breathing out

i worked from home yesterday morning so that i could be with my family for the "zoom funeral". it was weird watching my brother carrying the coffin and saying kaddish for our uncle, he's really looking like a hunched-over shadow of his former self.

that set off an unpleasant train of thoughts. i don't want to have to return to south africa for any reason whatsoever, least of all to bury people.

this is a selection from what i sent to hido on wednesday evening: "this is gonna sound harsh but i'm praying my mom gets out of there soon because honestly, if i never set foot on SA soil again i'll be much happier for it... i'm over looking over my shoulder, brother, being thoroughly relaxed walking through the city at any time of day is where it's at!! i'll take the occasional siren/bomb shelter run over 24/7 security any day of the week"

...

gd and phoenix were on their way to a store next door to my office, so they popped in for a visit. the office was practically empty because thursdays are mostly-remote days, but within five minutes my son was begging me to let him stay. we have a playstation. one of my coworkers had brought his dog in. and the snacks drawers has his favourite chips (doritos spicy sour).

an investigation a bit later into installing rayman: legends on the playstation quickly turned into a dressing down by a coworker when i suggested that i was planning on getting an xbox (the mongoose had convinced me that in israel it's the better option, my coworker strongly objects, now i have research to do), and our discussion quickly generated some in-office rivalry after i told one of the fifa-leaguers that we were talking about real video games }:>

otherwise, i spent an hour sharing my RCA reports with my department and apparently i did really well.

i also managed to implement most of the feedback i'd received from my team lead, so even if i didn't accomplish my goals i did make a lot of progress.

last night was a celebration of... the end of the week? not being thoroughly exhausted even though mr smear only went to bed around 10pm? i had a beer, making sure to disturb it into as much foaminess as possible, and gd and i watched an episode or two of the boys. something's "settled" a bit in the third season, but the payoff is amazing.

...

i still can't believe this scene from don't look up actually played out in real life.

...

i've become increasingly frustrated by all the things that don't "just work". and by all the people and organizations that think that mobile messaging is a viable, reliable communication medium. or that the consumer needs to make an effort to get services instead of the service provider.

reset

 i struggled to get to sleep until 4 or 5am on tuesday morning, and i was a complete wreck during the day. i went home in the late afternoon for a quick rest - sprawled on the couch with my fam watching the cuphead show in hebrew - then i put on my rollerblades and returned to the office for game night. it was fun! i rolled back home to say goodnight to my family, then headed out for TAR.

twenty five kilometers of TAR. it was a great route, though some of it was quite tough, and we had a few amazing downhill stretches.

once home, i needed half an hour of stretching under the air conditioner before i was ready to shower and go to bed, and i slept pretty well.

yesterday was a much better day, i was still a bit tired but very relaxed. it was a productive day, even if i didn't finish as much as i'd hoped, and i walked home, had a mostly enjoyable evening and then went to bed early.

this morning i woke up to a message that my uncle had passed away during the night, i'm sad for his kids but relieved he went quickly.

the staycation: over

i'm starting this post at 2.15am on tuesday morning. i've spent more than two hours lying in bed, the first hour or so reading and the last stretch just trying uncomfortably to sleep.

friday:

we went to the tomorrow exhibit at the ramat gan museum. the AI-assisted videos were mostly amazing, but we could have experienced that at home on youtube. the female pop icon NFT thing (women ape yacht club?) was dramatically unimpressive and the icons themselves so remarkably uninteresting that we rolled on by, the VR experience was interesting for all of two minutes (the games we've played on the mongoose's setup were incredible, this seemed like an attempt to suck the joy out of the technology), and the "classics" stuff was hebrew-only; one section was boring, the other was cool for gd and me but unnerving for mr smear.

i hard napped when we got home, then dragged myself out of bed to walk with mr smear to the beach to join cm and his family. we had a really great time!

overall, it was an excellent day.

saturday:

we started walking to the port to meet up with ric and his family, but a quarter of the way there gd realized she was in too much pain so i walked back to pick up a car and we drove there instead.

driving in tel aviv? not recommended.

we enjoyed our outing with them, their little one's super cute. mr smear was mostly cool until just before we left, and we ended up with a bad vibe on the way home.

we stopped at home for a short while, then i took mr smear to ra'anana to meet up with dod* and his family. mr smear wasn't being particularly social (we have to teach him that the concept of "strangers" in israel works a little differently), but he thoroughly enjoyed the ninja obstacle course.

