win some lose some

 today was long. ultimately successful, work-wise, but a bit of a failure on a personal note. there was some friction at bedtime, and i mishandled it. i regret saying good night on an unhappy note.

i worked from home today and i was kind of okay, but my throat's still uncomfortable and i didn't feel like going rollerblading was the wise thing to do.

i've spent the evening doing bits of not much (perhaps i shouldn't have engaged in an argument with a troll who's literally a philosophy professor in an established university), mostly reading up on cool tech and mooching on the couch but being particularly blown away by my initial attempts with scribble diffusion. this is incredible stuff!

am ai nervous?

 i was so bothered by my ai experience that when i woke up yesterday morning i felt compelled to write about it. and then i listened to the recent hard fork episode of the daily podcast on my way to work and things are getting *really* creepy.

my work day was good. i feel like i've made a lot of progress, even if i haven't yet completed the ticket i've been working on...

i left work early so that i could get home in time to help mr smear with his homework. some of it went well, but most of the experience was quite negative. i'm feeling proud of myself that i didn't lose patience until we'd passed the two hour mark, but gd had lost hers way before and we ended up having a generally shitty evening.

he apologized on his own, which i'm proud of him for, but i don't know if he really *gets* the lesson (this is his second "grounding", and it doesn't feel like the first one was so long ago) or if we're going to have to go through all this again...

anyway, i managed to have a constructive evening. but just before going to bed i felt my throat start getting sore, so i'm at home today hoping it's not going to become a thing. of course i would get sick two days before we get to enjoy an adults evening with friends with a babysitter looking after mr smear...

...

this morning's been going well so far. i got mr smear to school on time, got the dishes done, took the broken plunger that we bought on friday back to the store, picked up better gear to deal with the mold problem that we've been dealing with the last couple of weeks...

now, to work.

messy

 i'm tired, and i have a headache. i'm still reeling from the news that a cousin's husband committed suicide a few days ago.

it was a partially successful day, i'm getting really positive feedback from my boss but i'm still wondering if he's just keeping me in a holding pattern or not. at the same time, i don't have the energy, interest or bandwidth to interview anywhere and the recruiters i dropped my guard with have been giving potential employers my contact details without letting them know i'm not jumping in with both feet.

as i type this, i've finally gotten a cdk reconfiguration right after an hour or two of troubleshooting. i also tried to get chatgpt to give me a summary of a book i read ages ago, and it straight-up lied to me! (i wouldn't even have known if i hadn't had my own copy to verify)

this morning i struggled with midjourney for a bit, i finally got the hang of giving it an image prompt and text prompt combined but it refuses to turn my entire hand into a robot hand and the results are consistently... weird. and not what i asked for.

[i'm too tired to type out a nuanced explanation, so suffice it to say that gd and i went together to pick up mr smear from school and the type of person leading the class was... unexpected. we were relieved to discover that there was no agenda, just a person, because gd and i have strong opinions on the ages appropriate for certain conversations and there are lots of people who don't agree with us]

another real weekend

it's a particularly special feeling being able to close out the weekend with the sense that i did precisely what i *should* have been doing with my weekend: resting my soul.

yesterday got off to a busy start - first, i published my new video. afterwards, we did a quick grocery shopping, which is normal, but then rushed home so that i could make it to the school in time for mr smear's class "family day".

a bird shat on my shoulder along the way. it was lucky. for the bird. i guess some things don't change.

we tried to get haircuts and failed, stopped at eazy cafe for a delicious lunch and coffee, then chilled the rest of the day. mr smear got hot chocolate with marshmallows. predictably, he loves it.

this morning started off with me "reading the papers" while mr smear played minecraft, but eventually - when it was his breakfast time and *my* play time - i fired up kingdom hearts iii to see what all the fuss was about.

it's amazing. it's a final fantasy with disney characters, and mr smear totally got into it with me.

in the afternoon, we all walked to the city centre, and were joined for a while by sailor. gd really wanted hummus, and after a little bit of a mission we eventually returned to abu dhabi and all thoroughly enjoyed our meals. the walk home was nice, though a bit chilly.

i needed a hot bath when we got home, and the evening was peaceful and enjoyable. mr smear pleaded with me until i agreed to a hot chocolate with marshmallows before bed...

i'm tired. my body's a bit sore. i think i'm going to do some stand-up gaming and then go to bed ;)

awkward thursday

a few days ago, inspired by back to the future, my son came up with an idea for time machine boots - very similar to the delorean, where if you walk fast enough the shoes go backwards or forwards in time. unfortunately, they have a slight design flaw in which the wearer of the shoes' feet go with the shoes but the rest of the wearer is left behind. shenanigans ensue.

...

our home internet connection's been all over the place this past week or so, we've had a technician replace our router's cable, another one replace the building's amplifier, and nothing's worked. this morning i updated the network appliance firmware (which i did around the time the troubles started), and it *crosses fingers* looks like everything altogether has final done the trick.

spotty internet is tough. first world problems are real problems.

today began with a phone call with a man who wants to hire me while i'm not sure i'm actually interested in switching jobs. after the awkward call, i sent a flurry of messages to the recruiters to remind them of my situation and we all (mostly) agreed that unless i'm really excited by something we should arrange calls with anyone.

in the afternoon, i got a surprise call from another company :/

...

i had a hard time getting my head into work today. yesterday i made progress on a frustrating piece of work i've been fiddling with on/off for weeks, and today it almost felt like i was going backwards trying to take the next step. there was another project in a similar state. it wasn't a satisfying way to end the week.

we love watching mr smear play spider-man on the ps4. it's a full-body experience for him, a real work-out! it's also a really great game.

after dinner i wishing my family a good night and hopped on a bus to watch another improv competition, i arrived a couple of minutes late but it didn't really matter. it was a brilliant evening, a lot of fun, although something in the final post-judgement piece put me in a weird mood and then the post-event music was so loud that i couldn't heard what anyone was saying to me.

anyway.

i came home, showered, and edited what looks like my actual final recording of the slam, and now i'm fiddling around with midjourney trying to decide what direction to go in before i turn in.

which will probably be any minute now. or after another cup of tea.

...

bing with chatgpt is producing some amusing yet disturbing interactions.

tuesday wednesday

yesterday:

i managed to ignore all the noise and focus on an important refactor i've been working on / trying to work on for a while, and last night i managed to get it completed, reviewed and deployed in time to test it. i woke up this morning to see the results and they were heartwarmingly positive. that was a nice way to start my day.

i've been snacking constantly for a while, and not completing my daily fast, and not getting much exercise. last night i got home with a bellyache, and the belly in question was a lot bigger than it should be, and i've made a decision to reset and get back into the routine.

not every day can be a "cheat" day.

today:

aside from the fact that mr smear threw up at school while gd was at the doctor's and i had to jump on a bus to the rescue - he gleefully bounced out of the gate knowing that he was going to get to enjoy an afternoon off - i had a really constructive day and squared away a couple of important things. i left work on a good note.

i also had an opportunity to talk to ric, but as much as i'd like them to understand that they've done amazingly well in spite of fighting a series of uphill battles alone, the tone of the conversation was really sad. i'm praying that whatever happens, the next phase of their life is smoother.

i've been thinking a lot lately about our situation here. my aliyah was only successful because of the support i received and an incredible amount of good fortune. there's no way i could have handled any of the first twelve years alone, and there's no way in hell we could have handled last year's move alone. we have every - single - day of our israeli lives to be grateful for and amazed by.

...

i've been entertaining introductory calls, and it's weird. mostly because i'm not quite convinced i want to leave. some days are better than others.

...

i've been doing a lot of reading lately - newsy articles more than anything else - and i have to say that it's inspirational how much we're advancing technologically. it looks like we're fast approaching the singularity, and the curve is becoming more and more visible, in particular when looking at AI, VR, aerospace, genetics, robotics... these are certainly interesting times!

israeli hump day special

work-wise, sunday went much better than anticipated. and i've since had a one-on-one with my boss who seems very happy with how i handled the week.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

gd's nerve block + radio frequency treatment happened. we got there on time, and the last time she had a nerve block we were in and out relatively quickly. this time there was a long, long line of old people and a lot of confusion. eventually they explained to us that it's a day procedure, and if there are complications or concerns with previous patients we could wait anywhere up to four hours.

i had to pick up mr smear from school, and gd wasn't allowed to be there without an escort.

fortunately we eventually got sorted out, they did the procedure while i picked up mr smear and we got back to the hospital in time to take her home.

it was a weird evening, but we managed.

on sunday night, i couldn't sleep. my mother always tells me that if i can't sleep i should get up, but i was too exhausted to get up and too sore to sleep. so for about four tortuous hours, i just lay there miserably with my mind escaping to a problem that couldn't be solved without being up and awake and online. at one point i was finally able to get up and stretch (it was my lower back, mainly), went back to bed, then eventually got up and stretched a second time and that did the trick.

it was pretty awful.

