drop the pillow

i read this article on sleeping a couple of nights ago, and i've been dropping my pillow on sleeping on my arm since. and it seems to be helping.

...

this past week has been... really horrible. my neck and shoulder were simply awful for two days, and have been threatening to seize up again since. to make matters worse, i've spent days trying to figure out how to deploy code so that i can troubleshoot the thing that seemed broken, and over the weekend it began breaking frequently. so lots of stress, loads of repeating the same actions with minor tweaks and praying for a different result. when the alarms continued ringing on sunday, i decided to change tack and use a different OS to deploy (i've been working on a mac). i began setting up my windows machine but that started getting overly-complicated, then make the decision to completely wipe my old laptop and install linux on it.

this turned out to be a good idea for two reasons:

1. i discovered, during installation, that it was never a 32-bit machine! my whole struggle with it a few months back was unnecessary, the idiot who owned it before me installed 32-bit windows which reported it as a 32-bit machine (because windows), and running 64-bit debian on it is surprisingly performant.

2. as of this evening (after an hour or two troubleshooting with a coworker), i finally managed to deploy. the big lesson: the combination of serverless, docker and python is heavy and insanely expensive compared to CDK.

...

the weekend was mostly good, although there was one unpleasant incident of arguing about arguing. also, mr smear's been all over the place, his main cry this past week has been "don't boss me around" and "stop forcing me" and when he's not being generally fun to be around he's *really* testing us and pushing boundaries as much as he can.

...

i finally went to the traffic department today to renew my license, i had everything on the list. photos were not on the list, so i ignored the warning from security and walked on through. i waited my turn, supplied my documents, and... it turns out the list is wrong. after telling me what should be on the list, the clerk sent me to speak to a supervisor. the other clerk insisted on hearing what i had to say, then argued facts with me until i read the document out loud and explained that what she was saying isn't how english works. she fetched her supervisor. who not only agreed with me, but explained that the traffic department has been requesting an updated form from the department of transport for over a year now. she gave me a different list of requirements. i have to go back tomorrow again.

...

my side-project presentation is in two days, i feel like it crept up faster than expected. i'm *this close* to a functional product, and i'm really hoping that the others will be excited enough to participate.

it was good while it lasted

i mean, i'm still feeling grateful and all. life's alright. heck, i tried a new pillow last night and actually slept well (crazy dreams about a burning man event in a montreal university notwithstanding). then this morning i made the mistake of trying to flatten my hair a bit before heading out, and my neck and shoulder went into spasm and have made today one long, arduous battle.

after dropping off mr smear, i drove gd to the mall to get her new sewing machine fixed (turns out it was nothing serious, just a rookie mistake), and tried to get some work done while she was being attended to. that didn't work out so well due to wifi issues :(

yesterday, my first day alone at the helm of our cloud solution, was full of surprises. the first being that one of our customers is having issues that we didn't anticipate, and the last (and biggest) being that i discovered that i didn't have access to our production infrastructure - and i did *not* want to have to harass my counterpart on his vacation. fortunately, with literally two minutes of assistance this afternoon, i managed to sort out my access which was a huge relief. 

so i've spent most of today sore and unfocused. i got gd to watch hannah gadsby's nanette this afternoon, which meant i rewatched it too, and it was just as powerful the second time. mr smear told me a great story at bedtime because i couldn't read to him, gd and i watched the first episode of good omens which is brilliant, and now i'm going to bed early-ish and praying that i'll be functional in the morning. 

one more time, with feeling

it's past midnight, time for a quick memory dump before another night of trying to sleep without hurting myself. the past few nights have been abysmal failures.

the past week was hardcore. my counterpart has taught me as much as he could before leaving for vacation, and as of yesterday i'm now the only person available if anything breaks and i feel like we've barely scratched the surface. the next two weeks will hopefully be much quieter than i'm anticipating, and i suspect my low-level anxiety has been triggered more by my previous work experience than anything real.

my side-project's going pretty well, over the course of the weekend i've figured out another piece of the puzzle and i feel like i have enough to get the critical functionality ready before presenting it in a week and a half.

