Thanksgiving 2020

This big ball of dirt has rocketed around the fire orb once more and it's time for another Thanksgiving post. 

For those of you that are new to my blog, this is something I do every year and have done since I first moved to America. For those of you that aren't - skip this paragraph - you will have read the gist of it before. Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays, and one I only really discovered on coming to America. There is all the extravagance, the awful, awful history and fights with family but the thing that I really love is the sentiment that the name inspires. A day to give thanks. I am a natural pessimist, I tend to focus too much on the negatives and the problems. This day forces me into a habit of putting light on the good. Every year I try to improve on this, reduce the qualifiers in my thanks even further and take some time to reflect on all the good that has happened in the last year.

This time last year, my wife and I were psyching ourselves up for a grand adventure - we were moving back to the States! And... bringing our dog with us! The year before that we had been fighting to even be able to reside in the same country and the year before that we were separated and dog-less. A lot has changed in just a few years.

This year kicked off in December - Sailing from the UK to the USA, entering the country on a boat as it sails past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island was an experience unlike any other. Spending the next week in an Energy Drink induced haze of driving an RV across the whole country while trying to dodge around winter storms, spending Christmas Day on the road and discovering how much remains open even then. The whole experience felt and still feels Epic.

Much of the year felt, at the time, like we were living in limbo with our home, jobs, and many other things totally out of our control but even through all of that. I have been more productive with my hobby and painting. I started taking on my first serious commissions and have a small but steady income from them. I've already painted more models, faster than ever before with more than 750 finished in 2020 and hopefully another 150 to be done before the year is out!

The biggest news though has to be that we finally have a home of our own. It's taken years to sort out and there is still a hell of a lot to do as the buildings are in a pretty sorry state at the moment, but it's ours and we'll work our way through those minor hurdles. It's so much easier to see the end game now that we're in the place.

- Raggy, signing out