#365Gratitude Day 294: Another mawkish dithyramb

Sometimes recording my daily gratitude means I write about really silly, trivial things, and sometimes it means I write about really heavy things.  This one's about both.

On my phone I have this dictionary app, I keep in a utilities folder.  I'm a word-obsessed person, so having a dictionary close to hand is a real world need of mine.  One thing my app does that I love is ping me with the Word of the Day.  You can even go back and see a little tiled display of other recent Words of the Day, like so:

My blog is often two of these words:

Mawkish: adjective, "Characterized by sickly sentimentality."

Dithyramb: noun, "any wildly enthusiastic speech or writing."

I own that.  This blog is filled with mawkish dithyrambs.  

So, the serious part.  There are several people in my life dealing with not-nice-things.  For privacy's sake, I won't say exactly who, and I won't say exactly what.  But they reach out to me, for solace, comfort, and connection.  

Just recently one of these very-close-to-me  people made sure to text me so that I could hear their bad news before anyone else did, through any other channels.  I told them how much it meant to me, and they said, "You're family. <3."

That means more than I can say to me.

#365Gratitude Day 293: ${bikini}

So in my day job I work with a java framework called Grails.  (It's pretty amazing, and often very fun to work with.)  One thing about Grails is that almost every sub feature of it has a name that starts with a G. (It's a bit like Ruby on Rails, except the language underneath is called groovy.  It's Groovy on Grails, see?)

This random picture of a woman in a g-string bikini isn't gratuitous at all.  It's post context!  Riiiight.

One thing that always makes me laugh is that there's a special kind of string-handling in Groovy called a "g-string."  They look like this. "${some executable code}"

I was joking around about this with some friends of mine in a chatroom, and made a textual pun about it. "${bikini}".

My friend Josh made me actually snort with his reply, "${on_a_guitar}."

I don't know, maybe he's just got less of a dirty mind than me.

#365Gratitude Day 292: ...and Gold

Sunday I had the rare but awesome pleasure of spending quality time with my friend Sarah Noel.

Sarah's super busy doing complicated becoming-a-medical-type-person-stuff so we don't see each other a lot.  She works ridiculously long, exhausting hours, and her life is basically work-school-sleep-wash-rinse-repeat.  

But we both happened to have Sunday to ourselves.  So she came over to hang out, cuddle, and watch Inside Out.  (Which if you haven't seen it, you have to, because it's utterly fantastic.)

It was a lot of fun.  The best part really was just the time together.  I've known Sarah Noel for ages.  (More than a decade, easily.)  I love her a lot.  We call each other "Pal."  The very best thing about spending time with her is that it's always sort of timeless.  It doesn't matter how long it is until the next time we do it, it'll be just the same as it always is.  She's my lifelong friend.

#365Gratitude Day 291: Silver....

Saturday Missy and I got together with dear friends from Seattle, David and Krissie.  We love those guys.  They're partners to our little girl Valentalae, and one of the very compelling reasons we want to move to Seattle.  They're sweet, loving, giving people who we adore.

Krissie has a thing for rain forests in the same way I have my shark thing.  So, we decided to take them to the Baltimore Aquarium.  (Which has both!)

It was a super fun day out, and really great.

Here's my picture, of Missy taking a picture, of a shark.

We've known them for a couple of years now.  At some point in the day I found myself, as you do, thinking about the Girl Scouts song, "Silver and Gold."  

Definitely silver, heading towards gold.

#365Gratitude Day 290: That mom talk...

My friend Mel tweeted this YouTube video to me last night, I just saw it this morning and while it is very funny  in a way it's also kind of ...

PORN FOR ME ON YOUTUBE.  

Don't worry, it's worksafe. Just watch it. 

Thanks Mel!