queues

thursday:

i've been meaning to post this since thursday evening, now i'm confident i've forgotten some interesting things... most of the day was spent managing a couple of rabbitmq queues, i really didn't get much done otherwise, and i was very happy to get out of the office and into the weekend.

of course, i'm on-call today :P

yesterday:

gd and i went looking for a tumbledryer. we were standing there on the showroom floor, struggling to figure out how we could make it work, both physically and financially, because there's no way to put it on top of our washing machine (which travels) and no space anywhere else in the apartment, when the floor manager asked if he couldn't interest us in a combo washer/dryer.

which costs the same as a dryer, and takes up the same amount of space. i don't know how we never encountered a combo machine before, but holy shit it would have saved us so much headache and money and apartment space if we had! so it's being delivered on monday, and hopefully we'll find someone to take our current machine off our hands before then.

we did some grocery shopping, and ran into my previous team lead / department head on the way, which was cool.

we came home to drop everything off, then went to pick up mr smear and his friend. the afternoon was them playing their games, me playing crying suns (i've been doing a lot of that, lately), and then downtime / naptime for everyone once his friend left.

we were supposed to go with sailor to friends for dinner, but they literally cancelled at the last minute. so we ended up going to a vegan restaurant in neve tzedek, and the experience was mostly great.

i say mostly, because mr smear choked on a kebab and gd had to perform the heimlich manoever on him. let's just say that it was an emotional, scary experience for everyone.

it was also somewhat corrective, for me. i was thinking about my parenting a lot over the course of the past week, and i had a chance to put what i've learned into practice, and it helped.

we came back home, sailor hung around for a while to chat, and then we all said goodnight.

today so far:

i had some trouble sleeping, and got up pretty early. then everyone else followed suit, and we began the day watching the tyson vs paul fights. i mean, we watched taylor vs serrano, which was an absolutely infuriating insult to everyone. then we watched tyson vs paul.

now, i know that it was extremely unlikely that tyson would win, but i hoped for it anyway. and the fact that he went all eight rounds? the man is 58, that in itself is amazing. i found the way they ended the fight quite heartwarming, and some of mike's post-fight interview was hilarious.

now i've taken care of a huge pile of dishes, and we just had an explosion with mr smear being uncooperative about logging off his game, and on that sour note, i'm off to take sailor to the airport.

flaming walnuts

missed from yesterday: the walnut story. mr smear *hates* walnuts, but if he hasn't had pancakes (with ground flaxseed) then it's the next best source of omega-3. the other day he had the bright idea of putting chocolate syrup on the walnut, which was wildly successful. yesterday, when i offered him walnuts with chocolate syrup, he said no, and asked me to put a single drop of the jalapeno hot sauce on one of them for him to try.

let me be clear: mr smear experimenting with food is new, and absolutely thrilling for me. so i carefully put a single drop on a walnut, and he loved it! so he asked me to pour the hot sauce on all the walnuts. liberally.

and he ate the shit out of it 🤯

today:

it was a pretty calm morning. i left for work early so that i could have a chat with astute and discuss the politics surrounding the war. it was supposed to be half an hour, but an additional hour flew past before i realized that i needed to go back to my office.

an electrician came to our apartment while i was on that call, and was unable to get mr smear's bedroom light to behave badly. of course. so he tightened things up and hopefully it'll be fine now. that cost a whole lot of money we didn't need to spend... i didn't even try to get our landlords to pay the bill (but i did make sure they knew about it).

it was an odd sort of workday, punctuated by a mission to tamir for falafel and salt 'n vinegar chips, and again for vegan bourekas.

i got home with barely enough time to shower before joining a webinar with bijan kian, which was very interesting.

i'm tired, and i'm probably going to bed shortly.

testing

 the biggest news of the day was my mother meeting with representatives of the jewish agency to go through her documents again. unfortunately, it wasn't the final meeting, but it does look like she's made good progress and i'm very pleased that she spoke some hard truths to the reps that needed to be said.

hopefully she'll be sorted within the next couple of months. that would be nice. her story's going on four years already.

...

today got an angry start, part of it gd and mr smear (he's still a slow starter), part of it gd and one of our frying pans. so, after accompanying mr smear to school, gd and i went shopping. we picked up two frying pans, and a couple more soft blankets for our couch because winter's coming, and a couple of organizers to try and sort out our living room nightmare of piles of books and drawn-on pages and documents all over the place.

no vegan marshmallows for the birthday party mr smear's going to on saturday.

...

on my way to work i was suddenly overcome by some heavy memories of me being too hard on a much younger mr smear. it doesn't help that i thought i was doing right by him, i know now how messed up my behavior was and i'm sure that's going to haunt me for the rest of my life.

...

work today was all about writing and running tests. it was mostly good, minus a rocket attack and needing to fart while we were all waiting in the stairwell, and a bit of a fight with my boss which i definitely could have handled better.

i'm not sure if it helped that i was proved right by the end of it :P

i headed to the supermarket on my way home to see if i could find vegan marshmallows, and i'm getting the feeling they're off the shelves everywhere all of a sudden. i hunted through the entire mall until i eventually got to a candy store that had, while not the marshmallows i was looking for, a pretty good alternative from haribo. i'm not 100% sure if it's vegan, but at least it doesn't have fish, dairy or eggs in it...

they also had a giant bag of katjes that says "vegan" on it. so i bought that as well ^_^

i picked up a few umbrellas on the way to the bus stop, and the rest of the evening's been pretty good so far. putting mr smear to bed was a little bumpy, but we didn't escalate and i'm feeling pretty good about how the day went.

doing, and not doing

 i slept pretty well last night, but not enough. after taking mr smear to school, i continued on to the post office to pick up the palm rest sticker for my dell laptop. it was a beautiful morning, and i would have appreciated it had gd and i not been fighting over whether mr smear had lice or not 😣

anyway, we got through it quickly, at least.

i applied some more spackle on a spot i'd missed yesterday, and made some good progress with the silicone tube in spite of the fact that it's designed for one of those gun thingies and now the skin on my hand's peeling as a consequence :P

i called the number of the organization that's supposed to take over gd's cannabis licensing, which was just like a canadian government organization: a whole bunch of telephone menus, only to be directed to their website instead. anyway, i uploaded everything and i hope it's good enough.

i discovered that the sticker i'd bought was the wrong one, the ali express format confused me and i ended up purchasing a similar-but-different product. fortunately, i managed to cut out what i needed and it fits pretty well, and i don't really care if it's incomplete - it does the job.

work-wise, i think it's safe to say that i got practically nothing of value done this morning. i was quite hungry and i snacked a lot. i did do quite a bit while waiting for mr smear's hebrew lesson - oh! he drew a pretty cool pixel art hand today, we're quite proud ^_^

we're also extremely proud, and literally amazed, that he figured out part of wolfmother - pyramid by himself on the keyboard, entirely from memory because we haven't heard any wolfmother in aaaaaages 🤯

i did a fair amount of work in the afternoon, kinda making up for the slow morning, and then received a suspicious-looking message that i had a package waiting for me at a postal point in dizengoff center that i'd never heard of. i tried calling, but the number wasn't connected, and the message had come with a warning that they'd only hold the package for two business days, so on the off-chance that it was real (no way i was clicking on the url-shortened link) i decided to head down and see what was going on.

it was raining. i noped the fuck back home and waited until things looked dryer, getting some more work done in the meanwhile.

when it was dark already, i tried again. i made it there without a hitch (although something in the bus made my skin crawl), and i found the postal store. i explained my issues to the woman at the desk, who promptly disappeared. i struggled to find my package, and ask for assistance. the only person working at that point was a sharp-faced woman who assured me she'd help me in just a minute. then two teenagers came in, and she turned to them.

i asked her why i wasn't being helped. she told me, "they're kids". i was utterly dumbstruck for a moment, then tried to get her to explain why they get priority, but zero fucks were given on her side and on mine, i had to keep it together to not lose my goddamned mind. it was a while after i left the store before i started to cool off.

jesus.

anyway, i picked up a new pixel art sketch book (just a nice sketch book with squares) for mr smear now that he understands what i was trying to achieve the last time (when gd tried to inspire him with some examples, and he decided her drawings were cooler than his so he refused to use it), so that's cool.

i tried to come home but it was raining again, i then spent twenty minutes or so hunting for an umbrella that didn't suck and also didn't cost too much money. i ended up leaving without finding one, and fortunately made it home during a break in the clouds.

we watched about half of pixels during dinner, some of which is awkward, but most of it is hilarious, especially for a nine year-old...

and now it's bedtime. i'm a bit disappointed that mr smear didn't want to continue reading the magic pudding tonight, and then gd wasn't interested in it either :/

norms

 why am i awake so late? i've been soooo tired lately...

getting mr smear to school was fine, and i actually put a layer of spackle over where i cleared the peeling crud off mr smear's walls, as well as put in the first line of polyfill around the cupboard in our passageway.

so that was good.

gd and i arrived a bit late for our parental guidance session because the bus we were waiting for disappeared. it felt like a good sessions.

getting gd onto a bus to get to the dentist for another first aid meeting - she's been so scared to crack her other tooth that she's lost 2kg in just a week, which is distressing - took so long that i ended up quite late for work.

it was a pretty productive day, i guess, and my cousin's kid has just moved into an office on our floor and that's both cool and awkward at the same time :P

i left late, and was really pressured for time because i had to go to a lecture at mr smear's school that i was dreading. mr smear informed me that he had not, in fact, had another perfect day, but in retrospect it doesn't seem like such a big deal. then again, i've only heard his side of the story...

the lecture was about setting norms for tech use across the school, and i initially presumed that the school would be interfering with parents' choices. this immediately put me on the defensive because i don't trust anyone with those sorts of intentions to also be operating in an evidence-based manner. by the end of it, though, i was convinced not only that this initiative is well-informed, but that they have an approach that really does make sense.

assuming the prinicipal doesn't screw it up.

gd and i watched some pantheon, which was brilliant, and i've played some crying suns, and i'm now pretty sure that i'm ready for bed.

