Saturdays and sunshine

Ah, yes, the dynamic duo of Saturdays and sunshine…add to that a bicycle (recumbent, of course!) a lovely bikepath, and a couple of friends, and you’ve got something to be extremely grateful for.Especially when it’s been so wintry, with cold weather, snow, rain, fog, and very little blue sky.

But yesterday, the clouds disappeared, the sun came out, and I think somewhere in the valley the thermometer actually passed the fifty-degree mark. Positively balmy.

And it looks like there’s more of this to come in the week ahead… 

Snow Day!

The video says it all…this is something to be very, very thankful for  

Missing Mondays

I realized today how much I appreciate Mondays…yeah, I know, today is Tuesday, which is why I’m kind of missing Monday. See, I teach in a district where we have a “late start” on Monday – classes start an hour later, which not only allows us time to work with teams and departments on curriculum and such, but shortens our class period from an hour and a quarter to an hour, and makes for a really nice way to ease back into the week. Not that it was that bad coming back today after a three day weekend, and the week goes really fast this way…but it does make me grateful for Mondays. Which is kind of weird, I know  

Remembering a great man

Today was not only a day off for me, but a day in which our country celebrates the life and work of an incredible man. In my little corner of the world, there is a surprisingly profound community event to mark this day. Yes, in Ashland, Oregon, a mostly white community comes together to recognize Martin Luther King Jr., through drama, dance and song. It was the twentieth anniversary of this event, and it was definitely a moment to remember. So in honor of the day, the man, the emotion…today I’d like to express my gratitude for people like MLK who have made the strides they’ve made toward equality for all. True, we still have a long way to go,  but we’ve sure come a long way.

My girls

This morning was the second weekly meeting of “the breakfast club”, which was actually a spontaneous, informal get-together with “my girls”…my best friends, “sisterwives” , my core. It got me thinking, as it usually does after a soul-nourishing gathering with these women. Maybe the thing that I’m most grateful for these days would actually be three things – or rather, these three women  - Joyce, Cil and Alli. They’re always there for me, through thick and thin, the good times and the bad, the laughter and the tears. Lots of laughter and tears – often the tears are a result of the laughter…or they lead to it. We spend countless hours together doing all sorts of things, or sometimes nothing…watching movies, playing games, talking, drinking wine, it doesn’t really matter what we do. We’re just there for – and with – each other. There’s really nothing that compares to the company of my girls

TGIF…and P!

Today I’m not only thankful it’s Friday (yeah, I know, I only managed to work a half day all week!), but it’s also payday! Woohoo! After what seems like a loooong drought without a paycheck, finally, the day has arrived. Seems like not a minute too soon, as I was slipping precariously into the red zone this week. Money has always been a stress point for me; I never have enough, or I can’t hang onto it when I do. Somehow, I always seem to hang in there, to just barely get by. I don’t want to be living this way forever. The great thing about today was that my check was bigger than I thought it would be (had some extra stipends and things that I’d forgotten about), and it came a few days early, due to the weekend…and it’s a long weekend at that!I need to be thankful not only for the fact that I got paid today, and can now pay bills and buy groceries and gas and keep a roof over my head…but I need to remember that there are a lot of folks out there who can’t do that, and who are living a much more meager existence than I. It could always be much worse…and while I’d love for it to be much better, I can’t forget to be grateful for the things that I do have.

Grateful + Attitude = Gratitude

A new year is upon us. A “clean slate” so to speak, or as my friends are saying “Clean Slate in ‘08!” For me, that bears incredible importance, as the last year has been a tough one for me, emotionally, physically, spiritually…so while I’ve been messing about with my various blogs, it dawned on me that a) they were scattered and lacked focus; and b) I wanted to create something that truly mattered. Enter “gratitudes”…

What’s funny is that this idea came to me while I was lying in bed, recovering from a nasty bout of the flu, a bug that had kept me out of school for four days. What did I have to be grateful for? A whole lot…first of all, that I was on the upswing! I wasn’t dead, not even close to it (though I’d asked various people to help me out with that on the first day or two of the illness!), and I was going to be just fine.So often I find myself complaining about things that either aren’t worth my energy, or that just need a different perspective to adjust them, or that aren’t going to change anyway.

So my goal for this year, for this blog, is to post something positive every day, that reflects something for which I’m grateful, either in the form of text, photos, video, or some combination of the three.

We’ll see what happens…and please, feel free to share your own gratitudes. I have a feeling this could be contagious – but in a good way