the school and coming home furious because mr smear had been fighting back tears when she arrived - another incident. the two of us went to pick him up and have a chat with the staff, discovered that the parents of the other kids have lied to us about their interactions with the school, and that mr smear has been actively seeking this kid out himself.

between dinner and bedtime ritual we sat him down to talk about all this, i don't know what we're going to do.

3. a long day "in the office" (on the couch) constantly juggling three or four things at a time. some of those things were successful. i'm disappointed to discover that as excited as i am with my first foray into github's copilot, it doesn't help me in the slightest with regards serverless framework and i'm really not a serverless framework kind of person.

jesus fuck, i'm exhausted. and today's The Day. i'm so nervous (and so over being sick for so long) i'm not even excited.

...

oh, jolly good. one of my nostrils has just closed up again.

good grief.

relentless

 jesus, four days of this nasty whatever-the-fuck-this-is and not being able to sleep periods of perpetual coughing and nose-blowing and difficulty getting enough oxygen and i am sooooooo over it.

it feels like there's always something preventing me from getting a good night's rest. if it's not covid or this shitty running nose / chest infection thing, it's muscular discomfort or nerve pain or anxiety or just about anything.

i need to fucking sleep.

...

yesterday (as in sunday, i'm still in the middle of last night), to my wife and son's delight, i picked up "chipotle chillis" that promised to a) be entertaining and b) make my sinuses flow. over dinner i took out a large one, chewed through it (it's chewy) and it set my mouth and throat ablaze in a painful yet satisfying way. gd finally has a recording of me in tears hiccuping uncontrollably, and my son (i hope) now understands that concept of a non-dit ("we're going to get ten thousand likes on youtube!", he yelled enthusiastically while gd was recording).

i got through that first one without needing anything to wash it down / soak it up with food or drink. it was pretty hot, though, enough that my tongue actually felt like it was damaged burned.

after lunchtime breakfast yesterday (now i mean monday, because it is past 3am after all), i decided to give the chillis another go. i took small ones, and i was... disappointed. like, i barely tasted or felt anything. like, i was pretty certain that i'd burned off my tastebuds.

then in the late afternoon, convinced that it was barely going to have an effect, i picked up another little one. my wife and son were tooling around in another part of the apartment and being loud and couldn't hear me, but this single bite was the most powerfully hot chilli i've ever eaten in my life. it seared my tongue and cheeks and the roof of my mouth, it burned me so badly that i stomped my feet and hiccuped and cried and gasped for air and was entirely incapable of speech for a while, and boy was i grateful to learn that the half-cup of barista oatly we had left in the fridge could suppress the fire, even if i did have to hold it in my mouth and not swallow because the moment i swallowed all the pain returned instantly.

jesus.

i don't recall the last time i threw away an unfinished chilli, the entire thing was two teeny tiny bites and there was no way in hell i was going to take the second one.

...

i suspect this one might burn on the way out :(

...

after a month and a half of trying to make contact with my credit card company, i opened their app yesterday morning and browsed through their fake offer of a loan with good terms (i'd seen their promotions for it and was considering taking out a local loan to pay off my overseas debt). quickly realizing that it was just another bullshit corporate scam, i closed the app and forgot about it.

a couple of hours later, someone called me to "help me out" because they'd seen that i'd reviewed their advertising.

of course.

i told the guy i'd talk to him about the loan after he helped me sort out my incorrect phone number, without which i've been unable to communicate with them because every communication channel of theirs requires an authentication code via sms only and their systems - for some reason - cannot send an sms to my twilio number.

so anyway, he put me through to a support agent directly. and i was stunned when someone answered almost immediately - i actually needed a moment to compose myself!

the agent wanted me to authenticate myself. fine. i answered his questions with no hesitation until he asked me to give him an example of a recent transaction. i wracked my brain, remembered a purchase from friday.

"no, not friday. before friday."

wtf?! i have trouble recalling what i did yesterday without looking at my own blog (or scrolling through social media, my calendar and emails hunting for evidence), so in frustration i open the app and manage to pull up a list of my recent transactions. but no matter what i tell him - and i'm reading from the list of transactions they maintain - the agent tells me "sorry, i don't see that".

at this point i lose my composure entirely, because their systems are obviously broken if i'm seeing stuff that my agent cannot. i yell for his manager, he informs me that his manager was unavailable just now.

right.

i offer him a couple more transactions to no avail, then eventually he has an epiphany and triggers a voice authentication code to my phone. the same number they've called me on, the same number they cannot send me smses to, the exact functionality that is unavailable via website, whatsapp or the telephone call menu system.

holy shit.

so i put the agent on hold to switch to the call, catch the number on the second listen (i was beyond flustered at that point, and struggled to keep four hebrew numbers in my head while half-convinced that he'd hang up on me before i could switch back), say it back to him and *boom*

authenticated.

he agrees that i'm me, he updates my number. he agrees to send me an sms authentication code just to make sure that he's got my number right. i get the sms.

*whoosh*

a month and a half of messages and calls and visits to my bank and pure kafka-esque frustration with these morons is over.

achievement unlocked.

so.

me being me, i say something along the lines of "right, now you're going to do two things. first, you're going to escalate to anyone who will listen that your systems are broken..."

"that's not something i can do. and besides, our systems aren't broken."

"how do you explain that you couldn't see the transactions i was referring to?"

"what's broken? nothing's broken. the system only shows me a select few transactions, not all of them!"

a part of my mind exploded right there on the sidewalk.

"what the hell is the point of that?! how does that help anyone???" [and why the fuck didn't you say that in the first place, you stupid fuck?]

"they can't just show us everything, do you want us to be able to just give you the answers?!"

holy shit. the combination lack of iq and basic education that could generate such a stupidly illogical statement. i simply could not wrap my head around what i was hearing.

"and besides, sir, let me stop you right there. why are you even going on about a problem that we've already resolved?"

brilliant. he'd found my big red button.

"because i don't want to have to go through such a ridiculous challenge in the future! because i don't want other people to have to go through it either!"

"i can't escalate that, i don't have the authority."

"you don't have the authority to do your damned job? or you're small minded?" [in hebrew: "you have a small head", it sounds much better]

"i'm not small-minded. it's not my job to..."

by this point i'd really lost my temper. i yelled at him for "having the smallest head there is" and did the "you have a good day now" thing, drawing some smidgen of satisfaction from his confused "you too" before hanging up on him.

...

i was utterly blown away.

i'm still blown away.

i somehow managed to put the episode on hold for a few minutes and took care of the errand i'd been on, but on my walk home, i mulled over our "conversation" and this past month and a half of fighting with these cretins, and eventually came to the unsatisfying conclusion that CAL visa is a financial company built on broken / badly designed systems held together by the earwax and drool of their otherwise unemployable employees.

...

i'm so tired that i want to just slide back into bed, but i'm so frustrated that i'm put off even trying to sleep. and this is the second last "sleep" before our big meeting on wednesday...

hello 5am my old friend

 i couldn't sleep on saturday night because swallowing was uncomfortable and i was having trouble breathing. yesterday i worked from home and we all went through a lot of tissues, with me dealing with what appeared to be a chest infection.

not covid, though, apparently, at least according to multiple RATs...

about two hours ago i woke up struggling, but it seems like i've coughed out most of it. now i'm just restless. tired, and restless, with my brain conjuring up all sorts of fears and awkward moments for me to chew on while my muscles ache (as usual) and i worry about wednesday.

...

around lunchtime yesterday gd and i had a fight that for a little while really seemed to be the end of us. we'd had a fight the day before, and thought it was resolved, but a few things came out that were expressed in ways that hadn't been expressed before and we somehow seem to be doing okay now. we've both got homework to do.

i'm sad for mr smear that he was present for most of it, but there were a few moments when he got involved in a positive way and it makes me feel like he might just be navigating some of this world a little better than we do.

...

so here i am drinking chamomile tea and staring at a screen, hopefully i'll be able to grab some shuteye before alarm-time. so many things to be anxious about, so little time...

well... gosh.

 work-wise, this did not feel like a good week at all. the second round of my design review brought out some significant changes and the boss was unhappy about the lack of efficiency in how much time everyone's invested in this process so far... i guess we're all learning, but i'd rather it wasn't on account of something i own when it's my first time doing this with them.

to make things worse, after two and a half weeks losing an enormous amount of time to other people's flaky tests that took hours to fail each time, the flakiness was finally fixed and by the end of the day - the end of the week - we finally discovered that my code had, in fact, broken something.

good grief.