 i spent a couple of hours sorting out my great-aunt's computers, and i'm really proud of the fact that they got back to her with the changes feeling familiar enough for her to be enthusiastic about them ^_^

yesterday's mission to the mall: three and a half hours of supporting gd, entertaining mr smear, and spending a month's rent on a sewing machine. it was exhausting, but we shared a lot of good moments too.

on friday evening i noticed a box that gd had "hidden in plain sight", it was my swag from the beta-program i've been working on as my "side project". mr smear was particularly excited by the lego stars wars hover bike, so we made that together yesterday morning and he's been obsessed with it since:D

 i don't recall what made me watch hannah gadsby's nanette, but i'm glad i did. it's pretty powerful, and while there are a couple of nuances i disagree with i think it was brilliant.

i feel like there was something else important that i needed to put down, but if there is it's escaped me. i guess overall i'm feeling pretty grateful right now. life's mostly excellent at the moment. fairly tough. occasionally infuriating. generally gratifying.

circles under my eyes

it's 2am and i've been up for an hour after being restless for about an hour... i've really been struggling to sleep the past few nights. last night was because no matter what i did i was hurting my neck, tonight because i'm now trying to learn how to sleep on my back.

this is hard.

i worked from my mom's on monday morning, installing heaters but remaining cold as the doors, windows and vents still need fixing. gd joined me for lunch, though, which was nice.

yesterday mr smear's teacher sent a panicked message making sure that his fake cheese wasn't nut-based. every time we have an incident like this it makes us really angry, because other kids' allergies are being taken seriously whereas nobody gives a shit if contact with dairy might kill our son. that's fucked up. i told her so when i dropped him off in the morning, but it's not like she's going to be able to change anything.

you can tell how difficult it was for me to get motivated today by the fact that i finally hung the mirror we "inherited". i got sucked into grocery shopping after picking up mr smear, picked up an obligatory cup of coffee from my mom's coffee shop, and after finally working out and documenting the steps to a new process i joined an onboarding call for a couple of hours - at the end i registered that i was caffeined up to the gills and totally wired...

today our little neighbour came over to play with mr smear, and she asked why we don't drink dairy. we gave her the for-kids version - that cow's milk is for calves, and what happens to dairy calves when they're born - and i'm very curious to see if her mom's as okay with us answering questions as she claims :P

*sigh*

i've now refactored some of my side-project code, hopefully it'll all run so i can go to bed with a clear conscience...

circles

another week down. this last one was cold and stormy. 

mr smear going back to school has been an *enormous* relief. it may be tough getting up at 7 every morning (in utter darkness) but the payoff in hours of being a functional adult is immense. in combination with me now able to work from our bedroom (the wifi repeaters are good!) i was actually really productive. and gd made me awesome pyjamas that are so comfortable i forgot to change before my first work call on friday. 

tattoo 10/154 is done! i'm very happy with these last two, i have a solid idea for filling in the gaps, and our plans for the next two are quite exciting. 

after two months of stress, gd's fingerprints are finally in the mail. next step: mr smear's passport renewal... 

reevaluating how we deal with mr smear's regressions

leyning: i did alright with yesterday's torah reading, but i get so nervous that i tend to stop breathing properly after a couple of verses... 

mr smear bashing his head on a boom yesterday, then on my mom's couch today :(

side-project achievement unlocked - as of today, infrastructure and security are taken care of and i can finally focus on the core functionality with no distractions :)

harry potter rewatch + a few more hours on the lego game. loving them all the more. 

after midnight

yep, it's 1am and i've been restless then up for a while now. so much for a good night's sleep...

we rented the invisible man last night, it's an excellent concept with great production, but there are parts of it that were so poorly written that i spent them raging with disappointment. there are infinitely better ways to move a plot forward than to rely on characters being completely ****ing stupid. there were a number of great scenes that make it clear that the writers were just lazy, as opposed to incompetent.

today was a much better take on "anniversary". we dropped mr smear off at our cousins for a few hours, went to plant for an enjoyable lunch date, chilled at home (i completed a chunk of my side-project, and we re-watched some of bill burr's paper tiger), and then spent about four hours picking up mr smear.