* divan orange dude. i've just learned that le divan orange closed down a few years ago and that makes me a bit sad

we left just after a gangly kid wearing glasses tried to run up the side of the ramp mr smear had been using, and i looked on in horror as he slipped and smashed his glasses into his eye socket. dod and his wife helped tend to him while his grandparents made phone calls, the cut looked awful and i hope his eye's still functioning.

sunday:

sunday was accompany gd to the pain clinic day. it was a long day of doctors and bureaucrats. some of it felt constructive and promising. between clinic visits she got her nose piercing switching out and mr smear and i had a huge hummus breakfast at mashawsha. it was expensive but delicious.

monday:

back to work! aside from a tedious day of completing reports (two down, one to go) interspersed with multiple distractions, it was a good day and i must admit that it feels good to feel welcomed and appreciated.

gd had a rough day (feeling nauseous), but i was pleased to hear that mr smear had a very successful playdate.

...

the other day we watched a compilation of child comedians on the got talent shows, and mr smear is trying very hard to be funny, with results that are sometimes hilarious but usually for the wrong reasons...

...

i've been re-reading neuromancer for the last while, there's soooo much i'd forgotten and it's really, really amazing in spite of the anachronisms. during the staycation i also started reading the elements of eloquence, and it's very enjoyable!

...

of course, i got side-tracked writing this. i wonder if i'll be able to get to sleep soon.

the staycation: day five

 i'm stressed out and it's not even noon. i'm feeling strangled by an overwhelming sensation of a million things that need doing that i'm not taking care of, a million fragments of my attention tugging at me in all directions and all i want to do is curl up into a ball and close my eyes and figure out how to drown out all this noise.

yesterday was nice. we met up with a cousin and walked around the shuk in tel aviv and had a huge lunch at the vegan place that urchin introduced us to a while back and met up with her daughter for coffee, then had a pleasant walk through king george and gan meir park to the bus home.

we watched a bit of luca over dinner and then crashed.

the staycation: day four

we did it! we actually went to jerusalem yesterday, and visited the western wall. the train ride there was pleasant - we spent most of it playing "i spy" - but the bus ride from the train station to the old city was tragically long and smelly. some religious nutters left their toddler on the bus, didn't even bat an eyelid when the shocked bus driver managed to find them.

the wall experience itself was powerful for all of us.

after the wall, we walked through the shuk, meeting an ex-south african along the way. then hunted down food, eventually finding ourselves eating build-your-own falafel in a rather grimy spot, staffed by another ex-south african. we walked back through another part of the shuk, at which point i developed crowd and shuk fatigue, and stopped by the wall to use the bathrooms before heading back.

while mr smear and i were using the bathrooms, gd was accosted by a teenage girl about covering up her tattoos. when i got back to her and found out, i was furious. it's such an ugly thing to do to anyone, least of all an israeli jew who practices judaism far more authentically than these societal parasites ever will. we talked about what we could have and should have said. then we headed to the bus.

we stood waiting next to someone who turned out to be another ex-south african, another recent escapee.

and then we saw that girl. and confronted her. not only was her ugly smirk accompanied by ugly, bully-like responses, but her friend was defending her by telling us about the "laws" they're protecting. i was becoming frustrated by their bullshit when gd pointed at her smile and talked about "this ugly thing", at which point they fled to the other side of the waiting crowd and i think i saw her friend consoling her.

human pieces of garbage.

anyway, the bus back was less long, but pretty awful. that's due the people on it, the writhing mass of overdressed humanity with more babies than they can care for and public displays of domestic violence (one woman kept slapping the back of her kid's head whenever he made a noise, not sure if he's autistic or those are just symptoms of abuse). the bus ride itself was a rollercoaster, as our driver didn't appear to believe in speed bumps as he sped through the windy hills.

getting off the bus and through the crowds and into the train station was a corrective experience. the train back was a relief. gd, like me, was very grateful to return to our little bubble of civilization.

two joggers ran past us, one speaking to the other in a heavy saffer accent.

