breathing and sneezing

filing years of documents is dusty work.

also: wanna know how i've lost ten kilos in six months (almost exactly) with no exercise? intermittent fasting, combined with incredibly high stress levels.

this past week became more and more stressful and frustrating, both work-wise and bureaucratically, and i spent friday afternoon trying not to let me heart explode.

we have no control over our situation.

while the jewish agency has determined my family to be jewish enough to migrate, misrad hapnim is blocking us and there aren't any humans to talk to. after a long chat with the lawyer who appears to be the right one for us, she ended the conversion saying "you're going to go through all this whether you like it or not. you can do this 'in chill', or you can make yourself sick".

something i needed to hear, i guess.

this weekend has been BAKING hot. my brain was melting before the temperatures rose. i picked up cardboard boxes yesterday morning and got the car valeted, and we've spent a large chunk of the weekend sorting and triaging and packing. and trying to breathe. and even breathing a bit.

also, gd and i watched a lot of cobra kai last night and it's so well-written and cringy that i'm not sure i can handle any more of it. certainly not with all the other stuff going on in our lives.

shaky

was today tuesday? jesus. two intense (and largely frustrating) work days disrupted by a chat with the consulate during which it became apparent that the woman i've been dealing with is a giant spoke in our wheel, it's just not clear whether that's due to incompetence or malice. we're trying desperately to get permission for mr smear to travel next tuesday. we have no idea whether or not we'll be getting on that flight. in a way, this is all considerably more stressful than leaving montréal, and that was hella stressful...

otherwise, mr smear had a meltdown this evening followed by what appeared to be authentic regret, although he did admit to me later that he was hoping an apology would earn him his privileges back... and tomorrow he starts grade 1. if we're lucky, it'll be for only four days and then we can spend the next while fighting to get him into kitah aleph instead.

this morning i commented on a friend's post about flashbacks not being a thing, i spent ages putting it together in a way to make it clear that i appreciated what he wrote regardless of the specific detail i took issue with but what i subsequently learned was that i really should have just left it. *sigh*

rollercoaster (sleepless)

 i feel like i survived the whirlwind that was today. i've been talking to lawyers since thursday, talking through plans that seem saner or more mind-bogglingly mad depending on the number i times i talk through them, each strategy making less sense than the one before and each path at the mercy of organizations and factors out of our control.

i didn't sleep much last night. i spent a good chunk of it pacing up and down, exhausted, working through conversations i was praying i would be able to have in the morning and dreading the continued silence from the people we thought were on our side. or listening to strangers sharing their stories in series' of voice messages, gleaning little bits and pieces of experience that may actually help us.

this morning i shakily got up, my stomache churning and my heart* thumping in my throat, and called someone who i thought was avoiding me.

no answer.

i subsequently tried calling her second-in-command.

no answer.

and then, suddenly, a call back from the first with a sense of compassion. she appears to have heard me, explained to me why nothing's happening as fast as we need (primarily because everyone's come down with covid, funny how south africans discovered the new strain and got blacklisted but we all seem to be relatively functional), and has agreed to plead our case to the decision-makers. my anxiety's far from gone, but it is dramatically lessened.

* which reminds me, i've lost a fair amount of weight over the past months and i've hit 85kg consistently for the first time in many years. i think my skin's responded at a slant because my AURYN (sonnet 19) seems a bit skew and it didn't before.

after that, a half hour chat with an israeli cousin who's disgusted by what's happening and trying to lend a hand. after that, a chat with the second-in-command, who seems very sympathetic.

in summary: the court process will almost certainly take a lot longer than we can afford - two people have reported stories taking eight and nine months, even - and our quality of life with all the stress and uncertainty is already quite low and will only be lower if we're forced to stay here or go to montreal. we need them to make an exception for us, to let us get there and take care of the details once we arrive. the irony is that nobody disputes whether mr smear should be living in israel, only whether his right to do so is by birth or as an immigrant, and them preventing us for moving because they're not sure makes no sense whatsoever.

my mom came over for a bit, and after we discussed the container quotes we've received we've all agreed that it makes far more sense to send all our belongings to an auction house and buy new things there - it'll certainly be cheaper, and it'll also be less headache.

i spent a good chunk of the day shuffling paperwork, trying to sort out some of my documents, and i took mr smear down to the pool for a break which was fun until i realized that he had been developing a real cough so i rushed him back upstairs...

i don't know what happened, but i was buggered. probably exhaustion from the stress and not sleeping, possibly virus-related? who knows, these days. not only did i feel weak and dizzy, but my phone kept pinging... i finally got up around the time my mom came over for dinner (including an unfortunate and unpleasant outburst by gd about my godmother, triggered by our johannesburg cousin's sister doing something ugly), made another call to a lawyer, had a brief text chat with vfmp and made a call to horseman, got dragged off for dinner. then horseman and i resumed our chat and an hour or so later we said goodbye full of inspirations: i do believe he's invented his own branch of the sciences, a "psychematics", if you will. an exciting idea that thoughts might operate according to mathematical principles.

