...and a Pleasant Thanksgiving Holiday
I've been enjoying a very pleasant and relaxing few days. Wednesday night was my poly men's group meeting in Sonoma, and then I had a comfortable morning and afternoon at home organizing & cleaning up cluttered computer files and helping Laurie prepare our part of a group Thanksgiving dinner - helping mostly by staying out of the way unless needed. We had a great Thanksgiving dinner with five of our nearest and dearest at Zhahai & Cascade's, just two mile away. Nice not to have to drive for an hour to be with friends for a change! Two of our number came back home with me to spend the night, and after all the turkey dinner,dessert, wine and champagne we fell asleep much sooner than we intended to!
Friday Laurie had to work but I observed National Buy Nothing day by staying at home and catching up on things that I wanted/needed to do. I even took advantage of the nice weather to mow the lawn and tidy up the yard a bit. English walnut trees are messy this time of the year! I made one trip into town to rent some movies (that doesn't count for Buy Nothing Day, does it?) I rented Protocols of Zion (disturbing documentary about anti-Semitism, religious prejudice and abysmal human ignorance that helped reinforce my prejudice against organized religion in general), Thank You for Smoking (wicked cynical satire about a tobacco lobbyist) and X-Men The Last Stand (fun adrenaline rush).
Yesterday, we had a second Thanksgiving dinner with my mom, who lives about 90 minutes away. She turned 89 on Tuesday and is in remarkably good shape for her age. She still lives out on her own, drives and takes care of all of her own needs, except for having someone come by to tend to her yard every couple of weeks. She is sharp and in good spirits and is fun to spend time with, but I notice that she is getting alarmingly forgetful and I need to keep a closer watch on that. We took her a home-cooked turkey dinner with all the trimmings and she prepared a salad and vegetables, and insisted on doing all the cleanup and dishwasher-loading afterward. I know better than to try to stop her so we just stood by to help if she requested or needed it.
Today Laurie took her mom out shopping and I tended to things at home and then set out for some grocery shopping and errands of my own just as the rain came pouring down!
This is the first post-election Thanksgiving in the past six years when my sense of gratitude for the blessings that I enjoy hasn't been severely tempered by a desperate urge to emigrate to Tierra De Fuego or hide under the bed until at least 2008. There is a much work to be done and I am not very confident in the power shift in Washington to really make much of a difference in the big picture, but I am feeling glimmers of hope and renewal that I haven't felt in a long time. Above all, I continue to feel profoundly grateful for the incredible people in my life and for the amazing places they have taken me over the years. I can't - and don't want to - imagine who I would be today if I hadn't found my tribe over these past many years and hadn't chosen to follow them out of mainstream conformity and complacency and into the incredibly rich life I live today. My wish for the world is for more people to open up and experience this same kind of shift in perspective and awareness in their own way.
Friday Laurie had to work but I observed National Buy Nothing day by staying at home and catching up on things that I wanted/needed to do. I even took advantage of the nice weather to mow the lawn and tidy up the yard a bit. English walnut trees are messy this time of the year! I made one trip into town to rent some movies (that doesn't count for Buy Nothing Day, does it?) I rented Protocols of Zion (disturbing documentary about anti-Semitism, religious prejudice and abysmal human ignorance that helped reinforce my prejudice against organized religion in general), Thank You for Smoking (wicked cynical satire about a tobacco lobbyist) and X-Men The Last Stand (fun adrenaline rush).
Yesterday, we had a second Thanksgiving dinner with my mom, who lives about 90 minutes away. She turned 89 on Tuesday and is in remarkably good shape for her age. She still lives out on her own, drives and takes care of all of her own needs, except for having someone come by to tend to her yard every couple of weeks. She is sharp and in good spirits and is fun to spend time with, but I notice that she is getting alarmingly forgetful and I need to keep a closer watch on that. We took her a home-cooked turkey dinner with all the trimmings and she prepared a salad and vegetables, and insisted on doing all the cleanup and dishwasher-loading afterward. I know better than to try to stop her so we just stood by to help if she requested or needed it.
Today Laurie took her mom out shopping and I tended to things at home and then set out for some grocery shopping and errands of my own just as the rain came pouring down!
This is the first post-election Thanksgiving in the past six years when my sense of gratitude for the blessings that I enjoy hasn't been severely tempered by a desperate urge to emigrate to Tierra De Fuego or hide under the bed until at least 2008. There is a much work to be done and I am not very confident in the power shift in Washington to really make much of a difference in the big picture, but I am feeling glimmers of hope and renewal that I haven't felt in a long time. Above all, I continue to feel profoundly grateful for the incredible people in my life and for the amazing places they have taken me over the years. I can't - and don't want to - imagine who I would be today if I hadn't found my tribe over these past many years and hadn't chosen to follow them out of mainstream conformity and complacency and into the incredibly rich life I live today. My wish for the world is for more people to open up and experience this same kind of shift in perspective and awareness in their own way.