Today I’m grateful for Herbie. No, not the sentient 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. Herbie is our palm plant.
Here’s the back story. When Pepper and I got engaged and bought our first townhome back in 1995, we received a bunch of coupons and “welcome to the magical world of homeownership” junk mail. Home sales are public record in Colorado, so companies in the area knew we owned a new home and probably needed furniture and appliances and tools and whatnot. I remember one of the flyers in the mail was a Home Depot coupon for a free plant. A free plant! So we picked up a little four-inch-tall palm plant at the local store.
Twenty-eight years later, this four-inch plant has become a six-foot monster. All I’ve done over those years is watered consistently and re-potted several times. Since I don’t have much of a green thumb, I’m pretty proud that Herbie is not only still alive, but thriving. He reminds me of a similar palm plant my grandma had– I think it was at least six feet tall as well.
That said, perhaps this whole post isn’t so much about Herbie as it is about those twenty-eight years. Essentially that timespan covers my relationship with Pepper, and you could say the growth of this hardy little plant is akin to the growth of our marriage and our lives together. Like any relationship, and like any plant, marriage takes effort and patience and diligence and nourishment. And the result, after all that, is something that’s far bigger and better than when it started. So thanks, Herbie, for reminding me of all that.
Today I’m grateful for orange juice. I often refer to it as the “nectar of the gods”, and drink at least a quart of it daily. I have a massive mug specifically for my juice; here it is with a Lego guy for scale:
I feel like I’ve loved orange juice my entire life. Growing up, I remember that at breakfast we’d alternate between orange and grape juices. Thom loved grape, but orange was always so much better.
The juice is delivered in many ways– not just in my massive mug, but in martini glasses, a special freezer mug, wine glasses, small snack-size glasses, big dinner glasses, so-called “recycle mugs” from college, and sometimes just straight from the jug in the fridge. (I only do the latter when I know no one else will be drinking from the jug.) Last winter I enjoyed some homemade juice in Arizona, although typically I’m chugging the Costco brand. What’s the point of drinking in bulk if you aren’t also buying in bulk, right?
Even on this very blog, I’ve been writing about my OJ habit for twenty years. So today, as I eat my afternoon snack, I’ll hoist a mug of the nectar of the gods!
Today I’m grateful for software. Yeah, it was the backbone of my entire career– despite the fact that in college I had no intention of getting into software development– but that’s not why I’m grateful for it today.
A few days ago I was processing a bucketload of photos for a friend. There were about a hundred of them that needed to be cropped, resized, and then framed in a certain way. Although the process wasn’t difficult to do by hand, one photo at a time, a hundred of them were going to take around half an hour to process. So, I decided to write some software to do it for me. And that’s one of the reasons I love software: it’s like an infinite toolbox, from which you can fashion a tool to do almost anything you need.
The program I use to manipulate images has a built-in scripting language, and if I could write a script I could then run it against my hundred photos and within seconds I’d finish my little project. Moreover, in the future when I have to do the same thing for other photos, I could just pull up that script and whiz through it. The only real headwind here was that I didn’t actually know the language! In a general sense, all programming languages are the same, and it’s just a matter of semantics. They solve the same kinds of problems in the same kinds of ways, but you have to know the syntax so you can structure a program in the right way. By all accounts I’m a pretty decent programmer, and I know about half a dozen languages fluently, and maybe another half-dozen at a high level. This one, however, was completely new to me.
So I sat down and started digging through the documentation about the language. I learned how variables are set, commands executed, and loops looped. Then I had to learn the API– the application programming interface– so I could use the language to do what I needed on my photos. That was another set of documentation. Finally I started writing my script. I tested it. I tweaked it. I tested it again. This is the way of software development.
The thirty minutes I would’ve spent processing the photos by hand soon became three hours of reading, writing, and testing. For some reason, the script just wouldn’t do what I wanted. Eventually I decided it was simply going to take too much effort for too little return (meaning I wasn’t sure how often I’d actually use this scripting language in the future). I heaved a heavy sigh, closed my editor window, and processed the images by hand.
Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl programming language back in the 90’s, was famous for stating the Three Great Virtues of a Programmer:
Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It translates into labor-saving programs that might take some time to create, but that, over time, will save far more time.