...

i've been battling with a mosquito for the last hour or two, it's infuriating.

quiet

 it was a very quiet day, aside from gd and mr smear being visited by friends. oh, and a false alarm of a "hostile aircraft intrusion" that sent us all running to the shelter.

i guess it was nice to catch up with the neighbors.

the rollercoaster intensified

 thursday:

thursday started off well, and i'm pleased to say that mr smear received another glowing report in the afternoon about how well he behaved!

confirmed: it's not that he can't cooperate and get the job done. it's that he lacks the proper motivation. you don't need to medicate a child and potentially handicap them into order to get them to comply. speaking of which, i think chatgpt was lying to me when it said it would process the PDF i uploaded and get back to me, but in the meanwhile, i got it to translate chapter by chapter and compiled it myself.

so i just checked in with the PDF production:

omg, chatgpt is even worse than a real human! 🤣

work was alright, it was harder to implement my boss's feedback than i'd anticipated but i'd made good headway by the time i left. along the way, we had a frontend emergency in production and it was really nice to be able to figure it out and fix it quickly.

i was disappointed to learn that the art school we want to enroll mr smear in is in such high demand that it works on a lottery system, so even if he does everything perfectly he might still not be able to get in...

yesterday:

waking up to news of the pogrom in amsterdam. and the horrific online shit-show that followed. of course the jihadists can justify it. of course. of course the police didn't intervene. of course.

our enemies have always liked to compare us to vermin. we're the one "protected group" that the woke don't care to protect.

just a head's up though: when us "rats" start fleeing, it means your ship is sinking.

gd's been taking things really, really hard.

otherwise, it was a quiet day, continuously punctuated by that anxiety.

i woke up from the following dream: i left my bag on a train after a post-lecture lecture in which everyone around me couldn't see me, only gd in a swimsuit instead.

panicked about losing my computer, i tried to understand what to do while whoever had it easily unlocked it and was messing with my company. i got a call from a threatening encoded voice but it didn't say anything helpful, i called my boss, and he told me he'd been receiving the same calls. 

i tried to brush my teeth in an outside sink but this homeless-looking mime wanted toothpaste. he did something weird with the toothpaste and i got angry with him, as in a almost clocked him, and gd got between us to stop me from getting into trouble.

all of a sudden he stopped his performance and took me to show me that he'd somehow managed to retrieve my computer. i helplessly and humbly expressed my gratitude, and asked him, incredulously, "how?!"

he took me to a secret spot on the hill about the square, dug up and opened a container, introducing me to a giant flea that he appeared to regard as a pet.

we had some drama when picking up mr smear from school because we thought he'd lost his pencil case - that would be the second time in a few months, and it's a really expensive thing to replace - but it was a huge relief to discover that his teacher had found it and put it in his locker...

we did some cleaning in the afternoon. at some point, mr smear cut up a mango by himself for the very first time. also, i soaked some dried pineapple (unsweetend) in lemon juice and it was a surprisingly good experience.

sailor came over for dinner. it was an enjoyable evening, we ate too much and it was great, and we even had coffee afterwards, in part because i didn't want to fall asleep too early, again.

but i totally fell asleep too early, again. not even the caffeine could stop it.

today so far:

we all slept in this morning, and it's a beautiful, beautiful day so far. mr smear's still snotty and coughing, i think we're going to take it pretty easy on ourselves after such an insane week.

more rollercoaster

 i think i slept well last night. i'm already beginning to nod off now, but i wanna post this and drink a cup of chamomile before hitting the hay.

...

the US election took up the majority of my brain-space this morning:

omg i never thought i'd feel so relieved to hear a US election result, and especially to see trump returning to the white house. america, you and the free world just dodged, not a bullet, but an RPG.

i expect all the UN ambassadors from their anti-west totalitarian regimes must be feeling deeply disappointed right now. i don't know how much trump will get done over the next four years, but at least this gives us a window to take down the ayatollahs and make peace in the middle east an actual possibility.

assuming *we* don't manage to screw this up, of course. best of luck to us all 🫡

i was a little distracted still by the election noise when i got to work, but i managed to find my groove. a couple of new companies have moved in to our floor, so it's much brighter and more welcoming.

...

everything was fine until lunch. on my way to joining my coworkers, i received a call from mr smear's class assistant - he was having a very scary asthma attack, and he'd apparently told her he didn't have his pump. in retrospect, i think he misunderstood the questions, but i told her it was in his bag and immediately alerted gd that she'd need to hurry to the school.

then another panicked call - she couldn't figure out which pump to use.

so i called gd, also panicking, and she told me, and i called back and told her. also, i told her it should take a few minutes to work.

more panic, because it didn't working. at this point i was sitting at the table, staring into the distance, praying for my son and thinking about a guy a couple of years ahead of me in school, one of my youth movement councillors, who just suddenly died in his sleep one night from an asthma attack.

fortunately, i got a call soon afterwards informing me that it did seem to be working, and that his coughing fit was calming down, and he was able to breathe between coughs.

holy shit, that was terrifying. truly terrifying.

...

i was still unsettled an hour later, when i went to go and make myself a cup of turkish coffee. i poured the boiling water into the glass, and heard a *crack*. some of the coffee was seeping onto the counter. nystire has a thing about cups cracking due to temperature differences, so, relieved that it hadn't been worse, i took a step back and pulled out my phone to take a photo for him

just as i did that, the glass exploded. i was fortunately just out of range, so aside from the shock i only had to worry about cleaning up the mess (how did the coffee get under the counter ledge??), find a safe way to dispose of all the shards, and then making myself a much safer mug of instant coffee.

...

i was - understandably, i think - restless for the remainder of the work day. at least i feel like i got a couple of important things done.

at some point in the afternoon i received another report from mr smear's teacher: apparently, he's understood the mission. today was a really good day for him, asthma attack notwithstanding, and he was cooperative and worked well!

i did some quick shopping on the way home, mainly for toilet paper but gd's really scared about her other fragile tooth cracking so i picked her up some soya yoghurts and desserts. puddings. or, in our family's parlance, pudignes.

anyhoo, i came home, hugged my son tightly (to his chagrine, he was playing minecraft online), and overall the evening went smoothly. and gd made her delicious new cottage pie recipe (mushrooms and leaks and beans), and we watched some x-men, and then it was bedtime for mr smear.

i, on the other hand, spent the last couple of hours doing another run of kaycee's mod, and then working on using notebooklm and chatgpt to produce a useful summary booklet for anatomy of an epidemic and translate it into hebrew. i don't understand why the translation of the 12 pages would take hours, but that's what i was told so i'm hanging in. i also discovered that you can (now) prompt notebooklm when generating an audio discussion, and that's really powerful!

personal wars trump big wars

yesterday:

rollercoaster continued. mr smear stayed home because of his cough again, and a ridiculous amount of the day was dedicated to gd's private response to the rabbi she'd yelled at the evening before.

it's amazing how much more anxiety we've been experiencing from the open letter i wrote and its fallout, than that for the new round of iranian threats.

by the time she finally sent it, it was pretty powerful. the response she got back did an excellent job of not addressing it and playing off our feelings as "an ideological disagreement", but the important thing (in my opinion, at any rate) is that she said what needed to be said.

aside from that, i don't recall much. we took mr smear to the doctor and got him some extra medication, and in the evening i accompanied them to the eye doctor, which ultimately i didn't need to. he's got a new prescription, and apparently it makes quite the difference.

oh! i actually managed to get to the minimum requirements on the ticket i was working on, which considering everything else, and the fact that it wasn't trivial stuff at all, feels quite miraculous.

someone from gd's conversion class got whatsapp hacked, and their hacker tried to take me too. what a freaking nightmare! she was so grateful that we called to check on her, i hope she's got her account back by now.

today(-ish):

i took mr smear to school, and while he wasn't happy about something (i "distracted" him while he was trying to count) and he really didn't feel that he needed to go, by the time we arrived he was in better spirits and we were cool.

i continued on the post office, arriving just in time to pick up gd's heavy shoes in addition to the 3D glasses i ordered.

the work day started off alright, but then i received a call from gd and learned she'd just cracked a tooth (in a particularly nasty way) that her dentist had warned her about, but that we couldn't afford to do anything about.

well, i guess we're going to have to find a way to afford it now.

she went off to first aid, and i was very excited to hear afterwards that she'd managed to get sorted with an actual appointment with a receptionist who couldn't speak a word of english! that's pretty big, so we were both rather proud of her ^_^

...

during the morning i received a disheartening message from mr smear's teacher that he'd been completely uncooperative the entire morning.

after a big lunch, i walked to the school (i don't know why i didn't take a bus), picked up mr smear and walked through to the dental clinic. on the way, i told him about the art school that we want to register him for, and explained to him that if he doesn't "turn the ship around" and be on his best behavior for the next two months, then his current school's report may well prevent us from being able to move him to the next school.

i'm pretty sure that it's true, and i'm also pretty confident that if anything's going to motivate him, this will do it.

so that's the carrot. the stick is no screen time until i get a good report from his teacher.

