Good Morning!
What’s on your mind today?
It’s pouring here. Not cats and dogs yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some soon. So this seems fitting, given the weather.
Quote of the Day
“Into each life some rain must fall.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Wandering Views 
Good morning all. I would have to agree that if rain is considered as difficulties in life that Longfellow was exactly right in his assessment. If you haven’t had some great difficulty in your life, you’re probably still young.
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Good Morning Everyone. FYI, the Bible Study for Leviticus chapter 22 is posted for those that are following my blog.
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Good morning. Here’s an update on the little girl I asked y’all to pray for yesterday. Brooklyn and her family made it to London last night. She is receiving wonderful care there. Their pastor flew to London to offer comfort during this extremely difficult time. She is still on dialysis and a morphine drip. Please continue to hold her up in prayer.
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Good morning all!
We started the summer in near drought conditions, so I’m not distressed about the rain we’re getting now—though flooding is a danger for some. But the tornado watches and warnings? Well that’s another matter…however, since we apparently made it through the night without a touchdown in the area, I’ll not whine too loudly. :–)
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Thanks for the update, Ann.
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I’m glad to hear that Brooklyn is doing well, will continue to pray.
First time I’ve mentioned Brooklyn in my prayers. 😆
I thought that “Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall” was a song by the Ink Spots. 🙂
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There used to be an Episcopal Convent outsife of Catonsville, MD. A blind nun painted the most wonderful things and I have often regreted not buying a little painting that said “All sunshine and no rain makes a desert”.
On my FB page I have a quote I took off of another friends page that says “Life isn’t about learning to weather the storms, it’s about learning to dance in the rain”
Because I am Southern, I have to quote a song from the Cowboy Junkies, “Into every life a little rain must fall. Lord, let it be a Southern rain”.
Today I will figure out if I can get married within a month like I requested or if I am going to have to drag this out 3 months. I really, really, did NOT want a wedding hanging over my head. I told my priest that I was the exception. Most females plan the wedding never taking into consideration there is an actual MARRIAGE to follow. Needless to say, Paul isn’t much in favor of waiting. I spoke plain English when I told him I didn’t want to drag this out and to ask me a month before he was ready. Lo and Behold he actually listened and understood and now I am going to have to go back and say oops gotta wait. That really isn’t the right way to train a man or a dog. (I was aiming for humor in that last sentence, so don’t read too much into it)
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Well, the Bible says that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so Biblically speaking, rain is a good thing. If you read it like that, it’s still true but also comforting.
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Just because I can..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ia-lyW4c9-k.
Lord, let it be a Southern rain,
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This is an “appliance” post – heads up, Michelle.
Earlier this year we bought a new top-of-the-line Kitchen Aid dishwasher (without doing any research, sigh). It not only doesn’t clean the dishes, it makes them dirtier than they were when they went in and then bakes the crud onto them. Last night I poked around the internet and found a thread of 399 posts complaining about the same thing. One poster accurately described it as though the last rinse cycle re-used the dirty water, spreading a fine film of mess all over everything. This is exactly what we are experience. Seriously, this thing cannot even clean a bowl that was used for ice cream. Many people said they’d complained to the company, only to be told, “too bad.”
Have you ever heard of such a thing???
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It rains here also. I am loathe to complain, after such a terribly dry summer, but it would have been good if the rain had held off another week. Just now, the farmers are trying to get in the bean crop and they cannot harvest in the rain.
There has been a lot of ‘rain’ in the farmers’ lives recently.
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Hubby lost his father when he was 10 years old. His mother remarried and Hubby did not get along with his stepfather and step brothers. Now whenever someone starts a sob story about why something in their past is keeping them from doing the right thing now, Hubby’s quotes “Into each life some rain must fall.” It has to be something pretty bad to get his sympathy.
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Totally sympathizing. In our continual problems with dishwashers, we’ve found if you don’t use that product Jet-Dry, things just don’t go well with the dishwashers. I’d check to make sure you have sufficient in the well (and the machines go through it fast).
Beyond that . . . clean the filter, but that has meant dismantling the entire dishwasher for me and while I can do it, I find it extremely frustrating. I never dismantled anything in a dishwasher until I got that really expensive German unit.
And of course these machines don’t do as fine a job even with the filter, dismantling efforts and Jet-Dry.
I’ve been told by my in-house engineer it’s because they use so much less water.
Of course.
You can save a lot of water if you don’t wash the dishes . . . Especially if you wash them in ten minutes rather than the two hours our dishwashers seems to need. Sigh.
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I liked the suggestion yesterday that people with different names here than they had on WMB end their posts with the old name to help us keep them straight.
drivesguy = Joe B
roscuro = Phos?
— Kevin Berasley
🙂
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Michelle, done that with the Jet-Dry (many of the other “complainers” said that they had, also). It’s brand new, so the filter shouldn’t be an issue. From the comments I read, this a legitimate issue that the company is aware of but doesn’t care to address. I just don’t use it any more and wash everything by hand. We’re moving soon, so it won’t be my problem anymore but I do feel badly about dumping it on someone else.
