locking down

another lockdown. we're praying that mr smear can go to school tomorrow, but that's still not clear. thursday and friday were pretty much lost causes as far as work was concerned. i was a total mess until thursday afternoon, and a partial mess until this morning. on friday evening my hackathon team made the deadline by about fifteen minutes. yesterday was basically spent playing videogames, either with mr smear or by myself. i was still very fuzzy, and i'm amazed at how successful i was with braid and super meat boy (i didn't have headspace for much else). i was really impressed with crossover (to play 32-bit games on my mac), but disappointed by how much they're asking for it. mr smear slept over at my mom's last night. gd and i gave up on lawnmower man last night and finished watching blackspace instead - the former is not a good movie. the latter is a powerful, superbly-told story. i *think* my cough / sinus / etc. situation is finally starting to clear up; this morning i woke up and took care of a few things, not least of which being that i put together the outline for pages 13 and 14 (the new A3 whiteboard helped, though i'm not certain how much of that was psychological). my mom, mr smear and i went up table mountain this afternoon, it was pretty cold and windy but we all enjoyed it immensely. after mr smear went to bed this evening gd had a bit of a breakdown - being stuck in south africa is taking its toll, and we're praying that our year-long slog through the swamps of bureaucracy pays off. i've finally made some satisfying progress on my side project for the first time in weeks. omg it's approaching 1am already.

still hacking

 i'm *still* struggling with the coughing. i went to the doctor again today, this time armed with better information after looking up decongestants and "rebounding" yesterday morning and learning that gd and i have been unwittingly maintaining a decongestant addiction because we thought that infrequent low doses were fine.

they're not. we've been paying the price for months. and these past few weeks we both just happened to blow up at the same time :(

i'm on different meds now, not sure how i'll sleep tonight but at least i don't feel as wired as yesterday.

...

mr smear was so excited to go back to school today, and we were overjoyed and relieved to hear that he had a fantastic time. i didn't get much work done today, mostly because of my doctor's appointment and a "quick" visit to the bank (the ticket said "estimated wait time: 5 minutes" and it lied). we tried playing unstable unicorns before dinner and i think we both enjoyed it :)

...

the last two work days felt oddly productive considering the mess i've been. it's funny, but as my role's never been very clearly defined i find myself straddling both management and development in an interesting way.

...

back to the hackathon stuff.

around the world

 i think we're all starting to feel better, to varying degrees. mr smear still isn't ready to go back to school yet, but *knocks wood* his cough seems to be subsiding a bit and we're hoping he'll get a good night's sleep for once. gd's exhausted and has actually gone to bed already.

i didn't get a lot of hours in at work today, although i did get through some stuff i wasn't looking forward to and i did manage to fix our shower door, so... winning. gd had a busy day with two visits to the dentist - the first to get a temporary crown (neither of us are convinced that it was worth the trouble) and the second to get the broken temporary crown fixed.

otherwise, it looks like her canadian document might actually be on its way to us, so that we can send it back again to be certified. because we, like all the other immigrants, are rich and can afford to throw thousands upon thousands of dollars at couriers and a wide variety of government agencies.

mr smear and i had a couple of altercations today, but we're mostly fine. this parenting stuff is hard.

i'm finding myself drawn more and more to steamworld heist. a part of it is that i need a break, and it's giving me one. a part of it is that it's a gorgeous, atmospheric game with a cool story and great mechanics.

right. back to the hackathon stuff.

father's day

 today was a great father's day. i played quite a lot with my boy, he was excited for a boxing lesson and actually did really well, he picked a weirdly father's-day-themed movie (bambi), i picked a weirdly father's-day-themed movie (stardust), we all felt sorry for our super-allergic selves together and generally enjoyed each others' company.

in other news, gd participated in an online "aliya fair" this morning and there's a possibility that we could handle the rest of her process from within israel, which i expect could make things considerably easier for us.

after putting mr smear to bed i jumped on a hackathon call, but there were only two of us and we just ended up have a great chat about a million different things for quite a while. then gd and i watched the second episode of blackspace, which is brilliant.

