mon/tues

it's yom kippur, i'm trying to fast but i'm exhausted and still a bit "off" (somewhat dizzy) even though my nose situation has been relatively relaxed since yesterday.

sunday was a great day work-wise, yesterday was more of a mixed-bag. i managed to make good progress on my "primary" project - it's primary when there aren't fires to be put out - but then i was invited to a mystery which, after a couple of hours with three of our heads together turned out to be kinda my fault. when we finally understood the ridiculous nature of the problem, i cracked open a beer and started working on a fix... which may not have been the optimal way forward, but it was necessary. so two revisions and lots of testing later i finally managed to get it right, and i was done for the day.

i slept better last night than in a while, but that's only relative, and around 4am i walked into the kitchen to grab a cup of water and encountered a very large cockroach while i was unable to catch...

i was planning on going in to work this morning but as i opened the front door i felt dizzy, so it was another day working from home. which was fine. it was a productive day, and i enjoyed receiving a significant assist from github's copilot when writing my tests. like, a literally amazing assist, because i was having trouble with a mocking framework and it knew all the details the documentation had glossed over.

between that and the last couple of months of AI frenzy regarding image generation, i can't help thinking that we might be fast approaching the singularity...

i got to rest a bit this afternoon, lying on the couch or reading deadpool comics, and took mr smear out for a bit of exercise. then the two of us dived in to the costume quest series on amazon prime which is fantastic, accompanied by wolfing down large quantities of gd's home-made vegan sushi as the pre-fast meal.

and then, after a quick shave and shower, the sun set. i had a quick chat with horseman, then joined gd and mr smear who were enjoying the after-dark park experience with the rest of the neighbourhood. there's something utterly magnificent about relaxing with other parents amidst throngs of kids just doing their thing, a festival-like atmosphere, and for us in particular witnessing mr smear confidently hanging out and getting on nicely with the other kids.

i'm typing this while listening to the live sermon, and feeling an enormous sense of gratitude. may this coming year be better for us all in every respect. may each and all of us evolve and adapt and be better.

gmar hatima tova.

sat/sun

saturday:

successfully getting our phones sorted out and watching the original dumbo

a fair amount of game-time

a frustrating afternoon walk to nowhere

yesterday:

"urgent" flailing about bureaucracy, a call from the school coordinator telling me to hurry to set up a training session that our health services claim to know nothing about (that cost 1.5 hours on the phone)

successfully fixing a critical project

money stress with the credit card date surprise - fortunately our rent was paid before anything else happened

successful context juggling

a long but useful misrad klitah meeting

a pistachio ice cream break after not picking mr smear up from school (we weren't sure if he had his animation and film class or not)

lining up ducks before meeting the boss

a great relief clearing the air and tying up a bunch of loose threads

mr smear's teacher called to check in on the morning's shenanigans, i made it clear that i have experience with israeli bureaucracy and we ultimately agreed on two issues that need to be addressed

a chat with vfmp in lieu of a game night, but with both of us making horrible noises because he has covid in addition to a sick cat

...

about halfway through the night my runny nose stopped running. i'm still uncomfortably dealing with the fallout of four days of post-nasal drip but i was able to get some real sleep afterwards even if it doesn't make up for the deficit...

ill and demoralized

 i'm tired. and i'm sooooo over being sick again, even if it's a mild cold this time and not another round of covid. i think i've been sick more in the last few months than in the last few years, possibly since before covid, but at the same time i have been considerably more physically social than in a really long time too.

either way, i worked from home on thursday and it was mostly not great. having said that, i did manage to resolve the issues i needed to on one project and had my first customer-facing encounter, which went better than i anticipated (my initial hunch proved correct). for the other project, i eventually called it (putting it on hold), tried to implement an apparently trivial part of it as a favour for the boss and discovered that that might be the thing causing problems, so i'll test it again tomorrow and hope for the best.

in addition to the demoralizing nature of fighting a losing battle against a patchy and highly complex ci/cd system, i don't feel like i'm earning trust. it looks like i'm failing while i'm falling on other people's swords, and that's not good.