...

we were all exhausted after such a long day. after a ramen cup dinner i chatted with my mom, gd got mr smear ready for bed (he was pretty much asleep by the time i said good night), i chatted with vfmp for a bit and then crashed.

...

for me, yesterday morning before we left was a long string of frustrating events, mostly related to needing to update the side project i've been neglecting. maybe i'll make some progress today before we meet with our cousin. or maybe i'll read a book, play games and do not much of value. that could be good, too.

the staycation: day three

 holy shit, it's wednesday already. effectively, i spent yesterday setting up the projector and the soundbar, which took two trips for hardware - the second one being on rollerblades and involved travelling around the port trying to find reflectors for the night ride. i came home red in the face, overheated and dizzy.

by the time i'd said good night to mr smear, i was too tired to go out anyway.

win for the day: everything's set up. there's a bit of weirdness with the subwoofer, and i'm quite frustrated that while the macbook's airplay works beautifully with the roku, the windows machine's miracast / airparrot is an abysmal failure.

...

four months later, i finally received confirmation yesterday that my payment to the licensing bureau was reversed. paying for the renewal using a local card was quick and painless. and i've ordered a credit card for gd so hopefully we'll get her health insurance website access sorted out soon.

...

plans today: to go to jerusalem. and start making actual holiday plans.

the staycation: day two

last week was horrific. i'm calling it "seven days of retaliation" - based on sept jours du talion - but the only revenge was being taken on me for being an anxious chump by hundreds of micro-services and the onboarding of a new customer using new tech that hadn't been battle tested yet. i got to enjoy the first battle.

tuesday 9th:

the first two days were alright, and i was fine. it was going to be a corrective experience to my on-call nightmares when working for AWS. but my pager went off on tuesday morning at 3.30am, neither my team lead nor my line manager were available, and everything was on fire.

it turned out to be caused by a third party service that went down, and there was nothing we could do about it. by 9am, when the issue was finally resolved, i'd done a full day's work and i was tired. but that was just the beginning of my day.

after a quick visit to the clinic to "activate" my membership - i thought i'd done that weeks prior and they'd given me a card, so... - i napped for an hour or an hour and a half and then went to the office. everything was fine for an hour or two, then the pager went off again. and again. and again and again and again. a couple of us stayed until late putting a patch in place, which would let me sleep that night, but by the next morning the patch was rendered ineffective and my first cup of coffee was interrupted by another alarm.

wednesday 10th:

i tried not to stress. i tried not to freak out. but even after a night's sleep i was still shell-shocked. my brain was... sideways. i was a deer caught in the headlights and struggling to keep up with anything that was going on.

this was not quite the corrective experience i had been hoping for.

after a long day in the office with no much to show for it, i returned home, had a meal with my family, put my son to bed, then checked in to discover that we were experiencing another fire that had no alarm attached. that took me to midnight.

i'd been over the week for a while already.

thursday 11th:

another long, tedious but stressful day. the fix for the ongoing series of issues that had begun on tuesday was finally ready - or so we thought - but it was a thursday evening. israeli weeks run sunday to thursday, what we pulled the trigger on was the equivalent of deploying on a friday night.

we spent the next two hours "following" the deployment, not only monitoring but also making emergency changes directly via the console.

it wasn't pretty.

by the time we left it was long dark, and for the second time in the past couple of months i'd said good night to my boy over video chat, that might be the second time ever. i followed the graphed metrics for the next couple of hours, then said good night.

