the cough

 gd's still coughing, and my mom and mr smear have been coughing pretty badly too. i've been a bit post-nasal-drippy myself, but i'm doing somewhat alright. the three of them did rapid antigen tests yesterday just in case, so apparently it's not covid. that's something.

this has been a HUGE week, and i have to work backwards because just trying to remember what happened a few days ago is overwhelming. so i'm writing the rest of this post from the end, but trying to keep it in chronological order nonetheless, so i'm feeling a bit like a detective right now :P

tuesday:

we started the day pretty early, my mother needed to get her phone sorted out (she'd been here three days already) and gd and i navigating legal cannabis. that turned out to be surprisingly straightforward! our next step was trying to sort my mother out with a ravkav card, which we failed to do. i took mr smear with me to work while my mom and gd went to ikea, and i was quite nervous about how the day was going to go... the last time i took him we had an incident.

it proved to be a corrective experience for both of us: he started the day with blockbench, and then when he got bored of that he moved on to video games. we took a break for lunch, and in the interests of expediency (he just wanted to get back to the office) he elected to get sumsum for lunch, and was very proud of himself for putting together his own salad. although he has since admonished me for interfering with his selection, even though i know that if i hadn't "helped" him it was just have been a giant bowl of pickled cucumbers :P

so he ate well, had a good time, and when gd eventually arrived to pick him up he needed to be coerced rather aggressively to leave :P

gd, meanwhile, had had a brilliant idea after she and my mom had picked up curtains and a small desk for - that it might be much cheaper and easier to bring the stuff home by taxi than to get it delivered. and she was totally right!

after work, i walked to firefighter's office for an informal chat. everything was going great until his two "officers" asked me about my professional history, and i finished talking about my previous employer. at that point, unprompted and unplanned, my jaw continued flapping and i just blurted out how unhappy i was with my present employer. not only unprofessional, but a couple of the things i said were far from accurate. i was mortified, and that was while my mouth was still working.

ugh.

i'm still cringing.

the follow-up conversation apparently went well in spite of that, and firefighter helped me put a finger on the root cause of my complaints: i may like the people i work with and get along with them, but we do not have a good culture fit. and the main reason for that is that they're a thoroughly reactive culture.

i came home to recover with my family, simultaneously buzzing with excitement and shame. i spent quite a while thinking about what transpired and what was potentially on the table.

i also put together the new desk, and i'm sitting at it right now - i'm very happy with having a proper space of my own to operate ^_^

wednesday:

the day began with gd and i going for an extended hour and a half of guidance, which proved very helpful, but made me a bit late for work.

the workday began with two revelations: the first, that our italian colleague is leaving, and the second, that a few months ago he ripped out a whole bunch of functionality that i needed in order to complete my work.

in the middle of the day i met up with gd and mr smear for his initial consultation with the public mental health people. we were taken by surprise that the meeting was just for mr smear alone, and we were very concerned that he wouldn't be comfortable with that, but he handled it just fine and actually had a good experience.

this is good.

the next couple of hours were me finally completing the work that i'd spent three days suffering from, and i left the office when i realized that i was effectively done with my week and didn't need to be looking for anything else to do. it was a really, really good feeling.

i did a decent-sized grocery shopping and arrived home just in time for a call with copywriter, who i haven't chatted to properly in years. we had a very interesting chat until dinner time, and he opened with one of the biggest points that is a lesson that i definitely needed right now: it doesn't matter what you're going through, you give positive vibes when you start talking to someone. even if just to set the tone. i've always had trouble with the question "how are you" when i'm having a bad day, and that conversation really clicked for me.

yesterday (thursday):

i needed a vacation day to get my head right, i started the day by chopping a number of items off my to-do list and it felt good.

gd wasn't feeling up to leaving the apartment, and nobody was feeling up to the planned jerusalem mission, so my mom and mr smear and i went on a shopping mission instead. we began by sorting out her ravkav card, which was a bit of a story but we got it right eventually. our first stop was bash gal, where we picked up all of mr smear's mma gear, all right-sized for him, and for much cheaper than getting it through his gym.

i cannot tell you how proud it made me to see him wearing his jiujitsu gi! (even if i've never worn one myself, it looks really good on him ^_^)

then we picked up (apparently) exactly what we needed to get our curtains sorted out, and checked out the gadget store where i thought we'd pick up a pokémon starter kit. 1. we didn't pick up a starter kit, and in retrospect i'm glad we didn't. 2. mr smear may or may not have broken one of the toys on display (i'm pretty sure it was broken already), but the look of abject horror on his face and the deep understanding of why we don't play with items we haven't bought? priceless.

we got to the mall and immediately found the pokémon battle academy, which is what i was looking for. and the sales guy threw in an extra booster pack to wish us luck :) we got slushies, and then i managed to pick up exactly what i needed - a proper usb hub and a simple keyboard that's a) got hebrew letters and b) way more comfortable than my other one.

[GROSSNESS WARNING] on the way out i threw something into a bin with a flip-top, not noticing that someone had spat a giant gob with chunky green snot on the other side. that slammed into the back of my hand. i couldn't get to the bathroom fast enough, and i was incapable of taking the disgusted look off my face for a while.

between our morning adventures and the evening ones, we had a couple of hours to rest at home. mr smear cracked open the new pokémon battle academy and we had a great time following the tutorial! our play was interrupted a couple of times, as i spoke to our neighbour's sister about my mother's aliyah obstacles. hopefully she'll be able to help, but it can't hurt having someone in the foreign ministry aware of the madness that real people (ie non-politicians) are experiencing.

on the way to the shuk, i was chewing gum. on the right side of my mouth, to avoid The Tooth. at one point towards the beginning of our journey, i got adventurous and chewed, twice, on the left side.

my mouth proceeded to HURT for the next couple of HOURS. it was deeply upsetting.

my mom and i sat for bit over coffee and iced tea after dropping mr smear off at his therapy session, and i made plans to meet with one of firefighter's guys who seems to think we're on good footing - this is very exciting! we walked around the shuk for a bit, picking up a french press along the way. i could probably have paid less for it, but it seems good. i'm still a bit nervous about the glass exploding.

we stopped at kongress bazel for falafel on the way home, mr smear ate most of a huge laffa and my mom and i had pitot. it was delicious.

i went to bed almost immediately after saying goodnight to mr smear, because when i bent down to say goodnight my hand suddenly hurt intensely: nerve pain from my neck.

i would wake up around midnight due to reflux (or something similar), caused by me going to bed after eating such a a heavy meal... 

this morning so far:

i woke up feeling a bit better, but nervous about my neck. mr smear's voice is almost gone, so in the interests of protecting it he's taken a page out of the adventure time playbook and he's writing notes to us. so far, it's hilarious!

family ties

 i scrambled to get some work done this morning before we left, but i'm not sure how much i achieved because at this point the morning seems very far away. i know i took care of some admin stuff, and mr smear built something cool in blockbench and we were all super excited by it.

then we headed out to herzeliya. the old age home was a bus and a short walk away, and we arrived in good time. it was sad to see the birthday boy (99!) and his wife so out of it, but it was really nice to spend time with some of the cousins and meet the newest addition (she was born three weeks ago). it was a good morning.

getting back to tel aviv was a bit of a story, a stark reminder of how good our public transport is compared to anywhere else in this country. and the train station we were planning on getting a rav-kav car from was closed for renovations, so we bailed on that plan and i went to the office.

i was only in the office for four or five hours, but it felt like a really long four or five hours. at least there was a nice leftovers-lunch of build-your-own falafel, apparently to celebrate the new quarter. i spent half my office time making an effort to not physically smash my own head into a wall, but eventually made some progress and walked out with two out of three of my goals achieved.

sadly, the third goal is the biggest and i'm still not sure where to begin :(

i also got good feedback from a coworker, who was pissed off that we'd both been instructed to work on the same thing and had duplicated efforts - he apparently preferred my solution, so he's co-opting it. that's nice.

i eventually left around 7pm and did some grocery shopping, then came home in time to sit with my family while they ate dinner. mr smear had a very successful day at his jiujitsu lesson, in spite of himself and his misgivings (he walked off the mats) he got a hold of himself and climbed back in. this is big stuff for him, and we're really feeling good about the whole thing.

...

HUGE news! gd's just been granted her license for medical marijuana, so we're off tomorrow morning to try and figure out how to use it ^_^

this is great for a number of reasons, not least of which because we're struggling with the costs and this will bring them down considerably.

on a related note, though, and a troubling one - she's been developing a really bad cough the past few days. i hope it's going to pass...

...

i was supposed to get some more done this evening, but i just can't. so we watched some more of the animatrix, and now i'm faffing around until antibiotics time. tomorrow's the last of the course, hopefully i'll stop feeling so shitty soon.

the meeting

 my work day was weird, i spent all day fiddling with something confusing and broken. in the middle of it, though, gd and i went to the school to meet with mr smear's teacher and the principal.

while waiting for the principle, we were talking to a teacher while petting the dog she had on a leash. suddenly, a little boy hears our son's name and enthusiastically says "you know mr smear? kids tell me where he is and i love hitting him in the face!"

just as he finished his sentence, his carer suddenly appeared from the classroom he was supposed to be in and hustled him away.

i was stunned. i was furious. i wanted to threaten him, and beat him. and his carer. i don't care if he's autistic - he is - he's been picking on, hurting, and traumatizing my boy.

the good news is that we've been informed that the school has recognized their inability to handle him, and he's out. the bad news is that it's not before he's done immense damage to a kid who was already struggling with anxiety and feeling unsafe.

it's really not fair.

it's also the first time that any of mr smear's stories have been completely, thoroughly proven true. this little fucker just confirmed everything. there was no exaggeration.