...

yesterday:

"zoomagogue", trying to shabbat and failing with all the stress

our rabbi friend coming over to swim, pool time before it got too windy

chat with a johannesburg cousin (and the awkwardness of getting help from her and her husband when my own brother's visiting cape town and hasn't even bothered to say hi)

tron + abe's exoddus + tron legacy, mr smear loving all of it along with us

a good sync with vfmp (with some uncomfortable talk about the kid we've both tried to help)

the work week:

my work week was thoroughly disrupted by all the things, even though i managed to be relatively productive my manager did express concern that i'm making it difficult for him to plan availability and productivity and that if this keeps up we may have to take steps. that does not spark joy at all.

friday in particular was effectively a lost cause, i spent most of it on phone calls and emailing and generally freaking out. we had dinner at my mom's with cousins and nephew, it was a jolly fun evening and towards the end everyone learned some things about everyone else's relationship/histories with psychedelics which was pretty hilarious.

...

*breathe*

*remember to breathe*

we celebrated too early

 we're not just deflated, we're stunned, shocked, full of anxiety. i got a very rude awakening yesterday morning in the form of a call from the consulate - it turns out they've recognized gd as jewish, but they have *not* recognized me as his father. not only that, it turns out that the last time i tried to register his birth i was told something critically incorrect: that the paternity test couldn't be done here in south africa. so the good news is that the test can be done in south africa, the bad news is that it's only under very specific (and expensive) conditions and may take months.

months that i would have had in spades if they'd only told me this before.

so now we're in a race against the clock (gd's visa to remain here, her police clearance documents) and we've got to be out of our apartment by the end of this month. i spent all of last night (until 3.30am) hunting through documents and social media for any scrap of evidence i could find, but this morning the consulate called to inform me that almost none of what i found was at all relevant. we've spent today trying to piece together a plan for getting there, but this is extremely stressful and disillusionment is at an all-time high.

the one sliver of light in the darkness is that we've managed to get in touch with our landlord from when we moved in together, and he might be able to help us out.

...

and i had to work today. so i just signed off a few minutes ago after playing catch-up because my hours for both yesterday and today would have been very short otherwise. also, we've been getting quotes for moving with containers and they're expensive. like, big debt expensive, the kind that kept us chasing our tails for three years after we moved here from canada. like, we need to consider whether it doesn't make more sense to sell everything we can and buy new there.

mr smear, for the last while, has been much better behaved and more stable but we did have a few incidents today - although the recovery from those incidents on all our parts was actually pretty impressive. and the biggest issue when we went down to the pool with the neighbour's kid and her cousin was that he really doesn't want to get out of the water even when he's clearly too tired to keep himself afloat (－‸ლ) [does that look like a facepalm? really?)

i think i should go to bed now.

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powering into 2022

dec 26th: whatever else happened that day, hido and i met up for drinks with a couple of other people and had a jolly time, after which i picked up mr smear from my mom's.

during the course of the week between christmas and new year's, we tried to organize an aliyah interview but things became very complicated because the shlichim were all on holiday. however! after pleading with the local representative to find a solution - any solution - we were connected directly with the head of aliyah in south africa who happened to be holidaying in cape town! she agreed to interview us on sunday morning!

new year's eve 2022 was very quiet for us old people. we spent the following evening at "family playdate", with one of mr smear's friends - the kids were mostly good, but the adults enjoyed a delicious dinner and played exploding kittens.

of course, i didn't sleep a wink on saturday night, but on sunday morning we met with her for three hours, we had almost all the documentation she needed and she got to meet the three of us as human beings. although i subsequently spent the rest of the day locating and scanning missing documents, she'd already been convinced (officially) that gd is jewish and mr smear is my son, and on thursday morning we received an official letter to that effect so our rush now is to get them entered into the population registry and mr smear's passport produced. as soon as that's done, we can make travel arrangements!