the weekend:

i woke up to a 2.22am message informing me that our operation had ultimately been a success. it was an immense relief, to be sure, but i spent the remaining two days of my shift on edge, constantly waiting for the next page and worried about somehow managing to put together all the handover documentation before going on leave on sunday.

i spent a large chunk of the weekend "housekeeping"; migrating a large quantity of my tasks and to do's and lists to notion. while doing so, i found a half-written rant on the implications of being overweight and i felt compelled to complete it as a medium article. i'm still waiting for the internet to turn me inside out and cancel me, but so far its performance is just mildly disappointing.

on friday morning we went to our cousin's mother's funeral. it was hot, and there wasn't a lot of shade. the eulogies were heartbreaking. the deceased's surviving husband's heartbreak was palpable.

sunday:

what was supposed to be my first day of vacation started at 6am with non-stop evidence gathering, reporting and documentation that last until our 2pm handover meeting. i informed everyone that although my leave is until the end of the week, i'll be seeing them on monday and not sunday.

nobody argued.

i spent the remainder of the day putting together a lego set that the mongoose had gifted to mr smear. lots of the pieces were missing. what ensued, while mr smear was enjoying his first playdate with our previous neighbour in ages, was gd and i obsessively sorting lego pieces in a hunt for what we could find, eventually being thwarted.

getting replacements off the lego website turned out to be a mission, not only are the parts expensive but they'd take a month to get here. we're going to try to get them from the store instead.

going out for falafel was a good idea.

yesterday:

we got up early and went to ikea. by the time we left ikea, i was frustrated and hangry. i don't like crowds in general, i detest holiday israeli crowds in particular. and salesman who talk shit to me after being condescending. and having to buy a not-great drill in order to pacify my wife when i could have borrowed a good one instead didn't improve my mood, either.

after a ten minute walk carrying a heavy shelf and a heavy bag we almost missed our train home.

...

gd made pancakes for breakfast. then we went out to pick up a sound bar.

it was hot outside.

we eventually returned home with the cheapest sound bar we could find. it seems really good. i spent the next while installing a shelf.

1. i used a level, and miraculously managed to get the shelf precisely along the pencil line. which was slightly off the level. so now that's going to irritate me forever.

2. i managed to get two fisher plugs in, for the other two i was unable to drill even half the distance i needed. i *think* it's stable enough, but i'm not 100% confident.

3. only after putting up the shelf and the projector and setting up the sound bar did i see how many power leads, adapters and cables we're missing.

in the evening we went to our cousin's shiva house for an hour or two.

we almost missed our bus home.

...

i'm tired.

birthday deliveries

it's mr smear's birthday tomorrow! after about a year of instability and drama and anxieties and moving halfway across the planet into a new language and culture and climate.

so this week we've been spoiling him a little. we began with a couple of comic books* recommended by the mongoose over the weekend, who subsequently rocked up mid-week with another couple of them in hand. we picked up a beautiful children's anatomy book in hebrew along with "anomaton", a human body you can take all the parts out of. i missioned around yesterday evening after work and picked up an x-box controller for him**, and today we all went to the new lego store in dizengoff center and let him pick out a set of his choosing (he went for minecraft, which was surprising considering his enthusiasm for the actual transforming optimus prime, the harry potter series, the marvel superheroes, the star wars stuff***, and pretty much everything else in the store. while in the queue i had to call on gd to back off when i caught her (unconsciously) trying to convince him to reconsider after she'd been eyeballing the harry potter stuff and the ninjago dragons... her birthday's coming up soon enough :P

* okay, these are really a sneaky trick to pull him in to reading in hebrew

** okay, so this is really because it's better for his spine and eyes than him playing minecraft etc. with the keyboard, and so far we've both been enjoying having it ;)

*** a lunchtime conversation this week convinced me to rewatch the original star wars trilogy, and it's going great so far

...

the last couple of days of the week were high-pressured, i eventually managed to bring the project to code-complete before my on-call next week but there's still a bit more work to do... i'm feeling quite relaxed about everything, though. i don't know if i'm learning to manage my anxiety better or if i'm just all out of ****s to give.