...

i was a bit nervous about the meeting itself, having no idea in which direction it would be going. i think we got everything out on the table, and by the time we were done each side of the table had homework to do. while i'm still bitter about the autistic bully business, i am happy with the principal and teacher's efforts to help our son integrate in a healthy way.

...

mr smear's second mma class went really well! i was so surprised by gd's reports that i wasn't sure if she was trolling me, or if our son had been replaced by a doppelgänger :P

...

in the evening, tahoma arrived for a quick visit that ended up being quick a few hours. the circumstances are sad (his mother passed away last week, so he and his husband returned to israel for two weeks from their year-long travel adventure), but we had really interesting discussions and debates and we were really glad he managed to make time for us.

...

tomorrow wasn't going to be complicated, but it's our cousin's 99th birthday and a whole lot of us are going to celebrate him. even if he's lost his faculties, we're at least going to be with the family. i've been feeling uncomfortable that i haven't seen him since we arrived (my mom and gd and mr smear saw him last year), but it's a weird sort of discomfort because at this point he and his wife don't always recognize their own kids...

permission to rest

 we all took turns napping today. mr smear had quite a bit of downtime and occupied himself nicely. in the afternoon we took a leisurely walk to get ice cream and let mr smear play in a park.

on the way home, mr smear was harassing me to buy furniture mods for minecraft - that's a no - and i offered him an alternative that a) really excited him and b) might help us get through the next two months with only mild loss of sanity: i won't buy him mods, but i will support him and help him to make his own.

we have installed blockbench, and we'll see how this little experiment goes.

we had a lovely evening, which helped reduce my anxiety about the upcoming work week and our meeting tomorrow with the school guidance councilor.

one foot in front of the other. i'm really glad i gave myself permission to rest today.

...

one thing that i *did* do - i started looking at the next page's script for the graphic novel, and i came up with something very exciting for the next two pages! additionally, i've decided that i'm going to shrink the scope of the first issue down to the mythology and the first sonnet, so i've laid out the remaining pages for the illustrator and i'm feeling good about having a good reading experience within our grasp ^_^

long friday

 i was tired yesterday - i'm feeling a bit better today, but yesterday was rough. gd and i did a huge grocery shopping in the morning, and then went to pick up mr smear and two of his friends from school.

the playdate - was - difficult. we had to intervene on a number of occasions, and the hours were exhausting both physically and emotionally. it felt like the end of the playdate was ultimately successful, at least.

after dinner, gd and i watched another episode of titans before going to bed.

i managed to get up at 3.30am to pick my mother up from the airport, and was busy parking when she called to say she was ready. it was so exciting to welcome her back!

this morning has been slow and busy, and nobody's making any plans for the rest of the day just yet. it's a beautiful day and it's nice to not be under pressure.

you gotta learn how to lie better

 what a weird ending to a long-ass week. or couple of weeks. i'm feeling a bit burned out, i've been having a hard time concentrating. not sure what's exhaustion (emotional more than physical), and what's the dental situation / antibiotics.

we're all very excited that my mom's flying to visit us tomorrow, though ^_^

i'm pretty relieved that tomorrow's mr smear's last day of second grade, and i'm looking forward to him enjoying a long holiday and having an opportunity to reset.

yesterday:

i don't recall much from the morning, but it was just another day in the office. the work itself was frustrating. i left early, did a very quick grocery shopping, and got home in time to head to the beach to meet my aunt. as i was telling everything to get ready, i received a call informing me that our new mattress would be delivered within twenty minutes. WTF?!

so i sent a message to our building's whatsapp group and one of our neighbours offered to help, gd was completely taken aback by the very idea of this "neighborliness" and i was stumped when they told me to just give them my key and let them handle it. i did, but not without weirdness.

anyway, it took gd and mr smear so long to get ready that we were only about 100m away when the mattress arrived, so i rushed back to thank our neighbor profusely and take care of it myself :P

we caught a bus and met my aunt and her boyfriend on banana beach. mr smear just wanted to head into the waves (we went in a couple of times, it was relatively heavy and he loved it), and i'm very glad i didn't let peer pressure get the best of me because i couldn't remember why antibiotics + alcohol is bad, and when i looked it up after we got home i was reminded that it's because it renders the antibiotics less effective.

we had a lovely evening, but it was very, very late by the time we eventually got home and got mr smear and ourselves into bed.

today:

we've been having pretty consistently good mornings lately.

i started filling out the forms for gd's cannabis license, then got stuck because they insist on being honest and none of the options made any sense. they don't answer their phones, so i had to request a call-back.

i spent a chunk of my morning battling with python imports. python imports (in particular, relative imports) seem like the kind of thing that would happen if a disparate bunch of devs from all around the world decided to compete to make the worst solution ever, and they all won.

i was supposed to be in the office between 2 and 4 pm to hand over our old router to a courier, and the courier called me about two hours before then to ask if he could pick it up in five minutes. i told him no, i'm not there yet, but that he was welcome to come to me (that was certainly more convenient for me). just as he called, i got another call - of course, the call-back. so then i had to request another call-back.

fortunately, they got back to me pretty quickly, and i asked the nice lady what i needed to fill in. she laughed as she explained that they're a legal organization and cannot possibly advise me on what to do.

oh.

so i went back to the form and filled it out "as best i could", and now we wait and see.

the rest of my workday was progress in fits and bursts, mixed up with slight disorientation and stress-snacking. i kind of felt good about how the day ended, although that feeling would be tarnished somewhat by a message from my italian coworker, but **** 'em.

gd was really sore today, so i took mr smear to his therapy session by myself. we arrived just in time on a new bus line (even though it arrived a few minutes late), and i grabbed an iced tea and milled around for a bit. in an obscure section of the shuk i found french presses that gd and i have been looking for for ages! and just as i put the phone down, i heard someone call my name: krybabie's widow and her kids just happened to decided to spend a day in tel aviv - that's ridiculous!

we chatted until i had to pick mr smear up, then mr smear and i rushed to catch the bus home (i'd missed my antibiotic). on the bus, a bunch of saffers sat down next to us, which wouldn't have been odd except for the previous encounter in the shuk.

shower, dinner, bedtime, titans, and pretty soon my final antibiotic for the day and hopefully some rest.

the battle pt 2

yesterday:

i dropped mr smear off at school, then headed to the dentist. old dentist, about to retire. examined my teeth, prescribed an antibiotic, then informed me that i need to get a root canal - and advised me to have both the bad tooth and its neighbor crowned.

the receptionist handed me the quote, and i had to make an effort to keep my jaw from hitting the floor. i sat there for a little while, stunned, trying to quantify how much money is worth me just being in pain and chewing on the other side of my mouth.

my mom and i used to laugh at my father about that - he was too cheap to get dental work done - but now i'm faced with the same choice and it's not so obvious how to proceed. in the best case, i wait until mid-august for my delayed insurance benefits to kick in before making an appointment.

i left work in the afternoon to be with gd and mr smear for his first bjj class. it went really well! aside from the bit where he almost got his elbow dislocated / broken because he didn't "get" tapping (even though he's well-versed in tapping in a different context - tickle-fights with us :P). anyway, he enjoyed it, and we're very happy with the instruction, and we've registered him for next month.

this is good.

i worked late to compensate, and was pretty beat by the time i got home. after reading a bit more of the iron giant in hebrew (which is slow going because i'm translating phrase by phrase), i sat down with gd to watch the first episode of titans. it's really good.

today:

i began the day with recruitment stuff, then went off to work. it was a pretty successful day overall. in the afternoon i skipped out to accompany gd to the doctor and the pharmacy, and i helped carry groceries home while watching an all-hands over zoom. then i took mr smear to the park, where we practices back kicks and tooled around until dinnertime.

after bedtime, gd and i watched another episode of titans and since then i've been taking care of a random selection of things and reading tech news. i'm tired, and i'm a little stressed about all the things that i haven't been taking care of, and i have to take my antibiotic in half an hour... i guess a half an hour's not too big a deal?

the battle pt 1

 the most important thing today happened in a single, blood-curdling moment, mr smear enthusiastically began the warmup for his first mma class and then walked off, and we were all out of levers to pull. there was drama, there were negotiations (about there not being negotiations), there were tears. there were pep talks.

and then, after gd had left the building distraught, there was a single moment of me and him, with me putting one word after another and praying for a miracle.

and there was a miracle.

a tiny spark, for what feels like the first time in his life, and he spoke to the teacher (who said all the right things), and he went back out onto the mats and he did what he needed to do. he learned stuff, he had a great time, we sat on the sides giggling, being amazed, and trying (and failing) to get a photo or two.

he's still not convinced about tomorrow's jiujitsu class, but i'm now standing my ground on the mother of all threats (no training, no screen time AND no getting out of the afterschool programme). i feel bad about having to do that, but i know and he knows and he knows that i know that he would much rather be training than in afterschool. and i know what i saw when he got off the mats.

joy. and pride.

we're doing this.

...

this morning was weird. i managed to make another first-aid dental appointment for tomorrow morning, and had an interesting chat with a head-hunter. i dropped mr smear off at school and put the caption guide together for the final edition of the latest page of the graphic novel.

then gd and i headed out to get to tahoma's mother's funeral, and the morning fell apart. we got on the wrong train and ended up in herzeliya, and on the way gd began to feel faint and ill. after further train schedule stress we ended up just giving up and going back home.

i had a weird workday, trying to do basic things with the circleci platform what they don't want to be done (and that many users before me have requested), and worked straight through until it was time to take mr smear to the mma class.

the class was 45 minutes, but we were out for about three hours.

i worked a bit between shower and dinner times, and then after bedtime dived in to try and figure out a solution. i eventually got it right, "good enough" even if it wasn't what i was looking for, and then i stretched a bit and watched matt rife's walking red flag special which was definitely not as much fun as his usual stuff. i think it might have been the crowd.