...

we waited for gd for a while, and it turned out to be a really good thing that i'd taken my boss's advice and joined her - she needed imaging done, pronto. so we all caught a bus to ichilov, picked a floor (there're three imaging centers in the building), and were surprised by how quick and painless it was.

someone i was on the community council with reached out to me to thank me for the open letter, which she said cited the exact reasons she gave up on them. the responses have all been very validating, and i haven't got the expression "shul capture" out of my head since i heard it on sunday.

we walked home, picking up a couple of onion bagels along the way, and mr smear dived in to his homework (including hebrew reading, which we were informed today can't be comics) while i did a little more work.

mr smear and i put his duvet in the duvet cover this evening. after wishing him a good night, i spent some time doing nothing until i was ready to pass out early.

...

and then woke up a couple of hours ago, restless and with a sore neck and shoulder, and i eventually got up to write this and try to entertain myself until i'm sleepy again. i've been watching a lot of youtube videos - we're praying that trump takes the US election, and we're waiting for iran's "imminent" attack - but i haven't been able to get into any games lately (although i did play through act's ii and iii of inscryption again last week). and i guess my reading streak is broken. maybe i'll try to get that going again.

exploding feelings

 holy shit.

today has been non-stop drama.

at least getting mr smear to school wasn't dramatic, so that's good.

but everything else?

...

it's been a day full of conversations and complications, some collaborative and some antogonistic, with members of group a telling a completely different story to members of group b, with our friend "called before the council" in an emergency meeting for an hour and a half of being interrogated and "nailed". and then, just as i began eating dinner, the rabbi i'd "named and shamed" called.

it was a tough conversation, and he asked me questions that i couldn't answer on the spot, but that after the call i realized i do have the answers to. i understand him feeling betrayed, but i know he won't appreciate just how much he's betrayed us. i agreed to remove his name from my open letter, but he tried to get me to remove my post entirely and that i refused.

in the middle of the call, gd came in, furious, needing to get something off her chest. what happened next, in the midst of me trying to be diplomatic with someone i know has done what he's done, was utterly mortifying to me, and if i had been watching it happen to someone else on a tv show i would've been cringing super hard and also laughing my ass off: she *yelled* at him, and said exactly how she felt, and threatened to shut him down for pushing interfaith islamic relations into the community while the muslim community in cape town is militantly antisemitic. it was mortifying, but also thrilling and cathartic at the same time. it's the kinda thing that both upsets me and makes me fiercely proud of her, even as i'm trying to encourage her to play smart, not hard.

i really do feel bad for hurting them personally, but before and after the call i spoke to a couple of different people who've confirmed that the real stuff we talked about was me being gaslighted. i'm going to go with the strategy i laid out to gd: i'm going to assume that's he's being honest, and that he wants to fix things. if things gets fixed - which they're now under real external pressure to do - then good. and if they don't, then he's hoisting himself on his own petard.

as much as i've betrayed my personal relationships in this matter, i feel a greater obligation to the community at large. and, as i told him directly, the leaders of the community are not serving the community.

it still feels awful, though. my anxiety and my mind are all over the place trying to make sense of how things are playing out, what was legitimate and what wasn't, and how things need to proceed.

...

i barely got any work done today, both because the work itself was messy, and because i was perpetually on edge and distracted. at least i managed to pick up gd's repaired shoes on the way home.

not as planned

yesterday evening:

we took a cab to tahoma's, and were absolutely blown away by the quality and attention to detail of their halloween decorations. they turned their little apartment into a legitimate haunted house, and it was so effective that mr smear - who's obsessed with making creepy and gory things and tries really hard to be scary himself - refused to even look at the rooms because they scared the shit out of him.

smh.

some of the evening before the party actually got started was awkward, but mostly it was cool and we met some really nice people. one guy convinced me to explain the word "trolling" to him, and by the second sentence i began to suspect he was trolling me but he was so convincing i just carried right on, and i was quite impressed with myself for describing it as clearly as i did :P

there was a hilarious moment when a guy was translating mr smear's english for his five year-old, and asked mr smear what he was dressed as. "a killer clown!", mr smear said with pride. "a scary clown," the man translated for his child. mr smear was shocked. 

"i said a KILLER clown!"

"i know what you said."

"a KILLER clown!"

"i KNOW what you said!"

at that point we were all in hysterics, and i took mr smear aside to explain what was happening 🤣

as more grownups arrived, we caught a ride home, made kiddush and ate insanely delicious challah and broccoli schitznel sandwiches. by the time mr smear climbed into bed it was probably around 11.30pm.

today:

i think i slept pretty well, but i woke up very early with enough anxiety to realize that i needed to get up and start writing an open letter. i wrote and i wrote until my family got up - not too late, either - and after running through it a couple of times with gd, i pulled the trigger and posted it publicly on facebook with my email address attached. in it, i called out the pro-palestinian rabbi and his wife by name, and after a lot of introduction that includes both a summarized history of the conflict and a brief history of our experiences with the congregation, i made the following statements:

• Stop listening to people who rely on your political ignorance to propagate malicious disinformation that is designed to harm you.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that you don’t have the right to live in the only land you’ve ever been indigenous to, the land in which you have historically been its indigenous people for thousands of years.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that there’s an occupation, or that there are “disputed territories”.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you about the plight of the Palestinians in a way that suggests it’s anyone’s fault but the league of Arab nations and the UN.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that violence against Israel, or Jews in general, is justifiable.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that this is Netanyahu’s war.
• Stop listening to anyone who tells you that believing that Jews should live in the only land they’ve ever called home, the only land that promises them protection, the only land they’re free to be Jewish, is wrong.

my anxiety immediately switched from that of feeling frustrated and ashamed for not having said anything, to that of having said something so undiplomatic and confrontational that there's absolutely no going back. it was validating to receive messages of appreciation from members of the community, including gd's fellow graduates, and also from old schoolmates who've been involved in the battle but unable to affect change.

i don't know what's going to happen next - although i was disappointed that the executive blocked me on facebook and messaged me to make it clear that we could no longer talk - but i feel like i've discharged my duty, and if i have to have uncomfortable conversations i will do so. as much as we owe to the executive and the rabbis, and as grateful as we will always be for them helping gd with her conversion and us come home, our loyalties are first and foremost to the community as a whole.

we've put our own oxygen masks on, and played nice and diplomatic until they were secure. now it's time to help others.

...

while scrolling down my whatsapp messages i realized that swordschool had sent me an important message some time in june, and i hadn't responded 😱

so i called him up, and we synced for at least an hour. it's very comforting having someone like that in my corner. in addition to discussing his new dice mechanics and desolation jones, amongst a thousand other things, i was shocked and saddened to learn that before the tragic incidents he'd been through just prior to us reconnecting a few years back, he'd been through an even more tragic family disaster... i feel awful for him, and also exceedingly grateful for what i have.

...

in the afternoon i met up with sailor and we did a couple of rounds of coffees (well, first macha tea and then coffee) and a lunch (he ate, between my nerves and the confusing menu i was fine). he accompanied me home, and remained with gd while i took mr smear out for a walk. it was fine, at first, but he was in such a good mood that he vigorously skipped for a couple of blocks - with me skipping along right behind him - and ended up having a full-blown coughing fit / asthma attack. so i gave him his pump, and we slowly walked home around the circle.

aside from my reacting to a barista milk alternative (that i was told wasn't barista, but then later informed was) and the occasional open letter-related intrusion, we had a pretty good evening.

after all the anxiety and everything, i'm exhausted, and i feel like i skipped a day of weekend. i did a whole bunch of dishes, wrote all this, and now... i think i'm going to drink this new cup of tea and hit the hay.