...

the reason i put down full price on will you snail was that in addition to it looking like great fun, we been watching jonas tyroller for a while and i felt this was a great way to say thank you. mr smear and i have now put in at least two hours into it, and i can honestly say it's brilliant, entertaining and so freaking hard that whoever wrote that "it puts obstacles in all the wrong places and doesn't challenge you enough" was clearly playing it on the easiest setting.

the past couple of days have seen quite a few hours sunk into gameplay, the three of us have completed rayman: legends (for the second time) and mr smear and i played brawlhalla as a team this morning (including capture the flag) and i must say it's definitely helping my mental state overall, in spite of the occasional outbursts. we're not always as cooperative as we need to be, but we're all consistently improving.

...

gd and i watched waltz with bashir yesterday. it was devastating. watching it was devastating, and according to the wikipedia article the movie barely touches on the atrocities that were committed. enabling the massacre was a thorough betrayal of our nation and everything we stand for, and while i'd learned a bit about the massacre before (it's a cautionary tale in the army) i now believe that we should be including its horrors in our holocaust memorials as a reminder of our failure to remember our own experiences and act accordingly.

...

page 25 is finally done! i'm about to make it publicly available, then i'll try to sort out the fact that my phone's still registered for the wrong country because it's a samsung and the account's country cannot be updated. morons.

less quiet

 well, that didn't last too long. yesterday morning mr smear was still too sick to go to school, and gd and i began the morning with a series of miscommunications that kick-started a no good, lousy, very bad day.

at the office, i resumed the soul-grinding task i've been stuck with the last few workdays, only to be whisked away to another task that had been stalled and it took me hours to find myself stuck without being able to debug my tests and then hours to get the damned debugging configured.

i wasn't feeling very positive when i stalked out the office around 6pm.

i picked up a beer on my way home, installed will you snail on the playstation. it helped. after putting mr smear to bed i had a bath, though not after a long conversation with gd, after which i slunk into bed emotionally exhausted.

at least i slept (relatively) well.

unfortunately, while mr smear is thankfully well enough to go back to school, gd and i woke up with scratchy throats and sickly feelings.

joy.

quiet time

> in five minutes we're leaving the apartment to find out if pre-booking a taxi was good enough to get us to our cousins on time for dinner.

it wasn't. and we finally understood that it's not that it's difficult to get a taxi on the big holidays, it's impossible because all of the drivers take the holidays off! it feels like there's a gap in the market for hiring foreign drivers, but maybe that's just us...

fortunately, our cousins were able and willing to pick us up and drop us off, and we had a really enjoyable evening with our family. we got to meet our newest cousin, who's super cute but pretty much slept the entire time, and we overheard mr smear actually speaking in hebrew to the kids his age and they all had a great time together, and we ate too much and talked a lot and it was an excellent way to usher in the new year.

monday afternoon we went over to friends for lunch (mr smear's friend's family that we had dinner with a while back), and that was also great fun, and we ate far too much, and met a few other people and talked a lot.

aside from that, things have been quiet and indoorsy. i invested a lot of time on both days trying to set up stable diffusion on my desktop machines, i managed to get it working this afternoon but the results were disappointing and the whole process was just as tedious as the uglier elements of my day job; it was work. maybe it is worth just putting down some cash on the more powerful / configurable public cloud offerings.

we also spent a lot of time gaming. it's been a pleasant, mellow couple of days. and we watched E.T. today, and mr smear loved it.

new year!

the last half of this year was tough, but much... much... MUCH better than the two years that came before it. my gods, we have lots to be grateful for. here's hoping and praying that the next year is an improvement all round.

handing over the dog yesterday wasn't as uncomfortable as we expected, although there was a lot of sadness before the handover; he obviously felt that something was up, because he did *not* want to go outside with me in the morning even though he definitely needed to go.

the rest of the day was spent trying out a bunch of the games that got a mention in the wowie jam 4! winners video (all the ones available on itch.io, at least), and after an hour or so that mr smear and i went out for a walk (and ice-cream) we got back into the godot tutorials. slow progress is still progress.

i hurt myself sleeping last night, i woke up this morning to find that breathing was painful.

no school today. half a workday that was *probably* more than half a day for me. minor progress.

afterwards, mr smear and i tried out the rest of the wowie jam 4! games.

