#365Gratitude Day 350: Love is like a fruit basket

Last night Missy and I both had trouble getting to bed. We had something really good on our minds. Plus, there were all these green Ingress portals annoying Missy.  

So she went out portalling, and put me to bed. It was a recipe for very early wake ups for both of us. 

After she got home we cuddled up for a few hours and then I got up to write, or maybe surf Twitter in our special Twitter reading room (yeah that one).

When I got back to the bedroom she was already downstairs, making the family Surprise Breakfast™. Awesome! 

She made egg in a basket. It was GREAT. Because I love her, I in turn made us clementine grape Greek yogurt smoothies.  

She loved hers. We sat down to breakfast with my sister-in-law and all ate together, which is rare for a weekday morning. 

What a lovely love-filled morning! 

#365Gratitude Day 349 Part 2: Fintastic Filth (Thanks @kinksville)

It's the rare, elusive, Gratitude Double-Shot today. 

This morning my friend Kinksville sends me a tweet.

@makoallen I ran across this and thought it might amuse you. [NSFW] https://t.co/RRqEhIHnFw 

Boy when he said NSFW, he was not kidding. Even though I'd already posted a gratitude today, this thing deserved one too.

The particular comic series he sent me a link to is hentai furry porn.  It's about a writer of erotica who happens to be a shark, who gets into a threesome with a bunny rabbit and a hyena boy.  

I tell people all the time that I really am NOT a shark.  I just really love them a lot.  I don't consider myself a "fin", the aquatic version of a furry.  But I will say that I'm quite open to those sensibilities.

Let me tell you - this thing is absolutely filthy in the very best way.  It's WONDERFUL.

Thanks, Kinksville!

#365Gratitude Day 349: The dulcet tones of uranus

Okay, I'll admit it.  Deep in my secret heart, I'm a 12 year old, and couldn't pass up the opportunity for this truly tremendous, and disgusting pun.

Now that that's out of the way, seriously, this thing is amazing.  What I'm talking about is a series of "recordings" made by NASA of electromagnetic radiation caused by celestial bodies in outer space.  They transform the wave patterns into sound (much like an AM or FM radio does to radio waves here on earth).  Thanks to my friend Shokolada for pointing that out, by the way.

The results are haunting and beautiful.

#365Gratitude Day 348: Perspective

Yesterday I spent hours trying to figure out this technical problem. I'm in the middle of refactoring an application.   I looked all over the software project I was coding, trying to figure out where this one little session variable was coming from.  Couldn't find it.  Nada. Zilch.

I pinged a co-worker, and confessed my frustration, and asked him for ideas.

In about 10 minutes, because he looked at it a different way, he had an answer for me.

Awesome!  (If you really want to know, the weird code solution was a Grails Filter). Then I started into the solution, and when I first looked at it, it seemed exotic, and strange.  I told him as much, and we agreed to refactor it.  Then I went looking in the framework documentation at how the original code had been put together, and found evidence that it was a reasonable thing to do.  So, I just brought the code over, and kept going.

It never fails to amaze me how caught up I can get in my own perspective, and how when I let that go, I get out of my own way.

#365Gratitude Day 347: Square Noise

This morning I got up early (as I generally do, being one of those disgusting morning people you often hear about).  I trooped downstairs, and threw together a smoked-salmon on a bagel sandwich, something I had been craving for days.  It was kind of a light pre-breakfast, before the actual breakfast I was planning to make for the family.

I decided to make them my Pancake Squares, which are amazing.  Don't they look good?

Once you get them all mixed up and in the baking dish, they take a good 25 minutes to cook.

While I was waiting I noticed some stuff.  The recycling really needed to get gathered up and bagged.  There was some trash that needed to go out.  

I'm not the only person in the house who could do this, but these things do typically fall on my list of things to do.  I decided to just get them done while I was waiting.  I picked up a few other things, straightened up some stuff too.

I just wanted to do nice things for the people I love.  It got me thinking.  

The whole reason I decided to do any of this was because of what was right in front of me.  When I woke up this morning, Missy and Richard were curled up in our big bed.  (Yes, we can sleep three abed, and yes I love that.) They didn't particularly ask me for pancake square goodness, but by their lovable, cute nature, and my love of them it felt just like a very good thing to do.

Ditto the thing about doing house chores long before they became requested or necessary.  

I was telling my friend Squee about this a bit later in the day. I said.

"I'm aware of something - about life in general.  The universe is fucking noisy - if you stop making noise and listen, you can hear it telling you all sorts of things.  This morning for example it told me I could take out the trash and the recyclables while I was cooking breakfast, because it would be nice to do, and because it's a change I can make in the world right in front of me.

I think my gratitude today will be about that."

Oh look, it was.