...

oh! on-call. i forgot i was on-call today. and then i realized that the reason i was getting confusing alerts that made me forget what day it was is that with all the scheduling changes for the holidays, i've ended up with four days of on-call in a row :/

post-halloween halloween

 we're leaving soon for tahoma's, he and his husband are throwing a halloween party and their friends with kids are invited earlier while they're still setting up. mr smear's skeletal make-up is looking good in spite of gd's past fifteen minutes of cursing to the contrary, and i haven't figured out what i'm going as yet...

i just spent the late afternoon - after napping and playing through some of inscryption's act 3 again - bringing down the mountain of dishes that had accumulated, and for the last while i've been on the verge of an anxiety attack because i can't stop thinking about the propagandists who've infiltrated the community and the damage the more "progressive" rabbis have done over the course of many years.

lhearning

i slept well, but not nearly enough. and i had some weird dreams.

it was a super-slow wakeup, after dropping mr smear off at school i didn't even stop at home before accompanying gd to the cobbler to get some of her shoes repaired. we caught a bus to dizengoff center, missed our stop, and arrived at the music store with half an hour to kill before they opened.

we took a walk up to dizengoff "square", where got a fine cup of coffee. we could have done without witnessing a dog owner just letting their little yapper go off at a bigger dog with the bigger dog's owner having to work hard to keep him calm...

we talked to the woman who originally sold us the keyboard, and she told us to speak to the guy in the dj section. that guys was super helpful, and instead of selling us a midi controller he advised us to go home and do some research first. now that i have a better idea of how instruments (specifically midi instruments) work, i'm particularly grateful for his advice: we're going to learn cubase first, and then we're going to experiment with cheap controllers, and then we're going to buy a good one. maybe.

we picked up some makeup for this evening's halloween party at tahoma's, which took a lot longer than it should have, then returned home, getting off the bus a little early because gd couldn't bear sitting behind a guy cleaning his disgustingly long and dirty fingernails with his teeth. i was grossed out too, but i found gd's reaction absolutely hilarious 🤣

we stopped to pick up a bottle of wine for the evening on the way home, and then i went to the school to pick up mr smear. he was talking to a friend, and i overheard him "making an exception" and showing his friend the passcode for his phone 🤦‍♂️

so we had to have a "conversation" and change his passcode.

we searched through his locker for the book he's lost, and it looks like we're going to have to order a new copy.

fuck.

anyway, the afternoon's been pretty chill so far, not counting a long chat with the head of the jewish community council. most of the discussion was about the pro-palestinians who have infiltrated and taken over, and in spite of my sharply-increased anxiety at the thought of it i've agreed to meet with some of the community leaders to strategize, but also with the terrorist sympathizers directly.

i don't really want to, but i do feel obligated.

dum, dum dum dum, dum dum dum...

 i gave clickolding a try, and it crashed every time it hit dialog, so i uninstalled it and requested a refund. i was pleased to see that i'd received the refund before i went to bed.

today:

mr smear had pancakes for breakfast, so that he wouldn't have to eat walnuts.

i took him to school, then continued on to our pharmacy to pick up a couple of prescriptions. the pharmacy was completely empty, and there was no one ahead of me in the queue, so i only had to wait for ten minutes. they had one of the items i was looking for, but not the other.

i walked down to the mall pharmacy, where i waited another ten minutes or so (thankfully, i had my "kindle" with me for both waits), and picked up that prescription, although the pharmacist was concerned that the doc had prescribed it differently to what she's used to. that caused stress, but when i looked it up when i got home i discovered that there's a range of "configurations".

the work day started off pretty relaxed, and i was saying to a coworker that it's the first time in many years that i've been back from a ny sort of vacation for an entire week and i'm still feeling relaxed! at noon we all went off for a farewell feast at a nearby restaurant. sadly, i burned off some of my tastebuds on the delicious onion soup, but the pad thai was still exquisite.

i ate far too much.

the next few hours were hellish, because my tummy had decided it was time to move and it was relentless. in addition to that, gd and mr smear and i had a few dramatic phone calls because he'd had an incident at school, and it wasn't clear if he'd kicked the other kid back or not. i was relieved to hear that he had.

we also learned that some of the kids employ a nasty tactic of hitting mr smear and then claiming that they've just consumed dairy, and we've explained to him that aside from that not being likely, it's also not a big enough concern for him to not defend himself :/

eventually that calmed down, and i finished the week on a constructive note.

after dinner, mr smear wanted to show me something on the keyboard, and he did it really well. then i reminded him that we'd discussed him trying to figure out the tetris music on his own, and - holy shit - he got it! i can't describe how excited i am, and he was excited himself, that he figured out how to play the tune by ear and by feel ^_^

i was disappointed - and embarassed - to discover that the keyboard we bought can't connect to a computer. i'm going to speak to the store tomorrow and see if we can arrange a trade or something...

after we got him into bed, i had a quick chat with my sister, mostly about her status between jobs.

i've spent the past couple of hours doing lots of not much, and i'm considering heading to bed now and reading a bit. i'll be surprised if i last more than a minute or two :P

stuck in the middle with you

 it was a pretty good morning. mr smear spent some time impressing us with the keyboard before i walked him to school, gd and i had a chilled morning together, and then i caught the bus to the office.

the day began with an all-hands, and we learned that the company isn't quite where its board wants it to be. i asked how much runway we have, and i've been assured that we're good. the "higher ups" are going to try to figure out new markets we should target, and a few of us got into quite a heated debate about the possibilities we're seeing from the ground.

ironically, this situation has made it clear that our project manager's vision is out of touch, but it's anyone's guess as to how we're going to tweak our approach going forwards.

overall, it was a decent day in the office, although i was quite tired for a stretch of the day and i was snacky for most of it.

the walk home was intense and full of feelings, because the roads were gridlocked with people behaving badly. i'm wondering if we shouldn't be doing the london thing, and making it impossible for private cars to enter the city center...

i got home just in time for dinner, and we had a bit of a scene because mr smear hates walnuts. he finally relented and tried to eat them with gd's home-made pesto pasta, and that definitely helped, but what really helped was his own suggestion: "do we have chocolate sauce?"

we do have chocolate sauce, we were surprised to discover, and it apparently only expires in about a decade's time. i tested it, it was great, he put it on the walnuts, and he enjoyed them. hell, he even agreed to put it on some dried mango and he enjoyed that, at least until he'd had too much chewiness because a couple of his teeth are apparently loose.

winning!

after dinner, and getting mr smear (all of us, really) ready for bed, and both him and gd going to sleep (well, he's coughing a lot, he coughs a lot at night), i'm now trying to decide whether i'm going to spend the next little while studying the storage stuff from the other day, or giving clickolding a try.

i think i'll give clickolding a try.

pivot

yesterday:

mr smear's cough was better, and he went back to school. but he was having and sharing a remarkably shit morning. so that sucked.

i continued on to drop gd's shoes at the post office to be returned, then walked back home.

my neck and shoulder gave me trouble throughout the day.

it was a slow work-from-home day, and i was on-call, and most of the work i did was on-call stuff.

around noon i picked mr smear up from school to take him to his hebrew tutor, and he was in a much better mood. on the way back from the tutor we picked up a few bags of walnuts, because i only just learned that they're a viable source of omega3 and we haven't been eating gd's flax-seed pancakes for a long time...

...

during a conversation with our product manager in the afternoon, i saw something in our designs that bothered me and i asked him if i was reading it right, and if we were actually pivoting as a company.

"100%," he told me, "this is the direction we're going in."

i was disappointed, and i told him so, and after the call had a bit of a crisis because the new direction really doesn't interest me. i discussed it with gd, and came to the conclusion that i'm happy with my team, and i'm happy with my bosses, and i'm happy with my role and my employment conditions, so if i'm less happy with what the company is doing it's not the end of the world, but it will mean refocusing on my side projects for my source of meaning.

...

gd made vegan-shwarma tacos for dinner last night, and we really enjoyed them!

after everyone went to bed i started looking into rewriting my mobile app, and dived in to a rabbit hole around security issues with local browser storage. at about the point i started finding useful material to peruse, my eyes started shutting on me.

today:

last night was our first night sleeping with a duvet since spring, it was cozy and i slept pretty well.

we all had a much better morning, and after dropping mr smear at school i replaced the lightbulbs in his room and then spent some time reading about secure storage while gd left to have coffee with a friend.

i didn't make much progress then, and i'm starting to become drowsy now, so i don't know how long it's going to take me to get a handle on this stuff...

while i was trying to read, i got distracted by the fact that the "palm rest" of my very expensive dell XPS was - and has been for a while - feeling annoyingly sticky. i tried cleaning it in a number of different ways, and eventually ended up (unintentionally) removing some of the surface. it clearly wasn't meant to be removed, so later on i'd look it up and discover that it's a known problem.

i regret purchasing a dell computer.

i found a couple of recommendations to purchase stickers that are cut specifically for my model, so i found some on ali express and i'm hoping they'll do the trick.