...

on wednesday night we hosted our rabbi's family. mr smear slept in our bed, and had had a bit of cough earlier - it got so bad during the night that he woken up screaming because (ironically?) he could barely breathe. after that i could barely sleep because i was freaking out about a nightmare scenario where wednesday's meeting with misrad hapnim has to be cancelled because we've picked up covid (again, reinfection is apparently a big thing now) or something else.

since yesterday evening gd and i have been struggling to breathe...

...

the rabbi and his family took us out to a vegan pizzeria, the food was excellent and our table was literally next to the door of levontin 7 - i really missed levontin 7! there was some series of events happening, and we were fascinated by the people going in and out because it seemed like young people and children were going in and being transformed into old people.

the evening ended on a good note, but that note turned sour as we rushed to get a bus from a... less than savoury area. gd freaked out because she's still getting over south africa trauma, but it otherwise really wasn't so bad.

...

this week's money drama has made it difficult to not be anxious or to get through the myriad bureaucratic chores on my plate. i'm exhausted. the world is relentless. i need a break.

...

gd's meeting is on wednesday, we got extra passport photos taken yesterday just in case. everything else is just getting through the next few days and praying that that meeting goes well.

quick report

i'm excited to report that this experiment in learning how to make games with mr smear and godot is going well. not only have we managed to get a handle on moving characters around, but we've learned about rotations (and how radians work) and this morning i explained integers vs natural numbers, and it looks like he got it!

yesterday was... intense. it began with the revelation that social security had taken more money off my salary than expected (making up for lost time) and we've either reached or exceeded the limits on every single credit card we have. and we don't have enough money to cover that.

it's a little bit terrifying.

and then, at 2pm i had my first design review, and it's for a huge project where they've given me lots more rope than i'd need to hang myself. i think it went well, though!

and then, at 3pm, i gave a fifteen minute presentation during our company's "enrichment happy hour" about shakespeare's sonnets, and unless everyone was just being super-kind a lot of what i said seems to have landed ^_^

holding our breaths

 backwards:

yesterday was a huge day for us. gd and i went to her appointment at misrad hapnim, and were extremely fortunate to find ourselves sitting across from an intelligent, sympathetic human being. there was only one moment of horror, when we were told that her divorce certificate wasn't the correct document, but gd and i translated it for them word by word and they eventually accepted it.

we've been told not to celebrate just yet, but essentially her aliyah has been approved and our next appointment (next week) is to get her formally registered. so we're relieved (kind of) and anxious (kind of) and praying that we get through it without a hitch. as soon as that's done, we'll have a ton of bureaucratic hoops to jump through but on a completely different set of feet.

...

work-wise, last week was pretty awful and this week hasn't started out so well. i've been trapped in a piece of work that should have been quick and easy but needed so much yak-shaving to get it to function correctly that it's been my primary focus, even when the *real*, *important* work has been on my table and not getting done. that doesn't feel good.

and it certainly doesn't help that a good chunk of the failures - which take an hour or two to detect each time - are due to flaky tests that were introduced recently and fixing them hasn't been prioritized :(

...

last week was mr smear's first week of summer school, and also his first week ever in aftercare. it's mostly gone amazingly well! although he's had repeated incidents with a bully in his class, and we're trying to work with the kid's parents to figure this shit out...

...

i wrote a poem last week for the first time in forever, not a very good one but a sequel to a couple of others that i realized i hadn't recorded. so i tried recording the first one, and i really love the poem but it's so dark that it upset gd to hear it and i don't actually want to commit it to memory. i'm going to give it another few goes this week and try to "publish" it.

...

on thursday morning we were supposed to go to ikea with the mongoose. i left later than planned, the bus i needed drove straight past us at the station, the expensive taxi i jumped into took longer than walking, and then i finally got in the van and couldn't find the ****ing handbrake. electronic parking / handbrakes are not standard, and the support agent couldn't understand me or help me once she finally did understand me, and eventually i lost my temper and yelled about bad service and how i was going to switch to their competition.

i found out later that their competition doesn't provide the same services at all.

so on the weekend, when i needed a van to pick up a table and bookshelf from the parents of one of the kids in mr smear's class that they were getting rid of, i bit down on my pride and rollerbladed three kilometers to try again. after having watched videos on the citroën berlingo's braking system on youtube. i released the parking brake, ignored the exclamation mark symbol on the dashboard warning lights, and had a pretty good experience.

what a stupid design.

anyway, the furniture is very heavy and was really difficult to move, but we managed it in the end and we're very happy with it.

...

this shabbat we hosted the wife of one of our community's rabbis, and we had a really great time. we managed to get to the friday evening service on the beach, which was mostly great except that i was deeply embarrassed for most of it. mr smear had asked me to lift him up, so i tried to put him on my shoulders but he screamed horribly. i put him down and he yelled that he wanted me to lift him up, which was confusing (and i was already flustered), and when i tried to put him on my shoulder but differently he yelled again that he didn't want to be on my shoulders, he wanted me to hold him up in front of me (like simba?). this was very confusing and uncomfortable, but i managed to get it right and was deeply frustrated because i didn't understand what the heck was going on.

a few minutes later, after i'd put him down, i learned what had happened and then i became *really* embarrassed: i hadn't realized that we'd been standing under an umbrella-like installation, and when i initially lifted him up i smashed his head into a metal bar :$

...

i woke up and hour or two ago with my brain buzzing about research grants and proposals and journals, and now i'm ready to try for another hour or so of sleep before hitting the new day.

next turn

a pleasant last day with a nice but much longer than intended walk - weather hot but with a nice breeze, like most of the past couple of months.

mom airport ride "human error" insanity (rollerblading to the wrong address because they switched cars at the last minute, the car being too small, driving back to pick up my mother and not being able to start the car again, car2go providing a taxi for my family and the luggage, returning the car and taking the train to join them at the airport and then getting home really late)

a much more relaxed work week but with plenty of blockers and head-scratching

mr smear's official end of term: a lice outbreak story

finally getting into podcasts (my walks to and from work are the perfect opportunity)

post-corona fatigue lasting until thursday, now just regular fatigue

yesterday:

(finally!) a good haircut, lunch with nystire, following godot tutorials and resting, hitting the beach with the mongoose and co and having a really good time, vegan frozen yoghurt and getting home really late, tired and sore.

today:

playing through a lot of the tutorial for main assembly with mr smear, mostly resting, taking a walk to meet urchin but she was too tired to see us so we sat down at café nona for what would have - aside from mr smear behaving badly - been a really enjoyable beer / lemonade-slush / shakshouka.

the spiderwick chronicles re-watch triggering a very interesting conversation.

...

there's so much bureaucracy to get through, it's really hard to take things one step at a time when everything is kinda crucial.

the aging process

 it's a saturday morning, our plans have fallen through, i've managed to get all of this week's posting for the sonnet comix project done, and i'm wondering if i should try getting into some game development lessons (the godot engine looks very interesting).

the work week ended on quite a dramatic note: not only did our VP of marketing "resign" very suddenly, but our dev team had to navigate a very hands-on product manager and his and our feelings when he sprung a ~20K line pull request on us. hilarity did not ensure. by thursday evening, just before i left, we'd managed to bring in the stuff we agreed on and hopefully we'll close this story tomorrow morning. everyone has learned some important lessons.

on wednesday evening, midway through the drama, i joined a couple of my teammates for drinks near kikar rabin. it was fun, and definitely out-of-the-ordinary for old-fart me. we had a very exciting discussion about doing some game development together!

our status here in israel is complicated and highly stressful at the moment, i'm praying that our insurance situation will be sorted out in the next couple of days but it looks like even mr smear won't have proper health cover until gd's status change in a few weeks' time.

yesterday, i joined my mom on a mission to a retirement complex next to the university. the apartments and the complex and everything seem like a really great deal! we then stopped for coffee on campus, and it really felt like "coming home" - i miss my studies...

my neck / shoulders / back have been in distress this week, i think i've been unconsciously slouching.

last night a cousin we've never met before came for dinner to say hi to my mom and we had a wonderful time catching up!

and speaking of cousins, we have a new one this week: wp's wife has given birth!

and now to (chill / learn) and enjoy our last day with my mom before she returns to south africa tonight.

shell shock

 i'm exhausted, highly stressed, partially relieved, generally confused.

1. my mom got covid last week - which is really sucky timing and is possibly my fault. i'd been over the symptoms for a couple of days before she arrived, but still... fortunately she managed to make the wedding on wednesday (she did an antigen test before we left), but we got her pcr result the next day and it was positive. also fortunate: that she just had a scratchy throat and was really tired for a few days, but nothing more serious.

