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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


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