...

it was a slow day in the office, and i wasn't the only one feeling the particularly relaxed vibes.

the day began with me learning about my new task, and syncing with the coworker who's leaving soon to understand how all the pieces of the puzzle are meant to fit together. at some point - because it was relevant to what we're working on - i mentioned the pivot, and his response stunned me: our project manager was describing his personal vision for the company, but he's already pitched it to the bosses and they've already explained to him that they're not interested in leaving the (awesome) core business they've built.

firstly, what a relief! secondly, what a shocking revelation, that i literally can't implicitly trust my project manager and that he actually caused harm with his delusion.

...

i started the task without a clear idea of what needed to be done, and it had been assigned six working days. i started making slow but steady progress, and then all of a sudden pieces of the puzzle - especially pieces that i'd put in place a few months ago - started coming together and by the end of the day i was effectively done!

it's a great feeling, but also rather unexpected.

i walked home, arriving just in time for dinner and some x-men. then my mom called, finally ready to try out the account i created for her a month and a half ago.

...

good grief.

it was impossible for her to log in without me signing in first, and it kept not sending us verification codes until i signed in, set up her phone number, and flagged her sign-in attempts as recognized. that got her into her account on her computer, so i wanted to set her up on her phone as well to make sure she's not dependent on me. but she's an iphone person, and apple makes it ridiculously difficult to configure new accounts and know if they've been configured correctly. so, after more than an hour and lots of feelings, we decided to leave it at a hope and a prayer and deal with any issues that may arise.

it could've been worse. we could've not succeeded.

...

as i said, i'm feeling drowsy - i think i'm going to go to bed now.

cough cough

we switched over to DST during the night. ugh.

mr smear was still coughing this morning, so we kept him home.

i got some good news before leaving for work - assuming i haven't misunderstood anything important, it seems like registering him for the art school for grade 5 will be quite straightforward! here's hoping we get it right 🤞

the work day was pretty good, i managed to get what i needed to get done by the end of the day and in a way that makes sense (to me, at least). but it did end on a sad note: my montreal coworker's given notice, and a while ago, so this will probably be our last week working together :(

it was also a bit sad leaving work at 6pm and finding it dark out already. i walked home, we had a pleasant evening and we all enjoyed finishing the first men in black movie.

back to school

yesterday:

mr smear's first day back at school (albeit fridays' "school lite")

a shopping mission gone wrong (gd panicking, and then feeling bad for not checking in with me before paying)

picking up mr smear and continuing on to a shoe-shopping mission down dizengoff just as the dust storm started.

trying out the 3D movie with the PSVR and being blown away, and ordering a bunch of 3D glasses on ali express.

another not-great experience getting mr smear to do his homework, but gd sitting with him and coaching him and getting through it.

replaying celeste all the way to where i gotten before. that game is hardcore!

sailor coming over for dinner with a lot more dietary restrictions than we were antipating, but gd managed to rustle something up and we had a great evening anyway. mr smear suddenly developing a pretty hectic cough.

today:

waking up to learn about our attacks on iran, and feeling disappointed that we've left the ball in their court again.

a VR start to the day, with a very enthusiastic mr smear. afterwards, i discovered a way to watch downloaded 3D movies using rad tv and the result was awesome!

spending most of the day reading articles and playing crying suns, with my family reading behind me - i think gd's just finished the wave, and mr smear's deep into the bone comics collection.

we had the usual fight about going out in the evening, but gd and i managed to get through to him eventually and we took the basketball to the high school courts with adult-height hoops. he didn't shoot a lot, but he got the ball in quite a few times and we were both very excited ^_^

then i had a turn, and i didn't do so well but i definitely got exercise. i didn't do so badly, either, but mr smear wasn't watching and decided that, absense any evidence to the contrary, that physics was against me and that i hadn't succeeded at all :P

overall, the outing was good and the evening went well. we started watching men in black over dinner, and after putting mr smear to bed gd finally watched the rest of demolition man while i passed out on the couch beside her. i woke up a couple of hours ago, groggy and sore, and have finally gotten up from either trying to stretch or doom-scrolling to make myself a cup of tea, post this, and play something before heading to bed.

i'm disappointed that my vacation's over, because i could definitely use a couple more weeks off, but i think it's been good for me. if nothing else, i've had less pressure and less juggling and that's made the world seem less overwhelming. and i think i've done a good job of not stressing about not Doing All The Things, while still doing a whole bunch of things.

peaceful and not peaceful

it was a weird day today. it's supposed to be a happy festival, and i was planning on taking mr smear to the synagogue for hakafot, but we all woke up feeling lazier than usual and the combination of that and "celebrating" the jewish calendar anniversary of the october 7th massacre just made for an uncomfortable mix of feelings.

yesterday:

we went on a mission to find gd a vape pen, and we visited a lot of places and put in a lot of steps before we eventually found one. i'm very grateful that the guy was able to let gd "try before you buy".

we then continued to ozen hashlishit in search of a 3D bluray disc. i was sorely disappointed by what they had available (though not unsurprised, it's a wonder they sell any physical discs at all), but we managed to pick up a copy of hugo and i'm planning on testing it out soon.

when i get to it :P

we indecisively walked about looking for food, and ended up at "garger hazahav" for a huge hummus lunch (even two meals between the three of us was way too much food), and it was utterly delicious and we thoroughly enjoyed our meal.

in the afternoon, i did a fair amount of "catching up" reading and watching videos online, while playing bloons: adventure time. i'm kinda in-and-out with it, and i kinda feel like i'm seeing the end (ie starting to close in on getting all my characters levelled up).

i actually spent some time designing a real estate solution i've been thinking of, too, which was satisfying.

we began the chag in the shelter, but otherwise the evening was pleasant. i watched videos until my eyes started shutting of their own accord, and i guess i got a decent night's sleep.

today:

more bloons: adventure time, reading william gibson's count zero. [omg i just realized that i've read it before, but didn't remember. like, at all (O_o)]

a large chunk of today was invested, unpleasantly, in getting mr smear to do his holiday homework. after five hours - under threat that i wouldn't let him go to sleep tonight until he was done - he completed the first two pages. and, i discovered to my extreme chagrin, had scratched a stick figure into our otherwise elegant, rather expensive dining room table.

out of about five hours messing around, he only needed *maybe* half an hour to an hour to actually get it done.

parenting.

i kept myself occupied with a combination of reading, and playing crying suns. when he was done, we took the basketball out to the school to shoot some hoops, and so far the evening's quiet pleasant.

jump

yesterday:

mma was fine, although on the way there mr smear did something rude and lost screen time, and then threw a wobbly because he didn't appreciate their being consequences :/

while there, i tried to do something functional but ended up spending most of the hour reading pete collins' pain & gain, which is finished this afternoon.

i saw and enjoyed the movie when it came out, but a few days ago came across a discussion about it in which it was said that the movie wasn't as faithful to the original story as it was made out to be.

that... was an understatement. what an unnerving, harrowing tale. also, a dramatic emotional rollercoaster, right until the very end. sometimes truth truly is stranger than fiction.

gd wasn't up for making dinner, so mr smear and i took a walk and enjoyed falafel and chips, picking up a vegan curry for gd along the way. it was a very nice evening out.

today:

i definitely slept better last night. i got up this morning, sat down with my coffee, and then saw a worrying message from sailor that he'd left a package for us out in the hallway in case he was fast asleep.

wtf?!

i scrambled to get my rollerblades on, and was just passing a grocery store when the sirens wailed and everyone ran for cover. there were a lot of loud explosions, and i found out afterwards that gd had been on the can at the time and that's a pretty awful time to have to get to the shelter :(

i arrived at the wrong address, but didn't get caught by the spider who'd webbed the gate, then went back down the road to the right address, and sat with sailor for a really nice macha tea and a serious conversation about where he is and (possibly) should be.

then we agreed to meet up at the icon festival, and i returned home for breakfast before mr smear and i made our way there. gd, unfortunately, wasn't able to join us - at first because she was hurting, but then because she took a muscle relaxant :(

the festival was full of cool things, but overall it wasn't an exciting experience. mr smear really wanted to do the LARPing sword-fighting thing, but after a short time he found it pretty boring. maybe it's just boring with me :P

we came back home, and spent the rest of the day reading, doing homework, and messing about. i think i've been spending a lot of the time over the course of the past few days wondering about what i'm doing, or not doing, and trying to make peace with relaxing and being useless. i think it's okay for me to rest and be useless. i don't believe it, but i think it. is that enough?

next

yesterday:

the mma class was cool, and i spent it learning about atomic crm. mr smear decided he wanted to go over to his classmate's afterwards, so i joined them and spent a pleasant while chatting with his dad while the kids played fortnite together, kind of.

it was dark by the time we left, we caught a bus home, and we learned that mr smear can literally get himself lost less than a block away from our apartment :P

i spent some more time after bedtime with the app, and eventually went to bed.

today:

i slept much better last night, even though there were a couple of rough moments. then i got up, had a cup of coffee, and left to catch a bus to afeka to pick up another pair of gd's shoes. it was a brisk morning, and the bus had its airconditioner on full blast, and i felt like an icicle by the time i got off. after picking up the package and waiting ten minutes in the sun for the next bus home, i was *just* beginning to thaw out a bit; fortunately, the bus home wasn't uncomfortable.

