Three Gratitudes - Day 9

Continuing on my quest to feel happiness, I'm going to post three things I'm grateful for for 21 days.

1. goodreads. As most people who know me are aware a read a lot. Several years I ago I was introduced to goodreads. I tell people it's like Facebook for readers. You get friends, you can follow people and then you see their postings. Their postings are what they've read, their reviews and what they want to read and I've found many books from there that I've enjoyed. The really neat thing about it is that you can use a tool to compare your books to another person and see how many you have in common and how close your ratings are. So, if someone reads way different genres then I do, I don't become friends with them and won't have to weed through their irrelevant postings. If Facebook would allow you to compare, say, religious and political beliefs before you accept a friend request, well, let's just say I'd have a lot less friends. Yesterday, goodreads announced that they've hit 20,000,000 users. They also sent me an email thanking me for being in their top 1% of reviewers. I can only imagine they're going by quantity of reviews as I've done 68 this year and 10, 87 and 145 in the respective prior years. I did say I read a lot. Regardless, it's nice to be in the 1% of something.
2. That my family is not bat shit crazy. I had dinner last night with two friends and one was bringing us up to speed to what's going on with her family. The short story is that they have a long history of mental and physical illness with the latter exacerbating the former. Instead of constructively dealing with their issues (family therapy daily for the rest of their lives is probably warranted at this point), they're mired in a downward spiral of mind games, hysterics, blame, guilt, self-pity and self-destructive behavior. If they were put on a reality show, it would shoot to the top of the ratings. I can only offer moral support because nothing's going to change. They'd have to be willing to move from denial and accept ownership and that's not likely to happen after lifetimes of their consistent behavior. My family is far from perfect and we all have our moments of bad/quirky behavior but, the reality is we're in decent mental heath. Could we improve on that? Sure. Is our mental health stopping us from having constructive, happy lives? No. I'm very grateful.
3. Wine. Wine can contribute to my mental health, just saying. But, seriously, when you think about the history of what we eat and drink today, it's amazing. I applaud the first man or woman who figured out they could get loopy on fermented fruits and all of the others who came after to create and refine a process that brings us the fantastic ambrosia that we have today. I love the taste, texture and potential buzz from wine but I've loved even more the camaraderie from taking wine classes and participating in special tastings and sampling flights with dinners. There's a reason that my club email is Wino. Fortunately, Buffett wrote this song so the nickname works on two levels.