holy holiday, batman!

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

anyway, it was a good day.

breathing and crashing

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

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

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

ticking boxes

 this has been an intense week.

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

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

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

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

the morning hours were lonely.

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

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

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

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

it was a great evening.

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

all over the place

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

i think that's everything for now.

antsy positive

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

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

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

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

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

worse? or better?

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

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

anyway, we seem to all be fine now.

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

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

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

...

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

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

still coughing

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

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

...

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

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

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

...

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

another time round the sun

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

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

swell.

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

let's go backwards to tuesday.

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

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

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

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

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

fine, i'll finish it.

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

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

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

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

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

wednesday:

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

i am full of gratitude.

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

tuesday:

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

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

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

...

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

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

...

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

off and on again

or on and off again.

friday:

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

saturday:

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

yesterday:

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

today:

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

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

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

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

one foot in front of the other

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

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

dod's proposal

two days of intense juggling at work

gd coming down with a cold

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

what a long, strange week it's been

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

it's an enormous relief.

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

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

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

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

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

it's not my party but i'll sulk if i want to

 wednesday was rough, my neck was hurting all day after sleeping badly and by late afternoon i was starting to have headaches and needed to get out of there.

wednesday night i seemed to have gotten my pillows right again (and marked them, this time), and so thursday was much better. i ended the week on a very positive note, super excited by getting the thing i wanted to work working.

yesterday morning i made the mistake of enthusiastically setting up a test for the thing i got working on thursday. setting it up took a lot of effort and time, testing it was hard, and the ultimate failure sucked. not an optimal way to spend a friday.

we did, however, manage to get the bathtub's drain unclogged.

in the late afternoon i took mr smear for a walk down to the marina, we had a really good time.

this morning started with dragon's quest builders 2. i cannot praise this game highly enough! it's what happens when final fantasy meets minecraft, and i was thrilled at how invested mr smear was in reading all the text. and playing the game, which is exquisite. and the music was so lovely that i ended up passing out behind him on the couch for a while.

that gave me more than a couple of hours of "me time". then we all headed out to the birthday party. gd's neck has been in spasm since she got up this morning, so she bailed a few minutes out of the house, and mr smear and i had a nice walk to the trampolines. we arrived in time to verify that my registration earlier this week was valid, and after i installed a dice app on my phone we played an oversized game of snakes and ladders.

so far, so good.

the party started off well, but some kid told him that only one kid per trampoline was allowed and he walked out of the fun area to sulk.

i don't know how to deal with the incredible sulk. i tried supportive, i tried manipulative, i tried coercive. i failed. over and over. every time i almost succeeded, i failed. eventually, many lifetimes later, i managed to convince him to come give it one more try and then we arrived at the gate to realize that he'd been so upset he'd ripped off and thrown away the bracelet so we weren't allowed in anymore.

genius.

at least there was a whole vegan pizza just for us and he got his own private dessert in lieu of cake, and then end of the party was positive.

i mean, mostly. i'm not taking him alone to a party ever again. it was heartbreaking and horrible.

over the hump day

it's raining right now and i need to go to the office... like, really raining heavily as i type this and it's beautiful and warm and cosy inside.

yesterday was a pretty good day work-wise, but i was completely buggered by the afternoon and it was tough keeping my eyes open. then i caffeined up for the office game night and had a good time, making it home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear.

i slept horribly.

i've managed to get a couple of admin items squared away this morning, and now i'm going to do some dishes and be off!

dishing it out

 we're two days in and this isn't a bad week so far.

work-wise, iffy but trending positive. the week started sour with my team lead "taking me off the project", but this morning i got him on board with letting me close it out and so far mostly good. i also managed to deliver something everyone is excited about, in spite of losing most of yesterday to writing up last week's incidents...

mr smear was still at home today, although i suspect he should've been back at school already. he really likes chilling at home. i guess i should be grateful he's feeling safe and secure.

i managed to upgrade the mobile app on saturday night! expo's new system is a little weird, but good enough, and it felt good to do something with the project.

this evening i met up with scrapper for frisbee. we did play a little, but we also did a very basic old-people's workout at the park gym and we caught up on a ton of stuff. it was fun.

finally - doing the dishes has been a big deal for both of us. it's like a forced meditation for me, and a huge break for gd. i wish i'd thought of this before.

