GRATITUDE

 Because of our anti-Happy-Thanksgiving-rant earlier this week, we cannot send such felicitous thoughts at this time. But can take stock of all we are grateful for. Starting with the important and ending with the sublime. 

If you peruse our Great Jail Adventure post yesterday, it may become apparent that before heading out to the jail, we were actually in the Old Gray Lady (The REGJB) and went inside a courtroom for the bond hearing. We walked into several courtrooms and this is what we saw: Judges in Masks, PDs and ASAs (mostly maskless); clerks; corrections officers, bailiffs, and all of the people needed to run a court calendar and run a court system. We are grateful for all of you. In the face of a pandemic, you marched into court and kept the system running, at personal risk to your health and life. Thank You. And while we are at it- you twenty something prosecutors and PDs who feel the invincibility  of youth- you're not. Wear a mask please.  

Second, we are grateful for the opportunity to blog. We couldn't do it if this was Beijing. The equivalent of Chief Judge Soto and now Sayfie would have had us arrested and sent to a reeducation camp. Instead, because of the First Amendment, our chief judges, our administrative judges, our judges, endured the slings and arrows of the blog with public grace. True, we've been dressed down privately in scathing emails from a certain Judge - but it was mostly deserved  and we reached a detente. 

We are grateful for our health.  "Good health...the most important thing." (identify the movie quote for valuable prizes). 

About ten days ago we walked into a medical facility and got a booster shot. It took all of thirty minutes with a reservation, including observation time. We are grateful to live in a country that protects intellectual property rights and rewards innovation. This is why we had scientists who had the knowledge and skill to develop a vaccine. Want the Pfizer or Moderna or the one from Russia or China? Moderna please we said, and we got it (get the full dose BTW). 

We are grateful for Hulu TV which we discovered during the pandemic. If not for the NFL ticket, we would cut the cord on cable. 

We are grateful for our Kindle. We can read whatever we want where ever we are. If you like to read, get one. Trust us. You won't miss the feel of books and the ability to manipulate the font and lighting makes reading so much easier. 

We are grateful for our barista at our local Starbucks, who five days a week has our favourite drink ready for us when we walk in. Just the right amount of espresso and coconut milk and shots of vanilla and she even knows that on Friday, just to mix things up, we want it on ice. She was out sick one day and called a colleague to have our drink ready.  You don't see that attention to customers much these days.

In no particular order, we are grateful for home baked crusty bread, the coffee and croissants  at the Pierre in Manhattan that they bring to our room every morning, our Peloton,  the Bills getting beat last week, the series the Kominsky Method on Netflix- Alan Arkin is brilliant and the most underrated comedic actor of his generation, the Noability App on our iPad, which makes reading discovery a breeze, a certain recent opinion in the First, and last, but not least, a majority of our readers, who make writing the blog a fulfilling experience. 

Happy You Know What.