new year 5785

last night was a huge attack on israel by iran, and we were stuck in the shelter for quite a while without signal, so everyone around the world knew more about what was happening than we did, while the sirens wailed and went silent and wailed again, on and off, and we heard massive explosions from near and far.

and right before the missile attack, there was an horrific terrorist attack in jaffa.

and with all the tension from outside, gd and i had a horrible fight last night, that only resolved around midnight. so between that, and worrying about whether we'd have to jump during the night, it was not the best night ever.

...

monday:

monday feels like an age ago, it's all a bit of a blur.

i woke up really tired (my own fault, i guess), and i had an uncomfortable stomache pretty much all day. i worked from home, took mr smear to his hebrew tutor and to jiujitsu. the work turned out more complicated than it should have been - as always, i ran into a wall of "how does this piece of software that everyone uses not do it's one job properly?" (a combination of fastapi and openapi tooling, with everything failing), but i essentially got the job done.

yesterday:

i really didn't sleep well at all, my lower back and hips were hurting. so i was quite tired.

the work day was interesting, i managed to get my task done as well as could be expected - using some quirky hacks, which of course we'll clean up later - and got a fun little side quest taken care of while avoiding working on my new task, which is another yucky frontend one.i was very happy to walk out of the office for the very long weekend, and i'm looking forward to the next few days being a bit of a break.

...

i've been fantasizing about us going all out against tehran for months, i keep thinking about how the US went into iraq in 2003 and how everyone was expecting it to be a serious war, and then the americans walked right through them. i have a feeling that if we hit tehran directly, we could be looking at a post-ayatollah iran which would immediately change the face of the entire region... so that's what i'm praying for.

may this new year be full of success, and relief, and reasons to celebrate 🙏

overload

it's past 1am, and i'm just slowing down from high-frequency vibrations, most likely caused by a couple of hours in the bloodlines mission that was ridiculously intense for the entirety of the run.

at one point i switched to my browser and read about the mission on the shadowrun wiki, and it became quite apparent that as invested as i am, and as successful as i've been so far, i'm really not particularly good at this game.

meanwhile, i've become convinced that a shadowrun: dragonfall tv series would be epic.

...

i had a hard time getting up this morning. mr smear wanted me to keep my distance on the way to school so that he could prove (to himself) that he can handle the roads, but on the way out the building he started a conversation about roblox that clearly took priority. roblox - to my mind - is much like oasis in ready player one - and the scale and range of games available is simply mind-boggling.

roblox might just be the future. i feel confident that there's a way to make roblox games in which players do real work for real pay.

i came home, and gd and i wrote rosh hashana cards for mr smear's teacher, their class aide (who used to follow him around to make sure he didn't come into contact with dairy), and for him. i was super awkward about writing them, because i'm always super awkward about writing cards or birthday messages or dedications.

it used to be that when i got embarrassed, my face would flush and heat up, but as i've gotten older, my flush has moved down to my armpits. it makes awkward things even more awkward, but at least it generates endless amusement for my wife :P

work went pretty well today. we toasted the new year with a plate of dried fruit and really nice baklawa. i had lunch with the CEO, who jumped both times my phone went off and so i changed the ringtone from the x-men theme back to a soothing track from rayman: legends. the afternoon was super productive.

...

midway through the afternoon i had to rush off to the paediatrician to get a referral for an "attention examination". after expressing relief when i assured her that we wouldn't be medicating mr smear regardless of the result, the paediatrician had quite a story to tell - when she made aliyah, they tried to force her to put her kid on ritalin and she ended up going into debt in order to fight the authorities in court.

what was particularly tragic about that story, is that she did what she could to protect her son, but still wonders if she did the right thing. i explained to her that, having read robert whitaker's anatomy of an epidemic, unless her son struggled through life and wasn't able to succeed in anything, then 100% she made the right call.

she definitely made the right call. on my way out i called gd, and when she expressed concern (again) that doing the test would enable the authorities to force us to medicate our boy, i explained that under no circumstances would i ever let that happen. and beyond that, i believe that taking anyone who tries to court, and making the case public, would be an exquisitely constructive way to take a stand against a system that promotes drugging kids instead of adapting teaching practices.

...

in retrospect, it would have made more sense to go straight home afterwards, but i returned to the office, completed the task i've been working on and geared up for an argument with my boss, to convince him that it made sense to change an API that we have that's really poorly designed.

the boss is being moved sideways (we're not quite sure what that means yet), so he delegated to my coworker... i mean, i guess he's now my boss? i'll start referring to him as my manager. so he delegated to my manager, who heard me out and then immediately responded with "do it".

that was easy.

i left the office on that note, walked home, spent half an hour kind of helping mr smear with his prep for tomorrow morning's math test, and then signed on to a zoom call about sailor's idea. sailor was fifteen minutes late, and the tension that generated was palpable.

we love him, but he really has no respect for other people's time and he has no idea how much it hurts his relationships, personal and professional. i feel like i need to say something, and not in a friendly hinty sort of way.

i left the call feeling like my brain was melting, just in time to wish mr smear a good night.

now, four and a half hours later, it's time to say good night to the rest of the world.

anyways

 we had a bit of a break between movie, then continued with batman returns. there're a couple of problematic scenes, but i think the innuendo went over mr smear's head and we all enjoyed it.

afterwards, mr smear and i went for a short walk and talk, which we both enjoyed. i mean, aside from the few minutes when we ducked into a bomb shelter (the sirens weren't in the area we were in, but nearby). the primary reason for our displeasure was that the shelter had two large mattresses on the floor, one of them with sheets on it, and some kids came in and jumped on them with their goddamned shoes on. their mother asked them nicely, once, to stop, but did nothing about them not stopping.

anyway.

we had a nice video chat with my sister and her kids (and grandkid), it was great to see them! but i won't lie, i had to work to keep from making faces or saying anything: she's gotten so much work done on her face that she can't talk properly any more, and that's really distressing.

anyway.

the evening was pretty good, and although we did have a bit of an issue with mr smear going to bed without a night light - i'm convinced it's what's been keeping him up much later than he should be - that part of the evening also went quite well.

as for me, i've just spent another few hours playing shadowrun: dragonfall. i completed two missions, but they were both punishing, and i feel like i'm falling down a rabbit hole.

anyway.

too much social media will rot your brain. i've just finished a cup of tea, and i'm about to turn in.

signs of hope

grumplestiltskin: i did get a reasonable amount of sleep. then i woke up and fell back into shadowrun: dragonfall. which has gotten really convoluted, really fast - they turned up the drama to 11, and i'm loving it. this game would make for a great tv series!

and then, a couple of hours ago, while we were finishing watching batman (i saw a lot of it, but i went from grumpy to sleepy very quickly), we finally got news that nasrallah's death has been confirmed.

it's a weird sensation, feeling cautiously optimistic after a year of almost constant bad news after bad. according to the news, we've also brought hamas' military capabilities down to zero, and they are being redesignated from an army back to a guerrilla terror group.

it's the last shabbat of the hebrew year 5784 (תשפ״ד), which has been one of the most awful years in jewish history. may this be remembered as an historical day when we turned things around, not just for our people but for the entire region.

a sliver of hope

 it's past 1.30am, and there's still no confirmation of whether nasrallah was killed. but there are vast numbers of arabs throughout the middle east celebrating his death, which - premature or not - is in itself encouraging. also encouraging was netanyahu's speech. i may despise him, but he told the UN off and was on point, every word.

i've spent most of the past hours playing through a particularly hardcore mission in shadowrun. i quit at the end of an insanely long battle, i'm not done with the mission but i definitely (theoretically) need to go to bed.

backwards

 i *did* go to bed relatively early, i think. if i recall correctly. it's kinda hard, though, because around twenty minutes to 1am the sirens went off and we all had to scramble downstairs into the shelter.

that was pretty rough.

the morning was okay, though. mr smear led the way to school so that he could demonstrate that he's ready to do the walk alone ("stay back, dad! i need to focus!"), and gd and i spent a quiet morning doing mostly nothing (i lie, i spent a good chunk of today putting together a couple of articles) and watching an episode of strip search. because we've been together for more than a decade and we still haven't finished the season 😂

oh, and we had to go give him his meds at 10am, the asshat security guard's been uncharacteristically cool with us and let me in to go look for him. while i was on a call with a support agent, and the kids were in breaktime. it was intense, and it felt pretty miraculous that i actually managed to find my boy in all that madness.

the afternoon was pretty chilled. i wanted to take mr smear to the beach in the evening, but gd reminded me at the last minute that we needed to be back by 6 for his next dose, so we ended up taking a short walk to a nearby park instead. where we happened to bump into a woman that i served with - we recognized each other, but until she did the "wait, is your name..." thing i wasn't 100% sure if i was looking at the person i thought i was :P

they've just arrived from overseas, with two english-speaking kids who need to integrate into the local schools, and it was a pleasure for both of us to see our kids immediately click. even though the older one's two years younger than mr smear, they're about the same height and they both speak roblox/minecraft fluently :P

we came back home, showered, relaxed a bit (i'm loving shadowrun), made kiddush (although my mom's properly sick, so she left her camera off), and watched the first half of the 1989 batman film. then mr smear went to bed - almost without a fuss, but he's probably still awake reading - and now it's time for me to figure out whether i'm going to sleep or not.