that was the day.

in five minutes we're leaving the apartment to find out if pre-booking a taxi was good enough to get us to our cousins on time for dinner.

shana tova!

a sad, scratchy state of affairs

thursday was a horrible workday. i jumped from task to task and got zero satisfaction. the day ended on a sour note, with a repeat of a nonsensical failure that i thought i'd corrected for. not a great send-off for my team lead, who's taking a month's leave...

on thursday afternoon i walked my ex-coworkers dog home for a couple of weeks of dog-sitting. we've had him for a day and a half, now, and things have been mostly great (we love him!) although we have been concerned about his lack of socialization: he's four years old and terrified of most other dogs, though he's cool with humans big and small. we feel sad for him. this morning i managed to get him into the idea of being brushed, which went really well (we got rid of a few dreads along the way) until gd spotted a flea. i'd seen him scratch a couple of times but this was the first evidence we had.

so after picking up mr smear from school we took him to the pet store where they put ampoule drops on him, and we hoped that that would take care of things... but when we took him out later, he was suddenly walking uncomfortably and constantly sitting down, looking as if he might have worms, too. this was just too much to bear, and while we feel awful about this we really can't handle playing host to anything more than just a dog right now.

we feel awful for the dog, and awful for the dog's owner (who's on his honeymoon right after losing his job), but we've asked his brother to come and pick up the poor creature and we're hoping that everything works out for the best. this is a remarkably shit feeling, but as the saying goes: "not my circus, not my monkeys". or, "not my circus, not my fleas"...

gd's back's feeling much better since her nerve block on tuesday, though. that's something. and mr cat and i made good progress on the upcoming graphic novel page. it's also nice that aside from some good exercise today mr smear and i played through a ton of games from the honorary mentions segment of the AI collaboration game challenge and some of them are just brilliant.

...

i hate this feeling.

what a week

sunday:

i don't recall anything specific from sunday.

monday:

monday began with a total shift in work focus onto a project i'm completely unfamiliar with. in the afternoon we had an interdepartmental team-building exercise, which we not only won but apparently set a record for: nighthunt. it was great fun, we worked well together, and i definitely proved my value as part of the team's problem solving arsenal ^_^

in spite of the lack of vegan options, i enjoyed dinner + beer + coffee with the guys, although as much as i enjoyed the espresso it really messed with my sleep that night.

tuesday:

yesterday was a half day that started with a glass of dry red wine (a company toast for the new year), as i left early to accompany gd to the hospital for her nerve block and immediately became chief caretaker of mr smear for the next few hours. gd's experience was so dramatically better than her last nerve block it's shocking, because it demonstrates just how incompetent and unprofessional her "pain specialist" doctor actually is (she's taken to referring to him as a jewish dr mengele).

gd has been sore since, but it seems to be having a positive effect.

we ordered dinner from karnaf last night, and we won't be making that mistake again.

otherwise, we finished watching superman:

by and large, it surprisingly still holds up! creepy non-consensual kiss scenes notwithstanding - that warranted a conversation. the only things that *really* bother me are

a) the completely ridiculous notion that being exposed to kryptonite would somehow weaken a child born on that planet, or that a tiny quantity could somehow "undo" the effects of being in proximity to a sun that gives him his powers when they don't even fail him as he travels beneath the earth's crust

b) the going back in time shenanigans.

still fun, though!

mr smear and i both felt ill going to bed last night.

today:

it took me most of the day to start feeling better. mr smear says he's still not doing great but dammit he's going to school tomorrow.

aside from a lot of admin in the morning and a lot of admin after mr smear went to bed - an overwhelming amount - i spent most of the day deep into work in spite of the whirlwind going on around me. i feel like my biggest achievements so far this week involve getting linters to work.

a pretty good saturday

 well, it's about 1am on a sunday morning, i was tired earlier but i've decided i need to get back into the habit of hustling into the night.

not that i hustled very much, mind, but i did get the ball rolling.

i also found a bunch of ways to "clean my desk", because... that's what one does?