shehecheyanu, v'kiy'manu, v'higiyanu laz'man hazeh.

the relief and excitement are both overwhelming.

work has been pretty great over the past couple of weeks, and by the end of the week our team was back together, bigger than ever (we've had two new hires in two months). i've made good hours in spite of many distractions, and i've actually managed to get some summer holiday time in with my family too.

so... things are good.

posting this was the first thing on my saturday to-do list, now i'm going to post something for my patreons, and then start rewatching Why Everyone Is Quitting Their Job To Play Call of Duty with an aim to provide subject start times and titles so that i can write a post about it. i've now seen 2.5 hours of it, and i'm convinced that it's the most important video ever uploaded to youtube.

happy new year!

merry christmas

as retribution for a few good night's sleep, the universe (or my neck) made thursday night a nightmare in which i was in so much pain that i couldn't sleep until about 4am, and i woke up yesterday still hurting and dizzy and exhausted. i got through yesterday (it calmed down after a few more hours) but i was still slow and basically took a full day to do less than half a day's work, which did not feel good. at all.

...

gd's documents finally arrived! and we *just* managed to catch our rabbi in time (before he disappeared for a week's vacation) to get another document updated, hopefully we'll get our interview invite soon.

...

i tried to purchase the ps3 king's quest collection today, but the playstation store website is broken. after giving up, i've just installed the king's quest series on my old windows machine and we'll find out tomorrow if mr smear is ready for a (relatively) text-based adventure!

...

this morning being christmas, and my child possessing the critical thinking faculties of a six year old, and my wife accommodating the santa klaus thing in spite of us all having had a very serious conversation about jews and christmas, we had two conflicting experiences: the first, him waking up excitedly to find santa's hat - convincing evidence, of course, that ol' saint nick had been here, eaten the oat energy bars and dropped off the present - and the second, that i was telling him about this week's parasha and we ended up watching joseph: king of dreams before "zoomagogue" which was surprisingly good in spite of the less-than-inspiring soundtrack (even my six year things the music is super cheesy and the singing is far from heartfelt).

speaking of which: gd was talking about having a heart murmur today and i told her she was heart-lithp.

we spent this afternoon with hido's family and had a really great time! and then came home and jumped in the pool, which was also great. now we're arguing over whether to put on the hogfather or the nightmare before christmas.

good, bad, either

good things: three days straight of taking mr smear to the pool, he's swimming nicely and we had a lot of fun. his behaviour's also stabilized, and i think all round our family interactions are healthier. i've also made generally good progress at work on a variety of projects.

i finally continued horseman's conversation with swordschool this morning, he's also in - i don't know how much i don't know when it comes to this sort of thing, but i'm excited nonetheless!

not so good things:

UPS managed to get gd's documents to cape town on monday, but have so far failed to deliver them to us. they've now effectively cost us a week, and we were already rushed.

gd's really been having a hard time health-wise this week.

not sure if good or bad:

the apocalypse came early to cape town - the city centre's power went out unexpectedly on monday evening and it took until the next afternoon to get sorted out. we had no phones and no internet, either. fortunately my coworker could accommodate me so i got a half day in at his place yesterday.

i've been going to bed early the past few nights, i feel like i've got so much to do but i also feel like i'm on the edge of burning out and that doing nothing (aside from my day job and parenting) is okay. the good part is that i've had a couple of nights of real sleep, which is very rare for me.

the week that was

there was much pain, and ugliness, but there were also some great moments.

work-wise:

the week began with a panic to ensure that our customers weren't affected by the log4j security vulnerability, and although our risk was minor i still ended up spending two days fighting with the only java components in our solution which hadn't really been touched in a couple of years. i don't like how some essential java projects don't subscribe to semantic versioning, and can't maintain internal consistency with their own packages. and i don't like javadoc.

otherwise, i managed to knock out some important work, complete some unpleasant tasks and prepare some long-term security measures. the week ended on a strong note, and then yesterday morning my manager sent me a note that our efforts a couple of weeks ago have secured us some new customers, which certainly feels good.

parenting-wise:

good grief. we had two disastrous nights this past week, and we've now understood that our poor kid simply doesn't understand that he *has* to do what his parents and teachers tell him. i mean, literally does not understand. that, and we're three people in this household who have difficulty regulating their emotions. i'm very pleased that we managed to get through those two episodes (and their fallout), but it's been heartbreaking and discouraging.

