this week has been a whirlwind. it was a lot more relaxed than the previous one, but not necessarily good. i was mostly unfocused, and the one big job i had i never got around to because i was busying myself with everything else. uh, anything else, if i'm being totally honest...
mr smear finally went back to school, which was a bit of a relief. i've been doing what i can to circumvent resistance and at this point i've got no idea what's working and what's not.
i've had zero time and headspace to work on anything outside of my main gig, and have been making a point of catching up sleep. i'm not sure it's helping.
taking care of my tattoos has been annoying as always, but this time the aftercare has been a lot more time consuming and going over each individual line has become an interesting little ritual. i'm really stoked by how good my arm looks, now, and i'm really glad i got this done before breaking for swimming season.
it's the tail end of rosh hashana right now, i'm not sure this has been a great couple of days but i'm hoping that it's the start of a much better year than what we've all been going through. that would be nice.
i began this post while sitting here listening to our friday night temple service after a painful and exhausting week, thinking about All The Things and being really grateful for the right now.
two new tattoos, and a beautiful sketch for the next page of the graphic novel in hand.
a beautiful family.
enough space to breathe, even if i'm desperate for a holiday.
a rough plan for the coming year, both in work and in where we'll be.
one small step at a time. details are just details.
i cannot believe it's wednesday night, i'm completely buggered and i'm finding it very hard to be effective and productive.
the big changes this week are about mr smear and independence; setting things up so he can do as much as possible on his own seems to be making a bit of a (positive) difference in his behaviour. it's not all roses, but another side-effect is that we're somehow managing to bring his bedtimes under control and this is the third night in a row that we've gotten him in bed at a more reasonable hour.
other good news: gd's police clearance is ready! we're waiting for the courier to pick it up and then we're one step closer to getting all her documents apostilled...
i found this ted talk on posture and movement fascinating, and it seems to be helping a bit.
i'm a bit sad that the past couple of months have been devoid of new tattoos, but i'm excited to have completed another one yesterday and i'm looking forward to my friday and saturday sessions!
i'm tired, and i've been very tired for a long time. this weekend was relatively restful, though. yesterday afternoon i took mr smear to my mom's and helped her hang paintings and set up a micro-ups for her router, and last night gd and i started with season 2 of the boys - we've just finished the second episode now, and i'm not disappointed.
oh! and mr smear and i started playing the gardens between yesterday, it's beautiful but it goes from kid-friendly to wtf in only a couple of levels... beautiful game, though, and we can play it together.
this morning was a slow-starter, i did spend a fair amount of time learning flutter things before we headed out to bakoven to meet a cousin and hike a bike trail... it was a beautiful day, and we all really enjoyed the outing! we then headed to plant and sat down to enjoy the buffet, the food was great and i definitely had more desserts than i should have.
the afternoon involved a nap (for me) while gd and mr smear played video games, i joined for a bit before getting motion sickness (toy story 3's sunnyside daycare area and way too much with the driving / riding), then the neighbour kid came over for a couple of hours and i spent wasted most of that time trying to point a subdomain at my api gateway. yee gods, why is it so damned hard to find an explanation as to how to do it? (i think i've figured out everything from the aws side, but my domain host's dns settings are clearly doing something wrong)
tonight's struggle with mr smear was about getting him to practice eating with a knife and fork. ffs, it's the things we expect to be easy in this parenting shit that always seem to be the hardest.
i'm tired, i feel like i should just call it a night.
thursday:
thursday was a bit mixed up. the good parts involved an exciting consultation with my tattoo artist and booking three sessions for next week, a little bit of success at work, a couple of pleasant short walks outside in our first spring weather and some great moments with my boy. the bad parts involved having difficulty focusing on work, realizing i've only done half my hours this week, and a moment over spilled coconut water that triggered a painful talking-to about my anger issues...
the big news from thursday was shocking and a bit surreal: my israeli passport has been renewed, but only for two years. they're literally giving me two years to return before i lose my passport. we were tentatively planning on moving before 2022, but now there's external pressure and that's made everything a lot more real.
after getting mr smear to bed i worked with SxS until late. i'm sad that the issues we're having are with the deprecated solution that's still being sold (silverlight is awful), but i enjoyed seeing what's become of the replacement project i initiated!
yesterday:
a general sense of the day being out of control, working at my mom's, a weird dmv experience (none of us could figure out what we were waiting for, and i somehow picked up my new license ahead of the handful of people who'd been waiting longer than me), eventually getting through it and back for breakfast-lunch (i hadn't eaten a thing until 1.30pm, and then i ate too much) before diving in to strange mysteries that we only managed to resolve about an hour after i'd planned to leave for the weekend.
