estaratshirai

I am grateful for the excruciatingly fabulous Tabitha, whose birthday is today. :D

I'm also grateful for happy coincidences. I ran into two women I knew when we were out to dinner. They were about to go to a book signing (next door, at the bookstore we'd been planning to go to anyway) by a woman whose stuff I may turn out to like - it's supernatural Victoriana with large helpings of sarcastic wit. (Gail Carriger is the author's name.) So I picked up the first book of the series.

Today it's just general burbling over how I have a home and a family and friends and life is pretty good. It was autumnal today, overcast and just a hair drizzly without being really cold. Sweet. And I got an appointment set up with Brain Doctor for before the sleeping pills run out, so I will continue to receive delicious chemical sleep without interruption.

I am grateful for the healing power of Making Lists and for 80's music. Yep. When nobody else is home, I do chores while singing Duran Duran at the top of my lungs, and no one can stop me.

I usually save him until his birthday as the journal closer, but I'm grateful that my son is a smart, funny, decent person who likes us.

Today we went to a Civil War re-enactment fair with our new friends Tom and Beth and their daughter (whose name I have not seen spelled so I'm not going to try and fail). (Stick with me, this is going to arrive at gratitude.) The staged battle was a bit more realistic and darker-edged than I'm used to from Ren faires. It was kind of an odd experience. On this side of the rope border, a bunch of moderns gibbering about things they think they know, and cheering for a side, and trying to control their shrieking kids, and eating hot dogs. On the other side, it's all banging and smoke and firecracker smell, and boys playing drums and flutes while other boys shoot and shoot and shoot from their tidy rows, and sometimes it goes on and on and nothing seems to be happening, and then suddenly there's one more round of shots and boys suddenly fall over, "dead" or grievously wounded and left to lie there while the cigar-chewing journalist paces back and forth in the distance with no apparent concern, and meanwhile it seems like no one ever comes around to them with even a swig of whiskey, let alone any medicinal help, until the priest swings by with his big wooden cross to send off the dead ones in spirit while the wounded still lie there.

So I'm grateful I wasn't in the Civil War.

I am grateful that sometime here soon, I will have a bike. La la la la la bike.

(Hey, take it for what it's worth. Otherwise it was "I'm grateful my back doesn't hurt quite as much as it's whispering that it could." I pushed hard on that last circuit and, um.)

I have completed the entire three-month cycle of circuit training I've been doing. I am made of awesome.

I am grateful that I never watched Starlight Express. I just found out today that all those people on roller skates were supposed to be trains. @_@

I am grateful for the magical force of habit, which after a few months of work, causes one to do things like crawl into workout clothes and onto the treadmill even though one doesn't actively want to, because that is what one does on a Thursday morning.

Habit can be your friend.

Because everyone's all worried about it right now.

My default setting on my livejournal is friends-only, and I have various filters that are even tighter. Nothing from locked posts goes anywhere, and that includes comments. However, there are some posts that I make public, like the gratitudes: those do end up on facebook (along with some fb-only comments, usually stuff too quick and off the cuff to be worth putting here). I don't know if that now means that comments you make on my public posts will show up at facebook, but as it is, they're PUBLIC posts here, so the risk has already been taken.

I never, ever link to anything someone has locked without their permission, because dude, seriously. I like to assume y'all are decent people who are doing the same in return, but it's not like I search my own name on the internets periodically to check up on you.

Got the details on Grandma's military service, so I am putting them here so I can't lose them again.

She was Army, and volunteered early into WWII. Although she apparently always impressed the boys with how quickly she could assemble a rifle, what they mostly had her do was PR work, traveling and shaking hands and posing prettily in pictures. Late in the war she went to Fort Dix and did x-rays. Grandpa came to Fort Dix after his tour in Germany (which was after his tour in Japan). They met when he asked her to dance.

She said no.

But she changed her mind later, and after dancing, in her words, "they went to town." Their courtship was pretty fast, and she married him after making him convert to Catholicism.

