Yesterday I did what I'm about to go do again.
I got in my car, fought traffic, and went to the gym to run around the indoor track before work.
I changed my running interval though. I bumped up from the very-not-challenging 30 seconds run/4 minutes 30 seconds walk interval I had been doing last week to the slightly-more-challenging-but-not-by-very-much-more interval of 45 seconds running for every 4 minutes 15 seconds of walking.
I know, I know - it sounds like I'm sort of shaming myself. Shush. I'm actually thrilled to be making slow and steady progress towards more fitness. During those newer, slightly longer run intervals I really booked it, and enjoyed doing it each time I did.
I'm actually really looking forward to getting to it again today. I've been slowing coming back to a place of higher function in what I do.
Yesterday I also spent a chunk of time re-reading the novel I'm working on, so I can continue my work on it. I also spent some time discussing design of a side web-project of mine, and talking about blocking out weekly time to workon both of these things.
15 seconds matter, when you use them mindfully!
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.
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.
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.