...
loadshedding didn't quite happen to us last night, but it did drop our internet connection:
MY ISP: "press 1 for support"
ME: *presses 1*
MY ISP: "press 1 for support"
because that's what i'd rather be doing on a friday night than watching a movie.
...
this morning:
it's been a chilled morning, except for the bit where a stripe support agent effectively deleted my account (intentionally!) because i'd complained about receiving 30 copies of the same sms. wtaf.
*yawn* second coffee and try-to-continue-doing-nothing time.
godsdammit, flutter IS awesome. i've got a good grasp on which components i need to Do The Thing, and i'm pretty sure that i can produce functionality incrementally in a way that solves the real problems from the get-go.
it's also been nice to receive positive-seeming feedback from our rabbis after i mailed them all a letter regarding kashrut and veganism. we really need to start moving forward.
gd's new tattoos are hardcore, even if i had to go out in the rain to pay for them (they're only accepting cash payments now) and i was ten blocks from home when i realized that i'd forgotten my mask :S
i've got another consultation tomorrow - i'm a bit bummed that our artist hasn't been communicating with me but he seems enthusiastic enough whenever i get hold of him...
i've had a bit of a head-cold (it seems) the past couple of days, but at least mr smear seems to be better. he's really loving the activity books i picked up yesterday, just in time for miserable weather :)
two passport applications, lots of bureaucratic details, loads of double-triple checking, and i finally couriered off two half-kilo bundles this morning. not that i didn't know these things were stressing me, but i didn't realize how much until they were gone and i could fill my lungs again.
yesterday and today were both less-than-half-days at work, so i'm not feeling entirely constructive. but overall i feel like things are okay.
yesterday i had a horrible experience with mr smear that was triggered by a failed attempt at a martial arts lesson, we all learned some shit and i think our dynamic's shifted a bit. i kind feel like it's for the better, but i guess we'll see?
i was going to work with SxS this evening but he delayed, so i've been watching steve hofstetter instead and am very soon on my way to bed.
it's just past 1am, i've decided i'm satisfied with flutter and its tooling. in spite of spending at least half an hour just fiddling with android studio and vs code and deciding that the latter is a *much* better experience. the afternoon / evening wasn't quite according to plan - i played a bit with mr smear, then it was suddenly dinner time, x-men and nebulizer time (he's mostly back to normal, but he's got a lingering cough and we're doing whatever we can to make sure he's good for school tomorrow), a very late shower and bedtime, and then about forty five minutes on the phone with an amazon agent because they forced me to change my password and then refused to let me in without an OTP that they weren't sending me.
****.
anyway, i spent most of the (night?) filling out passport application forms and hopefully i'll be able to mail off at least one of them tomorrow.
so far so good. sleeping late (mr smear tried to rouse me to play, but eventually settled for building up his moon base in little big planet 2 by himself (he's making amazing things), and although i felt horrible (possibly sick) this morning i was doing much better by the time i climbed out of bed.
coffee and determining whether i'd go with flutter or react native (i've been convinced to try flutter after reading a few articles), then a (mostly) nice walk with mr smear for donuts and a really wonderful time sitting on a bench enjoying my second cup in the sun while mr smear went to town on a delicious blue-and-bunny-biscuit topped donut.
i've had a chilled lunchtime, and am now actually installing flutter and will hopefully have something to show (myself) by the end of the day!
yesterday:
the usual start to my saturday, getting up early and learning the few verses i'd been assigned, a nice service and then dropping gd off at the hairdressers and mr smear's bike with protoplasm. i took him to plant for lunch after that, which was a mistake as he still had a runny nose and a cough and an attitude. i regretted getting him a burger.
