10/10/17

i'm thankful to have had a really good day yesterday. i'm thankful that in the morning i felt kind of crappy and antisocial but that that was okay because the people i work with are kind and not pushy and i was able to get some personal space and work out by the swimming pool in our rental house.  i'm thankful for the two teammates who i worked on a project with yesterday afternoon—i'm thankful we were able to work through some confusing stuff together in a way that i think we all learned stuff from. i'm thankful, after dinner, for another teammate's glee at getting to share a favorite hobby with others, a display of joy that was infectious and wonderful. i'm thankful for the time i spent with a group of people in one of the other houses where we're staying sitting on a back porch in the dark listening to queens of the stone age, which is a band i should listen to more. i'm thankful that in the dark, it looked like the porch overlooked a void of scrub and nothingness, but when we turned on the light, i saw that there was a crucifix shaped swimming pool and a ridiculously thick green lawn being watered by many sprinklers. i'm thankful that though i rode back to the house where we're staying in a car with too many people in it, which normally i would not do, we didn't get in an accident. i'm thankful for my teammate who is really into fancy dark chocolate and who prepared a tasting of little chunks of different very fancy bars for us to try. i'm thankful for his explanation of how in all of the bars he'd provided, huge variations in flavor were based not on the addition of ingredients but on the way that the chocolate and butter were deployed when making the bar. i'm thankful to have watched the confident meditative gestures of another teammate who was making cinnamon rolls for everyone—rolling out the dough into a broad thin sheet, painting it all over with melted butter, scattering sugar granules and clouds of cinnamon over the surface, rolling the dough tightly and crimping it at the seam to seal it, lifting the roll, turning it in the air, and slapping it seam side down on the counter, cutting the finished roll into individual servings, then neatly arranging them in aluminum pans covered with damp paper towels and putting them into the fridge to rise overnight. i'm thankful that i am going to get to eat as many of those cinnamon rolls as i want in just a little while. i'm thankful to stop writing now so i can go running first to make room.