#365Gratitude: Surprise, General!

One of my co-workers, a manager in fact, is also a vegetarian.  He's a flat-out vegan, not a fishy-milky-cheesy-tarian (sure, it's a word) like me.  We'd been talking since before Christmas about going to a really great vegetarian restaurant near our office.

It's called Sunflower.  And they have this one thing in particular that is so damn good.  It's General Tso's Surprise.

It's "Chunks of soy protein in hot kong-pao sauce, garnished with steamed broccoli and carrots."

I know at first glance "chunks of soy protein" might not sound appetizing to you.

You'd be wrong.

#365Gratitude: Shared Birthday Love

I share my birthday with our girl Katie.  I took the day off, and we drove up to northern Maryland to visit with her, her partner Leah, and their lovely son, C. (who adores me) and spend the day.  It was such a good day, from start to finish.  We exchanged cards and presents and such, went for kickass indian food, too.  (Did you know that there's such a thing as seafood masala?  I didn't!  Now I do!  SO GOOD.)  Then we went to a pottery place, where I worked on a Gratitude Jar.

The idea behind this little beauty is that I'm going to keep it in the kitchen, with a pad of nice paper and a good pen.  Anytime something good happens that someone in the house wants to remember, they can write it down, and toss the paper in the jar.  Then at New Year's next year, we can open the jar, and read about all the good things that happened that year.  

After we made pottery and visited a while, we drove back down to Virginia, and went out for yet more kickass food (grilled salmon for me, with birthday Key Lime Pie for dessert), courtesy of my sister-in-law.

I went to bed stuffed to the gills with both good food and great love.

#365Gratitude: Quick Podcast Help

The other day we recorded a show on the Littles Scouts.  It was really a great show, that I was very nervous to put together.  Lately, we've been recording once a month.  We had the idea to do the show on the scouts for a while, but for various reasons I only really began to put it together in earnest about 5 days before the recording.  

It was amazing how quickly people came together.  There were a ton of folks in the audience for the recording itself, and we had wonderful guests on the show, some returning, some brand new. 

It amazes me how folks band together to help us with the show, and to partake in it.

#365Gratitude Bonus: Teledoodling Supertotalmonsterdinosaur

So one of the interesting things about this not-numbering-my-gratitudes posts is that you can't tell when I'm posting more than one gratitude for the same day.  (I can, because I have a little notebook of sorts where I jot them down, by date.  CDO for the win, maybe?!)

This rare-and-elusive double-shot refers to two things:

First, the warm and schmoopy feeling of my girlfriend and Auntie, Squee getting to learn about the funny, weird-yet-consistent special grammar Mako-kun has.  He really loves to say "supertotal" instead of "very."  As in, that key lime pie was supertotal good!

For him, the superlative beyond "supertotal" is "supertotalmonsterdinosaur."  For something to be supertotalmonsterdinosaur good, it's got to be more than great, well beyond great.  How could I/he convey this to Squee so she could see it?

That's where the second part of my gratittude kicks in: technology!  We use a personal note-taking application-as-a-service called Evernote.  One of the more clever things we do with it is have a pair of shared notebooks we write in on our phones, tablets, computers both to each other and for each other.  One of the more clever things you can do with Evernote is draw pictures!

So, Mako-kun got busy drawing a picture of what supertotalmonsterdinosaur looks like, so she could see it.

Here it is:

#365Gratitude: Nothing Ch-ch-changes

I had this super busy day a few days ago, where I rushed from one thing to another, for hours.  It was early up, rush to the gym, rush to the munch, rush to get a birthday present, rush to another friend's birthday dinner.  I was on the go from the minute I was up, until the minute I went to sleep.

So for that Sunday I planned a different thing to do:

NOTHING

It was glorious.  I woke up with no particular plan in mind.  I went about my day in a sort of floaty ease.  So relaxing.

One thing I did do was listen to a lot of David Bowie music, because I found out he had passed away.  His new album Blackstar is wonderful, poignant, and sad.  It's got a jazzy, poignant, quality to it.  I found out later that in his last 18 months he had a sort of creative frenzy, like a star going nova before it finally fades out.  

This haunts me, some.  I love his music, and am sorry to see him die.  But I'm also comforted by the knowledge that when you're creative, the things you create keep on living, long after you yourself have returned to the nothing which we're all a part of.