The service was today, and apparently it rained big time. Aside from the Catholic service she received the military honors of "Taps" and a three-gun salute. Mom will be sending me the memorial cards, which have Mary on them. My aunt's business associates drowned the place in so many flowers that there are now lovely arrangements all over the hospital and hospice in their old hometown. The family's memorial fund is going to go to the local Catholic school, and my mother predicts that it will be "the most money they've seen in twenty years." (It's a small town.)

Mom told everyone I wanted to be there and they said ~~yeah sure~~ they knew, and my aunt Joannie said I could have sung at the service, and Mom told me that and I said GAH, because I so would have. I need to develop some kind of contingency plan for getting myself across the country at a moment's notice so these things don't happen. ._.

I am grateful to know my baptism date: November 7, to coincide with All Souls. ...Yes, hilarious. Stop giggling back there.

(For my friends and family who are So Not Christian and look at this choice for me with bewilderment: if you think about it, and consider the relatively progressive social agenda of my denom, this really isn't as big a change for me as it looks like. I hope you will all play along cheerfully.)

I am grateful that my dad's legs came back online after their brief fritz 8/ and for busses that run reasonably close to where I need to go at reasonable times.

I am grateful for the lovely friends who want to entertain and coddle me because I'm depressed. I'm grateful that Grandma died peacefully, in the city where she lived most of her married life, still and always secure in the love of her husband and her daughters, who always made sure she had proper physical care and plenty of company.

(I need a copy of her WWII picture. It's striking.)

This will be kind of a pointy, ouchful gratitude, but there it is.

I'm grateful that, after over a decade of not seeing my mom's family, we got out there a couple of summers ago and got what turned out to be a last chance to see my grandparents relatively well. I've just heard that Grandma is dying of respiratory and kidney failure. She'd been coming apart both mentally and physically, so for the family it's falling into that category where people kind of feel it's probably for the best even though it's still sad.

She's the daughter of immigrants but never really cared about that. I am currently blanking, dammit, on whether she was USO or actually military when she met Grandpa, but either way, she was the kind of woman who was trotted into PR photos. After the war they had three daughters and a successful restaurant. She is where I learned pies, sweet tea, and the family slogan "What difference does it make?" She has needed glasses for decades but never wanted to wear them because "that would just be giving in to it." I never remember seeing her in a bad mood. She is 92 and has been married happily for over 60 years.

They're Catholic, so if those of y'all who are of that persuasion were to give her an extra shout-out, I'd appreciate it. Julie Pavlik Park.

Love you, Grandma.

ETA: She's gone. Mom says it was peaceful, and that the service is on Wednesday.

Current Mood: sad

I'm grateful to be bad at hating entire categories of people, even when it is fashionable to do so. It ruins a lot of humor for me, but it also doesn't eat me slowly and viciously from the inside.

I am grateful that the news about my heart is that there is no news about my heart. Not that I thought there would be any, but my general doc is the general doc of what is primarily a "heart center," so you show up with borderline blood pressure and they're all up on it like rats in a granary.

Anyway, my heart is groovy and normal and fine. So now they want a stress test. Because, see above. Go me, I'm not dying. XD

I am grateful that I found "Dig That Groove Baby," the Toy Dolls album I once loved so absurdly, on Amazon for download. (It is outside the usual spirit of the gratitude journal to look askance at iTunes, which claimed to have it but had a totally fubared playlist, so let's just focus on how Amazon had it in a fubar-free condition.)

I am grateful for my theoretically spendthrift but actually kind of spouse-indulgent husband, who bought me a Chococat from Build-A-Bear even though I was out of my own money for the month and we're trying to be pretty good.

It has cuteness. :D

I'm grateful that, due to improved weekend management, I am starting this week at the bottom of the couple of pounds I've been bouncing back and forth over for the last couple of weeks, rather than at the top. It bodes well for resuming actual progress.

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estaratshirai

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