So Many Blessings!
Today I have two totally different things that deserve my appreciation.
The first is in reaction to a personal gripe. For the past 4 months I have been battling hackers who have been adding bogus email addresses into my accounts and sending spam from them.
I have been working with my webhost, but it seemed like it was a continual battle to eliminate the addresses, change the permissions and change the passwords. I was doing it about once a week, and it included about 30 accounts (my own and some other folks’ too), taking me several hours. I was finding the problem late at night, necessitating me staying up to fix them and dropping into bed in the wee hours of the morning.
Well, knock on wood (knock, knock), it’s been over a week now and no hacker email accounts so far. For which I am very grateful. Which makes me appreciate the new web host so much more than the previous one who didn’t even have a PERSON to talk with (sometime in the 5 years I was with them they opted out of personal contact and switched over to email support only).
And the second blessing, which is the larger of the two, is that today I sent in my retirement paperwork. I have worked for this employer for more than 20 years over the past 35 (in fact, if I hadn’t left twice, I’d be starting into year 35 in just a couple of months!). And on Christmas Eve I get to leave all of that behind and move into doing what I want to do.
I’m so appreciative that I had the opportunity to be hired on when I was a young single mother raising my daughter by myself. And that it was a large enough organization that I could move around every 3-5 years as I needed change or promoted into higher levels of responsibility. I appreciate the wisdom of my younger self in taking such a job and staying as long as I did.
I also appreciate that they allowed reinstatement – this last time after having been gone for over 15 years. I appreciate that I was able to buy back the retirement time I had cashed out, and that I was allowed to buy an additional 5 that will give me over 50% of my current income beginning in January. I appreciate that my salary, along with my husband’s allowed me the opportunity to take advantage of the buy-backs.
And, I am deeply appreciative that I will have a wonderful health benefit plan that covers both me and my husband and only costs me about 5% of what the full plan would otherwise cost.
I appreciate that I can do this at a time in my life when I am still relatively healthy and relatively young enough to expect many more years of doing what makes me happy. And that for the first time in my life I get to decide what it is that I want to do that makes me happy, simply for the reason that it’s what I want, without having to worry about supporting myself or anyone else.
Ahhhhhh, now that’s something to appreciate!!