...

otherwise, i'm a little nervous about going to bed now as my sinuses are starting to feel blocked again. i've been on five different kinds of medication (antihistamines, prednisone, antibiotic, cough syrup and mometasone furoate) and i'm not really feeling like it's all making a huge amount of difference. i mean, it's definitely helping, but not as dramatically as i would expect this whole routine should.

so much hacking

it's friday night, i'm still coughing. and this morning i woke up before dawn and coughed so violently that i injured my throat. it was initially so painful that i was worried that maybe i should be heading to a hospital, but over the course of the day it's calmed down considerably. this evening it was still sore, now it's a mild discomfort.

gd's still not feeling good - looks like she may have gotten food poisoning yesterday, but at least her lungs seem to be doing better. mr smear's super snotty and stuffy, so we haven't sent him to school in a couple of days (or been outside at all, how very "lockdown"), but aside from that we've been fine and mostly in good spirits.

things that have gotten me through the week:

work: we've successfully published the new release with days to spare.

the hackathon: whatever happens, i've successfully completed an enormous share of the work and almost all of it worked first time.

my tattoo healing: the harry potter (sonnet 13), titan ae (14) and groot (15) tattoos are healed, and my chest is still a bit itchy from the hair regrowth but it's bearable now.

steamworld heist: good lord, what a sweet and fun game! a very firefly feel for a turn-based platformer, and interesting without being too demanding.

mr smear helping me put together the new shelves today? awesome. the new shelves making an enormous difference to my "corner office" of the living room? awesome. picking up chickpea fudge at the chemist and both of us absolutely loving it? awesome. his enthusiasm when i picked up a discounted copy of spongebob squarepants: battle for bikini bottom - rehydrated this evening and we played it together for a bit? awesome.

more hacking

 i can't tell if it's allergies or not, i'm feeling like it may have been a bug (not covid, pretty damned sure about that at least). it was hardcore sunday night and all of yesterday, then last night it kind of calmed down and it's been on / off today.

half of today was spent doing paid work, which was surprisingly productive, and the other half working on the hackathon project. i at least felt like i was making progress, but it's a much bigger piece of work than i anticipated. like, a LOT bigger. so i'm really, really pleased that i've just deployed a basically functional version of it and if i don't go to bed really soon it'll be because i'm enjoying some "me time" :)

*sits down with a fresh cup of hot chocolate and a box of rusks*

otherwise, project mr smear has been running pretty well even if there have been a few hiccups along the way. gd's feeling a bit better even if she's still struggling to breathe. the directeur l'etat civil charged us for her documents this evening, now we're just praying they'll ship them to the right location.

for now? i think things are okay.

hack

 i would feel much better about today if my nose and throat hadn't been doing a thing for the last few hours. i'm praying it's just allergies and doesn't turn into anything worse.

praying.

this weekend was pretty good, barring having to drop off gd at the hospital this afternoon on our way back from a really nice world of birds play-date. my tattoo artist cancelled yesterday so i ended up watching big hero 6 again with mr smear, and today i woke up super early and made lots of progress with my part of the hackathon project - although i was hoping to have something deployed before going to bed, but when i finally had some alone time this evening i got stuck troubleshooting global secondary indexes instead...

 mr smear convinced my mom to play toy story 3 with him this evening. hilarity ensured.

 ...

i'm excited that netanyahu's finally on his way out, but i worry that his style of politics has already infected so many in government that the new crew might just be bringing in more of the same.

i hope not.

acceptance

this week has been... much better. it had some ugly parts to it, but i'm learning yet another important thing that i really wish i'd learned long ago: to let go of stuff and prioritize relationships i care about over my ideas of right and wrong. this week i've pulled back on anything even remotely discipline related and focused on making good memories, and things seem to be better.