i ate a hearty breakfast, then we all cleaned the floors, pausing occasionally for shenanigans or reading bits of pain & gain: this is a true story (holy shit, the movie is not faithful). now we've finished lunch (and i've overeaten considerably) and it's time to head to his mma class again.

cut

yesterday:

well, mr smear wasn't completely done with his shenanigans... he'd promised to come ride with me in the late afternoon, and when the time came he decided he hadn't. it took a lot of emotionally-draining work to get him out the door and onto his bike, and that was followed by an emotionally-draining ride to the park during which i don't recall if he took even a moment to stop whining about how much he wanted to go home.

it was in the park itself that we just about had an incident, but i managed to get him to confess that he just doesn't like going outside in general. i explained to him that it's important to be outside and surrounded by nature both for physical health, and mental health, and that the bicycle he detests so much (because it's neither easy nor perfect) is actually his ticket to freedom and independence and he needs to regard it as such.

the next ten to fifteen minutes of riding around and then home were pleasant enough that i was happy to treat him to an ice-cream on the way home.

sailor arrived just after we began eating, and he hung around for a while. mr smear enjoyed him being over as much as we did, and they had a "drawing competition" a la strip search, which was fun.

i was so tired at one point that i had to lie down, and aside from getting up to say goodbye i was stuck on the couch until the middle of the night, and my lower back was sore. then i moved to the bed and suffered there for a while, until i stretched a bit and managed to calm it down enough to get some sleep.

today:

i wanted to have a slow day, but i had to pick up gd's wellies from the post office and soon after getting home i left again for a haircut. i was tired. the hairdresser was awkwardly quiet. for most of the haircut, i was either closing my eyes and trying to not lose consciousness, or watching him suspiciously because his style is kind of like tetris, or chess, where the whole haircut doesn't make sense at all until it all comes together at the end.

gd and i are pretty satisfied with the cut, surprisingly, so even though the experience was unnervingly uncomfortable and the haircut was way more expensive than standard, i might well go back again.

it's been a chilled afternoon so far, and in a couple of minutes i'm taking mr smear to his mma class.

not with a bang

it's a quiet afternoon on a beautiful autumn day, it feels like a good time to put down some thoughts.

thursday:

around the time i finished posting, mr smear went to his friend's to celebrate his birthday, which was a very welcome surprise invite. apparently they all had a good time.

gd and i took the opportunity to finish watching deadpool & wolverine, which we immensely enjoyed once we were awake enough to watch it!

in the late afternoon, i took mr smear out to play some basketball. just as we were leaving, we received confirmation that sinwar was killed, and while lots of people are excited and celebrating, i'm just relieved. not because it means anything real as far as the war is concerned, because until our hostages are brought home nothing has really changed, but because for a large part of the last year i've been holding my breath with anxiety, worrying that the fighting would stop prematurely and the world would see a photo of sinwar coming out of the tunnels showing a victory sign. at least now, whatever happens, any symbols like that would feel as hollow as they are.

...

mr smear and i had a good time at the courts, not only is his skill improving but his attitude, too.

we completed the third season of the x-men animated series over dinner. two more season to go...

yesterday:

we got up and went pretty early. unfortunately, i couldn't get a haircut, but i was able to book it for tomorrow instead. the day began with a ridiculously long mission to get change for the bread guy who'd insisted on giving me something a few days ago when i had no cash on me. we eventually got hold of a stack of disgusting, sticky coins, which we tried hard to clean with hand sanitizer and water. when we finally got back to the guy, we found him with plenty of coins which had made the whole, gross experience unnecessary :/

we took a bus to the top of dizengoff, then picked up coffee along the way to babylon park at the entrance to the port.

now, the games they have aren't exactly what we were looking for, but the operation is really slick - the app, and unlocking games with the app, in particular - and we all had a jolly good time. in particular, mr smear loved the motorcycle games, and he got to play real pinball machines for the first time ever!

we took a break to find some food, and ended up at the little food market... at first, we were shocked by how much our two tiny plastic containers of nothing cost us, but then we were shocked by how shit the quality of the alleged "food" actually was. i told the woman working there that if i was me, i wouldn't sell it to people. that's absolutely the last time we try to eat something there.

we returned to babylon park for a bit more, but it was starting to fill up, so we soon decided we were all ready to go home.

we'd initially planned on cleaning the floors in the afternoon, but we'd all had too much of an adventure for that :P

the afternoon was relaxed, but just as evening was approaching mr smear had a moment (he was playing human fall flat, but more than that i have no idea) that turned into a proper tantrum. gd and i both tried various ways to deescalate, ultimately having to shut it down undiplomatically and with everyone felt like shit.

miraculously, though, when i went in later to tell him to go shower, he was calm and compliant, which i guess is as much of an apology as one can expect from a nine year old.

...

while we were all stewing, i compulsively restarted playing inscryption. between the time until dinner (which was much later than planned), and the bit of time between getting mr smear into bed and discovering that gd's never seen demolition man, a couple of hours this morning and an hour or so this afternoon, i've played through it completely and, i must admit, once again enjoyed the experience, even if in a somewhat different way.

...

gd and i both passed out pretty early on in the movie :/

...

i didn't sleep well, but i did sleep. aside from inscryption, we went to our friends for brunch and enjoyed a very pleasant late morning / early afternoon with them.

...

this morning i saw this video compilation showing the anti-american (anti-west) organizations explicitly describing their goals and tactics, and for anyone who isn't familiar with it this is what israelis have been trying to warn the world about for a long time, but specifically over the course of the last year.

groans, good and bad

what was next was me reading count zero in bed until i passed out, which didn't take very long. i'm enjoying it, but i'm not getting very far :P

in the middle of the night i awoke from a hyper-realistic zombie nightmare which began with me leaving a group of strangers huddling around a reservoir to go to a lecture in an underground facility with what looked like bleachers (grandstands), finding a seat at the back of the class and realizing that i wasn't wearing a shirt and the people in front of me were making a thing of it and taking (or pretending to take) photos.

then someone sitting a couple of meters to my left said something, and i responded by making a kind of popping sound with my lips, and unwittingly and accidentally spat at him. so that was awkward.

and then all hell broke loose further into the darkness, and it became apparent that some kind of riot was taking place, and i joined the people fleeing through the bleachers and up towards the light. i woke up just as i stumbled across a guy lying curled up on the steps, seriously wounded and looking like his guts had been pulled out of his ass.

i got up and spent a little time imagining what i could have / would have done for the poor guy under the circumstances (circumstance being trying to save my own life, not wanting to go near him but not wanting to leave him to die or be trampled).

i spent the next couple of hours researching printing services, compiling a table of costs and scaling, and eventually returned to bed having picked out two viable options.

the dream resumed from a later point in time. i was coming in from the outside, with someone else, and there was an enemy of some kind behind us. the compound seemed abandoned, but as i reached into a medical cabinet for a spray that would somehow serve as a zombie-repellent, i considered that the zombies must have been sensitive to light and that the "riot" may have been confined to the darkest depths.

i got up, caffeined myself, and began trying to put the test prints together. one of the services' sign up process is completely broken, so that leaves a single service, lulu. i tried reading through the guide, but as soon as i realized that i was out of my depth i sent it to mr cat to ask him if he can make heads or tails of it (in theory, it's his field of expertise).

mr smear has finally decided on a birthday present: battlezone gold edition. i played a little myself, and it's gorgeous.

out of office

 yesterday:

starting the day at the mental health clinic, for an appointment which took most of the last year to arrange. heaven forbid that should be drama free - mr smear and i were waiting outside when we heard lots of shouting, and it turned out that the psychologist, who's supposed to be dealing with people with psychological issues, greeted gd both rudely and aggressively.

WTAF?!

so gd was upset, the "doctor" was behaving like gd had done something wrong, and i had to jump in to the rescue... fortunately, the manager made every effort to fix things and, miraculously, an english-speaking shrink with a good attitude and a free slot arrived and the morning (and months of waiting) weren't lost. mr smear and i parked ourselves outside, reading and chatting, and gd was able to use her time and we're one step further down the road.

...

a surprisingly productive day at work in spite of the fact that i did *not* want to do any work. also, i was still in a mind-blown state from the vr experiences from the previous evening. i did have an argument with a coworker in the afternoon, and i was honestly really irritated by him not seeing things my way, but eventually i was able to put my finger on why each of us felt the way we did and realized that he was, ultimately, in the right.

it was a huge relief to leave the office, and (on-call notwithstanding) switch off for the next ten days.

i don't remember whether we tried to watch anything last night.

today:

i slept a bit better last night, but that's off a really low bar.

today was a big day, we set out to buy mr smear a proper synthesizer and we achieved our goal! we also tried to pick up some vr games along the way, but nobody seems to be interested in stocking them. we also looked at some books, then decided to get the entire bone collection on kindle instead.

the afternoon was spent playing with the new toy, and trying to watch a 3D movie on the psvr. that proved way more complicated than i was hoping... no success yet :/

mr smear played a vr space simulator that made me queasy, which led to a shitty mood, but eventually i got over it. kiddush for sukkot with my mom (virtually), followed by a nice dinner, interrupted by a hilariously crazy call from my sister who got herself into a particularly dramatic situation with multiple job applications and in addition to being entertained, i was actually able to give her some useful advice.

i hope she takes it :P

we put mr smear to bed, and i mindlessly/compulsively played did an idle run through kaycee's mod (only the final challenge enabled), and now it's anyone's guess what's next for the evening.

