#365Gratitude Day 261: Plugins, bitches

Remember that problem I've been wrestling with for two weeks now, the challenge of doom, that was going to send me hurtling to my eventual and horrible demise?

Solved it.

Without getting into the brain numbing details of exactly what it was, and how to fix it, I can summarize by saying that in a certain configuration file that absolutely everything relied on, the word "plugin" should have actually been plural, "plugins".

"Help me with this plugin, Fred."  "I think you mean these plug-ins, Wally."

That's right.  My entire technical problem, the thing that's been making me stark raving insane for days was that I was missing the letter "s" on the word "plugin".

When I figured this out, I was simultaneously angry, happy, and relieved.  Angrappilieved?

It's kind of a wonderful, horrible sensation.

My boss had told me, during my epic nuclear melt-down, that he was fairly confident my complete stance of despair meant I was about 2 days away from solving the problem.

I called him on the phone today and told him of my success, and told him to not be so sickeningly smug about it.

But I was smiling as I said it.

#365Gratitude Day 260: I'd like a brain melt, with a side of potatoes please

So I've been working on the same technical issue for about 2 weeks now.  

If you really want to know, what I'm trying to do is build a prototype website, running on Apache Tomcat, that uses PKI certificates to pre-authenticate the user so that they don't have to log in, but can just proceed, pre-authenticated, right to the site.  

It hasn't been going well.  The documentation for the software and components I'm using to do this isn't the best, and it's something I'm dreadfully unfamiliar with.

I told my friend Amelia about this and she said, totally helpfully:

"I like potatoes."

Which, I can agree with.  Potatoes are delicious, and clearly can be really good company on the couch, when you're watching say, a cooking show about how to prepare potatoes.  (Ghoulish, I know, but stick with me, I was upset.)

Anyhow, so for the past 9 days, I've been trying to steadily make this thing work.  I had one problem after another, but finally got to the point where I thought that maybe, just maybe, I had this thing licked.

Nope.

Around the end of the day I summoned my boss over to my desk, and proceeded to entirely lose my shit about it.  I told him, and several other higher-ups in the company how hopelessly, irrevocably, totally, galactically, nay, cosmically, fucked I and thus we, were.  I said that all these other project dependencies downstream from my figuring this out were about to slide to the right, more like death-march to the right, like a soldier on a grim, hopeless hike, heading to his eventual death, while carrying a 50 pound sack of potatoes.

Well, maybe not in quite those words, but that was the general gist of the idea.

This did not in fact result in my immediate dismissal.  Nor did men with butterfly nets come to collect me from the premises for a thoughtful time-out in a padded room.

What did in fact happen was that my colleagues and superiors rallied around me, offering advice and support, and assuring me that as long as I was just doing my best, not to sweat it, and that we'd get there eventually.

I felt immensely better, and went home, convinced that tomorrow would be the day I would slay this terrible thing.

The gem of gratitude from all this was my reconnecting to an essential truth.  It's okay, and even helpful, to be upset, and to express that upset to others.  It has purpose.  It helps evoke human connection.  It helps you chase the gnawing brain weasels out of your head kitchen so you can concentrate on making dinner.  (I recommend some nice potatoes.)  There's a Pixar movie that teaches this exact same lesson, called Inside Out.  It's really, really great.  You should go see it.

I'm glad I had a meltdown.  I'm glad that it's okay for me to do that.  I'm glad it's okay for you to do it, too.

#365Gratitude Day 259: Support Systems

Yesterday after work, I stuck around the neighborhood near my office, because it was a whole lot closer to the airport than where we live.  I got to have dinner with my friend Natasha, which was lovely, and afterwards go back to her house for a while to sit on the couch, cuddle, play with her horse plushie, Autumn, and talk about techie things before I had to leave to pick up Missy.

Tasha got to telling me about this super smart idea of hers for a Raspberry Pi based alarm clock that could be snoozed from the device, but only shut off from a web browser elsewhere in the house.  That way she would have to get out of bed.  What a smart idea.

It got me thinking about the nifty little support systems I have built for myself, both implicitly, and explicitly.  One of them is actually this blog.  Sometimes the blog is about really silly, vapid things, and sometimes it's about super serious things, but a big part of why I do it is that it's a form of long-term storage for thinking and exploration I've done before.

Just this morning as I was laying in bed, snuggled up to Missy, my brain was wheeling off into space, as I was thinking about the buddhist concept of shenpa, or attachment.  A while back I had heard an amazing lecture by Pema Chödrön about shenpa, Getting Unstuck.  She said that there are three ways we attach.  I couldn't remember them all.  (I knew about the shenpa of anger, and of pleasure.) I did a bunch of web searching, trying to find some text where she described them, because it was driving me crazy that I couldn't remember the third one.

Then I recalled writing about listening to that lecture months ago, in my blog.  (200 days ago, in fact.)  And I found it.

So glad I write this stuff down.

#365Gratitude Day 258: A Good Reason to Make My Bed

Yesterday morning right around 8:00am, I made my bed.

This would have been around 5:00am, pacific time.

Of course Missy was still asleep then, at her friend Sue's, in Tacoma.  She loves Sue very much.  (As do I.)  This was Missy's last day out west, after having been there for 9 days.

Long after I made our bed, she went to Seattle airport, and got on a plane.

On board, she texted with me, to let me know she'd made the flight, and loved me, and missed me.

I let her know I felt the same way.

I'm pretty sure she knew this already.  Doesn't matter.  Saying how much you love your spouse is a bit like real estate in Japan - you can never have enough of it.

She got to Salt Lake City, for her layover.

A little while later, she got on the very long flight from Salt Lake City to DC.

I may have watched the progress of her flight on my phone once or twice during my workday.  (Or maybe like 15 times.  Possibly 35 times.)  Eventually, she landed in DC, where she was now much closer to me.

I'm the blue dot in this picture.  But that's inaccurate, because I wasn't blue at all.  I was excited.

I knew at any moment she was going to come out of this hallway.

And about three minutes later, she did!

After which I:

• hugged her
• kissed her
• got her bags to the car
• drove her home
• brought both suitcases inside up many steps
• went to bed with her in the bed which I had made that morning.

See? I told you I had a good reason to make it.  Glad I did. 

#365Gratitude Day 257: Not that tired

Saturday night on my way home from my very long day out my tire pressure light came on. ​

This morning it was still on.  

Thankfully, I have a great mechanic who is minutes away from my house. 

Good thing.

One of the tires has a gash in the sidewall and needs to be replaced.   Another is wearing thin enough that it should go, too. 

Could be worse. At least it's just two tires.

Things have a funny way of working out just right anyhow.  I got on the road early this morning because I slept in a bit, planning to swim tonight after work. My sister-in-law gave me her next month's rent early, and the check is sitting in my pocket right now.  So I have the time & the cash. Plus, I got to catch my blog up as I wait. 

There's a special kind of grace to stuff like this. When I'm not caught up in how things should be, I work well with what's in front of me. 

That's why I'm only half as tired as I could be. ;-)