#365Gratitude Day 240:What's the story, morning glory?

Yesterday morning, Valentalae climbed into bed with Missy and I, and I read her a story called The Grammarian's Five Daughters.

It was a story she suggested to me.  And it's a damn fine story, for children of any age.  I'm not going to tell you what it's about, but I will say that it concerns itself with the following things:

• Strong female characters
• Inclusive and realistic portrayal of LGBT characters
• Polyamory
• The magical power of having good grammar

Yep, good grammar.

Go read it, see for yourself.

#365Gratitude Day 239:A rad way to mark a birthday

This one is super sweet, but requires backstory and a sort of special dictionary. My little girl Valentalae has this Denmark thing.

It's not that she fetishizes everything to do with the country, its language, culture, and food.  (Although that is true, but not like in a sketchy appropriating way.)  Her love for Denmark is deep, earnest, and true.  She feels the same way about it as I do about Asian culture and philosophy.

One of the Danish things she loves is a kind of red currant berry pudding called rødgrød.  

I've had it actually. She's made it for me. It's quite delicious.

I also find the name simultaneously hard to pronounce and kind of silly. It's led to endless sorts of punning and wordplay between Vee and myself.  We also share that love of what she calls wordfuckery  with many of our friends. 

It's rather a regular past time on the Big Little Podcast SLACK, a sort of private chat room we hang out in. (ps, if you want to chat there, just let me know!) 

Another of Vee's funny made up words is to hallmark .  Hallmarking is engaging in that sort of schmoopy, mawkish, unapologetically sentimental display of affection that makes people want to brush their teeth from how sugary it is.   

We do a lot of hallmarking.  

So months ago on the slack, Vee and I are trading quips and puns, discussing rødgrød, and weirdly, the telepathic gorilla super villain Gorilla Grodd, from The Flash. 

I make this really bad pun about how if Grodd rode a skateboard he'd be a rad Grodd. 

Everyone groaned loudly, including Vee.  

But then one of our friends, Marky (heh, maybe Hallmarky would be more appropriate) messages me privately to let me know: 

a) as part of his Lego collecting building expertise he knows about a Grodd Lego figurine AND a mini skateboard he could ride.

b) he was going to hunt then down (they're quite rare) and send them to me for her.  

Which he did, and I hung onto and surprised Vee with for her birthday, as we lay in bed cuddling with Missy.  

All the hallmarks!​

#365Gratitude Day 238:Company when I'm not at the company

I'm fortunate enough to get to work from home a couple of days a week.  Sometimes, the pure solitude of it is bliss to me.  But sometimes, the quiet can be almost oppressive.  

Having a split schedule like this is good in a lot of ways.  It's easier to get people to do work at the house, I am often here for package deliveries, that sort of thing.  Plus, where I live and work is one of the most congested parts of the country, traffic-wise, and it's really nice to get a break from it.

Something really, really cool happened today though, that's never happened before.  Our girl Valentalae is visiting, and Missy's got the day off, and they, and one of my cats, Yang decided to keep me company as I work in my home office.

It's blissful.

#365Gratitude Day 237:It's not that I can't do eunuchs...

So, as I've often said in my day job I'm a developer.  I've done different technologies over the years, and for several now I've worked with Java, and related languages.  

A big part of that is working with servers to serve up Java web applications. Typically those servers are some form of UNIX box.  

System administration and that sort of back-end command line stuff has previously been a tough go for me.  I didn't have a lot of training in it, and at previous jobs I'd got some degree of grief for my lack of knowledge about it. 

Really, when you look at the sorts of things you do in the back end, it's not rocket science. Mostly you copy files to the box, work with their permissions, bring up and down services, monitor log files, that sort of thing.  

Fear made me look at a text command line like it looked like this

But as I said, I had got some grief from previous co-workers and superiors even over my unfamiliarity. 

That grief had instilled in me some shame and fear. But I've been really focused on moving through and past it recently, and today I absolutely did. 

I did about a dozen needed tasks on a test stack today, and some of them were things I had to teach myself on the spot, with help from some great websites.  

I did it with gusto. 

Something I've taught many of my coaching clients is that there's a really big difference between  saying can't  and don't . 

When you say you can't do something you mean ever.  In a word, bullshit. And it's toxic bullshit at that. How do you know you can never ever do something?  People learn new things, get better at things, all the time. 

On the other hand, when you say you don't do something, you mean you don't do it right now. But maybe you will do it. Maybe you did it before and may one day to come, do it again.

Who knows?  "Don't" is the gateway to infinite possibilities. 

Today I stopped even that. I switched from don't to do. I ssh'ed and scp'ed and chowned and chmodded like a champ.  I wrote with .vi.  I viewed my history. I took command of my command line. 

It felt great.  

#365Gratitude Day 236:Knife behavior

When I was in college, I was mugged at gunpoint. It was a horribly traumatic experience. I was pretty scarred by it after it happened. A few days later the cops found my wallet and ID in a garbage can downtown.

There's a funny story I tell about the really weird things I ​had to do to get it back.  Ask me about it, I'll tell you sometime. 

It's been 26 years since that happened to me, and the trauma has long since passed, leaving me with just a funny story and a better sense of how to move about a dangerous neighborhood at night.

​Until just now. 

I saw this video a friend of mine posted to Facebook.

It got me thinking about the man who attacked me.

How it went down for Julio Diaz isn't how it went with my guy. My guy put his hands in my pockets until he got my wallet, then told me to count out loud, loudly, to 100, and not move unless I wanted to die.  

Yeah, not great. I was too busy counting and crying to really get a good look at him.

I don't remember much about him. He was black and shorter than me. I remember at the time thinking the cold, hard end of his gun poking me in the side made our height difference utterly irrelevant. 

I can't tell you what he was wearing, or really even what he looked like beyond those scant details.  

I remember that night though. It was cold. My breath steamed in front of me as I walked down the street at 2 am. 

What was I doing walking down the street at 2 am?  It doesn't matter, it was a stupid bad choice.  

But I'm left wondering, what was he doing walking down the street at that time of night too?

Sure, you don't just walk around with a gun in your pocket on the off chance you might get to mug a dumb college kid.  

Sure, I was hunted . 

But what drives a person to hunt another person?  How desperate must you be? 

I feel kind of like those shark attack survivors who turned to advocate for sharks afterward.  Seriously, that's a real thing. 

I haven't thought about my mugger (what a weird thing to say) in years. And before today, I don't think I ever truly made the connection to see him as a person. 

I'm glad I did.  

It's got me wondering what I can do to help folks like him now.