I've spent the last three hours or so cleaning up after a particularly enjoyable dinner with friends. And the cleaning up has made me profoundly grateful for a number of things....
It started out that I was thankful we have water to wash the dishes (two dishwasher loads and about 5 sinkloads of pots, pans, glasses and the like) in Johannesburg, reflecting on the challenges that Capetonians have been experiencing and are likely to continue experiencing as their rainy season comes to an end and their dams are still close to empty.
I remembered a book I read as a child by a woman named Corrie ten Boom, who had been imprisoned with her mother in one of the German concentration camps during the Second World War - and her mother used to always tell her to be grateful for the little things. One day while praying she thanked God for the fleas in their barracks, and Corrie lost it. She asked her mother how she could possibly thank God for those fleas?!? Her mother replied something like, "It keeps the guards from coming in to where we sleep." That story has stuck with me ever since.
I then started to reflect how lucky we are to have good friends who didn't know each other before yesterday, but who clicked well with each other and created fun and interesting conversation.
How lucky we are to have a fireplace, which gave us warmth and a cozy place to have those interesting conversations.
And how lucky we are to have a house (or at least a mortgage which allows us to live in the house while the bank gradually squeezes every last drop it can out of us).
And for me to have such a wonderful life partner in 
Bonus: he makes a wicked Tim curry. That was last night's dinner - a lamb curry that just got the noses sniffling enough from the heat of the spices on a cool winter's evening.
And lucky to have found out about Steemit last year from one of Tim's colleagues who I'm now happy to count as a friend, and to have made friends with wonderful people like 
I have a lot to be grateful for!
