Welcome @LynnThese4reSEXPEOPLE, @Hairydilemma and @WishingHopingThinkingPraying and thanks for joining us and sharing your news.
Happy New Year to all of our UK posters! It's still just 1925 here so we've just finished dinner, which was burgers on the grill and leftover mac & cheese. DD, who usually wants something different had grilled teriyaki chicken and oven-baked onion rings. None of us drink, so the rest of the evening looks pretty quiet.
As the quasi-official host or hostess here (and I agree, Eggy, hostess does sound quite dated) please let me offer a few thoughts.
2020 has been a heartbreaking and exhausting year. Granted, worse of some than others, but still awful and fearful for all of us. 2021 promises to be much better, particularly for us in the US now that we've shown Donald Trump the door. Medicine has delivered a small miracle in the form of multiple vaccines and interventions and we are much, much better at treating covid now than we were in the beginning. So here's to 2021. May we and our families stay safe until we see the other side of the pandemic.
I've given a bit of thought to these threads in the last few days. So many MN threads are mostly people piling on and shouting at each other until everyone gets tired and moves on to the next thread. This one "has legs" as they say. I think it's because by sharing our mundane news we share our lives, our challenges, and our small victories, and in the process, we have become friends. That has real value for people, particularly as we endure so much isolation and limitations on normal human contact. We are social beings at our core. We have listened to each other and offered a bit of kindness and support for each other. That is why we stay and why we have newcomers, who wander in to sit by the fire of fellowship.
Well done people. It's been an honor to host the last few of these threads and I am much the richer for being welcomed into your lives.