No, I am not going crazy. Everyone thinks and this must be manifested in a voice of some sort. I "talk" to myself in my head; this is how I think. When I am driving, in the shower, taking a bath, trying to work. I do not have multiple personalities, or anything like that. I used to hold entire conversations in there and imagine ( perhaps wish) that people could hear. To me, this is what this blog has become. My journals were close, but I knew that no one would ever read what I wrote. And that was and is fine. Those words are not intended for any kind of audience. My blog is my thoughts, my conversations in my head, brought to you. And you read and you respond, you care and you share. Is this narcissistic? I don't think so. I think it is validation. This is what life is and should be about. So I am very grateful to you for this.

Yes, I am still on the grateful thing. I am on day 2 of this and am finding the exercise so far to be fun and very positive. In fact, I have had trouble picking only five, because there are so many.

In addition to Blog Friends, today, I am also grateful for friendships and relationships to those I can see and speak to whenever I want. My friends. I was on the phone with a friend today. She was at work and I was at home and we were having a rather deep conversation. Someone walked into her office and she whispered to me that she had to go "Tell whoever it is that you're speaking to Cathy about the meaning of life, so they'll just have to wait a minute." She moves the phone away from her mouth and repeats my words to the person who just entered her office. I love friends.

Today I am grateful for clean water and baby food. I prepare bottle after bottle for the babe and as I was pouring water into one, I was reminded of the horrible photos of the babies after Hurricane Katrina, so close to home, dehydrated from the lack of water and baby formula. The world over, children are dying of starvation and their mothers can do nothing about it. Such a basic thing. I worry about buying crap we don't need. If I couldn't feed my children, the most basic of human entities... I would crawl in a hole and die. Can you imagine, parent or not, if you could not feed a child under your care, and had to watch their suffering. We tend to push these thoughts to the back of our minds, if we think them at all. As I poured water into a baby bottle and was grateful. For food and water.

I watched the mining tragedy in West Virginia unfold today. The most horrific thing was the misinformation. Being told your loved ones were alive and then hours later, that they weren't. Access to accurate and important, vital information, is something we should all be grateful for. When it isn't, it is annoying at best, and tragic at worst.

Since I am covering the basics today, I also must say that I am grateful for my home. We are warm and dry, cozy and comfortable. We have more than we need. Our house by the sea. Earned with hard work. But there are others who also work hard who do not get to this point. I am very grateful for having gotten to this point. The house we will live in forever already. It was not always this way. When we were first married (going on 14 years ago...) we lived in a cockroach infested nightmare. Two rooms in an apartment complex that no one in their right mind would live in. But we did. For four years. Because it was cheap ($350.00 per month) and we could save money. Smart choices, smart decisions, lots of luck, hard work and early sacrifices. Who knew...

This post is probably more than you want to read. I am still thinking deeply and need to get all this out of my head before I go to sleep tonight. I don't need nightmares tonight so I need to purge my mind of thoughts that could conjure them.

The second page that I folded over from "Tuedays with Morrie" by Mitch Albom was another quote by his professor, Morrie Schwartz..."We're so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meeting the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks - we're involved in trillions of little acts to just keep going. So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying 'Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?'" p.64.

Are you standing back? Is anything missing?