#365Gratitude: Rainy Day Commuting is not a hit

So this morning I'm on my way to work. Missy and I get out the door at the same time, and plan to kind of chase each other up the highway.​  She's got this errand to run that's not too far from my work. 

After a little bit I do catch up with her. We smile, we wave, and then I get ahead of her.​

It's raining today, pretty hard.​

We get to the place where 95 meets the beltway​.  Missy is right behind me.  I go to merge onto the onramp, only to find that traffic is at a stand still. I slam on my brakes and jerk my wheel to the left, slipping back onto 95. 

Thankfully Missy does the same. Otherwise we would've hit each other​.  She manages to merge in, getting back on the onramp a bit further up. 

I decided to go a different way altogether​, and follow my mapping app down side and back roads. 

I called Missy to make sure she was OK, and had made it onto the highway​ without further incident. She did. 

​I'm sitting here in my car in the parking lot of my office, glad that worked out so well. It could've been very very bad.

#365Gratitude: Test Tube

In my day job as an Electron Inconveniencer, I work heavily with a web development framework called Grails. I fricking love that thing, and all its model-view-controller goodness.  

There are a lot of options for testing your code in Grails, including jUnit, and the Spock framework. 

Of the places I've been that use Grails, none has really ever done testing well. It's all been sort of ad-hoc and an afterthought. My current gig really wants to do something about that though, and have asked me to lead that charge.  

I found a fantastic  YouTube video all about how to test your Grails app from stem to stern. It's so good.  

if you really want to watch it, and have about 90 minutes to spare, check it out. 

#365Gratitude: Bean there, done that. Also, spanking

This morning was all about fond memories of the past.

First, Missy found this picture of me she took at the Chicago Bean (which is really called Cloud Gate).

That's me in the blue and green backpack.  You can see Missy "bean" reflected in the sculpture taking my picture.  (She's in the green hoodie.)

We were there for CapCon.  We slipped away to do a bunch of touristy-sightseeing-things, have special time with Brother, too.  It was great.

When Missy showed me this picture, I was lying in bed, and through some random googling had found my way back to a website of spanking stories that I used to just absolutely love, Laura's Spanking Corner (NSFW, duh!) .  I remember back in the day, there were stories there that just got to me in the strongest way. 

Turns out, they still do.

Nostalgia.  Gotta love it.

#365Gratitude: Angry response led me to a grave situation

So I woke up this morning to someone pissing me off.  A longtime listener to the podcast wrote a not-so-nice thing about our show release schedule, which hasn't been exactly speedy these days.  This particular listener said, "I used to look forward to each podcast. I realize you guys have a life beyond this, but it's become a joke."

Here's an idea!  BE ANGRY!  Or maybe do something about it, instead...

 I'll admit it, my first inclination was anger.  I was going to say something back in anger, that sort of thing.

I sat down and thought about it though.  First, what good would that do?  It would just be hurtful, and I'm not about being hurtful.  Heck, it's a constant part of my everyday practice to not create or contribute to needless suffering.  

I thought about deleting the post so no one would see it, and just kicking the person out of the group.  Similarly, what would that accomplish?  Truthfully, our release schedule has been very, very slow of late.  

For a few minutes, I even contemplated calling it quits on the podcast altogether, because this isn't the first time I've heard stuff like this, and to be honest, it really stings every time I hear it. 

So, I did some processing.  I sent a message to Spacey, and Mae about the post with a one word comment.  "Ugh."  That's shorthand for a bunch of things:

• This sucks.
• I feel bad at letting listeners down.
• Can you believe the stones on this guy?
• What an ingrate!
• We really need to get better at this.
• Boy I want to vent about this to you guys.

Then I sat and meditated on it, contemplated it some.  I thought back to a previous series of contemplations I'd done on the nature of anger, and the varied ways one might respond to it, and what comes of it.  Generally, escalation doesn't work out well.

So, here's what I did.

First, I wrote to the guy, directly, and told him I wasn't going to post an angry response, bounce him out of the group, or post some public castigation of him.  (That's why even though I posted his little quote here, I haven't identified him by name, or linked to it, or any such thing.  If you really want to chase him down after reading this, that's on you, okay?) I commiserated with him about our slow production and release schedule as of late, and told him "whatever it is that's got you so riled up that you'd post something so angry and hurtful in the group, I hope that it gets better."