2. the wedding was beautiful and great fun, but the friday night with the family after the wedding was particularly special: my cousin has barely spoken in his thirty years on this planet, and it seems like he was saving all his words for his speech. it was long, non-stop entertainment, hilarious and touching and brilliant.

3. on sunday gd and i stood for seven hours in misrad hapnim in an attempt to get her status updated. mrs professor quirrel demonstrated to me, in our first interaction of the day, that she's not malicious: she's literally too stupid to do her job or understand the consequences of her incompetence. fortunately, her manager took so long to get a response to her that she "had to leave", and we were passed on to her coworker who is competent and pleasant to deal with. gd now has extended permission to remain in the country and we have an appointment to update her status (and mr smear's, i was mistaken last week thinking that him getting an id number was sufficient) in about three weeks' time.

4. i'm really, really struggling with insurance and insurance brokers. in both countries. jesus. we have no medical insurance because... because the insurance people are making getting cover a lot more complicated than it should be (we started the process of getting insurance a week before the 12th, when my south african cover ended, and it's now two weeks later and they're asking us when we want the cover for).

5. we're really struggling with teachers' strikes and summer holiday planning. at least we've managed to get mr smear registered for summer school and aftercare, finally, but the rest is so damned confused and i'm outta bandwidth and gd doesn't understand hebrew.

6. my personal banker is a complete moron, and/or the banking system is broken.

7. our financial situation is a mess. we're really stretched thin.

8. work has been really intense, it's nice to earn a good salary but they're paying me to not have any kind of work/life balance (during "crunch" periods, at least) and of course, we have my first "crunch" in forever while my mother's visiting.

right, back to work.

my evening in a nutshell (there's a theme)

1. filling out forms for travel insurance that will cover us for everything except the things we might actually need it for

2. signing up to try out disney+ and spending far too long figuring out that their parental controls are completely broken. now trying to get a refund as we haven't watched anything yet.

3. submitting a request to reverse my payment for my license renewal because the license bureau still hasn't responded to my requests and is now sending me letters telling me i haven't paid

4. giving up on payoneer, who've been messing me around for a week or two - they won't let me add my israeli bank account even though all my details are correct and match my profile

5. moving my patreon payouts to paypal after remembering that i have an israeli paypal account from before i left. even though i've added my new phone number as my primary number, they won't let me remove my old number and they insist on sending security codes to the old one only so i can't add my new israeli bank account.

dreaming

i managed to get cat poop on the top of my foot and tried to find a functional bathroom in the giger-esque men's locker rooms to clean myself.

i was in a college dorm with a bunch of jewish friends when an ISIS-like terrorist group came in. i futilely tried to reason with them, but i knew they were going to attack and i did what i could to try and get everyone out. just as we found ourselves going head-to-head with them, a bunch of christian clowns (or something? some kind of performance troupe) unluckily found themselves between us and in the confusion the other two groups went one way and we went another.

a witch who kind of looked like bette midler was trying to come back to life but she needed to be kneaded into a kind of spaghetti and cooked into her original shape. her attempt was mostly succeeding just before i woke up.

mid-week madness

i've got to go to bed soon, this week has been ridiculous so far.

FIRST THINGS FIRST! as of this morning, my wife and son both appear in my population registry record and my son has his israeli id number! next stop, getting gd's status updated - we're hoping to make some progress on sunday morning.

my mom's been here with us since saturday morning, and it's been really great having her here ^_^

on sunday morning i went to the courts and managed to pick up copies of the judgement.

my bank situation's a real mess, i spent an hour yesterday morning with them figuring out how to send money, but a day later and it's now clear to me that i have no access to my credit card account or any human support, and i literally don't have access to my own money at this point :/

i've been over covid since friday, but it took me until today to get clearance certificates from the doctors.

work has been challenging and fun. we're gearing up for (an anticipated) re-org. my coworkers were really impressed by the voiceover i did for our hackathon presentation :)

wonder no more

good grief, that "exhaustion" from last week? we got covid. like, this week was really tough, and in retrospect i should probably have taken a sick day or two - i only realized this morning that i'm still in "contractor mode" because i've spent so long not getting paid for not working regardless of the reason.

gd and i have both spent the past week perpetually exhausted and frequently faint (not getting enough oxygen), but i've been powering through, in particular so as not to let my team down for my first company hackathon. we failed to demo, unfortunately, but we generated a lot of enthusiasm for our idea and we *did* actually get it to work at one point... i'm amused that so many people enjoyed my voiceover for our presentation :P

for me the biggest struggle this week was that aside from one night (wednesday night) i've barely been able to sleep. even last night, when i'm clearly done with the main symptoms. in the aftermath of the first time (and last time) i got covid i suffered weeks of sinusitis,  and it looks like this time around is much of the same :(

...

otherwise, two big events happened this week. the most important one happened yesterday: we finally received our judgement, the state officially recognizes that mr smear is my son! we're expecting him to be entered into the population registry within the next couple of weeks, and as soon as that's done gd can make aliyah and we can all have access to all the rights and services that we should have been entitled to half a year ago...

and there was much rejoicing ^_^

secondly, the past couple of weeks have been extremely financially strained and as of this morning i finally have money in my account. it's particularly comforting to know how much i can expect each month (the tax consultant wasn't kidding about them hitting me hard), and i'm finally in a position where i can make plans and budget and so on.

...

finally, mr cat has produced the latest couple of pages and i'm looking forward to posting them over the weekend. which for me, has already begun. and in the wee hours of tomorrow morning i'm off to pick up my mom from the airport! exciting times ^_^

halfway through the weekend

 right, so it's shavuot tonight, and i'm exceedingly grateful that we have a long weekend because this week *really* took it out of me. gd's been sick the past couple of days, and i'm not sure if i was sick myself or if i was just so thoroughly exhausted that i felt sick (i almost fainted last night). i've spent most of yesterday and today just resting, and trying to turn my brain off.

that hasn't been easy, but i can thank the boys (re-watching season 1), deadpool (re-reading volume 1) and a mindless mobile game called alien shooter for helping.

[pauses to play another round or two]

there are plenty of things to be stressed about, but i'm already feeling better for having rested and done a lot of nothing. mr smear has been taking an interest in the fitness videos i was watching (browney) and not only was inspired to do push-ups, but i took him out twice today and he was as excited to impress me with his outdoor gym efforts as i was!

we also played some command & conquer and don't starve together, which was great :)

between yesterday and today i managed to get one of my unifi network appliances hooked up, and my computers are finally able to connect properly which is a huge relief.

rough stuff

 yesterday afternoon was first heartwarming, then heartbreaking. i finished my work day on a good note, managing to get out of the office just in time to make it to my boy's first "performance" - his class did a dance for shavuot. he was great, we were super proud.

and then he had a run in with the kid he calls "his nemesis", and it was clear as day that he was the antagonist. and not just to that kid. i tried to find a good opportunity to apologize to the parents but they wouldn't make eye contact. when i told his teacher i was concerned, she told me this is a daily occurrence.

talk about letting the wind out of my sails.

so yesterday evening was ghastly for all of us.

...

i've spent my last two mornings dealing with insurance brokers, and tomorrow morning will be more of the same. also, we've pretty much hit our debt ceiling. that's really scary, but there's really nothing to be done until i get paid...

...

today seemed to be a bit better for him. for me, i spent all day bashing my head against a wall of dependency resolutions. i finally got things running - not working - at 5pm and desperately wanted to check in my changes and walk away... but it would take another hour / hour and a half to further disentangle the dependencies for the pre-commit hook that refused to let me do so.

i'm emotionally depleted at this point.

...

last night was a struggle, so i installed some mind-numbing games (bacterial takeover is one of them). this evening: same. although i did pick up the remastered command & conquer collection and i think mr smear is ready for them... i'm really looking forward to introducing him :)

goods and bads

 i'm really tired. today was a good day, i guess? work was successful with some exciting things to look forward to, and i took mr smear out for dinner because gd isn't feeling good and we found ourselves at alegria: the food and experience were both excellent.

it was my mom's birthday today! we're really excited about her coming her in the next couple of weeks, but hopefully next year we'll be able to celebrate the actual day with her here...

yesterday was pretty awful. work was mostly good, but on my way home i spoke to gd and she filled me in on a deeply disturbing event that she witnessed when she picked mr smear up from school - we're praying to all the gods that he's acting out because of all the unsettling immigration things, and not because of something more dramatic...

saturday was... complicated. we would have had a really nice day with urchin if it wasn't for mr smear constantly pushing boundaries and gd's shoes ripping her feet to shreds. we walked a lot. in the evening we drove through to our cousins for a lovely evening with the family.

the groom's father's toast included a story about dolphins having large clitorises. one of our cousins had a cold and when they gave him the cup of wine to saying a really long blessing, a drop of snot splashed into it.