...

we bombed the shit out of hezbollah this evening, and netanyahu gave a speech in front of the UN (which has done little more than consistently expose itself as a mouthpiece for the most oppressive and dangerous regimes on the planet), and everyone here is trying to understand what it all means, whether it matters or not. and all i can think of, all i've been able to think of, is whether blinken's on the quatari payroll or not. it's been a year of all this insanity, and the west is still telling us to stand down / not escalate when we're the ones who're under attack.

crossing over into weekend mode

 it took me longer to get to bed than i'd planned, but i did get a (relatively) reasonable amount of sleep and so this morning was much better. i still felt a bit hungover, but definitely better.

i managed to square away my main website (for, like, the third time) before heading out to the office, taking a detour via the hospital to ensure that gd's next nerve-block appointment is what we hoped it was. it was, but it's in two months' time, as opposed to two weeks' time.

*sigh*

the work day started off slow, and by lunch time i was hungry and just couldn't wait for anyone else. it was nice to be explicitly invited to sit with them when they finally did eat, and between that and our thursday afternoon happy hour it was a rather agreeable day socially.

as for the work itself, by the afternoon i'd finally shifted gears from trying desperately to understand what the heck i was looking at* to implementing my changes, and the ai boost i got from cursor was palpable. by the end of the day, i was most of the way through my changes and decidedly happy with them.

* 99% of the struggle was due to poor naming.

on the way home, gd asked me to pick up something from the mini-market, and i was struck by inspiration - i asked her to send mr smear, and let him know i'd meet him there. it took me a little longer than i expected to arrive, but i found him in the mini-market proudly offering up the goods (he'd picked out a really nice zuchinni). he handled everything nicely except the payment (finally, a real reason to use cash :P), and he was appropriately proud of himself, as were we ^_^

the evening was really nice. so far, the night's been pretty good too. there's a good chance i might actually go to bed soon.

the wonky thread

it wasn't the worst day of the week, but it was rough. the jump-start and lack of sleep made a neat line throughout the day.

i got mr smear to school at a reasonable time, and he did finish the homework, but not without a bit of a fight because i made the mistake of not disabling brawl stars. when gd went to administer his 10am meds, he said something cryptic about being in trouble and getting kicked out of class, after which his teacher contacted me to explain that he'd hidden his workbooks in someone else's locker so that he wouldn't be able to participate in class.

my brain.

also, he vehemently claims that that's not the case. can't this shit be simple?!

the work day was all over the place. i merged my code, but there was an issue with something unrelated and as a result there was a series of reverting and replaying. that was distracting enough, and i was having real trouble getting a handle on the existing code i need to upgrade, but then a customer got hit by a bug in something i was responsible for and so we went into emergency patch mode. and then, just as i finally started making progress on my sprint task, something in my devcontainer was corrupted and i could no longer perform any git operations.

it was not my day.

i tried to fix it after our all-hands - during which it was announced that our CTO is stepping... sideways?... and the coworker i've been developing a very mixed relationship with is going to be filling in effectively as team lead / head of r&d.

cool.

i needed the walk home. it did me good, just not enough good. the evening was alright, and the family talk with mr smear went alright too. bedtime was pretty smooth. oh! he's getting pretty good at playing the piano (i mean, synthesizer).

i made a point of not going to bed early, and have spent the past couple of hours playing shadowrun and figuring out cdk stuff in my side projects. i think i'm going to be ready to go to bed pretty soon.

hopefully tomorrow will be easier.

peace and war

 we had a really nice dinner, then we put mr smear to bed, and then we went to bed almost immediately after that. around midnight, everyone was up to give mr smear his prophylactic meds (his eye apparently started tingling, there was some drama i forgot to mention yesterday), and i managed to hurt my back while getting up (by lying back down when there was a pillow behind me) and couldn't fall back to sleep.

so i spent the following four hours playing shadowrun and setting up one of my side projects for an experiment.

by the time i went to bed, i was feeling pretty great. that lasted until, mid-dream, i was wrenched out of my slumbed by a 6.30am siren. we all scrambled to the shelter, and after ten minutes came back upstairs. i was still in sleep mode, but by that point my entire existence was feeling pretty upside down, so while i stayed in bed for another half an hour i didn't really get much rest.

now i'm up, mr smear's completing the unfinished homework from last night, and i'm hoping the coffee does its thing quickly.

war and peace

i spent the rest of the evening fixing one of my packages, and the moment it came to rewriting the tests i said "screw that", bit the bullet, and subscribed to a cursor. money well spent already.

i also played a bit more shadowrun: dragonfall.

i got a pretty good night's sleep, and the day began pretty well. mr smear had some homework to complete before school, but not as much as we thought and he did it well. we left a bit later than we needed to, so i said goodbye to him a few blocks from the gate and came straight home, wondering how he'd fare if the sirens went off but pretty confident he'd be alright.

i picked up gd and we went through to the new therapist. she seems really solid, and we very comfortably performed our double-team mind-dump for the forty-five minutes we were there. i waited with gd until her bus arrived, then walked down one of the nicer streets to my office.

the day was a definite improvement over the previous two, but still long and plenty meh. i had a meeting with my boss, we argued a little but generally things seem good, and i did manage to complete my task and make some progress into the next one, so things are alright.

i ate waaaay more food than i should have today, even if it was mostly really good food.

during the afternoon, while i was supposed to be working, i had an extended moment just sitting back in my chair and daydreaming of a post-war middle east in which tehran and quatar were done and everyone else was just quietly rebuilding and westernizing.

i may have shed an emotional tear.

after a pleasant walk home, i was pleased to see mr smear's face again - gd gave him a long-overdue haircut today - and to hear that he had a good time at his friend's place, and even impressed him on a real piano :)

we're going to have dinner soon, mr smear's quietly doing his homework until then and i'm listening to carnavas for the first time in years and feeling pretty at peace for the moment.

muddling along

yesterday:

yesterday was a bit shit. the morning was good, the evening was good, but the workday was painful and i feel like i barely got anything done. i mean, i did start the day feeling groggy and a bit more spacey than usual, but every - single - thing that i did at work triggered an unstoppable recompilation that took upwards of fifteen minutes, and i kept having to context switch and jump between branches, and i was totally over it even before lunchtime.

anyway, so much for treasure island? mr smear begged me to buy him a minecraft book - diary of a surfer villager: book 1 - and that's all he had bandwidth for. and then, this morning, before he left for school, he finished it...

today:

i guess today was better, but it still had some decidedly shit parts. the morning was positive, but spent a good chunk of it feeling thoroughly lost. by the time i needed to pick up mr smear and take him to his hebrew tutor, i'd had some inspiration and managed to get something going, and while i waited for him i synced with my boss and learned that i'd totally misunderstood him... like that's never happened before :P

anyway, i manged to get things working, and then when we got home i cleaned it up and it was still working, so that was a win.

i then took mr smear to his jiujitsu class. while there, i started working on getting the changes review-ready, and that's where things took an ugly turn. and after we got home, they continued to become progressively hairier. at some point, i realized it was time to call it quits and put off the rest until the morning.

that's when we realized that mr smear had not, in fact, completed his maths homework as he'd claimed. what followed was a mixed bag of experiences as he begrudgingly worked his way through the exercises, culminating in a full-scale meltdown because he wasn't understanding something and was inconsolably beyond the pale of reason.

i tried to convince him - kindly - to not let that last exercise get the better of him before bedtime, because i wanted him to feel *some* degree of satisfaction and not go to sleep without having conquered the thing that gave him the bad feelings. we ended up having to double-team him with a more forceful approach, but once he relented he got through it easily and we could enjoy dinner and a more pleasant bedtime experience.

he's actually in bed right now, reading comics until lights' out. that's pretty cool, imo.

and tomorrow morning we're going to meet the new therapist.

mostly calm

 i'm tired, i'm probably going to bed soon.

yesterday: 

it took most of yesterday morning to build up the willpower to do two of the things on my to-do list, but essentially it was a lazy morning. mr smear apparently had a very good day, he enjoyed both his "computers" class (they're making levels with kodu game lab, and he asked me to install it this morning so he could play around with it some more) and his frisbee class. so that's cool.

we completed his math test prep in the afternoon, and the rest of the day was spent playing games alongside each other. i spent quite a lot of time in shadowrun: dragonfall, and i can't help wondering how far i got last time because it's all very familiar :P

today:

i've been on-call today, and i managed to miss two incidents which my boss picked up on, so that's a bit embarrassing. now i'm dealing with a third, and i'm not sure it's correcting... [i just checked, it looks like it is]

i woke up at my usual hour, weighing a couple of kilos more than i have for most of this past week :/

it was a relaxing morning - i napped a fair amount - and in the afternoon, after i spent some time working on the graphic novel, we watched independence day. mr smear thoroughly enjoyed it, and we did too, but i can't see will smith and hear him swaggering through his "cool dude" lines without hearing the irony in his delivery...

mr smear and i took a walk (and lots of talking) through the park, down dizengoff, and the headed back home, stopping for sandwiches on the way. we may be at war, and with a looming threat of escalation, but i love living in such a vibrant, safe city. we got home just in time for showering, brushing teeth and bedtime, and while i was disappointed that he didn't want to read anything that i'd picked up for him, i was very pleased when i had the idea of reading treasure island and he agreed, and he seems to be enjoying it so far ^_^

power moves and bird poos

i actually did go to bed, and i actually slept.

this morning started off well, i dropped mr smear off at school and then accompanied gd to the pharmacy.

on the way home, after introducing her a small supermarket that has some difficult-to-obtain things, i felt something heavy on my head and neck and shoulder.

a #$@&*%! CROW just pooped on me. the equivalent amount of poop to a small dog. a normal bird poop is horrible on the best of days, but i'm now feeling thoroughly disgusted and violated 🤮

thank god it wasn't far from home and that gd was around to help me clean up. EEEWWWWWWWWWWW.

it took at least twenty minutes to get the look of revulsion off my face. i went to the office, took the lizard corpse out of my coworker's cup and cleaned it (the cup), and overall had a pretty solid day. minus one incident with a coworker - clearly with good intentions - being dismissive of my concerns about whether something he'd offered me was vegan or vegetarian (he's a vegetarian) and convincing me something was vegan when in retrospect it most probably wasn't. i confronted him in private, he seems to understand why that's not okay and we seem to be cool.

