Stella! … Stella!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjHr-6Zl5P8
Okay, well if you aren’t already familiar with the play
A Streetcar Named Desire,
perhaps you won’t get my joke. I’m referring to the big “winter storm” in the eastern United States and here in Ontario and into Quebec and the Maritimes.
First it was the winter storm Stella and now it’s the Spring Equinox and first day of spring.
St. Patrick’s Day. World Happiness Day.
Either you’re drinking massive amounts of green beer or the day passes and you don’t do a single Irish thing, but you can’t help hearing about it. It’s the same with a day we are told to be happy.
World Happiness Day 2017: ticket to joy or time to ditch the smily face?
All these days.
I am thankful for snow in winter.
I like and appreciate it, during its season, but it is cold and I do happily move on from it by March/April.
I am thankful for flowers and birds and baby animals in spring.
Last year, I started off one of my TToT posts with some background about cherry blossoms, but today I am including a few others in this week’s title.
I can’t see them and their colours, but I am often obsessed with flowers, especially cherry blossoms at this time of year. I don’t know why those specifically.
Then I watched the new Anne of Green Gables series on CBC last night and there is a part where a cherry tree is featured.
If you know those books, Anne spots one when she first arrives off the train, before she meets Mathew and Marilla for the first time. She imagines climbing it and sleeping up in it if nobody had come to pick her up that day.
The blossoms are mentioned more throughout this newly updated version, and I took that as a sign of sorts, that spring has sprung.
I am thankful for anything Irish.
Don’t take my word for it. Don’t just drink some green beer. Visit Ireland and see it for yourself.
It was one of the best spur-of-the-moment decisions I’ve ever made. I don’t regret it and neither would you.
That’s why, whenever March 17th rolls around, though I love the music (like what Ed has done in the song above, anything else can’t quite live up to the real thing.
I am thankful to be working on a new piece which should be published in one week.
I am thankful the editor informed me of the stock photo she thought about including with my piece before simply going ahead and using it, without my knowledge.
It was a photo of a girl with her eyes closed. Part of what I do regularly is to educate people on what’s acceptable and what isn’t. I wish, sometimes, I didn’t have to do this. I wish people could understand without me having to explain it.
This may sound like I’m being self righteous about this kind of thing, but even if a girl with her eyes closed may say, right away to readers, “this woman can’t see,” it feels highly stereotypical and won’t help progress with people’s understanding and acceptance of those of us with disabilities.
I am thankful for the feeling of my baby niece’s soft head under my chin as I held her against my chest.
I held her while she slept. She has so much hair and it is so lovely.
I am thankful for her ability to already raise her head by herself.
I held her while her oma warmed up her bottle and I couldn’t believe how strong she already is. She will be one month old this week.
I am thankful for my four-year-old nephew reading his books to me.
Okay, so he didn’t so much read as explain about his favourite dinosaurs, but he did spell out “L i t t l e” on the sign as we were picking up a pizza.
So, he’s on his way. I try to explain to him that I can’t read his library book to him because my eyes don’t work. His response still is “my eyes work” as a way of comparing or reassuring himself or maybe just to inform me. I’m not sure, but, If I’m going to have a bonus thankful this week, it’s that his eyes do, indeed, work.
I am thankful when one of my really bad headaches subsides.
I am thankful for a doctor who understands when I can’t make it to my previously scheduled appointment, do to said awful headache, and their ability there to reschedule so soon.
I am particularly upset when I hear all the talk, south of the border, here in Canada, of U.S. healthcare. I want the kind of care I get, for every person who has lived with awful headaches, needed major surgery, been diagnosed with a chronic or terminal disease or illness, or who lives with a disability to not worry about not being covered or having to pay giant medical bills.
People in Canada complain about long wait times, convince themselves that our neighbours have the better options for medical treatments, and some may have terrible experiences with Canada’s healthcare system. All I know is my own experience and that of my family.
Healthcare shouldn’t be about insurance companies, deductibles, premiums, and whatever else I keep hearing, is all I hear when I hear the debates going on in the U.S. They talk of consumerism and shopping for the best health plans. Healthcare isn’t about shopping, even if so much of our society is all about consumerism. This is, in some cases, about life and death. It’s about feeling unwell or being able to be happy for more than only one day a year.
Ugh! It all gets me so fired up honestly, because I know what it’s like to need my country’s medical system. I have disability and medical conditions I depend on being treated for. I am lucky here. I hate how too much of the world still doesn’t get it.
