500 milestones

I give thanks that every day now, in some small way, I'm passing milestones on the long road of recovery. Some are too trivial or personal to share, but each one gives me disproportionate joy and determination to reach the next one. I  give thanks today I passed one significant enough for others to truly grasp - booking taxis to town and back and spending the best part of an hour out without a paramedic or minder to make sure I was OK. I give thanks I was OK!

I give thanks for managing to dig a little deeper into the heap of clothing I thought would be organised as normal before the gritters came out for the season, and find a hat and some boots a little flatter than the new ones, so that it merely felt as if my flesh was being flayed with stinging nettles rather than actual electric shocks. For the sun coming out to join me...

I give thanks for getting to use my Specsavers 'golden ticket' before the expiry date by asking for a chair and mostly trying on frames from the lowest tiers. Somehow I shuffled it along beyond the lowest valid prices without noticing as I wasn't wearing my own glasses at the time... So I give thanks for loving myself and the new choice so much I just bought them anyway! The myopic among you will know if you think the ones you choose in soft focus are attractive you may be in for a shock when prescription clarity sets in but some times I can't find any I like even when I can't see them properly either!

I give thanks for spending a quiet and still morning partly to prepare for the challenges ahead, partly to keep my blood pressure within limits required for anaemia meds...and for that going successfully too. I give thanks for quite a lot of quietness and stillness since I got home as well, certainly more mellow than last night so far with neighbours rowing noisily and my bathroom heater breaking. 

I give thanks for winding my solitary skein of Skye into balls ready to turn into a hat for myself when other crafting commitments permit. I give thanks for coming to the moving but dreaded end of a beautifully crafted novel based on the life of the last woman to be executed in Iceland. And for Colin (a man with far better places to spend his time than between the pages of historical fiction) bizarrely knowing of the book as he'd been to the beach where the events took place almost two hundred years ago...