it's not my party but i'll sulk if i want to

 wednesday was rough, my neck was hurting all day after sleeping badly and by late afternoon i was starting to have headaches and needed to get out of there.

wednesday night i seemed to have gotten my pillows right again (and marked them, this time), and so thursday was much better. i ended the week on a very positive note, super excited by getting the thing i wanted to work working.

yesterday morning i made the mistake of enthusiastically setting up a test for the thing i got working on thursday. setting it up took a lot of effort and time, testing it was hard, and the ultimate failure sucked. not an optimal way to spend a friday.

we did, however, manage to get the bathtub's drain unclogged.

in the late afternoon i took mr smear for a walk down to the marina, we had a really good time.

this morning started with dragon's quest builders 2. i cannot praise this game highly enough! it's what happens when final fantasy meets minecraft, and i was thrilled at how invested mr smear was in reading all the text. and playing the game, which is exquisite. and the music was so lovely that i ended up passing out behind him on the couch for a while.

that gave me more than a couple of hours of "me time". then we all headed out to the birthday party. gd's neck has been in spasm since she got up this morning, so she bailed a few minutes out of the house, and mr smear and i had a nice walk to the trampolines. we arrived in time to verify that my registration earlier this week was valid, and after i installed a dice app on my phone we played an oversized game of snakes and ladders.

so far, so good.

the party started off well, but some kid told him that only one kid per trampoline was allowed and he walked out of the fun area to sulk.

i don't know how to deal with the incredible sulk. i tried supportive, i tried manipulative, i tried coercive. i failed. over and over. every time i almost succeeded, i failed. eventually, many lifetimes later, i managed to convince him to come give it one more try and then we arrived at the gate to realize that he'd been so upset he'd ripped off and thrown away the bracelet so we weren't allowed in anymore.

genius.

at least there was a whole vegan pizza just for us and he got his own private dessert in lieu of cake, and then end of the party was positive.

i mean, mostly. i'm not taking him alone to a party ever again. it was heartbreaking and horrible.

over the hump day

it's raining right now and i need to go to the office... like, really raining heavily as i type this and it's beautiful and warm and cosy inside.

yesterday was a pretty good day work-wise, but i was completely buggered by the afternoon and it was tough keeping my eyes open. then i caffeined up for the office game night and had a good time, making it home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear.

i slept horribly.

i've managed to get a couple of admin items squared away this morning, and now i'm going to do some dishes and be off!

dishing it out

 we're two days in and this isn't a bad week so far.

work-wise, iffy but trending positive. the week started sour with my team lead "taking me off the project", but this morning i got him on board with letting me close it out and so far mostly good. i also managed to deliver something everyone is excited about, in spite of losing most of yesterday to writing up last week's incidents...

mr smear was still at home today, although i suspect he should've been back at school already. he really likes chilling at home. i guess i should be grateful he's feeling safe and secure.

i managed to upgrade the mobile app on saturday night! expo's new system is a little weird, but good enough, and it felt good to do something with the project.

this evening i met up with scrapper for frisbee. we did play a little, but we also did a very basic old-people's workout at the park gym and we caught up on a ton of stuff. it was fun.

finally - doing the dishes has been a big deal for both of us. it's like a forced meditation for me, and a huge break for gd. i wish i'd thought of this before.

...

i had a revelation a couple of days ago, and it's that as high as the cost of living in tel aviv may be, it's not actually as expensive to live here as it was for us in cape town. of the three cities i've lived in in the past decade, cape town is by far the most expensive.

economics are weird.

last night on-call

 yesterday ended on a much better note, although mr smear was still fiery hot and i lost the argument about him sleeping in his own bed - until the early hours of the morning, when gd eventually lost it (after i'd spent the night receiving kicks to the nether regions and elbows to the eyes) and he left ours.

today was a recovery day. i don't know why i hadn't thought of it before, but gd *hates* doing dishes and i kind of enjoy it, so the other day i offered to take over and since yesterday it's been my responsibility. everyone's happier with this arranged, so that's cool. and the few times i did it today were... meditative.