...

today was by and large a good day. fall guys is great, although players have been begging for years for local multiplayer and i'm stunned that they haven't made that available. we watched a fair bit of superman (the 1978 version), which has very slow pacing but is still good, and we played a bit of rayman: legends and king's quest. i took mr smear out for a couple of hours in the late afternoon, we headed to the beach and had a good time.

after reading to him (we're almost done with the magic pudding, and he's loving it as much as i am), gd and i (mostly me) persevered and struggled and completed the last few paintings of olympus maximus with all the achievements. that shit is hard. although we were certainly faster than our first time around.

then we (finally!) got through the second episode of the sandman. it is absolutely gorgeous.

wrecked, but here.

 was a wreck this past week. thoroughly exhausted, highly anxious. overwhelmed by bureaucracy / admin / the infinite number of things that i'm expected to deal with in addition to paid work just to make it through each day.

it doesn't feel like there's much relief.

thursday was a bit better than the previous couple of days, i managed to resolve an issue i'd been wrestling with and spent my afternoon improving test coverage and tidying up my tooling configuration. at least thursday ended on a positive note.

yesterday i went to endless roll to try and buy wheels and bearings for my rollerblades, and i now understand why everyone in the group recommends going literally anywhere else. i left in frustration after twenty or thirty minutes. gd and i were late picking up mr smear from school. when we got home, we played king's quest for a couple of hours and then drove to bat yam for a lovely afternoon on the beach with my coworkers.

a good time was enjoyed by all. mr smear was buried in the sand, he and gd made a kite and he flew it, we had fun in the water in spite of the lifeguards... it was a really great day.

this morning's been pretty good so far, too. mr smear spent some time developing drone intution with fpv freerider, mr smear and i have played some of the lord of the rings card game, which is really cool, and we're now about to give fall guys a chance.

also, mr cat's been making progress on page 25 of the comics and one of the panels has been proving tricky, i'm hoping my latest suggestion is viable.

processing

the saddest item is that there was a horrible road accident in our neighbourhood earlier that claimed at least one life.

...

i'm feeling wiped out. we're dog-sitting for my now ex-teammate (he's one of the people in the department hit by the layoffs) in preparation for our week looking after this wonderful animal while he goes on honeymoon (it was his wedding i went to recently). i just* got back from walking him, after walking home from a farewell event for a few others from the office, after an hour long lecture by mr smear's teacher (she's prepping all of us for the coming year), after a long and somewhat stressful day at work.

* probably half an hour ago, before i showered and couldn't decide if i was hungry or not.

we're in the middle of an "innovation", and i've teamed up with a couple of guys for a simple but interesting project, but i pushed code this morning that Broke Stuff and it took quite a few hours to put our fingers on what went wrong... otherwise, it was nice to receive public acknowledgement from the head of r&d, not least because i've been worried that i've pissed him off or something as he really hasn't had any time for me.

yesterday was wildly successful. surprisingly so. and then i capped it off by picking up tinker racers for the playstation - not only is it a really fun little game, but it was a great vehicle to get mr smear to practice "grit" and i convinced him to keep trying until he got the hang of it, after which point we both thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

...

i'm really struggling with all the bureaucracy and bills and admin.

...

i've had fall out boy's this ain't a scene, it's an arms race stuck in my head since yesterday evening, i don't remember if i used to enjoy it back in the day but i'm totally appreciating it now.

how much is psychological?

it's been a good weekend. i have experienced some anxiety for not getting much done, but i keep reminding myself that i'm allowed / in need of a weekend and it's okay.

it's okay.

thorsday was... uncomfortable. three of the people who were let go came in to the office, and i don't know who of all of us was more awkward. i spent the first half of the day planning work, the second beginning to execute, and finished off with a long phone call with an italian counterpart during the first half of which i thought my brain was going to bleed out my ears.

yesterday started off with two things: the first, me completing and publishing my parody lyrics to the everything is awesome song. the second, gd and i finally finished watching the third season of the boys.

omg it was brilliant. absolutely exquisite. i don't know why i found myself disengaged from some of the third season's episodes, perhaps the pacing was a bit off, but overall i've thoroughly enjoyed the series from start to finish. we even watched one of the animated spinoffs, the boys: diabolical, and it was great fun!

we picked up mr smear from school together, and he'd had a good couple of days in spite of his wednesday blowout. we were all excited by the extra-mural expo, so looking forward to this week's trial classes.

