What I'm Thankful For
It's easy to forget the simplest pleasures, conveniences, and joys in our everyday lives. Take a good, hard look around; there's so much to be thankful for! The last hundred years have seen a mind-boggling series of advancements that, to a time traveller, would make our world nearly unrecognizable. And when you think about how long humans have roamed this earth, that's pretty wild.
I begin my list with indoor toilets. When I was a little girl, my parents and I lived in the back of an old Plymouth station wagon, traveling from one farm to another harvesting whatever was in season. The toilets of my youth were outhouses and smelly rooms behind gas stations. Now that I live in a house with three of them, I remind myself to be grateful, even when I'm scrubbing them. Laura Ingalls had to brave snowstorms, heatwaves, and bears to do her business. Be thankful you're not Laura Ingalls.
So the next time you start to feel down about the world we live in, be thankful for:
Indoor toilets
The ability to drive from one town to the next without use of a horse
My laptop, which includes a typewriter, TV, instant mail service, games, an unlimited music library, books, my photo album, a telephone, my schedule, an assistant whose accent I get to choose...
Not having to cook in a fireplace
Traffic lights
Refrigerators
Clothes I didn't have to make myself
Washing machines
Ball point pens
Electricity
Asprin
Ikea
To be alive in an age when I can get on a giant boat, go out to the ocean, tool around for a while and come back...just for fun
Glasses
Breathe-Right strips
Novacaine
The accessibiity of books
The garbage man
The internet, which gives me the ability to learn anything I want for free, run a business, make friends and connections across the world, shop in my underwear, get news from a thousand different sources, watch 12 straight hours of Wheel of Fortune bloopers...
Cleaning supplies
Water piped directly into my house that I didn't have to get from a well
That I can change my hair color and change it back at a whim
No one I know is in jail
I have never been forced to do anything by candlelight
Root beer
Inexpensive tools
Soft blankets for under $20
Bubble wrap
Central air
Remote controls--those days of having to get up to change the channel were dark days indeed
The availability of fresh fruit and vegetables grown thousands of miles from me
Ladders
Flea collars
The Flintstones
I have never had to shoot my own dinner
Unlimited, free long distance
Pumpkin patches
Aluminum foil
Tarps
That social media wasn't around when I was young and mostly drunk
That women are no longer required to wear corsets, though I do wish men would go back to wearing hats
Disposable diapers
Starbucks
Matresses not made of straw