at least the weekend seems to be going pretty well.

health-wise:

we're fine, but on wednesday - mr smear's last day of school - our cleaning lady rushed off and two days later reported back that she had covid, so we've been exposed and have been isolating. again. this stinks. now we're trying to navigate a sea of (mis)information and figure out whether we should be isolating the 10 days our doctor told us, or whether we should be getting an antigen test tomorrow.

sonnetcomix:

the new page is posted, and horseman and i had a conversation about the project yesterday and he suggested something pretty amazing that is deep in swordschool's domain, so i'm hoping to get him on board with it.

game dev:

my son and i began playing around with unity today, because he wants to turn alphabit into a real game. this is definitely a long-term project, but we made some progress which was pretty cool

oh, the bureaucats!

 i completely forgot - it *looks* like gd's authenticated documents will be ready for pickup tomorrow. we're *praying* that vfmp manages to pick them up and courier them to us without a hitch. maybe we can move forward with this thing.

better, i think

this parenting thing has rough moments, especially for a decidedly imperfect parent like myself. mr smear was MUCH better behaved overall this week with his screen time reduced to almost zero, and in general things felt smoother between us, but yesterday he got his privileges back: some of it was great fun (we played around with the universe sandbox together, and then hit boomerang fu hard (he'd cheated being grounded by playing it at our neighbour's on friday evening), and things were good. well, until he threw a tantrum because he wasn't winning on the hard level by himself (he claimed the game was cheating).

that eventually resolved well, and the afternoon was fine: we all took the pikmin for a walk around cape town, encountered all the unmasked hordes with no concept of social space was unpleasant, but the falafel from nish nush was great and we levelled up until we unlocked the AR feature which was really cool - although gd got in trouble for squishing one of the pikmin while we were interacting with them...

last night was going great until shower time, at which point mr smear did something really ugly that i can only compare to lucy pulling the football away from charlie brown. this being the millionth time, i reacted badly, and then he reacted badly, and we all had an awful night as a result.

this morning he slipped into our bed and said some hurtful things, after a period of time with no response i eventually got an apology and some resolution. so far, we've had a pretty good day.

...

work was good, but friday was a weird emotional rollercoaster. we spent a few hours doing the annual "top 5", with everyone presenting their highlights of 2021 and some of the presentations were quite touching. what followed was a good day, and then our manager called us in to share a shit feeling about the awesome team t-shirts we made because he's concerned that others think that we feel superior... i've never been so offended by a perceived offence before :/

anyway, i think we'll all be fine, but it was a bit of a downer after an otherwise successful week (even if i didn't make my hours).

...

i've now had two days to recover, i've prepped the script for the next two pages (the current one's looking really good so far), and i've done nothing towards the side project except maybe getting my head (mostly) back in order.

am i addicted to sudoku? i think so. is my son getting the hang of it? i think so. is he reading like a champ? i think so. is he writing nicely? i think so.

okay, it's potter time (movie 3).

the not-so-good days that followed

 wednesday: a nightmare of gd's visa renewal, not only did they leave important items off the checklist but she encountered an obstructive PoS who raised all of our anxiety levels (i was trying to work, my mum was accompanying her). they finally got hold of some sympathetic humans, but my gods, *my* nerves were shot after that and the experience really threw me off for the rest of the week. and by "threw me off", i mean that i felt completely wiped out and wouldn't feel right before the weekend. 

on wednesday morning i dropped mr smear off at school and witnessed an event that inspired us to teach him to handle stuff differently. i'm no longer a fan of jim jefferies, 'cause he's turned out to be more of a shit person than his on-stage persona, but he makes a good point that's directly applicable to my six year old's life. so we've been teaching mr smear to be super-kind to assholes as a form of revenge, and reminding ourselves to as well (gd even got good use out of that exact technique with the obstructive guy from before). it's not clear whether he's ready to put it in practice, but he definitely gets a kick out of the idea.

the consulate hadn't contacted me since i sent them my payment details last monday, they were passive-aggressive on the monday and didn't let up on the wednesday. a short while ago they finally gave me a time for the pick up - next week - so hopefully that'll go okay.

friday: dropping mr smear off in the middle of an intersection in salt river was a weird experience, even if it was with his class. they had fun!

