Grateful for my greatly increased sense of gratitude

This is my 92nd post this year on my gratitude blog. It has been a life-changing experience for me. My empathy has grown considerably and relationships with others are better and closer than ever before in my life.

It is a wet spring day in Bellevue today. One activity in which I find my bliss is in reading books. Earlier this week, I downloaded 15 sci-fi books by well-known or favorite authors. The first of these is being read with great enjoyment. There is pleasant anticipation in looking forward to reading the rest of them.

I tend to read "guy" books of the murder mystery or spy vs spy genres. One thing I like about sci-fi books is that they often have an alternative perspective of government where government is not a corrupt lackey of the military-industrial-congressional complex. The stories are of societies with honesty and integrity in their social relationships.

I am grateful my enhanced sense of gratitude, my love of reading and the brave new world of ebooks on demand.

Great role models

I am fortunate to have many great role models in my life that are close enough to me that I can emulate their behavior. Fellow trudgers leading the way in 12-step programs are close and simply for me to copy. Living Saints such as Gandhi or Mother Teresa don't resonate with me since their milieus are so different from mine.

Tonight I got to listen to Christine Carter speak in Seattle. She is the inspiration for my gratitude blogs. I have given away 5 copies of her book Raising Happiness to my friends. It is a easy reading combination of anecdotal examples based on sound scientific research into raising happier kids.

I don't have kids. Neither do my friends Gigi and Shawna. Yet we were still able to get a lot out of her lecture on how to improve our conflict resolution skills, enhance our relationships with others, and improve our overall happiness.

I am grateful for the role models in my life today.

Grateful for the many shades of green

Spring in Western Washington is a thing of green in many hues. Leaves of grass, bushes and trees all have their own special color. The fir trees even come in two colors with this year's growth being a lighter shade.

I am grateful for the many shades of green healthy vegetation growing here in the NW.

Walks with Leslee

For the last five years, Leslee J and I have been going for walks at Bellevue Square on Sunday evenings before we go to our homegroup meeting. Leslee is an avid mountain hiker. She hiked down and up the Grand Canyon with her two sons in March. Walking the halls of Bell Square is about getting some exercise for me and spending some time talking together.

Today is Mother's Day. I will not be spending time with my Mother. I will go for a walk at the mall with Leslee.

I am grateful to have good friends such as Leslee in my life.

Midsummer Night's Dream at Bellevue Youth Theatre

Went with a friend to watch Shakespeare at the BYT tonight. It was my first visit. Most of the cast was in high school. There were two somewhat older guys in wheelchairs in the play. It was very well done. One kid had been in 23 plays. Most of the actors had been in 2-5 plays and were reasonably good. The play was funny. High school girls make great fairies.

I am grateful for low-budget live entertainment and a great theater for kids to practice in.

Feeling good right now

I read two positive psychology authors and listened to a third's meditation tape today. Journaled about gratitude in the morning and feel so good that I am writing again now.

I am grateful for the progress I am making in turning up my "happiness thermostat".

An income greater than my bills

In nthe midst of the worst recession in my lifetime, I am fortunate to have a pension that provides an income greater than my expenses. Part of my recovery program is making amends when possible. I can't pay back much of the financial havoc that I wreaked directly. I am making indirect amends by helping others who are not so welll off.

I could give my amends money to charities. Many people have done that. For me, helping others directly is a lot more fulfilling and responsible. I have to find out what others need and empathize with that need. That already gets me out of myself. Helping others figure out what they want and need are skills I can help with. The goal is to empower others while making my finanacial amends, not to enable others with ostentatious displays of so-called virtue.

I am getting better at helping others. Yesterday was a great day for that by my standards. I fixed a guy's email problem, took him out for lunch, bought lunch for a man that could not afford the fast food meal that he wanted, put some money on a bus pass and helped a woman get a card and a Mother's Day flower for her mom.

It is mildly stressful for me to write about this. I am grateful I am the one with the resources that gets to help others instead of needing help. I don't want to brag about how virtuous I am. It is a conondrum for me in how to express my gratitude in getting to be of service to others with humility. Progress, not perfection.