...

i didn't try to eat anything on the left side of my mouth today, and it's definitely not hurting as much, but i still think i might have an infection. i guess i'll find out in the morning.

coming down soft

 *phew*

i slept relatively well last night, and started the day on a good footing: mr smear decided he didn't want to go to the beach, and i offered him some toodee and topdee time if he joined us in good spirits. it's still on special for another day or two, and it's BRILLIANT. not only is it fun, and the perfect amount of challenging, but it's fantastic co-op and it gave us the vocabulary to have a really good conversation this evening about strategy, about solving the "puzzle" he's been dealing with at school.

so we did get to the beach today, and it was in good spirits. we all had fun both in and out of the water, but we were all completely exhausted by the time we finally got home. mr smear and i watched the "STAKES!" season of adventure time in its entirety, although i did pass out for an episode and mr smear had to catch me up. it's really great and we both enjoyed it immensely.

...

mr cat sent me the final version of the latest page, and i was busy posting it when i realized there was something missing... i'm too tired to deal with that right now.

...

my tooth is impossibly sore, if i chew on it (which the dentist said i mustn't avoid) it's so bad that i'm dysfunctional and need to take tylenol. that can't be right, i'm going to give it a few more days but i think i'm ready for a root canal :(

tomorrow is going to be very busy, and i'm hoping that i'll wake up in a good space for it.

the trip

it has been a completely insane week, with both gd and myself upside down and inside out for a good chunk of it. wednesday seemed like a better day, but thursday was even worse than monday.

this time, though, i was pissed. i was absolutely raging at the bitch father who i'd spoken to on monday evening, who'd been condescending and to whom i'd avoided - in the interests of civility, which was a mistake - pointing out that they and their rotten kid bear plenty of the responsibility for putting my son through hell last year and him coming out swinging.

we don't approve of how mr smear is fighting back, predominantly because he's hurting himself far more than the kid in his sights.

fortunately, all the things blew up just before mr smear's visit to the therapist, and i stole a few minutes of their time to get counselled myself. what she said calmed me down in one sense, but enraged me even further in another: i realized that in my conversation with the kid's dad on monday night, i'd let my son down by not defending him sufficiently, and in a way given him license to feel like they're on moral high ground.

that made me sick.

really sick. gd and i were both fully engaged with our PTSD and in full fight mode, and we got to the school early this morning in the hopes that we would see these sons of bitches and give them a proper piece of our minds.

in retrospect, the universe did us an enormous solid and we didn't see them, because we sat down with mr smear's teacher for a long while, as she'd done a pretty thorough investigation into the goings-ons the day before and... it really does look like mr smear brought the bad stuff on himself... he's really struggling, and the more he does what he thinks he needs to do the more harm he brings to himself. it's very difficult as a parent to deal with this.

...

wednesday: i'm officially on a completely different project now as our company's in the middle of executing a pivot, and we've all been asked to warn our families that we'll be less available to them for a while.

it's a whole new thing, with broken tools and time pressure and my boss on my case. it's fantastic.

thursday: gd and i began the day with anxiety, calmed down somewhat, and then *WHAM* picked up mr smear from school and went straight into full-scale drama.

i went on the "i'm so anxious i can't eat" diet for most of a day :(

...

this morning was the worst. in spite of how we were feeling, we got mr smear to school and then paid the clinic a visit, then walked to the barber shop, on the way meeting up with an ex-coworker's sister and her partner who were kind and gave some good advice.

the barber shop experience would have been great if gd hadn't uttered the words "i don't want to insult you" when she tried to fix a mistake of his, i'm pretty sure that without that phrase it would have been fine. as it was, she still had more to correct when we got home, but it's okay now.

we had about ten minutes at home before heading out for the school pick up, including the aforementioned fix, and i was honestly such a mess that i was feeling dizzy and faint. thanks to all the gods that the universe threw us a bone and we didn't have that anticipated encounter.

we felt much better about things after the meeting with mr smear's teacher, and immediately rushed to catch a bus down to florentin, where we picked up a good mattress (or so it seems) which should be delivered in time for us to be able to host my mom comfortably from next week :)

i've also registered mr smear for a couple of trial classes of mma and jiujitsu next week.

mr smear started getting the hang of knock-knock jokes on the way home, and we had lunch and played some toodee and topdee, single and coop, and mr smear and i had a great time. then we got ready for the beach (or so we thought) and headed out to join the mongoose and his family.

we were about five minutes from the beach when i realized that i'd forgotten swimming trunks 🤦

anyway, we all had a great time at the beach, i even went in a little bit in my shorts, and it was about 8.30pm when mr smear and i finally arrived back home for a quick shower, kiddush, and dinner.

at toothbrushing time there was utter pandemonium, when two out of the three members of our household screamed and panicked due to a rather large cockroach appearing on mr smear's towel. i tried to get it with a paper towel, but wasn't quick enough and it disappeared under the washing machine. i tentatively bent down and put my face to the floor (partially expecting it to rush me) and spotted it hiding in a corner.

fortunately, we had bug spray, but hitting it with the bug spray was a mission. it ran this way and that, included right under me (i jumped over it), but i hit it enough times with the spray to slow it down and eventually caught up with the bugger and crushed it. gd began retching when she came to help me clean up the bathroom (she claims it was the smell of the bug spray), which combined with the whole ordeal triggered mr smear's gag reflex, and he threw up.

there was cleaning up to be done.

i did the dishes after putting mr smear to bed, and was thinking of crashing myself but wanted to get down as much of these bizarre, trippy days down as possible before doing so. i really hope we manage to sleep properly tonight.

the eyebrow combover (and a very sore tooth)

 let's start with the most important business: yesterday gd and i woke up in a really bad place, the therapist wasn't responding, and we felt that it was absolutely wrong of us not to say anything.

so we said something. we said a few things. and then i took mr smear to school. it was a bad feeling morning, but nobody was angry, just upset.

when i got home and had had some time to think, i proposed something to gd and - unlike the last time i proposed the exact same thing - she agreed. and, in my opinion, did something very impressive at the same time which it isn't really my business to go into (let's just say she "levelled up").

we agreed to "flip the script", and - not as a punishment - make screen time a reward instead of making lack of screen time a punishment. no good behavior, no chores, no screens. and then, after we'd planned for me to be available to explain the new situation to him after school, we realized that i had my emergency dental appointment at that time, so gd had to put her big girl panties on and take care of it alone.

...

my work day was pretty relaxed. i skipped early to get my filling sorted out, and ended up getting there a few minutes late. the procedure itself? not fun. the anesthetic administration was surprisingly comfortable, but everything else was not and at one point i felt stabbing pains on the tip of my tongue and under it. then, when she was done, i bit the plate and was certain that the filling wasn't fitting correctly, but when i told the dentist she assured me that it was just an effect of the anesthetic and that it was definitely fine.

the whole way home my tooth and gum hurt, and i was sure by the time i got in that i'd managed to damage the new filling. then i ate something (she'd told me i didn't need to wait), and immediately regretted it. then i googled new filling aftercare and regretting it even more.

...

i don't know how gd broke the news to mr smear, i'm not sure she does either, but whatever she told him she absolutely nailed it. by the time i got home he'd helped her with some chores, having had a reasonably good day at school, and had already earned himself an hour. after that - and with no reward on the line - he then volunteered to help gd in the kitchen with dinner!

...

we all went to bed early last night. i managed to sleep, to the sole credit of my gum guard. i had bizarre dreams about vampires.

today:

my mouth still felt wrong. i got mr smear to school in good spirits, and had a bit of a morning - my tooth was griefing me, and i wasn't operating at 100%. the workday began alright, but at lunchtime i joined one of my coworkers and had a bite to eat, and the pain was excruciating! as soon as it calmed down i called the dentists office again, i tried to get some work done but i literally couldn't see straight.

the therapist called me back, she questioned me in a way that made me kinda angry but she also said some things about mr smear's situation that really helped me to de-stress (in conjunction with yesterday's successes). we're going to see her tomorrow morning for more guidance.

then i left for an hour or two (it was supposed to be an hour, ended up being two) and met up with gd to go for an initial consultation with public health services. form filling nightmare. anyway, we sat with a therapist for an hour and threw a whole lot of our life stories at the poor guy, then i returned to the office for an hour or so which included a good one-on-one with my boss.

then i rushed off to the clinic for an emergency dental appointment. i had to wait a while, and i was a bit worried because the dentist on duty seemed a mite twitchy and irritable. fortunately, within a couple of minutes he'd assessed the filling and fixed it (i was totally right, that's two for two in two weeks), and confirmed that what the dentist told me yesterday about it taking a month to settle was correct. also, that i shouldn't avoid eating on the sore side. also, that my gum is properly wounded after yesterday's shenanigans.

good grief.

anyway, i had a catch-up chat with gd, then with my mother, then i did a quick emergency grocery run and came home. we've just (a little while ago) managed to get mr smear to bed after a welcome and pleasantly quick and proper toothbrush and shower experience, and i'm now trying to decide if i have the energy to execute on a great idea i had yesterday morning while talking to a colleague about the trouble with regular expressions.

...

oh! i keep forgetting. i had a revelation a few days ago, and it's a weird one: a while back i started trimming my eyebrows with a beard trimmer (not too short, just less shaggy), and i've been bothered a bit by the fact that some of my eyebrows haven't grown back properly (both eyebrows are symmetrical). the other day gd pointed out that the patches are bald spots. the revelation: that they've always been bald spots, but that my extra-long and shaggy eyebrow hairs were effectively serving as a natural combover.

so, yeah. eyebrow combover. it's a thing.

regress

today was a no good, lousy, ugly, shitty day.

i was totally wrong yesterday. completely, totally, utterly wrong about making progress with mr smear, because today he continued on with the awful behavior and properly alienated a bunch (if not most) of the kids in his class. his "nemesis"? the kid he's been bullying non-stop for months? i had to have a chat with one of his dads this evening. that was not a comfortable conversation.