...

okay, i'm off to bed now.

weak end to the week

 yesterday:

yesterday saw two advancements and two setbacks.

advancement 1: we got a water filter system installed which replaces bottled water and the kettle.

advancement 2: the handyman came in and fixed the kitchen cupboards. he also did the prep-work for the bathtub, which is going to be a story when he comes back for it.

setback 1: i deployed code (that had been tested and vetted) that broke our ci/cd pipelines. all of them. i was working from home and my team lead and i weren't as in-sync as i thought we were, because our head of r&d sent me urgent voice messages at one point. fortunately, i managed to figure out the issue and fix it... by the end of the day. not a great experience.

setback 2: mr smear and i had a fight in the evening that was ridiculous and horrible. gd declared our relationship toxic. things may have been much better today but i'm still heartbroken from the entire ordeal.

[setback 3: mr smear did something really naughty - not maliciously, but that's not the point - and has been given a suspension warning. jesus.]

today:

gd and i started our day with a group of parents talking about a programme for the next school year. i translated as much as i could while still following. our take-away from this morning, which we'd agreed on before the meeting, was that we really need to sign mr smear up to the aftercare / extra-mural activities.

my local credit card has been blocked, and my bank a) didn't inform me and b) has not been reachable. on sunday, i'll be going to find myself a new bank.

otherwise, we managed to find me some clothing, pick up our kid on time, unpack most of our books and arrange them on shelves, get gd's contact lenses just before the place closed, get kiddush wine (and beers and a couple of breezers), finish watching charlie and the chocolate factory, rest, watch some star trek tng, chill and have a pleasant entry into the shabbat.

mr smear has just gone to bed, we're about to continue watching ricky gervais' new special. i didn't know about it until someone i know posted that i should unfriend myself if i find it funny. i didn't laugh at the transcripted parts, but i do think he was completely on point. otherwise, there's some really hilarious material in there.

the big day

yesterday: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

we managed to get out on time with all our stuff, we didn't not forget to bring a towel. we navigated the buses and found the laboratory. we all got our blood samples taken, and mr smear handled it just great.

and then it was done.

an enormous relief washed over us as the unstoppable ball began rolling, in a couple of weeks our results will hit the courts, in another misrad hapnim, and as soon as mr smear is registered gd will get her citizenship status sorted out, and anyone who interferes at this point will be doing so illegally.

...

we celebrated by going out for a delicious lunch at a coffee shop on yehuda hamaccabi, then came home where i spent four hours playing around with testing until it was time to get ready for the wedding.

...

1. omg between the wedding gift and the babysitter, last night was expensive. and when we arrived and everyone wanted to know where mr smear was, i felt like a right idiot for not having asked about kids before.

2. neither gd nor myself realized that i didn't have any button shirts until half an hour before we left.

3. the drive there was fine, i'm very glad i made change by buying a coke on the way to the car because i needed it to get home.

4. the wedding was beautiful and fun and we had a great time!

...

we arrived home around midnight to find two big puddles left by the babysitter's dog. by the time we'd sorted that out and i'd showered and brushed me teeth and fallen into bed, it was pretty late.

...

i woke up this morning with a hangover. today's going to be a milder "big day" as the handyman's coming to fix our kitchen cabinets and we're getting a water filter installed.

sun-tues

we all made it on time to meet the lawyer at misrad hapnim on sunday morning, and we were lucky to land at a desk other than mrs professor quirrel's. still not a great experience, but much, much saner and we were able to at least apply for the visa extensions.

money well spent.

sunday evening we had a team barbeque to celebrate last quarter's achievements (which i was obviously not a part of), it was really nice!

i promised to go shopping with gd yesterday evening, not realizing that it was our company's board-game night, so that sucked a bit. i did, however, manage to get a great pair of summer shoe-sandals (it's what i was looking for, really, but i didn't actually expect to find them!).

over the course of sunday and monday i finally lost patience with the incompetents at the cargo company, they failed to inform me that while i spent two weeks trying to get my status sorted out to avoid paying the customs duties i was wracking up significant storage fees. so i ended up getting everything released for 1.5 times what i should have paid - which was stupidly expensive to begin with - and then to top it all off they refused to do the front-door delivery that we'd specifically paid for. it's very hard to be professional for my coworkers while being furious with fools. (i managed, but it was hard)

gd and i finally hashed out the leftover feelings from friday evening, and although the process wasn't pleasant i think we're in a much better place for it.

this morning our shipment was delivered and left outside our building, i managed to get 280kg up about 1200 stairs in just about an hour, at which point my watch showed me that i had almost reached half of my step goal: i briefly considered throwing it out the window.

work-wise this has been a great week. the highlights were receiving very high praise from my team lead yesterday and today being asked to take over a task as a favour because i'm now The Guy in the team who they trust to tool around with the CI/CD pipeline and git 'er done.

we're all nervous tonight because tomorrow is The Big Day. we're off at cock-fart to get our blood drawn so that they can finally sort out mr smear's population registry entry so that we can get on with our lives.

wish us luck!

the week and weekend in brief

it took me a day to breathe better, two to relax a bit (our lawyer helped).

for most of the week gd struggled with a terrible migraine and was effectively incapacitated.

i spent yet another week trying and failing to get hold of someone at customs to get them to release our personal effects without taxing the shit out of us. we're getting desperate enough that we might pay the tax just to get this over with, and that's another lovely few hundred dollars.

i started wednesday with a personal visit to misrad hapnim to sort out my id and passport, and the contrast in treatment was refreshing / jolting / insulting all at once. the woman who dealt with me was kind, helpful, caring, human. she sits no more than two metres away from the evil **** who's putting us through hell. afterwards, i joined my company at the AWS summit, instead of enjoying a few talks and checking things out i spent the entire day on my feet pitching and demoing. i won't lie, i kind of enjoyed it.

in the evening i took mr smear to his class treasure hunt in the park for lag b'omer. it was a very pleasant evening, he had a great time, and i ran into grootbek and we chatted for a while until my boy finally came back into view.

thursday morning was a mixed mess of work and bureaucracy, but i went into the office for a productive afternoon and finished the week on a good note.

friday: friday was a perfect day, right until dinner time. gd joined me after i dropped mr smear at school and we went into town for a haircut and to find stickers for our postbox and front door, and we made it back to the school just in time to pick him up again. i then took him for a walk and we ended up at the beach, with plenty of playing on the way, at the beach, and on the way back, and i even enjoyed a beer on the beach while waiting for him. we really had a lot of fun together, it was awesome.

we then had an incident at dinnertime that was caused by something really ridiculous, and we all had a horrible night after that.

i was still feeling raw for most of today, we spent most of it doing not much (although i had some good times with mr smear playing video games and watching fun videos) and we sadly missed out on my cousin's pre-wedding family gathering as well as a birthday party for a bunch of the kids in mr smear's class.

everyone's gone to bed already, i just needed to put this all down before i go myself. according to our lawyer we have everything we need, now we just need a bit of luck. praying and breathing. praying and breathing.

one abusive ****

gd actually called her a very rude name out loud because she was so mean to us, i've understood from nystire that in his family's experience this is really her thing.

so we made it this morning! we were on time, we did everything we were supposed to, and this abusive "religious" woman made our lives miserable until we left, frustrated and stressed out and devastated. now we have to go back again in a week accompanied by our lawyer - which will cost us a very pretty penny - and pray that we're able to avoid having to leave the country next month.

...

it's very hard to be focused on work with this shit rolling around my chest. i'm pretty sure i overshared with my coworkers today.