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We are set for more sunshine here in So Cal. I would love a good rain, but can wait until November. September and October is some of our best summer weather.
Ugggh dishwashers, if the Japanese would only set their minds to dishwashers we’d all be fine, but in their small homes they wash by hand 😦 When we were there in August we were all fascinated by the simply ingenuity of their appliaces and product. In fact I really want a toilet seat made by Panasonic 🙂 The one with three bodet options and various music choices.
The one thing that fascinated us the most was watching the Japanses newscast predicting an earthquake. It didn’t give a lot of time to react, but enough to get in a safe spot. Well, except for us wide-eyed So Callies who just stared back and forth from the TV to each other and said, “They can predict these?!?!”
Adios
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A friend of mine has a very upgraded model of dishwasher. She was constantly having trouble with it and finally the repairman told her to go back to using Cascade dishwasher POWDER. She has had less trouble since then. I don’t know if it will work for the rest of you.
Linda, get a home warranty on your house that you are selling. It will cost 300-400 dollars, but it will be good will towards the people buying your house, and can cover any appliance failures between now and the time you sell. Ask your agent. That way if this really expensive one can be fixed for about $100 each time.
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I don’t know nothing about dishwashers. If something were wrong with out GE, Elvera would let me know.
🙂
Fall is coming to NC. We have lots of rain.
I see in the Times-News that SC is going to make a park out of their highest mountain peak, Sassafras Mountain. It’s 3600 feet. There are higher elevations than that in Henderson County. I live at 2400′.
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Since I am the dishwasher in our family, I am appreciating the faulty dishwasher stories. But, I do hope you all can get better results from your investment, and I think the company should do better by its customers. If not they should be run out of town.
I don’t think I would want to have a singing toilet.
It rained a lot here in Atlanta last night. It was “A Rainy Night in Georgia.”
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Good morning. We had dishwashers that worked OK. When we moved into the woods with a septic system, my wife read, “Can’t handle dishwasher outflow” so our house was built with no dishwasher, so we wash dishes by hand. Our Christian neighbors built their own house, have a dishwasher, have a septic system, and everything seems to go fine. So maybe God wanted them to have a dishwasher, and our lack of one indicates we are unblessed pagans?
They have five kids, so if they get too old to care for themselves, they have five choices for who will care for them. We will have to compete with five sets of grandparents for a place in a tiny place owned by two lesbians. Or maybe the chickens will care for us.
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6th of 7 chapters of an essay imagining a society where children are not told about God but educated about current secular knowledge of science and taught basic morality based an empathy. I asked if such children would come up with the concept of God on their own. Someone said they would “invent idols.”
Recent inventions of God.
We don’t know how religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam originated. The facts are lost in history, in a time before modern record-keeping, empirical research and “fact-checking” were developed. So it makes little sense to argue if they are “true” or false in the way most of us regard astrology as false or the law of gravity or the speed of light is true.
We have seen religions invented out of whole cloth in historical time, religions such as Mormonism, Scientology, and the Unification Church (“moonies”). Even though the falsity of these recent religions is fairly obvious, millions of people believe these “upstart” religions represent truth.
It’s hard to imagine a society as controlled and sheltered from outside communication as North Korea, but North Korea exists. It’s even harder to imagine a country as controlled and sheltered from outside communication as North Korea, but NOT run by monsters like the Kim family.
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The Japanese have musical toilets so when you’re in public restrooms no one has to hear or even smell what you’re up to in your stall.
It was very disconcerting the first time . . .
We used a dishwasher with all our septic tanks and didn’t have any problems.
I am, however, very thankful for being hooked up to a sewer. You don’t want to hear the septic tank problems I’ve been through! :-=)
(And they weren’t even machines–until the last one!)
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Is that really you, Random Name?
My sources had told me that you had been involved in a life-changing accident a long time ago, and had subsequently embarked on a journey of discovery.
Specifically, while working in your laboratory on an experiment in which you were trying to spontaneously generate Mozart out of hydrogen atoms, you were struck by your own artificially generated lightning.
This tragically happened because you slipped in a puddle of amino acids on the laboratory floor while reaching for a peanut butter cookie, and inadvertently grabbed the high-voltage electrodes that were dangling overhead.
Anyway, the story was that you subsequently became a Bactinian Monk, sequestered in an ancient crumbling monastery that clings atop a snow-shrouded mountain in the Himalayas. There you ceaselessly toiled from the first gray light of dawn until vespers, sitting on your stool amongst your fellow monks (all tonsured and clad in the skins of yetis and smeared with Bactine), diligently painting and illustrating those orange warning labels they put on electrical equipment.
Either my sources were wrong, or you have now gotten yourself banned from the monastery and are so back to scientifically trying to prove how the Living spontaneously arose from the Dead, how Love and Beauty spontaneously came from the Primeval Atomic Stew, how Consciousness spontaneously sprang from nothing, and how the concept of homemade pineapple-upside down cake somehow managed to evolve, spontaneously, out of a vast and uncaring wasteland of utterly tasteless matter.
How are you doing, Random Name? Are you still maliciously thwarting the upward glorious evolutionary track of rabbits, by shooting all the best and bravest of the little fellows?