...

today began with a fight over the toilet at around 5am (okay, it was more complicated than that), and i started my day with a headache and a neck-ache and a lot of shitty feelings.

i had a long day working from home, which wasn't fun but was at least somewhat successful, and then we went together to pick up mr smear.

i'm trying to be cool and follow the therapist's instructions, but it's fucking hard. i don't know if she understands what's actually going on, and we're going to have a talk in the morning. this evening was a right mess.

in addition to all that, my mother just got called out to sort out a generator in the middle of a winter's night and i just feel like that's a strong indicator of something being very wrong in this world.

i spent most of today just wanting it to end, and it kept getting progressively worse. i'm superstitiously nervous about typing anything about my hopes for tonight / tomorrow morning.

the good stuff

 today was good. although i woke up tired (i played tales of the neon sea until quite late), and then felt awfully tired for a good chunk of the day (after playing around with my cdk guide and playing a lot more tales of the neon sea, but it was mostly about my stomach being a bit iffy), i felt okay enough to accompany gd and mr smear to the beach and we had a really good time.

navigating these waters with mr smear isn't simple, but we seem to be muddling along and making progress.

i feel good about how today went.

whew!

today:

a good start, we managed to get our boy to school sort of on time in spite of the fact that he was convinced he was too sick (he really wasn't), and i managed to figure out where one of the issues that broke my thursday is even if i don't yet understand what the issue is. that freed up my soul to pack away my work machine for the weekend. then we workshopped the framework for a poem together that was inspired by me watching dead prez - hip hop, kanye west's def poetry jam recital of self-conscious, and the digging the greats video about all falls down. it's just a beginning, but it's a really good beginning.

we then went to the shops, where i picked up a decent charger for my laptop and we did the groceries. i had just enough time to eat a sandwich at home, then went to the dentist.

what an enormous relief! we worked together and figured out that i was absolutely right, that the previous dentist had just gotten things very wrong. it turns out i have at least one cracked filling, and the intense pain is caused by cold hitting the surface of the filling, then spreading deep until it hits the crack. it was a fair amount of investigating, and my teeth hurt for a while afterwards, but i have an appointment (for a few weeks' time) and while it's not clear whether it'll be new fillings or a root canal, i'll take whatever relief i can get.

on my way home i spoke to my mom, and for the first time *really* lost my cool and let her know exactly what her delaying leaving south africa means to us. i feel sad for her, but we're far beyond any point of no return and it's just not viable for anyone to live there any more.

i ate, flipped an avocado slice straight into my keyboard (panic! but it looks like i took care of it), washed dishes, snacked, washed more dishes, and played mr smear's variation of goodcritters. i suddenly felt drowsy when he started setting up, and i passed out while he was trying to explain the rules to me - that was embarrassing. i came round and got the hang of it, and while there were a couple of points that demanded a bit of debate it was overall a pretty fun game!

i needed to crash afterwards, though. i rushed off to lie down, and a bit later mr smear came to "punish" me for not helping tidy up by tickling me. the tickling became a pillow fight became me getting the hiccups and suddenly needing to throw up, which i did, and now i'm just feeling tired. in spite of that, though, i'm feeling pretty good about today.

yesterday:

mr smear was too sick to go to school, and i was working from home. for the most part it was okay, though, although i had a pretty frustrating and very long workday. mostly due to test flakiness, and my efforts didn't seem to help very much.

in the afternoon we went to a book fair (they're everywhere this month) and picked up four exciting books, so last night i decided to read the hebrew translation of "the giving tree" to mr smear at bed time. we got as far as the boy taking the branches before mr smear couldn't take it any more, he just broke down in tears and we couldn't finish the reading. so i held him tight (while fighting uncontrollable nervous giggling), conceded, and switched to the incredibly beautiful the iron man: a children's story in five nights.

i then spent the rest of the night (well, until 1am or so at any rate), entertaining myself online, watching wonderful and surprising things like big oxygen and playing tales of the neon sea (what a gorgeous game!).

wednesday:

mr smear woke up with a nasty cough, but it didn't seem like we should keep him home. at 9.05am the therapist called to find out where we were, and we - were - mortified. i don't know why it didn't occur to me to ask for a video chat, but we scrambled to catch a bus and made it there with ten minutes left on our clock. fortunately, she managed to move her next appointment by fifteen minutes and that gave us just enough space for a very productive and insightful meeting!

some of the advice she gave us was contradictory, but it's a lot of grey-area no-right-answers kind of stuff and in the two days since i feel like all three of us are doing better.

it was a constructive day at work. and a pleasant evening. i continued playing around with my new npm package and i'm really happy with it for now.

in general, i've been deliberately going to bed very late for the last week or so, and i've been sleeping much better as a result. i hope this lasts. 

...

i just taught mr smear how to do a shift cypher, which was fun!

werd

 the workshop this morning was kinda alright, but also kinda sucked at the same time. we were in the very fancy AWS offices - it's been three and a half years since i was last in those, and walking in was a strange sensation - and both wifi networks weren't functional and the room we were in had terrible reception so our mobile tethering didn't work either.

added to that, the stuff we worked through yesterday in preparation had been fully customized to the point where our experience didn't help us, and the guys who ran the workshop only finished with the customization last night / this morning and it was somewhat buggy.

at least the last hour was interesting for the attendees, those of whom hadn't walked out at least. 

the vegan options at breakfast were okay, but by lunchtime i was really hungry and there was nothing but a couple of slices of chocolate banana bread.

*sigh*

the rest of the afternoon was smoother, and quite constructive. then i picked up my new power adaptor for my windows machine, which turned out to be the wrong adapter, picked up a couple of grocery items and came home for dinner.

i was planning on going rollerblading, but by the time mr smear was in bed i just didn't feel like it any more. i've spent a good chunk of the evening (a couple of hours) trying to set up windows -> ps4 streaming via twitch, which was a lot of work for some unimpressive results. then i spent an hour or two testing and improving a couple of my repositories (in particular the simple-recursive-checksum package i published this week), and i think i'm just about ready for bed.

cinnamon synonym

 "cinnamon synonym" - coincidence, or conspiracy?

...

in my previous post i failed to mention that for the past couple of days i've been struggling with hypersensitivity in at least one of my teeth (around where the evil root canal took place). i went to an emergency dental appointment this afternoon, only to be told by a sympathetic-looking dentist that with my receding gums there's really nothing to be done until the teeth fall out.

@#!$.

...

this morning i tried updating my aws-cdk-js-dev-guide and discovered that i couldn't run the build script on my windows machine, so i ended up putting simple-recursive-checksum together.

...

it was a long work day, mostly spent preparing for the workshop a couple of us are helping out with in the morning. it's a long, but interesting workshop and i feel like the day was well-spent. i took a break to do the grocery shopping and come home and play a little death squared with mr smear and have dinner and get him into bed, then finished up and decided to write up my morning's checksum experience on medium.

i was ready to publish it when something went wrong, i refreshed the page, and discovered that almost none of it had been saved.

...

it's now Very Late, and i'm going to head off to bed soon after finishing my final chamomile. i've been getting to bed Very Late for a few days now, and while my nights aren't perfect i am generally sleeping better than usual.

drama llama

 there were a couple of dramatic moments today that i need to get down before calling it a day.

1. a wheelchair-bound man who triggered gd because his situation was very similar to what she imagines her brother to be in

2. a fight breaking out in the grocery store between a different wheelchair-bound man who was yelling at one of the workers and calling them a thief because he didn't like the prices and the worker who only had so much patience for being yelled at rudely

3. a phone call from gd while i was paying for the groceries after mr smear had accidentally ingested dairy (his friend brought him an ice lolly that he thought was vegan), she managed to get him an allergex in time but it took a while to kick in and the symptoms were worrying all of us

otherwise, i'm kinda glad and kinda sad about today. i'm glad it's over, i'm sad that i'm glad it's over, and i hope that i manage to get a decent night's sleep and have a more encouraging day tomorrow.

maybe not the same direction

 let's start with the good stuff: the weekend. it was a good weekend. it was a quiet weekend, and although i had to have my laptop bag with me at all times, the pager never went off and i got to enjoy good times with my family.

on friday morning gd and i did some shopping and tried watching mad max beyond thunderdome. it was fun at the beginning but there was too much animal cruelty and gd had to walk away. same with an episode of adventure time we watched last night (angel face). we picked up mr smear from school - he hadn't been cooperative, but there were no serious incidents at least - and one of his friends, and then another one joined later. for the most part, the kids had a fun afternoon and i got back into tales of the neon sea, and now that i've poured a few hours into it i can say without any doubt that it is a phenomenally fun and beautiful game, with a great story and superb word-building so far. some of the puzzles are hard. the evidence gathering mechanism is really cute and elegant.

this game has gotten completely into my head.

yesterday morning we all managed to get it together early and headed off to the beach to meet some friends. it was a hot day and we were surrounded by pride revellers (mostly fine, but there were a couple of disturbing conversations that one of the kids might have overheard and the guy who rocked up with a blow-up doll was a bit much), but we generally had an enjoyable morning and i even jogged for a bit with the other dad until i realized that i'd left my phone behind and was still on-call :P

we stopped for a bite on the way home, then spent a very lazy afternoon doing not much.

i didn't get much sleep last night, and i'm feeling it today (possibly also the jogging and the sun exposure etc.)... my work on thursday was very frustrating, but it paid off this morning as i got everything running and demonstrated that one of our customers was wrong to blame our software... i was disappointed to learn that the exciting breakthrough discovery i made isn't going to be reviewed, and i've spent half my day trying to build up motivation for a task that i couldn't care less about. and this feeling that i have has been mixed up with the feedback session from wednesday, and i'm thinking that maybe we're just not aligned and not going to be aligned. maybe i should be thinking about moving on.

i'm not unhappy like i was half a year ago, but i'm definitely not happy either.