...

i'm tired.

trepidation 2 (double)

the good stuff:

a really nice day out with cm and his family, gd made it as well and we all had a good time.

the latest double-pager of the comics is done! i haven't got the final hi-res copy yet, but it's come out fantastically well and i'm excited to put it out there ^_^

the nerves:

i know what we have to do tomorrow, and i'm worried about getting there in time and about gd and mr smear getting there in time after me. i'm worried about landing on bad bureaucrats or not having everything we need. i know (intellectually) that everything should be fine, but i can't help being stressed.

additionally, we realized this afternoon that the massive mounted cupboards in the kitchen are coming off the wall - and have been doing so since before we moved in. there's SO much work to be done in this apartment...

friday morning breath

 i have Things To Do but i've been chilling the past hour or so and really feeling like i've needed to.

two stressors at the moment: first, the shipment of our personal goods is supposed to arrive tomorrow and figuring out (even with my mother's assistance) how to get it to clear customs has been horrible. second, i'm rather nervous about sunday morning, when we go to misrad hapnim to attempt to extend gd's and mr smear's tourist visas...

the new guy at work seems cool, but i'm having a hard time evaluating him. so far i've had to rescue his new macbook from being very close to bricked and he generally seems a bit... institutionalized (he's been working for a massive corporate for the last decade or two).

anyway, the past two days at work were wildly successful, my first "real work" PRs are opened and i discovered that visual studio code works beautifully when attached to a running docker container which simultaneously blew my mind and enabled me to work comfortably on my new m1 macbook architecture that doesn't play nicely with others.

also, i passed around a link to an older article i'd written about regex (after hearing that there'd recently been an incident due to a misunderstanding about a misbehaving regular expression) and my boss has asked me to write a piece about our product, which i'm actually quite keen to do ^_^

on the way to work yesterday i stopped in at a pharmacy hoping to quickly pick something up, but the pharmacist was nowhere to be found. after taking a number and calling out twice for assistance, i knocked on the glass - at that point he finally decided it was worth communicating with me, but instead of apologetic or understanding he was aggressively rude. that pushed me over the edge and i lost my temper, threw the queue number through the gap under the glass and stormed off - the cashier, who had witnessed this (along with a bunch of other people there), told me that i should be more patient... i was so disgusted and upset that i told her off about how patient i'd been and what terrible service they were providing, but it was only after i'd left that i realized i hadn't said anything about how rude the pharmacist had been and *that* got under my skin almost as much as the bad experience itself.

so i ate my feelings with an early breakfast in order to be able to focus on work, and the irritation has been rising occasionally since.

although my work day yesterday included two exciting successes, the highlight of my day was getting home and taking mr smear for a walk to get falafel. i miraculously managed to convince mr smear to tell me how his day went - he was super excited about the obstacle course they'd run - and we arrived before the place closed and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. it was a great evening with no "but"s, i had a goofy grin on my face for half of it and was filled with non-stop gratitude.

...

i spent my morning either being mindlessly entertained or performing minor upgrades for my side project. i'm super excited about the latest double-page that mr cat has produced, and i can't wait to put it online! i've also just started playing a new game we picked up recently, labyrinth city: pierre the maze detective, and it's really beautiful :)

...

i feel like i've achieved stuff, and i also feel like i need to lie down, so i'm gonna do that now.

busy

. dropping mr smear off at school

. getting in an hour of work

. arriving at ikea just after they opened

. a quick and painless ikea experience

. getting in to work in time for a "linkedin party" - good food, but a very awkward experience

. a positive and productive day

. accidentally mistaking someone else's dinner for mine

. going deep with my first (official) ticket and leaving with a strategy

. arriving just in time to wish mr smear a good night

. rotating wheels and arriving at habima with a few minutes to spare - seeing pg's mother and cm and a bunch of other familiar faces

. tehina ice cream flavour is my new favourite

. an easier and more fun route

. a pleasant bath and posting this and going to bed feeling pretty good

trepidation

today was a mixed-feelings kind of a day. the highlight was a failed walk with mr smear to find a pharmacy - the failure being that we didn't find a pharmacy, but the walk with him was nice.

i'm stressing about money, we're so deep in debt again it's ridiculous. and tomorrow morning we're off to buy chairs at ikea.

joy.

considering the amounts / types of foods i've been eating lately i will be concerned if i *don't* put some weight back on.

a successful start to the new week

 i was already excited enough by my achievement before leaving the office with a sense of having dropped a mic, but the other guys' enthusiasm for my win really took me over the top ^_^

that problem that i woke up in the middle of the night fretting over? we kind of solved it, but i managed to work around it in a way that'll make our dev environments better in the long run. my onboarding hasn't been as quick as i would have liked, but i feel really good about bringing in some value before i've even had a chance to look at the code itself.

...

saturday morning went mostly according to plan, and i picked up a car from ramat gan and drove us down to bitzaron for a lovely day with our friends (mr smear's friend from pre-primary school's family). his friend was a bit miserable and unfriendly, apparently in large part due to having a sprained arm in a cast, but he really got along well with her siblings and we all enjoyed each other's company, great food and a few drinks... and their five year old's utterings.

my goodness, this kid has the cutest israeli accent when he speaks english and one of the highlights of the day was me telling mr smear to say "excuse me" after burping loudly to which he responded "mah slicha?!" (what's this "excuse me" nonsense?!) 🤣

anyway, we had a great afternoon but eventually had to rush home to return the car, my cousin dropped off a prescription for mr smear (he's a paediatrician and mr smear and gd don't have medical insurance yet) and the watched most of the jack black version of gulliver's travels before hitting the hay.

this morning, after dropping mr smear off at school, i enjoyed a battle with the vehicle licensing bureau (they took my money to renew my license but have no record of me paying), and then walked to work for a busy / frustrating / ultimately fantastic day.

...

i'm anxious about applying to renew gd and mr smear's visas next week. i'm praying it all goes smoothly, and i'm excited about the prospect of their status being updated soon, possibly within the next two months. my neck has been giving me trouble and gd just gave me a neck / shoulder massage that's made me faint, so i'm going to bed now.

2am saturday morning

 there's something magical about deliberately not working on shabbat, but having my brain serve up a nightmare that demands making progress on the issue i was unable to solve on wednesday.

thanks, brain.

anyway, yom ha'atzmaut started off with the emotional discomfort left over from some unpleasantness the day before (gd and i had had a confusing fight about walking distances and her health while trying to find furniture the day before), and when we left (late) to pick up the car on the other side of the city we had another one that threatened to stop the day in its tracks (apparently, it was a bad call on my part to actually follow her explicit instructions from the previous day's fight). fortunately we managed to resolve it, but not without thoroughly disrupting our scheduled timeline...

i got on my blades, found the car, picked up gd and mr smear and drove straight into the traffic jam leaving tel aviv. so we were stuck in the car, mostly not moving, for at least half an hour, and it was miraculous that gd didn't have one of her usually perfectly mis-timed panic attacks...

... we finally arrived at ze germans' residence with much less time to hang than we'd have liked, but it was really great reconnecting, and the people i was specifically nervous about running into were there and everything was good. it was crazy how many kids we all have between us - and a few of the kids weren't even there, teenagers too old to spend the afternoon with their families - and both gd and mr smear had a blast.

we managed to get the car back to its spot just in time, i rollerbladed back home and the evening was spent relaxing (see the end of the post for the bit about the raspberry pi).

...

yesterday (friday) morning i dropped mr smear off at school and settled in to work, and gd convinced me to continue furniture hunting with her. we ended up a bit south of the central bus station looking at very nice but very expensive chairs that convinced me to give ikea another try (on condition that it's on a weekday morning). we hopped on a bus, split up on the way home and i arrived in time for a meeting with sailor that somehow started an hour earlier than i was invited for.

the meeting went really well, and i dropped out just as gd returned home and we needed to go pick up mr smear.

his "tom cruise" tooth, which he'd prematurely loosened a week before and had been "flapping in the breathe" for a couple of days (it was so distracted that it had become impossible to look at him *and* listen to him at the same time) finally came out! as i type this i realize that the tooth fairy hasn't done her job yet...

[the tooth fairy makes an appearance]

... anyway, we walked through to tel aviv proper, had a brilliant lunch of lafot at "the congress" (we've been here almost two months and they've never had those!) and then moseyed on over to the mongoose's, because they finally moved in this week - their renovations made a lot of sense and it's even nicer than when we slept on its floor!

on the way home we picked up a bunch of things for the house, and then i tried to use the last hour before shabbat productively but... meh. i was pleased to see that my final payment from my previous employer had arrived and between that and both gd and i being extended more canadian credit we're at least able to get through our "adjustment period" with a little more air to breathe. and this week my mother sent off our freight, so hopefully that'll arrive soon and in one piece - or, at least, the same number of pieces it left in - and our new lives will be coming together nicely.

[sets a reminder to start the process of renewing his family's visas]

...

on thursday evening i finally opened the box of my raspberry pi pico: mr smear definitely didn't have the patience for figuring out how to put it together, and his enthusiasm for me showing him the light flashing when i pressed the button lasted all of five seconds. it would have helped if the instructions had been clearer. last night, after friday night dinner, we watched an episode of battlebots and he was into that stuff. so much so that he threw a wobbly when i tried to get him washed and brushed for bed, he was literally falling asleep in my arms and then indignantly tried to convince us that he wasn't tired...

but i was tired. i didn't last more than a cup of tea longer than he did.