...

my side project that i invested so much time in? i haven't touched it in half a year, i simply haven't had the bandwidth. i received an email yesterday informing me that the lady who i sat with for two hours and helped put notes together to teach her how to run exports and imports hasn't touched it either in all this time, and has lost her notes. i guess i'm going to have to dive in again, and i'm almost feeling ready to get in there.

speaking of which, we've been making "staycation" plans: i'm taking a week off after my on-call, my first vacation in years, and we've got loads of things to do and family to see.

...

last week saturday the left side of my middle-back began to spasm, and it was uncomfortably sore and continued threatening spasms until yesterday. this morning i woke up and it felt fine. then on our way back from the lego store my right shoulder did a thing so i'm still in pain, it's just moved like an air bubble when you're trying to smooth out a sticker.

over hump day already?

 four and a half months in israel, and i'm still not used to weeks beginning on sunday. i just registered that i have two days left on this one. next week: "ninja" (on-call). the week after: a staycation week for the summer holidays. this means i have to deliver the thing i thought i'd be able to deliver last week - it's a bit of a bummer that it's not ready yet, but the code quality and testing have both improved dramatically and i've learned a lot.

also, github copilot is AMAZING. it doesn't always help, and it doesn't do all the work, but my gods it saves lots of time on the repetitive coding and on the documentation hunting.

...

i felt terrible - thoroughly exhausted to the point where i felt perpetually on the verge of collapse - from friday until monday. i'm still feeling tired, but since yesterday i've been feeling actually functional.

that's physically.

psychologically i'm feeling relaxed and safe and confident for the first time in so long i can't remember. while i still have plenty to do vis-a-vis writing up and publicizing our stories, we're finally on the other side and it's such an enormous relief that i cannot describe it in words.

CCP drugs and tiktok

i recently listened to sam cooper on the jordan harbinger show, how the west was infiltrated by its enemies, about how the CCP has effectively turned vancouver into a stronghold. considering how different the tiktok experience is for the chinese vs the west (their content is generally geared towards education and self-improvement) my takeaway is that tiktok is a weapon in a culture war and they're using it to dumb other cultures down (even further than we're dumbing ourselves down, to be fair we're already pretty good at that).

one nose-blow at a time

 jesus, this week was harsh. not only am i still struggling with sinusitis - i was snotty all week - but i was under immense pressure and only finally saw a way through just before leaving the office on thursday. in retrospect, i've learned a lot over the course of the week, but i believe that i would have progressed must faster if i'd had a more relaxed approach. a significant part of my struggling was the perpetual discomfort and distraction from my sinuses.

i'm going to have to see if my "damage control" efforts have paid off when i speak to my team lead tomorrow...

...

mr smear's first doctor's appointment went well! it's rather helpful that his paediatrician speaks french, so gd was able to communicate effectively with her. this is good.

...

i had a fight with an agent of the municipality over arnona because i had absolutely no idea what he was trying to say to me. it turns out their system is set up in such a way that one must never make a payment that's in someone else's name, because when they finally transferred the arnona into my name they retroactively credited our landlord's account and charged mine for the period it took us to get the transfer sorted.

smh.

...

yesterday i signed up for ha'avoda in order to vote for a reform representative who actually cares about the lack of humanity in the immigration process.

...

jesus, it's hot. and nowhere near as hot as the heat-wavy regions of this planet that are a solid indication that we're rapidly approaching extinction. holy shit. the more i've read on the topic the less optimistic i'm becoming, and i said to gd yesterday that as much as i'm working towards our future and as good a quality of life as possible, i'm also partially resigned to the fact that we've all collectively decided that we're doing this, welcoming the apocalypse, and we need to make the best of every day we have left before everything falls apart.

