September 7, 2018

I'm grateful that though I started my drive to work this morning several miuutes late, traffic was very smooth and allowed me to arrive only slightly late.

September 6, 2018

Grateful for discovering the previously mentioned Alan Richman. Really sharp writer I am greatly enjoying.

September 5, 2018

Very, very grateful my car, a 2009 Honda Fit, is very, very reliable. Which is indicated by my seeing when I parked at work today that it had just hit precisely 100,000 miles. Problems have been remarkably minor and far between.

The most serious service matter has been the seemingly universal need to replace defective Takata airbag inflators. Those replacements were completed on the Fit several months ago.

September 4, 2018 (Retroactive post)

I am grateful for the promptings at work to warn about phishing emails that led me to realize I had received just such an email.

The major thing that sent up a flag for me about the email was it had an unsolicited PDF attached to it. Very, very odd and suspicious.

Something I had learned about phishing is it appears to come from a trusted source, and such was the case here; it showed as being from the vendor of an application I use every day at work, and which I will soon be taking specialized training on that this vendor supplies. Due to this training I have been in contact with one of their personnel.

So I clicked a button that appears in our corporate email utility that sends suspected phishing email to our data security group. Also received an apology email from the vendor; from the contents of that I suspect they were dealing with a hijacked internal system that was generating the phishing.

September 3, 2018

Feeling better today, so pleased to present TWO notes of gratefulness in one post:

1. I was grateful to see a Mission Impossible movie (the latest) for the first time, in a local theater. Wow, wow, wow, what an amazing, almost non-stop thrill ride.
2. AND I was very grateful to experience my neighborhood's Little Free Library for the first time.

My understanding is Little Free Libraries basically function as a point for exchanging of books, basically take a book, leave a book (or return a book taken previously.)

This one in Serra Mesa is located on a the outside of residential fence, on a sidewalk, on Mission Village Drive just before it intersects with Admiral Avenue. This Google Street View image was taken before the Library was installed: https://goo.gl/maps/2GV9fE6aBdo

I especially like the location because it is very near a middle school, and students going to the school and going home walk right by it. Hopefully it gets lots of visits from them!

So, I stopped by this morning to take photos and see if I could make an exchange. Here is a front view of the structure:

There is actually a tiny live, planted garden of succulents on the roof of the structure. Here is part of it:

And lastly, here is the interior before I start rummaging around:

I did make an exchange. I left a science fiction story collection I had not re-read in some time:

And I took this book, by restaurant critic and food writer Alan Richman. I've started it and am enjoying it:

 

September 2, 2018

It has not been a particularly good day, to be very honest, but at least I am grateful that the bad muscle tension headache I've had much of the day is by now lessening quite a bit.

September 1, 2018

I'm grateful I had the sense to self-edit myself to NOT do something that I realized could have come across as being stalkerish.