Then, as soon as that was done, I felt so much better, so grateful, that I realized that even at this very early hour, that  this whole sordid affair was my gratitude for the day.  Because situations like this help me know who I am.  I'm proactive about being kind.

I went looking for a good graphic to wrap this post around, and did a google search on "turning the other cheek."  But after a lot of searching, the images I found weren't really cutting it for me.  I'm not Jesus, I'm no saint.  And, while I'm all about nonviolent conflict resolution, turning the other cheek didn't exactly have quite the flavor of the idea I'm looking to convey, that I'm grateful for.  Lately, I've been super focused on mindful boundaries, on the precept of Do No Harm, But Take No Shit.  

Then I saw what's purportedly a quote by Confucius that seemed spot on.

Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

That's more like it.  What does responding-in-anger buy me?  Not a thing.  But my anger can motivate me to do things.  It can spur me to change a habit, engage in contemplation, and be more firm in my own sense of practice.  I went looking for a good, non-smarmy-preachy graphic with that quote.

Not so much.  The vast majority of what I found was really sort of sanctimonious.  At first I opted for something plain.

Just a couple of dead people.  Nothing to see here.  Move along.

Then I decided to search for funny gravestones.  And found this:

"CONNECTION RESET BY PEER.  He came, he saw, he logged out."

I actually laughed out loud.  That is absolutely brilliant.  And led me to find more things like that here.  (I especially like Lester C. Madden's.)  Maybe you can go dig some of them, like I did.  

I feel better already.

#365Gratitude: Fail, Abort, Retry

Back in the old days, when I used to ride my dinosaur to school, uphill mind you, both ways, and use my command line ui computer, there's this thing I used to encounter, the Abort, Retry, Fail prompt.  

"Not ready reading drive A - Abort, Retry, Fail?"

Most nerds have seen this lovely little fellow.  It's the indicator that that thing you were trying to do just now (most likely getting a file off a floppy disk that wasn't inserted properly, or perhaps at all) wasn't working out, and that it's time to make a decision about it.

I know, I know... floppy disks.  So retro.

Anyhow, the reason I bring up the A. R. F. is because it's relevant in life too.  Although maybe the order's wrong.  This year I decided to explicitly not number my gratitude days, because it set up a sort of expectation roller coaster that was driving me a little batty.  I'd get behind, and rush to catch up, or goof up the count, or some such, and it would just make me pressure myself about it in a way that wasn't fun.

So I decided in 2016 that I'd ditch that altogether.  Then I got the idea to still jot them down in a handy app on my phone, just a little bit of shorthand, so that I'd capture them, still know the number really, and be able to jot them down later. 

Well, that worked just great - until the middle of March, which for one reason or another turned into a very busy, tiring month.  I dutifully jotted stuff down all right, but got so behind in actually writing the posts that my little shorthand ended up losing context for me, and I just couldn't manage to decipher what I'd meant.

Why did I fuzz out the shorthand?  Because that's kind of what reading some of the entries felt like two weeks or so after I'd written some cryptic summary for myself.

Here's the thing though.  It's really okay.  I'm not scrapping my gratitude practice at all.  No, far from it.  In fact, this whole fail at a new way of doing it, abort that process, and retry yet another way has become this sort of mega-meta-gratitude.

I forgot along the way why I started doing this practice in the first place.  The value is (go ahead, roll your eyes right along with me) in the doing of it.  It's not about completing a collection, indulging in reverie, anything like that.  All those are nice additions to the main purpose of the thing, which is to stay present and write it down.

But, that's totally okay.  In fact, it's better than okay.  This "getting off-course and finding-my-way-again" sort of stuff, this is the very essence of mindfulness.  When I am mindful, I don't really even notice it, celebrate it, or frankly, give a shit about it.  I just do.  The only time I am aware of my um, "percentage of mindfulness" is when it's less than 100% and dropping.  When that happens, it's like this little gong goes off in my head, or a little voice whispers to me:

"Psst, hey, this whatever-it-is-you're-doing-right-now, it's not working for you!" it might say.

or maybe "You're caught up in expectations about the past and the future!"

or perhaps "You're congratulating yourself instead of paying attention."

or, my least favorite, "Why don't you stop shaming yourself?  It's not necessary."

Ouch, right?

But kind of not really.  Because as soon as I hear my little voice, I laugh, gently, right along with it, and remember that this one moment, right here, right now, is the only moment, and it goes on without end for so long as I am alive.

And when that happens, I realize it's time to try again, and I'm grateful for it.

Just like now.