Forgotten Passwords And Deadbeats Can Still Lead To Thankfuls

That I haven't been participating every week in the Ten Things of Thankful is not for lack of thankfuls but is for lack of motivation to write them down because the little humans I work with every day are FREAKING EXHAUSTING. 

On with the show:

1. I am thankful for my weather app on my phone. I use one from a local(ish) tv station, and it's pretty darn reliable. Again with the little humans, but the success of our day often hinges on our ability to go outside, and being able to check the forecast and look at the radar is quite valuable. It is not fun to put jackets on 16 2-3 year olds only to have rain start pelting down as you get to the playground door.

2. I had a migraine on Tuesday. I don't have them very often anymore (sometimes having your hormones take a hike is a GOOD thing), but when I do, I have textbook ones. It always takes me a few minutes to comprehend that I'm getting the aura because (a) it's hard to see at first and (b) I'm usually in deep denial, but this time, I got some ibuprofen and caffeine down me quickly, and the headache turned out to be fairly mild (nothing makes the aura go away any faster - it just has to run its course).

3. I'm thankful that my reinforcements came quickly when I sent a group text to the staff and said I had a migraine coming on. I love my co-workers!

4. Okay, so in the midst of having this migraine, I remembered that I needed to change my work computer password and I thought I had to do it while on the university system (still don't know the definitive answer to that), so I called IT and found out what I needed to do to change it, which I did, then promptly forgot what I picked for the new password when I tried to log into my email from home. I'm not sure what the number of stabs at guessing the password you get before you get locked out of the system, but it's at least 20....

5. I'm thankful to the poor, patient fellow in IT who not only walked me through changing it in the first place but was also the unfortunate person to answer the phone when I called back the next morning to say I immediately forgot the new password THAT I PICKED and needed to start all over again.

6. The electric mattress pad is on the bed and has been utilized several times this week.

7. My daughter came home from college for a couple of days so she could vote absentee in the presidential election. It was good to have her home, and she even helped me write messages on postcards for the Postcards To Swing States campaign that I volunteered for, not realizing that writing a message on and addressing 200 postcards is a pretty big project. (In all fairness, they sent me the postcards WEEKS ago, but it truly never occurred to me that it would take so long to do this, or I would have started sooner*)

Finn giving me very little help with the postcards.

*this is a lie - I still would have put it off

8. Pumpkin snickerdoodles.

9. The background story to this thankful is long and dull, but the nutshell version is that a warehouse that our family owns was leased by a deadbeat tenant who was going to run a tire recycling business there and who paid exactly one month's rent, trashed the building, stole thousands of dollars worth of tools from my dad, and was finally evicted in July of this year, 15 months after he moved in and stuffed the warehouse full of tires. The first thankful related to this is the Department of Natural Resources disposed of the tires, and with any luck, they will be able to get their hands on the deadbeat's scrawny neck and get him convicted of numerous felonies.

10. The warehouse was, of course, left filthy from the thousands (THOUSANDS) of tires that were stored in it (did I mention the deadbeat cut a 4 ft. by 6 ft. hole in the floor and filled the basement with even MORE tires...?), plus the trash he left (disgusting trash), and remains of walls and other parts of the building he literally destroyed or dismantled. The second thankful is that two of my dad's fellow Rotarians decided to take on the cleaning up of the building as a service project. My dad rented a couple of ginormous dumpsters, and Saturday morning, the Rotarians descended on the warehouse and cleaned it up. One of the men even brought his quite large tractor to help (my dad used to have a tractor, but the deadbeat stole it....) What a relief for my dad and for the rest of us! It had been weighing heavily on us about how we were ever going to be able to clean everything up. "Many hands make light work." My heart is full!

Always, always be thankful.

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