...

mr smear's friend came over, after a long time that he hasn't been open to a visit from her. without going into detail, she unintentionally did something that was humiliating for her and that really upset mr smear. we had coached him on letting gd handle things, but as they walked into the apartment together he said something that gd was powerless to stop, and that we haven't stopped laughing about since:

"you might have been really embarrassed by what happened, but it was worse for us."

holy shit. more surprising is that she apparently just took it in stride, and they had a nice afternoon together.

...

when i got home, i helped mr smear with his preparation for a math test next week. mostly it went well, but there was a short struggle in the middle... the rest of the evening was fine until bedtime, when i was trying to put him to bed and he decided that being cool was over for the day. so that was upsetting, but a little later (before he'd fallen asleep) i did the thermian walk into his bedroom and he was too amused to protest me wishing him a good night :)

i had a meeting with dod. it went on a little too long - half an hour after i'd said it had gone on too long and that it was time to crash - but we have a real execution plan and agree on the strategy.

beep beep two

oh, wow! yesterday i forgot to mention something amazing - they've finally assigned a new therapist to mr smear, and we're meeting her early next week. this is a huge relief!

...

i went to bed late again, i did play some shadowrun but i also - finally! - managed to get my website working properly again. i learned some stuff.

getting up this morning was rough, but it was a pretty smooth morning. the scale reported 80kg for the second day in a row.

i took mr smear to school, and on the way back called dod and synced - he's had a hollywood-esque kafka-esque year or two, and when he started telling me some of the details that's he's uncovered recently it's looking like someone in the industry has somehow had him blackballed, and all he has to go on are suspicions and an investigation by a recruiter he knows.

wtaf.

anyway, as awful as his situation is, the combination of it with what i learned over the weekend means that he's in the perfect position to help me make one of my side projects profitable, and quickly, and if we can get that right we'll both be in a better place.

i rollerbladed to work, which was fine although my neck's been giving me trouble the past couple of days - i think it's got to do with the weight of my backpack and a bad strap configuration :/

the workday was good. three highlights:

1. there was generally a really good vibe in the office, it was fun.

2. we had an insane experience when i found a dead lizard on its back next to my desk. we then - as a team - spent the following five or ten minutes fighting over whether it was a real lizard or not. the poor lizard's corpse (i'm convinced it's real) suffered abuse at the hands of a coworker convinced that it wasn't real, and then ended up in an absent coworker's empty mug. the whole thing was just ridiculous.

3. after a lot of time spent troubleshooting my github user not being able to see a repository i definitely had permissions for, one of my coworker's suggested chatgpt. the first couple of suggestions weren't helpful, but the third? i'd never have considered it, and it saved the day!

here i'll note that there was a second attack on hezbollah this afternoon, in some ways even more robust than yesterday's. this is amazing.

it was darker than i would've liked by the time i left the office, but the rollerblade home was pleasant. the evening went well, although i literally started falling asleep while reading to mr smear and the sentences i was reading were blending with dream images...

the past couple of hours have been a blend of talking to my mom, watching random things, taking care of admin stuff, playing some inscryption, and reviewing my podcast feeds. i'm starting to feel like maybe i should skip doing anything further and just go to bed.

beep beep m*f*

 so... no, i didn't finish this. i just went around in circles, until eventually it was around midnight and i decided to stop, play some shadowrun: dragonfall (restarting from scratch, and re-learning everything the hard way), and get some sleep.

mr smear stayed home today, and i understand he was pretty cool the whole day. i feel like i got some stuff done this morning, but i honestly don't remember what. the work day was pretty good, although ended on a frustrating note because none of us can figure out why i don't have access to something that i clearly should have access to, and it's preventing me from doing my "one job".

in the late afternoon, all our phones began buzzing and ringing and vibrating as news and gruesome videos of the mysterious attack on hezbollah beepers hit all the media channels.

i called gd to let her know what was going on, and she reminded me of congresswoman neuman 😂

it was a pretty good evening.

i've now spent some more time trying to figure out this website nonsense, and i think i'm going to switch into shadowrun mode soon.

heavy steps into ai wonderland

 the last try was somewhat successful. i passed out quickly, and i guess i slept pretty well, but once everyone else was up at 6.30 i was forced to get up too (mainly because mr smear was moving slowly again).

the biggest part of the deployment was successful, but i ran into SPA issues with the distribution (again) and the documentation for cdk is useless. after much struggling, and a pleasant break to walk mr smear to school, i decided it was time for cursor/claude to step in.

i got a bunch of unhelpful bullshit that didn't actually do what i wanted. i felt strapped in to an emotional rollercoaster, and every deployment managed to raise the bar on how much disappointment i'd been feeling. i just wanted it to end, but i also want things to be kind of okay before starting on my paid work.

by the time i was done for the morning, it was 80% there - that's a thumbsuck and a half - because after enough prompting and complaining i finally got a suggestion that did something positive. now that my workday is over, we've had a good dinner and mr smear is in bed, i'm just about ready to see if i can get the result i actually wanted.

...

the workday was long. i'm on-call, but i'm not sure that means anything today (the one incident we had was taken care of by someone else behind my back, i don't even know who :P), and the morning began with a nonsense devops side-quest that didn't lead anywhere constructive.

i took mr smear to his hebrew tutor, it looks like he had a good day in general but he was apparently struggling with a runny nose during their session and he's still stuffy now, so i guess maybe he is sick after all...

who knows. whether he is, or whether he passes the threshold for staying back from school, it's really not clear. gd's convinced that keeping him home yesterday was a mistake, though.

i had a hard time focusing this afternoon, and at some point i crashed on the couch. i woke up a short while later, not just feeling groggy as hell, but convinced that there was some kind of tremor happening. according to the latest data there wasn't? anyway, i caffeined up and got some good work done, by dinner time i was quite satisfied with my progress.

...

right. let's see if i can finish this.

it gets worse

 it's past 3am, and i've been complete *done* for hours now. but i'm still going, because shit's been getting weirder. but the two biggest issues? 100% my fault, two awful mistakes and i can't even think of how i could've prevented making them.

ugh.

one last try before i go to bed. hopefully not miserably.

brain melting

 i've just spent the past few hours furiously trying to get my website back online, because CDK insists on cross-region certificate shenanigans and it's broken. now i'm desperately trying to get things back online by any means necessary, only it's not clear what could possibly do the trick (and i've tried, repeatedly, completely removing everything and starting from scratch).

this sucks.

the irony being, of course, that me touching my website at all was because i published an article i'm really proud of this morning before leaving for work, and it includes a sample app that i link to and i wanted to manage it properly :/

...

otherwise, it was a pretty standard day, i guess?

my neck and back have been giving me trouble, and i ran out of tissues, and my throat was scratchy (one of my coworkers complained about the same, another arrived having lost his voice after being properly sick on thursday, my boss was sneezing absurdly loudly and frequently).

i worked hard at finishing up my work, and i'm really happy with the results.

i was good about not drinking coffee/tea around meals, so that's good too.

the rare exception

 during our traditional fight about getting mr smear to leave the house yesterday, i explained to him that we always go outside, every day, with the only rare exceptions being when we're sick or injured, or the weather's too harsh.

well, today was just such a day. mr smear claims to be feeling sick, although i'm highly suspicious, but i definitely needed the rest. we spent most of the day playing videogames, or exploding kittens (irl), or watching galaxy quest (which we all thoroughly enjoyed) and the season 2 finale of the x-men series.

that scene in the season 2 finale of the x-men series when nicolas cage stepped in to play cyclops

aside from all that, with napping in between, i've spent a whole lot of time putting together an article on my experience using cursor to create a PWA. as i've dived deeper into the article - i'm now at a point where i'm trying to deploy the result so i can test it on an actual phone - i've learned more and become more convinced that the $20/month asking price for cursor is of far greater value that my copilot subscription. as in, i pitted them head-to-head and copilot's results were thoroughly underwhelming.

as the day progressed, i felt less bad. i'm still a little woozy, but i guess we'll see in the morning how i've fared.

on an unrelated note (or maybe it is related?): my test results showed low iron, and even though there's a chance it's not a problem* it's been bugging me for a long time now that i'm always consuming teas and coffees before and after meals, which interferes with iron absorption. my new plan is to completely avoid tea and coffee for the couple of hours surrounding lunch and dinner...