on friday night i went to shul in person to commemorate my grandfather's yahrzeit, it was a good experience. after getting mr smear into bed, i spent some time practising leyning properly for the first time since covid struck.

saturday: i'm amazing that i managed to get up early, practice some more, get to shul, and (mostly) do alright (i needed a couple of prompts, but otherwise i was fine). i was feeling super awkward by the time we got to the end of the service, dunno why.

mr smear had excitedly agreed to go to a casting, and when the time came to get in the car he refused. it was with much drama that we eventually got there, and got through it. we have, during and since the incident, explained to him that it's all about the importance of keeping one's word and sticking to agreements (although him being rude to us also wasn't appreciated), and, except in certain, very specific circumstances, we've "cancelled" his screen time for a week. we had no idea what to expect, but in a mere two days things have become... easier. also, and in our opinion incredibly, today we heard that they'd like him to come in again, and we made damn sure that he understood that if he didn't want to do it he needed to tell us immediately.

he wants to do it.

i'm still in disbelief.

if i was wiped out before, saturday afternoon's episode exhausted me to the point of feeling ill. i spent the rest of the afternoon and the entire night feeling terrible and tired, in bed and sleeping fitfully.

sunday:

and then i woke up, and felt... better. not great, but pretty decent. i published the latest page publicly, and aside from that the biggest achievement of the day was installing pikmin bloom. mr smear came out for TWO walks yesterday, voluntarily, once in a light rain with sailor. sailor joined us for dinner, after which i put mr smear to bed (he insisted on switching from the neverending story to the ocean at the end of the lane, go figure), and then i napped for an hour or so before joining vfmp for an exciting game of thunderstone in which he utterly crushed me.

today:

huh, i guess i should mention that i've been playing a lot of sudoku recently. i find it intriguing that hard is sometimes relatively easy and sometimes really hard.

the first thing that happened today was me saying something surprising (to me) out loud: we're staying here until the end of january. if we don't have our shit sorted out by then, we'll have to live out of luggage for a bit (probably at my mom's), but if we get everything sorted out before then we're still going to stay here until then. it doesn't make sense to not know anything about our own timeline, it's stressful and unnecessary.

my cousin came down with covid, so i dropped off our covid kit this morning, filled the car (shocked at how expensive it was), drove all the way home and only then remembered that there's heavy construction work happening over our heads.

another half-day of work, not good.

during my lunch break (breakfast break, i guess? i'm still intermittent fasting) i took a walk to get t-shirts printed. the first place on the map was non-existent, the second place difficult to find (inside the golden acre, i tried three floors before giving up), the third and fourth places turned out to be the same.

i don't understand why so many businesses don't bother to fix their google maps details.

anyway, i was there for quite a while negotiating with the dude, who seemed genuinely grateful to me for showing him a new way of thinking about doing his job, and i really hope he manages to get it done the way i want it before thursday.

mr smear came out with me for another walk today, so enthusiastic that he was happy to go an extra bit just to grow one of his seedlings. he was excited to name the pikmin, and excited to enter their names himself. and then, when we got home, he was excited to drag me to the jungle gym for a bit, which he hasn't done in ages.

i'm tired, it's late, i'm going to bed. soon. after another quick game of sudoku. i feel better about having posted this. maybe tomorrow or the next day i'll be back into some kind of groove and figure out how to manage my "free" time.

a good day

today was my birthday. it was excellent. lots of people i care about got in touch, my work day was spent doing something straightforward yet satisfying, my wife made sufganyot for chanukah, my son excitedly made an effort to contribute to my day being good, we had a great dinner out.

...

the weekend was good. i spent a lot of it doing "me" stuff, either gaming, or doing small pieces of side-project work. and publishing the latest sonnetcomix stuff. the rest of the two days are a bit of a blur. yesterday i was... distracted. technically i got stuff done, but it sure didn't feel like it. i recall something was bothering me but i can't quite put my finger on it now...

final update for the day

i needed some "me time", even though the evening was good. before dinner i managed to get gold in a rayman: legends challenge, watching mr smear deftly navigate the same challenge was pretty amazing. after dinner i passed out watching ralph breaks the internet, eventually showering and getting mr smear into bed around 10pm and then making some tea and watching half of the first episode of electric dreams. so far, so good. then i made some more tea and played some more space haven which i picked up in a humble bundle yesterday, and i'm really digging it. the aesthetic, the concept, and the soothing vibes of the peaceful mode.