it was late by the time we returned home, and in a few hours we'll be getting up for his first school day since march 12th.

i hope we've got everything we need.

wooden day's eyes

happy fourth of july! it's our 5th wedding anniversary, and we've spent the day celebrating by watching over mr smear and our neighbour's kid while gd's allergic reaction to the physio's kinesiology tape drives her nuts and i half-heartedly play games and work on my side-project.

tomorrow might be more "anniversary-like" :P

it's been a weird week - aren't they all, these days? - and i spent the remainder of it working from home and making stop-start progress on a wide variety of tasks. i've been sleeping really badly - including last night - usually waking up around 3 or 3 in the morning and finally being able to rest from 5-ish. not so great.

the big news from this week is that i'm finally able to continue the tattoo project! sonnet 9's pretty darned cool, and i'm quite excited about sonnet 10 which is scheduled for tuesday ^_^

checking out after midnight

it somehow feels like the fact that my workday ended a few minutes after midnight just fits in with a general theme over the past few days.

having a car is a game-changer. on wednesday, gd sat down across from me and sternly informed me that i needed to go work somewhere else... on thursday morning i picked up the car and have been working from my mom's since. game-changing! although i'm a bit sad to not be seeing my family during the day, i'm actually able to focus on work for hours at a time and the difference is palpable.

friday was a particularly validating workday, again. it really is a great feeling working for a great employer with a team of decent, competent human beings!

also on friday, i called up telkom to try and find a solution for our "uncapped" connection being throttled every month. i couldn't help laughing out loud when the agent described the different "uncapped" packages - none of which are uncapped - and was stunned when i finally understood her explanation of why i couldn't pay for more data: even though they were throttling us, we technically hadn't run out of data so if we *did* buy more data we'd never get to use it :S

this weekend i finally completed exapunks, i finally got back to it after many months and i was about to give up and copy a solution to the final level when i was inspired to try a simpler but less efficient algorithm. i ended up feeling very pleased with the results, and i really internalized the "moral" of the game by doing so.

on saturday we went to my brother's flat to pick up some stuff.  we left just as the storm started, it was bucketing down.  there was a lot of nostalgia, and a lot of shaking our heads. also, i really feel sad for my younger nephew who's clearly making an effort to right himself after a lifetime of spiritual neglect.

i lost a couple of hours on saturday night trying to synthesize my cdk project, eventually realizing that there are really good reasons for using typescript instead of javascript. on sunday morning i managed to convert everything and by end of the weekend i'd made exciting progress!

all three of us joined gd's friends for a promenade walk on sunday, after which we bumped into one of mr smear's friends at a playground. after that we went to the mall for a looong shopping, and i was so tired that i passed out right after putting mr smear to bed. my legs were *sore* this morning.

sailor's father passed away yesterday, i feel sad for his passing and particularly sad for our friend being in a different country while dealing with his grief :(

i sorted out our ISP problems this morning, we now have a new capped connection that should cover our needs.

there was a complete stuff-up with the removals, and in addition to that the couches my mother brought to her place appear to be infested with something. i was *not* impressed that it didn't occur to her to warn me before i arrived...

omg it's 1am. bedtime.

"the world lies on the brink of madness"

meh. the world's been utterly mad for at least a hundred years, now. it's more likely that we're on the brink of sanity...

hump day approaching

i can't believe it's wednesday already/again/whatever. this has been a productive week so far work-wise, and i've made some real progress with my personal project. i've published the results of my learnings, and i've moved on to using them :)

i've had a throat thing going for a couple of days that makes me uncertain as to whether i'm suffering from allergies or whether i have a cold or something, and my neck's been quite uncomfortable.

mr smear likes lemon + poppy seed donuts. he's been good, my wife's been mostly good (she's going through some stuff, we're both feeling a bit old of late).

it's 1am, i think i've just spent about half an hour writing an answer of about three lines about infant sleep patterns on a mom's forum (i answered without realizing i know the mum personally, so her response was quite surprising). i'm definitely ready for bed.