i got mr smear to school yesterday morning and then went straight to an eye exam. the doctor puts drops in my eyes to make my pupils dilate. the exam was fine, and apparently my eyes are just fine, but i didn't have sunglasses and the walk home into the sun was hardcore. it was painful, and my body was still messed up from whatever it was that was keeping me from sleeping and i was exhausted to boot.

the coffees could barely keep me functional yesterday.

and there were impotent protests making the bus take much longer than usual.

somehow, yesterday was productive in spite of how bugged out i was. i was sore, tired, and had a head full of cloud the entire day, but i managed to close a pretty complex ticket so i left the office on a good note.

it helped that i managed to make my annual dermatologist checkup on time, and picked up a really good pita (just salads) and fries on the way back to work.

i handled a big grocery shopping on the way home, and we had a pretty good evening. i ended up going to bed surprisingly late considering how i'd been feeling (i was working on an article about something i learned recently), and i actually got a pretty good night's rest.

i'm still tired this morning, but definitely doing far better than yesterday. let's see how this one goes.

restful shabbat

it was. it really was. my on-call shift still isn't over but today was great. mr smear spent half his day playing spider-man (it's awesome), i spent a good chunk of it reading about interesting things, listening to comedy, napping...

in the afternoon, we all went to pay the mongoose and his partner a visit and meet their daughter! she's beautiful, and it was an enormous relief to see how happy and relaxed they all are. they've got good support and they're doing great ^_^

we had to leave in a hurry (as usual) when gd's allergic reaction to their cats became overwhelming, we had a nice walk home and then realized we'd left something important behind, so i got on my blades to race over and pick it up and it felt like i got the perfect amount of exercise.

the evening started off awesome (we ate a delicious dinner and watched the end of back to the future part iii, and mr smear was literally jumping up and down and yelling at the screen he was so excited), turned a bit sour (gd upset and mr smear throwing a wobbly), but i managed to get everyone back on track in spite of their protests and ended up having a great chat with mr smear before reading more charlie and the great glass elevator. we've almost finished it and i love how much fun we're both having with it!

...

i had a long chat with my mum after putting mr smear to bed, mostly about the fact that ric and his wife have called it quits and are leaving israel. i'm particularly sad because the two of them have done incredibly well considering all the challenges they've faced, but they probably won't appreciate that and i'm confident his parents won't either.

...

it's late, and it's a bit stressful having to prepare an on-call handover session when i myself neither know nor care what actually happened and i don't want to look foolish. otherwise, gd's got another nerve block scheduled for tomorrow and we're praying it goes smoothly and does the job.

definitely not invested

being on-call is the perfect antidote for what remained of the previous week's positivity. i almost handed in my notice yesterday morning when it looked like i was about to be assigned to customer service because our customer service team didn't show up. i'm fervently praying for a quiet weekend.

i was effectively alone in the office yesterday. i struggled to be functional in spite of the usual high levels of context switching. then i rushed off in the afternoon to take mr smear from school to the dental hygienist.

it was a surprisingly good experience, although apparently mr smear doesn't chew enough. 

this morning was the usual big shopping run. i got home with sore arms. 

we picked up mr smear, and learned that he'd traumatized his teacher and a few of the kids in his class by falling over and playing dead after eating some oreos. we had to explain that crying wolf isn't funny in spite of the fact that we were struggling to hide our amusement while doing so... 

i did a quick mission to pick up a couple of things from our local dollar store, then spent the afternoon resting or playing video games with mr smear. 

sailor joined us for a a nice dinner, we've all enjoyed a late night, and i'm done now. 

on/off call, relationship clarity

sunday night was okay, though if i recall correctly i didn't sleep too well.

then monday hit.

i spent half my day trying to fix somebody else's problem (apt repositories weren't reachable), and ended up setting up a workaround. at least that was a positive. there were a few negatives.

i left work a little early, picked up a birthday card for gd, picked up the shopping, got caught in a heavy downpour on the way home.

i came up with a plan for writing in the card without gd knowing about it - after she said good night and it was my reading time, mr smear and i took turns reading and filling out the card. this, it turns out, was working absolutely perfectly! until gd decided to walk into his bedroom to put some laundry away. she walked in without warning, i continued reading while mr smear scrambled to hide what he was doing. gd left the room, but left the door open behind her, and i did what i could to keep on going (and not look suspicious) while signaling to mr smear to keep still.

she came in again for another couple of items. on her way out she stopped to say good night again, and that was when she registered that something was going on... but up until that point, it was a good plan!

exhausted, i went to bed early.

at 12.05am, my phone rang. i groggily acknowledged the page and got up. then it rang again. and again. and again and again and again, for over ten straight minutes. it's very hard to look into a problem when there're more than sixty variations of it and it's not clear whether any of them are for entirely different issues.

i spent an hour following the runbook and the runbook's references, none of which were at all helpful. so i started guessing. fortunately, i eventually found something that looked suspicious and then noticed something else suspicious, what looked like one of my coworkers deploying code at 11pm without so much as a "hey, i'm deploying code in the middle of night" to the idiot on duty.

i felt trolled.

and then the traditional attempts to get hold of my boss, because as usual he wasn't answering his phone in the middle of the night, but fortunately i managed to reach the guilty party and sat with him while he reverted his changes and we verified - about two hours after i'd been woken up - that it was those changes and that everything was okay again.

i went to bed feeling a bit disgruntled.

tuesday morning started... not well. it was gd's birthday! so that was great. but i woke up with a really sore neck. and i had to walk mr smear to school in the rain. and i was a mite bothered by the fact that i got another bunch of mysterious paging calls just as we walked out the front door.

was that yesterday? i feels like a long yesterday. yesterday was loooooooong. i worked from home, caught up in a bunch of confusing and uninteresting shit, my only win fixing something that the previous day's workaround had missed.

gd and i went to pick up mr smear from school, and learned that he'd been a real handful (difficult and rude) for his after-school carer. the walk home was unpleasant for all of us, but somehow by the time we got home he'd changed his tune and things eased up a bit.

fortunately i got some respite, some clemency, and went off-call for gd's birthday evening. we celebrated by having dinner, myself managing to ruin dessert due to a misunderstanding and some leftover raw feelings from sunday, but otherwise we all enjoyed a pleasant evening.

gd and i started watching kick-ass after mr smear went to bed. we just finished it a little earlier, and while i always remembered loving it, i'd forgotten that even today it's absolutely one of my favourite movies of all time!

today was better. i think? my mind was all over the place, as it was yesterday, i'm not sure if i really achieved anything work-wise except really dig deep into why i'm not thrilled with my current occupation.

the big deal of today, really, was managing to get everything together just in time for gd's first lidocaine-magnesium treatment. and an appointment for her with the allergist - that was quite an experience, with the good-luck-trying-to-fire-me receptionist behind a heavy sea of humanity - all before i started my work day in a food court with a nice cup of coffee.

after accompanying gd home i realized i had to stay, as the network technician was coming to visit us. did i forget to mention that the past few days we've been having really horrible experiences with our internet? the wifi's been dropping regularly, usually while on important calls. anyway, he replaced a cable and ordered an outside technician because there's definitely a problem with our building's connection, and just before he arrived i figured out that i shouldn't have let my very expensive network application optimize its channels because the best ones aren't compatible with macbooks (old or new) or playstation 4s :/

mr smear went to a classmate's home after school, and gd and i went to pick him. he'd had a great time, and after a quick grocery run we all came home to play evil genius 2: world domination and enjoy a nice dinner followed by a pretty good shower/bedtime ritual.

...

it's been a frustrating few days. i'm really tired, but in spite of how rough the past couple of days have been i feel hopeful.

mr smear and i are still ironing out the kinks in our new strategy. for the most part, things seem to be going well or getting better.

i realized something important, yesterday, on our miserable walk home. i had a revelation about my relationship with my own father. aside from the usual bullying and name-calling that formed the basis of our relationship, there's something he would always describe me as that used to get under my skin: "rude and obnoxious". i never believed i was being either.

yesterday, after mr smear's behaviour when we picked him up, i had those words front-and-center in my mind, and in those moments i could imagine just giving up on my son, giving up on trying to have a good relationship with him and giving up trying to guide him into becoming a decent human being.

just imagining that was a horrible feeling, but it made me realize something very interesting; i think that that must be what happened to me and my father. i was always told it was because i would say "no" to him from an early age, but i suddenly realize that that "no" is hereditary, whether genetic or behaviourally, and that i've passed that "no" on solidly to my son. that "no" is the family curse, and it's not just a "no" - it's a perpetual battle of wills that should never have been in the first place.

i don't know if my father ever really cared about me. maybe he did, once. i know he was severely damaged by his upbringing, that he was a violent and aggressive and venomous person. i know that i inherited a lot of that. but as good as my intentions may always have been, as much as i've tried to raise him with love and build him up, i'm raising a kid who's struggling with the very same anger issues that i did, and with whom i'm struggling in a very similar way to how my father must have with me.