I am grateful that I am able to give back to others what has been so freely given to me.

Modern refrigeration

Feeling lazy about cooking tonight, it was dinner from the freezer. Pulled sausage, corn, potatoes and an ice cream bar from the freezer. I usually nuke frozen food in the microwave. Tonight I went all out and used a steamer/double-boiler for the corn. It was not gourmet. The food was good enough and could hardly have been easier to make.

I tend to cook a hunk of meat (chicken, pork, beef or fish by frequency) and maybe have a salad with it for a meal. Tonight's dinner was reasonably well balanced for me.

Some day I will work more on that diet and exercise thing. Lord (and anyone who sees me) knows that I need it.

I am grateful for my refrigerator/freezer and the amazingly wonderful selection of meats, veggies, fruits and prepared foods at local grocers that I can stick in it.

fresh running water & a drain that works

My kitchen sink stopped draining last night. I made a few tries to get it to clear by running the garbage disposal. That didn't work. This morning there was a nasty sewage smell in my living room/kitchen—fortunately it was not too pungent.

I called the apartment maintenance dispatch people at 8:30 expecting a tech within 30 minutes. 4 hours later, still no tech, I called again. The work order had been 'picked up' but the tech had not arrived. I called the leasing office for more help. Cory got a tech over here in 15 minutes.

The tech was a new guy. He spent an hour on the problem, said it was fixed and left. I quickly ran some water and found that it was not fixed. The techs run around the complex with electric golf carts. He was in the cart by the time I got to the door. I did catch him at the tool shed before he put his tools away.

He came right back and worked on the drain some more. Using a small manual drain snake, he was not able to clear the drain. Using a larger electric powered snake, James ran it down the drain 50 feet. When he put the drain pipe back together, the drain worked as designed.

I was grateful that it only affected my kitchen sink drain and not my bathroom sink, toilet or shower. I am extremely grateful for clean inexpensive soft potable water. Good water is a major benefit of living in Western Washington with our large undeveloped forested watersheds.

Living in a place with few poisonous species

I just watched The African Queen with Bogart and Hepburn. The movie was filmed in England and Africa in 1951 in a lush jungle setting. There was one scene showing them being attacked by bugs and another with leeches. Throughout the movie, I kept thinking of how many nasty critters, bugs & diseases there must have really been there.

Western Washington is blessed with an absence of nasty critters. Our worst pests in the summer are mosquitoes—even then they don't carry malaria or other major diseases. Bees are the most poisonous thing most people will ever see in these parts. They are not killer bees from Africa either.

I am grateful for the lack of nasty critters & bugs in Western Washington.

Warm spring days

Today was a gorgeous spring day in Greater Seattle. I went for a walk and a meeting with friends.

I am grateful for good friends, meetings and warm spring days.

New friends and more

I made a new friend this week that I hope to go to lots of meetings with. We went to two meetings this week and had dinner tonight after a meeting. My friends are very low drama and usually low maintenance. I have not had a steady reliable go-to-different-meetings friend since Joy moved to Walla Walla 4 years ago.

I am grateful for new friends, good meetings, being able to afford to dine out at nice restaurants, live music at the Wild Vine Bistro and being sober.

My web browsers of choice

For years, Internet Explorer (v6) was the only game in the town of PC web browsers. There were modified versions of IE such as the AOL web browser, but it was still basically IE with additional bugs.

Opera was released as free software in 2000. It did some tasks really well and felt like left-handed scissors for others.

In 2004, Mozilla Firefox (FF) was released. There were a few problems with FF causing me to switch to IE on some web sites. Back then, many web developers designed many non-standard web sites expressly for IE. I soon adopted FF as my primary browser.

Google Chrome entered the browser wars in late 2008. It was designed from the ground up to be fast and secure.

I have Apple Safari loaded on my PC. I rarely use Safari. It uses the same layout engine, WebKit, as Chrome.