last night we finished watching the second tobey macguire spiderman movie, this morning we watched the third. i've never forgotten just how much i hated some of the scenes in the third one, but i didn't remember just how thoroughly rotten the entire trilogy is. in addition to the terrible over-acting, the only way the plot moves forward is by every single character in the movie being utterly stupid.

every.

single.

character.

maybe doc ock was a possible exception. maybe.

anyway, so after a nice couple of hours spent with new-friends neighbours at a kids' play area in the mall closest to us, we came home and watched spider-man: far from home, which was an excellent palate cleanser.

mr smear is now in bed, i'm trying to decide if i should hit the hay, continuing watching the new doctor strange movie or get some of the sandman in.

decisions, decisions. everything on my real to-do list is a tomorrow's me problem.

a little bit broken

i can't believe it's thorsday already. (we've taken to calling the days by their original names, woden's day being our favourite)

tuesday was a productive day. as i was on my way out my team lead "reminded" me of a 7pm all-hands meeting which i'd never heard about... i played rayman with mr smear while listening to how we're downsizing, and a bunch of people have been let go. what they're doing and why they're doing it makes sense, and they're doing it in the best way possible (two months severance + assistance in finding new work), but it's still horrible. and some of the decisions were surprising, to say the least.

after putting mr smear to bed i hopped on my blades and went out for a 23km ride. i almost gave up less than five minutes after leaving the apartment because my knee was feeling wobbly, it only settled yesterday evening but i feel like it was important exercise both for it and the rest of my body.

which is still feeling broken, but hey.

yesterday was also productive in spite of the feeling that i was falling apart, although there was a lot of distraction and sadness and the last hour or two i found it particularly difficult to focus and the fourth cup of coffee didn't help much. then i came home and joined a council meeting that was entirely uninteresting and i had nothing to contribute to.

so i updated my machine and shovelled sushi into my mouth until it was over.

i went to bed early, but struggled to sleep. not only was my neck and back hurting, but my brain was all over the place. i spent most of the night with my headphones in listening to NSDR recordings.

...

i took mr smear to school yesterday morning after a very dramatic episode of failing to follow instructions when trying to leave. the walk to school was mostly fine, but then after saying goodbye and walking a couple of meters he stopped, turned around, and i could see he needed a hug.

but the hug wasn't enough. he exploded in a tantrum of how he's not going to school, how he's always being harassed. the principal happened to be standing right there, she tried to help, then someone else arrived that i didn't recognize and she tried to help, and then finally his teacher arrived. i went inside with the two of them and we tried to figure out what was happening, but we already knew what was happening: there're a couple of kids in his class that he doesn't like, one of them is a bully and they're both a bit... slower than the rest. and because he doesn't like them, he interacts with them negatively instead of leaving them alone, and he doesn't like the consequences and he doesn't accept responsibility.

and he also refuses the outs he's given. when i, or gd, or his teacher gives him a choice of (a) or (b), he will always choose (c). and it will always be a (c) that he knows is not on the table.

...

gd's worried that he's self-harming because he he damaged his skin scratching off one of his fake tattoos, apparently because of something related to the bully. i don't know if she's right, but whatever's going on is fucked up and i'm really sad for him.

manic monday

and sunday, too. what happened on saturday?

oooh, i remember. we all had a quiet day indoors, except in the late afternoon when i took mr smear for a walk to the park by the beach. we had a great time and some interesting conversations, although i don't quite recall what about, and on the way home we stopped in at a synagogue to help them make a minyan. they offered me the honour of hagba, which i've never done with a sephardi torah scroll before, so that was an interesting experience.

sunday was another work day spent chasing the tail end of wednesday's surprise. yesterday? more of the same, although i did enjoy a few additional successes along the way and finished strong.

both sunday and yesterday i was feeling... manic. also, on saturday i listened to a podcast on chiropractors and my take away was that there's a distinct possibility that my neurologist's recommendation to avoid all upper body exercise may have been shortsighted.

...

on sunday night i joined vfmp for a game night for the first time in aaaaages. we played villagers, i was tired and it took me a while to get the idea but it was a lot of fun regardless.

