Thankful for the Little Things

It's been kind of a weird week.

I'm down at my folks' in Tucson, where I'm working on faux-woodgraining their porch. Which is great, because then in the evenings, I can write, right?

Except, no. My dad's Internet provider apparently knows everyone in this retirement town of Green Valley goes to bed at 6:30pm. So by 9 pm, when my folks have retired and I have all the time in the world to write... suddenly pages take about 10 minutes to load-- if they load at all. Then in the morning, when I can't be on the computer because I need to be painting during daylight hours, everything is working just fiiiiine again.

It's as if they knew I needed to write about 20,000 words to catch up on my NaNo while I was down here, and are deliberately thwarting me.

I was feeling really crabby that I was so behind on word count, and frustrated at how much work I've gotten this month. When you have to write a dozen articles in one day, it really makes you less inclined to find an extra 1,667 words within you to contribute to a novel that will most likely never be published anyway.

This led to wondering just how much I have written this month. Outside of NaNo, I mean. So I added up all my assignments and my blog entries. (If I'd wanted to be super-accurate, I'd have included all my emails & reddit comments too. But I digress.)

Total? 33,105.

33,105.

And this does not include any of the writing I do longhand. Which is also a fair amount.

So, you know... now I feel thankful.

I feel thankful I am writing every month. Even if it's boring stuff about how to buy a franchise or the process of getting a patent, and not the next bestselling YA novel.

Because it's a start.

It is so easy to be thankful for the huge things, the obvious things, but those little things, those teensy starts that hardly seem like starts at all... those are harder won. So here are a few more tiny things I'm thankful for this year.

• That I will have written 50,000 original words by the end of this month, even if not all of it was for NaNo.
• That I have a husband & daughter who both wake up cheerful. 
• That my stepdaughter no longer leaves the room when I enter it.
• Dogs and their snorty, snurfy, waggy happiness
• That our house is painted. That the bathroom wall is finally finished. That there's a for-sale sign in the yard.
• That by next Thanksgiving, Las Vegas will be permanently behind me. Finally. (Okay, this is not a little thing; it's a HUGE thing, but how could I leave it off the list?)
• Yoga
• That I can buy groceries sans panic attack this year.
• That my car has a stereo which, while flaky, does allow me & the girls to sing along with the Glee soundtrack on long road trips. Which, by the way, is pure awesome.
• Reddit
• That I have finally found a deodorant I'm willing to commit to for life. 
• That the new Zelda game is out! And that my family is willing to sit around and watch me play it this weekend.
• Trader Joe's
• Nature's Brew Outrageous Ginger Ale, which is the perfect ginger ale.
• Burt's Bees chapstick, which is the perfect chapstick.
• The way Sunwood smells. 

I like the little things in life, so this list could be quite a bit longer, but that's good for today. 

Be thankful, even for the little things. Maybe especially for those.

Happy Thanksgiving.

(PS, Now we're at 33,717)