feeling weekend

as usual, i'm a bit surprised to realize that it's late on a sunday already.

this weekend was mostly awesome. friday was a great day, i got a bunch of stuff done and dusted and i was really happy with the results. dinner at my cousins' was really nice, and there's something about carrying your sleeping kid from the car to the bed at the end of a great evening.

the entire weekend's weather has been miserable, so we've barely gone out except to inspect the car and determine that we're going to have to trade it in...

yesterday was a game day, i got the hang of magic: the gathering arena and spent some time playing lego: harry potter with mr smear, and played with real lego for a bit. in the evening, we settled down to complete the hobbit trilogy.

that was a mistake.

aside from a couple of particularly graphic moments in the first two movies, we felt they were fine for our kid as long as we were watching with him and explaining things. i wish i'd read the reviews from all three movies before beginning, because we felt compelled to complete the story and honestly, it's the most obscenely graphic and horrific violence i think i've ever encountered on film. if the battle sequences were in another movie that wasn't based on a children's book and i was watching with my peers i would have loved it, but i definitely agree with an R rating for this final installment. from a values point of view, i have to say that it was mostly alright but legolas' antics, tauriel's forced romantic relationship and the incredible amount of damage that the main characters were able to withstand made it impossible to take things at all seriously.

so that happened.

shadowslight and i played a couple of games of thunderstone after mr smear went to sleep, i may have lost them both but i was really pleased with my second game!

today was father's day, and it was a good one. from the card delivery while on the can, to an hour or so of mtg arena, to a great family lunch at home and making decent progress with my aws guideline project. the only bummer was mr smear having another "regression", but we have a strategy in place and the internets have been reasonably consoling (it looks like it's not age-inappropriate, at least).

right, i'm done for the night.

what a long, strange trip this week has been

there's something decidedly awkward about receiving something that was yours to begin with, was stolen in a fit of malice and spite, and is now being returned - sixteen years later - because it was never actually wanted in the first place and is now simply taking up space.

this week we've "inherited" furniture, cutlery and crockery, beautiful paintings, and a car that might actually cost more to license than it's worth. i don't know what's more uncomfortable - that we're getting things that should have been ours in the first place, or that when i called my brother to thank him he was so indifferent about the whole thing. the car has literally been sitting sadly in his garage for a decade and a half.

...

after last week's mad rush to make up hours, it's been another half-week. most of it spent being demoralised by *another* massive code review. at least it looks like the team is onboard with my suggestions to cut down on the size of our pull requests, but we'll see if that changes anything in reality.

otherwise, i've made a couple of excursions on principle (i'm increasingly uncomfortable with how out of shape i've become) and taken mr smear along with me, and he's mostly been pretty cool. all three of us went to the shops today and picked up insanely delicious vegan donuts on the way home. it was a good day.

the past couple of nights i've gone to bed straight after getting him in bed, so maybe tonight i'll manage to get something done before i crash. i think i might have been ill, i can't fathom any other reason for feeling so tired and low.

just because i disagree...

... doesn't mean i'm right. but knowing that doesn't make it any easier to accept that i'm not, and the internal conflict is painful. also, i've been feeling miserable and ashamed because of my reactions to others' reactions that were (in my opinion) equally toxic, and while i've agreed (ages ago, in theory) to attempt to retake control of my emotions / reign in my bad behaviours, i'm not (and have never been) certain of my ability to do so. which is all very depressing, and depression is where my bad responses stem from. apparently.

gods, being a human being is messy.

friday itself - up until the evening's unpleasantness - was intense, but surprisingly and wildly successful. i finished the day on a high note, feeling very validated and appreciated.

