reminders to be more mindful and present

1. unlike last summer, i kept the grass in the backyard alive through the heat wave. before it ended, we rented the backyard of someone who had a pool for an afternoon, which is something we've done a couple of times before and has been great every time. memories of striking out at two food carts and ending up eating mediocre dairy queen burgers (which tasted better because by that point we were very hungry), of the ideal backyard pool (long enough for laps, standing ledges around the edges but a true deep end), of floating on an inner tube with my butt in the cool water and the sun beating down while deborah read aloud to me from the beginning of her recently received copy of scammer by caroline calloway (a figure who i identify with so heavily and see so much of myself in! also i still miss marie calloway)

2. reminders to be more mindful and present, like when i had been lying in bed on saturday morning idly pulling on my vape pen while reading the most recent issue of new york magazine and then got up to brush my teeth while looking at my phone and then after brushing my teeth and putting on deodorant and still looking at my phone quite naturally stuck the tip of the flonase in my mouth and squeezed. (elsewhere in teeth and consciousness, i'm getting a wisdom tooth out on friday morning and i haven't had general anesthesia in years and i love its pillow of oblivion so very much (my words to the surgeon: "i want to feel as little as is humanly possible") and can't wait (plus follow-up opiates!))

3. writing automated tests (basically a kind of living proof that your code works and continues to work even as over time you and other people change it and the many thousands of lines of code around it) has always been such a pain for me (i am at a place where i feel confident that i can do most anything i need to with javascript but whether i can do it in such a way that i can reliably (and without screaming in frustration) prove it works is a much more open question) but i started working with a test framework i haven't tried before yesterday afternoon and it made things so much nicer and i actually had fun. (generally work is so good right now i'm afraid to jinx it by saying so but this is my gratitude journal so i also need to say for the record anyway fingers crossed)