otherwise, we spent the whole day indoors, quietly watching things or playing games. the only constructive thing i did was give feedback to mr cat, who was understandably unhappy with me realizing that the background needed a big change after producing what he thought was the final draft...

it's better, though.

i guess the other thing i did today was play around with the brave browser, which is now basically a thin skin for chrome with better privacy stuff and generally improved performance because of it. i now warmly recommend it, not least because i didn't have to give anything up - all my extensions work very nicely and the profile system is exactly the same.

not quite the weekend i was hoping for

 the past few days haven't been all bad. but they haven't been particular good, either.

tuesday and wednesday were a continuation of the deep dive into unhandled promise rejections in aws lambdas, which was not fun but did produce some interesting learnings.

tuesday and wednesday i worked from home after i found myself having a coughing fit five minutes before entering the office, i seem to have picked up from mr smear. who has subsequently gone on to become really sick with something else - he's been spiking a high fever since yesterday and we're keeping a close eye on him.

gd reported that the two of them got their bloodwork analyzed recently and the results were excellent, so that's encouraging. vegan ftw.

unfortunately, by the time i was ready to head back into the office on thursday my team lead was off sick. i'm being reminded of "optics", because he's never around to see the successes but i have to report to him whenever i have trouble. this is not boding well. especially because i was feeling much more confident by thursday and getting all sorts of little things squared away. i'm sure he was or will be around for my recorded knowledge share which i'd been too overwhelmed to prepare for, and i feel like i made an ass of myself.

...

by the time dinner arrived (at the office) yesterday i was utterly *done*. but i really wanted to go support my teammate at his improv competition. i'd ordered a meal from four one six, and was thoroughly impressed by their vegan shwarma, but their portions are so big i had to stash the remains (about half of it, even after significantly overeating) in the fridge. then we left.

we hadn't made it to the bus stop across the road before our support team got hold of me, asking me about something i was unfamiliar with. fortunately one of the coworkers with me could help, so i passed on a suggestion from him, and from that point until we walked out of the improv competition things were calm. i got to have a drink, and a beer, and enjoy the entire show without being paged, and the show was brilliant - most of it, anyway, there was one team i found a bit tiring - but we generally had an excellent time. our coworker's team won the evening, and our coworker definitely stole the show - he was quick, and he was hilarious!

after congratulating the team, i opened my phone to find that the support agent hadn't quite understood the instructions. so i clarified - but having no experience, i worried that i might simply be giving bad advice. so when i got home, after a quick shower, i sat down and began tinkering. if i got home around 11pm, and i went to bed around 1.30am, i can say that most of that time was spent diving deep into lambda logging.

finally satisfied that i knew what i was talking about and had tested all the possibilities, i squished into the bed next to a furnace - mr smear has been too uncomfortable to sleep in his own bed, apparently - and because he was overheating we were sleeping with the aircon on.

conditions were less than ideal.

...

and then woke up to the pager alarm at 4.40am. i spent the next hour and a half bleary-eyed, trying desperately to figure out where the fire was and unable to reach any of the team leads nor our department head. this is not the first time. and i felt especially guilty trying to contact these guys at stupid o'clock in the morning when one was sick and the other having just had beer with me before continuing on for more drinks with the other.

and then, all of a sudden, the metric returned to normal.

it had been a false alarm the entire time.

stunned, i climbed back into bed.

stunned, i woke up fifteen minutes later to another page.

a different one. after an hour and a half unable to find the fire, it also auto-resolved.

it had been another false alarm.

i crawled back into bed.

...

and woke up about three hours later to urgent messages from our support team asking me to investigate and then join a call with a super-important client.

being on-call for my employer is awful. it's ugly. and it makes me feel things like "i hate my life". i'm building resentment at every incident. i don't want this, and i don't think i'm being paid enough for this.

another coworker came to the rescue, fortunately, and a little while later i was ready to take a bus to the office to rescue my dinner leftovers.

...

which had been turfed by the cleaning staff.