i'm beginning to believe that things really started going badly between me and my father when i was about mr smear's age not because that was when i started standing up to him, but because that was when he finally gave up on our relationship because he just didn't know how to handle me consistently defying him. yelling at me didn't make me want to cooperate with him, physical violence didn't make me want to cooperate with him, and he just didn't have any other tools in his toolbox.

that's kind of how i feel sometimes. "no" was one of mr smear's first words, and it's always been difficult for me to get him to cooperate. it got more difficult the more i tried, and i kept on trying because i care and because i don't know any other way. for the last couple of years - too late to prevent real damage, sadly - i've been doing everything in my power to keep a cool head, to reason and discuss things with my son, and to use non-violent sticks and carrots to convince him to cooperate; but it's hard to convince someone that they don't need to fight when fight-mode has become a baseline for them. it took years for me to be able to see my own angry face reflected in my boy's, in order to even realize that i've been in fight mode the whole time that i'd felt like i was in care mode.

mr smear's a good kid, when he's not being stubborn or angry, and most of the time he's pretty chill. most of the time he's a loving, kind human being, and he doesn't like fighting. this week may have started out horribly, but we've had some big conversations and i'm extremely grateful that right now, after everything that's transpired, we're still able to talk to each other, and listen to each other, even when we don't particularly like what we're hearing.

i don't want to fight any more. i don't believe he does, either. this week we all learned a few new words, a few new ideas. now all we have to do is remember them and put them into practice.

off-call good, on-call not so good

the last couple of work days last week were miserable. they felt unproductive and were full of frustration.

friday morning was productive, if i recall correctly, and the afternoon was wildly successful! i took mr smear to a birthday party at the cinema, and not only did he have a great time but i got to sit in a comfortable coffee shop right across from the entrance and fiddle around with a potential side project.

we got a ride home with our neighbours, and the kids in the back were in hysterics the entire time.

on saturday afternoon i took him into town for a walk and we met up with sailor, we sat at the 100% vegan anastasia cafe. it would have been much better if i'd been wearing a sweater, or hadn't been sitting in the draft. we had a nice afternoon stop, though everything i bought for mr smear i ended up consuming myself... he didn't like the carob in the chocolate milk, then he wasn't into the ice-cream with hazelnut sauce... oh, well.

anyway, it was a really nice weekend.

...

this morning got off to a horrible start, and then i went on call. the day was pretty okay (so far), but i went to pick up mr smear and attempted to sort out the morning mess and he wasn't interested, so we ended up having a long family meeting instead.

there were some unpleasant parts, but mostly it went well and the evening's ended on a much better note.

we're all exhausted now.

feet status: wet but not cold

 i have wet feet from taking mr smear to school this morning, and as usual the rain pretty much stopped once i got home. i'm jealous of my son's galoshes.

still riding high from saturday night's success in completing the transition to serverless for all my personal projects, i had a very positive meeting on sunday night about the kind of project that my entire life journey started with.

we'll see how things play out!

in the meanwhile i'm much happier at work in spite of the fact that i'm going on-call again next week and in spite of the other crazy things on the go.

we've been in israel for almost a year now, and slowly but surely life seems to be falling back into familiar grooves from before i left. less chasing my tail, more chasing a variety of dreams.

long may this last.

$25 to see the end of louis ck

 i watched louis ck | back to the garden last night.

a few months ago, we purchased his new special, sorry, along with all his other specials for $25. it was brilliant. it was louis ck doing what he does best, and doing so while acknowledging his behavior and (pretty much) apologizing for it.

let me very clear: what he did was awful, and i was (and am) disappointed in him as a human being.

at the same time, he didn't manage - in my entirely subjective opinion - to cross the boundary where i could no longer separate the art from the artist*. his whole schtick is that he's always been a bit of a piece of shit, and his comedy has always been absolutely brilliant. although, now that i think about it, his 2017 special didn't really strike my funny bone, so let's say that his comedy has mostly always been brilliant.

* only two artists have managed to cross that boundary in my eyes: ian watkins, the voice behind shinobi vs dragon ninja which i can no longer listen to without being filled with disgust, and marilyn manson, who turned from hero to zero and took all of his music with him a few years back when it turned out his personal corruption matches what he's been singing about all along.

anyway, aside from the 2017 special i was able to enjoy it even while he himself made me uncomfortable, and his older work is mostly fantastic.

back to louis ck | back to the garden.

the first disappointment: i could skip past the jazz, but not the two decidedly uncharismatic, unfunny comedians he wheeled out to open for him. this was just like bill burr presents: friends who kill: did bill burr actually perform? i couldn't make it through the opening acts. where did they find these people? why do these events smell like great artists selling out? wtf is going on?!

but this time, i pushed through, and i bore witness to each and every excruciating minute of louis ck's performance. it was... it was louis ck, and it was louis ck doing louis ck-style bits. but he just didn't have any funny. he didn't have that light shining out of his eyes. his jokes... his jokes weren't funny. they weren't even interesting. there were three minor chuckles in the entire set, and then an almost-clever bible reading bit, and then nothing less than a resounding disappointment.

breathing out before the week starts

 we went to neighbours for dinner last night, we generally had a really good time in spite of the fact that all the kids declined to eat dinner and that gd had an allergic reaction to their rabbits.

i let our host insist on giving me a second beer, that was a bit much for me at that point.

i got up this morning and dived in to migrating my server-hosted applications to serverless. there were quite a few sharp edges and it took a lot more time and effort than i'd anticipated, but by early afternoon i was ready to start the migration.

so i took a break, and the three of us walked down to the beach. gd enjoyed a drink while mr smear and i played in the sand, and then we did some serious bonding on the way home by eating hal's jalapeño chips in spite of them setting our faces on fire. 

those things are hardcore.

gd made a delicious dinner while we showered, and by the time mr smear went to bed he'd more than made up for the skipped meal the night before: he'd had a huge breakfast, too, and then three helpings of dinner with fruit. not even garbage-bin dad could eat that much.

i started reading charlie and the great glass elevator, then joined gd for half of the first episode of the new season of hunters while starting to run deployments. when she went the bed i finished watching the original gremlins movie. i'm pretty sure it was my first time - i've always loved gremlins 2, but i think my only contact with the first installment ever was via mad magazine when i was a kid.

holy shit, that is *not* an appropriate movie for mr smear. and now that the concept of gremlins is fresh in mind, neither is the sequel.

the deployments took forever (i needed to follow a very particular sequence), but i finally got it right and it looks like everything is 100%! i've now destroyed my droplet, and after years of configuring and maintaining and performing manual updates and deployments i'm now very pleased to report that everything i've got online is a) serverless and b) managed by cdk projects.

so... cheaper, and far less effort. and i get to check off a to-do list item that's been bugging me for at least a year or two.

good night!

three for three

 yesterday morning started off on a fantastic note - i disabled the linter and tested out my theory, and it worked beautifully! then i got some work done before taking a call from a recruiter for a company i'm not particularly thrilled about. i worked from home yesterday, and it was a long day but marginally successful.

mr smear and i got through most of his homework between last night and this morning, and we're currently trying to finish up the last two questions before shabbat begins. as frustrating as the experience can (and has) been, it's exceptionally rewarding to see him beginning to get comfortable and succeeding and taking pride in his successes.

last night i went out with sailor after putting mr smear to bed, and we ended up in château shuál, a really cool little place. by the time i got home, bathed, and had watched a bit of comedy before going to bed, it was 1am again...

this morning went pretty smoothly, and after i got home i took care of a few things while occasionally helping gd deal with the black mold (vinegar spray and elbow grease). then we did a huge grocery shopping (barely manageable, my back's better but still twitchy), started vetting the first gremlins movie, then i picked up mr smear and brought him home. we had a bit of a fight on the way home which resolved nicely - through the bad vibes i learned that he has grossly misunderstood my motivations as his dad, but once we aligned, we hugged and moved on.

i napped for about an hour, and woke up seriously groggy. now i'm just trying to breathe and relax into the weekend.

...

mr cat is making good progress on the next comic pages. they've taken forever, but i have a good feeling they'll be worth the wait.

