"Dear air," she wrote. "Thank you for smelling like cookies right now." To a lip numbed by Novocain, she wrote, "Thank you for not looking like what you feel like you look."
In 2009, when her longtime boyfriend moved to New York City, she started a thankfulness blog "as a way to hold on to some little thing that could make me feel good everyday."
Thanking a car or burnt toast is gratitude in the the purest form, says Dieterich, 31, an advertising copy writer in Los Angeles and author of thxthxthx: thank goodness for everything.
"Sometimes when you write a thank-you note you are thinking about how that person's gonna feel. It's different when you're thanking an inanimate object because you know it's not gonna thank you back," she says.'