Count your blessings

I had my first drill since November 2007, I am back from Iraq! I am happy about it and feel blessed to be back in my life, working and picking up where I left off. When a person deploys, they change, the experience is life changing. Coming home is always kind of weird too, it is great to be home but their is an adjustment period and you are adjusting to your new life, whatever that has become. The world that you leave changes too.
I live in Rhode Island and although the economy has tanked, here in RI and nationally. That effects me mentally but not in a major way. As long as I don't get laid off and I don't dwell on the concept of my very humble retirement just got a whole lot humbler. It is all relative though. When I was making like half of what I do now, I was eligible for qualify to get a property because I was so broke. Now, the agency that funded that program is broke itself. While the world was going crazy though while I was in Iraq, the vortex of the world gone crazy, gas hit $4 and I vowed to to do public transportation as much as possible. While biking around I often pass a tent city of homeless which isn't total uncommon in this day and age . There are even homeless cats living in the tent city. I haven't seen stuff like this since I lived in NYC in the late 80's with the homeless tent cities in Alphabet City in the Lower East Side.
I see all of this and I feel blessed, only in that I am not in a hopeless situation. Like this guy in California...
"So the company I'm working for, I get laid off," Cutch says. "I qualified for unemployment — 24 weeks. My car's paid off, my truck's paid off, my bike's paid off, everything except for my house payment, right? But I feel like I'm still going to pull out of it."
Months went by without work. Cutch lost his house, his car was stolen, his savings ran out. This past August, he took up a friend's invitation to come to California, but that didn't work out, either.
Life can be hard, over whelming and the crumbling around you but you can always be grateful for what you have.