This is the Celebrating the Small Things blog hop, run by Lexa Cain and her two wonderful co-hosts L.G. Keltner @ Writing Off The Edge and Tonja Drecker @ Kidbits.

It has been a long and hard several months.  Make that years.  Disappointments, the realization that certain things are not likely ever to happen, learning yesterday that a job for which I had a phone interview, for which my interviewer was very excited, already had an offer out on it, but she had spoken to them and was pushing my candidacy.  (With an offer already out there.)

It is a good thing to go along and count your blessings, but sometimes you can’t help feeling like someone standing at a gate and looking through the bars at a beautiful landscape that you can’t enter, no matter how hard you try.

Sometimes you have to accept that and move on without wincing at the cliche’.

It’s been a long haul and I am very tired.

But:

I signed up for NaNoWriMo and will be finishing my first draft of book #3 in my Memphis Cycle  series.  The chunk out of the middle.  I will keep it completely separate from the rest of the book.  50,000 words will be a goodly number to allow me to weave the threads together and bring all the characters and their conflicts and joys together at the battle itself, then, skipping one day (already written) continue until they circle around and head for home.  That story has been chiding me for years, and I will, by golly, finish it.  It has some of my best writing in it as it stands.  That will be enjoyable

And – my top celebration – my 88 year old mother, one of two very great joys and blessings in my life, came through her hip surgery on Monday, is experiencing reduced pain, and will be moving into a rehab center that she likes, attached to a community she knows and has friends in.  The grinding pain is gone.

Mom’s lack of pain and increased mobility trumps any sadness I’m feeling and, by golly, it’s worth celebrating.  Here’s to my mother.  And NaNoWriMo.

What are you celebrating?