...

i had a revelation a couple of days ago, and it's that as high as the cost of living in tel aviv may be, it's not actually as expensive to live here as it was for us in cape town. of the three cities i've lived in in the past decade, cape town is by far the most expensive.

economics are weird.

last night on-call

 yesterday ended on a much better note, although mr smear was still fiery hot and i lost the argument about him sleeping in his own bed - until the early hours of the morning, when gd eventually lost it (after i'd spent the night receiving kicks to the nether regions and elbows to the eyes) and he left ours.

today was a recovery day. i don't know why i hadn't thought of it before, but gd *hates* doing dishes and i kind of enjoy it, so the other day i offered to take over and since yesterday it's been my responsibility. everyone's happier with this arranged, so that's cool. and the few times i did it today were... meditative.

otherwise, we spent the whole day indoors, quietly watching things or playing games. the only constructive thing i did was give feedback to mr cat, who was understandably unhappy with me realizing that the background needed a big change after producing what he thought was the final draft...

it's better, though.

i guess the other thing i did today was play around with the brave browser, which is now basically a thin skin for chrome with better privacy stuff and generally improved performance because of it. i now warmly recommend it, not least because i didn't have to give anything up - all my extensions work very nicely and the profile system is exactly the same.

not quite the weekend i was hoping for

 the past few days haven't been all bad. but they haven't been particular good, either.

tuesday and wednesday were a continuation of the deep dive into unhandled promise rejections in aws lambdas, which was not fun but did produce some interesting learnings.

tuesday and wednesday i worked from home after i found myself having a coughing fit five minutes before entering the office, i seem to have picked up from mr smear. who has subsequently gone on to become really sick with something else - he's been spiking a high fever since yesterday and we're keeping a close eye on him.

gd reported that the two of them got their bloodwork analyzed recently and the results were excellent, so that's encouraging. vegan ftw.

unfortunately, by the time i was ready to head back into the office on thursday my team lead was off sick. i'm being reminded of "optics", because he's never around to see the successes but i have to report to him whenever i have trouble. this is not boding well. especially because i was feeling much more confident by thursday and getting all sorts of little things squared away. i'm sure he was or will be around for my recorded knowledge share which i'd been too overwhelmed to prepare for, and i feel like i made an ass of myself.

...

by the time dinner arrived (at the office) yesterday i was utterly *done*. but i really wanted to go support my teammate at his improv competition. i'd ordered a meal from four one six, and was thoroughly impressed by their vegan shwarma, but their portions are so big i had to stash the remains (about half of it, even after significantly overeating) in the fridge. then we left.

we hadn't made it to the bus stop across the road before our support team got hold of me, asking me about something i was unfamiliar with. fortunately one of the coworkers with me could help, so i passed on a suggestion from him, and from that point until we walked out of the improv competition things were calm. i got to have a drink, and a beer, and enjoy the entire show without being paged, and the show was brilliant - most of it, anyway, there was one team i found a bit tiring - but we generally had an excellent time. our coworker's team won the evening, and our coworker definitely stole the show - he was quick, and he was hilarious!

after congratulating the team, i opened my phone to find that the support agent hadn't quite understood the instructions. so i clarified - but having no experience, i worried that i might simply be giving bad advice. so when i got home, after a quick shower, i sat down and began tinkering. if i got home around 11pm, and i went to bed around 1.30am, i can say that most of that time was spent diving deep into lambda logging.

finally satisfied that i knew what i was talking about and had tested all the possibilities, i squished into the bed next to a furnace - mr smear has been too uncomfortable to sleep in his own bed, apparently - and because he was overheating we were sleeping with the aircon on.

conditions were less than ideal.