...

this week my chest has been itching just as badly as last week - post-tattoo regrowth is not a joke. it's been fine if i've been shirtless, but it's either been very cold or i've been at work so that hasn't helped much.

work-wise it was a very interesting week. it took us the entire week to take a basically solved problem and render it release-ready, with a lowlight of our efforts being updating a golang package version to indicate a breaking change, which proved unnecessarily complicated. i also got pulled in for a two-day investigation that left a bunch of us a lot more knowledgeable and with a few interesting ideas of how to move our project forward.

side-project-wise, i got side-tracked by a mid-week emergency when one of my clients forgot his password and i realized that i hadn't implemented any kind of password reset feature yet... the back-end changes were almost trivial, but it cost me two nights of fighting with react before i was able to give them something that not only looked decent, but wasn't going to fall over if something breathed too hard.

hackathon-wise, we've had a couple of cool discussions and made a lot of progress. no idea how far we'll get in two weeks, but the fact that there are three of us who have drive to make this thing happen long-term is satisfying.

gd's been coughing again, apparently she's landed up with yet another chest infection. mr smear's also been coughing a bit, but we're convinced his is just a result of post-nasal drip and bad allergies.

...

it's friday evening, and for the first time in a while it really feels like erev shabbat.

bottoming out

 life is good, but my relationship with my son is not. today was a really rough day after a lot of other rough days, and it's clear that he just doesn't give a damn what i think and that he doesn't like me. it doesn't matter how good my intentions are, clearly i've screwed this up. and he's not even six years old yet.

so today i've decided to take a step back and keep a bit of distance between us. i don't know what direction things are going in, but i know it's not a good one and something needs to change.

...

the thursday night meeting and presentation was brilliant, there's a lot of enthusiasm for our idea.

on friday afternoon my coworker and i finally figured out a big chunk of the elusive bug that's been plaguing us, which is an enormous load off as we now have over a week to tighten up related code and test the crap out of it.

gd took over my tattoo session yesterday, i'm a little surprised (her new ink runs all the way down her arm and into her fingers) but it's definitely cool. my latest one seems to have calmed down, and my regrowing chest hairs from the previous pieces are giving me a bit less grief than they were (they were thoroughly distracting for days).

this evening i went for a stroll with sailor along the promenade - good exercise, great company, but damn, he lives in a different time zone from the rest of us and i keep finding myself synchronizing with him... i got back much later than anticipated.

...

 i finally got some work done on my side project this morning, and a little bit this afternoon - i was going to continue now but i really, really feel like shit at the moment.

the joys of parenting

it's so hard to have conversations with our five year old. in some ways, he's just so darned clever and in others... he can be a real dumb-ass.

we've been going through a really painful time with him lately. he's got such a good heart, and he loves connecting with other kids, but there're a bunch of behaviours he's modelling from the little bastards at his previous school and he keeps doing things that turn other kids off... we're doing our very best to help him but it feels like it's out of our hands, like we just have to leave him to figure this stuff out the hard way.

it's tough watching someone you love make mistakes. it's even tougher when you know that it's not their fault. it's even tougher when you know it's kinda yours. if i'd had understood how much damage being in that school was doing him, i'd have pulled him out instead of trying to deal with unqualified, uninspired seat-warmers.

and now the new school's switched the teachers because the school's running out of funds, and they've clearly made an enormous mistake. his teacher for the first few months was AMAZING. the new teacher? she's mediocre at best.

can't we just catch a break for once?

...

things have been a bit overwhelming of late, i've been worried that i'm burning out. or, burning out more than usual. at the same time, i have to Keep On Adulting and the universe just keeps throwing more stuff at me. half of those things are opportunities that i can't refuse but don't have the bandwidth for.

case in point: there's a new hackathon going on, and my teammate and i came up with something so cool that even people outside of the hackathon are getting excited - i don't even know what to make of that.

and i had a chat with a university friend who's now a game developer, and he's on board with this educational thing i've been talking about for years now.

otherwise, work is work and i don't feel that my downtime is nearly enough. i've just given gd my next tattoo session so i can get over the latest one, which was insanely painful for an interminable hour and a half, no matter how brilliant it may be (although it will need a bit of a touch-up). it's right underneath no. 16,  exactly on my ribs and i yelled and wailed and moaned a lot.

we got page 12 out the door, though. so that's good.