...

i ended up going to my coworker's wedding alone on thursday night, and that turned out to be a good thing. nobody else brought their partners, it was a good group bonding session, the food was great and i didn't drink too much and we all danced all night. the wedding itself was very, very sweet.

yesterday was recovery day, and nystire picked us up to go to tahoma's birthday party which was a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

...

we watched treasure planet yesterday evening. it's great.

not so successful

 friday's pool party was a raging failure in our book. gd and i were heartbroken to see mr smear sabotage any potential fun or friendship (although he did eventually play with a couple of kids in the pool towards the end). most of the parents were super awkward with us, too, although i did get into it with one mother who was asking about our travails and i really bummed her out.

in the evening we had an episode where i ended up "containing" mr smear, and it seemed to work. last night we had a similar incident and i tried it again, and it definitely didn't work.

this parenting shit is confusing and our story right now feels pretty tragic.

i had a long chat with scrapper yesterday, and he had a fair amount of criticism to share with me on the topic, i can't say that i disagree with any of it...

this evening gd was furious with me because we went to the school to pick up his books and i ran off with a coughing fit at the exact worst possible moment, and that somehow made her miss the opportunity to connect with the mother of a kid that mr smear *does* get along with.

...

up until today i was just as sick as before. long, difficult nights and extreme sinusitis and lots of coughing. gd, on the other hand, got progressively worse over the course of the weekend. i took yesterday (sunday) off and we ran a gauntlet of the maccabi health system, and it seemed as though they were making a real effort to convince us not to join them. the doctor she saw, an older ex-south african who either hated us or simply has an awful bedside manner, sent us off for PCR tests as well.

having learned my lesson, i passed and gd did it so that only one of us would really be in trouble if we had covid - the problem with the current system is that if i do the PCR test on my last day of covid and the test is positive, they count the isolation as if the PCR test was done on the first day which makes no sense whatsoever.

i had to stop working for an hour and go off to the pharmacy to get the result because their systems hadn't emailed them to us. at least the result was negative. and gd's been prescribed antibiotics which seem to be working, so that's good.

finally, while we expected gd to be covered by our family's healthcare within ten days from wednesday, we hadn't expected her to be covered by tomorrow, so that sms was very welcome!

...

i've been reading quite a few distressing articles about the encroaching climate apocalypse over the past couple of days, and i'm feeling like the only way forward for me personally is to bury my head in the sand and pray. and try to make the most out of however many manageable days we have left.

...

for the past couple of evenings i've been writing up our experiences from the past couple of years, which triggered this post about the state of south africa. i cannot tell you how grateful i am to have managed to get my family out of there, and i'm praying my mother, the rest of my family, friends, and anyone else who can gets out before becoming just another statistic.

...

i'm extremely anxious and frustrated at work. i've been assigned a great task but i have to do it with primitive (relative to what i'm used to, at least) tools and contexts that i'm not familiar with, and if i don't succeed by deadline then the project dies. i'm being tested here on something important and with everything else going on i'm feeling doomed right now. as if i didn't have enough on my plate.

...

over the past week we've managed to overcome quite a few hurdles.

one: it took many days and lots of frustration but we finally managed to hack our way around initiating a transfer from my mum's israeli bank account. i'm still stunned by the incredibly poor UX that managed to fail in almost every aspect of the procedure, it was almost as if it was designed badly on purpose.

two: last week i tried to contact my mobile phone operator to update my payment method, but i couldn't log in with any of my numbers. i tried contacting them on friday, but their whatsapp chat-bot only works during business hours. i tried again today and was unable to authenticate myself. just then i received an sms telling me to call the finance department because i owe them money, and the sms had a phone number! so i called the number up and we eventually got sorted.

they somehow had my first university email address, which hasn't been active since 2004. the address they had on file was from before my mother and i bought an apartment together in 2009 (which we're now deeply regretting having sold, but anyway). and here's the best part: they'd been charging my old israeli credit card attached to a bank account that i closed in 2013 and that had expired most of a decade ago. wtf?! none of that makes any sense!

...

i took a sudafed a short while ago (more "in case" than anything after the past two weeks), and i'm not certain if i'm going to stay awake much longer or not. if i do, though, it's going to be studying for tomorrow because this task is really messing me.

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.