Man, I love Greg Proops. He's this very liberal, very snarky, very smart, well-dressed comedian who travels around the world doing stand-up.
He records said stand up into a podcast called The Smartest Man in The World. It's wonderful. I hadn't listened to it in months, and for no discernible reason decided to put it on for my commute this morning.
I haven't laughed this hard in ages. My girl Katie and I saw him once live, in DC. We're going to need to do that again sometime.
I've been sick for a while, and it knocked me for a big loop. Everything habitual and systematic I've been doing went right out the window. Mindful eating, decent sleep, regular exercise all got canned.
I finally feel better though. Spent some time writing a day or so ago, which is always a good sign, for me. And today, just now in fact, I swam for a half hour.
I'm so grateful for this. Grateful I can do it. Grateful that the doing of it is enough. Grateful that the choice I make in this moment is the most, in fact the only choice that matters.
There's a Buddhist term for this, shoshin, or "Beginner's Mind." It means embracing the moment, being eager to be present and participate wholly in whatever life has for you.
Every time I experience this feeling, I'm grateful for it, and every time it feels like it's the very first time I feel it.
That's because, in a very real way, it is the first time.
So grateful.
So this morning I'm on my way to work. Missy and I get out the door at the same time, and plan to kind of chase each other up the highway. She's got this errand to run that's not too far from my work.
After a little bit I do catch up with her. We smile, we wave, and then I get ahead of her.
It's raining today, pretty hard.
We get to the place where 95 meets the beltway. Missy is right behind me. I go to merge onto the onramp, only to find that traffic is at a stand still. I slam on my brakes and jerk my wheel to the left, slipping back onto 95.
Thankfully Missy does the same. Otherwise we would've hit each other. She manages to merge in, getting back on the onramp a bit further up.
I decided to go a different way altogether, and follow my mapping app down side and back roads.
I called Missy to make sure she was OK, and had made it onto the highway without further incident. She did.
I'm sitting here in my car in the parking lot of my office, glad that worked out so well. It could've been very very bad.
In my day job as an Electron Inconveniencer, I work heavily with a web development framework called Grails. I fricking love that thing, and all its model-view-controller goodness.
There are a lot of options for testing your code in Grails, including jUnit, and the Spock framework.
Of the places I've been that use Grails, none has really ever done testing well. It's all been sort of ad-hoc and an afterthought. My current gig really wants to do something about that though, and have asked me to lead that charge.
I found a fantastic YouTube video all about how to test your Grails app from stem to stern. It's so good.
if you really want to watch it, and have about 90 minutes to spare, check it out.
This morning was all about fond memories of the past.
First, Missy found this picture of me she took at the Chicago Bean (which is really called Cloud Gate).
That's me in the blue and green backpack. You can see Missy "bean" reflected in the sculpture taking my picture. (She's in the green hoodie.)
We were there for CapCon. We slipped away to do a bunch of touristy-sightseeing-things, have special time with Brother, too. It was great.
When Missy showed me this picture, I was lying in bed, and through some random googling had found my way back to a website of spanking stories that I used to just absolutely love, Laura's Spanking Corner (NSFW, duh!) . I remember back in the day, there were stories there that just got to me in the strongest way.
Turns out, they still do.
Nostalgia. Gotta love it.