...

i've been doing holidays wrong, so i don't know how this one is going to turn out. my first priority is to rest my mind, kind of. and spend some quality time with my family. my second is to make some progress on the side project that i discussed with dod. my third is to try to arrange some test prints for my comics.

anything else is bonus.

winding down

 it wasn't too bad a day. i rollerbladed to work, which was very quiet because i was the only one in the office. in spite of things getting a bit hectic at one point, i managed to complete the frontend work that's been upsetting me for the past couple of weeks and returned home for lunch before taking mr smear to his jiujitsu class.

while there, i did a little more work - but nothing too serious - and when his class was done we returned home. as we stepped off the bus, the sirens sounded and we scrambled through narrow stairways into a deep bomb shelter along with a large number of coffee shop patrons, most of whom were clumsily wielding their dairy-based drinks in a way that made it anxiety-inducing to navigate to a safe corner while keeping mr smear out of contact.

god damn.

anyway, it was unpleasant but we didn't have an incident, so that was a win.

we both showered quickly when we returned home, and there was time before dinner to fire up the vr.

gd and i agreed that we could afford to get him one of the vr games, and he decided on battlezone, then he discovered that i'd downloaded a bunch more vr demos, so instead of buying something we dug into those instead - and we had a really good time. there were two games in particular, which caused a bit of a fight at first because we didn't understand what was going on or why mr smear needed us to tell him what was happening, but once we did get it they were brilliant. and then i took a turn, and i was absolutely blown away by how good the vr experience was!

after dinner, mr smear went to bed, i posted my two books on gumroad, and then gd and i settled down to re-attempt deadpool & wolverine. we made it a bit further before we were both falling asleep. it's really fun, we're just really tired...

i haven't slept well in a while, and i know that going to sleep early will cause problems, so i carried on fine-tuning all my online offerings and i'm now pretty happy with how things look. i think i'm about ready for bed now. i hope i am.

i'm very excited that i'm going on vacation tomorrow evening.

back to front

 yesterday was a bit shit, i'm really hating working with pure frontend and for the entire sprint every time i've resolved an issue another one has sprung up. i haven't been this unhappy with not-exactly-coding since i quit my job with mmf at the end of 2011.

anyway, it's not my usual job. and i had a conversation with my manager wherein i explained that i understand frontend dev enough to know how much i don't understand, and that while everything the contractor did makes sense within the confines of his employment the solution wasn't built in a way that inexperienced frontenders like ourselves would be able to make massive changes to its scope. none of us are really qualified to work on this, nor interested in it, and we're burning money and demoralizing ourselves. if we really feel like this is something we should be investing in, then we need to hire a frontend dev. if not, then we shouldn't be offering to build this stuff for our clients when it's far outside our competence.

in the middle of the day i left the office to pick up mr smear and taking him to his therapy session. while he was occupied, i tried to find a place with coffee that i could get some work done. the aroma's bathroom was unusable, and then i witnessed one of the kitchen staff walk out without washing his hands, so i noped on out of there. the next place didn't sell coffee, then the next place did have a place to sit and the employees were smoking right at the entrance. the next place, cafe taizu, doesn't sell coffee, and i finally landed on maafiyat lechamim. the atmosphere was cool, but the service was really shit and the coffee mediocre at best.

i'd spent so much time looking for a place that i got about five or ten minutes of "work" done before i had to get up and leave to pick up mr smear. i didn't really get anything of value done.

...

our financial situation's better, but not good, and i was really hoping to be able to put down the money for a proper keyboard for mr smear this month. and now i've been looking at vr video games and equipment as well. and gd wants a clothes dryer. fuck.

...

mr smear was only too happy to continue watching the original x-men series, but that's because he's seen the trailer for x-men 97 and he's really excited to see that... aaaaand i just realized we still have two more seasons we haven't watched, and everyone's groaning :(

...

i just went on-call ten minutes ago. hopefully it'll be a quiet day.

day of atonement

friday:

aside from grocery shopping in the morning, we were pretty much at home all day. the biggest achievement of the day was finally (finally!) setting up the psvr system, only 2.5 years after the mongoose loaned it to us. the pad at the back of the headset is falling apart, but otherwise it's in good nick. unfortunately, the paddles won't hold a charge so we're limiting to games that work with the regular gamepad.

either way, mr smear is over the moon and we both thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and the biggest challenge is going to be finding good games that don't cost an arm and a leg and being solid about limiting time with the headset on.

...

gd prepared a feast pre-fast, and after dinner we put together a very basic 200 piece puzzle, and mr smear actually participated fully for the first time. afterwards, i managed to convince him to come out on his bike. we met up with his re-friend / her dad and brother for a little, but all the kids were being whiny, so we went off in different directions. mr smear decided he was done earlier than i'd hoped - but apparently that's because he needed the toilet and didn't want to go outside - but overall he got the yom kippur "vibe" and we had a pretty good experience.

yesterday:

i slept really, really badly. i barely slept - although i did sleep a little, because i remember having some weird dreams - but i got up in the morning almost as tired as when i'd gone to bed.

firstly, we're really impressed that yesterday went as smoothly as it did. not only did we not have issues with a day without screentime, but we had constructive conversations about what we were doing and why we were doing it.

secondly, i spent most of the day resting, or following the morning prayer service with gd, or reading. i was tired, and a bit dehydrated, but i didn't have the usual caffeine-withdrawal headache and i wasn't feeling hungry.

in the afternoon we went to a park to meet up with a new friend of his, by which stage i wasn't feeling too fresh. the kids were getting along great, which was a relief to witness, although at some point mr smear wanted to leave because he was being harrassed by mosquitoes. he ended up staying in spite of that, though, because he was having fun... right until he wasn't. his new friend's little brother accidentally bumped him off an installation, and he was hurt and angry.

the resulting outburst was thoroughly embarrassing. i made my apologies as i followed him out of the park, and about halfway home managed to get him to listen to reason (i'm sad that i needed to threaten privileges for that, but it is what it is). things escalated when we got home and i explained what had happened to gd, but refreshingly quickly he managed to figure out what we were trying to get him to figure out and the tone of everything changed.

i sent off messages to his friend's mom and hopefully there'll be more playdates...

we logged in to the prayer service for the ending of the fast + blowing of the shofar + havdala + singing of hatikva, then dug in to a big meal. mr smear decided that he'd rather vr than fantastic four, so we tried out some of the other demos and we both had a *really* good time. then it was bedtime, and bedtime went smoothly.

gd and i tried to watch deadpool & wolverine, but as much as i was enjoying it i started passing out quite early on.

...

so far, the day's begun well. i slept alright, woke up and did a lot of stretching (my hips and lower back are still really sore), and we've had a long a constructive conversation with mr smear that covered the plans for the holidays, and a big discussion about gambling and other addictions that ended up with all of us agreeing that if we had the money, we'd establish and run a doggy hotel.

now it's time for me to go to work. *i* still have a couple of schooldays to go before my vacation begins :P

dragonfall: complete

 i've just completed the game, i don't know if i'll be playing it again but i do understand why so many players do. there were some decisions i made - or that were made for me - that i didn't feel good about, but by and large i loved almost every aspect of the stories that i played through and i really struggled, both in role-playing and in personal morality, with a lot of the choices that were put before me.

it's a fun game, it's a set-your-nerves-on-fire game, and it's a make-you-question-yourself game. it's a fantastic game.

someone's on vacation

 a pity it's not me. mr smear's off for the yom kippur / sukkot vacation, and i'll be joining him from wednesday next week. in the meanwhile... at least i'm off for the weekend.

work-wise, yesterday and today were punishing, and i'm still not out of the woods yet. and it's all css bullshit. i told my boss today that i'm willing to bet that backend / application developers will be replaced by AI long before frontend devs, primarily because none of that shit has any sort of logic to it and there's no way to know which signals make things work and which signals interfere.

i have made progress, though, but it's been really, really slow. otherwise, between my manager and my boss i kinda feel like things are good. i hope i'm right.

gd's been in trouble, pain-wise, much worse than usual. she's managed to pick him up from school, but both yesterday and today i've taken him to mma. the travelling together has been fun. he's been mostly good with his classes, but not very focused and not particularly well-behaved :/

i'm sad that the fight camp has been cancelled due to insufficient numbers, but he's happy about it, and it certainly uncomplicates our holiday times.

...

one of ze germans posted about notebooklm yesterday, so i took a stab at it and it's the first time i've used an AI tool that has absolutely blown me away. i spent a good chunk of yesterday evening making "podcasts", interrogating sources, and writing up my experience, and this evening i've been throwing more stuff at it, mostly with superb results!

