Thankful Thanksgiving Thursday

[mdlbear]

It's (American) Thanksgiving, so this is the day when I try to include an extra helping of gratitude and maybe add a few explanations. So here we go: Today I'm grateful for...

• my family, the Rainbow Caravan: my wife Colleen, my sister N, her husband G, my niblings j and m, and our housemate L. The extended family: our kids Chaos and Emmy, the Niblings' other parents, assorted cousins, and most especially my Mom and N's parents.
• our feline family members: Desti, Ticia, Cricket, Bronx, and Brooklyn.
• all of my friends on and off the net. Present company explicitly included.
• our health -- or at least the good parts. Despite serious crises for many of us, we are all still alive and more-or-less functional. No thanks to our assorted conditions -- we are alive in spite of them. Or should that be "to spite them"?
• modern drugs and medical technology, without which many of our respective health conditions would have been fatal rather than merely harrowing.
• our medical insurance, what there is of it. Because we live in the US, the above-mentioned modern medicine is overpriced and incompletely covered, but at least it's mostly covered. No thanks to the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and their paid lackeys in Congress.
• music: the filk community, my bandmates N and m, and the songs -- notably "The Mary Ellen Carter" and "Bells of Norwich" -- that get us through rough times.
• modern computing technology, particularly the communication protocols and software that tie our household together: TCP/IP, HTTP, ssh, slack, signal, firefox, and dreamwidth, among others. Also noteworthy are git and rsync, each of which has saved my arse more than once.
• the GNU project for emacs, make, and bash; Don Knuth for TeX, Leslie Lamport for LaTeX, Linus Torvalds for linux and git, and IBM for the Thinkpad keyboard.
• Whidbey Island.

NaBloPoMo stats:
  13281 words in 24 posts this month (average 553/post)
    328 words in 1 post today