#365Gratitude Day 6: A warm coat & hat on a snowy day...and a warmth within

I'm wearing the new hat Rachel made for me for Christmas, along with a very warm coat I bought myself more than a decade ago. 

That's a good thing, too, because it's snowing today. 

As I drove to the station today, my car's brakes slipped once in the snow, and I had to gently tap them to come to a stop at an intersection. 

I made it to the station in time to catch the train without having to run for it.

The wind was cold, and the sky dim and bleak.  A long distance train came rushing down the tracks, blowing enormous clouds of windswept snow along in its wake. 

I was glad for my coat, glad for my hat, glad I had arrived there safe, glad I was going to make the train.  

All that gratitude made me happy.  

That's the funny thing about gratitude. I used to think you felt gratitude when you were happy. But it's actually the other way around.  

There's actually research that this is so. Brother David Steindl-rast, a Swiss Benedictine monk and interfaith scholar is part of a project doing that research.  

I'm grateful I know about the research, and what it means to me, personally. It keeps me as warm inside as this coat and hat do, outside. 

365 miles: 6.5 miles

Swam again tonight, for 45 minutes.  

That was a good burn. There's this thing that always happens to me after I exercise, but especially  after swimming. My vision becomes super sharp for a little while. I love that feeling.  

It's like the real world equivalent of getting a power-up in a video game.  

#365Gratitude Day 5: Seeing something funnie

One of the things I really love about being an age player is how we often repurpose the stuff of childhood for our own amusement.  

Being an adult who hasn't put aside childlike things isn't exclusively the province of ageplay either. There's a growing social trend called being a rejuvenile, coined by the author Christopher Nox in a book by the same name.  (I haven't read it yet, but mean to.). Rejuveniles like very many of the same things they liked as kids, and which many ageplayers like, too. 

That's good news for me. It shows up in some odd places, too. Just this morning as I was waiting for my train, I saw some very interesting graffiti on the side of a tanker train. 

It took me a second, but I realized I knew that purple beret and sunglasses wearing redhead. It's none other than Judy Funnie, sister to the title character of the cartoon Doug. 

I love that stuff like this happens. It's like the whole world is in on the gag that I'm not entirely a grownup. 

Maybe no one is.  

#365Gratitude Day 4: Homework

I'm sure you've all seen this little chestnut before.  It is true, as I get older I do like taking naps, and getting spanked.

I also enjoy having homework.  Typically, this is homework I wind up giving myself.  I have homework primarily in two big areas: philosophy, and technology.  

I'm a huge fan of the philosophers, authors, and speakers Pema Chödrön and Alan Watts. I frequently listen to Alan Watts lectures when I swim, or run.  I also love Pema's book When Things Fall Apart, which I recommend anyone and everyone read. 

Today's been a day of technical homework for me.  I've been learning about the Twitter Bootstrap framework, because I want to use it for a personal technical project, a behavior management tool for kinky people in general, and age players in particular.  It's awesome.  It makes for super clean, pretty, and functional front ends.  

I'm a big fan of having my ends clean, after all.

I started out this morning digging into a twitter bootstrap course I bought, but then stopped to watch a presentation about it, from a Grails developer.  This one, if you're so inclined.  Watching the presentation was terrific.  I came up with a lot of good questions and ideas, and I'm really looking forward to experimenting with the technology, just for the sheer fun of it.  Part of why this is all so great for me is that it's not just the eventual end product of this all that's good, but the journey along the way.  I love being creative, love learning, and love stretching myself.

I'm grateful for my homework.    

#365Gratitude Day 3: Many happy returns

Went back to the gym today, and walked three miles on a treadmill.  It wasn't bittersweet at all, rather it was like coming back to an old friend.  I'm sure I'll be running plenty in the days to come.  The whole process was filled with revisiting old familiar things:

• I put on my favorite sweatpants, which I have been running in for years. 
• I had good gear to use - good, quality running socks, good shoes 
• I was listening to a familiar, and favorite audiobook, David Eddings' Enchanters' End Game

It felt good to do.  I walked three miles, bringing my #365Miles total up to 5 miles.  Not bad for the 3rd day of the year.  

My gym is designed to encourage you.  Snappy, high bpm music plays in the locker rooms and on the gym floor.  The walls are decorated with quotes and encouraging statements, like "Leap and the net will appear."

I remember years ago, before I had first found running and really dug into it, I was both excited and terrified to do it.  I had no idea if I would be able to do it.  There's no question - I've lost a fair amount of fitness this past year.  But it's exciting to leap towards getting it back.

One big decision I did come to, as a result of all this is that my experimentation using a fitbit has come to an end.  

I think that wearing it has had the opposite effect from what I wanted.  The fitbit  monitors your steps all day long.  For work reasons, I have to take it off when I'm at my desk, which is kind of a drag.  But I also have come to realize that wearing it actually encourages a sort of mindlessness, an "auto-pilot" mindset in me, that isn't in my favor.  

Don't get me wrong, I'm ALL ABOUT metrics.  I love them.  I have a lovely, very fancy Garmin running watch that I will wear when I do run and walk.  And I'm more committed than ever to using Lose-It to track my nutrition and exercise.  The thing I see about the fitbit is, it makes me sort of mentally lazy about it.  That's not a device problem, nor is it a Mako problem.  It's just how I'm wired.  I need the focused attention of tracking my workout explicitly, without relying on the "background chatter" of my calories/steps burned by daily life.  

I'm grateful that I can return to what works for me.