yesterday was a long, low day. i'm still not feeling fantastic now. but the things that have been happening since yesterday morning have all been very positive: after a very small portion of torah reading (started off fine, then i got nervous and breathless), i had some time to myself to just go through my youtube "watch later". lots of blm stuff - very powerful stuff - and then a fair amount of fluff. mr smear jumped straight into lego: harry potter when he got home and i joined him for some of it, gd and i are both happy with the framing for the prints we bought last week, mr smear enjoyed reading comics with me (swamp thing, we both enjoyed the experience), and then we all watched about half of the desolation of smaug before bedtime. shadowslights, djelibeybi and i were going to play board games online but ended up just chatting for a few hours, i was convinced to purchase the bundle for racial justice and equality (two or three items out of 1650+ made it worth it), and being introduced to LP (the two "live session" videos are amazing) was awesome.

this morning is off to a pretty good start, i've published page 7 publicly. and pancakes. now to get back to trying to wrap my head around the thumbnails for the next few pages: i'm just learning now that as much effort as i put into the panel breakdown, it's really only half the work.

hobbit hole

"down, down, down in goblin toooooown"

we finished the first part of the extended cut of the hobbit this evening, mr smear loved it and i think he's finally excited about reading the graphic novel with me. he was totally into the swamp thing last weekend, and he got angry with me when i stopped reading before the guy's head gets twisted around because i thought it was too much.

meanwhile, we witnessed a bunch of goblins and ogres being decapitated tonight so i guess a slightly extreme take on looking over one's shoulder is probably fine. 

his biggest worry at night is an evil queen (i think it's since watching willow), this evening he tried to convince me that she's allergic to the theme of pirates of the caribbean so i should leave that playing all night.

... 

this week has been intense. first, because i'm paid hourly and i realized that last week was actually average for the month, second because i've barely had a moment to focus on anything, it's just been a constant barrage of distractions both work and life in general. 

at least we've gotten a handle on online groceries. i wish we'd done that months ago. 

... 

the latest comic page is done! 

unintended unpaid leave

this past week has been... let's start backwards. i'm sad and angry right now, it was a fantastic weekend (that included spending time with our cousins and bringing home a massive part of their lego collection) and then mr smear did something awful a few hours ago that just turned everything sour and unpleasant, so this probably isn't the best time to put everything down but hey, if not now...

anyway. the lockdown level shifted down to three, and on monday morning our domestic worker (i'm tired of saying cleaning lady / nanny) was finally able to return to work. the relief was palpable, it made such a huge difference to our week and a lot of stress just immediately and dramatically lifted.

that was followed by massive relief on tuesday morning when i discovered that the aspects of our passport renewal and police clearance stories that were caught up in a catch-22 weren't actually problems after all, just poorly explained.

those two things set the tone for the week, and i was so relieved that i just lost all focus for work. i think* i got about fifteen hours of paid work done in total, the rest of the time was spent taking care of random things or working obsessively on my aws cdk/sam project. by "obsessively", i've lost a couple of nights' sleep over it...

* i record my hours meticulously, but i can't be bothered to check right now.

i realized yesterday that the new internet hardware hadn't arrived, then discovered that there was some issue with my documentation and they hadn't bothered to contact me about it. if they can't make an effort for a new customer, i don't want to know what they're like to deal with when there's a problem, so i've told them to cancel everything and not waste my time.

why is this world so full of shitty service? appropriately, i'm typing this into blogger's updated interface and they've manage to make it SO much worse than it was before.

speaking of which, i had an interesting discussion with our temple chairman this week about the technology we use, as a result of which i've come up with some ideas for a vastly cheaper system that i can build myself and then productize. also, i made a mailgun web interface for bulk mailing, which i feel takes me full circle to the first paid project i ever did. it's been a productive week for things that aren't bringing in money, at least :P

finally: racism politics. black lives matter. it's been hard not to get too caught up in everything that's going on, i've learned some startling facts about the history of american racism. i've also had some interesting conversations about our local travesties, which are racist in the opposite direction (against the white minority) while at the same time managing to hurt the black majority even more. at least i've learned that there are lots of people having similar conversations, but unless we start having these conversations as a community i'm not certain the talking will turn to walking.

i'm totally over this weekend, i'm frustrated and exhausted and i'm not feeling ready to kick into gear tomorrow but i'm going to have to make up a LOT of hours this week and i've no idea how i'm going to manage that.