...

we've been watching transcendent man in bits and pieces, and with that in mind some of the news i read today just blew me away:

• scientists build a working tractor beam
• a brain implant thinner than a human hair

two 1ams in a row

i'm falling asleep, but i want to get this down quickly.

mr smear's grounded until the weekend for being particularly uncooperative yesterday. he's absolutely loving charlie and the chocolate factory. 

gd's been struggling much more than i realized. 

we've just discovered that we have a very real problem with black mold. 

the work days have been long, but much more positive and successful. 

i'm a bit irritated by the people i might end up working with. 

i'm excited about a conversation that's scheduled for early next week. 

i'm relieved that one of my teammates who got laid off found a new gig. 

i began today with a threat of a back spasm and i'm still feeling it and feeling nervous. 

i just spent about two hours trying to test a really cool idea for an obscure cdk use case and i got so stuck on the damned linter configuration that i haven't tested it yet. 

the tell

 i'm a terrible liar. even when i'm not actively lying, but just trying not to disclose something. my boss trapped me this afternoon and expertly manipulated me to the point where i couldn't keep the embarrassed smile off my face.

either things are really good at the moment, or he's pacifying me until such time as i can be replaced. it's impossible to know which. but if i take him at face value, then all of my unhappiness boils down to a combination of on-call stress, mismatched expectations and miscommunications. apparently everyone views my work as critically important, and appreciates its expensive.

yesterday was a long day that wasn't terrible, today was also long but included some good achievements. and both days, i've been improving at taking things one task at a time. overall, i'm doing okay.

gd's been struggling (physically) more than usual lately, i hope her next treatment has a significant impact.

mr smear made me super proud this evening - after dinner we did some of his homework together, and he did remarkably well.

my head's all over the place but... it's okay. my body, on the other hand... aside from my neck and back acting up a bit lately, i've got a couple of skin concerns (i made light of it yesterday, but mr smear with a complete lack of irony woke up this morning and told me "dad, you've definitely got cancer"). we'll see what the doctors have to say, i guess.

weekend complete

and on the seventh day - and a fair amount of the sixth - i rested. sailor came over for gd's vegan sushi dinner last night, we had a good time and even spun gd having a particularly emotional moment into a positive (her spine injuries are far from trivial, she's still not used to feeling allowed to have emotions about it).

this morning mr smear and i got up together (erm - he got my up) and we worked together to solve a puzzle in dragon quest builders 2 that's been bothering him for a while. i then managed to convince him to walk with my to meet up with nystire and his family - i'm still feeling pleased and proud that i managed to manipulate him into coming out with a good attitude - and just as pleased that gd was able to meet us there.

nystire and i took longer than planned for our coffee mission and returned to a goodbye with some tensions, but overall it was a really nice way to spend the morning and the walk home was really cool as well. it was a beautiful day.

we spent the second half of it doing whatever, mr smear continuing his game ("it's WAY better than minecraft), me finally convincing cdk to publish a static website with both a domain and subdomain, watching the first half of back to the future while eating leftovers and oatmeal, reading to mr smear and both of us laughing hysterically (we're almost finished charlie and the chocolate factory, the book has some hilarious moments), and chatting with horseman.

...

that was the positive stuff.

gd and i then settled down to start watching j'accuse!, the documentary about the lithuanian holocaust. it's beyond horrifying. especially if you're of lithuanian descent (which i am).

the world needs to know that this happened to us, and the world needs to understand that the lithuanian government is *continuing* to cover this up.

not-so-functional

wednesday was a write-off, and i'm actually kinda proud of myself for taking off a sick day when i needed it. i did nothing of value all day (aside from getting mr smear to and from school), i just rested all day. and most of the night.

i finished watching the original back to the future, which i decided could be handled by mr smear. but then i thought of some of the things in the second movie, and now i figure we can wait a few years...

we all watched the fifth element together in the evening. there're a few uncomfortable minutes (the take-off scene) that didn't seem to interest mr smear, and everything else ("except the kissing") was enjoyed by all.

yesterday i worked from home, and i was feeling pretty relaxed. my boss had given me some uncharacteristic praise, a few of us had a good meeting about security disclosures and the implications of using copilot's offerings in our proprietary codebase, and i admitted to a coworker that i thoroughly hate everything to do with our ci/cd solution.

i spent most of the afternoon upgrading something that was long overdue an upgrade, in spite of the fact that one of the elements was left pointing to the old API because the provider hasn't made it available on their new one... even though they've been threatening to turn off the old version for over two years now :/

aside from a quick grocery run, and an hour or so of a founders' meeting, last night was quiet.

this morning saw me trying and failing to produce a satisfactory recording of the slam - i thought it was satisfactory until gd informed me otherwise - and i've just spent some time failing to communicate my thoughts to midjourney. otherwise, we've done our weekly grocery shopping and i've failed to do any of the things i *needed* to do because i've been very invested in self-care. which means doing nothing that feels like work.

so there.

this seems to be happening

i'm very busy processing, after a meeting in herzeliya earlier which made things seem both real and surreal simultaneously. there was a moment, as three of us rushed into the train station, where the captain of the ship pulled me aside to let me know his estimation of me has increased significantly. it was a good moment.

then i got home to a message from twilio informing me that they've finally resolved the messaging issues which have been plaguing and frustrating me for months. i restarted my phone and confirmed.

that's nice, too.

my day started with geoffrey asmus and will foskey. the former i've been following for a week or two now and i love everything about his comedy, the latter i just discovered this morning and he's really fun.

the work day was a bit of a bitch. whatevs.

the mondays

israeli politics are troubling (it's hard to ignore what's going on in spite of my best intentions to the contrary) and i woke up to a post about the awful societal failure they're calling 50 shades of black, which i watched for half an hour before realizing that i do not want to start my day with this (too late, i guess).

friday was functional - we got a lot done, including buying my and mr smear new shoes - but the weekend was by and large cozy and indoors while the winter weather did its thing. it was a tim burton weekend, we watched the nightmare before christmas, edward scissorhands and corpse bride.

i also published a video for advice, which i've been wanting to do for the longest time.

mr smear's been sick since the weekend, it started with a sniff and progressed into a horrible cough. i stayed home yesterday while gd went to ulpan, and for the most part we were good.

i spent a good chunk of yesterday morning reading through job listings and making contacts. i'm grateful to not be doing this under pressure.

i had a meeting with my boss yesterday, and it feels like all the words left unspoken were heard loud and clear.

is it really thursday night?

 i'm a bit stunned, and i should probably be getting into bed. i'll do that soon.

in the meanwhile, the past couple of days were a continuation of the week's intensity, although yesterday evening i managed to complete the main part of the effort and today i spent cleaning up the surprises. there's one broken thing left to deal with, but it was broken before.

that was the work week.

yesterday evening nystire and i participated in a mini "flight" reunion, which was really fun! it was my first time in the sarona market, which is a bit too expensive for regular visits but the sandwich i had was amazing.

both yesterday morning and this morning mr smear lost his mind arguing about whether his shoes are too big or too small. in both cases i eventually managed to explain to him how these concepts work and he admitted he was wrong, but my gods i wasn't expecting a second round. otherwise he seems fine, although gd had to intervene this evening when one of his friends straight-up attacked another by punching him in the head...

i'm sore. i'm tired.

this evening i joined a call with dod and co for a couple of hours, i have some concerns but it looks like these guys might actually be able to secure funding and if they do, i would be a real idiot not to dive in. at the same time, i need to start sending my resume around and there's already at least one possibility that might be exactly where i need to be.

we shall see.

meanwhile, mr cat's been making exciting progress on the next page of the comics, but i haven't had bandwidth to really sit down and evaluate the draft (or fill in the blanks), so hopefully tomorrow morning i'll be able to push things forward.

routine-ish

i started yesterday taking care of admin and watching a bit of transcendent man at horseman's recommendation. it's the perfect time to watch it, with all the AI madness going on (i've just received an NSFW warning from midjourney because i'm terrible at prompt engineering...).  i remembered to take leftovers to work. i spent most of the day laser-focused on the security stuff and i ended the day with a pretty big achievement.

it's weird getting praise from my boss because i don't trust him to actually mean it.

i don't remember much about what i did last night, but i got home relatively late. after wishing mr smear a good night i finally had a chat with vfmp, we've been just-missing each other for weeks... i ended up going to be unreasonably late, but i don't recall exactly what i was occupied with.

this morning i restarted transcendent man to watch with mr smear at breakfast time. then i managed to record advice (it took a lot of attempts, i'm satisfied enough with the final output but it's not perfect...)

work was more of the same. i left the office having almost completed the task, but with my eyes and brain crossed after so much concentration. it's really sensitive and convoluted stuff.

we had a good evening, the highlight was finishing the peanuts movie. we watched the peanuts movies from half a century ago and absolutely loved them, they've aged beautifully! then we watched the 2015  movie and it totally blew me away. i'm stunned by what is clearly a work of pure love, both for charles m schultz and for his characters.

it's literally wonderful. (except the music, but whatever)

mr smear was so excited reading charlie and the chocolate factory tonight that he had to sit up and sit next to me, occasionally getting up to pace animatedly while musing about how amazing getting a golden ticket would be ^_^

it's close to midnight

 i'm getting sleepy, but i also felt the need to make myself another cup of tea. i felt much better today. i fell asleep around 5 or 6am and was barely able to get out of bed, but half an hour lying on the couch and a short race to the corner with mr smear (his idea) woke me up a bit. then i had a cup and a half of coffee and got a bunch of admin done and by the time i left the apartment i was actually a bit wired.

and very much not giving a fuck.

the work day was long and very focused while i worked on something highly sensitive. i made good progress and kinda felt like everything was (relatively) okay / back to "normal".

i didn't eat very much today. i'm trying not to spend too much cash on food - also, i wasn't really in the mood for anything in particular - and with our company cutting back we haven't got too much to go on in the kitchen. i really need to remember to take leftovers...

going home was weird. there were a lot of kids around, a lot of hyper kids some of whom were play-fighting in a way that suggested that real violence was imminent. older people were behaving a little weird too. i felt relieved to get home without getting into a scrap.

we watched the rest of a boy named charlie brown, which was a movie that i loved as a kid and it was great seeing mr smear invested, entertained and sympathetic. the evening wasn't perfect but bedtime was cool, we've been reading charlie and the chocolate factory and really enjoying it.

after wishing my boy a good night, i received messages from his teacher - he's got a problem with boundaries and a problem with emotion regulation, and the two together can have some bizarre effects. we're going to have to have a talk tomorrow.

