#365Gratitude: My kink family

My kink family is large.  It has members in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, California and Illinois.  (We're expanding, coming soon to a city near you!) Some of its members I see fairly often, others months go by, even years without my spending face-to-face time. (Which doesn't matter, because the second we're together, it's like no time has passed.)

There's a core part of this group I do see fairly regularly, although it's a bit like real-estate in Japan, no amount, no matter how big, is ever enough.

On Saturday, a bunch of us got together to celebrate our girl Rachel's birthday, at our house.  Rachel, her husband B, Katie, Leah, my vanilla-but-kink-friendly sister-in-law, Missy, and myself all hung out for the day.

One of the more fun things we did was play this videogame version of Pictionary called Drawful.

It was crazy fun.

We all kept making each other laugh, as we surprised each other with the goofy, off-center ways each of us think.

It was delightful.

Even more delightful to me was how all these people whom I love got together, to spend time with each other.  Not because of me, just because we're all family.

That's very special to me.

#365Gratitude: She doesn't see how I'm not

On Friday, I got a lovely surprise.  Our girl Katie's partner Leah was in town for other things, and had an appointment of hers get canceled.  Which meant that she and I could go to lunch.

Going to lunch with Leah is one of my favoritest things ever, because she is one of my favoritest people ever.

We're family.  She sort of snuck into my family in the best way possible.  She came to live with Katie, moving to the east coast from Seattle.  This was something I was excited about from day one, because I've always been impressed with her as a person.  She's kind, loving, gentle, thinky, and smart.  She's a really great partner to Katie, a warm and engaged parent to Katie's son, and has always been wonderful to me, Missy, and everyone else in the family, too.

I particularly love spending one-on-one time with Leah, because she's one of those skull-digging-deep-thinky-people like me.  We could talk philosophy, Taoism, mindfulness. and Harry Potter for hours. 

Actually, who am I kidding about that?  We have done this.  Repeatedly.

One of our big shared jokes about mindfulness, which we often say to one another, and which absolutely makes us both burst out laughing every time one of us says it is, "I don't see how it isn't."

I love her.

#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.