the crest of the wave

 it's been a wild few weeks, i've been feeling overwhelmed even since work pressure eased off just over a week ago. last week mr smear brought home a cold, so that was a bit of a scare, and last tuesday's tattoo session was so intensely painful that i was suffering from shock for two days afterwards (saturday's also hurt a lot, but nothing like no. 15).

i've been stressed about my side project (not that i haven't made any progress, but it's been hard to make headspace for it), i've been stressed about gd's documentation (after giving us the runaround for a couple of weeks, they informed us that the form they'd given us was invalid and that the lawyer who's helping us isn't lawyer enough), i've been stressed about pushing out the graphic novel (although we did just complete a really cool page), and i've been stressed about the awful stuff going on in israel almost as much i've been stressed about the world's ridiculous response to it.

it's funny, though, that through all the anxiety and the day-to-day trials and exhaustions i'm sitting here typing this and feeling pretty okay about the world.

...

in mr smear news:

the past couple of weeks have been easier than before when we were going through a period of particularly difficult behaviour. he's been repeating to whoever will listen that i'm always working and never play with him (completely untrue, but not the point), even though he's (in the same breath!) told someone that i don't have a job. *facepalm*

twice over the course of the past week or so i've managed to get him to come down to the parking lot with his bike, and both times he's had a blast and made real progress. i hope we can gather enough momentum for him to be confident enough to drop the training wheels.

while things have generally been pretty good with him, tonight he pushed gd too far and for the first time ended up going to bed without dinner. to put it simply, he was being an asshole. i don't know how we correct this, but i think this evening was an important step.

...

 right. imma going to bed now.

happy mother's day

 today was an excellent mother's day: mr smear dragged me out of bed early and we made some nice cards for our mothers. we played through the first couple of levels of lego star wars: the complete saga which, along with the other lego series' we own makes me want to thank each and every one of those responsible for producing those games because the fact that they exist is AMAZING for me and my boy. they've hit on the perfect formula for making adult movie experiences interactive and appropriate for children while still being super fun for us bigger kids.

my mum picked us up and we went through to maker's landing to sample the wares of three of the vegan food shops - it was all fantastic! the vibe there was really cool and we had a great time. i was exhausted when we got home, so i crashed for a bit, then got dragged into a little more lego star wars before we all went out again to visit my great aunt, who we haven't seen in person since a while before lockdowns began. it was really nice spending time with her :)

it was quite late when we returned home, we ordered curry club for dinner and - for the very first time - managed to convince mr smear to dig in and he enjoyed it too ^_^

...

the past week was hectic, i don't know if my fogginess on tuesday and wednesday were due to intense allergies or if i had a cold or something, but those two days were hard. thursday and friday were a bit less stressful, and included a meeting with the programmable banking team which was very interesting and probably quite fruitful!

otherwise, on saturday afternoon i sat through the tattoo for sonnet 14 and in the evening gd convinced me to watch in the name of the father... i cried a lot after that movie, i would have been deeply moved by all the unjustice in the film (and the true story it was based on) but dad-me was utterly heartbroken.

a checklist that includes my first harry potter tattoo

yesterday:

new page's script off to the illustrator: check.

a lovely visit to the museum with mr smear: check.

a great 5km evening hike up the mountain with sailor: check.

a four-hour upgrade of one of my mobile app's components after putting mr smear to bed: check.

today:

a morning full of meetings, ages logging my hours and invoicing my employer, lots of context switching, and enjoying the walks with and waits for mr smear to and from school: check.

managing a git repo rescue and helping a coworker put out a release and leaving the house with ten minutes to get to the tattoo parlour: check.

getting an amazing tattoo done in about forty five minutes: check.

playing lego batman: the videogame with mr smear, then totally firing up his imagination with honey, i shrunk the kids at dinnertime: check.

learning all about push notifications while polishing off gd's oversized, delicious raspberry pie: check.

getting ready to wash my tattoo off before going to bed: check. check. check.

the blur

i went to bed after posting on wednesday night, i'm still not clear on why mr smear was sleeping in our bed but that and my neck were the least of my troubles - with everything else going on, my ear starting hurting and it felt like i was heading for an ear infection. i managed to get an appointment with the doctor first thing (well, first thing after dropping mr smear off at school and joining my morning meetings), and was relieved to learn that we'd caught it in time, so i could avoid antibiotics but still had to engage in preventative medication, which appears to have done the trick.