*sigh*

anyway, gd and i watched the end of the angriest man in brooklyn (which was beautiful) and started watching the recipe together, and then she turned in and i started watching jersey girl. i don't know what made me push through the utterly detestable beginning but i'm about halfway through and i am enjoying it.

okay, it's past midnight now.

can't sleep

 i'm still frazzled, even after most of a night sleeping well i've woken up a broken-record scratching imagined potential end sequences for my current employment.

yesterday had some good times, although some of them involved some mixed emotions. we went to play table tennis at a nearby park, we did have some good times but a big part of it ended up being trying to teach mr smear how the game works and it was less fun than it could have been...

i spent the rest of the day just trying to sort my head out and plan my next steps. a long chat with horseman and a shorter chat with sailor definitely helped a lot.

i also had a short but very important talk with gd about what she's up to after mr smear went to bed, we both needed that.

stress-sick

 i'm feeling somewhat better this morning, but the whole of yesterday i was literally ill with anxiety and depression. i didn't get through the things i needed to (aside from an efficient shopping with gd in the morning), and sheer disappointment with life occurred just as we were about to say kiddush when my pager went off and i had to spend the next half an hour to an hour figuring out what was wrong, fixing it, monitoring it all while doing everything in my power not to ask for help.

i was successful, at least.

i managed to join my family for the end of matilda: the musical, and i have to admit i really enjoyed the adaptation! they really did the book justice even if they went significantly off script.

which reminds me - we read james and the giant peach a little while ago, and i was thoroughly disappointed by the movie adaptation. they made some weird decisions, and some deeply upsetting ones, the two main ones being the decision to not kill the horrible aunts and the incomprehensible switch between live action and stop-motion. either one would have been fine.

after everyone went to bed i decided to try and get snow bros running on my windows machine. i haven't used that machine in so long i had lots of accumulated housekeeping to do, and then i went through a variety of emulator software (probably picked up some malware along the way, hopefully not) before realizing that mame is still the best of breed. so i downloaded the snow bros rom and configured it to work with our joypads.

this morning, in spite of minor trauma caused by mr smear thinking i was telling him how to draw when i was explaining what i'd need from him to convert his drawings into sprites, i managed to draw him into a game and we a) had a great time together and b) finished the game for the first time in my entire life!

having infinite credits helped, certainly, but that doesn't take away from the satisfaction of finally having seen the closing credits of a game i've been loving (and still love) since i was a kid.

mr smear's now back into gravity rush, which we discovered yesterday evening once his playdate was over. it's fun, and clever, and beautiful.

...

i've been a huge fan of steve hofstetter for ages, and yesterday i listened to the recipe. i've heard a lot of the elements of these stories in various bits, but he's put his special together in such a wonderful, powerful way that aside from its sheer hilarity it's also a provocative emotional rollercoaster.

pushed and depressed

 this has been an absolutely awful week. i've been on-call again, which is going to happen more and more frequently now that our team's been cut down to size, and it's made me realize that i am passionate about my job.

i'm hating my job with a passion.

it suddenly struck me this morning, while i was feeling horrible after our "retrospective" yesterday in which my boss informed me of how disappointed he is in my on-call prowess, that in our tiny team of eight there're two developers who aren't included in the "ninja" roster: our frontend devs. but for six months i've been the infrastructure guy, the dev-ops guy, not just as disconnected, but even more disconnected from the everyday workings of our product as those guys are.

i'm raising an eyebrow very, very hard right now.

this week was a fantastic time to be listening to this crazy one podcast, i found it quite inspiring. i really need to focus on finding where i need to be, instead of coasting from compromise to compromise. it's time to start looking around and being very intentional about what i pay attention to.

...

it wasn't just an awful week from a work perspective, but the emotional stuff got better.

we decided it was a good time to introduced mr smear to who framed roger rabbit. i don't recall whether or not i've seen it since its big-screen debut, but we all thoroughly enjoyed it and it's aged amazingly well!

we've been very lucky to have received some government assistance, we're still a long way from clear but it's easier to breathe knowing that we can keep the roof over our head without having to borrow more, and as much as it sucks seeing all our money disappear it is a bit of a relief to be able to pay bits of our loans off. if it wasn't for all the debt incurred in getting here we'd actually be able to save money - possibly occasionally travel, even - so hopefully financially things keep moving in a positive direction.

we had a parent-teacher meeting yesterday, and i couldn't stop giggling. half of it because mr smear can be legitimately hilarious, half of it because i knew exactly what his teacher was talking about and was both amused and embarrassed. in general he's doing fine, but he really isn't the most cooperative kid...

yesterday afternoon gd tried to get medical assistance and was sent to the refugee clinic, where they refused to help her because they're not allowed. the clinic is in the old bus station, and i was dealing with work shit, and she was in tears trying to navigate that godforsaken place alone. when she got back and told me everything she'd been through i called up our healthcare provider, and we were informed that of course she can get treatment if she walks in to the clinic with an urgent issue.

which is what they'd previously made clear to us was not an option.

anyway, the woman i spoke to was helpful and we now know what our options are for emergency medical assistance. which is a relief.

...

i forgot to mention that gd and i finished re-watching dredd on new year's eve, and holy shit it's still as phenomenally brilliant as we remembered.

that movie is criminally underrated.

less than happy

 today was a really good day. productive, constructive, good feelings all around. yesterday was a bit weird, including both gd and myself missing our dental hygienist appointments by over an hour, but ended on a positive note even though i was so tired by the time we got mr smear into bed that i just crashed completely.

this evening was not good, and i'm exhausted and feeling sick from the emotional turmoil.

happy 2023!

another time round the sun!

2022 was WILD for us. it started off theatrically scary and confusing, became super crazy for a few months, became a whole different kind of crazy for another few, and has finally ended with us miraculously - gratefully - feeling pretty stable, positive, and surrounded by friends, family, neighbors, and nation.

...

thursday: a productive, constructive, positive day. my only mistake was eating two pitot with the hummus. the "happy hour" whiskey made the last hour a little more difficult than it needed to be. on thursday night, i finally succeeded in deploying something i've been struggling with for a week now.

yesterday: massive progress in the morning after my 1.20am victory. then the big weekly shopping with gd, then we split up so that gd could pick up mr smear and take him to a birthday party while i picked up a couple of bottles from the liquor store. i joined them afterwards for a very pleasant afternoon drinking beer and eating vegan pizza and conversing with the adults while the kids entertained themselves on a couple of massive bouncy castles and wired themselves up with candy floss.

i think that was mr smear's very first candy floss experience.

sailor came over for a sushi dinner, i was pretty down - more exhausted than anything else, i feel, but it did make me a bit withdrawn which sailor picked up on.

today started off positively, but went sour when one of our support team contacted me for assistance about something i know nothing about and i felt bad asking him to wait until tomorrow because, i suddenly realized, i didn't actually have a clear idea of what's expected of the on-call victim ninja at night / on weekends. i sent a message to my boss for clarification, and he quickly jumped in and made it abundantly clear that on-call isn't to be bothered outside of work hours unless there's a real emergency.

i feel better now.

in the afternoon we picked up australian cousins and drove through to our lapid cousins, we had a lovely evening ushering in the new year with family, ate well, heard good news and generally ended the year on a very positive note.

...

here's to a magnificent, surprising, peaceful and wonderful 2023!

yesterday was better

i tried recording one of my poems yesterday, but i'm not particularly happy with the result. on the way to work, i stopped by the clinic prepared for a fight about covering our hospital visit, and was caught off guard by a lack of protest on their part. having said that, it's only the first round (the cover request needs to go through a committee or something) so i guess it's wait-and-see-time...

it was a productive work day, and relaxed. i struggled a bit with an overactive last-mile digestive system towards the end of the day which was uncomfortable. although i left the office later than i would have liked, it was due to helping out our on-call resolve something so i ended the day on a successful note.

amusingly, my boss was working with me on the final stretch and he witnessed copilot giving me a hand: all it takes is one good suggestion that saves time and increases confidence to make it worthwhile, and he's sold. even if its suggestions are often wrong, they're almost always useful. sometimes they're useful in that i can press tab and i'm done, and sometimes they're useful like a rubber duck.

the shopping experience on the way home was a bit frustrating, but still better than spending double or more money and carrying a small bit every day is certainly preferable to huge loads irregularly.

i was tired last night. gd and i couldn't agree on what to watch so we ended up restarting 2012's dredd, and i'm pleasantly surprised at how much sleep i got.

i had plans for this morning but i got distracted by a number of notifications on mastodon.