I have used FF as my primary browser for six years. FF v4 was released this year. It is a bit of a pig to load and has problems rendering pages from my bank and credit card vendors. Two weeks ago, I made the decision to try using Chrome as my primary browser. Chrome also has its quirks such as tabs above the search bar. Since I change tabs far more often than doing searches, that is a bit annoying and can also conflicts with the Windows "minimize" button. Now I am in the middle ground of using both Chrome and FF as my primary web browsers.

I am grateful for all the choices in web browsers, options, add-ons and themes for my WWW surfing pleasure. Choice and competition are great for innovation.

Literacy and a love of reading

I have loved reading since I was a child. I am sure that I have spent more of my leisure/recreational time reading than any other activity.

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, I am blessed with instant access to more free books than ever contained in the fabled Library of Alexandria. For printed books, I am a five-minute drive to the large Bellevue main branch of the King County Library System. The vast majority of my library visits are at the small community library in Crossroads Mall. When I reserve books from the KCLS, I pick them up at Crossroads.

I bought my first Kindle book this weekend. Pricing is clearly not based on costs, but on market demand. The book I wanted was listed for $9.99, 12.98 and $13.99 respectively for paperback, hardcover and digital editions on Amazon.com.

I have had my Kindle for two months. I prefer it to paperback and hardcover editions. It is a toss-up between the Kindle and large-print editions—which I can read without wearing my eyeglasses. The Kindle is far more convenient size-wise since one small device can hold 1000+ books.

I am grateful for my literacy, love of reading and access to copious quantities of quality reading material.

Warm sunny days

It was a warm sunny Easter weekend in Seattle this year. I love how the days get longer and warmer.

I am grateful for dry warm spring weather with long sunny days.

Happy for No Reason…

I am reading Happy for No Reason by Marci Shimoff. A third of the way through the book and I am liking it a lot. The gist of the book is achieving an internal serene happiness that is not dependent on external circumstances.

Studies suggest that we all have an internal happiness setpoint much like setting the temperature on a thermostat. The setpoint is a 50/50 result of nature and nurture. Using methods and exercises from positive psychology, people can increase their happiness setpoint from, say, "cool" to "warm" in a relatively short time such as a few months to a year. We don't get to go catatonic depression to ectastatic. Going from kinda whiny and sad to more than moderately optimistic is readily do-able.

My experience in changing my happiness setpoint has been fantastic progress on my own. Years of therapy got me from chronic depression to stoic. Five months of gratitude blogging got me to moderately optimistic and even brief flashes of feeling that I am lucky.

I am lucky and grateful for having the wherewithal to achieve a much higher happiness setpoint in my life thanks to the 12-steps, my HP, help from many people and a lot of work on my part.

My relationship with my higher power

I am grateful for my relationship with a higher power in my life today. When I start to worry or let things bother me too much, it works best for me to turn the problem over to my HP and simply do the next indicated thing.

I spend a lot less time worrying & fretting now and a lot more time doing the next indicated thing (NIT). The NIT might only be read, watch TV or sleep. Those are all a lot better uses of my time than worrying about problems that I can't change by worrying about them.

My relationship with my HP also helps me to avoid feeling alone. I am a bit of a hermit by nature. Knowing my HP is always there for me means that I don't have to feel lonely nor isolated.

I don't know if god exists or not. Strangely enough, it doesn't seem to matter whether there is or is not a god. I do know that my life is much better when I act as if god exists.

I am grateful for my relationship with my HP today.

Helping others

It is nice to be in a position in my life to be able to help others. Help ranges from just letting someone vent without having to tell them what they should do, to giving someone a ride to a meeting or the airport, or help with buying food & clothes.

Prior to recovery, I was not much help besides giving someone a ride to meet with a drug dealer. Now I am able to be of service a lot more than being needy.

I am grateful for my living situation which allows me to be of service to others. It is a lot better than being needy or dependent.

Grateful for my program of recovery

Twelve years ago, I went to a 3-week in-patient rehab facility on May 1st, 1999. I have slightly less than six years of continuous sobriety. Sometimes I refer to it as 11.5 years minus a week.

