#365Gratitude Day 88: it's not me, it's you

I've always enjoyed the feeling of being part of something bigger than myself, one of the team, part of the group.   

That idea is really driven home for me when I see the inner workings of other people's lives out in the open. I get this sort of voyeuristic contact high from it.  

Case in point. Missy and I were out running errands and saw this.  

Now I don't know Laurie. I don't know the person who wants to be her prom date, either.  

But I love that somewhere nearby, maybe a bit before I saw that, or maybe soon after, Laurie would see and be surprised by this sweet, romantic gesture.  

In a way neither of them will ever know, I got to be part of their little adventure. For just this brief moment my life intersected with theirs.  

If you pay attention you can see this same sort of thing happening to you countless times every day.  That guy next to you on the elevator might be going home to practice his guitar solo in his heavy metal band. The woman in front of you buying toothpase might be buying it for her trip to Brazil.  

The same thing is true about you. Your own unique, wonderful life adds to the richness and variety of all the lives around you. 

It's like we're each a tile in this vast and beautiful mosaic. I love that feeling.  

#365Gratitude Day 87: Having history

So, not to be a downer, but I've got some trauma in my past.  My dad wasn't a good guy, and did some pretty crappy things to me and my family.  He was absentee for a lot of my early childhood.  In later years, I found out he'd done some atrocious things to me and my family, including among other things, pretending to have leukemia when he never did, committing infidelity to my mother on an unprecedented scale, and financially compromising everyone in the family through lies and deceit, including me.

Cheery, huh?

 All these awful things came to light for me at a cataclysmic time, and sort of destroyed the childhood I thought I had.  One terrible net effect of this was that for a long time, I felt like I was sort of artificially new.  Like, I had just had the shrink wrap off, or arrived here, as an adult, from a mystical land that wasn't real.  It was a surreal feeling.  I felt like I had no history I could reliably speak of.

I've come to realize that that's just not true anymore.  Like, by a long shot.  I was looking back through old photos in the giant digital graveyard that's my iPhoto library, and I have over a decade worth of history to comb through.

That's a picture of me driving my old convertible through downtown Silver Spring, about nine years ago.  Missy took the picture, and it's been a favorite of hers (and mine) for a long time.  We were out and about driving on a warm, sunny day.  It's a great memory.

I don't have that car anymore.  I don't have those sunglasses anymore.  I haven't lived in Maryland for years.  (I still do have the skull and crossbones bandana though.)

What I do have is history.  Which just goes to show you, that while bad things do happen, they can't dictate to you the entirety of your being.  Every day you get a little older, and each thing that's come before stays a part of you, but a progressively smaller one.    

#365Gratitude Day 86: Mug shot

A while back I got into mug cooking.  That's small recipes you can make in a mug, with a microwave.  I went through a big phase of this about 18 months ago or so, and then promptly forgot about it again.  

Until Friday night.  For some reason, I stumbled across a e-cookbook of them I had and was hooked all over again.  I like taking the recipes and tweaking them, to make them my own.  I'll halve the sugar, to reduce calories, use margarine instead of butter, substitute ingredients to see how they'll turn out.  Because these are tiny recipes, that don't take much in the way of ingredients or time, if an experiment is a dreadful failure, it's not the end of the world.

I found a new recipe I had never made before, Peanut Butter Mug Cake.  It turned out amazingly well.

#365Gratitude Day 85: My catkids

I've had Yin and Yang since they were 10 weeks old.  They turned 10 years old in February.  They've been a source of constancy and joy in my life.  They were just little babies when Missy and I first met.  In fact, the way she loved them, and the way they instantly took to her was one of the ways I knew that I wanted to marry her.

Here's an old picture (from April 2006, of Missy playing with Yang, at my old apartment.)

It boggles my mind that my babies are 10 years old.  They've been around to share in the love Missy and I have for one another.  They're just as loving, adorable, and sweet today as they've ever been.  Over the years, they've fought to figure out who's the alpha cat in the house (clearly the answer is Missy.)  But they are good to each other, and good to us.  I'm grateful for them.

#365Gratitude Day 84: Teaming Multitudes

My new job is at a small company.  I regularly work with a very small team.  Wednesday two of them went with me to lunch.

This was the second week in a row we've done this.  Our first week I took us to a pho place near the office.

This time Coworker B picked a place, and it was damn good.  

The whole experience made me very happy.  I've worked at companies both big and small. I've had jobs where I had some degree of "work friendship", and others where I had none.

I am really liking my job, because I really like the people there.  This is sort of new territory for me.  When I interviewed for the job, part of why I wanted it was because I clicked so well with the interviewer, and then later on, with the higher-ups who called me for the gig.  

I feel like I can do well there, that these people are my people.  It's a good feeling.