good night.

bring on the weekend, please

i'm feeling better, but my post-nasal drip / resulting cough hasn't entirely gone away and that's been upsetting.

not as upsetting as mr smear throwing the weirdest tantrum this morning - he was so excited to get out of bed for the school's field trip to the science centre, and then somehow got it in his head that this field trip and becoming a scientist in israel are mutually exclusive. and then, after making us late, waze threw its own tantrum and tried to steer us in the completely wrong direction, so i got lost in obs for five minutes before coming right.

so *i* started the day needing a stiff drink.

the good news is that halfway there he decided he was going to try to enjoy the trip, and when we picked him up later he'd had a really good time.

i spent the majority of my day figuring out how to test my changes from yesterday. i didn't finish off the day with a good feeling - i'd picked up a code review that i really wasn't in the right headspace for - but i'm at least confident with my changes and desperately in need of shabbat.

laundry list

yesterday:

finishing up my primary task for the sprint

mr smear coming home from school saying he wants to keep a diary. mr smear generally reading very nicely and even gaining confidence writing

snacking during an insanely long PR for outsourced work

making time to hit the pool

aladdin

switching cars with my mom

watching more arcane (which is amazing), but having trouble staying awake

today:

waking up exhausted, not enough coffee in the house

asking my manager for feedback

wrapping up the insanely long PR for outsourced work

making time to hit the pool

getting some good (and satisfying) work in before dinner

wreck-it ralph (director's cut, it's even more amazing)

delivery of the latest sonnetcomix pages (one edit, one new)

...

we've been playing a lot of rayman: legends again lately, mostly the daily and weekly challenges. they're freaking brilliant.

recap

my post-nasal drip has been getting progressively better, though i'm still not 100%. i am feeling loads better, though.

i dropped mr smear off today, drove to my mom's, sold his old balance bike, and tried to square things away so i could get some work done.

the first order of business: docker. i spent forever troubleshooting All The Things, eventually it turned out that window's firewall was silently blocking it without any kind of notification or monitor logs. fuckers.

then something bizarre started happening, and it took me a long time to identify exactly what was going on: whenever something was running with administrative privileges, the mouse and trackpad would be completely disabled. i spent hours searching and trying things out, to no avail, but eventually started shutting things down in desperation and lo! the holdkey app that i've been using for a year was the culprit. clearly i hit a bad setting, and once it was closed my system ran beautifully.

over the course of two work days, i've managed one day's worth of billable hours. i have enjoyed exactly none of this whole ordeal, and effectively lost four irretrievable days of quality of life that i sorely needed. the biggest lessons learned? a bit more patience with some of windows' worse flaws, and that i'm most definitely a windows person - at least until the millions of well-meaning asshats who make linux products for money learn that user experience is meaningful and begins at installation.

...

mr smear:

we had a pretty good start to the day, although as we were leaving for school he told us: "we were playing 'simon says' and one of the kids said 'simon says hit mr smear' so they did". i don't know how accurate/true that story is, but even if it's 100% true then he waited so long to tell us (he hasn't been at school in a week) there's not much we can do about it. the whole thing is heartbreaking.

he got himself into trouble with gd this afternoon, and we suspect that he has been having too much screen-time. he's usually okay with downtime but he wasn't today, though he did calm down eventually and got to choose our dinnertime movie as a reward: i'm glad he chose coco, we all enjoyed it immensely (again).

...

gd and i had a bit of a fight this evening, two rounds, and she said/did some really brilliant things (even though i was angry, i couldn't help but laugh at her legitimately hilarious impressions of me), one of which brought up something really powerful: she described me as operating out of a tiger's cage that i've constructed for myself. and i realized something crazy: my father, as abusive and mean and violent as he was, was not as consistently abusive as the kids (and some teachers) that i was forced to spend most of my days with.

i went to a particularly toxic school, where a culture of bullying has always been the norm - not just the students, but the parents and teachers as well - and i always made a great victim. i came from a home with constant fighting, and was socialized with constant fighting, how was i not going to grow up a big, angry baby? i'm embarrassed about my flailing about, but i still don't know how to handle my emotions, how to express myself in healthy ways. i might not be on the spectrum, but i do exhibit similar behaviours and tonight's little revelation makes me realize that i've spent the past two decades on a sine wave of resocializing. some days are better than others, unfortunately the ability to understand a behaviour or emotion doesn't directly equate to managing it properly.

