Things I am thankful for

“This is not the year to get everything you want; this is the year to count all the blessing that you have.”

There are times when those Facebook feeds or bumper stickers just reach out and smack me across the head and cause me to stop and ponder life. So, I am pondering all my blessings.

Of course, the problem is that when I am pondering life it looks like I am just sitting in my big, overstuffed chair doing nothing.

And, granted, there are times when I am sitting there in my big, overstuffed chair doing nothing; it is hard to tell the difference.

Bubba told me he has the same problem.Sometimes his wife accuses him of sitting there in a lawn chair drinking beer scratching his belly, but he claims that he is fishing. It is hard to tell the difference.

This is only a problem when my too kind and loving wife is scurrying about doing all those chores in the house like the dishes, vacuuming, the wash, scrubbing toilets, mopping the floor, paying the bills, and buying the Christmas presents for 12 grandkids.

I don’t know who divided the chores when we got married, but I am sure glad for the way it turned out.

I get tired watching her work all the time; I tell her she should learn to relax. Really, relaxing is an art form.

She sometimes says, “Hey, Michelangelo, can you help me move this couch?” She is so appreciative of me, I think.

For example, one of my chores is to fix the washing machine when it breaks. I waited 20 years for it to break and to my credit I was on it the day it happened. I called the Sears man, and he fixed it the next day. How is that for taking my duties seriously?

I also signed up for other important chores likes fixing the house if an asteroid should ever hit it. I sure get nervous when I hear on the news all these reports of near misses.

Just last August, “Earth had a near miss with a car-sized asteroid that wasn’t spotted by NASA. The space rock came as close as 1,830 miles to the planet, which is the closest recorded close shave Earth has ever had with an asteroid!”

I wish those boys at NASA took their job as serious as I take mine. I was really quite distressed that I wasn’t informed of this; I had a golf game scheduled.

So, there is that! I am counting that as one of my blessings, whew!

I am thankful that every day I learn something new. Just the other day my too kind and loving wife and I were ready to go to the store. My important job is to drive her to the store; hers is to make the shopping list, shop, cook, and cleanup.

But I digress.

We were ready to go. I asked, “Are you ready to go?”

She assures me that she is. So, I go out to the garage and get in the car and start it. A few minutes pass. A few more minutes pass.

Finally, after 30 minutes pass, I decide that perhaps she had a fall or a heart attack because clearly, she said, “Yep, I am ready to go.”

I storm in the house. I am somewhat heated up because I have been sitting for 30 minutes waiting, which is different that pondering.

I go in the house, and she is taking a shower. I am in touch with my love languages, so I politely ask, “Why the frick are you taking a shower?”

She looks at me and waves through the glass and says, “I am not showering I am rinsing.”

I would note that she is in the shower, getting wet from water coming out of the shower head. I have 60 years of life’s experiences, and I was fairly sure I knew what taking a shower was. But there I am learning something new.

I thought showering was when you were in the shower getting wet from water coming out of the shower head. And, I thought rinsing is what I do to my grapes when I use a colander and spray water in the sink to rinse them off.

So, there is that! I am always learning new things.

So this Thanksgiving, put the thanks back in the holiday and in your life. I am betting that we all have things that we are thankful for.

As I was sitting in my big, overstuffed chair pondering life and all that I was thankful for, the list stared getting very long. And then I fell asleep.

So, there is that! I am thankful for my too kind and loving wife; she didn’t start vacuuming or wake me up. Instead, she put a small blanket on me and turned down the TV and shooshed the grandkids when they came running in the house.