...

and then woke up to the pager alarm at 4.40am. i spent the next hour and a half bleary-eyed, trying desperately to figure out where the fire was and unable to reach any of the team leads nor our department head. this is not the first time. and i felt especially guilty trying to contact these guys at stupid o'clock in the morning when one was sick and the other having just had beer with me before continuing on for more drinks with the other.

and then, all of a sudden, the metric returned to normal.

it had been a false alarm the entire time.

stunned, i climbed back into bed.

stunned, i woke up fifteen minutes later to another page.

a different one. after an hour and a half unable to find the fire, it also auto-resolved.

it had been another false alarm.

i crawled back into bed.

...

and woke up about three hours later to urgent messages from our support team asking me to investigate and then join a call with a super-important client.

being on-call for my employer is awful. it's ugly. and it makes me feel things like "i hate my life". i'm building resentment at every incident. i don't want this, and i don't think i'm being paid enough for this.

another coworker came to the rescue, fortunately, and a little while later i was ready to take a bus to the office to rescue my dinner leftovers.

...

which had been turfed by the cleaning staff.

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the rest of the day has been recovery, and a fair amount of silent prayer that the rest of the weekend will be quieter. and i posted a haiku i was inspired to write yesterday. you're welcome. i don't know where i'm going to find the energy to upgrade the mobile app for my side-project, which has been neglected so long that it's no longer supported :/

...

we've been making great progress on the sonnet comics front. so that's good.

pray for me.

so far, not amazing

 my sunday didn't begin so well, it started with the beginnings of a sniffle and a sore throat which has gotten progressively worse. thanks, mr smear. as the day progressed i became more disheartened, i'm very unhappy with having to babysit a highly complex solution that's full of components on fire, and the more i looked into things the less certain i became of what was relevant and what wasn't.

after a long day, i came home, watched an episode of pokémon indigo league (we've finally agreed that we can put aside the animal cruelty and exploitation and give the series another chance) and finished watching the chamber of secrets. almost immediately after putting mr smear to bed, while i was trying to decide whether to chance going to bed myself, my pager went off.

i had neither the knowledge nor the permissions to deal with the issue, so my team lead put me in touch with another team lead and the two of us worked on the thing (i bore witness, at least) until around 11pm. and then i crashed.

to be woken yesterday morning at 4.40am. again, no knowledge or permissions, and i woke up my team lead and we spent the next couple of hours on a call. we ended the call on an unpleasant note, and i couldn't get back to sleep.

frustrated, and with so much frustration having accumulated, and full of bad feelings, i started updating my resume and am considering putting feelers out.

i tried to have a conversation with my team lead when we were both in the office, but it would take all day to get an opportunity to speak to him privately. during that time, i got paged for two further incidents that i still don't know anything about.

we finally had it out in the evening, and while i have no way of knowing whether things went "well" or not i think we both did some airing of grievances and went a long way to clearing the air. i certainly feel like we're more aligned than before, and we haven't spoken properly in months which i suggested might be the cause of the drift.

he took over my night shift and told me to go home and clear my head, which i think i've managed to do. hopefully things will improve.

...

i'm shocked that the aircon people charged us NIS 500 for two remote controls that cost at most 100 each, where the main cost was apparently the "call out fees" for delivering said remotes. i wouldn't have paid, but these are the bastards we need if the air conditioners themselves need maintenance so they really have us by the balls. so that's an expensive lesson...

gearing up for another on-call

 i'm surprisingly relaxed about this coming week, even though the end of the week was stressed for the previous guy and my last one didn't go so well. and even though my legs have been giving me a lot of grief over the past few hours.

the end of my work week was generally positive. i'm not sure if it's enough to make up for the weeks before it, but i finally closed in on the end of the unpleasant project and even got a few hours in on the thing we've all really been wanting me to do.

so that was good.

otherwise, mr smear was feeling ill on thursday morning but seemed well enough to go to school, it was only when gd picked him up that we understood that he really should have stayed home (and me with him). so i felt a bit bad about that.

yesterday morning we went on a mission to pick up another phone (for me, this time). the model i wanted wasn't available, but we picked up an amazing persian breakfast which we ate at home and then i returned alone once it was. overall, the cellphone experience has been very positive!