I have a friend that is dying from alcoholism. It is sad & tragic to watch her try to find an easier softer way than simply getting a sponsor and working the 12 steps. She knows she has a problem and that her body is shutting down from substance abuse. Her problem appears to be fear of dealing with suppressed pain and having to get enough humility to learn how to live life as a functional adult in our society. It might be better to have progressed to fear instead of being stuck on denial. I don't know. Either way, it is good that I am not in that position.

A big part of my recovery is letting go of my self-pity in thinking my situation is so much worse than what other people have. While reflecting on my friend's situation yesterday, I realized I would not trade my life as an overweight paraplegic for her life as a dying late-stage alcoholic.

I am grateful for my life, my sobriety and the progress I have made in my recovery. It is good to be at peace with my life.

Grateful for my gratitude

I try to write about a specific topic that I am grateful for when posting here on my gratitude blog. Tonight I suffer from a case of topic block. It is good to be grateful and that is enough for today. I am grateful for my gratitude blog.

Dinner and a meeting

On most Friday nights for the last couple of years, I have met with my friend Sandy for dinner and a meeting.  We missed the last two Fridays.  Tonight was Vietnamese food.  Sandy loves the pho noodles.  I had a spicy chicken curry.  Both were delicious.

We tend to show up late at the meeting.  Tonight we were a few minutes early for a change.  We read from the literature for awhile and discussed the impact of a loved one's alcohol consumption on our psyche.  It leaves a mark and takes a lot of work for some of us to get past the trauma.  For those of us that go to meetings, life is a lot better now than how it used to be.

I am grateful for my dear friend Sandy and easy access to lots of 12-step meetings.

Life in prison

For 9.5 years, I have been going to 12-step meetings at the Washington State Reformatory in Monroe.   Leslee and I went again tonight.  As always, it was a good meeting.  There were six inmates at the meeting.  One guy has 30 years of meetings in prison and the new kid was at his second meeting.

They inmates look just like the people I used to run around with.   I would not want to have to spend the rest of my life (or any part thereof) in prison.

I am grateful for my freedom today.  I always get a great dose of serenity & humility when I see the serenity the inmates have even while living in a stressful place.

I am also grateful that I got to have lunch at Molbaks Nursery with my friend Tracy today.   She is a great mother and she makes me laugh.

Crisp apples

Since I was a child, apples have always been one of my favorite fruits. 

Back in the day, Red Delicious apples were small, crisp and slightly tart.  Now they are large red bland mushy inbreds.  

Today my favorite apples are Braeburns, Honeycrisps, and Fujis.  Tonight I had an organic Fuji for dessert.  It was cold, crisp and delicious with a slightly tart aftertaste.

I love the wide selection of fresh fruits available from local grocers.  When things are out of season here, they are often in season in Mexico, Chile or Canadian greenhouses.  Apples are often stored in oxygenless nitrogen-filled coolers so that they can be sold as fresh fruit all year long.

I am grateful for a variety of apples and other awesome fresh fruit available at local grocery stores.

Dinner with Gigi

It is Seattle Restaurant Week.  Gigi and I went to The SeaStar in Bellevue.  We got an appetizer, entrée and dessert for $28 each. 

I had Waygu beef with gnochi—it was like the world's best beef stew.  Delicious.

Gigi is one of my best friends.  I have known her for ten+ years.  We are opposites in many ways, but we love and support it other very much. 

The lady that got my into the idea of a gratitude blog—Christine Carter—is coming to Seattle on May 10th.  Gigi is going to go see Christine with me.  It will be fun.

I am full and have a TV show to watch.  TTG

I am grateful for great friends and great food in my life today.  It is a lot better than how it ever used to be.

Grateful just because...

My gratitude blogging goal is 5x/week for all of 2011. There is no criteria for the quality or quantity of the post. I had a good day today. Talked about having faith instead of hope in my life tonight at the meeting. It is a much better relationship with my HP and the rest of the world. The weather was sunny and warmish compared with the last two weeks of rain.

I am grateful today for days that are better than merely good enough.