...

the rest of the day has been recovery, and a fair amount of silent prayer that the rest of the weekend will be quieter. and i posted a haiku i was inspired to write yesterday. you're welcome. i don't know where i'm going to find the energy to upgrade the mobile app for my side-project, which has been neglected so long that it's no longer supported :/

...

we've been making great progress on the sonnet comics front. so that's good.

pray for me.

so far, not amazing

 my sunday didn't begin so well, it started with the beginnings of a sniffle and a sore throat which has gotten progressively worse. thanks, mr smear. as the day progressed i became more disheartened, i'm very unhappy with having to babysit a highly complex solution that's full of components on fire, and the more i looked into things the less certain i became of what was relevant and what wasn't.

after a long day, i came home, watched an episode of pokémon indigo league (we've finally agreed that we can put aside the animal cruelty and exploitation and give the series another chance) and finished watching the chamber of secrets. almost immediately after putting mr smear to bed, while i was trying to decide whether to chance going to bed myself, my pager went off.

i had neither the knowledge nor the permissions to deal with the issue, so my team lead put me in touch with another team lead and the two of us worked on the thing (i bore witness, at least) until around 11pm. and then i crashed.

to be woken yesterday morning at 4.40am. again, no knowledge or permissions, and i woke up my team lead and we spent the next couple of hours on a call. we ended the call on an unpleasant note, and i couldn't get back to sleep.

frustrated, and with so much frustration having accumulated, and full of bad feelings, i started updating my resume and am considering putting feelers out.

i tried to have a conversation with my team lead when we were both in the office, but it would take all day to get an opportunity to speak to him privately. during that time, i got paged for two further incidents that i still don't know anything about.

we finally had it out in the evening, and while i have no way of knowing whether things went "well" or not i think we both did some airing of grievances and went a long way to clearing the air. i certainly feel like we're more aligned than before, and we haven't spoken properly in months which i suggested might be the cause of the drift.

he took over my night shift and told me to go home and clear my head, which i think i've managed to do. hopefully things will improve.

...

i'm shocked that the aircon people charged us NIS 500 for two remote controls that cost at most 100 each, where the main cost was apparently the "call out fees" for delivering said remotes. i wouldn't have paid, but these are the bastards we need if the air conditioners themselves need maintenance so they really have us by the balls. so that's an expensive lesson...

gearing up for another on-call

 i'm surprisingly relaxed about this coming week, even though the end of the week was stressed for the previous guy and my last one didn't go so well. and even though my legs have been giving me a lot of grief over the past few hours.

the end of my work week was generally positive. i'm not sure if it's enough to make up for the weeks before it, but i finally closed in on the end of the unpleasant project and even got a few hours in on the thing we've all really been wanting me to do.

so that was good.

otherwise, mr smear was feeling ill on thursday morning but seemed well enough to go to school, it was only when gd picked him up that we understood that he really should have stayed home (and me with him). so i felt a bit bad about that.

yesterday morning we went on a mission to pick up another phone (for me, this time). the model i wanted wasn't available, but we picked up an amazing persian breakfast which we ate at home and then i returned alone once it was. overall, the cellphone experience has been very positive!

<TMI WARNING> on the way home i stopped in to a grocery store to pick up an ice cream. i felt i deserved it. i usually don't have much flatulence during the day in spite of being a vegan, and when i do it almost never smells. but as i stood waiting for my turn to pay, an urgent ball of gas formed and i just had to let it out. it was silent, but so awful that i could barely breathe, the cashier gagged and, shocked, asked if it was me; i couldn't bring myself to admit to it, so i rolled my eyes while she desperately sprayed air freshener and her coworker laughingly suggested it might actually be her... i suspect he was just doing it for my benefit.
</TMI WARNING>

today was mostly an indoors day, with one mission to get coffee / lunch at timothy's, which was excellent except for gd and mr smear sitting on a bench that was utterly soaked and had had its warning sign ripped off by a previous sociopathic customer.

and we restarted a harry potter movie rewatch today. once a year seems a good amount of times.

...

i'm VERY excited by the progress with the sonnet comics this week.