...

i've only seen the first third of EMERGENCY EPISODE: Ex-Google Officer Finally Speaks Out On The Dangers Of AI! - Mo Gawdat | E252, but i can already say without a doubt that it's not merely "interesting", but should be considered mandatory viewing by everyone.

published!

 the podcast has been resurrected, after quite a few hours fixing the feed (which i forgot about when i migrated from server to cloud a few months ago, and didn't have any of the backups i thought i'd made), and quite a few hours reclaiming the various accounts that have, for one reason or another, decided that i'm not eligible to manage my own podcast (i'm still locked out of iTunes, with nobody to talk to).

anyway, it's all good now and i'm really happy with the result. i did end up making a change on tuesday morning, and that was re-recording the intro with mr smear ^_^

you can hear the results (or see them, if you go the youtube route) here!

...

it's been a weird week so far, and i'm still waiting for the pager to go off when it's most inconvenient. i've at least enjoyed a fun achievement (i figured out a way to hack streaming response support for lambdas), and my annual feedback session with my boss this evening could definitely have gone worse. it wasn't stellar, but it's an alignment thing and every time we talk we both end up feeling like we're generally moving in the right direction.

gd's been having a couple of rough days. this week we've been working through the mad max series. she watched the first one without me and bailed about halfway through, and when i skipped through i realized that i'd never actually seen it myself. it's a milestone movie, but by today's standards not really watchable. the road warrior, on the other hand, is still great fun!

mr smear's had some good days and some not good days. we've talked a lot, hopefully some of it has landed.

my mom will be here in less than a month, and we're all excited! we're busy planning touristy things, i realized this evening that i don't think we're going to be able to do the winter vacation in montréal like we'd planned. c'est la vie.

fingers crossed

 it's just past 1am, and i've managed to splice together the new video for the podcast. using clipchamp and the sound recorder that comes with windows, i've managed to do it far more easily than using the macos tools! the quality's not perfect, but that's me and my not-studio conditions, and when i wanted to do something interesting with the audio i jumped back to garageband for its effects.

[this post was interrupted by a phone call, my heart started racing in anticipation for an on-call page. nope, it was a spam call. wonderful.]

the only thing left to do is review the completed video in the morning with my wife. i'm pretty happy to put the video out there, but i have a suspicion that there might be a couple of things that i should probably clean up... at least i know that if i do need to update something, it's really not going to be too big a deal.

my heart in a dumpster

 sunday was fine, right until i arrived at the school to pick up mr smear. the councilor informed me that he'd destroyed another kid's artwork, the same kid he'd thrown a rock at a month ago. that was bad enough. later, after putting him to bed, his teacher called, and dropped a whole bunch of horrible news items on us. he's been straight-up bullying these two kids non-stop, and while the first of them is understandable (he welcomed mr smear last year with non-stop griefing and made him miserable), the second is purely because he's an easy target.

bother those kids had a birthday party on the weekend which phoenix disinvited himself to, and we were mortified to learn that he'd been trying to convince the other kids not to go either. m*****f*****.

in addition to that side of the story, we wanted to know more about the kid who's purportedly been beating up mr smear regularly. he's autistic, and the kids with him are also in "special ed". and, it appears, mr smear insists on finding them during recess. a girl-friend of his joined / joins him (not clear if it was a once-off thing), and she ended up getting bashed in the face with a stick.

gods help us.

today the kids went on a hike, and apparently everything went fine and everyone had a good time. but there was a minor incident in the after-school program. minor, but ffs we need this shit to end.

...

i'm on-call since this morning. pray for me.

imperfections

 today was mostly great. a couple of points of friction, but mostly great. we all enjoyed raiders of the lost ark, we went out for a bit and hung out at a local park, we watched a bit more of wolfwalkers at dinner time (after a tricky negotiation to get mr smear showered before dinner), and after he went to sleep gd and i finished watching serenity which really was brilliant in spite of the rushed start.

it's just past 1am and i've just finished the recording for the podcast episode. during the week i'll try to stitch it together, along with the update of mr smear and me singing the chorus of the pretender (which we might have to re-record because as amazing as it is with everything else, clipchamp tends to clip the first sounds when recording... thank the gods they haven't broken the sound recorder. yet.

11th level of awesomeness

 i did it! i finally got the trophy i've been working towards, and it does feel good. it wasn't the only trophy for this week, either - yesterday marks the first day in about three and a half years that i've been able to put together the script for a new podcast episode. to be fair, it was half-complete this whole time, but i'm finally ready to record and i'm a bit nervous in anticipation.

thursday:

from a mr smear perspective, it wasn't a perfect day but there wasn't anything major. in the evening we took him to see the therapist, and were surprised to learn that his parents weren't invited. so we got a "date hour" milling around a cool area, and then had dinner at a hummusia close by. sitting at a table next to a bunch of south africans with thick joburg accents, trying very hard not to eavesdrop.

work-wise, it was a good day. i completed a hugely impactful task over the course of the day, and ended the day feeling pretty good about having a clear desk for next week's on-call. not that i'm excited about going on-call again, but it's better to not have additional pressure.

yesterday:

i'm glad i listened to gd and did a very early grocery run, it was about 40 degrees centigrade and the world was baking. one of mr smear's friends came over after school for a few hours of minecraft, and i managed to get the podcast script completed in spite of that noise. i'm also very pleased that mr smear's friend convinced him to (finally!) get into survival mode :)

last night gd and i watched quite a bit of serenity, it definitely gets better.

today so far:

mr smear and i got up early (as usual), and i played around some more with clipchamp. it's REALLY powerful, and intuitive, and i like it. a lot. i had a good chat with my mom, who's saturday morning golf was cancelled due to the opposite weather we're having. mr smear and i played a little bit of mr. robot, and so far it's a lot of fun!

the big plan for the day? we're going to watch indiana jones: raiders of the lost ark. it's time.

serenity

so... done but not so dusted. i was feeling antsy on tuesday night, and didn't go to sleep until late. even later than late, because i was up long enough to check on the results of the nightly cleanup code i'd committed and see that it had failed. others were online too because a bunch of other things broke, so midnight through 1am were pretty much "regular" work hours :(

i woke up at 7am most decidedly not refreshed.

yesterday was a long work day broken up briefly by getting mr smear to school, grocery shopping, and helping mr smear with his homework. that last part went well, and it's now been two days since his last incident. hopefully this will last... 🤞

we completed the firefly series last night, and it was an amazing finale. then we started watching the serenity movie; aside from the ridiculously rushed exposition, gd was too tired to follow what was happening so we stopped. i'm a mite bothered by some minor inconsistencies, but i remember loving the movie in spite of them.

i managed to get a good night's sleep last night, although i did wake up very tired. it's fine. this is fine.

...

at the end of august last year, we restarted rayman: legends again. by october, we had completed the game entirely. since then, pretty regularly, i've been doing the weekly and daily challenges. i enjoy doing them - it's meditative, in a masochistic kind of way - but my primary motivation has been to collect as many of the trophies as possible. i need 6000 points to attain the highest level of awesomeness, and it looks like i'll be there within the next day or two. i'm so excited!

...

my aunt's boyfriend arrived yesterday from cape town, and brought a month's worth of medication to tide gd over until my mom arrives. it looks like they've already helped in a big way, so 🤞a little more that this holds.

...

mayce galoni is hilarious. video games vs the bible is amazing!

humming along

it's been a weird couple of days. actually, a weird couple of weeks. there're a million things on my to-do list that generate anxiety when i think about them, but for the most part (mr smear's drama notwithstanding) i've been feeling quite relaxed and have been very good at just putting one foot in front of the other.

it's okay.

mr smear had a better day today, long may it last.

we started the day recording a birthday video for my mother, and using clipchamp was a surprisingly pleasant experience!

i did the dishes while listening to an article being read to me by read aloud: a text to speech voice reader, which was a far superior experience to the narrator app (massive UX fail) in spite of the fact that my computer kept sleeping mid-sentence because it doesn't signal that it's playing audio. i figured out that i could work around that by playing a youtube video on low volume/mute in the background and i'm feeling pretty pleased with myself for coming up with such a dumb hack :P

yesterday, i managed to rework my current solution and refactor all the tests by dinner time. it was a lot of work. this morning, i learned that i needed to interface with a third-party that almost nobody in our company has any experience with, so i spent my day figuring that out and managed to get the job done and dusted before leaving the office.

so that felt good.

i also had a one-on-one with my boss for the first time in a couple of weeks, and it was reassuring to feel aligned again.

i ran into the firefighter on the bus home this afternoon, maybe we'll actually manage to arrange a meeting soon. which reminds me that i bumped into daddy-o quite a while back and still haven't made a coffee date with him...

on sunday i started reading the story of hercules to mr smear from edith hamilton's mythology. i've been using the book occasionally as a reference over the years, but the past week or so i've been reading selections from it. it's lighting my boy up! he loved the story of medusa, and he was enthralled by the story of the cyclops. the story of hercules begins very intensely, reminding me of lews therin telemon, and it gave me a good framing for discussing some of mr smear's recent behavior with him. this evening we read and discussed the first two labors, and even though they're only two short paragraphs in the book we had a really good time picking apart the details and implications :)

gd and i are halfway through the season finale of firefly (she needed to go to sleep), and it's kind of sad feeling like the re-watch is almost over...

f*** around, find out

the meme's been everywhere lately.

today it was mr smear's turn to find out.

he hit a girl in his class today, after harassing another kid who was just trying to quietly read a book. it's the first time i've ever spanked him. i wasn't emotional when i did it - gd and i agreed that it was due, and then it was a matter of picking the right moment - but i was emotional afterwards. i was pretty pissed off that he'd brought us to a place where i need to wield physical authority.

a short while later, after giving him some space to steam, i approached and sat down next to him, and asked him what he was thinking. god knows how effective this experience will actually prove to be, but he basically swore off violence and assured me that he's going to start listening to us.

we'll see.

it's heartbreaking to see him self-destructing. thursday's therapy session can't come quickly enough.