...

*sigh*

it's been an hour, i wonder if i'll be able to go back to sleep now.

bittersweet celebrations

after all our experiences trying to come home, i have some mixed feelings about independence day this year. by and large i'm proud of my people and my country and i'm *really* pleased to finally be back, but every time i hear someone talk about "a home for all jews" i think... it's *supposed* to be, but misrad hapnim isn't honouring that at all and we're either turning away thousands if not tens of thousands of jews, or frustrating them so much that they leave.

...

anyway. this first (short) week at work was mostly good, with minor but to-be-expected awkward moments every now and again. onboarding is a process, but i'm absolutely certain at this point that i'm in a really good place and working on really interesting technology.

...

yesterday was a bit complicated, but i managed to rent a van and pick up a table from urchin, and after a long and somewhat unpleasant walk we managed to find a temporary chair solution so we're all sitting at it right now.

this is good.

...

we're joining ze germans for their traditional independence day barbeque. i'm feeling a bit disconnected so i'm curious as to how things go down.

endings and beginnings

 this past month has been ridiculous, and the past week more ridiculous than the rest. i burned through to 130% of my hours and yesterday, after a really nice farewell call with the department, i finally managed to deploy an almost-complete (one last bug, but my co-workers can handle it) version of the software.

it was an exciting and momentous occasion.

i've now (an hour or two ago) sent off my final invoice and am gearing up for a very busy first day with my new employer tomorrow.

...

mr smear's first week at school was mostly excellent! the highlight of the week was the moment his teacher explained to us that he has sport on tuesdays and fridays, because up until then we hadn't known that israeli schools operate six days a week.

holy shit.

otherwise, we prepped him for holocaust memorial day and apparently he behaved impeccably during the siren. unfortunately, he subsequently sat down and removed his sandals in order to smell his feet. not the most appropriate of follow-ups...

...

today was mostly good. i began it with housekeeping (physical and virtual) while listening to greta van fleet (this article on their trolling is fantastic). then mr smear and i took gd to meet urchin, the two of them went in one direction and mr smear and i headed off to find food because he was "famished". so i bought two decent-sized and delicious poké bowls, i finished mine and he barely touched his.

funny how he had plenty of space for the frozen yoghurt afterwards. and then complained dramatically to gd that he was "famished" again after we met up...

the only thing that wasn't nice was the sudden, painful gas in the evening that lasted an hour or two and made the walk home... unpleasant. i don't know what specifically it is that i ate that caused it, but it was most unwelcome.

anyway, we generally enjoyed our mission around town this afternoon and it was nice to be able to stroll around without any kind of time pressure!

...

now, to bed!

a little thing

i left something out from the "good" section earlier: there's something really powerful about being where you know you're meant to be. it feels *good*. i don't recall when last i really felt like this. 

the good and the bad

the good:

mr smear loved his first (actual) day in school, he made some friends and he demonstrated familiarity with the hebrew alphabet (that's thanks to gd). his teacher and the other kids are really cool and made a fantastic first impression.

and it was a bit *weird* coming home without him and working in quiet for a few hours.

we did find a proper supermarket next door to the school, and i broke my fast early today on a new vegan flavour of my favourite cereal of all time.

metal lords is pretty damned metal.

the frustrating:

losing my cool when being "helped" by a representative of the transport ministry; it was shitty and unprofessional service, but i was honestly more upset by the sheer stupidity of the design of their website forms.

we have mosquitoes in the apartment and they're real assholes.

both good and frustrating:

as i posted last night, i got hit with sdk bullshit when working directly with aws resources that didn't happen when working against localstack. i very luckily figured out where the problem was quickly even if it didn't actually make any sense, but it took a few hours to refactor everything to use lower-level calls.

then i made a change in one package not realizing that i was breaking something in another, and i needed them both to work and it took a least an hour or two of insane debugging efforts to put the pieces of the puzzle together. it was a long day, but getting everything running and successfully tested was rewarding and i'm keen to dive back in to the next thing tomorrow.

otherwise, it's my last week with the company and a bunch of "lasts" have been going well. and in general, i'm excited about starting my new gig next week and feeling pretty good about the state of the world. i guess it helps that i've managed to make up so many hours in the past couple of weeks.

first and last days

 the past week was dominated by my scrambling to complete my final project. it's stressful because i keep hitting walls and i get the feeling that my "replacement" (a coworker that i generally get along well with) really doesn't seem very invested in its success... not entirely unfamiliar, i'm reminded of my last team-lead role in montreal...

having said that, i am enjoying the work itself.

over the weekend we rented a car2go for the day and drove up to visit kibbutz cousin, her son and his daughters were there and we generally had a lovely day!

today we took mr smear to his new school, talked to the principal and counselor, then hung around with the teacher who's pretty much the school's answer to hagrid. the school feels kinda like a real-world analog to hogwarts, they're got a bunch of animals and an urban farming section that the kids are responsible for, a "junkyard", and plenty of facilities.

after that, i took a bus to the licensing bureau. i had to wait two weeks for the appointment, then more than an hour. i was falling asleep by the time my number was called, and i was out of there less than five minutes later with instructions for renewing my license that i'd discover later are impossible to follow :/

anyway, i've just spent four hours figuring out and coming up with a workaround for the fact that the C# aws sdk's dynamodb object persistence model manipulates datetime strings under the hood which breaks all our contracts :(

anyway. let's see how tomorrow goes!

to this year in tel aviv!

it's passover, and easter, and i'm working while everyone else is on vacation... this is fine.

my neck's in better shape since last week, but it's still not good and giving me a fair amount of trouble.

work last week was pressured but good, friday we took gd to get her nose ring "fixed" *again* and otherwise had a very nice day.

the biggest stress from last week was getting to our cousins' seder table on friday evening, of *course* all the car2go cars had been fully booked for the holidays months in advance... kc's parents picked us up and then we had additional drama because another family had been abandoned by the taxi driver they'd actually booked :/

anyway, everyone eventually made it and it was a blast. it was so great to spend an evening catching up with all the cousins, everyone had an amazing time and even mr smear enjoyed himself immensely ^_^

yesterday was recovery day, and today's... well... mr smear has been all over the place (now finally off screens after being banned from touching my macbook because he punched the screen in frustration).

*sigh*

going to bed with anger

not me, i'm going to bed with sadness. mr smear is full of anger, it's mostly directed at me and it's very unclear precisely over what.

... 

my neck is slightly better, but still bad enough that i was disfunctional for half the day and had to skip yet another rollerblading group. i managed to drive to and from the wedding last night, though, and it was lovely seeing the family!

turning over the stone

[started writing this as i got up, then got distracted] 

it's bad enough i just woke up from a horrible nightmare in which i went into impossible debt borrowing from the mafia and was still unable to take care of the things that brought me to borrow in the first place, but i messed up my neck while dreaming it. i can't look left and i need to drive tonight.

that nightmare is definitely a reflection of reality, in one month (tomorrow we'll have been here a month!) we've amassed way more debt than we did in many months when moving to cape town and are precariously close to maxing out our credit cards... at least the job i'm starting soon pays well enough to start reducing that debt, that's something i didn't have for years after moving to cape town...

i finally got in touch with the licensing bureau yesterday and learned that i can drive temporarily on my south african license, and this evening we'll be using car2go for the first time. i'm trying not to think about how much money this would have saved us over the course of the past few weeks :p

over the weekend - we had a generally quiet and relaxed shabbat - we met (and approved of) the babysitter and i put on my rollerblades and did a circuit for the first time since we arrived. i was out of breath when i got to habima, but otherwise it was good and i'm mostly impressed by all the new bike paths.

[resumed] 

we had a fun time meeting up with my old neighbor yesterday (even if mr smear was bored), and sammy called to catch up in the evening which was great! 

also great: we received a phone call from the municipality this morning, and mr smear is going to school after the holidays!! 

mr cat has finished the latest page of the graphic novel, our couch has arrived, our mattress is on the way, i'm slightly nervous about driving this evening. back to work. 

things are looking up but i need to sit down

 the sofa's being delivered on monday. as is the replacement mattress.

my feet hurt.

this has been a really crazy week, and it's amazing to me that it's thursday evening already.

...

on tuesday, around lunchtime, i had a chat with the CEO. it was a pleasant chat, and he told me a few things that made it clear that we're even more aligned than i believed. either that or he's a *really* great salesman. either way, i made a decision and signed on the dotted line(s), a little while later i saw that they'd signed the contract too, and gd says that my face literally changed colour and my freckles came back.