...

i'm rather disappointed with the outcome of tuesday's elections, it must be said. i've been trying to keep the political situation out of mind but morbid curiosity occasionally gets the better of me. i pray the next couple of years won't be too different from normal, but i'm sad that my own people appear to be on a path to polarization / radicalization and i want it to stop.

election frenzy

i can't believe it's wednesday already! (well, technically speaking, of course)

gd's had a big night - not only did i finally pick up a new phone for her (or me, if she doesn't like it), but she's been accepted into an ulpan class and is super excited to be starting her first class tomorrow morning!

today was a big day: it was our first election since we landed and we both got to vote. the experience was pretty good, although it was marred by a little old woman who - looking pretty non-religious to me - stood behind me and asked me why my son and i are not always wearing a kippah, and then threatened that once things come right all the non-practising jews will be thrown out the country.

holy shit.

anyway, we had a long walk (too much for gd) looking for breakfast after voting, ending up at our "usual" falafel spot, and later in the day i took mr smear to the lego store where i was informed in no uncertain terms that there's nothing i can do about all the missing kit pieces other than order them online and wait a few months. at least the store was fun. then i dragged mr smear around while figuring out what phone to buy and where, and in all the time there we were surrounded by ridiculous crowds of loud and or costumed teenagers. the vibe was cool.

turns out the other big mall saw a fight break out that needed police intervention with tear gas. sheesh.

my work-week hasn't been going great, it's stressful and disappointing and demoralizing. hopefully it'll improve.

acceptance

 the mongoose said something to me today that struck a chord: not just that i need a holiday, but that after everything we've been through i actually need to stop planning on doing things and give myself a breather.

he's not wrong. absolutely not wrong.

having said that, it's approaching midnight and i've just fired off the next three pages of the comics script to the illustrator, and i'm quite fired up about it. not least because both my wife and my son think that the concept's really cool and none of us can wait to see how mr cat puts it together, and he's just promised me that he'll be starting very soon on the last page i sent him and the minor corrections to a couple of earlier ones.

...

today was a good day. i took mr smear to meet the mongoose and his partner for a walk in the park, and i spent a large part of the day being very grateful to be here, to be home, to be safe and secure and developing a sense of stability and "rightness" with the world. well, *my* world, at least, regardless of the dumpster fire humanity's facing right now...

mr smear had a fantastic time today as well, it was just a really nice day. less so for gd, but at least she got to stay in and rest. hopefully tomorrow will be better.

we finished watching the "live action" (yeah, right) remake of pinocchio, which was surprisingly good. gd and i played a bit of rayman after putting mr smear to bed, and i watched the expanse until i couldn't keep my eyes open any more. then i went to bed, but couldn't sleep, so i got up and worked on the script.

now i don't know what i'm going to do. and the beautiful thing is that i don't really feel it matters much.

lower

 i woke up yesterday morning really bugged by the shell behaviour from thursday that threw me off, and i set about writing up an article about it. in order to write the article, i put together a script to showcase the offending behaviour... and unlike on thursday, it worked the way it should have.

this sent me into a panicked "i have to test this in my work environment and fix everything before my code's reviewed" mode, so that's how i spent the next hour or two. i felt so dumb, having realized that whatever it was that hadn't worked must have been a combination of different things, and just as dumb for having done my testing in a suboptimal way.

and aside from the sheepishness, i felt completely burned out. i've been feeling this for a while - it's been years since i was enthusiastic enough about what i'm doing to care enough about "diving deep" and investing time. everything's always under artificial time pressure. very little of what i do is stuff that's actually exciting, most of it's made up of things that i inherit because nobody else wants anything to do with them either.

so that was how yesterday started.

mr smear had two playdates yesterday, the first was a rip-roaring success with an english speaking friend, and another a partial success with a hebrew-speaking one. i say "partial" because it started and ended well, and i was super proud hearing mr smear "breaking his teeth" and having mini-conversations in hebrew! but at some point the two of them were playing rayman: legends together and mr smear went into griefer mode, gd and i were mortified and had to get involved.

not cool.