...

on saturday night, after closing the book i was reading to mr smear, i was about to turn off the light when i noticed he had what appeared to be a thousand-yard stare.

"are you okay?"

"uh huh."

"what are you thinking?"

"imagine if the pound actually did what it's called, and smashed dogs and cats into nothing but blood."

jesus christ.

...

yesterday morning, during the twenty five minutes between mr smear picking up his toothbrush and actually starting to brush his teeth, he shared a bunch of musings. one of them went along the lines of "when i'm older, i'm going to erase all my memories and turn myself into a naga". i put on a crying face and asking him if he really wanted to forget his childhood with us and our love for him, and he immediately understood how his plan implied that and felt so bad that he bawled while i consoled him.

parenting is a rollercoaster.

...

during breakfast yesterday, mr smear asked me if zombies are real. this is what transpired.

so tired

 i've been up for more than an hour but i still feel like i'm in that soft, in-between state where i was lying comfortably for the first time all night but neither asleep nor awake. now i'm sitting here sipping coffee after helping mr smear out with little big planet 3, which i took a risk on last night and was pleasantly surprised to find that it works decently on the ps4.

thursday: i arrived at work, got over the next hurdle. it took a while to be confident that i'd resolved the main issue, but subsequently got hit by another one. that took all of my energy for the rest of the day, and when the third surprise landed i remembered that i'm not on-call and giggled uncontrollably while handing over the task to the poor guy who is.

i honestly hope he's had a quiet weekend.

i was *very* glad to reach the end of the day and say "fuck this, i'm out".

...

thursday evening was a mess. my mess, and i'm still feeling horrible about it. i tried to have a conversation with gd about a potential ski trip next year, and only after doing some damage did i realize that my internal concept of a ski trip - a solid week of nothing but snowboarding - is no longer appropriate as i'm now married with a child.

having painfully uncovered the root of the problem, our plans are now as follows: we try to get to montreal this winter if we can afford it, any part of winter there's snow but preferably around christmas time. although i had initially fantasized about going snowboarding there, it just doesn't seem feasible... and if by some miracle we can afford it, we try to go on a ski trip as a family.

maybe i'll even suck it up and take my family to the hermon. maybe. the idea of hitting the slopes alongside israelis who don't realize that using other people to stop isn't cool is not especially appealing to me.

...

yesterday morning was "me time", but i didn't really know what to do with it. i made a little progress on one of my personal projects, i played some of batman: arkham knight (definitely not for kids), read random things but couldn't keep focused.

we experienced a weird moment when a wolt delivery arrived on our doorstep with a thank you package from our now ex-neighbours that was decidedly not vegan (we kept the challah, put the rest of the lovely baked goods on a bench).

then we picked up mr smear, who'd had his second good school day in a row, picked up some stationery, bought sushi prep stuff and then spent the afternoon chilling. mr smear helped gd make sushi, we all stuffed ourselves.

i, as usual, put myself to sleep early reading the magic pudding to mr smear - i love that he's old enough to enjoy it! - and then woke up restless and with a stiff knee in the middle of the night. i joined gd who was just completing a binge-watch of kevin hart's true story, and when she went to bed i watched a couple of episodes of rick and morty (i'm quite behind) before turning in again.

...

i'm still re-reading neuromancer. i'm perpetually fascinated that all i remembered from my first read was an opening scene moment completely irrelevant to the story, and a massive spoiler that i still haven't encountered yet, but pretty much nothing about the plot or the myriad brilliant moments and ideas along the way. it may be outdated in many respects, but it's still a phenomenal piece of work and highly entertaining.

happiness and sadness

 the birthday party didn't just go smoothly, it went GREAT. i wasn't there for most of it, but mr smear had a fantastic time, even managed to be cool with the class bully, and put on a show when invited up to the "stage" that had all the other kids in stitches.

gd and i are so damned proud, and hoping that he's turned a corner.

...

work yesterday was a mess. i enjoyed some successes in my project - not complete, but exciting progress nonetheless - but towards the end of the day got handed a particularly nasty, urgent task by a coworker who'd been handed it by our team lead, each struggling with it and then leaving on vacation. so here's me, not on vacation and not on-call but working long hours alone trying to resolve a "spaghetti western" that i've never encountered before.