throttled

wednesday and thursday were full of technological failures, on friday morning i spent hours trying to get hold of telkom to sort out our internet and eventually lost patience and decided to shut down my service and move to a different provider. it was during this process that i learned that telkom had been sending sms warnings to our router that they were going to throttle our account.

a) not a helpful way to communicate.

b) i have no way of knowing *why* they're throttling us, and there's literally nobody to speak to - telkom's support lines were completely unavailable.

hopefully the throttling will be reset at midnight tonight as it's the beginning of a new month, and then we're hoping to get the new router and SIM by the end of next week. once we've established that works, then it'll be through telkom's hoops to cancel our account - i'm expecting a struggle.

i did get some work done on friday, albeit not very much. i was very glad to sign off at 5pm, have a drink and zone out for shabbat.

...

yesterday was my mother's birthday. the celebrations were fun, mr smear was really funny (can't keep a secret), and that's in spite of the fact that my mom and i went grocery shopping in the middle of the weekend, the best time to see crushes of useless people.

mr smear and i played a lot of lego: harry potter yesterday. he played about five hours today. i'd be concerned but i'll be damned if it's not teaching him to read, and his problem solving skills have been dramatically improving.

i watched a "live" steampunk production of a midsummer night's dream by an amateur english troupe last night. it wasn't actually live, it wasn't steampunk. some of the acting was alright. there were tech-fails aplenty. but overall, it was an inspirational attempt, even if most of the inspiration was generated by train-wreck moments.

also, all the power in the CBD went out last night with no warning. kinda worrying.

...

mr smear and i got up early this morning, he played lego: harry potter for the first five hours and then gd took him to the waterfront with my mom for his first proper outing since mid-march. i spent the entire day trying to solve the problem of integrating aws' cdk and sam tools for local development; if you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it, and i do *not* understand how to get all these things playing nicely together.

what i finally accomplished a short while ago is using a cdk-synthesized template to create tables on a docker-contained instance of dynamodb-local and providing a reasonable useful interface for recreating those tables on the fly. the next step is getting lambda functions to point to that container when invoked locally with sam while also performing correctly when deployed in the cloud.

now to get my head out of the cloud (had to) and do the regular school-night evening routine.

poor taste

problems with working from home during lockdown #5734983: i was in a meeting this morning, my boss is working on a python project and gd overheard me say something to him that included "if you're fiddling with your package...". i realized as soon as the words were out of my mouth that that was NOT the appropriate phrase, but i managed to shake it off and move on, and my boss and coworker on the call didn't seem to notice so i chalked that up to their being german - i mean that in the sense that the phrase probably doesn't translate.

but gd heard. and gd began giggling uncontrollably and loudly, and i - in the middle of a very serious discussion - had to move my meeting to a different room with my boss and coworker laughing at me cry-laughing hysterically until i could get a hold of myself.

###

i came up with an original joke today:

A man dies, but has no recollection of his last moments. Death greets him with a television screen and a box of tissues and says "I want you to come to your own conclusions".

###

unexpected banking experiences:

1. on my way to the bank to close my account, it suddenly occurred to me that i might have more money that i hadn't transferred, and i did. so i transferred the paltry sum, then purchased R900's worth of solidarity fund vouchers with my non-transferable ebucks. having emptied my account, i was then informed that i couldn't close it without paying the (unlisted) outstanding account fee. it was R30. i NEVER have cash on me, but in a flash of desperate inspiration i checked my wallet and found R40.

2. i never thought i'd enter a bank wearing a mask and feel like i was being robbed.

3. i walked out of the bank and attracted the attention of a man lurking between shops.

"hey, big man, you look pissed"

"yeah, i've just been robbed by the bank"

"robbed by who?!"