...

i slept alright last night, which was the first time in quite a while. i dropped mr smear off at school, got through the morning rituals, then wasted half an hour with my south african bank.

the weather today was somewhat improved, but still crappy.

work was interesting. i effectively lost a day due to a redesign triggered by a review comment, but i'm definitely happier with where the solution is.

i left work early to pick up mr smear, and we had words all the way home. correction: i had words, and he knew exactly how in the wrong he was and appeared to actually be listening.

we'll see.

i'm very glad that gd found my old keyboard, but this evening that's been the least of my concerns. i'm not sure if i'm having trouble because of the upgrade to windows 11, or because i haven't used this computer in such a long time... either way, slow and steady progress...

...

there's been a mosquito buzzing around me all evening, and i haven't been able to catch the bugger :/

the fear

 well, that was a mistake. mr smear's been really scared since friday's ghostbusters experiment. it's a bit of a bummer.

on friday evening i discovered - to my shame - that i was pretty badly sunburned.

yesterday:

the weather's been apocalyptic since yesterday. quite dusty, hot and humid, windy and even a bit rainy. it's weird. mr smear and i joined cm and his kids at the beach, gd unfortunately had to turn back because she's been really struggling with pain the last few weeks. the beach time itself was great - the kids get along well - but as we were beginning to get ready to pack up a heavy wind suddenly struck, throwing chairs and shoving us around.

it was over about ten minutes later.

i got more sunburned, this time with sunscreen. that i now suspect has expired.

we came home, gd and i had a stupid incident that had to do with leftovers and debilitating chronic pain. so that sucked. the rest of the day was mostly spent watching the incredibles (both of them), playing games, reading and resting.

today:

today began with a stressful mission, after dropping mr smear off at school i went to the clinic to see if i could get our doctor to give gd a prescription for the meds she's been desperate for for the past couple of weeks. i managed to get it sorted, to my relief and surprise, and it looks like it's helping already.

otherwise, my second-hand 2013 macbook is feeling like it's on its last legs so i made a move back to my windows machine.the computer itself is great, and windows 11 is actually feeling pretty solid so far, but i'll be damned if i didn't manage to forget how much i loathe using this **** keyboard. voice access is okay, but it's not that good that i can switch to it...

i wonder where my external keyboard is. i guess i'll look for it in the morning.

i was a bit slow today, but i did get my main task taken care of.

then i went to pick up mr smear from school.

fortunately, the councilor caught him before he delivered his "hate letter" to his little nemesis. it was crude and rude, and if he had managed to get it into the poor kid's hands i'm pretty confident we'd have been invited to a little chat with the other parents... we've had a couple of talks with him and we're praying he's getting the message...

i don't know why i struggled with tekken 7 before, i think it's because i accidentally entered story mode. the actual game itself is clean and clear and well put together. gd and i are making good progress with the firefly series. i got too excited by the apple tv preview app, which feels great and does everything except actually play the media :/

the climb

 last night was really nice, in spite of a sudden wave of nausea almost making us turn back on our way to dinner. we all had a good time (even if mr smear needed extra time to warm up), and there was even some food for us :)

this morning was a slow morning (as it should have been), with me up first and getting quite invested in monster boy, then mr smear woke up and we explored cities: skylines. i love the fact that we've got access to a fresh take on the simcity franchise.

we called my brother for his birthday, and i chatted with him for a while - he's really not in a good place... stuck in johannesburg, with an increasing lack of infrastructure and protections and apparently income too...

i took mr smear out for a walk, and we ended up at the sportec. i wanted to show him the climbing wall but he refused, and when pushed he admitted that it's because he's afraid of heights. so i explained to him that climbing is a sure-fire way to cure his fear, and he agreed to give it a try.

i feel like we both leveled up today. him, for facing his fear and getting the hang of "letting go" (both literally and figuratively), and me for being patient and undemanding and just focusing on him gaining confidence.

we had a great time, and we've agreed to make it a regular thing ^_^

then we came home and watched the original ghostbusters. he was a bit scared for some of it, and there were a couple of sexually inappropriate moments, but overall we all enjoyed watching it together. then we played some pinball heroes, q-bert (the reboot is pretty sweet), and he's now diving into the gigantosaurus game.

gd's really not feeling well, but otherwise it's been a Very Good Day indeed.

harvest time

it's shavuot! our harvest festival that's been co-opted by the dairy industry, and now we're taking our dairy-allergic son to a family gathering where everything will be touched by cow juice. so we've eaten early and we're taking our own snacks...

...

this week was much more reasonably paced than i've gotten used to. the work we pushed on sunday was the culmination of months of incremental achievements under fire: our company bleeding money on ci/cd infrastructure that i've been busy overhauling for the past year. the work isn't complete, but we've finally got all the pieces in place and staunched the wound, and the past few days have felt like stopping and taking a breath.

mr smear's week improved, in spite of a couple of rough moments. monday morning was the low-light of the week, though, and the rest of the moments (so far, i guess) have been pretty minor and manageable in comparison.

yesterday:

scrapper's last day in town, so i jumped on a bus to meet up with him. someone cut the bus off and the driver slammed on the brakes and swerved, throwing me into a woman standing by the windscreen and smashing a mirror in the middle of the packed bus and showering everyone (including someone in a wheelchair) with glass.

fortunately, i walked off with one cut finger and a couple of sore ones, and nothing more, and the woman i slammed into seemed to be okay (i asked a second time to make sure, but to be fair she could also have been in shock).

scrapper and i sat and chewed the fat for a while, then he joined me for a quick grocery run and stopped by to say hi to the fam for a few minutes before he had to run. all in all, it was a nice catch up full of interesting stories and i'm glad we got to see him.

today:

a half-day at work, somewhat productive. then we went for a walk to pick up a gift wine for tonight and have a delicious lunch and coffee at cafe ava - it's awesome to have an excellent vegan coffee shop/deli within walking distance!

the afternoon was lazy, mr smear and i tried out untitled goose game, which was a lot of fun, and we've got a bunch of new downloads to try :)

i'm very excited to have a couple of days off. chag sameach!

hopefully tomorrow will be better

it's exhausting trying to teach someone how not to self-sabotage while they're busy self-sabotaging.

saturday:

a long walk with an apparent misunderstanding of what the word "port" meant. some of it was pleasant.

yesterday:

gd and i went to the clinic and the hospital and sorted a bunch of things out. some of it needs to be redone because i have a form to fill in and no idea who's supposed to fill it in nor what precisely it's for.

it was a long day working from home. it ended with me pushing and praying.

mr smear surprised us by asking to go to his classmate's after school. we were a little weirded out by this because he's been complaining about this kid for a while. when we went to pick him up in the evening we found him very busy making sure they wouldn't like him.

we tried talking to him last night about it. he didn't want to listen.

today:

we tried talking to him this morning about it. he didn't want to listen. the walk to school was mostly him being angry with me, and then eventually him bursting into tears and apologizing. it was heartbreaking.

i spent the next two hours putting together fixes for the stuff yesterday's prayers hadn't sufficed for,   then struggling with administrative stuff.

it was a dust-stormy day, and gd and i were both concerned about mr smear and feeling shitty about what he was going through. it was a relief to hear from her in the afternoon that she'd picked him up from school and that things had been mostly okay.

i managed to get a lot of stuff done today. it was a pretty good work day. i came home early to take mr smear out for an ice-cream, gd joined and co-opted and we ended up having laffot for dinner. (i'm exercising portion control after two days feeling very uncomfortable in my body, so two laffot and one pita). we bumped into an old friend from the rollerblading group who's become a vegan activist working with a farm sanctuary, so that was cool.

we had a minor incident on the way home (mr smear accidentally kicked the back of gd's ankle and then got upset when i explained why it was his fault and not hers), but got over it. then we convinced him to shower immediately and quickly so that we could play a game of goodcritters. it started off alright, but then he blatantly cheated and that made it shitty.

hopefully next time will be better.

bedtime itself was mostly good. aside from a quick update with my mom, the evening has been spent playing rayman (we're soooooo close to the final level of awesomeness!) and watching firefly. and battling an extremely patient mosquito.

it wasn't all bad today, but hopefully tomorrow will be better.

west-bank wedding

wednesday:

i don't recall too much of the workday itself, but it certainly wasn't as rough as the previous too days. in the evening we had a company team-building exercise at eureka jaffa, which was a really fun experience! we then had dinner a short walk from there, and i got a ride home from a coworker who's a sudanese refugee and we had a really interesting conversion.

thursday:

it was a short workday for me, but very busy. i left my coworkers with instructions for how to proceed in the testing without me, and i was very excited to get an update later that everything seemed to be working. it's a piece of work that's a culmination of various efforts over the course of the past year, and it all seems to be coming together nicely :)

we managed to get out of the house on time, which was pretty impressive. the drive to the wedding took about three hours (i'm guessing traffic was worse than waze was expecting), i managed to fill up the tank on the way there (which was a big relief) and aside from being directed through a couple of dodgy areas we were fine. i was a little nervous when an agent called to inform me that we had absolutely no business going into areas A or B and that if we got stranded there they'd be unable to assist us, but fortunately (i found this out yesterday after examining some maps) we were nowhere near those areas.