Impatience: The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. It translates into ways to make the computer, and thus yourself, more efficient.
Hubris: The urge to write software so other people don’t say bad things about it. It translates into a pride of craftsmanship, writing a program that works well, handles errors gracefully, and is easy to maintain.
I’ve definitely felt all three of these Virtues in my thirty-odd years of software development. And even though I’m not writing software for clients, or working on a team with other people who have to understand what I’ve written, I find myself writing scripts and programs literally every week. Thank goodness for software.
Today I’m grateful for board games. I’ve probably been playing them for forty years. It started with the usual suspects: games like Sorry, Parcheesi, Life, Monopoly, and of course Pop-up Trouble. In high school there were more complicated games like Scrabble, Chess, and even Axis and Allies (which often took several weekends to play!). Decades later, I have a well-stocked game closet:
This is only part of my collection. There are more games on other shelves, and some of the less-played ones are stashed on the very top shelf of the closet. And every month or so, it seems, another game joins the group. Pepper rolls her eyes a bit (“Don’t you have enough games?”) but I figure there are plenty of other hobbies that are more expensive or more dangerous. Board games are relatively cheap and simple.
Board games were (and are) a favorite activity with my kids. There have been countless afternoons and evenings where we’d gather around the table and spread out some game for an hour or two. It’s become our “thing” when we’re together. Pepper only likes a handful of games, but the kids tend to be pretty excited to pull something off the shelf. Part of the fun is the absolute trash talk.
In Longmont, I loved getting together with Jason, Mark, Mike, Brit, Scott, Brendan, Kurt, and others every few weekends for a night of board games. We’d usually crank through two or three games, and we’d eat Cheetos and Peanut M&M’s while we chatted and laughed and talked smack. Even after I moved away, we’ve kept the tradition alive with the occasional remote game night. When I visited Longmont a few months ago, of course we got together for some games.
I still meet up annually with my high-school friends, the Magnificent Seven, for a long weekend of gaming. Covid shut down the world but didn’t stop us from playing. This summer I drove several thousand miles to Omaha and back to play games.
And now here in Bigfork I have a gaming group. Every Monday we get together for some pizza and a game or two (Mahjongg is a part of that tradition as well). Every Thursday we meet up in town, or in Columbia Falls, with a larger game group. Tonight we had our annual Secret Santa board game dinner– called the Covert Turkey this year because we had to do it extra early in November. We each bought someone else in the group a game, and I went home with one I’ve been wanting for a while.
In short, board games have been a way for me to be more social, expand my circle of friends, keep my mind sharp, and have fun throughout all of it.
Today I’m grateful for peanut butter. (Sorry, Thom!) I’m not talking about just any old peanut butter– I’m talking about Adams 100% Natural Creamy Peanut Butter.
When I was a wee lad, one of my favorite places to visit was the farm Dad grew up on near Kiel, Wisconsin. As a kid, running around exploring an old farm was truly a treasure. We had so much fun climbing the corn crib, running through fields, sitting on rusted-out equipment, wandering the barn, and chasing the gazillion wild cats. Another thing I distinctly remember was Grandma’s cooking. She’d always lay out an impressive spread of food, all homemade, for lunch and dinner. And at every meal, it seemed, there was a stack of sliced homemade bread in the center of the table, along with a bowl of peanut butter.
I loved that peanut butter. Eating it on fresh homemade bread was absolutely heavenly. Occasionally we’d use Grandma’s toaster as well; that thing probably dated back to the Civil War, but somehow it always made the toast just right. Again, spreading some of her peanut butter on that crispy golden bread was amazing.
Back home, we grew up eating Skippy peanut butter. Skippy is fine. I liked it, and I ate bread and toast at home as well. Yet it wasn’t the same as Grandma’s peanut butter and bread. It was only when I was in my mid-20’s that I realized Grandma had been buying Adams 100% Natural Creamy Peanut Butter. (Or at least something so similar that I couldn’t tell the difference.) When I discovered that stuff in a store, it brought back all those fond memories. And now I’ve been buying that brand for the last thirty years.
