2020 gratitude notes

Little pieces of folded paper that I threw into a vase.

I didn’t make one every week. I only have 11.

• week #1: on Thursday, PM shift, a lady tipped me $100 on $148 at work
• week #2: slept well all week long
• week #3: my regular Tuesday night table of doctors gave me an envelope with $300 in it for belated Christmas
• week #4: hard drive from the old computer is gonna be ok
• week #5: filed my taxes and getting a refund! (thanks to quarterly payments that I overestimated)
• week #6: despite missing 16 miles of mid-week training runs (Wed. & Thurs) I got my 22 miler done today. 1 hour in the dark & the last 11 miles in the snow!
• 20200320 (& 19): I got the food from Ted’s that they were going to have to throw away to help me while furloughed
• 20200502: studying has been going well and I’m going to be working in I.T. again
• 20200711: I got 2 surprise presents delivered to my door. A new set of Doctor’s Choice pillows and a cold brew coffee maker (from 2 different people)
• 20201001: started full time job as a BI Analyst
• 20201122: offered a salary instead of hourly compensation, put in my notice at the restaurant

As I was looking through these, other things that I am grateful for came to mind and I was tempted to insert them into this list but did not because this exercise was simply to record the paper notes. I also realized just now that as I would think of other things that I should have left notes for, my mind would throw in excuses for the periods of time during which I didn’t write notes, even when I had so much to be grateful for.

I also just realized that most of these notes were about material things. Thankfully they all were not. I spent a good solid 9 years pulling myself out from complete financial devastation, so I guess that took a toll on my perspective. I will work on that. I’ve climbed out by now and I can let the suffering go and recognize all of things I am grateful for, all the time.

I make more of these notes in 2021. What gets measured improves.

Cathartic is The Void

During my time off I have been starting to go through my old blogs, which are pretty much all set to private. The initial purpose of this was to uncover dive reports for dives that I had lost the logs for (between 2004 and 2018) and try to put the pieces back together as best I could. I did find a lot of stuff I had blogged about, nowhere near all of it but at least some good memories have been recovered (minus the actual data).

It was a whole different thing when I was just reading the dive reports but I think I got through (sadly) all of my blogs about those yesterday. It has since turned into a deep emotional “dive” into my personal history. I’m glad I blogged it but some of it is just too much, even for me, to read now. I’ve known some darkness in my life; that is for sure.

I’m keeping a lot of it private, but I’ve been going through and trying to make some of it public, if I can bear to, because who really cares anymore. I don’t have kids and my legacy to the world is nothing more than my personal experiences. I used to think I would one day write a book but, realistically, that probably won’t ever happen. I always have more on my plate than I am capable of, or interested in, actually eating. Plus, nobody would care but me anyway. Cathartic is the void.

I just now finished reading all 27 days about when I went down and cleaned the hoarded mess from my childhood house. That was so traumatic. I should probably take a break for a while now and do something more uplifting as I ring in the new year. This has kept my mind occupied though, and off thoughts about being alone or any such nonsense. I’ve been through a lot and I have a lot to be grateful for.

We are all in this world of flesh and illusion to have experiences and I have had quite a variety of them.

I know what I will do now. I will read the little pieces of “gratitude paper” that I had put in the vase over the course of the year.

whale bone

I went diving at Ginnie with Chris Hartmann of NorthFloridaScuba today and we had a great time! I would definitely recommend him for training or a guide or a refresher course if you are interested. His number is 904-673-4367.

We were both diving steel doubles (I had 104s and he had 108s) and a single AL 80 stage bottle and a single AL 40 O2 bottle for deco.

We went in through Devil’s Ear and got onto the main line and would exit through the Devil’s Eye. I had my stage too loose at the bottom and it was creating more drag than it would have if I had just wrapped the bottom clip around the rope one time. It slowed me down a bit in the high flow and we ended up dropping our stages between the park bench and Hill 400, instead of on the Hill 400 as we had thought we would. We took a left jump to the Hill 400 line and then took a left jump onto the siphon tunnel briefly then a right jump to double lines right away (got on the first one). Then about 200 feet after that put a reel in and went to the left to a tunnel which led to the really cool whale bone (which was on the right). We exited out the Eye, which means that when we got to the Ear we just stayed on the gold line to daylight. He lead on the way in; I lead on the exit. It was lovely.

My old Suunto Vyper is basically not working that well for me anymore. The display is difficult to read and it also isn’t syncing right. 170 dives that were stored on it have become corrupted somehow (probably when the battery was changed). I’m gonna have to get a new gauge/timer/computer very soon. I will probably start off with the Peregrine. I like that one. It’s not the exact one that I want (the Perdix, because it also does Helium and has way more capabilities, like if I ever move on to rebreather for example – which I currently don’t have any plans for yet), but I can get that one later. Peregrine will do for now.

It was so great to get back in a cave. I want to do another one very soon.

The Bartender Bond

I wasn’t actually tired today at work, oddly, even though I barely slept last night. I guess I was too busy chatting up all the guests, knowing that I won’t be doing that anymore after one more Sunday. I’m leaving my job as a bartender for good. I’m not even going to moonlight on the weekends anymore. I’ve moved on. The extra time I had in early 2020, while the whole world was shut down and everyone was freaking out, gave me the opportunity to study constantly and get current with the changes in technology. I was forced to realign my priorities and that led me straight back to my first love: database work. This is the end of an era and a long anticipated return to myself, for which I am truly grateful, but it has been a fun ride.

I’ve really come to like a lot of the regulars. So many of them are truly fascinating, highly intelligent people who are very powerful in the community, people with whom I’d most likely never have had occasion to otherwise bond. I will miss them. I will miss our conversations. I will miss feeling like they care about my life; I will miss caring about their lives and somehow feeling like I’m in some way a character in a vastly different world. In that environment, between #bartender and guest, people don’t feel pressured or weird and they will just share their lives with you. It’s actually pretty awesome.

I’m seriously, once this whole pandemic thing gets under control, going to have to force myself to do social things now, because left to my own devices I will stay inside my apartment all of the time and literally never, ever, talk to a human in person. Maybe I will become one of those people who goes and eats at a restaurant bar by herself and orders sparkling water and tips well and maybe I will meet interesting people that way. Shrug. There aren’t many of those people. People who don’t drink alcohol don’t stay long enough to form bonds typically. I don’t even know if I’d feel like talking if I was on the other side of the bar. Maybe not.

It’s weird how if you put a bar in front of me I can talk to anyone and I actually really enjoy it but in normal circumstances I tend to choose not to. There just doesn’t often seem to be occasion for me to speak to people without that setting. Small talk kinda annoys me in general. It feels awkward to initiate and may not be well received, especially if you don’t seem like people who would normally talk to one another. Unless, of course, you are behind a bar and the person is on the other side of it. Then, all the rules are different.