#365Gratitude Day 277: Yoi tomodachi (良い友達), "Good Friends"

A while back my nephew married a sweet, lovely girl from Japan.  He moved there, and eventually they had a baby.  (He's adorable.)  Now they're back in the United States.  I've known my niece-by-marriage for a while now, having met her when they were first dating.  She's hysterically funny, often hyperkinetic in the best way, and very loving.  She's phenomenal.

Her side of the family came to the US for their wedding, where I got to meet them.  They wanted immediately to connect with us, and help grow the family.  This shows in countless little ways.

For example, when Marybeth (my sister in law) visited them in Japan earlier this year, they tromped all over Kyoto looking for a painted fan for me with a copy of Hokusai's Great Wave Off Kanagawa on it, as a present for me.  (It's my favorite painting.)

I love that these sweet, gentle, kind people are family to me.

Nowhere does this show more than the relationship between Marybeth and Y., my niece's mother.  They're best buddies, co-grandma's together, and thick as thieves.  She came back to the US with my niece and the baby.  We're on vacation down in Florida visiting with them all. 

I snipped this little picture of them out walking together this morning as I was out on my run, and it filled me with all sorts of joy.

#365Gratitude Day 276: Flying into fish

Yesterday we flew down to Florida.

I was worried it might not go well.  Hurricane Joaquin was due to make landfall right around when we'd be getting in the air.  Thankfully, the storm turned east, and didn't get in our way.

We got through some fairly stressful airport hassle and hubbub, did some convenient ingressing, made our plane with plenty of time to spare, watched a little Big Hero 6 on the plane, and after dealing with some really annoying rental car nonsense, eventually made our way to the house we rented, where Marybeth and her fellow grandma-to-the-newest-member-of-the-family were waiting up for us, with, among other things, some very delicious sushi.

All in all, it was a day that worked out pretty well.

#365Gratitude Day 275: Pause

Friday was going to be a busy day.  I had to get into work quick, make short work of a long day of technically difficult things, then jet home to work out, and pack for our vacation.

I drove to work in a heated up frenzy of anticipatory impatience, not helped by the torrential rain coming down from Hurricane Joaquin.

Once I parked though, the sound of the traffic and the falling rain just fell away from me.

I got out of the car, looked across the parking lot to the highway and just...

...paused.

And for a few minutes, my mind was empty.

It felt good.

It wasn't too much later my brain was full again, and I rushed around like a maniac.  But that doesn't mean that the pause wasn't worthwhile.  It's always good to have.

#365Gratitude Day 274: Getting by with a little help from my friends (and co-workers)

So that same problem I got close to solving last night? 

Solved it. 

But not by myself, after all.  After a whole lot of tinkering this morning, I solved some of the related problems, but still got stuck on something related to a Regular Expression  (linked, if you really want to know, but you don't, trust me.)

Regular expressions are the devil's arithmetic.  They're complex, weirdly formatted expressions that manipulate text values.  They're often insanely complex, and just a total bitchfest to figure out.   

The good news is that I figured out that it was a regular expression problem.  I saw with my one co-worker, C. looking over the logs of the application, and he caught the critical error that pointed to that.  So I tinkered a while, and then C. called over two other developers, and we all hammered at it for a while.  Closer, but it still wasn't working. 

I reached out to my friend Sukima, who is a genius and a programmer, and asked if he had good "Regex-Fu".  He sure does. 

The following exchange happened. 

My amazingly humble, smart, selfless friend actually chided himself for not being faster and more efficient in helping me. 

How lovely, silly, giving, and wonderful. 

Really, I'm just in awe of how fortunate I am.   

1. I really do have the skills to do this stuff.  Sometimes I don't believe it, but I really do.  I did the majority of the heavy lifting on this problem. 
2. Part of having those skills is having the skill of interdependent thinking.  I knew when it was worth my while to seek help elsewhere. 
3. I'm amazed at the resources at my disposal.  There are total strangers, colleagues, and close friends all around who I can rely on to do the work I need to do.   
4. Because of #3 there, I'm in touch with a certain truth: the universe is not a malevolent place.   (It's not benevolent either.  Rather, if I'm paying attention, and fully mindful, I have more allies and advantages than I might otherwise realize.)

To celebrate my good fortune, I went out for sushi.  Where I got this good fortune: 

"You will be singled out for promotion." 

Man do I have a lot to be grateful for. 

#365Gratitude Day 273: The kindness of strangers

There's this famous Tennessee Williams line, "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers." 

Truthfully, I haven't done that.  I really put value into being more or less self-sufficient, and I try really hard to solve my own problems.

Sometimes though, you just have to reach out to other folks, even complete strangers. 

That happened to me at work yesterday.  I spent the better part of 5 hours trying to do something that on the surface appeared to be simple, but kept running into roadblock after roadblock.  I logged onto this sort of chat board for web developers, and one guy in particular, who I'd never talked to before, jumped in and offered to take a deep dive look into my issue.   

We did every possible thing under the sun to try to find the answer.  In the end, we still weren't successful.  But I understood the nature of the problem way better than when I had started. 

I was convinced I had eough knowledge to solve the problem myself now.  I told my new friend as much, thanked him profusely and offered to buy him a beer at a conference if we both managed to get to it. 

I'm grateful that a complete stranger could be such a decent person.