the afternoon and evening were spent... gosh, i don't know. there was a lot of fighting with mr smear (he's *really* devoted to being defiant lately), and an awesome session with gd practicing and eventually completing the radioactive marshmallow challenge in lbp2. mr smear didn't like not being invited, but he'd already bored both of us way beyond our limits doing his own things... (like filling worlds with stickers)
friday:
friday was supposed to be a short day for me, but it was 5.05pm when i finally was ready to publish my work and walk away from my keyboard. the big achievement was getting both mr smear and my passport photos taken! he has RBF, so getting a shot of him not smiling was straightforward :P
mr smear and i had a very unpleasant interaction after i was done working, gd stepped in and we were all quite unhappy for a while, but the resolution was positive for all of us and gd and i appear to be on the same page now so that's good.
thursday:
i jumped out of bed at 7am with fixes to my prototype bouncing around my head, my boss wasn't as excited about the project as i was but both my coworkers convinced me that these were definitely billable hours and one of them now owes me a case of wine :)
i then found myself volunteering to be responsible for our team's next release, i'd been manic since the night before and the rest of the day was just nuts. also included was a successful cloud deployment that went much smoother than expected and an enjoyable weekly beta programme demo.
...
and now back to flutter.
mr smear's come down with something (seems like a regular cold), apparently gd's been hit too and i'm not sure if i had it a week ago, or if that was just allergies and i'm on my way too...
yesterday:
working from home on tuesday mornings is fantastic - it's not monday and things are quite quiet.
we did make some progress, but i was feeling slow and stupid (possibly due to the antihystamines).
i ended up working late, and it took hoooouuuuurrrsssss to get mr smear through the bedtime routine by which point i was done.
today:
mr smear stayed home, after a slow but moderately successful start to the day (that included a delicious improvised "krabby patty") i drove to my mother's. i was thoroughly unmotivated until after lunch and the post-lunch presentation, and then i threw myself into improving our git tools until a coworker distracted me with an interesting challenge, and i eventually left my mom's so late that she opened the door while i was putting my sneakers on.
krybabie update: it's freaking scary how rapidly things are deteriorating and it seems like it's irreversible; this is absolutely heartbreaking.
i came home to another great dinner (mr smear's being thoroughly spoiled) and spent just under four hours designing and building the MVP for our package management system which should give us all the ammunition we need for the morning's meeting on the topic.
i love that in less than four hours - less than three if i hadn't hit a really weird bug with JSON parsing - i was able to go from rough idea to functional tool using my AWS CDK repo as a guide!
there're a couple of things that have become clear over the last little while:
1. i need to exercise more - i was shocked to discover i've put on ten kilos, and although i'm confident that two or more weeks of donuts and cake had a part to play i'm also confident that five months of barely going outside have something to do with it.
2. i need to invest my time better. i've been taking gd's advice and slowly adding "downtime" to each day, it seems to be helping.
3. i need to update my blog more often! what follows is missing so much and it's always been a really good tool for me to process my day-to-day.
after running a few tests, it looks like the swelling in my jaw that's been bothering me on/off for the last couple of years is just another irritating part of getting older. i've also, over the course of the last couple of weeks, given up on there being a good way for me to get a healthy amount of sleep. i'm not comfortable or safe with the pillows, or without them, and so far the biggest help has been my returning to sit on a pilates ball while i work.
in other news, krybabie's been in rapid decline since we heard the diagnosis (which
appears to have been inaccurate), which is kinda hard to process... we
may not be very close any more, but we were and our families still are.
work-wise, it's been a decent week overall (in spite of being dopey due to allergy season being in full swing) but i've lost so many hours to python shenanigans that i'm at the point where i feel as good about python as i do about php, even if it's for very different reasons.
i've picked up a bit of extra work helping SxS out with a piece of code i wrote a few years back - i was surprised to discover that although nobody every really tested it, it's been live for clients and working unexpectedly well :)
we had the plumbers in last week - they damaged the floors a bit, but they finally got the awful wardrobe smell sorted out! it appears that some workers damaged the seal to the stack (or whatever it's called) and we'd been enjoying open access to our neighbours bad smells for over a year...
the next sonnetcomix page is beginning to take shape, although it's turning out to be a little more complex than we originally thought. i've had to make yet another big shift in how i approach the pages in the first place, which i guess is evolution.
mr smear has been really funny and fun when he hasn't been hardcore, and he's been a lot less tough to deal with since we realized that his "thing" right now is asserting himself. the other night he told me "you're not the boss of me!", and i told him that he's absolutely right, and if he doesn't want to live under my authority he's welcome to go out, get a job and take care of himself. he's begrudging agreed that gd and i can be "the boss of him" until he's ready to go.
on a different note, last night i did something that upset him and was met with "YOU GET ZERO STARS!" - it was truly difficult to hide my laughter as he was really angry, but after my third attempt to apologize had been ignored i asked him if i really only get one star. "okay, if you apologize you can have ONE star".
he's been really getting into writing words lately (i only wish he wouldn't get so stuck on things like "PPOO"), and although we haven't got him on his new bike yet (he refuses to try without training wheels) he did a great job on his balance bike around the pinelands canal yesterday which was awesome.
oh, yes: "do we have the ben ten game?"