...

yesterday was not october 31st, but our neighbourhood celebrated halloween anyway. gd took mr smear out trick-or-treating with some friends, and they had an amazing time right until one of the houses included two human jump-scares that absolutely terrified him. in the meanwhile, i stayed home, dressed up with two giant bowls of candy, but nobody came. not one person. i don't know if it's because our building is out of everyone's way, or because our neighbours closed the doors a couple of time - which was totally our fault for not warning everyone :(

i watched an episode or two of she-hulk while waiting. it's entertaining, but my gods: its feminism is about as subtle as a brick to the teeth and it really detracts from the experience.

...

this morning has been a gaming morning with mr smear. so far: limbo,  readyset heroes, thomas was alone, hollow night, and currently tron run/r. this ps plus subscription does have value. (it's also how we discovered the ffvii remake and the oddworld: new 'n' tasty! remake of abe's oddysee).

not the best, not the worst

 it's been a weird week.

work: the plan for monday failed abysmally, sending us back to plan a. it took a day to get that done, then another day to implement the feedback, and that left today to work on my primary project. except that needed something little done, and what should have taken no more than an hour ended up taking the rest of the bloody day, and even bit into my evening.

@!#$.

health-wise: i'm feeling... heavier. i've been planning on hitting the gym but i haven't done that yet, and i missed yet another rollerblading route this week. i've been stress-eating a lot, and walking less. so i'm not doing wonderfully in the self-care department.

family: we miss my mom, and we're stressed about her being in south africa. mr smear seems to be doing well, although it was a surprisingly big deal for him to get comfortable saying goodbye at the "hug and go" spot which is a whole 50-100m from the gate :P

gd's been crafting for halloween, which is apparently a big deal in our neighbourhood. and she's been listening to the audiobook edition of neverwhere, which is exciting!

otherwise, i've seen relatively little of my family this week which kinda sucks.

but overall, things seem pretty okay.

the crawl back

 omg i'm tired, but about an hour ago my brain decided to start playing a weird awake-but-dreaming form of the three cups magic trick with itself while my muscles torture me and it took me until now to actually get out of bed.

today... was a good day. my team lead is back, we're aligned, and i finished the day with an actual plan for the work i've been doing (it's kind of a long story about tests and mocking, i've been trying to make something work for a new use case when it shouldn't have been built in the first place).

there's something magical about feeling ready to do things in the evenings, making plans and such. it's definitely a sign that there's some stabilization and healing going on.

i mean, i guess at least i slept

i usually don't sleep very well, but last night i passed out after reading to mr smear and woke up this morning, and i don't recall there being much of the usual "not sleeping" going on throughout the night.

so that was good.

but i did have two consecutive nightmares just prior to 6am that were so awful that i jumped out of bed to get as far away from it as possible.

in the first, i was on a military base and we barely thwarted a night attack by what appeared to be a faction of our own side. there was a lot of bloodshed and, while i don't remember exactly who it was now, i ended up having to shoot someone i knew.

in the second, i was trapped in some little cottage somewhere with another couple of people, and we realized that this place was infested with horrifically oversized, hairy scorpions and crab-like spiders and other weird and dangerous creatures. i woke up in real life after having been woken up from a nap in the dream with one creature under my armpit and another biting into my hand, trying to get them off without flailing.

tiiiired

really tired. not sure why. gd as well.

thursday:

i didn't get to speak to the boss on wednesday, but i did have a "catch up" chat with HR on thursday that - for the most part - allayed my concerns. thursday was also helpful because i started off the day with a coffee with an old friend and pitched some of my ideas, between him and our angels (the mongoose and his girlfriend) there's a possibility of something actually going somewhere in the near future.

otherwise, thursday wasn't bad but it wasn't great either.

yesterday:

yesterday was a cool day. gd and i watched a bit of louis ck (we've bought all his specials and are slowly making our way through them), then dropped off her sewing machine downtown and i got a haircut. we then picked up mr smear and met up with urchin, walked through to jaffa (stopping for a delicious lunch) and thoroughly enjoyed our shuk experience. my wallet, not so much, but i do now have an adult witness to just how awful gd is at haggling... or how amazing she is for the seller.

anyway, it was lots of fun and we all had a great time.