* according to what i've read, vegans usually have low iron stores, which is what's tested, but sufficient iron levels in the blood itself.

friday 13: rough around the edges

 i just got up an hour or two ago after ages spent impossibly uncomfortable in bed. too tired to be upright, and immediately feeling faint, like i was going to pass out, but also throw up and poop myself at any moment. it's been a while now, a mix of lie-down-flat time and toilet time, and i'm still feeling unstable but much, much better.

so this is happening.

i'm pretty sure a big part of it was eating too much for dinner, but i was feeling off all day, and i guess the past couple of days haven't been too good either. i think i might be sick?

...

the day began pretty well. gd joined me and mr smear on our walk to the school - she's been feeling cooped up, she's still sore but definitely doing better since her latest nerve block - and then we came home and settled in to watch stander. there's a problem with the video, so we ended up watching the first half of apocalypse now instead. this was mostly an outstanding experience, although at some point gd was upset by some animal abuse (there's a surprising amount in the film) and i made the mistake of confronting her about her dissonance on the topic*. i've been generally good about keeping my mouth shut on the topic, but i slipped this morning and it took us some time to recover :/

* she's not fully vegan, though she doesn't disagree that we all should be. in theory.

i picked up mr smear from school, and was pleased to hear that he'd had a good day.

i wasn't feeling too good - i've been having trouble with my neck, and i think something's been stuck on a nerve, so i lay down for a bit. before lying down, i'd tried to add mr smear's steam account to my family account, but had given up. at some point, he woke me up because it had rendered all the games unavailable.

i spent the next while trial-and-erroring my way to changing his account's country, which required setting up a VPN (again), and making a purchase with a canadian payment method. that last part proved complicated, because my canadian credit card's billing address isn't in israel. anyway, i eventually got it right, picked up a copy of dehumanized for less than a dollar, added his account to the family account, and we can now both play steam games at the same time.

score!

as evening approached, we had the same old fight with mr smear that we always do about going outside. i tried really hard to be gentle and make it a discussion, but that ultimately failed. we had some drama, but gd and i rallied and - although more harshly than either of us would have liked - managed to bring him around.

mr smear and i then walked to midtown in good spirits, he had some food and then played in the water installation for a while before we headed home. all in all, we had a really nice evening together.

everything was great until dinner time, when i began to fall apart, feeling suddenly and overwhelmingly tired.

...

it's taken me a while to write all this out, not least because i was playing the martian games in bloons: adventure time simultaneously. i died writing this last sentence :P

i hope i get some sleep soon.

enter the weekend

 yesterday:

picking up mr smear's new shoes on my way to work. in the afternoon, we had ridiculous drama because he couldn't get them on. unlike his previous shoes, these ones aren't velcro... they're slip-ons. i eventually managed to regain control of the situation, and ran him through drills until he got it right 🤦

i received a message from mr smear's teacher before noon, informing me that he wasn't playing ball :(

i had a one-on-one with my boss, and it looks like we're both happy with how things are going. so that's good.

i had brought leftovers to the office for lunch, and i had to leave early to take mr smear to mma, so i didn't join my teammates on their trek for lunch. what i didn't realize was that it was my coworker's birthday - the one who i've been in damage-control with regarding our relationship :/

he responded well to my apology, and things were really positive today, so i guess it's alright?

yesterday's work was exciting, i got a lot of stuff done and i was really happy with the outcome.

gd had had a rough time with mr smear since picking him up from school, but she managed to get a handle on it and his behavior for the rest of the afternoon was pretty good. including mma. on the bus home i asked if he wanted to do einstein puzzles with me, and he reminded me that he was being punished and didn't have privileges 😆

i tried to watch beverly hills cop 2 with gd after putting mr smear to bed, but i couldn't keep my eyes open.

today:

i didn't sleep particularly well, but it wasn't a bad night. this morning was a bit rough, but only because i couldn't drink coffee before my blood tests. i went over the results in the afternoon, and it looks like i'm mostly good, with a minor concern for (possibly, open to interpretation) b12, iron and dehydration...

gd and i went to the mall on the way back from the clinic, and we had a good hour chilling before i went to work.

i started the day by showing off yesterday's work to a teammate, and i picked up on a bug. i literally spent the entire day trying to figure out the cause and find a solution, it was really hard but it was great material for a new article or two :P

not only was mr smear more cooperative today, but for possibly the first time ever he actually did his homework in class like the rest of the kids! he was almost as excited as we were that he didn't have to do it at home :)

i tried joining gd for beverly hills cop 2 again, but passed out almost on contact with the couch. i realized towards the end of the film that a part of it was second-hand smoke, and i turned on the fan and moved upwind and woke up. i find that while the original movie aged surprisingly well, the sequel is only really entertaining if you're admiring just how shockingly amateur the writing was.

straightforward

 i picked up the package in one of the most gorgeously designed buildings in tel aviv (although some of its internals seem to be in a state of disrepair, and the doormen were only kind of helpful).

it was a pretty good workday, i tried using a notebook to keep myself focused during the weekly update and it seemed to help a bit.

by the end of the day, i'd managed to make some progress, but on the way home i realized that i'd left out something important...

anyway, the evening was pleasant, for the second night in a row i read from edith hamilton's mythology and we discussed the parallels with other things we're familiar with (in particular, hades' invisible cap, and pallas athena being born fully formed from zeus' head).

then gd and i settled in to watching the rest of the original beverly hills cop, which still holds up as an entertaining movie, even though it's a real showcase of eighties everything 😂

i've been a bit nervous about going to bed early tonight, so i've gotten a bunch of reading done (internet articles, really), but i am starting to feel sleepy.

humdrum or not

yesterday:

yesterday was a work-from-home day. it started off well - mr smear was fine. i legitimately enjoyed the work i was doing (first time in a while, especially after a few weeks of frontend) and made pretty good progress.

i picked mr smear up on time for his hebrew tutor, which, since she moved closer to the school, now means early. we literally sat on a corner and chatted for half an hour, which was really nice. once he was delivered, i found my "usual" coffee place was full so i walked to the next closest one. i got stuck into the work, and completely forgot that i wasn't right next door so arrived late to pick him up :P

we had about half an hour at home, and then i took him to his jiujitsu class (which went well). gd had packed his bag and forgotten his epipen, but i managed - after many attempts, and for the first time in months - to get his phone to purchase a bus ticket. on the way back, i figured out what appears to have been the problem this whole time: the old huawei's gps location is so completely off that the app refused to validate.

so hopefully that's resolved.

i ate a huge (early) dinner, did some chores, did a little bit more work, then walked to the school for the start-of-year establishment of ground rules with the parents. i realized that i don't know most of the parents - as in, i don't know their names, nor whose parents they are - even though we've all been in the same class for the past three years...

i struggled to here the teacher, but i got most of what she said and it looks like they're running things in a reasonably intelligent way; especially, surprisingly, how they're handling issues with mobile phones, whatsapp groups and online bullying. anyway, we'll see how things go.

i came home, laid out and discussed the rules with gd and mr smear, and bedtime went smoothly. including for me, because i passed out almost immediately afterwards and, for the most part, slept through until this morning.

i had dreams that included battling swarms of bees.

this morning so far:

gd's back feeling a better

hamas is playing more hostage negotiation games, proving netanyahu right (about the so-called "deal"). the only way we're going to come out on top is to stop playing the ignorant west's game of trying to negotiate; we need to understand that our hostages are lost, and we need to assert our dominance if we're going to have peace with our neighbors, or any security at all.

amusingly, netanyahu's trying to prevent israelis from seeing the new documentary that's just being screened in canada, and our courts said "nope" :)

mr smear walking into a pole after weeks of us warning him to look ahead: "i think i've learned my lesson now"

picking up a box-cutter blade on the sidewalk. wtf?!

gd unfriending rabbis who don't stand with israel (i should probably do that as well)

now i'm off to pick up a lunchbox that my mom sent via our capetonian hairdresser.

the false sense of security

 yesterday morning (it's the middle of the night already) was a bit less restful than i expected. after a solid week of mr smear playing ball in the mornings, he regressed, and then gd got upset, and then i rolled in to back her up and the whole situation got entirely out of hand.

so that was a shit start to the week.

...

unrelated, i'm about a kilo up, although apparently 1 or 2kgs is a standard fluctuation? it's a little discouraging.

