#365Gratitude Day 310: Handy Pillow Talk

So, like you do, my wife Missy and I were laying together in bed  this morning, drowsily cuddling. 

Let me add, at this point, that cuddling is one of my wife's superpowers. If cuddling were an Olympic event, she'd have taken the gold at both the Winter & Summer Games. (In Winter Cuddling you leave the window open and use a heavy blanket.) 

Anyhow, so we're laying there and I'm being all bed octopus all over her, which she never minds, and we hold hands, and she grabs my thumb. 

I laugh a bit, and remark how I love her tiny hands, and how my thumb fits in her whole fist. So then of course, we had to compare them. 

Moments like this are precious to me. We'll have been together a decade this January and to me sometimes it feels like it's been ten minutes.  

I'm so grateful for Missy.  

Immortality

If you could be immortal, would you take the option?

Answer the poll, then tell me why you picked that choice. 

#365Gratitude Day 309: Pay to Play

I don't talk about my day job much in my blog, for a variety of reasons.  But today I'm grateful for it. Basically, I'm paid to play with toys for a living. 

Not these kind, though. I work in Information Technology. I've been various things over the years, a trainer, a help desk tech (absolutely the most thankless job in technology), a network administrator (second worst), a technical writer, and a developer.  

All of which essentially have this same one thing in common: I'm paid to play with toys for a living. 

I love computers.  I think they're amazing tools.  I know that the work I do with and on them isn't trivial either.  

But I will say I'm extraordinarily grateful to do this sort of work.​

​Years ago I used to work for this very slick salesman, M.  He was one of the Very Big Dogs at the consulting firm I worked for.

He told me a story about appreciating the work we do.  One wet, cold, grey, wintry day he was driving into our office.  He was driving his very expensive car, wearing a very expensive suit.  He was talking  on his car phone, complaining to another Very Big Dog about the difficult day ahead of him, filled with meetings and sales calls, and all sorts of troublesome things. 

Not that guy, but you get the idea 

He pulled up to a red light, where this utility worker in a bright colored jumpsuit, was in a hole in the road, working on some electrical something as he stood in about three feet of cold, muddy water.  

As M. sat at the light, he watched the man work. Sparks flew out of whatever he was working on. A car came from the opposite direction, splashing dirty slush all over the guy, who sighed, wiped his face with his arm, and kept working.  

After M. saw that, he said he would never complain about anything about his job ever again. 

I feel much the same. I'm not going to tell you that my job doesn't have its fair share of frustrations and annoyances. But when I get really grouchy about them I remember that story, and find myself grateful that no matter what sort of hole I'm in at work, that it's not a literal one like that guy.  

#365Gratitude Day 308: A Space Oddity

I just heard about this, because I saw my wife post about it, and I'm utterly blown away.

You know Chris Hadfield, right?  He's the Canadian astronaut who back in 2013 lived aboard the International Space Station, and did a lot of tweeting from there.  I followed him for a long while, as I'm sure many of you have.  He's a marvelous human being.

He's also, as it turns out, a really great singer.  He recorded a version of the famous David Bowie song, A Space Oddity, from the International Space Station and posted it as a YouTube video.  It's brilliant.

See for yourself.

I'm grateful to live in a world with such a remarkable person in it.

#365Gratitude Day 307: Exception Handling

In Java there's this concept called exception handling.  It's a sort of preparation one makes in code to deal with potential problems.  You mark a particular method that it's got the potential to "throw" an exception, and then you "try" to do the thing that might cause the problem, and "catch" the error that gets thrown, and deal with it somehow.

Life has this too.

Yesterday, after grappling with a code problem for a few days, I asked for help from a co-worker.  They helped me out, and together we worked through the problems I'd been having.  After they'd left my desk, I implemented the solution, finding a few more slight problems along the way, and handily dealing with them.

It's a funny thing, when you write code for a living you tend to live in this weird binary way where you either feel like you're totally on top of things and kind of godlike, or you have no clue what the hell you are doing.  

So I got the particular feature I was building all tested, and checked it in, and was feeling really pretty good about myself.  I went to lunch.

When I came back, I went looking for something new to do, and couldn't find a single thing that looked like something I had the skills or drive to do.  I sort of floundered for an hour or three.  I had that nagging feeling of being overwhelmed by the unknown.  When your job relies on you confidently using your skills, that's pretty paralyzing.

 Then I realized I could use the downtime to self-teach myself a bunch of things, and dug into that.  I made the best effort I could at the time to acquire some new skills.

At the end of the day, I was still feeling sort of "spoonless", but took myself out for a nice dinner.(Because Missy was still driving home from a long day trip.)  By the time I got home, she was home, too.

As we went to bed, I realized that my I-don't-know-what-to-do-next feeling earlier that day was a form of exception, and that I'd properly handled it.  I went to bed feeling like my day had worked out for the best after all.

My gratitude for the day then is that we have that sort of exception handling I'm talking about built into us, organically.  Sure, things come up which knock us for a loop, but eventually, we're self-correcting.  That's a good thing.