...

i'm not sure about what i'm going to do now, but i don't want to go to bed too early. speaking of sleep, mr smear's been going to bed without a night-light the last week or so, although he's been asking for the airconditioner on which serves as a very dim night-light, but i guess it's a win. he's definitely going to sleep faster, that's for sure.

down

 i'm tired. i'm still feeling shite, and there's a definite edge of depression slicing into everything. i slept on the couch for most of last night, mainly because i was too tired to get up until around 4am, and then i spent a couple of hours flooding my brain with war and politics.

i was tired today. i took mr smear to school, then stopped at home to pick up gd and my bag and we went to the therapist. it was a pretty good meeting, i think? then gd and i got breakfast at the azrieli food court before i headed to work and she took a taxi home because her legs are hurting again. on the way pissing off an oversized dog owner who was dragging his little greyhound behind him on his scooter with the leash around his neck.

fucker.

i was alone in my room at the office today, and i spent the day squaring off with the particularly ugly frontend jobby i've been landed with. the more progress i make, the more i understand where i should have started - too late :/

my mother was informed today that one of her contracts won't be renewed, so she's stressing about that :(

mr smear had a couple of rough moments today, so when i got home we sat down and talked - gd's right, though, we definitely talked for too long, but i feel like he got most of it.

i'm really struggling to stay awake so that i can sleep, but i'm completely uninterested in anything. i've just picked up a copy of gibson's count zero, hopefully that'll help.

oct 7th

 it was a long day, overshadowed by sadness, anxiety and frustration. it was difficult to concentrate. it was difficult to not be trying to concentrate.

there have been flashes of optimism. the iranian crown prince in exile sent an important message, and the kiffness responded to uncle cyril's propaganda in way that was a huge relief for us jewish israeli fans. the realization (by some of the US leaders) that they should be following our lead, not trying to restrain us from fighting evil.

otherwise, mr smear handled himself pretty well today, and i remembered to return to the coffee shop to pay the bill i'd forgotten about, and gd overcame her fear of more attacks today and went to her sewing class.

...

i've been feeling a bit raw since our fight the other night, and have been playing scenes from it over and over in my mind. as shitty as it all was, at the very end of it gd and i (well, more her than me, but i helped) arrived at a breakthrough conclusion and i've got a feeling it's going to help both of us going forward.

the longest year

 in six and a half hours, it will have been one full year since the beginning of the october 7th attacks. it's hard to believe that it's been a year, that we still don't have our hostages back, that we've accomplished amazing things but suffered painful losses, that there are large numbers of people around the world calling for our destruction, and that includes pro-palestinian jews who have absolutely no understanding of the forces they're aligning with.

it's all insane.

...

this morning was alright. mr smear informed gd and me that in retrospect, pantheon isn't appropriate for him. after his initial enthusiasm died down, he found it disturbing. fair enough.

i sorted out some financial stuff - hopefully this month will be more stable, but who knows? - and then realized i couldn't find an important medical document of gd's. i walked to work past the hospital, where i got them to print it out and discovered that the previous receptionist i'd dealt with had entered something completely wrong (and seemingly incoherent) as gd's email address...

the work day was alright. i didn't feel like it, but it was productive nonetheless. i might have eaten too much - i finished off what remained of gd's challah, and that was most of it - and my biggest frustration of the day was that there wasn't any non-barista non-dairy milk alternative for me. so it wasn't a bad day.

i had a good chat with vfmp on my way home, and a short but meaningful talk with mr smear about the current war situation and what tomorrow means for us. the rest of the evening was pretty chilled, and my biggest issue right now is kinda the same as it's been for a few nights: i think i might be depressed, because i'm tired, but i can't sleep, and i don't feel like doing or watching anything.

i guess i'm just going to try stuff (like shadowrun) and see what i can do to run out the clock and go to bed as late as is reasonable.

nice

 it's the middle of the night, and i'm having trouble sleeping again. i've spent the last hour or so doom-scrolling, now i'm going to try writing this and maybe, possibly, going back to bed,

i went to bed early last night, again, and i mostly slept through the night. i started the day with the beginning of what i presume is the final shadowrun mission, saved (and double-checked my save) and got ready to go out with gd to pick up snacks for our guests.

it was at that point that we realized that mr smear's bag was missing, the one with his epipen and mobile phone 🤮

i was panicking that we'd left it in a park or something, but then i checked google family link and was (somewhat) relieved to see that it was at or near the ice-cream parlor we'd stopped at. so gd went to the store for snacks, and i rushed over to the ice-cream parlor. it was a huge relief to find the bag there, and find everything in the bag, but the experience had certainly elevated my heartrate.

the minecraft playdate was great, the kids really enjoyed themselves and the adults had a good chat too. overall, excellent.

at some point gd decided that we needed to go and find food, so we went our separate ways and took mr smear with us to cafe eva. the only seats available were the comfy sofas, and after we'd finished eating mr smear pulled out his kindle (he's voraciously reading dr block books) and i continued reading superman: escape from bizarro world which is far more interesting than i expected it to be.

but between the comfy chair, and the food, and the atmosphere, i spent most of the remaining time there passing in and out of consciousness :P

...

eventually, we returned home and settled in as a family to watch pantheon (horseman's recommendation). as far as age-appropriateness is concerned, it's mostly fine with a rare scene where we need to send mr smear out of the room for a minute and then explain what happened afterwards. as far as entertainment / intellectual stimulation / writing is concerned, it's phenomenal, and we're all in, all three of us!

...

the only unpleasantness of the evening was mr smear being upset that we weren't going to watch another episode when it was already getting late on a school night :P

in spite of that, and the subsequent 45 minutes of him not brushing his teeth and then complaining that he wasn't being given time to read, bedtime went smoothly. and then i passed out on the couch, eventually moving to the bedroom, and then eventually moving back to the couch again. now i don't know what i want to do, because i don't want to get into a game, but i don't want to doom-scroll either.

ooh! maybe i should try actually reading again. it worked this afternoon :P

...

this long weekend has been good for me. we're now entering a more-or-less regular work-week tomorrow, and then it'll be ten days off. i'm really looking forward to that.

shana tova 🙏

on wednesday morning we were preoccupied with making sure we were ready for the long weekend, and the afternoon was relatively relaxed. having said that, i must've eaten something bad or picked up a bug somewhere, but i spent a large part of the afternoon running to and from the toilet.

fortunately, that settled down the moment we left in the evening, and didn't return until the following morning.

we went to our friends for the chag, and for the most part it was a relaxed evening with the kids (mostly) being cool and the adults enjoying good food and good conversation, in spite of the fact that we were coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum. it's nice to have conversations with intelligent people.

we came home relatively early, and after putting mr smear to bed i settled in for some shadowrun: dragonfall. until... until pretty late.

yesterday:

i woke up with the middle of my back threatening to spasm, and it was painfully on the verge for pretty much the entire day.

in the morning, gd and i left mr smear to his devices (i think he was playing minecraft) and took a pleasant walk around the very quiet neighborhood. other than that, until 4pm i was mostly preoccupied with the apex mission in shadowrun. that mission was hard, and i needed a restart or two (i made some pretty big mistakes), and goddammit i earned the won't suffer an ai to live achievement. just decided how to handle that story required a few restarts and reading up online, i literally couldn't decide, as a player or as my character, whether it made sense to make a deal or not.

that's good writing.

i completed the mission, saved, and quit. still buzzing from how difficult the mission was and having completed it by the skin of my teeth, i closed my computer and went out with mr smear for a walk and some time chilling in the park.

it was nice. and my stomache was mostly okay by then.

so we had a good time, and i got a good break from the game. after we got back and showered, i decided to fire it up, just until dinner time. and that was when i learned that my save game - the one i saved after completing the mission - did not exist, and i was taken back to the very beginning of my last attempt.

i died inside. that really messed me up, and i'd stay messed up about it until this afternoon.

we had dinner, watching an episode of x-men and an episode of the fantastic four, and then everyone went to bed early.

today:

we didn't know if we'd have guests today or not, but either way our apartment was in dire need of a clean. so, for the first time, the three of us did it as a family. it took a while, but we did well, and we all rested nicely afterwards. (mr smear reading on his kindle, i've just been convinced to pay for kindle unlimited).

with an hour to go before we-need-to-go-outside time, i decided to give the apex mission another try. this time, i was doing alright when the game got stuck in the middle of the battle and wouldn't let me end my turn.

so that's a thing, too.

it's an old game, so nobody's going to fix it. but i did find a forum post mentioning debug mode, and debug mode has a "kil" button. so i reloaded, again, and quickly breezed through the mission using a big, fat cheat.

once i was clear, and out of the mission, i saved, verified that the save saved, and *then* closed the computer and went out with mr smear for a walk.

it was a good walk, and we stopped for ice cream on the way. this evening's been alright, we've just finished showering and are about to eat, and we've played some games together.

today was a good day.

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 🙏