On being thankful.....

Given that we don't do Thanksgiving over here, last year I blogged about some of the things that I was thankful for.

This year most of those things remain the same....... though more and more as I see people struggle to gain acceptance within their own families I am more and more thankful that I grew up with parents who were open, understanding and above all loved me enough to let me be whatever I wanted to be.

The last twelve months have also given me something else to be extremely thankful for, and that is an ever growing group of internet friends, I could say internet family really.  With many that friendship has grown out of the internet sites into true and proper friendship.  To them I am extremely grateful, for their support, encouragement, helping me grow and making me smile.

Purple unicorns - for a very special friend :)

May contain waffling....

aka - my head is all over the place right now....

There are two reasons primarily for this - firstly, yesterday and the service to celebrate AP's life.... it wasn't a funeral as such, that had been a family only affair first thing in the morning.  This was an opportunity for her friends and family to come together in the Methodist church that had played a very important part in her life and the life of her family.

There were 18 of us who attended who had known AP through the internet book group we were all members of, all of us wearing something with a touch of lime green.... what was lovely was that her husband and daughters were also wearing touches of lime green which kind of hammered home to me how important her internet friends, who by extension are part of an internet family, were to her.  Each year this book group has bi-annual meetings at which AP would make book marks to sell off to raise funds for whatever charity we were supporting. Her husband, despite his own personal loss and grief, had taken the time to make a set of book marks for us, with pictures of her and the book she wrote on one side and her dates on the other.  He gave them out to us after the service to remember her by.


I did mean to blog last night, but in catching up with my blog feeds I read the day's post that the lovely people at Chicks & Dicks had put up as part of their abuse awareness month this post here now anyone who has read parts of this blog will understand why that that hit....  I hate the terms victim and survivor but if I am honest that is what I am and the whole description of verbal and mental abuse, deliberate isolation from friends and family, ensuring financial and personal dependency, the excuses, the not seeing what's happening and the threat of loosing something important if you rock the boat, brought back some pretty horrible memories and thoughts to the surface.

I am not ashamed to say that I have been a victim of abuse, I don't think it weakens me, I do however, have days when things are looking on the dark side when I still feel a complete and utter useless fool for not seeing it at the time, for pretending it wasn't happening when I did realise it was, and for not getting out sooner......

It was all a bit much last night, so I went and hid under the duvet with my guard cats.

Nostalgic Midweek Music...

My friends, who know me far too well, frequently feed my shower gel addiction (erm, there might have been about 9 new bottles for Christmas)... anyway, this morning I cracked open a new bottle (hell I'd been back at work a whole day and felt the need to treat myself - what do you mean, but there are already 4 open bottles in the shower??).  Anyway, by the time I'd used said shower gel I was getting some lovely fuzzy flashbacks from the smell to a rather wonderful night a long long time ago involving some games with vodka and cinnamon sticks (never underestimate the kitchen for interesting things to play with)

All day I've been on a bit of a nostalgia trip, particularly as every damn time I catch the smell of said shower gel I have been trying to stop blushing

So, whilst I go reminisce some more, two songs which take me back to around the same sort of time ...