So it’s about 2:00 am and I’m sitting here working on a haunted house’s marketing materials for the upcoming season, while watching Buffy Season 2 on Hulu.com, after a long speakerphone conversation on my Blackberry with one of the haunted house industry’s most well-known personalities.

This is after a lovely dinner in my back yard with my family, watching the sun set and looking at our newly-installed lighting system, which is gorgeous.

I am so damned lucky I can barely comprehend it.

Not just the obvious stuff – my health, my family, owning a house, owning a business that I love. Did I mention the part about watching Buffy on Hulu? Of all the things I just mentioned, that’s probably the most likely to get dismissed or taken for granted, yet it’s also the most remarkable.

I’m working off a reasonably powerful laptop that has an output for a secondary monitor – I work on the big monitor while watching Hulu on the laptop’s built-in monitor. That I can watch a show that I absolutely love, for free, while I work in my office? That’s pretty amazing, and it was only a couple of years ago that it wasn’t possible without a significant cash investment.

Beyond that, if I want to, I can log into Twitter or Facebook and find out what’s happening to friends and family all over the world. We take that for granted, when we should be thunderstruck that we can do it. As much as I jokingly gripe about The Stupids on Facebook, I also have to say that it’s a small-scale miracle in my life – I’ve reconnected with people I haven’t talked to in decades because of it. I can’t dismiss or mitigate that.

My point: Appreciate what you have. Appreciate how easy the internet is making certain simple pleasures. Appreciate how easy the internet makes it to stay in touch with people you genuinely care about. Appreciate your family. Appreciate whatever is going on in your life that doesn’t make you say “ouch”.

You’re lucky to have it. ANY of it.