Some days my gratitude is something deeply profound and meaningful.
Today is not one of those days.
"MAKO" is the Words with Friends Word of the Day.
This pleases me greatly.
So I have this friend, Dawn-Marie. I first met her through my friend Peanut. She's to Peanut much like Spacey and Pene are to me. She's a really neat person. She's kind, funny, can be silly and goofy, too. She's a lovely person, and very beautiful. I'm thrilled that we're friends.
It pleased me to no end to find out that she really likes my writing, too. She's a regular follower of my @TinySmut account on Twitter, where I write micro-erotica. Yesterday was her birthday. I decided to write her a piece of TinySmut as a present, and asked her what she'd want.
She asked for "Lady next door with neighbor boy. Humiliation/teasing of the boy would be delightful."
I gave her this:
He mowed the lawn, watching her as he did.
He grew sweaty.
She would need to pay him. She let her legs drift apart.
He grew red. #tinySmut
She liked it very much indeed. I'm grateful she did, and that she's my friend, and that I could make her happy on her birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY DM!
Sunday afternoon, I went back through one of our podcast episodes we have "in the can", listening to update the show notes on it before Brother could release it. (Which by the way, he did. It's this one.)
I texted him, to let him know I'd finished, and we edited the "blurb" the show description for the episode together, in text.
He took what I had to say, mixed it with what he had to say, and came up with a really great description for the show. I said as much, and that we were done, and it turned into the silly pun you see above. (For my VI readers, I said "That's a wrap people!" and he responded with a picture of an actual chicken wrap. Delicious and funny!)
I love my brother. He's frivolous and serious with me, about all the stuff I care about. Getting to do creative stuff with him is one of the best parts of my life.
I've written before about how I adore our girl Kate's son, who for comic reasons past, I call Captain-Man. Kate and the good Captain came down for a visit this past weekend. One thing I really love about when they visit is getting to be his Uncle Mako, and seeing him spend time with his Aunt Missy.
Missy adores him, as I do. She gets to flex her nurturing muscles in a way that is fulfilling and altogether different. Sure, she enjoys her time with Little Mako and the rest of our "grownup kids" - but it's a pale substitute for the real deal.
I spent the day watching the two of them just bask in one another's company. Cap, he likes to talk to Missy about anything and everything.
Missy is pretty patient about it. A 5 year old has as many things to talk about as there are clouds in the sky. Really, she sort of revels in it. We took a ride on the metro, to try to go see a very busy and cool exhibit at the Building Museum.
This wasn't the Captain's first time on the metro - but it had been long enough that he couldn't remember it. Missy held his hand, and they sort of ooh'ed and aah'ed together at all the little everyday details about riding a train that I take for granted.
It was a long day, filled with a lot of walking, some really good pizza, and a whole lot of xbox minecraft, followed by a bubble bath for the Captain.
He conked out pretty hard.
I think he had a lot of fun, and I know Missy did.
My family is unique, and has its own special shape. I'm happy I have it.
A lot of my day job as a developer is troubleshooting. A missing semi-colon, an unbalanced parenthesis, or an outdated reference to a wrong identifier, and WHAM, you get a bug.
Not this kind of patients. Not this kind of triage either.
But the good news is, all bugs are ultimately fixable. Technical know-how is important, but just as important is the ability to patiently triage the problem in the first place.
This morning I've stumbled across the value of patient triage three times. First, I figured out that a feature we thought was broken was in fact working, it just didn't look that way. Then I realized a JavaScript validation wasn't firing because it was pointed to an outdated ID. Lastly after we fixed all that I realized that the .war file we deployed didn't have the most recent version of the JavaScript file.
I COULD tear my hair out over this stuff. But instead I'm grateful that simple patience helped me find the problems.