...

oops.

i got to enjoy it for half a day

 yesterday morning started really well, i Got Things Done, i Figured Things Out, and i Made Plans. then i went to work, spending a good chunk of my first couple of hours catching up or being distracted by my teammate's dog who's clearly decided we're each other's support animals.

we have three people in the office leaving soon, two of them having "kind of" been let go and the fact that it's only them working from the whole crew feels off somehow. and one of them's feeling slighted because an aspect of her job was covering for someone who hasn't been hired yet and they're still trying to hire that hypothetical person.

anyway, office drama aside: i was (noticeably) in good spirits, taking my time to dive deep on solving an unexpectedly difficult problem, when i was called in to a meeting with my boss (previously my team lead, that's a bit weird too). we were in the middle of refining what it is i'm supposed to be doing when gd called. i ignored the call, but then looked again a couple of minutes later and that was pretty much the end of the meeting: something had happened to mr smear's head and nobody could tell if he needed a doctor or a hospital.

i tried to finish the meeting but obviously that didn't work out, so i packed up and left and met gd and mr smear at the hospital. along the way i tried to find out what protocol we needed to observe from the medical insurance's point of view, but it was so difficult that i gave up after my third phone call.

with a little help we found the kid's emergency unit, then went through all the motions. the triage nurse was a bit horrible, but everyone else was great. eventually a doctor came to see him and decided he didn't need stitches, she checked him for signs of concussion/nerve damage and declared him fit and fine. but we didn't know if or when he'd ever had a tetanus shot, and for some reason it took them a long time to deliberate and eventually decide to administer one.

mr smear was not into it, but with the support of the nurse (after a quick search, my description of lockjaw wasn't particularly precise) he agreed that the vaccine + death by old age was preferable to the potential alternative and he calmed down. he barely felt the injection, which is a far sight better than *my* first tetanus shot - it was my first shot that i remember and i tensed, and the needle bent in my arm...

by the time we were finally able to leave i was exhausted. i'm still feeling exhausted, i think we all experienced a giant adrenaline dump. we did a quick emergency shopping and then walked home, and the evening was all about getting through the evening and getting into bed.

aside from a battle between gd and a rogue mosquito which i participated in for a while, that was the end of my first day back from staycation.

today's plan: to battle with the medical insurance and hopefully get yesterday's job done.

not as planned

 gd and i walked to the school to pick up mr smear yesterday evening, and on the way home we got caught in the heavy rain of a thunderstorm and mr smear and i returned home with soaked shoes.

mr smear's animation classwork is really cool, he's been heavily inspired by alan becker and he's nailing it!

i had some trouble sleeping last night, and polished off the telephony solution migration. i'm not sure how i managed to drag myself out of bed this morning.

or mr smear, for that matter.

OOOOOOH. i just remembered where i developed my thing about hating rain - israeli municipalities don't understand drainage and sewerage systems. we have approximately two drainage points in the 500m around our apartment, so as long as it was raining (well, drizzling by capetonian standards) every single road was completely flooded and there was no way to cross any of them without getting soaked shoes. everyone's cars parked on the main road had water most of the way up to their doors, and drivers couldn't pass us faster than walking pace without drenching the sidewalks.

mr smear is now at school with wet shoes because a) we didn't have galoshes for him (that's today's investment) and b) i expected it to keep on raining (as it had done all night) and not let up five minutes after i said goodbye.

in retrospect, i feel shitty because we should have just called it a "rain day" and kept him at home.

so that's how our day began. it got immediately better when i received an email from social security that our allergy stipend application had been approved, we need all the help we can get and this was a huge relief!

aside from a lot of reading (articles, not books) and watching random things (ultimate fighter season highlights), this morning passed by quickly. the air conditioners are finally starting to pump out hot air, which is awesome. then gd and i headed to the mall to look for shoes.

i hate malls. gd's not too fond of them either. we went through the entire mall (azrieli), every store with shoes, and eventually found a great pair, waterproof, to my taste, and not too expensive. but their credit card machine was offline. i'm still deeply disappointed.

we tried at a different mall (the hospital mall), and found stuff for mr smear but nothing for me. we ate laffot and had an altercation with a nasty old woman (gd did an amazing and hysterical impression of her to her face, i'm still conflicted but it *was* brilliant), then returned home where i soon passed out on the couch. she woke me up at ten minutes to pick-up time and i was a mess, and it was pouring outside.

we managed to book a car, drove to pick him up, i dropped them off at the mall and drove around while they got the shoes, picked them up and we all went home.

mr smear thinks he has worms. we don't.  🤦

anyway, it wasn't the best use of my last day off work but i guess everything's good. since last week i certainly feel a bit more rested, a bit less stressed. i've enjoyed a lot of nice times with my family. i've gotten shit done - and enjoyed doing it. i definitely needed this.

...

i've spent bits and pieces of the last day or two trying to get an s3-hosted website to work with my domain name. that'll open some doors when i get it all squared away, and allow me to shut the door on running an ubuntu instance, but it's taking a lot of reading and fiddling for something that really shouldn't be so hard.

leaps and bounds

thursday:

thursday began with a pleasant walk to school with mr smear culminating in a super-cute moment when, after ten minutes of waiting, the gates finally opened and all the kids ran towards their classrooms. i'm struggling to remember anything else from thursday.

like, anything.

friday:

friday was almost entirely about helping urchin and her mother move out of tel aviv. the van cost me a lot more than i was expecting, but they really needed help and it was great being able to step in and step up. it was even greater seeing that their new space is really good for them. it was sad seeing her drooly dog not well. helping out as a family - mr smear begrudgingly did his "boring" part by standing by the illegally parked van and looking out for traffic police - was great and the drives in both directions were very pleasant sing-alongs :)

yesterday:

yesterday was mostly superb, though there were some bad feelings all round in the evening. this was for a number of reasons - one of them being that somebody's been generally grumpy since stopping an anti-depressant, and somebody else is still learning that being rude or mean to a parent's face doesn't make for good feelings... but enough about the negative, the positive was REALLY positive. we finished the build of the beautiful lego set that the mongoose gifted mr smear when we first arrived in march, it's a ford mustang shelby gt 500 with pull-back action, not only were we super-excited by its looks and details, but the thing really motors and mr smear was jumping up and down for hours.

it was a great bonding experience and we were both thoroughly pleased with ourselves, for myself not least because there was an issue with the pull-back mechanism and i managed to hack together an effective solution using two of the leftover pieces.

i spent most of the day continuing to work on my telephone management solution, which i finally began migrating to serverless lambda / dynamodb components on friday. it took a lot of work (mainly debugging), but i finally have it functional and it's a huge relief to be one step closer to dropping my cloud "droplet" which demands a lot more maintenance than i'm comfortable with.

in the evening we watched snoopy come home, and it's amazing to me just how well that 1972 film has aged. mr smear was very upset towards the end, and i needed to explain to him (not for the first time) that good movies make us feel the things they want us to feel, and that's not always good feelings. i loved hearing the theme song ear-worm burrowing into him, it's a song i've had floating around in my own head since i watched it as a kid.

today:

it's a beautiful, cold, rainy, wintery day today. it's easier to appreciate indoors and warm. just like yesterday. i began the day positively, finishing up the phone management migration, then gd and i grabbed a coffee and did a big shopping run, and we've spent the subsequent hours just lazing around cozily.

now i'm actively ignoring a flurry of work messages (i go back online on tuesday), and i'm feeling inspired to put together another poetry video. and then i wrote that word and got distracted by seeing an image of a very grey-haired sandman in a neck-brace and wheelchair (recovering, thankfully) and now it's time to start moving out (in the pouring rain) to pick up mr smear from school.

...

i keep making tea because i need hot tea and then by the time i get to drinking it its cold...

holy holiday, batman!

i'm conflicted. on the one hand, i'm trying very hard to be on vacation. on the other hand, this is the opportunity to do All The Things! i've already put out another video, this one for the now-polished step away from the vehicle. i'm extremely pleased with how it's come out. i'm even more pleased now that i've configured the captions, which i must admit was a lot of work but very satisfying.

now i need to do the same for the musing video... but that's going to have to wait another day.

i worked sunday and monday, long days but generally good ones. i'm still amused that i was the only one in the office on monday night who knew the blessings for the candle-lighting, but not one of us remembered all the words to the first verse of ma'oz tzur...

yesterday morning gd and i went down to ozen hashlishi (after passing through dizengoff center and browsing comics and figurines) for a hipster breakfast and a browse through their enormous catalog of awesome media that we most certainly do not need. sailor came over for dinner, which was a bit of a failure from a food perspective but it's fun to be able to spend time with him again.