It was a week where I could care less about the actual March Madness, as I am no basketball fan, but…as for some other madness:
It’s precisely why I need to count my blessings and why everything on my list today is needed more than ever and deserves the recognition in my own life.
Her Headache 
Keep letting it get you fired up. Complacency never changed a thing.
YAY for snuggles with your niece. I took mine with me to the tattoo parlor yesterday to arrange for a tat to cover a bald spot I have (due to a highly painful and out-of-nowhere infection in my scalp that has left me hairless in an embarrassingly large patch at the back of my head. She shouted out for all the other people to hear that I am there to get my bald spot covered. So yay.
Cherry blossom is wonderful.
Oh, I am plenty fired up here.
Don’t you just love those little buggers when they are so damn honest? It’s a sweet thing to know, that someone can be that real, but it can lead to some rather awkward run-ins.
Definitely lol 😀
I loved your post! You go girl….
Oh I will. Thank you.
This was an excellent TToT, you have such a powerful way with words! I smiled at your appreciation for cherry blossoms and for all things Irish, and the awesomeness that your nephew is eager to use his eyes for you. The sweetness of a baby is all the more precious through scent and touch, and she will grow up to be so very spoiled by you I am sure! 🙂
I am glad you take your role and responsibility to educate others about blindness and how we perceive individuals with visual limitations. You have a strong voice and the ability to make a difference!
I am not thankful for your bad headaches, by I am so very thankful that you live in a country that provides access to the medical care you need, without all the mumbo jumbo we are going through here in the USA at present. It makes me so very angry, and it affects both Papa Bear and I and the limitations of what we can take care of and can’t afford to. It is wrong. There are no perfect answers, but surely this is not it.
You are so right, that when life around us is in turmoil, that’s when we most need to be mindful of our blessings and thankful of who and what we have. I always finish my post smiling, and I’m betting you do too! Thank you so much for sharing, blessings to you in the days ahead! 🙂
Thank you Josie.
Yes. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. I am highly triggered by all this nonsense with medical care in your country. I get so frustrated and it’s not even my concern really.
I will continue to speak up about all the issues I believe so strongly about in my heart, the things that get me fired up, as Lizzi said in her comment.
I get frustrated and fired up, but then I do finish my post for the TToT and read the other posts and I do find something to smile about. That’s all that matters.
A couple people this week mention headaches and I have had a terrible one this week, too! Has to be the bizarre weather. Used to get migraines but not since Zilla was born – great bonus! I’m sure hormone changes had something to do with that.
I love cherry blossoms – always have. It’s the one thing that would lure me to live near Washington, D.C.
Snuggles are always good. Keep taking them whenever you can get them!
I plan on getting more time to snuggle with my niece because the world is so full of nonsense. She is one of the few things that makes sense lately.
Thanks Lisa. My headaches are complicated, less weather related I think, but I manage them okay, for the most part.
Oh, Kerry, your post is lyrical and wonderful and I would not have known about an eyes closed photo if you had not pointed it out here. Everytime I think about healthcare, I get so upset. There are long weight times here. Doctors are greedy, or the insurance companies don’t pay enough per appointment, so many of them double and triple book. I once waited over 2 hours to see my primary care doctor. I would have left, except I needed my medication renewed. Now I’ll wait an hour (no more) and then leave. It’s a mess, the Presidency is a mess. I have hope that some very despicable and nasty things will come to light and he will be gone.
Lyrical. What a wonderful compliment Val. Thanks.
A mess. So much greed. I hold onto hope of that too, right along with you.
It’s like some great big, ridiculous movie script, playing out before our very eyes. So unreal.
I think many of us are glad of Spring! Perhaps your nephew is telling you his eyes work as a way of saying he’s here to help if you need him? We saw blossom the other day too, but I couldn’t tell which one it was. Any blossom looks beautiful to me though.
I like to think that’s what he’s saying too. Thanks.
Cherry blossoms are beautiful, and at the moment in season! I’m glad that the week was great, and I hope that this one is too!
Thanks. We are all ready for spring I think. Bring on the blossoms.
I’ve never been to Ireland, but I imagine I would love the beauty of it. John and I did, however, go to The Irish Rovers in concert the week before St. Patrick’s Day!
Close enough. Perfect timing. I imagine you would. Hope the show made you feel like you had a little piece of Ireland there in front of you.