Thankful Thursday

Happy Thursday!  Only one more day until the glorious weekend - not that I'm counting or anything.  (Ok, ok: I'm totally counting.)

I'm going to do two posts today to keep things from getting too long here, so stay tuned this evening for Day 1 of my November Challenge!

In the meantime, though, I'd like to start the day off on a super-positive note: the lovely Jessie from Jessie Loves to Run has started a fantastic link-up party called Thankful Thursday, and I think it's an awesome idea.  Each Thursday, people write posts about the things they're thankful for, and then post their links to her blog.

I find that between work, commuting, getting stuff done around the house, etc., it's often really easy to a) lose sight of the good things that happen during the course of a day/week (on a related note, why is it so easy to remember the bad stuff and so easy to forget the good stuff?), and b) forget to actually express gratitude for those good things.

Jessie's idea is to create a forum for noting all the things that are well and good, and clearing some time and space from our hectic lives to really be thankful for them.

I'm going to brazenly borrow a Britishism here: Jessie's idea is brilliant!

So, on this lovely Thursday morning, here's a short list of the things I'm thankful for from the past week:

1) I'm beyond grateful that we weathered Sandy without any damage or loss of power.  We're obviously incredibly lucky, given the madness that is Jersey and Manhattan right now.  (Given the destruction, I keep thinking that if this were a late 90's/early 2000s hip-hop song, I'd tell Sandy that she was triflin'.)

2) Speaking of Sandy and the aftermath of the storm, one of my friends from high school is a doctor in Manhattan.  She got evacuated from her job at one hospital, only to wind up being placed at another hospital that was taking on water and losing power.  She wound up doing things like inserting a chest tube into her patient by the light of a flashlight in the middle of the storm...all while working a 48-hour emergency shift.  So, suffice it to say, I'm incredibly thankful for people like her and her colleagues -- people who have the ability to work tirelessly to keep their patients stable amidst a disaster.

3) Another friend from high school gave birth to her first child as the storm was blowing in, but the baby started having respiratory problems soon after she was delivered.  She was transferred to a NICU at a hospital a few hours away from where my friend lives; my friend and her husband were able to make the trip to the hospital -- by the skin of their teeth, given the incoming weather -- to be with their daughter.  Happily, their daughter is starting to improve, and she's in excellent hands in the NICU.  I'm so very thankful that they were able to get to the hospital before the storm arrived and that their daughter is getting healthier and stronger by the day!

4) I'm incredibly thankful for your positive responses to yesterday's November Challenge post - it's more encouraging than you know!

5) I'm grateful that I got to go for a good run last night around the DC monuments (I don't have many "DC moments" these days, but the tour of the monuments is really cool), followed by a massage from Massage Envy.  My muscles are sooooooo haaaaaapyyyyy.

Hope you all have a wonderful Thursday!