Thankful Time Again

Heading into Thanksgiving Season, I have a few things I want to mention I'm thankful for. I regret toay night. It's been cold out on the playground with the wind and all, but today the sun actually came out and stayed out. We hadn't had a sunny day for an entire week, and I was very thankful for that. I am thankful for the seasons. All four of them. Currently, fall is winding down and winter is on the way. Actually, winter doesn't start until December 21, so we are still in the fall, but Standard Time is this weekend. Have to set the clock back an hour before bed Saturday night. It's been cold out on the playground with the wind and all, but today the sun actually came out and stayed out. We hadn't had a sunny day for an entire week, and I was very thankful for that. I am very thankful for having just had a wonderful phone conversation with my brother that went about an hour and a quarter long. We usually talk a long time, but it had been quite a long time since we had talked. He commented two things. One, that neither one of us is very good at only talking for 15 minutes, and the other thing was that if we had tried to have an hour-long phone conversation back in our younger days it would have cost about $100. Now, isn't that the truth? There are so many things today that cost exponentially more than they used to, but one thing we can do now that we couldn't do ages ago is talk on the phone for an hour and the phone bill stays the same every month. Now that is something to be thankful for. There are, of course, always many things to be thankful for, we often just either don't pay attention or we don't bother to stop and be thankful for things. But I think it's worth noting that it really is very inexpensive to talk on the phone long distance nowadays, whereas, 30 years ago, this wasn't the case. I didn't know this, but in 1998-1999 according to the AI Overview, "Sprint introduced the first 'Nationwide Calling' plan with no distance fees, a model quickly adopted by AT&T and Verizon, effectively making domestic long-distance calls 'free' for people on those plans." I wasn't aware of when it was, but I remember it used to cost a lot to talk long distance, and now it doesn't. That's one great advantage to this period of history. There are other things about this period of history that I'm not as excited about, but that is one thing that I am happy about. One thing we talked about was how the American Academy of Pediatrics used to recommend children only use the Internet for two hours daily, and how I can't even do that myself. I'm trying. I'm getting closer. Right now, my average time is two hours and 34 minutes. That's pretty good for me. When I first got my smartphone, I was on it as many as 12 hours a day. That's a lot. Another thing we talked about was how important it was to get plenty of sleep, stay active and eat healthy food. We shared our love for potatoes. I am thankful for sleep, and I am thankful for potatoes (with butter and salt). We talked about how thankful we were that we got to grow up in the 50s and I am just very thankful for the relationship I have with my brother and the memories of growing up in a simpler time. There are so many more important things to do in this life besides watch TV and listen to podcasts. The amount of stuff you can like or follow or subscribe to is simply overwhelming, and I honestly don't know how anyone gets anything done anymore with all that stuff out there to continually tune into. I am much happier since I quit watching TV and am doing a little reading instead. I am so thankful for books. Maybe I can talk about some books next time. Now, it's night-night time, and I am thankful for the weekend and Halloween being over, which has had the kids bouncing off the walls for 30 days. Goodnight.