the wedding itself was beautiful, in spite of a relentless, icy wind, and aside from an altercation when we arrived (gd and i have very different ideas of how we should have handled getting into our nice clothes) and one of the way back (a rehash of the earlier one), we had a great time with the family, and even mr smear got over his shyness at some point and busted out all his moves :)

for the first time ever, i'm now confident in recognizing and identifying all seven of my cousin's kids!

we got back to tel aviv just before midnight, relieved to be home safe after a really nice evening out in west-bank desert.

yesterday:

gd and i did some shopping in the morning, then picked up mr smear and went through to dizengoff center. we got heavily sidetracked trying to organize food, but we managed to achieve our primary goal and i'm very excited that we now have a hardcover copy of the complete maus. i've been trying to get gd to read it for years, and coming across the page that changed comics forever yesterday proved an excellent catalyst!

the rest of the day was napping and playing humanity, which we discovered yesterday and absolutely adore.

today so far:

i walked into the living to room to find mr smear trying to make a level for humanity. my back and neck are still threatening spasms, i'm trying to stretch them out and crossing fingers.

purchase

monday:

it was a long work day, with lots of tedium. then i rushed from the office to the school for our last parents' meeting with mr smear's current teacher. some of the report was very good! and some was very... not so good. nothing we weren't already familiar with, though.

gd and i finished re-watching district 9. freaking disturbing, and brilliant.

yesterday:

also a long work day, but less repetitive. one very successful rework of something that has been causing us problems since before i joined the company more than a year ago.

a relatively successful, but somewhat weird, shopping experience after work. h&m doesn't stock men's trousers over size 36, which makes me... too fat to shop at h&m. then we hit renuar, where my suspicions were confirmed by an assistant that their sizes are ten more than the actual size, so a 38 from anywhere else is a 48 at renuar. wtf?

we also picked up shoes for a reluctant mr smear - we'll see soon enough if he's actually willing to wear them - and a pair of sandals for me which seem to be a good fit.

the good part about the shopping was being able to use the gift vouchers i'd been given by my employer! i'd earmarked them for other stuff, but i do feel we made good use of them.

bedtime last night was mostly fine, right until saying goodnight when mr smear threw a tantrum because it was too late for reading him a story and he just would not accept that. that was a sad way to end the day.

now:

i've been uncomfortable for the last while, but i kinda anticipated that. i went to bed soon after mr smear, feeling a bit tired and a bit antsy.

the good, the bad and the gummy

aerospace:

the good: we all like each other and want to proceed. the bad: a surprise upset in yesterday's news that's sent the company into a bit of a spin (a funding setback for their biggest customer).

politics:

the good: it looks like the ceasefire might hold this time. the bad: the government is trying to siphon funds from the big, secular taxpaying cities to the religious nuts and zealots. 

dental hygienist:

the good: gd and i made our appointments, and managed to get to the school (just) in time afterwards. the gummy: our teeth are in a better state than before, but it was still a very scrapey and bleedy experience.

my wristwatch:

the bad: i wasn't able to connect to it with my phone, so i tried a factory reset and for an hour or two it looked like i'd bricked it. the good: i eventually found a video with some helpful suggestions that rescued it. 

work:

the good: a couple of minor positives, but a big relief that i hadn't done anything about the unpleasant feelings from thursday evening after learning that my boss is off sick. the gummy: not making much progress during a rather distracted day.

blogger / blogspot:

the gummy: wtf google. a bunch of my old posts were flagged as violating terms and conditions by the auto-reviewer and were taken down. some of them had links to sites that had once been legit, some of them were considered too racy. some of them were marked as spam, which made absolutely no sense whatsoever. 

family:

the good: getting gd through some steps in the process of making an allergist appointment. mr smear's enthusiasm for "leveling up" in his drawing. a generally good day.

a good weekend

 it was... very weekend. this morning was relaxed, this afternoon we took a walk to the beach, i got in a couple of naps. vibe-wise there was significantly less stress or disagreement than usual.

we're about halfway through a re-watch of district 9. it's so damned gritty and real. it's hard to watch.

gd went to bed a bit earlier and i've been watching a comedy marathon. i'm feeling oddly wired, i hope i can get a good night's sleep and handle the work drama i expect in the morning.

this has been a week

i've barely been able to sleep this week, and i've been really tired. that's kind of been the theme of the week. here are a random selection of highlights and lowlights:

* i've been feeling uncomfortably overweight these days. maybe we should buy a scale. i feel like at this point in my life i should just accept that this is what my body is like.

* work: the work week was very frustrating, it would take until yesterday morning for our pipelines to be released and for me to finally put out the important and "urgent" work that i finished at least a week and a half ago.

* work: for my first time ever, i have options that have vested. this is cool! i hope they end up being worth something.

* work: i had a misunderstanding with my boss, and in a meeting on wednesday night i became upset and annoyed and intense. he handled me really well, but i felt (and still feel) shitty about it.

* aerospace: i had an hour long chat with an investor yesterday that went really well. it seems like everyone in this little circle is like-minded, cool, and technically solid - i hope the money question works out!

* mr smear: we finally got to see someone yesterday, and the experience was a bit awkward but i feel like they've got a good approach and attitude. mr smear started off completely uncommunicative, but slowly opened up; i was absolutely mortified (but giggled uncontrollably) towards the end when mr smear leaned back on his chair, lifted up his legs and let out a really loud fart.

* work: one of my coworkers is very quiet, and can be a bit of a dick. i review a pull request of his and he became defensive, dismissive and passive aggressive. i went back over the comments this afternoon to make sure that i didn't start shit, but even looking at it now it just seems like i'm dealing with the wrong kind of laziness.

* today's shoe-shopping experience has taught me that it's probably worth the extra cost of letting gd and mr smear do it alone. i'll put down good money to avoid that stuff if i can afford it.

* strip search: gd and i just finished the series, and it's been such a great trip the second time around - everything about the show, and the contestants, is just wonderfully affirming and inspirational!

contact

saturday:

saturday wasn't bad, but it was uncomfortable. we all spent our morning doing our own things, then walked to the beach in the afternoon. that could totally have been a great experience if it wasn't for the fact that mr smear whined and complained non-stop, he didn't want to leave the house, then he didn't want to leave the beach, and he only wanted to do what we didn't along the way (there and back)... so that was unpleasant. aside from that, it was a beautiful day and it was nice to be outside for it.

sunday:

i woke up in the middle of the night (around 2am) feeling sore, and spent three or four hours researching and writing an article on restless legs syndrome. i completed it on my two hour-long train rides, though i have yet to publish it because i need to get the photos done first.

dragging myself out of bed was hard. the walk to school was uncomfortable, and i dropped mr smear off with advice that i could only pray he would hear some of.

haifa is a beautiful city with a great vibe. meeting the guys was excellent, i love what they're doing and i love that we're all in a similar headspace. i think both myself and the CTO were taken by surprise to discover that we both previously worked with anti-ad-blocking tech, and he admitted that his team used to "borrow" from my team's work!

i was invited to join a bunch of them for lunch, it turns out half the company is vegan or vegetarian and we went to an entirely vegan hummusia (hummus bar) - the food was excellent, the company was great.

i don't know what's going to come out of sunday morning, but i can say that i really felt at home and would be thrilled to be able to join them!

...

i got home in time to pick mr smear up from school. i chatted with the afternoon councillors, and the picture i have of his general behavior / interactions with the other kids is less clear than before. i also learned that he's been lying to them in order to get out of doing homework... i tried to do some of it with him when we got home, it was really tough to get him to cooperate.

gd had been spending the day with one of our community's rabbis, who came over for a brief visit.

after putting mr smear to bed, gd and i finally continued watching strip search.

yesterday:

mr smear and his enthusiasm for blockbench gave me an opportunity to send him off with an easy message for the day...

i took care of a bunch of things, then went to the office. the first thing i did was push a fix for something i broke on thursday, after which we had our daily meeting. one of the guys complained that things still weren't working, and i asked him when they last broke considering i'd just reported fixing it. "yesterday and the day before". this is not the first time he's done that, it's super weird.

someone else broke something critical yesterday and it still isn't fixed, so we were all stalled... i managed to get through an enormous volume of tedious effort; it's done, and hopefully today will feel more productive.

apparently gd had more luck with mr smear's homework yesterday afternoon, so that's good. on my way home i felt like my belly was a bit exposed, and while i suspect that my t-shirt has shrunk, gd assures me that i've put on a bit of weight :/

more strip search after bedtime.

today:

i slept very poorly last night.

