Not “tears of joy” level, but I just got a promotion today!

Tears of joy? Nothing, ever. But this moth is really cute.

I thought i clogged the toilet at the police headquarters in Brisbane when i was doing my entrance exam. The water rose almost up to the seat and i was freaking out. The water just stayed there and I thought “this is it, i’m fucked, what do i do, who do i go to, what do i say” - and then it just randomly went down and everything was fine.

I haven’t cried in decades, but I got very excited last week when I get a call back from a company I applied to without even a vacancy. Not the first time I applied there, I just like the company. I’m a SWE with 0 YOE, so the market sucks for me. I’ve been job hunting for 6 months, with a couple interviews, but no concrete offers. I do have a couple years of semi-relevant experience (where I’m currently employed) and that’s what they liked in my profile. Now I’m excited to see if this leads anywhere.

The speed my pupper jumped up to come get his morning loving from me when I said “good morning” made me feel happy. We have a routine where he puts his head in my lap for neck massage then I check his eyes for sleepy stuff before anything else. It brings us both joy. Dogs will change one’s life.

I feel like I was able to calm my dog today after a big thunderstorm

what made me really happy is that I realized that she trusts me and feels calm with me

she’s a really smart and sensitive dog

My band played a show recently with a bunch of more experienced bands and we got a lot of really nice compliments after our set. More than one person made it a point to make eye contact and say something like “seriously, that was really original and cool”. I’ll ride this high for weeks, if not months.

A friend of mine that I’m growing closer to asked if I wanted to borrow her house while she was away on vacation so I could feel a bit about being a homeowner. I have recently started looking at buying one after living in apartments for the last 20+ years. Just that invitation and handing over responsibility made my heart melt. Made me all woozy-warm-cozy inside.

My Autodesk login is attached to my old student email, which I guess finally got deleted by my old college. I was incredibly grateful that I had a PC that was still actively logged into Fusion 360 when I learned this. I was able to preserve and export all the 3D design and modeling work I’ve done over the last 8 years before I get locked out of that login for good. I don’t use 3D modeling every day, so it was very lucky that I realized my login was now sitting in limbo while I still temporarily had access to everything.

Very grateful for that. There’s hundreds of hours worth of work there.

Back when my son was a baby, I used to play cricket with him. I’d take his feet and rub the soles against each other and go “CHIRP CHIRP!”. But as he grew older, he naturally didn’t enjoy this as much, and we’d do it less and less. He’d sometimes still ask me to do it, but occasions got scarce. He’s almost six years old now, and i had kind of accepted that he had grown out of it. Well, yesterday in the evening, just before he went to sleep, he asked me to do it again, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it, and we laughed, and it was beautiful. It may be the last time, as he grows older and won’t want to do such childish things anymore, but the pure fact that I got to experience it one more time AND KNOW it was the last time and I got to experience and savor it very consciously made me enjoy it just SO MUCH more, it brought tears of joy to my eyes. Yeah OK, I’ll admit it, I ugly cried. Hard. And I’ll cherish this memory forever.

My daughter sprinting across the playground to give me a cuddle when I collected her from preschool.

That was earlier in the week.

The garden I’m growing. Just keep throwing seeds on the soil and add water regularly. Some shit will grow. There’s these incredible beans - the flower starts out a buttery yellow, then turns a whitish violet when it opens. Or pansies - first time I grew one from seed and I could just stare at them for hours! While humanity disappoints often even the smallest of plants makes me incredibly happy.

We received a kitten through the universe’s cat delivery service and he is just an absolute joy.

Under a pound when he arrived, strong & healthy now. Pictures don’t really do justice to his cuteness, he’s so brave, unbothered by our big dog, loves our other cat and she tolerates him well too, unbothered by us handling him.

I can’t remember tears of joy, I think I’m just too jaded.

The last thing that brought me happiness was getting to ride a skateboard pump track for the first time this weekend.

Been wanting to try it for years, but there just weren’t any in my area.

Scary and challenging at the limits of my skill, which is just what I had hoped for.

Been a lot of tragedy in my life recently, I’ll take what I can get.

In April I was diving in Cozumel. Being able to see things like this was truly amazing.