...

we're all still coughing. it's been weeks now. this is ridiculous.

we thought mr smear was sick yesterday, so we turned off our alarms and slept in. he picked up on this, which was unfortunate because we quickly realized he was fine and this "betrayal" started our day on a rather unpleasant note - not entirely his fault, to be fair - but we were extremely pleased to pick him up at the end of it and hear that he'd actually had a really good time.

this morning gd was more certain that we should keep him home, and by the time she regretted that decision it was far too late. in the grand scheme of things this worked out well, because in addition to starting our day with a couple of hours playing through the lego harry potter game together, i took him to the tel aviv art museum in the afternoon. he's been wary of galleries every since we encountered the butcher boys, and our tour began with him immediately whining to turn around and go back home...

my initial attempt to draw him in were almost a complete failure as we encountered a (legitimately) creepy doll statue, but after a couple of talks about practicing bravery and opening his eyes and heart and reassuring him constantly we started coming across installations that piqued his interest, we ended up have a really good time!

we'd both had enough at roughly the same time and i thought i'd get him an ice-cream on the way home, but he was more into a falafel so we split a particularly satisfying one (meaning i got the leftovers).

we all forgot about candle-lighting this evening because mr smear and i were invested in completing the artful escape. what a delightful game! i also cleaned up scrapper's bass guitar and amp (after gd had already taken care of the worst of it) and plugged them in, but i suspect that the guitar's battery is dead because i couldn't get a sound out of it with either of the two cables...

anyway, it was a good day.

breathing and crashing

 i'm still struggling at nights with the coughing and the post nasal drip. i'm tired.

but now i'm tired for an additional, positive reason; this morning, the mongoose woke me up with an invitation to join them for mushroom picking in the forest. while gd was unfortunately unable to join us due to a crushing headache, mr smear and i went along and we (mostly) enjoyed ourselves. mr smear got a bit whingey when the ice-cream truck showed up close enough that we could hear its eery tunes, and then a bit more when he thought that worms were going to fall from the trees because that's an actual thing that happened at his old school.

anyway, it was a really nice morning out in nature. i'm exhausted now and i think i need to lie down even after my second coffee...

ticking boxes

 this has been an intense week.

i'm still struggling with the post-nasal drip / horrible coughing. it's been relentless, for weeks. i'm so over this.

i didn't manage to get any rest on tuesday night, i just lay in bed miserably tired and wired until i had to get up in the morning. not wake up, mind, because i was still wired and didn't need any caffeine until wednesday afternoon - the trigger for that cup being desperation after an hour-long all-hands that i struggled to keep my eyes open for.

everyone left was in the office on wednesday, and the office had already taken on a completely different vibe. we're a tiny startup now, less than a company, and our department is now a team. it's a palpable difference, and it's bizarre.

yesterday, i was the only developer in the entire office for the first half of the day, and only a single coworker joined me for the second half. counting the product dude who's also a dev, there were three of us in the wide open open-space.

the morning hours were lonely.

my ex-team-lead-now-boss had forgotten that i have c# experience, so i volunteered to give him a hand with a .net bug-hunt and found myself with a new task. i'm not used to working with visual studio on a mac, which is weirdly different from the windows offering, and i'm not used to working on an x64 project with an arm64 computer, so it took a little while to get a handle on where everything is and running the tests.

it was late afternoon by the time i found *the* bug. which was just one amongst a bunch of others, but while i was trying to figure out what was broken and where (it actually looks like the code might be fine but the tests are badly-written) the product dude jumped in demanding that we release the fix urgently (on a thursday evening, which is a friday evening for the rest of the modern world) in time for a call with the complaining customer.

we assessed the risk, and pushed the button. and then i had to leave - taking some FOMO with me - to pick up training gear from scrapper before they leave for canada (tonight!). let me tell you, the update a bit later to say that we'd successfully solved the customers problem and delighted them with our performance was a fantastic start to the weekend!

also seeing scrapper and partner and picking up a whole box of awesome (if very dusty) stuff and just happening to be there when another friend of his explained that he'd take the bass guitar but wouldn't actually be able to do anything with it. so i returned home with a box of gear and comics and books, ate quickly, said goodnight to mr smear, and then went back for a guitar and amplifier and twenty minutes of tea and an interesting book club reading that i'd walked in on.

it was a great evening.

this morning began with an hour of yelling at idiots*, then i walked with gd to the clinic to make an urgent appointment (she's having trouble with a prescription) and picked up a couple of household items before coming back home, scarfing down breakfast and then heading out to the barber shop. it's not the best haircut, but it's fine.

* my cellphone company has been blocking my twilio messages, and when i asked them to remove the block they contacted twilio and informed them that i requested a block; our medical insurance company sent gd an sms with a link to their app, but the thing we were supposed to find in the app wasn't available because reasons

while gd and i were shopping, mr smear's teacher called us - mr smear was throwing a proper wobbly because they made latkes in class and the other kids were using eggs. we're trying to teach him to lead by example and take the soft approach, but it's hard not to empathize with a kid who understands just how evil the egg industry is.

...

finances: mistakes have been made, and we're trying to navigate the fallout. if we miraculously get through the next few weeks without surprises we'll be okay *knocks on wood* but we're in a really dicey position and we have to make dramatic changes. the good news is that after a couple of long and sensitive chats with gd, we have a plan and we think we can handle this.

the sad part is that we wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for the ridiculous levels of debt we incurred emigrating, we'd actually be doing just fine. i think i may have mentioned this before, but our income to expenses ratio is much better in tel aviv than in cape town because the economy here, while tough, is still far more reasonable than in south africa.

...

anyway, as crazy and rough and heartbreaking as this week was, i feel like i've taken care of the most important stuff. now to try to get the paintings hung before shabbat comes in.

all over the place

 i'm too tired to be vertical, too wired to be horizontal. i knew the 5.30pm coffee was both a good idea and a bad idea. also, i was totally right about there being a round two on the coughing/post nasal drip, it's horrible.

today was particularly interesting. it began with a very unpleasant goodbye after mr smear made it clear that he had no intention of participating in the class "project" - the teacher has been pairing up different kids for playdates to try to get them better integrated and he had to go to one of the two kids in class that he really can't stand. i managed to apply for the government allowance for kids with life-threatening allergies before heading to work, so that was another administrative load off. the work day was pretty good, all in all.

about an hour before my evening meeting with dod and co, one of my teammates announced that he'd just been fired. i literally didn't believe him at first, but soon after it became clear that we just got thoroughly reorganized and about half of our department just got dumped. i was finally over the reorg that just happened a few months ago, and as much of a relief as it is to have "made the cut" this is really, really horrible. my teammate? he's just announced that his wife is pregnant with their second kid and is currently renovating his new home, so not the best time...

... not that it's ever the best time...

on my way to the meeting i spoke to gd and was pleasantly surprised to hear that mr smear had cooperated, with no drama! later i'd learn that he actually had a really good time and i'm so pleased for him!

the meeting: i get it now. it's an amazing idea. it's elegant. i know what we have to do. the long-term prospect was attractive anyway, but is even more so considering the updated state of my current employment. now's the time for research and due diligence, and i'm excited.

...

the weekend was mostly good, although saturday night took a turn for the worse (gd's been having a rough time lately and i pushed a red button) we did get over the hump and the past few days have been easier for both of us as a result. on friday evening we went to mr smear's friend's family for a really nice dinner. a large chunk of saturday was spent playing around with midjourney, culminating in my releasing musing on sunday morning. i'm extremely proud of it! in the afternoon we walked to the beach, which on an almost-empty winter's day was absolutely lovely.

there was stuff i meant to post about regarding sunday and monday but whatever it was has been so dramatically overshadowed by the sandwiching days i simply can't recall right now...

oh! on sunday morning i got up around 3am and spent an hour or two writing up an outline for an app i'd discussed with a coworker on thursday morning. on sunday night i met with said coworker for the game hack thing, and we settled on building a different social app based on an idea i had just over a decade ago and i was pleased that he was so excited by it.

i think that's everything for now.

antsy positive

 it's a friday afternoon and i'm itching to *do* something, but i don't actually have any idea what it is i *want* to do. so my mind is jumping from vague intention to vague intention while i try and catch up on reading from the infinite reading lists while the kids behind me argue about how to spell things for a minecraft session and i try to get over this morning's revelation that my kid doesn't like babies "because they cry all the time".

the work-week ended on a good note. most of the week was a stressful mess of me vs the machine (in this case, our ci/cd setup), which culminated in a glorious moment yesterday afternoon when everything finally turned green and 

[posting interrupted by a massive tantrum caused by mr smear griefing his friend by renaming her virtual dog]

i was finally able to Push The Button. the rest of the day was spent slowly and methodically preparing a whole bunch of migration PRs and i got to leave early and enjoy a cider at the end of a long week.

i appear to be finally over the week and a half of post-nasal drip, though last night i was woken up by gd unconscious and coughing into my face so maybe i'll get to enjoy another round...

worse? or better?

 same pattern, two days later... it was so bad last night that i got up in the middle of it and ended up going back to bed so stupidly late that i still feel like i'm in dreamland.

the past couple of days have been a bit mad. work's been good, but family's been... complicated. sunday started off rough (mr smear not quite getting that being horrible to me won't make me nice to him), but by the evening things had settled and we'd worked it out. and then gd and i had a blowout just before his bedtime that was a real night-destroyer. let me just say, for the record, that winning an argument doesn't actually feel good if the process of getting to the bottom of things was horrifically unpleasant.

anyway, we seem to all be fine now.

after a week home sick, gd returned to the ulpan this week and had a big test yesterday - it looks like she's done pretty well and it's really helping her confidence! and she's back on duolingo in addition to her homework, so that's cool.

mr smear's biggest lesson lately is the (for him) revelation that the primary reason he's being sent to school is to learn how to interact with his peers and teachers. i hope it's helping. we're workshopping fears of the dark etc. too, and seem to be making progress.

on a totally different note, i introduced him to wikipedia last night and it totally blew his mind.