...

[breaking news - i passed out while posting this, then woke up to phone calls checking in because there's been a shooting in tel aviv. a cousin is locked in a restaurant while the police/army searches for the attackers. jesus.]

...

the rest of the day and the following day were filled with easy conversations with recruiters informing them that they could leave me alone now and hard conversations with the other companies, one of which was about to make me an offer that i could have waited for, but didn't. the VP that called me up has a bit of a speech impediment which made the conversation even more difficult...

but i'm really feeling confident that i've made the right call.

...

i'm trying really hard to have a good relationship with my son, the past couple of weeks have been hard on all of us and i've been forgetting to just let go of a whole bunch of things. i think today was better.

...

finally, we received an important update today from our lawyer: we officially have the court order we've been waiting for! it's going to take another ridiculously long time to get the blood tests done (the earliest we could book was the end of may), but at least things are finally moving.

hmm. i wonder if perhaps we wouldn't have better luck at a different lab. i'll check on sunday.

...

[damn, they still haven't caught the shooter(s) yet]

bad feelings

hoary sheet.

so aside from working frantically until after 1am this morning, i've (so far) done a ten-hour day and we've all only managed to go outside for a short while in the evening.

i have been having real trouble making up my mind, and i surprised myself by telling my potential boss that it'd be much easier to make a decision if the two offers weren't practically identical. now i've got a meeting with the CEO tomorrow at lunchtime and i guess i'll be making a choice at the end of it, one way or the other.

the relief is that it looks like i may have a third offer on the table by then, which will make things less stressful for me. but no matter what happens i'll still feel bad for at least one company that didn't get me when the market is feeling so worryingly dire.

...

i announced my leaving to the department this morning.

what day is it?

 this past week was absolutely nuts, even if i could write down all the highlights i'm sure i'd be missing important stuff.

• i don't even want to go to ikea again. we went at the worst possible time, thursday evening in rishon le'tzion, and it was horrific.
  at least mr smear got to ride on a real train.
• we still don't have furniture. but i have managed to pay rent / the real estate agent / legal fees on time.
• work has been good, but it's been hard making up hours. my phone now makes me nervous.
• i've now got two job offers that i'm excited about, but the mongoose is telling me things that i'm not convinced are correct and trying to decide whether these offers are good or not is a confusing mess.
  i have had some very interesting conversations, some of them with the wrong people.
  i've officially given notice on the last day before i would have been contractually obligated to continue for an additional month.
• i've been declining interviews for companies and one of them has been desperately trying to guilt me into coming in anyway. they even tried to convince me to come in during their "happy hour" for whiskey.
• we still don't have furniture.
• mr smear enjoyed two playdates with kids his own age on saturday, and they were wildly successful!
• mr smear has lost his second tooth in two weeks, the tooth fairy had to go out after bedtime to make change...
• we're still struggling to get mr smear into a school, but it does kinda feel like we're making progress.
• while our washing machine was disconnected we used a laundry service called "kvisi", and they destroyed four of gd's garments. then they took them back to fix them and they returned them even worse. then they called this evening to explain to us how we should be satisfied that they've done the best they could, and that they're willing to offer us a discount for the next time we use them. 
• summer is coming.
  

tired but... almost hired?

 the announcement to the team today went over about as well as could be expected, everyone is cool. and this evening, when i asked my manager and a coworker if they would be willing to serve as references, they both agreed without hesitation and i'm really grateful for that!

my phone rang non-stop today, i'm being hounded and harassed by recruiters from all over and it's hard to find space to breathe.

my first meeting today was with the first-prize company, and it was just great. like, it was actually weirdly great to have the guy i interviewed with last week walk in on my chat with the team lead to give me a hug and welcome me.

the second meeting was with my cousin's company, and the guy who interviewed me and i had a really fun coding session together.

that's two companies who want me in their offices tomorrow in an attempt to complete the application process.

the third company, tahoma's that i interviewed with yesterday - they're also scrambling to pick me up, and when i shared my morning's insights with the recruiter she basically told me that they felt the same but they were very happy with how i think.

so that's good too.

...

the company i didn't do so well with the other day? i've been thinking about that interview, and it did not give me a good vibe. i think maybe i shouldn't go in to visit them on thursday.

...

in other news, my tax-free "trust fund" has been released and we can relax a bit about money.

...

i really hope i'm not starting a throat infection.

regerts

these past two days have been a little crazy. these past couple of weeks have been a little crazy, even crazier than the weeks before them which we even crazier than the weeks and months before them.

but things are, overall, going well. 

yesterday i learned an important but painful lesson, that i should not be interviewing for a role as a full stack - i'm a backend dev who dabbles in full stack, and it looks like i may have burned myself with two potential employers that i was excited about.

i will be learning from this experience. 

... 

in positive news, a company i did a challenge for yesterday that i'm extremely keen on joining is very happy with my solution, and today i'm paying them a visit to see if we actually like each other in person! 

also, after learning from cm that the absorption ministry had given us bad information*, gd took mr smear to the nearby school and apparently we're going to be able to work something out.

* or at least, failed to help us out with useful information

... 

today my manager wants to announce my plans to the team. 

past midnight check-in

 i managed to get two and a half hours of paid work done today, and just finished them a few minutes ago.

the rest of the day was dedicated to technical interviews, the first took six and a half hours and the second was really... not good. both of the interviewers want to follow up.

tomorrow morning, early, i have another full day of interviews.

i'm exhausted.

i'm really deep into six day weeks right now.

on friday night we were picked up by cousins for dinner, and it was really excellent :)

shabbat morning started nicely - i managed to convince mr smear to walk to the port with me and we met up with nystire and family and tahoma, the morning was pretty good until a last-minute incident and mr smear and i had a walk home that was so unpleasant that i really don't think i'm ever going to forget it.

it's really tough navigating him being six and his world being upside down and needing extra understanding, and him continuing to display behaviours that we've been struggling to deal with for years.

urchin paid us a visit in the afternoon and then the mongoose and his partner, we ended up taking quite a walk which was mostly great but at some point became too much for gd.

...

we have a washing machine! and also, a bunch of gd's clothing that's been destroyed by the professional laundry service we had to use until the technician finally came today.

...

we met our lawyer the other day, although we spent most of our time in her home office playing with her very jumpy, very loving pit-bull.

...

these past two weeks have been ridiculous. my telephone doesn't stop ringing and it's giving me anxiety.

i really hope i get an exciting offer soon.

theory and practice

i should have been taking notes, but i haven't. these past weeks have been ridiculous. we've been trying to put together our new apartment, navigate our new life, all while i interview like crazy and try to make up hours with my current employer.

christ, but there are a lot of bills to pay and bureaucratic side-quests to complete. 

one day at a time. one foot in front of the other. 

the breakdown

 i got up this morning at least as tired as when i went to "bed" last night. i'm exhausted, we all are. this morning was a particularly intense emotional rollercoaster, between scrambling to extract money out of my pension fund and trying to get work done and interviewing for a potential new job, then half-running to the bank to get there *just* before closing...

... it didn't start off so well, but the clerk eventually warmed up to our story and when she contacted my mom and was satisfied that she should help us i literally cried - so obviously that she rushed off to get me some water and said she was worried that she was going to follow suit.

we now have everything we need to sign for the apartment tomorrow morning.

i spent most of the second half of the day pretty fuzzy, my brain having turned to candy floss from all the emotions and exhaustion. i managed to get some work done, but really not a significant amount, and i did a lot of jumping from phone call to phone call with various people and organizations.

in the evening we went to the mongoose's, where gd made a nice dinner and we had some interesting conversations, including a phone conversation with a friend of theirs who has a very interesting business proposition... (crypto again?)

i'm sad that we left waaaay to late for me to join the TAR purim rollerblade route.

otherwise, it was a fun evening and the taxi ride home was interesting and now i'm finishing this up and taking another desperately needed shower and going to bed.

disconnect / reconnected

friday 7:50pm:

we really are nuts. but the world is nuts, too, i guess it'll all even out in the end.

i don't remember when last i got a good night's rest, i probably posted about it enthusiastically but i cannot for the life of me remember which year it was. after six years in cape town, having arrived sleep deprived and in debt and with no idea what was going to happen next, we've now gotten on a plane (after weeks of furiously sorting and packing and dropping hundreds of dollars every time we spoke to anyone) and are halfway to the holy land, praying that they'll let us in and start setting our bureaucratic wrongs right.