"uh, i don't remember any ben ten game."
"i've been waiting to play it my whole life!"
two days of really horrible behaviour from my five year old, i'm trying really hard not to take it personally but the only thing that's keeping me even remotely sane right now is that we ran into one of his friends this morning whose father admitted that they're going through the same thing.
my neck's feeling like it might spasm again at any time.
i've had a chat with the illustrator, it's not clear if my idea for the next page is viable or not but at least we agree on general strategy. i tried to have a chat with the tattoo artist, but he's been blowing me off or ignoring me for weeks and i'm beginning to feel like i should be finding someone else.
i've gotten into art of war over the course of the weekend, not the battles but the expedition mini-game. it's a very clever, insidiously addictive mechanism.
i finally watched avengers: endgame, and it was a decent end to what had become a generally mediocre run. i've read most of the first omnibus of the boys, and i have to admit that the tv series is better written. the comic's fun, don't get me wrong, but it's just not as tight.
i've just spent the past hour or so looking into mobile app development, and i've just realized that it's past midnight... so...
it's been another long week, although thankfully not as intense as the previous ones. the major theme of this week was a continuation of the weekend - setting up virtual machines - but although i've lost a day's worth of billable hours and tons of productive time, i feel like my equipment is in a good place right now. i'm immensely amused by the fact that after much hunting, i finally found a way to get accented characters on my windows machine! my first (and possibly last) purchase on the microsoft store is a relatively expensive app called holdkey, which makes your keyboard do exactly what a macbook does out of the box. if i wasn't regularly typing my german boss' name, i don't know if i'd feel it was worth it but as it stands i'm getting great value for my money!
speaking of which, gd's totally addicted to duolingo and her hebrew's improving dramatically ^_^
by the end of monday i was finally ready to prepare all of gd's aliyah documents for the courier, and then realized that i was so focused on her canadian police clearance i completely forgot that she needed south african clearance as well, so that was another workday effectively struck from the record :(
mr smear's birthday celebrations seem to have calmed down, there's something palpably more mature about him all of a sudden and it's kinda freaking me out.
i've finally gotten back into the sandman comics again, and the boys is AMAZING. i'm also finding a bit of space to think about mobile development for a volunteer project i've agreed to take on, and hopefully i'll be able to make some space this weekend for the sonnetcomix project. and teach mr smear to ride a bike.
i just heard that krybabie has been diagnosed with the same thing my father had around the time we became friends, feeling really sad for him and his family right now.
working backwards:
i don't know if i'm cut out to be a software developer for the rest of my life. sometimes i feel like the thing that really separates us from the rest of humanity - the thing that makes us worth the money we're paid - is the willingness to persevere through a never-ending world of broken tooling to get to the point where we can actually do what we *think* it is that we do, which is write code.
i've now spent most of my weekend - and a large part of that is time i'd set aside to do some actual work - trying to get my new computer configured so that i can repurpose the other machines and get on with my life. the new computer is fantastic. the new internet connect is fantastic. trying to get software building on virtual machines using shared folders is torture.
birthday stuff: mr smear's birthday was great, but he's been so damned difficult since turning five, so defiant and seemingly incapable of listening to the most basic instructions... the worst was yesterday, when we went to protoplasm's to pick up his new, very expensive big-boy bicycle. he seemed excited, then got scared, then decided he simply didn't want it. the cowardice and lack of gratitude were deeply disappointing, i may understand intellectually that he's only five but emotional i'm still quite bitter. then this morning we had a zoom birthday party for him and a few friends, it was freaking weird (obviously nobody else got to eat the cake).
friday was utterly unproductive, i was supposed to be making up for it this afternoon but it's now 2.30pm and i'm still trying to get my computer set up. i need a break.