...

i said work's been good, but it's actually been excitingly positive. i've been slowly but surely coercing our CI/CD pipeline and bash scripts into better behavior and things are starting to gain traction and move faster.

finally, mr cat sent me all the edits and the last few pages are now looking much cleaner and crisper!

still coughing

 this has been ridiculous. every day i think i'm getting better, and every night i experience a sinus reset that sees me either coughing up constantly or feeling like i'm about to start a throat infection. i woke up at 5am "this morning" (saturday morning) and spent the subsequent hours playing the artful escape (which is absolutely stunning), until eventually i was exhausted enough to pass out for a bit but i still spent the afternoon feeling thoroughly worn out.

and here we are, after 12.30am, with me afraid to go to bed.

...

friday was more interesting than i would have liked. primarily because on my way to pick up mr smear from school i saw two messages that i'd missed warning me that our rent cheque was about to bounce if we didn't take immediate action, but considering it was a friday and already after cut-off there was already nothing i could do about it until tomorrow (later today).

and there's not much i can do about it. it turns out our "debit" cards aren't actually functioning as debit cards, and a whole bunch of money unexpectedly disappeared from our account when i was under the impression it had already been counted. that in addition to the fact that our credit card payments are entirely automatic and there's no choice in the matter of how or when we pay them, which is very different to how things work in south africa and canada.

in short, everything is wrong about how israeli credit cards work and it's hurting us. and it's hard not to be anxious about the consequences.

...

last night i explained hormones and puberty to my seven year old son and hilarity ensued. it was a lot simpler than i expected, but i think that's because i've got a pretty good understanding of how it all works...

another time round the sun

 (sung to the tune of "another one bites the dust")

hear i sit, starting to write this post at 6.20am on a friday morning, sitting in my onesie having sadly giving up on trying to sleep in favor of being vertical and coughing up green.

swell.

these past few days have been a whirlwind of positive crazy.

let's go backwards to tuesday.

i went to bed a few hours ago, having watched most of romesh ranganathan's the cynic and giggling hysterically.

that was after finally calling it a night, having spent my time after reading mr smear to bed early (for him, anyway) trying to reproduce a weird bug with my italian coworker and meeting online with potential partners for a particularly interesting little enterprise.

there was a lot that was very gratifying about successfully demonstrating that my code was working well despite my coworkers snarky suspicions to the contrary.

the meeting with my potential partners was also gratifying, but in a different way.

i brought home what remained of the birthday vegan mango cheesecake from the day before because mr smear had woken me up yesterday worried that we hadn't really celebrated my birthday because we (from his perspective) hadn't had any cake. we ate it together while he watched the end of how the grinch stole christmas, although he enjoyed just a small amount and then decided it was mine.

fine, i'll finish it.

yesterday was a really great day at work. i delivered something really impactful that i've been working on all week, i dived into golang code that's been untouched for (hi-tech time-scale) generations and uncovered something juicy, and generally enjoyed the peaceful wind-down to the end of the week.

in the morning, i received a mind-blowing email from my ex-team-lead: after i left, he went on parental leave. the combination of the two of us not being around demoralized the other two teammates, which was bad enough, but then the company decided to revoke certain employee "privileges" (being able to work 100% remotely) and both of them quickly found other employment. once my ex-team-lead returned to find that he needs to completely rebuild the team for what is a) his baby and b) a core component of the company's success, he became so demoralized that he's walking away too.

aside from feeling... not guilty, but at least partly responsible for how things have turned out, i feel like the leadership of this company which i thoroughly enjoyed contracting for for two years of my life has galloped full-tilt towards the trust thermocline and won a race to the bottom that they hadn't realized they'd even entered.

never mess with your employees. compensate them fairly and make them partners in your success.

another thing about yesterday morning was mr smear getting up early enough that we got to play hue before i took him to school, and hue is beautiful.

wednesday:

i didn't need to celebrate my birthday any more than i actually did. physically or virtually, i felt surrounded and supported by people i care about, i had a surprisingly lovely regular day at the office, a nice dinner + the rest of the seventh harry potter movie with my family, and i'm home in tel aviv for this one.

i am full of gratitude.

i've also decided, after hearing again about the effects of nostalgia on aging, that i'm going to start counting backwards. besides, my age is now equal to the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe and everything which is the ASCII value of the asterisk character * which means "anything". so i'm just going to roll with "anything" as a permission slip to be well and feel good.

tuesday:

i don't recall too much about the actual day that was tuesday, but in the evening i joined spot and the mongoose near the beach and we sat a talked for ages. i then walked spot all the back to the bus from across the road from our apartment and finally went to bed.

that was exactly the moment when my throat started warning me that i was coming down with whatever this horrible post-nasal drip thing is. no, wait - looking back at my previous post, that was the moment when the looming throat infection stopped looming and launched a full-scale attack.

now that i think about it, i must have worked from home on tuesday. whatevs.

...

overall, this week was a good one. gd was upset about being too sick to go to ulpan, but she's at least learning to navigate the healthcare system and receiving treatment.

mr smear was mostly great, he's drawing really interesting things and we've had a lot of good conversations. while he's a bit damaged and struggling in some ways, he really is a good kid with a sharp mind. i mean, he's obsessed with demons (when he isn't terrified of his closet) and he can be super-naughty sometimes, but then he refuses to play the artful escape because there aren't any dialogue options for "i don't want to commit a crime" 🤣

...

oh! and mr cat has sent me all the edits, so i can publish them this week. things are looking amazing.

off and on again

or on and off again.

friday:

in the evening i walked through to scrapper's farewell. i ended up having some really interesting conversations in the kitchen and in retrospect i think i was the only person not high for them.

saturday:

bedtime was an explosion of unhappiness, triggered by an incident at the park. aside from that and gd feeling really sick, mr smear and i had enjoyed a really lovely day together that included a good frisbee session.

yesterday:

i wasn't feeling 100%, but i did go in to work. it was a day, i guess? i was stunned when i looked up to see how dark it had gotten by 5pm.

today:

i worked from home today after a long night with a looming throat infection - it was mostly fine during the day, and now it's started up again. i started the day by taking gd to the clinic to get her reassigned to a new doctor because her experiences so far with the previous one have been pretty awful.

i made good progress at work, and things generally feel positive with my team lead.

spider-man: no way home is a beautiful way to tie up the existing franchises and pull an into the spider-verse.

spot's grandmother's just passed away, which makes me sad.

one foot in front of the other

wed: vaccine failure and a report about mr smear getting along with the other kids, not cooperating with the sports teacher, being too disgusted by snails to be in the same room as them, and making good progress with his reading and writing.

mr smear's "friends" being warned away from him? we're not sure that's what happened, but we're concerned

dod's proposal

two days of intense juggling at work

gd coming down with a cold

today so far: getting caught in the rain after dropping mr smear off at school, making page 26 public

what a long, strange week it's been

 i finally had my performance review yesterday, and it was mostly positive. after all my discomfort and anxiety the past while, it turns out we didn't have a trust problem, just a communication problem. and we've now identified it and we're working on it.

it's an enormous relief.

on sunday evening i went off to a reunion of the last unit i served in, but i arrived to discover that i hadn't registered properly and they wouldn't let me in. so the half hour i spent waiting for nystire to rock up felt eerily like the last six months of my service... he was good enough to skip the thing and join me for a walk and a drink, it was nice catching up properly (it's different without the kids).

one of my coworkers and i then spent an hour or so playing around with a gamemaker tutorial, and we learned some interesting things! i've subsequently spent the last couple of days rebuilding it and polishing it for mr smear, it's been a great learning experience and lots of fun ^_^

work has been... busy. an insane amount of juggling, but for a good cause.

last night was, i think, the first time i've headed out to the rollerblading group feeling solid. i was feeling quite dry when i arrived, though, and picked up an iced-coffee, which i suspect helped - but the second half of the 25km was still a fitness struggle and i finally got home with big blisters. on the flip side, it was a really, really fun route!

i haven't slept much, but what sleep i did get was good. i've got a bunch of stuff to take care of this morning, not least of which being that i need to make sure mr smear actually gets his flu vaccine...