#365Gratitude Day 103: one tired cat

For whatever reason I slept horribly Monday night.  I woke up in the middle of the night and could not get back to bed.  

When I got home from work Tuesday, I was exhausted. We had dinner, after which I cleaned the kitchen. (Under protest, because I was exhausted, but glad I did it, because it really wasn't so bad.) Then Missy sent me upstairs to get in my pajamas, so we could watched a favorite TV program together.

She surprised me by diapering me before we got down to watching tv. That felt so caring and lovely. 

After it was over, I put on my CPAP mask for sleep, like I'm supposed to, without prompting.  

Missy kissed me goodnight, and told me what a good boy I was, and how proud she was of me.  

I slept like a baby.  

#365Gratitude Day 102: Making people laugh

Since Frolicon, I've had this mega text chat going with brother, and our friend Marie Furie.  

We sort of idly chitchat about nothing and everything all day long.  

My work can be very isolating and solitary sometimes, so I really welcome their company.  

I also love making then laugh. We were discussing something Monday that brother replied, "negative ghost rider!" to, and it gave me the idea to make this:

Marie laughed herself silly over it. 

I love those moments.

#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.