Thankful (2012)

With Thanksgiving 2012 scheduled for tomorrow -- at least in Canada -- I want to list the things I'm thankful for this year in the most honest and unsentimental way possible:

• autumn weather: for good nights of sleep, frosty mornings, and making me feel better about returning to indoor pursuits
• natural gas: for making me not have to panic about the approaching winter, and not have to gather and cut firewood
• oil: that lovely black, natural, and organic product that lets me be able to afford to live so far from the congested area in which I work, and makes most of the other things I enjoy possible, when you get right down to it
• having a normal, traditional family: I know it's not trendy anymore, but it's the best foundation you can have.
• the free market: for keeping food affordable, for providing variety, and for making things that shouldn't be available year-round available year-round
• the global supply chain: for giving me apples when the crop failed in Ontario and hardly raising the price at all
• China and India, in collaboration with the free market: for bringing more people out of poverty by far than any organization I've ever donated money to.
• Steven Wilson: thanks for Porcupine Tree, Storm Corrosion, your solo work in particular, and pretty much everything else you've done
• Opeth: thanks for making me find some value in death metal by applying it only sparingly and making it beautiful by surrounding it by beautiful music, and especially for "Heritage", where you left it out altogether
• Amazon Kindle: for letting me take books with me to places that I'd never normally take them because they were so big. I just wish you'd let me lend books to people, and the Kindle book should never be more expensive than the paper one.
• Microsoft: for getting your act together with Windows 8 and giving me a reason to avoid buying an iPad. I'm not sure I'll easily forget that you killed off Media Center, but I suppose I understand
• Squeezebox: such an amazing music distribution system, flexible beyond what most people have a right to expect. It was inevitable but still saddening that Logitech destroyed your future.
• Halloween III on Blu-Ray: the 30th Silver Shamrock edition with high-def mono soundtrack made it worth the wait
• work: for making all of the above even more appreciable by way of the fact that I have so little time left to enjoy them
• iPod Touch: left until last for a reason: grudgingly, I have come to like this thing. Thanks for making it easy to overlook the things you can't do. And I've also come to tolerate iTunes as long as I don't have to use it very much

I haven't thanked the Lord, but if the Lord made all of the above possible then I thank Him, too.