...

so anyway, i left for work on a sour note. on the way, i stopped by the mental health clinic to inquire - literally - if we'd done something to offend them because it's been four months with no continuation or contact. the receptionist very kindly informed me that the guy who was going to take over left just when the handover was supposed to take place, and they've been unable to find a replacement :/

work was a bit awkward. the first task of the day turned out to be more complicated than my boss was happy with, and then we got hit with a complication on top of that - the customer documentation service we're using is poorly designed and very broken. at least i managed to document some workarounds for my teammates before my tasks got reprioritized.

the second task is a big one, and it took some digging and some assistance before it was clear what's actually expected of me, but i'm pretty sure i have a handle on it now. it was just as i decided that, that i discovered - by happy accident - a bug in our new release, and i caught it just in time for us not to have to re-release with a patch.

it turns out, using javascript's array flat() method inside a push() method with a spread operator can lead to call stack size being exceeded on large arrays... (so we used concat instead)

that wasn't fun to debug.

i walked home, buzzing somewhat. i strongly suspect that the two decaf coffees were to blame, but i prefer drinking those to too much chamomile tea. too much chamomile tea is boring.

i was listening to some really solid psytrance on the walk home, and between that and the buzzing i was literally bouncing for the last stretch, and as much as i was enjoying it i was also trying to keep it low-key but i did notice random strangers staring...

mr smear apparently had a decent day at school, and he'd been good throughout the afternoon. we had a quick chat when i got home that wasn't unpleasant, and the evening and bedtime went pretty smoothly. 

although i did eat more dinner than i should have, but i guess it was better than eating more dessert than i should have :P

...

after reading to mr smear, i watched some random videos on youtube and then went to bed pretty early, feeling stuffy and praying not to be sick. [sneezes - i really hope i'm not getting sick]

...

and then woke up around midnight, lay in bed restless for a while and then got up to stretch. inspired by a really shit playthrough video of inscryption, i continued my previous run in kaycee's mod - i've been trying to play the hydra deck, and i've been trying to do it without save scumming (although without any additional challenges set, either).

the hydra wasn't the most impressive card in my deck, but i'm really pleased to have finally done it! i think i can now say i've achieved everything i could want to out of the game ^_^

relaxed

 today was mostly very relaxed. not only did i get a good night's sleep, but i also had to take a couple of solid naps during the day as well. in the morning, i played some chrono trigger, and mr smear sat with me for some of the experience - it's really fun. i mean, i know that everyone knows it's really fun, but *i'm* enjoying it.

i mistakenly wished a cousin a happy birthday two days early in a group chat this morning, and another cousin teased me about it to the point of bullying. interestingly, i was reading some of worm this morning and i found myself in a similar unpleasant situation where challenging said bullying would only really cause harm to me and my relationships, so i did some dishes which helped me calm down.

aside from that, we continued a bit on our replay of rayman: legends. it's going pretty well so far, and as a family we're definitely playing together better.

we were smarter than in the past, and although we had a great experience watching the first x-men movie,  we didn't just assume that the sequel would be safe. according to parent reviews it isn't. so, in the early afternoon, we watched the mask instead. we all enjoyed it, and i'm pleased to report it's aged well :)

in the late afternoon, i went out for a walk with mr smear. some of the walk was pleasant, but it had a few intense moments - a couple of things happened that needed to be resolved with important conversations. so we had those conversations, and i feel like they went well, and i feel like the messages were received. i hope so, at least.

dinner was good (we watched a couple of episodes of brainchild, it's brilliant), although mr smear decided he was hungry again just before bedtime and ended up with a tummyache... otherwise, the evening went well.

i just had a chat with my mom, who amongst other stories (including the heartbreaking story of a cousin who got scammed) told me this cringer.

...

i'm still feeling amazed that thursday's workday ended so well, and that tomorrow morning i have relatively low-stress tasks to do. this is a nice feeling with which to start the week.

almost two year old me flying on a snow day

the following story is a retelling from my mother's version of events. i don't remember any of this, but the bit about what i was doing always leaves me cringing and mortified. there wasn't much anyone could do to stop this? i wasn't there, and it was apartheid south africa, but WTAF?!

on the 11th of september, 1981, it snowed in johannesburg. i was just shy of two years old, and was flying with my mother and my brother to johennesburg, with the flights all thrown into complete disarray due to the snow.

apparently, i was such a "busy" baby that the crew offered my brother the crew's jump seat so that he could enjoy some peace and quiet.

there was black family sitting in the seats in front of us. apparently, a large part of my "busy-ness" was standing up on the seat, and playing with their hair.

on the way off the airplane, someone approached my brother and told him "your little boy is really busy".

"that's my brother!"

beach ride

 yesterday was brilliant. i picked mr smear up from school, and we sat down to read bone: out of boneville in hebrew together (he's been reading the books alone, but not understanding all the individual words).

we spent the hotter parts of the afternoon quietly doing our own things. a little after 5pm, we started getting ready and took the bicycle and rollerblades out for a ride to the beach.

the weather was perfect, we had an excellent time at the beach. we left just as the sun was setting - a glorious sunset that blew even mr smear away - and the rode back home.

by the time we arrived, we were both exhausted, and hungry. after showering, we found that ark: survival evolved had installed - we'd enthusiastically watched its trailer earlier and discovered that i'd picked up a copy of it about four years ago - so mr smear sat down until kiddush to read through the introduction / guide.

we enjoyed a delicious dinner, and finished watching the first x-men movie. and then... everyone went to bed.

i'm still a bit in shock after sleeping through the entire night. life is okay.

sub-81 and stressing

 i woke up this morning with a bee in my bonnet, and checked our bank account. and discovered that although i went through the numbers with my mother, we still managed to miscalculate the amount i could transfer :/

*sigh*

anyway, in other news, it's the first friday in what feels like forever that mr smear is back at school, and we have the apartment to ourselves. so we're doing chores. of course. but i'm also finally sitting down and looking into app building again.

i've just realized that i'm under 81kg for the first time in 25 years, this is pretty amazing! and gratifying.

getting shit done

today:

a pretty good start to the day. a new exercise.

light rail to pick up gd's sewing machine.

anger with gd after realizing how heavy the machine is, because i kept letting her carry it to her lessons in south africa and believed her whenever she said "it's fine".

a couple of hours of work before heading out to pick up mr smear.

listening to a recommended podcast on the way home.

hungry, stopping at home for a banana, walking in after receiving a phone call, gd screaming and scaring the shit out of me.

picking up mr smear, a pleasant walk home, a good breakfast.

back to the office, sitting with my clearly-sick coworker until we finally all had epiphanies together separately.

a healthy happy hour (fruit salad?!), and a productive last hour to close another intense week.

leaving the office, calling gd and being reminded that i'd forgotten the sewing machine ("you don't sound like you're suffering...")

getting on the bus, getting stuck in traffic and having to take a detour around the protests.

trying to help gd in the kitchen (lemon explosion: she had a fight with the lemons and i think everyone lost)

x-men continued.

mr smear taking a long shower->bath, us using that time to close gd's credit card account. gd's mixed feelings about closing the account.

crashing early on the couch, getting up to post this, probably going to bed soon

(although with sore legs)

(to be fair, i *did* get in a lot more steps than usual today)

...

oh, i keep forgetting i'm on-call. i hope it stays quiet.

adventures in vpn-land

omg, that was insanely complicated: i just spent the last hour and a half trying to set my mother up with a google account that we could connect to our family account. everything about the process is ridiculous, not least of which being that our family accounts are all registered as canadian because that's how they were legitimately created, and we can't change that because we need access to the canadian play store in order to use canadian apps (like our banking apps).

firstly, google insists on phone verification when creating an account on the desktop, but wouldn't accept any of our valid, active phone numbers. after quite a struggle, i stumbled across a support answer that suggested creating the account from an android phone, where phone verification is optional.

excellent. i still can't believe that worked.

but then, once i had an account created i couldn't change its country. even after providing my canadian payment details, because that's based on the current IP address and not card issuer. i - tried - so - many - things...

eventually, i thought "bugger this", subscribed to and installed a vpn on both my desktop and my mobile, set everything up for ontario (not quebec, which was somehow confused with romania?!), created a brand new account on my mobile, signed in on my desktop, and finally - FINALLY! - was able to hit the "join family" button.

i never thought i'd post an endorsement like this, but veepn was well worth the once-off $10 for the month. i've paid for vpn trials in the past and been very disappointed, but this was simple AF. if i actually needed a VPN long-term, i'd probably go for the cheaper plans, but it's good to know there's a viable option that doesn't suck.

openings, closings, and in-betweenings

yesterday:

after another good morning getting mr smear to school, i synced with my mom and made what i hope will be my last big forex transfer to canada.

although gd has been hurting, she gave me a haircut in anticipation of the important meeting that was scheduled for this evening. she wasn't happy with it, but it's definitely respectable enough that i've got nothing to be embarrassed about.

work was tough, but i finally got the job done. then i ran into performance issues, and spent the rest of the afternoon (and some of the evening) tweaking until it was good enough.

at 5pm i met gd and mr smear at the pain clinic for her nerve block appointment. as soon as she went in, i took mr smear for our "usual" falafel laffa. the food court - and ordering in particular - was an exercise in cultural anthropology. even the team working the counter were having a hard time with the group of seniors ahead of us weaving in and out between the rest of the customers sowing chaos. when we finally got our order, i asked the girl sitting behind us with her mother to take her shoes off the chair, which she didn't. halfway  through our meal, i looked up and saw - and then couldn't unsee - that almost everyone around us was chewing with their mouths grotesquely wide open.

so that happened.

regardless, mr smear and i enjoyed our meal together and we both ate a lot. after we got gd home, i walked to the cafe to pick her up a sandwich (and dessert), and the rest of the evening was pretty quiet.

today:

i got up a bit early this morning, with my neck still giving me some trouble. not a lot, but enough to be uncomfortable all day.

the day began with two Very Big Deals: the first, that after chasing down the canadian debt we generated migrating and getting settled for two and a half years, we finally were able to pay it off! we're not out of the woods yet - we owe my mother and our south african bank quite a lot of money - but it's a huge milestone and relief.

the meeting i was looking forward to in the evening? gco had forgotten about it and run into complications, so it had to be cancelled :(

the second Big Deal was a meeting with mr smear's teacher, principal and guidance counsillors. the first step to a corrective experience was that i made it very clear to the principal - twice, for two different aspects - where and why our last meeting went south, and she accepted it with a grace that really impressed me. the second was an actual discussion - much easier to have without gd, primarily because i didn't spend half the meeting translating. so it's a pity she couldn't make it, but it worked out for the best.

in short, mr smear has started the year on the right foot*, and we've received helpful advice, and he's going to be supported, and we're all feeling better about how he's handling.