"the bank. they rob everybody."

he tried to sell me ecstasy and marijuana. we're still in level 4 lockdown until next week, but i'll be damned if that's not "essential services" in these trying times...

thursday already?

the week's been a rush. even the good parts have been exhausting. it's been half days work-wise, full days of everything else. the biggest highlight of my work week so far was today - two meetings in which i managed to redirect development efforts with buy-in from my peers, and an invitation from my boss to work on a project that i'd be only too happy to.

today's drama: my old bank wasting my time unashamedly, to the point where i told the cashier to destroy my card before withdrawing all my cash, and now i've got to get them to close the account which i assume will be a story. that's the second bank that's burned me since we've arrived.

i spent sunday setting up a project for aws deployment, which was mostly successful but i ran into some issues. when i checked in with our resident expert the next day, i was not as surprised as i should be to learn about the existing packages that do what i need which are inexplicably hard to find out about. now that i've played around with them - sam and cdk are good solutions - my next step is figuring out how to use them together. and then, if i'm lucky, i'll be able to actually Do The Thing because the architecture and the code itself were definitely, definitely the easy part.

apparently my back's in better shape since i started rounding my shoulders, the physio's happy with the improvement. what i'm not happy with is that i've noticed that since the lockdown began my legs have been shrinking again...

games and cloud

yesterday i stated that the paw patrol game was worth every penny... this morning made me change my mind. by the fifth hour mr smear had completed all the missions, been awarded most of the badges and was totally bored - i've never seen him bored by an expensive game before, it was very disappointing.

lego harry potter, on the other hand, is brilliant - we played together yesterday (he really doesn't *get* how to use arrow keys properly), i found the puzzles entertaining and challenging and he loved just wandering around randomly or watching me play.

gd's big discovery yesterday was that our cousin's amazing pumpkin pie isn't vegan. i think it's even more disappointing when it's an intelligent person who forgets that eggs don't grow in the ground...

shadowslight and i played thunderstone last night, just the two of us, and it was the first time i've ever played with traps. and i got hurt by them, big time. i made a few mistakes but overall i played well enough and had fun.

...

i have spent the vast majority of today setting up a project that allows me to locally test lambda functions using dynamodb, and i'm perpetually shocked that i haven't been able to find any guides or projects online to doing things as simply as what i've arranged. i'm *this close* to getting my sample function up and running (i ran into an IAM issue after sorting out all the other bits and pieces), and then my next step is to create a separate repo so that others can Do The Thing without the headache and hassle i've been stumped by for the past couple of weeks.

lekker vegan for dinner was a great idea. a hot bath was a great idea. the 2014 teenage mutant ninja turtles movie is becoming a family favourite.

what about bob? i found the characters so distastefully unfunny that after half an hour i had to call it quits.

calm down

it's mid-saturday now, and to be honest i haven't really worked since wednesday. i went to bed so late on thursday night that i didn't take mr smear outside for his daily yard time, and my biggest achievement of the day was posting the gif i made.

not to suggest that i'm working now - it is the sabbath, after all. it's just that the past day has been a bit of a blur. is it because i'm only having a coffee a day? is it because my neck's been really sore and i'm not comfortable working anywhere in the apartment at this point? am i still slightly foggy from last week's procedure? i am feeling much better, at least.

the temple service last night was better than usual, and we enjoyed video-conference kiddush and dinner with some friends before settling in to a couple of episodes of gargoyles and bedtime. we're getting used to bedtime reading with my mom using caribu, they've got great books and the experience is... usable.

i passed out immediately after putting mr smear to bed, woke up a couple of hours later and decided to stay down. i definitely felt better for it this morning.

mr smear and i took a walk to grumpy & runt, picked up a couple of doughnuts and sat at a bench outside making a complete mess eating them. it was one of those very rare moments for which i'm gushingly grateful.

my mom arrived MUCH sooner than expected with my upgraded machine, and mr smear has spent the last couple of hours playing the paw patrol game we bought so many weeks ago - worth every penny! in particular because he could play over *there* while i captioned a comic page, went through reviews of a piece i submitted to my creative writing group last week, bought tickets to next week's live online steampunk production of a midsummer night's dream, donated to support a fight against our government's tyranny, and was generally distracted by Random Things.

it's been a good saturday, so far. except for the bit where i learned that a good friend was robbed at gunpoint this morning. another not-so-gentle reminder that it's best if we go live somewhere else.