...

my eyes were *sore* when i turned in last night, having moved forward a bit but still completely lost in the woods. having enjoyed my first cup of coffee this morning and taking mr smear off to his first day of kitah bet (he was mostly good this morning, although we're still all struggling with getting out of bed), omg it's september already, i'm now heading off to the office and hoping for a miracle.

the middle of a big week

sunday:

the visit to the allergist took hours longer than anticipated. mr smear is still very much allergic to dairy. the big decision was whether to put him on a programme to increase his tolerance or not, which would entail him consuming daily "doses" of dairy. considering how bad dairy is for kids, the fact that we've been managing fine until now and that he's getting older, i didn't think it was a good idea / worthwhile and the allergist didn't disagree with me.

monday:

the biggest event this week so far was mr smear coming to my office for a few hours. it started off really well, but i needed him to eat something before i went into a meeting and things escalated rapidly and bizarrely to drama in front of... pretty much all my colleagues.

two days later and i'm still mortified. apparently it was less of deal for my coworkers, but maybe they're just being polite...

earlier that day i received my first negative feedback from my team lead, relating to how much effort i invested in something that i didn't want to do at all and - in my opinion - shouldn't have been responsible for in the first place. it wasn't a bad conversation, but it's a little frustrating.

yesterday:

yesterday morning started well, with mr smear and i giving the first chapter of playstation's king's quest a go. it's BEAUTIFUL. and lots of fun for both of us. it was a tough day in the office, but successful.

i left the office, ran into the mongoose on the way home, switched to beach volleyball clothing and headed down to gordon beach to meet a group of coworkers and discover that i'm much older than i was last time i played beach volleyball, that moving dynamically on sand is tougher than i recall and that getting a face full of sand isn't an optimal experience. but aside from that, i had a fantastic time and played pretty well over all!

i did wash a LOT of beach sand down the drain when i showered at home, though, i hope i didn't cause real damage...

...

today is the class birthday party for mr smear and a couple of other kids. we're praying it goes smoothly.

back to work

well... in a few minutes, at least. two significant things happened on friday, the first being that after a whole lot of confusing research, i discovered that while the mongoose was advising me to buy an xbox rather than a playstation, he has a playstation. and that's what he was offering to lend us. for a much, much longer period of time than i initially understood.

i now get the logic behind the xbox recommendation - that it's far better value for money when you have kids - but we're a family that's definitely good with playstations, and the VR gear they're loaned with. even if repurchasing and configuring was an expensive chore.

the second was dinner, we were invited to mr smear's friend's home and we had a really lovely time!

yesterday was mostly a good shabbat. we started off watching the third tobey maguire spider-man movie (because venom, in spite of it being a crap movie the tom hardy venom movies are definitely age-inappropriate), but it soon became apparent that mr smear needed the back story in spite of his protests to the contrary so we watched the first one. 2002! it came out in 2002! and it was also a bit crap, but for a seven year old it was just fine.

then i rolled over to the mongoose's again to pick up a power cable, and spent a good chunk of the afternoon sorting out our upgraded entertainment system. in the evening, we took a walk downtown, with mr smear responding to the old riddle of two guards with an interesting take of his own (not quite the solution, but if allowed two questions he would have asked "do either of you tell lies?") and following up with a crazy tale that i'm right now trying to convince him to draw for us because it was seriously convoluted and he did go on and on about it.

we enjoyed a delicious special-treat veggie-sushi dinner followed by vegan frozen yoghurt.

after getting mr smear into bed, i played an exploratory couple of rounds of fortnite for the first time ever and it was fun. i did okay in my second attempt, although i ultimately ended up with a bit of motion sickness, but as fun as it is i'm very confident it's not age-appropriate and we'll be sticking with the ratings stickers on this one. gd and i also ran through a couple of levels of rayman: legends to break in the machine :D

it was a good weekend.

health report

oh! and gd and i got our blood test results back. it turns out i'm super healthy in most respects, but possibly anaemic.  also, it looks "bad" that i don't have nearly as much cholesterol in my blood than normal people. medicine is weird.

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.