sleep-wise things didn't improve, though, as i've spent half the nights waking up around 1am with what seems like post-nasal drip-induced acid reflux, being too tired to do anything constructive so just resigning myself to hours of watching youtube (okay, some of it was educational, at least).

otherwise, the rest of the work week was arduous but much improved, i closed off the week with a new release candidate with which i believe the problem is resolved.

yesterday was fantastic. hido's down in cape town with his family and we joined them for a braai, it was wonderful seeing everyone and introducing all our kids ^_^

after an excellent day, mr smear and i played some biped in the evening (hardcore, absolutely brilliant) and after getting him to bed i jumped in to a thunderstone evening that was a little slower than usual, but between turns i figured out how to get my expo app working on an android emulator and by the time i got to bed i had moved all my TODOs out to a backlog board which seems a lot saner.

on the shakespeare front, on wednesday i received page updates for the nymphs' breast reductions but haven't had much bandwidth to publish them, so i'm going to do that now and then dive in to putting the page 12 script together for mr cat.

two down

work today and yesterday was extremely frustrating. after hours more than exptected spent getting my "quick win" friday task sorted out (mostly due to atlassian bamboo's specs reference being difficult to navigate and only partially correct), i then dived in to producing and testing a new release candidate and we still haven't managed to root cause why it's broken. and each attempt to try something different takes an excruciating amount of time to set up.

i've spent a lot of time walking away from my machine to avoid angry-crying.

on the home front, yesterday was a difficult day (mostly just sad), and gd's been really struggling with a bunch of things all happening at the same time (including having a wisdom tooth extracted yesterday morning). today we all had to get up early (failed) to get mr smear to the hospital to get the dressing for his stitches replaced, which turned out to be a pretty good start to the day.

in the late afternoon (when i gave up with work) i took him to the company gardens where he made friends with a gangly older kid, and things were pretty cool except for the bit where they got excited and he bashed his stitches into him while they were trying to hide from the other kid's mother... i really hope he's good.

 we've been having trouble with our apple tv for ages - gd's had it since before we met - and today our roku premier arrived. it was a welcome distraction around lunchtime, and after waking up a little while ago (after falling asleep reading to mr smear) i've been playing around with it and it's sooooo much better than the apple tv! it has exactly one shortcoming - that we can't install the prime video app on it - but that's covered by the ps3 and everything is working excellently.

my neck's been giving me a bit of trouble. i'm nervous about sleeping on it, but i guess it's time for bed.

sunday school

 ugh, it's almost 1am and i've just eaten (again) so i need to wait a bit before going to bed...

today was... well, it started off quite frustrating, with mr smear griefing gd while i bashed my head against a wall of react native documentation. things weren't working, and there was no indication of exactly where or that the broken bits were caused by me using an older version of the packages than the documentation was for.

*facepalm*

i walked mr smear through to visit my mum, she helped me put together an email i was supposed to send out weeks ago and then we checked out a cool bookstore and stopped at her coffee shop for a treat.

after we got back home i finally finished redesigning and refactoring (it's not perfect, but it's definitely far better than it was) and then did my stairwell exercise for the first time in a week or two. i found myself energetically walking that off and ended up doing some very basic boxing/taekwondo exercises in the park, which felt good until i was halfway back, walking slowly, and tweaked something in my back.

it seems to be okay, now, i hope it stays okay through the night.

our rabbi friend (who traveled to augrabies with us) came over for dinner, after which we put mr smear to bed and watched half an episode of invincible before gd bailed on me and i got back to the expanse. then i finished publishing my changes and celebrated with hot chocolate and youtube videos (chubbyemu videos are amazing).

lacerations, or "stitchnik junior"

 well, today was an interesting one. it started off well, pretty relaxed, and in the early afternoon gd and i left mr smear with our neighbours and hopped off to the waterfront to make a big purchase (a new ipad, it's been seven years since i bought the last one and apparently it's not handling old-age very gracefully). we arrived back just in time for the afternoon's excitement, as mr smear had just been demonstrating his breakdancing abilities and managed to bash into a drawer knob that opened up his forehead enough to need three stitches.