* okay, not perfectly, as we learned later in the day, but definitely on the right foot.

my work day was a bit wonky. i fixed yesterday's code based on my boss' comments, partially at least, but i was supposed to be focused on a hugely important bug and it was a morning full of distractions (although the back-to-school sandwiches were very welcome). at lunchtime i walked to the school to pick up mr smear, walked him pleasantly back home, had a bit of a family fight when gd found out that he'd done something self-destructive that we've been warning him to stop doing, which i'm pleased to report i managed to diffuse pretty effectively.

i returned to work, right into a retrospective. afterwards a bunch of us went downstairs for coffee, where i bumped into one of my cousin's kids, who's just started working two floors up from us.

the rest of the workday was a mixed bag. by the time i left, i hadn't achieved what i needed to and i felt like my brain was melting out my ears...

i walked home, managed to rekindle the earlier fight, which we eventually seemed to have resolved, and dinner was great (we started watching the first x-men movie).

i've just put mr smear to bed - we're both really enjoying reading the goblet of fire so far - and we're about to call gd's canadian bank to ask them to close her account.

sky cry

 yesterday morning we learned that six of the hostages were executed. on our way out of the apartment, mr smear told me that he could smell rain coming.

"i PROMISE you it's not going to rain", i said.

on his way to school he informed me that it was the first time in his entire life that he was excited to go to school.

after dropping him off at his new class, i walked straight to the pain clinic to accompany gd to her appointment. the appointment was positive, and she's (amazingly) scheduled for a nerve block for tomorrow evening.

we left the hospital and went straight to the clinic to organize authorization. and that's when the skies opened. and they opened for a long time. and they opened *hard*. it bucketed down on us. and even as it raining down hard on us, the weather app continued to suggest a 2% chance of rain.

so mr smear was right, and we're taking it as a sign of the world's heartbreak.

we tried to walk home, but got trapped between rivers and had to call a taxi.

by the time i left for work - minutes after getting home - the weather was mostly back to normal.

work: another long, painful day dealing with frontend shenanigans. to my relief, my changes we merged by the evening, and i managed to push a fix for a mistake we'd missed before leaving the office.

in the evening, i had a meeting about a project, and it was way longer than anticipated. it was also considerably more productive than anticipated. additionally, i have a meeting with a VIP scheduled for wednesday evening 🤞

today:

i woke up from a weird series of dreams into a relatively subdued morning. the biggest issue of the day was the general strike and protests. i fully identify with the frustration and anguish that everyone's feeling, but i also feel confident that everything that's happening is just dancing to our enemies' tunes.

it took a while to get into work - partially because of an argument with some of ze germans about the situation - and shortly after i had to go pick mr smear up early from school. i made it home in time for a zoom meeting with the same guys i met with on thursday, this time they managed to resolve the issue (or at least give me a workaround while they acknowleged and promised to fix the bug). afterwards i uncovered a different bug, just as weird.

i hope i'm not the one who introduced it.

i took mr smear to his hebrew tutor, worked while i waited, then came home and dove in to the biggest ticket of the sprint that i've barely touched yet. i mean, i tried to, but i must've eaten (or drank) something that disagreed with me and i estimate that i spent about half the afternoon on the can. 

it was very frustrating.

the work i did get done is a move in the right direction, but everything about it is complicated and unpleasant or weird and broken. i'm not going into tomorrow with good vibes, but i do need to go in with a more professional tone than i've been expressing since i started working with css again.

it's been a weird evening, now i'm going to read to mr smear and try to figure out where my head's at.

...

oh! and i did some banking this morning. we're not in a good place, but i feel like we're in a better one than last month 🤞

reversal

 WELL. we went to our friends for dinner last night, and aside from enjoying a really nice evening with them - and eating too much delicious food - we were all completely taken by surprise when mr smear and their daughter forgot their rivalry and just had a really good time together!

today was mostly relaxed, we played rayman: legends (we've restarted from scratch, and we're generally playing pretty well together), and we watched the second installment of pirates of the caribbean. so that was a great start to a saturday.

in the afternoon we all went out to play table tennis, which would have been nice except for a) mr smear throwing a wobbly on the way that generated a lot of unhappiness and b) the apparently-biting flies (both gd and mr smear complained about them) and wasps around the table.

so after all the drama in getting there, and the minor success in mr smear deciding he wanted to play, we ended up getting out of there without much playtime.

i had a good chat with horseman, though it's tough hearing how much he's been struggling (he's been suffering from chronic pain, he's in montreal where the only effective care is private, and he's had to quit his counselling job and has limited benefits that are running out).

in the evening, i put on my blades, mr smear got on his bike, we picked up our friend's daughter on hers and we went to the climbing wall together, for the last time on the three-month membership we bought. the kids were cool, and the evening was largely successful (her father and brother joined us after a while).

after a few walls mr smear decided he was done, but not after doing something that i had to punish him for. minor, but still. towards the end, i struck a bargain with him that i instantly regretted the moment i heard it coming out of my mouth - two more "goes" to drop the punishment.

gosdsdammit, i'm the one who's being trying to reinforce the idea that punishments are not transactional. fuck, fuck, fuck. afterwards, i explained to him that i'd made a mistake and that that won't be happening again...

the ride home was alright, and the rest of the evening was alright. now it's our bedtime, we have a big day tomorrow - first day of school, and ari's pain clinic appointment, at the same hour. whoo!

it's okay

 the morning went alright. we hit the mall early, and after some consulting with the parents' group i think we got the right thing - an actual tanach for mr smear. and then a bunch of stuff at the pharmacy and grocery store.

and then a bread and a bagel and a... pretzel thingy at the bakery.

we came home, dropped everything off, then turned around and caught a bus to south tel aviv. we got to the store without incident, and picked up our couch cushions. the ones we paid for almost half a year ago. along the way i tried to explain the time value of money to mr smear. and that it's not exactly stealing, but kind of stealing, when you promise goods in return for money and delay the delivery for an unreasonably long time.

on the way home, we stopped at a coffee shop for coffee and apple juice. we all had a good time, right until we didn't - so that kinda sucked - but by the time we left we were alright again. the walk to the bus took infinity time because of the light rail construction, so we ended up at a light rail station and used that to get home instead.

i quite like the light rail.

the afternoon has been spent relaxing, with a good chunk of it devoted to an exciting rewatch of the first pirates of the caribbean movie. so that was awesome. now we're all chilling until it's time to go to our friends - or frenemies, in mr smear and their daughter's case :P

in the middle of the night

 it's 4am. i've spent half the night tossing and turning, mostly responding to a message from a friend about whether or not canada is dangerous for jews. i don't know how dangerous it is right now if you don't openly identify, but i do know that gd and i both know people who've gone off the rails on pro-hamas / antisemitic propaganda, we have friends and family who either don't feel it's safe, or have cut off communication. did we make the right decision to stay? we didn't really have many options. financially, we definitely wouldn't have managed... 

also, i've been physically uncomfortable and restless. so i got up a while ago, and have been doomscrolling social media.

now i've responded to that message, and am left just feeling sleepless and sad.

