Thank you...

I need to tell you all how much the blogging world I am a part of has helped to keep me sane over the past 15 weeks. I also need to thank each and everyone of you - whether you blog, or just read, whether you comment or just visit - for doing so. I see how many of you visit each day - I know where most of you come from and I have had miserable spirits lifted so many times just to know that someone out there is reading what I say, and hearing me waffle on.

You make me smile - you make me laugh out loud here, and you also channel my thoughts away from "me", and the 4 walls around me. You help to shift my focus, and remember that it is deeply dangerous to become obsessed with one's self, and forget all the millions of things I have to be thankful for. And there are millions.

I have been thinking about just what I would have done without this blog in recent days/weeks/months. I may well have been in a padded cell by now. But, even though I have been stuck here, I have been transported all over the world into your lives, and my mental world has expanded as far as my fingers will take it. All I have to do, is click the mouse and I enter yet another world. So very many out there. There is no reason to bemoan the fact that I don't have any books to read when I have a world at my fingertips. Millions of worlds. Of words.

I can enter springtime in the southern hemisphere, or autumn up here in the north. If I want to go to Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria or Switzerland, I can. I can go anywhere I like. If I want to see some new ideas for sewing or crafts or quilting - hah! All I have to do is press enter. If I want to go and wander round a ranch - hey I can do that too! Climb a mountain? Yes. Easy.

I can plan new baking days from the biggest variety of step by step recipes imaginable. I can learn new scrapbooking techniques. I can be challenged mentally or I can read the best humour around - and it is all real. Because real people write the words. People I can get to know simply by reading more of the words they write.

Blogging is a wonderful thing.

The fact that it is global is what makes it so special. I have many wonderful friends in real life, and like all of us, they have lives to lead, and their time is precious. But here on the computer, what could be long empty hours are instead filled by people in other time zones, waking up as I am going to bed. So there is always someone posting new things, and I never feel alone.

I am sitting here wondering why our parents and grandparents don't do this more. I know of so many older people who get very lonely, and this could be a way for them to communicate, and share their life stories and make new friends. Something positive to fill their days, which could be very empty.

It is one thing to get our parents to write their memories down for us, but how much more wonderful it would be for them to write and have people comment as they do just that. There is such joy in knowing that someone finds what we have to say interesting - though heaven knows you will have been challenged on the interesting part here in recent times! There is only so much interest one can generate within the same 4 walls. And delving into my mind is not always suitable for this family friendly site. I am not always a ray of sunshine. Sigh.

I have mentioned before, that history is a subject which is being ejected from our school curriculum here. And I have just had a friend pop round, who took a drama group of young people to see a play last night. The opening scene of the play had an old newsreel playing on a giant screen, and a young soldier ran across the field and was blown apart by gunfire. The audience, 90% youngsters, roared with laughter. Leaving the older people staring around at each other, absolutely aghast. Those kids had no idea at all. They have been totally de-sensitised by computer games, and to them, it was funny. They had just actually watched footage of a war time soldier die, and they were amused.

So I have been thinking about how we need our older generation to tell the story the way it actually was. Thoughts, fears, pain, sorrows, joys and all. Someone has to keep the history of our world alive. Or soon it will be gone - relegated to the dusty old tomes in long forgotten basements around the globe. If schools today are focussing on IT and consigning the history of our nations to the scrapheap, let's use IT to remember instead.

How about suggesting to the older people you know that they tell their stories? That they start blogs of their own? What do you think? Mum??? Are you listening? You can be the charter member of the "Let us Remember" club! I feel the need to invade old people's homes and make suggestions.

Anyway.

I just wanted to say a huge "thank you". I have not always been fine and dandy. Or pleasant to be around. And you have been wonderful friends. Perceptive and wise. I hope you will continue to brighten my life the way you do.

You are stars!

PS: If you want to laugh, go to youtube, and put in Chonda Pierce. Her menopause parking and the honeymoon clips are beyond hysterical, and if you want to cry, watch Hold on Tighter.