there was much drama, and way more screaming than i was ready for. trying to get him to breathe and do a quiet "big boy cry" didn't *ahem* cut it.

anyway, one parent only in the emergency room so after hanging around for a while i went to my mom's coffee shop to chat over a chai latte, and we both arrived at the hospital just in time to greet our war heroes.

the evening was pretty chilled, and after putting him to bed gd and i watched the new mortal kombat movie: surprisingly good, and great fun!

it's now 2.30am, and the only reason i didn't go to bed two hours ago is because i've been setting up the new ipad and logging in to all the apps etc. but that's done, i think, so now i'm free to crash.

 i'm tired.

breathe

 1. mr smear's behaviour improved, and one thing that he kept repeating that was worrying me was clarified: he claimed that me "using [my] body, not [my] words" was a factor in his misbehaviour - i discovered the next day that what he was referring to was me physically carrying him to his room for a time-out after he refused to go by himself :P

things seem much more settled now, but i'm still making an effort to be easier (and more patient) in general.

2. the feedback from thursday evening's presentation was amazing, even if i felt like i'd done a terrible job. some of the programme managers / investors were inspired enough to want to have a chat with our team next week to take this project further. of course, mid-presentation i found a bug i'd introduced the night before in one of the most important pieces of functionality :P

either way, very validating.

3. as i told my department in our morning meeting, yesterday was supposed to be "me time". so i subsequently ended up doing lots of code reviews :P

i did, however, manage to put a few hours into a ticket i've been wanting to take on for ages, and i completed it successfully! but not without taking down our build server, which we discovered at 5pm on a friday afternoon. i hope we can resolve this quickly on monday morning...

4. while struggling with our apple tv and airplay yesterday evening, it became apparent that our home setup is long overdue an upgrade. after a deep dive into all our options, it seems like the most cost-effective way to get what we need is to acquire a roku (to replace the apple tv) and get a new ipad for gd. considering the fact that her current one has (more or less) lasted seven years and that it's still much cheaper than the most basic laptops available, i guess it's worth it.

misbehaving

just in case i don't post soon, this is a reminder to myself that yesterday and today (yesterday, in particular) were troubling days with mr smear that needed hard conversations.

also, it's now 2am and i'm only just going to bed after spending all evening preparing for a demo of the hackathon project and doing a fair amount of refactoring and bugfixing.

otherwise the week began with devastating fires and everything still feels kinda slowed down. 

remember this day

 there's a scene in f is for family in which kevin shares a memory of his father, when he was much younger, telling him to remember that day as it was a really good one.

today, with that in mind, i said that to my son. in spite of the fact that none of us likes getting up early in the morning, and in spite of the fact that (apparently) neither do any of the other parents involved, we arrived at acrobranch at 8.30am and we all had a really good time.

we (sadly) drove past the beginnings of the massive fire that we only learned in the evening wiped out the UCT library, which was and is heartbreaking.

we came home, i napped, and mr smear dragged me out of the bed to ask for my help with opus magnum. firstly, he didn't actually need my help, just me sitting by his side asking him what he should do next. secondly, the solution he came up with was really cool and very different to what i would have done.

after spending an hour working on my budgeting app for a presentation on thursday, i took mr smear to sea point, picked up sailor, and we headed to queen's beach.

it was lovely. it was a hot afternoon, but the sun wasn't too harsh by the time we arrived (around 4.30pm), and we had a great time playing around in the rock pools and clambering around the rocks. we even stopped in at scheckter's raw on the way home to try out their vegan "twix", which is pretty darned close to the real thing!

i really, really hope mr smear remembers today.

some of the evening was a bit of a bummer after all that, but whatever. after shower / dinner / bedtime and an episode of wandavision, i sat down and hammered out the upgrade for the presentation and i'm definitely happy with the state of things. the only thing i need to do before thursday is create new accounts and import fake data so that i don't have my personal data exposed on the recording...