#365Gratitude Day 101: Nerdlove & addiction

It always happens the same way.

I find something new, cool, and interesting, and begin to fiddle with it.  After I've vetted it for a while, I show it to Missy, who always insists that she really doesn't need yet one more thing to be into.

Then, after some slight hesitation, she tries it.  Fire the starter gun, because we're off!  She'll dive in, and really get into the thing.  She'll become expert at it, and enjoy the learning process.  

I love this.  We're nerds.  We groove on shared passions.

Our latest thing like this is Minecraft.  After my friend Cargo's visit, she started to get interested.  A little while ago we began playing it on our xbox one, and then I got it for her for her mac, so we could play online together with friends.

Yesterday on our way home from the DC littles munch, as I was driving us home, I noticed she was fiddling with something on her phone.  I asked her what she was doing.

Any guesses?

Yep, Minecraft for iOS.  (I laughed too.)

When we got home, we booted up the xbox, and spent rather a large number of hours tinkering together on our little shared private world on our xbox.  We put the game into creative mode, and just sort of built up the house we'd built together, making it really special.  

She did all this groundskeeping, making the path to our mine have a glowstone walkway, and pruning back all the many jungle trees near the house, with painstaking effort.  I changed our cobblestone tower to use brick and wood, and have a more modern aesthetic inside.  It was weirdly a bit like we were both grownup and kids, playing house together.  We were making a dream house together.  It was super satisfying, relaxing, and entirely selfish in the best way.  We just spent time together, doing nice things for each other, in an effort to surprise each other.

At the end of the evening, we toured through what we'd made for one another, together.  She loved the high glass ceiling in our tower bedroom.  I loved how she'd widened out the bridge over the lake behind our tower, and made the pathway from it to the mine so easy to navigate in the dark.

I love this about my wife.  She takes my passions and makes them her own, and that makes them all that much better for me.

#365Gratitude Day 100: Butt the historical value!

The other day I downloaded an upgrade to my operating system that among other things, came with a new cloud-based app to replace iPhoto.  As part of the consolidation process, the system moved all my various photos and videos out to the cloud.

As this happened, I got into a sort of forced nostalgia dumpster-dive of old photos and videos.

I found this little gem.

This is about a decade ago, when I took a trip to DisneyWorld with Spacey.  We were in the Imaginarium, the explore-and-play area at the end of Figment the dragon's Journey into Imagination ride.

There was this music-making-sensor-activated display, and I was activating it all right - with my butt.

As I recall the cast member running the attraction commented to Spacey, upon seeing this, "It's way too early in the day for me to be seeing this."

It's a precious, silly memory and I'm grateful for it.

#365Gratitude Day 99: Help with the trees

So in my day job, I'm a web developer.  

As opposed to all the other stuff I do, including:

• writing about people getting their diapers pulled down to get a spanking
• talking to people about asking their partner to put them in a diaper, which they can then pull down to spank them
• talking to my brother and his wife and select guests, while being recorded, about those guests wearing diapers and.. well, you get the idea

I love what I do.  It's creative, and challenging, and fun.  It's also really hard.  I'm constantly teaching myself new things.  Lately I've been learning all about a certain kind of chart-building, making a tree diagram, programmatically, using a javascript library called D3.js

When I first got started, I went right to the D3 homepage, and from there to some galleries of examples.  I cobbled together something rough, based on an example.  Then, I tinkered with it, moving from junk data to actually using real data, brought to the front end via an ajax call.

After I got it all working, I decided I wanted to get super fancy, and make the radial tree I'd built collapsible.  But I had only a loose idea for how to even do it.  Until I found that someone else had already done just that. (If you're really curious, it's at http://jsfiddle.net/Nivaldo/CbGh2/)

I took what I'd already built to get the data from the back, mixed it with what I'd done on the static tree page, and this new stuff, and VOILA! It worked.

If you're still awake after reading all that, here's where my gratitude comes in.  I'm one of thousands, no more like millions, of people who do this sort of thing.  All over the world, every day, dorkasauruses like me are figuring stuff out, and writing it down where other people can see it.  Whether it's in a book, or on the net, these people are on my team, they've got my back.  

I have so much help learning new things.

It boggles my mind.

#365Gratitude Day 98: Jam isn't sticky

Yesterday on my way to work, I got caught in a whopper of a traffic jam.  

Even the express lanes on the beltway, were, for a while, at a standstill.  It was awful.

But it didn't last.  Eventually, I got out of it.  I got to work at a reasonable hour.  

Later that day, I had this enormous technical issue, that could have made me lose about three weeks worth of work if I wasn't careful.

I got through it.  Just like that traffic jam earlier in the day, it was temporary.  I fixed my issues, committed my code, and all was right with the world.

These two things have more in common than it might appear at first.  Misfortune doesn't last.  

Because nothing lasts.  Strawberry jam is sticky, but traffic jam isn't, and neither is a logical jam.  Whenever I find myself caught in misfortune, it's hard to remember this lesson.  

But it's still true.

#365Gratitude Day 97: Suggestion Roulette

Since Frolicon, Spacey, Marie Furie and I have been in a group-texting marathon.  We sort of stumbled into a funny game we play which I call "suggestion roulette".  The iOS keyboard has a suggestion bar above it, which helpfully offers you whole words to complete your sentence.

It's kind of an idiot.  It's offered up gems like "No more I want you in my room", and "Not sure if you don't have a good idea of what I want you to be."

But the absolute winner of suggestion roulette the other night was this gem:

Panties on my phone and I love you.  

We all collectively lost our minds at that one.