when we got home i upgraded our playstation plus subscription and we spent the rest of the day checking out awesome things. hot wheels unleashed is our new favourite racer.

today:

aside from a mission to find vegan margarine, today was spent indoors resting because we were (and are) exhausted. in the afternoon mr smear started getting restless so i dragged myself off the couch and we went for a long and very pleasant walk, then came home to stuff ourselves with mom's sushi.

now it's bedtime. i'll probably crash. i hope i don't regret it because i've been concerned lately that i'm sleeping many hours poorly rather than few hours well.

concerns

the past few days were pretty good, overall, but yesterday a conflagration of events brought up some anxiety, and it looks like i'm going to need to have a chat with the boss today. i've been doing a pretty thankless job that nobody else wants to do, and i keep being told that i have exactly one responsibility while repeatedly getting fresh, urgent and unrelated tasks dumped on me. it's bad enough that my team lead seems to have forgotten that we agreed that how i handled my post-on-call week was reasonable, we're now talking about introducing performance management benchmarks and i have a feeling that they're going to put me at a distinct disadvantage.

i don't want to work in a place that makes me feel uncomfortable. i don't want to work in a place where i'm paid for a number of hours a week, given a mission and then consistently asked to do considerably more.

...

after delivering the dog on saturday, we had a lovely breakfast together and then rented a pedal boat for an hour. it was hard work, but fun!

sunday was a frustrating half-day, fortunately followed by another holiday (the last for a while). we spent a good chunk of monday with urchin, enjoying a walk-and-talk around the city and a big lunch.

yesterday, gd and i paid social security a visit and it feels like we've got everything sorted out!

gd has decided that she needed another piercing (septum), so that's a thing.

not the dogsitter

 we're about to take the dog to its owner's sister... we've had him since wednesday, and it was mostly a good experience, but on thursday evening he snapped at mr smear and then yesterday there were apparently two more incidents of aggression, so he's out.

this really sucks, because i took mr smear for two long walks with him yesterday and used the opportunity to train both him and the dog, and it felt like both of them were getting the hang of it and establishing their relationship in a positive way. aside from the three incidents, the two of them have been really cool together, but when gd spoke to the owner's sister last night she admitted that the dog had gone for her kid as well when he was younger so maybe it's not so out of character...

my favourite moment from yesterday was mr smear having a conversation with the dog in hebrew: "i only told you to stop when we crossed the street because i love you and don't want you to get killed" 🤣

gd felt horrible from thursday through to this morning, hopefully she's on the mend. i've been exhausted. aside from a few long walks yesterday it was mostly spent consuming media, gaming and napping. today seems like a nice day, maybe we'll go out. or maybe not. we'll see.

crushing - it

the IT part of the title is a private pun, suffice it to say that the past two days have been a lot longer than they should have been. the project i referred to in my previous post has been mostly great, but immediately raised a bunch of issues that needed resolving; i had intended to take today off after doing more than my fair share of hours this week, and it ended up being a half day, and a stressed one at that.

having said that, i did get to take gd and mr smear to the icon festival, where the two of them fought with fake swords and we had a great breakfast before gd felt ill and had to go home. mr smear and i wandered around all the stalls and saw some pretty crazy stuff.

we had fun.

in a surprise turn of events, we were surprised yesterday afternoon by a message asking us to dog-sit again. we agreed, on condition that we received details on what to do in case veterinary services are required, and we received our furry guest yesterday evening. so far things have been good, although we did have one incident of him snapping at mr smear - i made mr smear join us for a walk immediately afterwards and worked on training both him and the dog to re-establish their hierarchy. mr smear's developing a bit of confidence in giving commands, and the dog's starting to get the idea that he actually has to listen to him.

anyway, yesterday evening i sunk myself into final fantasy vii remake, it's absolutely amazing but it's certainly not appropriate for kids.

i spent this evening playing around with quicktime and obs studio for screen recording on a mac, the former i'm hating less and the latter i'm quite fond of.

anyway, i'm very glad tomorrow's friday.