back to my father: it's intriguing that there are some (positive) things i do with mr smear that remind me of him. i think he was very confused about this whole "life" thing, i don't think he was capable of really loving another human being, and i'm very confident that having children was something he wasn't too excited about, but amidst all the awful memories i recall a few fun ones. it wasn't all bad, and it feels surprisingly peaceful just remembering that.

and back

today was torture. the post-nasal drip made for a nasty day, it's still not great now but seems to be a bit better. and my head? didn't feel so good. it didn't help that i spent half my day struggling with my ubuntu setup even with help, and by the end of the day i was ready to throw in the towel.

which i did. and my new setup is already sooooo much cleaner and easier to deal with, and even the minor obstacles have been... not unpleasant.

my mother had an interesting idea today, which set some things in motion: first, that we've pushed back our notice on our apartment by a month (i hope they don't cancel our internet before we leave), and second that we've begun the application process for gd's south african visa, just so that we can stay long enough to get her aliyah status sorted out.

this is all such a nightmare.

...

the other half of my work day was spent prepping for a ten minute presentation that i've been dreading for months, i couldn't be less interested if i tried. also, i took the car in because we were concerned about a possible oil leak and i'm glad everything checked out.

we've been watching the reboot of cowboy bebop, and it's gorgeous. considering we own the original series i hope this gets gd to give that a watch, too :) 

it's late, i have to be up early to take mr smear to school and then sell his old balance bike.

squandered

i truly regret migrating from windows to ubuntu - after all that, the performance of my windows VM is pitiful the moment i try to use it for development and it causes my linux box to freeze irrecoverably more than host windows ever does. after spending most of my weekend on this, i'm feeling exhausted, frustrated, and confident that my coworkers (and all other users who love linux) are suffering from stockholm syndrome.

our day was a mix-and-match of emotions, good and bad behaviour, a visit to the mall (which at least two of us are never in the mood for), and spending some time with kibbutz cousin and her sister and brother-in-law. and then, after putting mr smear to bed, i finally decided to add a feature to my phone control system and discovered that the service had been down for a couple of days because of a certificate issue.

because linux, i guess. i figure it's high time i moved this this to the cloud, at least AWS and CDK take care of all the stupid stuff.

oh, and i've got hectic post-nasal drip.

i'm so over this. at least it looks like mr smear should be back at school tomorrow.

a long day

it's approaching 1am, after a long day spent backing up windows, installing ubuntu and battling with each and every installer along the way i finally have a functional machine (i'm actually very impressed so far with running windows on a VM, even if getting vmware installed almost pushed me to switch back to windows.

gd gave me a talk today about facing off with my issues with my father's memory, i wouldn't even know where to begin but i am certain that i'm not dealing with All The Things in a healthy manner, and i'm reminded of something profoundly true and painfully apt: "If You Don't Heal What Hurt You, You'll Bleed on People Who Didn't Cut You".

the end of the work week was alright, i guess.

though we learned that the missing documents really are missing - the idiot from SecureShip hadn't been looking for the documents, and was reporting on an entirely different package and wasting everyone's time (and money).

inside out

they're all mad. apparently fedex found the documents, but now they're denying it. apparently they were sent to toronto instead of cape town. the consulate representative i spoke to assured me that she'll do what she can, but also explained that they took our complaints about the documents going missing personally and now that they've been found they'd like me to contact the consul general and report that they did, in fact, give excellent service (perhaps sending our critical, sensitive documents to the wrong address is part of "excellent service"?).

and time marches inexorably on, and it's becoming more and more likely that we'll have to go to canada before we get to israel. this is all very nightmarish.

at least my current contract continues regardless of where i'm located. i cannot overstate how grateful i am nor how much of a difference that makes.

this week started with some bad news - the deployment was successful but exposed a problem that, now that we have useful dashboards set up, has been a long time coming. we scrambled to fix it and managed to get that out early on tuesday, and getting that resolved has left a very good feeling.

mr smear's really sick, just as our kibbutz cousin has arrived for a visit - hopefully we'll all be healthy enough to have drinks or dinner before she leaves.

i managed to help out my aikido friend this evening, while adding really useful functionality to my telephony application. and i also put together an outline for a really cool team shirt design and handed it off to my nephew (who's a graphic designer) in the hopes that he can make it beautiful and we can get prints done in time for our department's end-of-year presentations.