Nothing too surprising on this list but here you go…
1. Although my mother-in-law battled a serious form of cancer for most of last year, she’s doing much better and, knock on wood, everyone else in our immediate family is doing well healthwise from Sasha who’s six years old to my dad who’s seventy years older than her! (Okay, sixty nine.)
2. That I was born in Canada with everything that includes – universal healthcare, high standard of living, generally stable government and relatively low inequality.
3. I lead a relatively privileged life, partly from the things beyond my control (born male, white, middle class) and things that I was able to control or influence to a large degree (obtaining advanced education, finding a career that I think I’m very suited to, who I married.)
4. That I often feel like I’m living at the apex of civilization – air travel! The internet! Advanced surgeries and medical knowledge! (although I also sometimes worry that the future will get worse due to climate change or rising inequality or some other unforeseen disaster instead of the upward path society followed for most of human history.)
5. It’s a minor one but that I have a relatively large amount of leisure time to enjoy various hobbies – watching hockey and reading books and playing guitar and stuff like that.
6. Shea and I are a great couple – we are very similar in our views on the “controversial” things in relationships (money, politics, child rearing) and our differences complement each other well.
7. Shea and I have had fifteen wonderful years in a great house we bought just before the Sask economy boomed (so it’s value has gone up by 2.5x what we paid for it), which was built by a cooperative of half a dozen tradespeople who banded together to build each other’s homes in the late 1970’s (so we know our home is solidly built and, if we ever doubt it, go next door to the carpenter who still lives next door!) and it’s given us the opportunity (with generous help from both sets of parents) to learn a lot about everything from installing tubs to building fences to unclogging drains! 🙂
8. Our kids are not only healthy as I mentioned earlier but both are intelligent, funny, amazing human beings.
9. That I have the honour of working in a public library where I have daily reminders of all the reasons I am so fortunate – from comforting grieving widows to working with new Canadians who have only a fraction of what I do to people suffering from mental illness, addictions and worse.
10. There’s one more very recent development that I’m incredibly thankful for which is not quite public yet but which I’ll probably blog about soon. 🙂