*sigh*

ugh.

i rollerbladed to work this morning, after a relaxed start to the day. i arrived at the office and realized i'd forgotten my wrist pads, and sandles. so that's where my head was at, at the beginning of the day.

fortunately, the security guard let me roll into the building.

i don't recall how many "i hate my life"s came out of me today, but let's just say that me and frontend dev are not vibing right now. and it didn't help that for about three hours - between lunch and "happy hour" - i was repeatedly disturbed by sudden and aggressive needs to go to the toilet every few minutes. wtf? i was trying so hard to solve a real life puzzle (which i didn't really manage to solve by the end of the day), by the time i left the office i was done in multiple ways.

i got home, showered, and played rayman: legends with mr smear until dinner. then we continued watching x-men, and then it was bedtime, and then it was pay bills time, and now it's i-don't-know-what-i'm-doing-or-want-to-do-but-i-feel-shitty time.

tomorrow's the last opportunity to sort out school shopping for mr smear. tomorrow evening i have an exciting call scheduled with sailor. right now, though?

ugh.

progress

 yesterday:

another clinic visit in the morning on the way to work. buying a laffa for lunch but being served a pita instead, "paying" them to not have to go back inside. meetings in the morning and struggling not to fall asleep in the afternoon.

a good evening, but issues with mr smear around and after bedtime, making for a long, shit feeling until my own.

today:

a somewhat decent night's sleep, weird but forgotten dreams.

on the way to work, i dropped off the shoes gd's returning at the post office. the post office experience was okay, but the people were weird. especially the older woman who kept bashing into some guy's scooter (even immediately after apologizing for doing it), and the woman who was in a hurry because she'd left her baby somewhere bothered me.

i walked and talked with my mom on the way to the bicycle repair shop, not sure if the bike would even be there. almost there, the call cut off, and i couldn't call back - i only understood later that my ear had hit the airplane mode button :/

i arrived at the shop and asked about the bike. the good news? the bike was there, and the bike was repaired! the bad news? once there, i *had* to pick it up and i had to carry it all the way home. by the time i got home i was seriously sweating, and not only that but i was running late to a meeting...

... i managed to get to azrieli center in time for the meeting, and parked myself in the food court. this was fine at first. the first guy i spoke to was pretty professional. after five/ten minutes he realized he was in over his head and brought in a dev.

the dev joined the call wearing a wife-beater and with one arm holding a cigarette out the window next to his desk 😂

we spent the next forty five minutes finding the first bug, but the next one was on them and we eventually called it and agreed to meet again. by that stage the end-of-summer-holidays crowds had filled the food court and the rest of the mall, it was loud and unpleasant, and getting out to the street was anxiety-inducing.

i arrived at work just as everyone was planning on going out to eat. i'd brought lunch from home, but i joined them anyway - i recently read somewhere that nobody ever remembers when you worked through lunch, but they remember when you impacted them socially, so i've been making a point of not skipping lunches / happy hours.

i didn't want to eat, but i hadn't had my usual second coffee and i stumbled upon a fruit shake place selling vegan coffee shakes made with dates and bananas, and that sounded really good. unfortunately, i didn't think to ask about the price until the shake was already ready, and i was shocked to discover it was more than the cost of a meal. it wasn't just me, my coworkers were shocked too.

it was delicious, to be fair, but i won't be doing that again.

the rest of the work day was... not bad, but difficult. i've been struggling with frontend shenanigans for two days, and it's been very frustrating. every time i've gotten one thing working, another's fallen apart.

in the middle of it all, i had my second bi-weekly (every two weeks) meeting with my boss. i was expecting to discuss how things have been, considering that the last meeting was quite negative, but i guess things are fine because we chatted awkwardly about family and argued gently about traditional weddings - i've never been to a wedding with groomsmen.

anyway, there was a visceral moment this evening, around 5pm, when i suddenly, luckily - nay, miraculously - got everything working the way i wanted it. i spent most of the next hour tidying things up for a code review, and then walked home.

the evening has been mostly positive.

skull storm

i've just completed the skull storm challenge. it was the last holdout achievement for me. i have been on edge the entire run, with a wacky deck that had just as much chance - no, more chance - of crashing and burning than of getting through three rounds of grizzlies and everything else leshy had to throw at me.

pictures for illustration:

an eclectic insect deck with an insect/hive totem - first time i've ever played that

me drawing my unkillable, fired-up mantis god copy (the bad copy without the annoying sigil) in the starting hand of the final battle.

what a trip!

for months i've been playing almost daily, pausing only to play through hex for the first time, and for months i've been unable to wrap my head around just how utterly, absurdly brilliant this game is / all the daniel mullins games are.

i just posted a thank you in the discord to everyone whose comments pulled me back in when i got frustrated, and whose suggestions helped me think a bit differently ✌️ 🙏 🤯 

back to front

 yeah, it wasn't a great night's sleep, but it was definitely an improvement. so that's good.

i started the day with a walk to the hospital, after discovering that gd and i had completely missed her appointment we waited months to be able to make. by months. the appointment was mid-may.

mid-may.

goddamn.

anyway, i managed to secure one for only a couple of weeks' time, and i managed to sort out some more stuff at the clinic along the way home.

...

mr smear's drawing is incredible. he drew a knight on a horse, waving a flag, in motion, yesterday, and today he doodled (on a computer with a mouse) detailed images of among us characters that completely blew us away.

...

i spent most of my work day involved in frontend fuckery. i've managed to get the results i wanted, under very particular circumstances, and the underlying code is ugly and i have no idea what it's actually doing.

it's kinda embarrassing.

i went over all the extracurricular activities the school is offering, misread how much it would cost, got both gd and mr smear excited about them, and then realized we couldn't afford it. i'm struggling to wrap my head around how the arts and music programmes cost between the same amounts as the school fees and double the school fees, and that's on top of the school fees.

where are the other parents getting all this money?

anyway, gd took mr smear to his hebrew tutor, and i took him to his jiujitsu class. for the most part, his day went well and mine was pretty successful. and gd's doing well enough emotionally that she's actually been able to read for the first time in ages. so that's good.

it was fun chatting with a cousin my mom was visiting while putting mr smear to bed. afterwards, we continued reading the goblet of fire but i had to stop because the book's version of events at the quidditch world cup were far too much like what's actually happening with us and hamas/hezbollah.

holy shit.

quiet

 the workday was... frontend. i spent the morning figuring out and successfully replicating echarts' tooltip rendering, only to discover that they've recently added a method that completely obviated the need for doing so. otherwise, it was a constructive day but psychologically costly, as in it cost me more snacking than i'm happy to admit to keep me keeping on.

i was reminded of the interview i bombed a couple of years ago, when i said i was "full stack" but not so good with making things look nice, and they tested me as a frontend. in my current role, i'm the most frontend guy in the team and it's clear how much more comfortable i am with the html/css/javascript ick.

i called the furniture store, who we ordered cushions from about half a year ago. apparently they've been in their warehouse for a while, and they haven't retrieved them yet. not one piece of information in that sentence makes any sense to me.

anyway, the day was alright, and the evening was pretty pleasant. i've spent the past few hours trying to wear myself out with games (inscryption and bloons) and youtube videos, and i'm not quite sure i'm ready to sleep yet... i mean, i'm pretty tired, but my back's hurting and i'm worried it's going to end up being more of the same from last night :/

compulsions

 i'm really not sleeping well. friday night was a bit better, but still rough, and last night was pretty horrible. i did have some really weird dreams, though, when i finally did pass out a few hours ago. in one of them i was being harrassed by an "undercover" black man when i saw his red-haired manager plant something in his bag. that ended with me physically attacking the manager, but although i was beating him up we had that weird dream-thing going on where my attacks were doing a lot less damage than they would have in real life.

there was another dream, too, but the moment i described the first one that one melted away... something about a sandwich named "jamothy" and a vegan tuna wrap named "vuna vovegood".

yesterday was all over the place. firstly, i got up with a bee in my bonnet about obtaining the missing inscryption achievements (666 damage and deleting the captive file). that didn't take very long (thank god i tried the stim mage tactic, because the ouroboros one was extremely tedious), but even after obtaining them i continued playing through the end of the game again because i was enjoying the deck i built.

the afternoon was mostly spent relaxing and napping.

i had a talk with my mother about our argument the other day, i hope what i said landed.

in the evening, mr smear and i walked to the climbing wall. the walk there was nice in itself, but there were a lot more kids than usual so mr smear had to queue to get on walls, and by the third one he got emotional. i tried to talk to him after he calmed down a little, but he said some really hurtful things and i needed to walk them off.

we met outside, and started on our way back, and i was trying to find a way to tell him how he made me feel without making him feel the same. it looks like i succeeded, but that opened up a proper fight over him going to the summer school and after school programmes, and i sat him down on a bench and talked (okay, there was some yelling) him through what we, as his parents, saw and went through.

suddenly, the look on his face changed and he apologized for what he'd said, and we both took some breaths and had a very grown-up conversation about it all. that continued into the walk home, and the rest of the evening went well.

this morning was going well until he thought i was teasing him about his accent (i wasn't), and we had a whole different shit-show. eventually resolved, but not without me stress-sweating. and it turns out the new anti-persperant that gd insisted on me buying doesn't work well for me, and she subsequently insisted on me getting rid of it :/

...

anyway, i've just arrived at work and am about to begin my day. everyone's nervous because we stopped a massive missile attack aimed at tel aviv, and i just cannot figure out why we're supposed to be more worried today than yesterday, before we stopped it. or the past two weeks, when they've been threatening it. or the past eleven months, when they've been attacking us non-stop.

if it was up to me, i would've dropped flyers on quatar and tehran weeks ago, waited a few days, and then bombed the shit out of them.

slowdown

i slept a bit better, but still not great.

today began busily. we started off on a mission to get mr smear's gear for the new school year, and neither i nor the poor kid at the stationery store could make heads or tails of some of the items on the list. mr smear and i had a really good conversation on our way into the mall, and if he remembers any of it i think he's going to have a much better year.