Yesteday I polished off a jar of it, so I had to open a new one and run the mixer. Since it’s all natural, the peanut oil tends to separate over time, and it has to be stirred frequently. I always mix it when I open the jar, and then each time I dip into it.
Although it’s awesome on sourdough toast, and just as good with some cheese and crackers, I admit there are times I simply open the cupboard and dip into the jar for a couple mouthfuls of raw peanut butter. Yeah, I like it that much.
As I write this, it occurs to me that being thankful for something like peanut butter– or rather a very specific peanut butter– is kind of a strange thing. Maybe part of the magic in this particular brand is that it reminds me of the good times I had as a kid on the farm. Grandma and Grandpa are long gone, but those visits still evoke vivid memories. So perhaps in a larger sense, I’m grateful for the good things of my childhood, and the happy memories they continue to bring me all these years later.
This afternoon Pepper and I were in Kalispell for our monthly grocery trip. We typically hit Costco for the “big stuff” and then Walmart for the rest. In the Walmart checkout lane, I snapped this picture of her buying avocados.
Why is this significant?
Well, she’s holding two avocados in her hand but paying for three. The reason: about a month ago, in Utah, she bought some avocados and after returning home realized she hadn’t paid for one of them. (Ah, the joys and perils of self-checkout.) Since that day, she’s been waiting for the opportunity to return to Walmart and intentionally pay for one more avocado than she has. Because balance must be restored.
Today I’m grateful for sleeping in. I’m very much a night person, and rarely get to bed before midnight. Even then I’m not really tired, but I know if I’m up until one or two in the morning, I’ll pay for it the next day. Then I’m usually awake at eight. Here’s my clock this morning:
I really don’t like getting up early, although of course I can do it when needed. Six years of 5:30 alarms for early-morning seminary was rough. And four years of that was combined with working full-time (which meant many late nights), ultimate leagues, and raising kids. Most of the time I’d get around six hours of sleep each night.
I feel like our culture almost prides itself on not getting much sleep. People sort of brag about how little they’ve slept, or how hard they’ve been working, or why they’re so busy they can’t seem to find enough hours to get a proper night’s rest. And at the same time, there are countless research studies that show with little doubt that everyone absolutely needs 7-9 hours of sleep consistently, or they’re in for a world of health problems and even a shorter lifespan. Everyone knows sleep is important, but we still seem to prioritize other things.
Since finishing seminary, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed sleeping in almost every day. Sure, there are some extra late nights, or those times when I toss and turn a bit before finally drifting off, but overall I’d say I’ve been pretty fortunate in getting seven or so hours of solid sleep. Hopefully I live a little longer as a result!
Today I’m grateful for Mahjongg. It was more than three years ago when I was first introduced to a few ladies in the Mahjongg Gang. It was about two years ago when they first invited me to join their game. And I’ve been playing with them more or less ever since, every Monday at lunch.
The Gang seems to shrink and grow from week to week. Sometimes there’s a visitor from out of town who moved away years ago, but was part of the group in years past. Sometimes there are only two or three of them, and other times there are a dozen (which takes up the entire upstairs room of Rosa’s Pizza). Regardless of numbers, they’re always gracious and pleasant, and we have a good time.
Today I explained to them that I was going to write a brief note about them in my November gratitude journal, and they agreed to be in a group photo. So here’s today’s Gang:
Yes, they’re all twenty years older than me and about a foot shorter, but I still feel like part of the Gang. Thanks, ladies, for welcoming me! And for not taking too many of my quarters…
“I need a photo of an angry cat”, I said to my friends Brandon and Kricket. Sure, I could find one on the internet (there are so many photos of cats on the internet) but I figured I should use a friends’ cat if possible. After all, this is for our Christmas card!
They sent me this.
Pretty good, right? Brandon remarked “Oska isn’t really an angry cat” but somehow they made him look downright mean. Perfect. The card is coming together…
Pepper bought a new sweater the other day, and wore it today with her new skirt. She added her fish earrings and necklace from Hawai’i.
But the crowning moment was when she realized she had a teal water bottle in the cupboard. She added that to the ensemble (she always has a water bottle with her) and completed the set.
