To Show I'm Not Totally Ungrateful...

It's November. I can tell by the change in attitude. Somehow November 1 hits and people exude gratitude with every breath. Then November 2 hits and people forget for one day, but then by November 3 all is right in the world again. (Unless you're a democrat and you got voted out, then by all means forget gratitude for a year...)

So, lest we get left out for not sharing our "Gratitude Attitude", here are some things we're thankful for today:

A bed, where we can potentially sleep all night long if we can ignore the sleep walking, sleep talking, coughing, snoring and falling out of bed coming from the other rooms (or from the person next to us).

Flushing toilets and toilet paper, even if those inventions aren't appreciated or used as much as they should be around here. My best guess is our kids are "going green" and feel the need to conserve water and paper.

Garbage disposals, because I look forward to my weekly appointment with Mr. Insinkerator and his ability to make last week's leftovers disappear with only a slight lingering odor, even if I forget and throw fish down there. Nasty, I know.

Dust, because without it I would absolutely forget that I swept, dusted, vacuumed and mopped YESTERDAY. Oh, and bunnies are prolific, even if they are of the dust species; they multiply even faster than the hairy variety.

The State of Texas. Where else can you drive for over eight hours and still not be to your destination within the same state you started? How great is that? Plus we have towns named Oatmeal, Notrees, Earth, Blanket, Comfort, Chocolate Bayou, Turkey, Watermelon and Uncertain. We also have 70° weather in November, the ability to fly our state flag at the same height as the US flag and "Don't Mess With Texas" signs on every highway. (It's a litter control slogan...c'mon).

We are super grateful for technology like portable DVD players so we can keep the peace on long drives, cell phones where we can be located at anytime -anyplace, and our new favorite, the Garmin GPS which not only tries to get you to take every tollway out of Houston, but never gets irritated when it tells you it is "Recalculating" one more time.

We're grateful for sports teams like the University of Texas Longhorns that show us patience, long suffering and the ability to love a team even when they're sucking it up, BADLY, because we still have something to love, and potentially look forward to next season. Some teams never have that.

We're grateful for the friendly neighborhood gray fox who lurks in the dark alleys around our house at night. Without him we wouldn't have been so diligent in checking on our chickens and leaving the door open of the coop to allow them to walk out and become dog food. And I'm super grateful to the friendly little sparrow who befriended our last, lone chicken.

I'm certainly grateful for my math skills and the ability to add and subtract points to determine that I'll still pull approximately a 'C' in my English class, even if I don't do the research paper. And I'm grateful that my kids are still too young to understand that they don't have the same luxury of skipping homework they don't want to do.

So there you have it, a small list of some of the things we're grateful for this Thanksgiving season. There are many more, and maybe, if you're lucky, we'll share a few more. Because we're also grateful for friends who know we're blogging slackers and who love us anyway!