I'm so grateful for all of the people that have blessed our lives that have served to help safeguard our freedoms. While we have a lot of WWII veterans on my side of the family, we also have a lot of friends who have entered our life in more modern times that have served in some capacity or another. We have three right now in our circles that are active (Army), a couple of retirees (Air Force), and an old friend who left her private sector nursing job to be a military nurse (Navy).
As for my two random things...
1. I'm grateful for Facebook Messenger. While I've been using it for years for messaging with my mom and some friends, I completely forgot that you could make calls from it and play games. I've accidentally hit the call button a few times on there and given a few people a good laugh. So maybe I should be grateful for those mistakes? In any event, DD17s boyfriend left last night for his family's annual trip overseas. They're in London right now with some family, but will be flying to Italy in about a week to spend the rest of the summer at their summer place in southern Italy near some other family. They're not used to being apart, so there's been a lot of moping around in the last 12 or so hours. They were hoping to use WhatsApp to communicate since we've successfully used it for international travels in the past, but it kept glitching. They look at all things Facebook as "old people social media," but through Messenger, they can talk and video chat, as well as play games...kind of like they would using GamePigeon over text. He landed about 2.5 hours ago and I can hear them talking right now. He's a sweet kid and treats her really well, so I'm happy to see them finding a way to communicate while he's away. It's going to be the first big test for their relationship, so it's kind of good in a way. Either way, I'm grateful that I remembered that Messenger could do what they needed.
2. I'm grateful for getting in some early morning exercise. I've been trying to get myself back into an early morning routine. I need it for general health reasons, but I need it even more because of the stress. I'll spare you the bulleted list of everything that's keeping me up at night, but exercise helps. I had been using some of the stuff in my home gym this past week, but this morning I was feeling especially stir crazy and needed to hit the trails in our neighborhood.