<TMI WARNING> on the way home i stopped in to a grocery store to pick up an ice cream. i felt i deserved it. i usually don't have much flatulence during the day in spite of being a vegan, and when i do it almost never smells. but as i stood waiting for my turn to pay, an urgent ball of gas formed and i just had to let it out. it was silent, but so awful that i could barely breathe, the cashier gagged and, shocked, asked if it was me; i couldn't bring myself to admit to it, so i rolled my eyes while she desperately sprayed air freshener and her coworker laughingly suggested it might actually be her... i suspect he was just doing it for my benefit.
</TMI WARNING>

today was mostly an indoors day, with one mission to get coffee / lunch at timothy's, which was excellent except for gd and mr smear sitting on a bench that was utterly soaked and had had its warning sign ripped off by a previous sociopathic customer.

and we restarted a harry potter movie rewatch today. once a year seems a good amount of times.

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i'm VERY excited by the progress with the sonnet comics this week.

...

i'm rather disappointed with the outcome of tuesday's elections, it must be said. i've been trying to keep the political situation out of mind but morbid curiosity occasionally gets the better of me. i pray the next couple of years won't be too different from normal, but i'm sad that my own people appear to be on a path to polarization / radicalization and i want it to stop.

election frenzy

i can't believe it's wednesday already! (well, technically speaking, of course)

gd's had a big night - not only did i finally pick up a new phone for her (or me, if she doesn't like it), but she's been accepted into an ulpan class and is super excited to be starting her first class tomorrow morning!

today was a big day: it was our first election since we landed and we both got to vote. the experience was pretty good, although it was marred by a little old woman who - looking pretty non-religious to me - stood behind me and asked me why my son and i are not always wearing a kippah, and then threatened that once things come right all the non-practising jews will be thrown out the country.

holy shit.

anyway, we had a long walk (too much for gd) looking for breakfast after voting, ending up at our "usual" falafel spot, and later in the day i took mr smear to the lego store where i was informed in no uncertain terms that there's nothing i can do about all the missing kit pieces other than order them online and wait a few months. at least the store was fun. then i dragged mr smear around while figuring out what phone to buy and where, and in all the time there we were surrounded by ridiculous crowds of loud and or costumed teenagers. the vibe was cool.

turns out the other big mall saw a fight break out that needed police intervention with tear gas. sheesh.

my work-week hasn't been going great, it's stressful and disappointing and demoralizing. hopefully it'll improve.

acceptance

 the mongoose said something to me today that struck a chord: not just that i need a holiday, but that after everything we've been through i actually need to stop planning on doing things and give myself a breather.

he's not wrong. absolutely not wrong.

having said that, it's approaching midnight and i've just fired off the next three pages of the comics script to the illustrator, and i'm quite fired up about it. not least because both my wife and my son think that the concept's really cool and none of us can wait to see how mr cat puts it together, and he's just promised me that he'll be starting very soon on the last page i sent him and the minor corrections to a couple of earlier ones.

...

today was a good day. i took mr smear to meet the mongoose and his partner for a walk in the park, and i spent a large part of the day being very grateful to be here, to be home, to be safe and secure and developing a sense of stability and "rightness" with the world. well, *my* world, at least, regardless of the dumpster fire humanity's facing right now...

mr smear had a fantastic time today as well, it was just a really nice day. less so for gd, but at least she got to stay in and rest. hopefully tomorrow will be better.

we finished watching the "live action" (yeah, right) remake of pinocchio, which was surprisingly good. gd and i played a bit of rayman after putting mr smear to bed, and i watched the expanse until i couldn't keep my eyes open any more. then i went to bed, but couldn't sleep, so i got up and worked on the script.

now i don't know what i'm going to do. and the beautiful thing is that i don't really feel it matters much.