...

today is our cousins' matriarch's 92nd birthday. i feel guilty that i haven't made time to see her and her husband. they're both suffering from dementia, and i really hope they're at ease.

well, bully for us

wednesday:

a couple of weeks ago i mentioned that we were struggling with ringworm, and for more than a month it has been causing us all a lot of stress and unhappiness. so it was more than a relief on wednesday morning to get a second second opinion that it is most assuredly not ringworm. it's not infectious. it's actually, and this is the first time i've heard about this, a case of atopic dermatitus and there's a list of suspicious possible causes. basically, gd's developed another kind of allergic reaction.

immediately, i suspected that it was related to cannabis, but apparently the skin thing started before our recent adventure.

so that's an enormous relief.

on my way home from work, still heavily contemplating monday evening's revelation, i came up with a simple strategy for relating privileges to behavior in a positive way, and i was so excited to share it with gd that apparently i managed to say it in a disagreeable way. and then, although she later admitted that she didn't disagree with what i was proposing, she told me she didn't agree. and then i lost my temper, and we spent the next half hour or so having a massive fight.

i guess it's kind of understandable why mr smear gets so angry so quickly.

thursday:

thursday morning started off okay, right until i needed to take mr smear to school. he began fighting with me in the stairwell, and once we got outside i realized that i needed help. so i dragged him back upstairs so that gd could talk to him. she tried, gave up after a moment, and then told me he would calm down during the walk.

i know my son well enough to be certain that he would not be calming down on the way. he just stews and gets angrier.

we got about halfway when i managed to get him to take a breath and talk to me. things weren't good by the time we said goodbye, but they did seem reasonably less bad.

then i returned home to a new fight, or maybe it was a continuation of the previous night's fight. this time, though, we found resolution, at least.

i took my watch in to a different place for repair, and it was quick and painless. the watch is no longer water-resistant, but that's fine. it was a cheap watch (xiaomi huami amazfit BIP) that i picked up in july of 2018, and although the notifications are inconsistent, it's a decent digital watch with a step counter and heart-rate tracking that still only needs to be recharged every few weeks.

i returned home and settled in to work. i had something big and important that needed to be done.

about five minutes before our daily standup, the phone rang.

we rushed off to pick up mr smear, who had injured a (different) kid in his class by throwing a rock at his head.

we were devastated.

the teacher informed us that he seemed to be remorseful and feel guilty, and instructed us to be gentle with him.

we're trying.

let's just say that the rest of my workday was a little bit distracted. and a bunch of random and unexpected things began failing (and that's how we realized that the end-of-life deprecation phase date for .net 3.1 had come and gone).

at some point gd took mr smear out to go and do something, which is when the fridge was delivered. 

fortunately, that went pretty smoothly. though there was a moment when the movers thought that they wouldn't be able to get it through the door, but after removing the packaging and measuring twice and getting me to sign a waiver that i wouldn't blame them for any scratches they managed to get it to squeak through without any damage (or without ripping off the mezuzah, which they almost did with their initial attempt).

that big and important thing that needed to be done? it didn't get done.

one positive thing that did come out of this awful experience is that we managed to get a contact for a therapist from the school - which we'd asked for more than a year ago - so we have an appointment for next week and hopefully they'll be able to help us get back on track.

whatever "track" means, in our case. we just want him to learn how to enjoy his life and not be so angry and stressed all the time. us too.

we would have been more excited about turning on the new fridge in the evening if it hadn't been for the trauma of the day.

at bedtime, one of mr smear's friends called to assure him that he was still his friend. it was very sweet. very awkward, but very sweet.

yesterday:

mr smear ended thursday and began friday with a stuffy nose and a post-nasal drip, a great start for their school sports day in the park. gd accompanied him, and they ended up coming early, apparently it was just too hot (it was very hot yesterday) and a lot of families bailed.

the other delivery guys arrived to pick up the old fridge, which by this time had been defrosted and cleaned. although their manager had informed me that i couldn't ride in the cab with them, they didn't want to have to wait for me to bus to the destination so they asked me to jump in.

i don't speak any arabic (except for the borrow-words, and a phrase i learned in the army that should never be used unless i'm armed and under threat), so i didn't understand a word that was said when i wasn't being spoken to. i also had some trouble hearing what was said when i was being spoken to, but for the most part our conversation was good. the guys got a good laugh out of the fact that i could not, for the life of me, pronounce one of their names correctly :P

the destination was in a very odd neighbourhood, with no place to park that had access to the building, so that was a thing. but we found a way, and delivered the fridge, and i handed over the money, and we went our separate ways.

for all the stress that went into planning the deliveries, that worked out remarkably smoothly. and although the delivery cost was high (very high, considering the old fridge wasn't difficult for them to move), we're much happier having sent it to someone who needs it - to a lone soldier, particularly meaningful to me as an ex-lone-soldier - than to recycling.

i met up with gd and mr smear at abu ghosh for a laffa breakfast, i was hungry and i stuffed myself. we then did grocery shopping and returned home.

i was tired. it was hot.

in spite of that, i dragged myself out into the weird weather (it was hot, but somehow misty?) and walked to drone hacker's for a beer and a chat, we ended up talking for three hours and it still felt like we were halfway through a conversation.

i bumped into the older parents of one of mr smear's classmates on the way home (i didn't recognize the father, though he recognized me, and as usual i made it weird), and we ended up having a very animated and occasionally heated discussion about the unreasonable obstacles to making aliyah. the father, as a lawyer, made a very interesting bet - that he would represent us for free if the authorities tried to kick my mother out while trying to make aliyah from inside the country - which in the grand scheme of things feels like a bet worth taking but i couldn't possibly imagine my mother packing up and leaving without assurance that we'd sort everything out.

though... that's really what we did. it's crazy to think about it, but that's exactly what we did.

and here we are.

...

i managed to get tomorrow off, and i'm heading north to meet some people. no idea how this unfolds, but just having a point of contact in private aerospace is exciting in and of itself!

revelation

 that awkward moment when i realized that up until now, my boss might have been able to see my interviews on my personal calendar. i think the privacy settings were correct, but my recent experience with broken macbook "features" tells me not to be so sure...

monday evening:

mr smear's teacher called, and unloaded a lot of interesting and mortifying details. there was a lot of surprisingly positive stuff: he's apparently very strong with the math, and participates in class (and often corrects the teacher), he's creative and apparently his weird brand of humor is something the other kids enjoy. but there was something awful, too. the kid who was harassing him non-stop last year? mr smear has been investing a lot of effort in getting revenge - something we've explicitly talked to him about many times - and has been making things really hard for this kid. more than they already are, because he's... a bit slow...

yesterday:

yesterday had a rough start. it began with a family discussion about what we'd learned, some of which landed well and some of which landed... well, let's say it was an emotional and emotionally draining morning. mr smear got to school about fifteen minutes late and i got home in a shitty mood (in spite of having apparent success in improving it in mr smear).

then we learned that gd's appointment that we thought was for yesterday is only in two months, and that's ridiculous. so i begrugingly (i wasn't in a great mood and i needed to get ready for a big work day) accompanied her to the clinic. the receptionist at the clinic was very understanding, and told us that we needed to get to a clinic in bat yam for an emergency appointment in two hours' time.

we raced to find a bus, which was more complicated that it should have been (the moovit app was not cooperating). we finally boarded the bus in a cloud of flecks of dusty something from another passenger which got in both our eyes. the bus ride was long, very bumpy and filled with fleghmy people.

i tried to get some work done, but had to stop due to motion sickness.

we arrived at the clinic with time to spare, waiting twenty minutes or so to see the receptionist. to be told that we were on the wrong floor (better than sunday's "wrong side of town"). while waiting, we met a canadian couple who've just made aliyah and were surprised to learn that their documentation story took a year and they were physically in canada.

jesus.

we arrived at the right clinic, but just over twenty four hours early. the clinic was closed, the receptionist from the beginning of the story had gotten the date wrong and we hadn't thought to double-check.

...

we sat in an aroma while i listened in to an all-hands meeting. it was boring AF.

we then caught a bus back to tel aviv.

it was difficult to get my head back in the game, but overall i think the day was successful. it ended on a good note, at least. then i got some grocery shopping done on the way home, arrived home to crack open a beer and put my feet up. aside from a bedtime story (i read horton hears a who, and pounced on the opportunity - when mr smear yelled angrily about the kangaroos' and monkeys' behavior - to show a parallel with his class behavior), i kept my feet up, ate chocolate and re-watched the first episode of firefly. i'm loving the relationship between adam baldwin's jayne and his animal mother.

today:

neither gd nor i could sleep last night, so we're pretty tired. and we're about to repeat yesterday morning's attempt, hopefully smoother this time.

...

i'd spent a good chunk of the last couple of days trying to make fridge delivery arrangements. i'm still not done, but at least i have a backup plan...

...

forgot to mention: the other day i got off a bus with my headphones in, listening to music, and walked past a bus where i could hear muffled yelling. i looked, and saw a leg sticking out of the baggage compartment! fortunately some other people noticed too and managed to get the driver to release him! then yesterday, one driver almost closed the door on gd and another on a woman carrying her tiny baby... getting eaten by a bus is a real danger here.

sell the rip?

yesterday:

yesterday started off weird. i took gd to her dermitologist appointment, we left a little later than we should have and arrived almost exactly on time. but we had to wait twenty minutes to see the receptionist even though we had an appointment. then we were informed that we were in the wrong place.

the receptionist could not understand why i was upset.

i thought i'd take the opportunity to take my watch in for repair, and the repair shop only opens at 10am. so we went to my old favourite coffee shop for coffee (i sat and worked a bit while enjoying it, but it was still a good experience and totally reset our vibe). we arrived at the watch repair shop at 10.05, and there was nobody there. and nobody was answering the phone.

i know that they have excellent reviews, but surely people who work with watches could be expected to be vaguely on time...

i worked from home yesterday, which was a mistake because they've started work on one of the apartments upstairs. it was a long day. fortunately, it had a great payoff at the end.

we had a bit of an episode with mr smear yesterday, when we picked him up from school we discovered that they'd watched a theatrical production of lassie in the morning, and his takeaway was somehow "i don't need to listen to anyone". so he was deliberately uncooperative for the rest of the day. not only that, but one of his classmates took me aside to inform me that mr smear had called him and another kid idiots. so we had to deal with that too...

today:

that meeting i was excited for took place this morning, not sure what will come of it yet but it was very positive.

trying to arrange the delivery of our fridge (and ensuring that the old fridge goes where it's needed) is a real ballache.

today was a really long, complicated day at work. but i'm off-call, at least, which is nice.