In the Spirit of Gratitude

I'm so happy I get two days off this week at work. With no classes in session and my boss vacationing and my co-worker out of town taking care of a family emergency, I have been going solo at the office. It is sooooo boring. Seriously, the best part of the day is when the mail carrier comes.

It has gotten really cold here. We've had snow flurries, but nothing sticks. Lots of ice to scrape off the car before work though.

I finally picked up the book my mother-in-law gave me for Christmas last year: Small and Simple Things by Marjorie Pay Hinckley. It's such a cute little book. It's pretty much full of nature pictures with inspiring quotes, advice, and even recipes picked up from global travels and the life of an old woman. It was refreshing to read and put me in a wonderful mindset ready for the Thanksgiving holiday.

This week a grad student from Nepal handed me a container of chocolate chip cookie dough. He bought it from one of the fraternity's fundraisers, but said he didn't know how to make it into cookies, but he was pretty sure I knew. I felt so special to be the one to explain to him how to bake cookies.

Most of the students that work in my office grew up in countries where they didn't have much, or couldn't be free to do or say whatever they wished. It makes me appreciate all the more what I have and have had my whole life. I've never had to question my freedom or opportunity to education, and I've never known otherwise.

I spoke with another grad student from China. She told me all the horrible stories she heard from girls her age who didn't know anything about sex, or protection for that matter, who are off at college right now just like her and are getting horrible diseases and having painful abortions over and over because they just don't know otherwise. She says that such subjects are taboo and so there is no kind of education unless you sign up for it in college. As odd as it was, I'm glad that she felt she could confide in me about such a topic and that I could give her the advice she needed.

I am grateful for the pilgrims that laid the foundation for our country. If not for them, we wouldn't enjoy the freedoms we have for liberty, for justice, for education, for medicine, for technology, for religion, and more.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Be safe!