mr smear got really excited about vine leaves and cauliflower schnitzel, so we splurged. it was outrageously expensive, but i kinda wanna encourage him anyways.

after getting home and eating a bit, we all took his bike to the repair shop. it was a long, long walk in the heat, which hasn't been this oppressive since my mother left... i had an unpleasant and weird moment with a woman who arrived after us, but cut in front of us. if i'm honest with myself, i shouldn't have been waiting so politely for someone to get to me. anyway, we left them the bike and my phone number, not a clue when they'll get back to me.

on the way home we stopped for lemonade and to get mr smear a half-pita of falafel, which he thoroughly enjoyed. gd says he's entering his "eating" phase. if that's true, i'm good with that.

the afternoon was spent very lazily. we tried watching my dinner with andre, which i found somewhat interesting before i passed out and which gd walked out on pretty quickly. i invited mr smear to join me as i played through the ending of inscryption, and we both enjoyed that. we ended up watching quite a few videos about it, and i'm now playing through act ii again just to get an achievement i missed, and there's a final kaycee's mod achievement that i missed as well...

in the evening, i tricked mr smear into watching some of fantasia with us, which he enjoyed a lot more than he thought he would.

we just finished a late kiddush / dinner, and everyone's getting ready to go to bed.

the feelings

tuesday:

my boss didn't like my approach. we argued about it for a bit, after which he decided to put the work on hold while he thought about it. it's frustrating, but the fact that i've seen that one of my coworkers is working on fixing an underlying issue, the discovery of which was through my efforts and which i've been saying needs to be taken care of, is at least a little comforting.

our new sprint began, and almost all of my work is frontend. i'm strangely okay with that.

on tuesday evening i took mr smear with me when i went to the school to pick up his books for the next year. the summer holidays are almost over...

after putting him to bed, gd told me she'd been feeling really sad. i didn't know what to do with that information.

yesterday:

yesterday morning was going alright until gd said something that triggered a fight, a fight about how she's been dealing (or not dealing) with the past 11 months of war and trauma, but really a fight about how and when she communicates (or doesn't) with me about it.

so the day started off really shitty for both of us, but by the time i got to my office building i'd managed to transform my anger into something more constructive and we both found ourselves in a better place.

the work day was alright, which was a big deal considering how not alright it's been for week or two prior. everything was okay, everything was put on the table during the retrospective and the vibe was less tense in general.

when i got home, gd and i had a talk. a lot of the time, i say things and she says things and we talk past each other, but last night we not only heard each other, but i managed to put things to her in a way that she clearly heard, and not only did she immediately feel better about things but she's been doing a lot better over the course of today.

and even that is more than either of us expected.

i passed out on the couch immediately after putting mr smear to bed. nothing knocks me out faster than reading to him.

today:

around midnight, i was able to drag myself off the couch and get into bed. doing that, however, woke me up just enough to be too conscious of the stiffness around my hips to be able to get back to sleep, but i was also too tired to get up. even for a little bit. that went on for a few hours, and although i occasionally had the strength to get up and move around it would wear out within minutes and i'd need to lie down and suffer again.

i don't know how long it was before i finally fell asleep, but i'm guessing three of four hours of that.

my alarm clock woke me up at 7am, and i rushed everyone else up, grabbed a cup of coffee in a takeaway cup and walked to the post office. i arrived there just past eight, picked up gd's shoes, then walked back. it was hot, and i was pretty sweaty by the time i got home.

i didn't even take my shoes off, just gulped down a cup of water in the entrance and then we all went to the bus stop with gd's sewing machine to head down to the sewing machine repair shop. it was a long ride, with some very... interesting... people, and gd regretfully informed me that i need to start wearing deodorant 💀

we arrived at the shop just after 9am, and we were out of there in about ten minutes. i took a bus to work and they took a bus home.

the work day was - socially - good. all good. the work itself was difficult, parts of it quite unpleasant, really, and it was really hard to focus on it. but i eventually got it 98% completed, and my boss agrees that if i can't finish it within the first couple of hours on sunday then it'll be good enough as is.

i had a long chat with our cape town community director, and it was a huge relief to hear that by and large they've shifted (ideologically) to a stronger (and right) position vis-a-vis the war and zionism. gd still has reservations, but i'm glad that they didn't cater to the pro-palestinian nonsense.

i ate too much cake during our happy hour.

on the way home, i contacted urchin who informed me that she's finally signed a contract with a new employer! we're really excited for her, she's been miserable for ages and the new gig (on paper, at least) sounds way better in every respect :)

the evening was mostly good, although we had to stop watching harry potter during the scene in which bellatrix interrogates hermione because gd couldn't handle it. our national PTSD with the hostage situation is very real.

before and after putting mr smear to bed, my mother and i had a really heavy argument about her and aliyah and a lot of it was really unpleasant. at the very end, i feel like she at least heard me, but i don't know what good that'll do.

if she chooses to stay in south africa, or at least not prepare to make aliyah before the universe forces it on her, the most likely outcome is that we'll all be in big trouble. but she's a big girl and only she can make that call.

overload

 today wasn't easy. it started with financial stress, and borrowing money from my mother again. that's really not a good feeling. gd and i had a serious talk about strategy from her end, which i feel was constructive, and an argument about shopping brought out a story from her childhood she's never shared with me before, something that's pretty useful to know.

i worked from home today, and mr smear was being difficult. i had a call with last week's coworker of the week, and the tone seemed pretty positive.

my work day was 95% battling to understand why my tests were flaking out, which was a quintessentially frustrating experience. especially considering that even the source of the flakiness was flaky.

in the afternoon i took mr smear to his jiujitsu class, but he was the only kid there. i convinced him to help out his teacher with promotional material, and they made what from the side appear to be really funny videos. if the videos don't come out as funny, i personally got to witness absolute hilarity in their production :)

i'm concerned about mr smear's neck - he really doesn't understand how important it is to keep his neck stiff when standing on his head. or use his arms to carry his weight. i really hope he doesn't end up with a neck like his parents'...

while mr smear's behavior while we were out was good, it regressed as soon as we got home. gd informed me that it's been days of that - i'd thought everything was going smoothly - and we had a couple of tense "conversations" before he appeared to remember his place. the rest of the evening went pretty smoothly as far as he was concerned.

another coworker called me just as mr smear was going to bed, and he confirmed that the theory i'd come up with only minutes before made sense, and pointed me towards the source. i think he was quite surprised that i came up with a solution as quickly as i did, and once he understood what i was getting at he seemed enthusiastic. hopefully my boss will feel the same tomorrow.

earlier i completed a survey from the school, it looks like they're making a play for controlling the kids' screentime and access to mobile devices. i don't trust their judgement in the slightest.

gd and i watched the first bit of the director's cut of donnie darko before she crashed, and although it's been a couple of decades i was amazed by how familiar i felt with the characters and scenes!

after gd went to bed, i had a quick chat with my mom and then fired up inscryption. i meant to play until i was ready to pass out, but it's almost 1am and i've just completed act iii for the second time. only this time, i unlocked loads more stuff, built a ridiculously overpowered and fun deck, and encountered some puzzles and scenes i'd completely missed the first time around. i'm really happy i decided to play through again.

otherworldly

 today was a weird day. i was on-call, but fortunately the only thing i needed to deal with could wait until i was back in the office... mr smear and i accompanied gd to the dermatologist, deep in the heart of bnei brak. on the bus there we discussed - for mr smear's benefit - the differences and similarities between the ultra-orthodox and us, and he was fascinated.

we arrived half an hour earlier than the scheduled appointment time, and just as the electricity in the building began to flicker, which messed up the queue system. we walked a bit to find a store where i could get a coffee and gd and mr smear could get something cold to drink, and the two of them picked up parve (but not vegan) potato burekas which they both agreed was absolutely delicious.

fortunately, due to my not wanting to burn my tongue i took the lid off my coffee before tasting it, so i had the opportunity to see that they'd put milk in it and take it back for a replacement.

we ended up waiting quite a while for the doctor, but once we saw him he was absolutely worth the wait. he was patient, and thorough, and explained his thinking while actually doing something to help gd. apparently, what she's managed to develop is a "nail-shaped corn" driving straight into her foot. he performed the conservative treatment, and we're all hoping it's good enough and that she won't end up needing surgery.

getting back to tel aviv took forever, partially because the first bus skipped our stop, and partially because of the ridiculous traffic through bnei brak...

i was hungry by 2pm when i finally got into the office, but i had some challah and a couple of tiny pieces of mr smear's breakfast wraps, and a banana, and aside from that and a couple of energy bars i was very good about not snacking today.

i had a big dinner to make up for it, but all healthy stuff :) i registered yesterday that over the past week i've been getting flabbier again - not heavier, but definitely more "meaty" than i'd like :/

the work day felt marginally successful, and i walked home in time for dinner. we continued watching the seventh harry potter movie, and then it was mr smear's bedtime, and then i sat down for some more inscryption time.

i discovered the bone lord in act iii, which i hadn't heard of before, and i beat the mycologists in a way that scored me an *amazing* card even though i hadn't read how that mechanism works (i just got lucky).

oh, and i've started doing an exercise that i saw online today, seems like it might actually be good for my hip / waist issues.