#365Gratitude: Duh, karaoke!

The other day I was trying to explain the concept of te to a good friend.  Te, pronounced sort of like "duh", is really, really, hard to understand.

Directly, one might say that Te is "virtue", or "morality", or even more loftily "power".  The Tao te Ching literally translates to "The book of the Way and its power."

None of which really cover it.  All those things make it sound very inaccessible, high, and mighty.

But te isn't like that.  Te is doing what you can, mindfully, presently, without letting fear or doubt stop you.  In fact, it's really the very doing of such a thing, precisely when fear and doubt tell you otherwise.  It's not so much being brave - it's doing what you can, without letting what you think you can't do get in your way.  Like Piglet, when he went for help after Owl's tree house fell over on The Very Blustery Day.  Piglet has amazing te.  So much so, that there's a great book about this called The Te of Piglet by Benjamin Hoff.

That was when I realized I had a perfect example of te from my recent trip to Chicago.  I sang karaoke for my first time ever, in front of a group of mostly complete strangers.  I'm pretty brash and ballsy about a lot of things, I'm not afraid to do public speaking.  (I even enjoy it!) But singing, on a stage, that's another thing altogether.

But I just took a deep breath, picked a song I wanted, and ran full-tilt boogie towards the thing I feared.

It turned out pretty good too.

#365Gratitude: Bugsquash

The Wednesday after I got back from Chicago, I had planned to have an easy workday.  Get in, work on my latest story-ticket, nice lunch, home early, all that jazz.

A coworker was demoing a story to the lead and the system threw a nice big juicy bug, putting an end to that plan.  The code that worked just perfectly when I ran it locally just horked up a lung and died when it was on the test box. 

Not ACTUAL bug, computer bug.  Still, horrible.

Said coworker enlisted my help, because they had no earthly idea what it could be.

After a while of banging my face against it, I figured out why it woiuldn't show on dev, but did appear in test, and exactly what was causing it!  (If you really want to know why and what it was.. the why was because of differences in the dataset and the what was that datatables.js doesn't support colspan attributes in tables.  Having one causes the HTML to be considered malformed by the library.  This can be easily fixed on a .gsp by swapping out the HTML in question conditionally, using a template.  See, you didn't really want to know, now did you?)

Anyhow, it feels good to figure that kind of stuff out.

#365Gratitude: Paid in full

A couple of years back my nephew was in college, and couldn't make tuition, and I took a loan off my retirement account to help him out.

The way the loan was set up, the repayments came out of my paycheck, so I wouldn't even notice them.  I kind of forgot about them, except when I changed jobs, and had to start paying them manually, by check.

I worked out how to set up a direct deposit repayment thing and proceeded to forget about it again.  

I don't have to remember it ever again, because on Tuesday I got an email that it was all paid back.

Man, that feels good.

#365Gratitude: Good Goodbye and Hello

Historically, I've been terrible at goodbyes.  I hate leaving, hate other people's leaving, and become sad, wistful, and teary.  The Monday that I left Chicago though (alright, technically Milwaukee) was a different story.

Squee and I had a lovely, long, slow goodbye.  

Monday morning I helped get her kids off to school, which was pleasantly, domestically enjoyable.  It felt very family-normal-good.  Squee, Kit, and I walked with their youngest daughter, S. to the bus stop.  At one point S. rolled her eyes at us, and said, "This is too many grownups at the bus stop."  (Because we're tragically uncool like that.)  But it didn't stop her from playing seedpod soccer with me and her dad for a while until the bus came.  I joked to Kit that it was the opposite of "Futbol Picante".  

Eventually the time came for Squee and I to get on the road, and we did so early, so we could really take our time at it.  This was a very good choice.

We drove to the airport, and then circled it a bit, sussing out our best options to maximize time.  I curb-checked my bags, and we got back in the car to park, sit, talk, and really channel our schmoop.

Coincidentally, a good schmoop channeling takes about 45 minutes.

Then we went inside, and in front of a busy terminal of strangers proceeded to hug and kiss for a while.  It was tender, and good.

I was able to go through security without being a weepy mess.  Then I had a nice, easy flight home.  I got my car out of the long term parking at a hotel near the airport, and drove home.  Missy wasn't home yet from her busy day, so I got some special time with the cats.  Well, half of them.

On the whole it was a most excellent set of goodbyes and hellos.

#365Gratitude: Squee's selenite heart

On my last day of my visit to my auntie Squee, she had me hang onto something precious to her, her heart.

No, seriously.  Here you can see it.  It's a crystal heart, made out of selenite.  I took it in its little velvet pouch and stuck it in my pocket, warming it with my body as we went about our day.

She told about it as we drove around.  When she first got it the heart was flawlessly clear, not a scratch on it.  The thing about selenite is, it's a very soft, pliable sort of mineral, and can scratch easily.  After only a little while the heart was scored and scratch some, and she worried what to do about it.  A friend told her that wasn't a problem, and to just keep it in its protective little pouch, and she could keep it from harm.

I immediately got this.  And understood just what it meant that she was letting me hang onto it for a while.  I took it from the pouch, and held it in my hands.

After a time I put it back in the pouch, and just before our long goodbye at the airport, gave it back to her.  Mostly.