What makes people so negative in their thinking and conversation?

Spend two weeks traveling with the same people on a ship, on a bus, on a train, on a catamaran, and you quickly learn to avoid their pattern.

I’d rather spend the moments of each day that I will never get back by focusing on laughter and beauty and helping others and inclusion rather than exclusion, acceptance rather than rejection…

Today, I am grateful for young people and seasoned people who have chosen to not let life just pass them by but have chosen to experience new and embrace “if not now, then when,” by spending their summers working in these Princess/Holland America resorts and ski resorts and tourist destinations. What a hoot we’re having, visiting with international students and newly retireds and young graduates and bucket-listers who left normalcy in Florida or South Carolina or New Mexico or Serbia or Jamaica or China to work in Alaska for four months.

I am grateful for a husband who is an early riser. 4:30 am is the perfect time for hot chocolate in front of a fireplace, waiting on Denali to wake up.

I am grateful to be in the 30% Club. Didn’t know it was a thing. But it’s a thing and we are now a thing, too. Did you know it is rainy and cloudy wet 80-85% of the time in the rain forests up here? (Tongass and Chugach) And we are not technically in one of the two rain forests today, but only 30% of visitors to Denali National Park ever see the Denali peak because of the prevalent summer rainy dismal weather. Ding! Ding! Ding!

I am grateful to hear Sam sing “Oh Victory in Jesus…” while he’s showering.

I am grateful for pictures of granddaughters Parker and Reilly this morning, uniformed up and ready for their first day in their new school!

I am grateful for a hood on my jacket when it’s cold raining as we walk the street of Talkeetna, base camp for Denali climbers and site of “Northern Exposure” TV series.

I am grateful for eagles and ospreys and trumpet swans and little shrews and wood bison and moose and wolves and of course, bears, all of which we’ve seen during the land portion of our journey to Alaska. Oh, and dogs. But they are on leashes and if they are attached to an Alaskan, they look at you as if to say, “Dumb tourist, I’m a DOG, for cryin’ out loud,” and if they are one of the 746 dogs in the Seattle airport (that might be an exaggeration but not by much), they have no time for pleasantries because their bladders are crying and there are miles of shiny polished floors to navigate before the the asphalt grass of outside is in sight.

I am grateful to be an adult back-of-the-bus-er. After all the years of choir trips and having to be the first-seat adult-in-charge, I get now why the rebel music children loved the back of the bus.

I am grateful Kansas doesn’t have Devil’s Club.

And I am grateful for these tourist group packages that include a luggage service. We set our suitcase outside our hotel room door in the morning, it magically disappears, and then reappears hundreds of miles away that evening in our room at the new resort location.

So, the lesson for our Wednesday – it IS Wednesday, isn’t it?

Appreciate the showers of beautiful blessings and let the negatives and annoyances roll off the waterproofed jacket of life.