six kilos of documents are weighing me down, but for some reason i have a mostly positive feeling about the way we're going about this and it kinda feels like the universe is almost cheering us on.

i mean, it does right at this moment, after a long night frantically packing and taking care of the insanely demanding administrative tasks involved in getting on a plane, and a couple of terrifying hours at the airport.

i don't think i mentioned our discovery three nights ago that mr smear's south african passport had expired. i'm usually on top of those sorts of things with alarms and alerts and what-have-you, but we were supposed to be out of here in *september* and we really didn't think we needed to care about it. and then there was also the story of gd's visa renewal application not being reflected in her passport.

and learning, in the middle of the night last night, in the dark during our second round of loadshedding for the day, that we'd overestimated how much carry-on luggage they'd let us have and underestimated how much hold luggage we needed.

anyway.

so mr smear's been handling this all very well, and he's been travelling pretty well too. his farewell circle at his school yesterday was super-sweet and everyone got a little emotional. we've been saying lots of goodbyes, making lots of big plans, and we still have no guarantee that we'll be let in when we get there - i can't say i'm not nervous.

our old ipad broke in the baggage compartment in the cabin earlier, because i packed it badly. it was right on top of this machine and i was a bit traumatized that this had suffered the same fate - *sheesh*.

i've been struggling to frame where i am psychologically, i'm like a functional burn-out. i have flashes of motivation and i'm totally capable, but it's so damned difficult to dive into things and enjoy them. i've spent so long worrying about the dark side of things that i've got to retrain my brain with this "it's going to be okay" mantra, and it's nigh-impossible to shake the feeling that i'm not doing enough, that i'm missing out, that i'm forgetting something...

breathing is hard.

on wednesday, i had a chat with my manager, and neither of us were expecting that conversation to go the way it did: i've effectively, though unofficially, given notice. he took it hard, not least because he was relying on my presence to take his upcoming paternal leave with an eased mind, and i think he panicked a little bit. i'm a little distressed that the big boss has been unavailable / has made himself unavailable to talk to me directly about it.

...

if i compare how we left cape town to how we left montréal, there's little to go by. i feel that that's in no small part due to my mother's efforts, and the fact that gd has had very real, competent help for the last few months since we replaced our domestic worker with her sister-in-law. not to sound ungrateful, but i don't see why she was given ALL of the ice-lollies when she left this morning, i would have liked to take one for the road.

...

i haven't posted anything on social media because i'm afraid of jinxing us. leaving "quietly" feels really weird.

speaking of social media, i was pleased that a friend i called out for being rude to sailor online was big enough to apologize and make amends. he's been deep into fighting the world on social media since covid hit... i was reading a little reality is broken earlier and i was wondering if it wouldn't be helpful to start "polite-ical dialog" groups on facebook to see if generating some level of constructive, civil debate is even possible these days.

i certainly wouldn't want to moderate it, though.

saturday:

two long flights, the first with a terrified autistic kid in the row behind us and the second with an obviously sick man right behind us wet-coughing and refusing to wear a mask. otherwise, we got through it just fine and arrived in ben gurion.

* mr smear eating a meal at 1.40am

* surreal yelling to get the first border interaction started

* the surprisingly straightforward entry

* mr smear actually helping us out between 3 and 4am, getting through PCR testing and getting to the hotel in the rain

* a complicated welcome, getting into bed as soon as possible

* my first re-encounter with tel aviv

* ordering in amazing hummus

* tahoma coming over for a few hours, a mission, knafe

sunday:

* getting a little work done, a quick and pleasant walkabout with gd and mr smear, then a mad rush to get out of our hotel room and get to the mongoose's with much difficulty with getting taxis

* an amazing reception, the mongoose winning over mr smear with an amazing videogame setup (including an arcade cabinet!)

* quick shopping

* realizing how urgently we needed sim cards, driving through to kenyon ayalon, gd going missing while "looking for me"

* being sorely disappointed by the apartment location walking all the wrong routes

* the viewing

* walking the opposite direction and loving the location

* returning to the mongoose's, complications ordering food and setting up my new number

* meeting the mongoose's partner and watching her win mr smear over with lego technic assistance

* gd's sudden and violent reaction to the cats

* a dramatic exit and moving in to their new, empty apartment with nothing but air mattresses: "camping in the middle of tel aviv"

monday:

omg it's monday. it was an insane monday. it was a very intense and wild and confusing monday.

waking up early to work, being absolutely freezing. walking along ben gurion for the first time in almost ten years to get coffee, then walking to the bank to try and open an account.

making an appointment to open the account next week (really?! apparently a covid thing)

a really shitty feeling from my boss (i was uninvited from the weekly meeting, i really think he's taken me leaving personally)

a confused day jumping between apartment things and working, barely eating anything (and then learning that i'm apparently at risk for an e-coli infection because i've been eating hummus leftovers)

my brain falling apart, but pushing through and leading a team security event

gd feeling lost, then finding herself and enjoying the area

the glorious shower after a day of feeling disgusting

an evening shopping with the mongoose and getting sushi (he's *really* winning mr smear over, like, we can't compete at this rate!)

awkward stress trying to navigate closing on the apartment, panicking in spite of the fact that if we *do* get it it's a miracle, then my mom pointing out that i'd misread the contract and simply wouldn't be able to pony up for the deposit, then realizing that i actually have enough pension available to cover it

accidentally sending my pension report to the landlord

gd's hand, having been scratched by the same damned cat, ballooning up.

trying to resolve an issue with my canadian credit card, trying to cancel our south african mobile numbers, failing on both counts

...

anyway, i'm exhausted and i have a technical interview in the morning, i'm going to bed feeling pretty positive that we'll get the apartment and feeling incredibly grateful to the universe in general and to the mongoose and his partner in particular - they really are our aliyah angels. 

t-?

 it's late. again. i had things i'd planned on doing, but then an hour or two ago while dealing with some travel agent drama (every time i talk to her i drop a few thousand rand) we realized something horrifying: we thought we'd be out of south africa by september, and in all the madness i've completely forgotten to renew *his* passport.

jesus, fuck.

so we're busy scrambling to try and get him out the country without it, which is... complicated. we might have a way, but at the same time we might have to wait for a new one to be issued. i've managed to start the application process online, but i can't make the payment because - and i can't believe i'm typing this - my bank's payment systems are offline from 8pm to 8am according to their 24/7 hotline.

jesus, fuck.

so tomorrow's going to be a story.

anyway, after a brief update with the mongoose i've realized that this kind of setback is no different to us getting a positive PCR test result, so whatever. we'll deal.

...

in apartment and job hunting news, we found four good apartment candidates last night alone, which gives me confidence that we'll find *something* in reasonable time. i've also applied to a couple of job that look really interesting and had a long chat with a dev at one of the MAMAA companies and gain some more insight into the current state of things, and i'm going to take the mongoose's advice and relax on that too, i'm confident i'll find something good quickly enough.

...

reviewing python code isn't the same as writing it. so when my python migration script ran smoothly to completion the first time i employed it yesterday, a script i'd spent a few hours polishing that integrates three components i've never directly worked with before, i had to walk away for the day with a

via GIPHY

t-5

mr smear's been having tummy troubles this past week or two, so we figured we'd round off this rather excellent day with an emergency room visit. i really hope it's not appendicitis.

i'm exhausted. i'm anxious. i'm feeling a bit sad. this past week had some great bits and successes, but it also included me taking the warnings seriously and consulting with an international tax specialist, who made it very clear in no uncertain terms that i am not earning nearly enough to live anywhere near tel aviv.

also, that i'd be a dumbass to continue working as a freelancer from israel.

we also suddenly remembered that gd is allergic to cats and had forgotten to ask the mongoose if he has cats. he does. two of them.

i'm now desperately looking for a place to live and a new job. hooray.

...

alright, apparently mr smear isn't presenting with the right symptoms for appendicitis and we're going home (after only an hour or two). he passed out on an emergency room bed shortly after they let him in.

that's my boy.

...

did i mention i'm tired?

t-10

yesterday:

feeling better in the morning because i can earn more by working more hours, but estimating that i still need a considerable wage bump to be comfortable

a long workday, mr smear wishing me a good meeting after almost making me late with a tantrum about being rushed - later we'd get an excellent report of him from his martial arts teacher

today:

the changeling: mr smear waking up on time and being polite and considerate and cooperative all morning

2.5 hours spent figuring out travelling details and discussing some of them with nystire and the mongoose

a surprisingly pleasant walk in the chilly wind along the promenade

day of the tentacle

a late eveing with shadowslight and muadib