winter is coming

 kind of. i mean, after a week of arguing with me about the weather gd acquiesced and put duvets on our beds yesterday. last night was too hot for me, but this evening i needed a nap and it was really good protection from the air-conditioner :P

today was a much longer work day than planned. i got up and dived in, planning on quitting early to go to the icon festival, but gd and mr smear's plans failed so that's been deferred to thursday and i worked straight through to the evening. which is why i needed the nap.

and now my back hurts a bit, but i really want to go rollerblading tonight so i'm going to risk it.

today i finally finished off a piece of work that has taken me many demoralizing weeks to get through; there're still some irritatingly weird things happening but at least i'm confident that the task is complete.

am i doing it right?

hint: probably not.

i've been restless, lately, and after a pleasant, meditative walk this evening i suspect that the primary reason is that i'm not used to dealing with life without the perpetually levels of anxiety and looming existential crises. i'm also noticing that i'm avoiding taking on any kind of additional stress lately, which includes not doing a bunch of things that i actually want to do. and quite a few things i need to, as well...

the half-day of work yesterday turned into a fair bit more than planned, but the outcome was pretty successful so i guess it was worth it.

today's holiday seemed needed. our financial situation is a little weird at the moment because our bank seems to have lost track of how much money we have or whether our remittance orders have been executed or not (this is not the first time for us, i went through a similar story a couple of years ago with a south african bank), but i splurged a bit on a month of playstation plus membership and the complete king's quest collection.

this morning we completed the first chapter of the console reboot of the king's quest series, and it is GLORIOUS! the interface is really well designed, the story is entertaining and the puzzles are clever enough to be a thought-provoking challenge but entirely solvable by a parent-child team :)

in addition to getting started on the second chapter, i got a taste of tetris effect: connected (beautiful) and played a little of the final fantasy vii remake, which my son insisted on playing a bit of and i'm not certain whether i'm being an awesome parent or a terrible one.

speaking of which, mr smear's behaviour has been trending very positively of late, it really does feel like he's maturing in a lot of ways.

...

we had a delicious dinner delivered this evening because gd's struggling with a headache, i went to bed quite early and then woke up a short while ago with indigestion / reflux.

a grain of sand

i read a post from sandman's mother last night, he was in a terrible motorcycle accident on friday night and they don't know yet just how damaged he is. i really hope he pulls through.

...

we had the relaxed shabbat i'd hoped for. we watched the second half of the "a hope in hell" episode of the sandman series, completed the 1500 piece puzzle we started on wednesday, and in the late afternoon i took mr smear to the beach and we had a really great time.

now i have a half-day at work, mr smear is off school for the next week so we neeeeed to find him things to do!

slow and steady

yom kippur itself went a bit differently than i expected... in a good way. it started with me "tuning in" to the online service, but i really wasn't feeling it and found myself consistently distracted. at some point i just thought "sod it" and grabbed a cup of coffee and settled in to the other traditional israeli way of spending yom kippur, on the couch with my family playing games and watching movies. for a little bit, only, because at some point i got it in my head to break out a 1500-piece puzzle and we're still going strong*.

* okay, we haven't touched it today because my legs and buttocks have been too sore from two days of up-and-down building of the puzzle on the floor.

in the evening went joined the rest of the neighbourhood hanging around outside the chabad service waiting for the final shofar, but as the first blast started a child started screaming next to us and then an ambulance went past with its siren on so all we really heard was an anticlimactic toot.

whatever.

it was a nice day. i really needed the downtime.

yesterday was a mostly positive day at work - although i worked from home again because i'm still not completely over this annoying cold - i completed the work and the boss and i revisited our ci/cd authentication procedures together, and aside from a minor deployment issue my main project for this year is pretty much ready to go!

today, legs and buttocks notwithstanding (nor notwithsitting, but that's beside the point), gd and i went on a failed curtain mission but enjoyed a nice coffee in a cool place in south tel aviv, and i enjoyed a laffa on the way to the school, and then picked up mr smear and spent the rest of the afternoon watching wile e. coyote and spirited away, and trying to give disney+ another chance.

we've just had some downtime reading dog man in hebrew, and i'm looking forward to a relaxed shabbat.

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.