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Kim, I assume you will at least have marriage counseling? As my brother and I can testify, there are some unique differences in a marriage with bringing together two middle-aged households, with one or both spouses already having children, and that is without any living ex-spouses.
For me I wanted a real wedding (a fairly simple one, but I wanted the lacy white dress and the friends and family in attendance), but my three-month “official” engagement was preparing for marriage and stepmothering as much as it was preparing for a wedding. (If we hadn’t wanted to get married and settled before winter, we would probably have waited another month or two to get engaged, and give the girls more chance to get to know me and get used to the idea. It felt “rushed” to them, though it didn’t to us. In our case, they didn’t meet me in person till a few days before we got officially engaged, though they’d known about me for a couple of months.)
Re dishwashers: I’d rather wash by hand. Dishwashers are too noisy, too expensive to buy and run, they take up space I’d rather use for other things (in Nashville I removed mine and replaced it with a miniature freezer), they sometimes damage the dishes, and they don’t really save very much work. The only thing they do that is positive is make the counter tidier. I was happy to find there was no dishwasher in this house. There really isn’t any surplus cupboard space anyway, and so none ever got installed.
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P.S. That is actually without any “ex” spouses at all, though my husband lost his first wife to cancer and my brother and his bride each lost a husband or wife as well.
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What is a fact, Random? It seems like you’re saying that something is only a fact (i.e., is only true) when it’s been empirically tested and proven. So therefore, the speed of light for instance, was not a fact until man proved it and declared it a fact. Is that about right?
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Cheryl,
My dishwasher is quiet, it saves water over hand washing, and now that I’ve learned a few secrets on how to maximize dishwasher effectiveness, it requires no pre-rinsing or washing. Dishes go straight from the table to the dishwasher and they come out sparkling clean even if they’ve been sitting in the dishwasher for a day before being turned on. And it keeps the counter tidier. It does, however, take up space under the counter. But for all it’s benefits, it’s space I happily allow it.
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Ah dishwashers. Probably not the problem, but here in Canada they removed the phosphates from dishwasher detergent (better for the environment?) which made even formerly good dishwashers not able to get the dishes as sparkly clean.
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I like my dishwasher – and when the kitchen is re-done I’m going to put it up a bit higher so I don’t have to bend over so far all the time (I’m tall). Maybe a pot drawer underneath and then pantry shelves above. Any thoughts as to if this should work or not?
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Ree, realistically we simply don’t have the space here anyway, so it isn’t an option. But the one we had on vacation (and used a couple of times) reminded me of why I don’t like the things: I don’t want to listen to clanking for 45 minutes or more just to get a few clean dishes! It’s nice to know some better ones are available now, but if I had one, it would probably get used as my sister’s does: She is a wife and mother of five, but she uses her dishwasher only as a drainer after she washes the dishes by hand. In Nashville I didn’t even use mine as a drainer (partly because it was the other side of the room from the sink and the cupboard!). I simply never used it, never even tried it to see if it worked. I just replaced it as soon as I found a freezer the right size (that was the hard part; mini fridges are easy to find, but mini upright freezers are rare).
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Well, if you eat out at your neighbors and relatives a lot, you don’t even need a dishwasher.
And, even if you do accumulate dirty dishes at home (say due to borrowing things out of your neighbors refrigerators and pantries), you can always bring the dirty dishes back over to your neighbors, the next time you eat there, and let the neighbors wash them. After all, it’s their dishes, not yours.
Parenthetically, you can also wash your clothes in their washing machines, while you are eating.
Saving hot water this way is smart, and environmentally friendly, too.
I always try to keep my carbon footprint as small as possible, even if it means sacrifice and inconvenience.
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My house came with a built-in dishwasher, the first one I’d ever had. Within weeks I was hooked. When it went kaput a few years later, making a horrible sound one night, I was at Sears within the week scoping out a replacement (a modestly priced Kenmore which has done a good job, cleans the dishes to a sparkling finish, and has now lasted for several years now).
Now that I’ve had them, I LOVE dishwashers. Noise? I never even notice.
Linda, I was thinking also that if the dishwasher is still under warranty perhaps you just swap it out for a more workhorse model? But the house insurance that Kim mentioned sounds like a good option for the new owners as well.
I am still in love with my new GE refrigerator, I practically swoon at the sight of it sometimes when I pass by it in the kitchen. It’s GORgeous. 🙂 And efficient. And so cutely organized inside. I’m in the process of filling out the paperwork to get the $55 rebate the LA Department of Water and Power offers for getting one of the Energy Star appliances.
It’ll be a long time before I see that money, of course, having had long experience with the DWP in getting overcharges and other money owed to me (they were overcharging me for trash pickup and it took more than a year for them to -a- stop overcharging me and to -b- refund the money they’d wrongly billed all those months).
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Kim, strangely it’s not our house to sell. We lived in it for 30 years but sold it to #2 son two and a half years ago. We lived together until this spring when he decided to move closer to work (and his finance) so we’ve been renting it back from him since then. So it’s really HIS dishwasher and HIS problem.
We’re moving to Pa. with #1 son and his family (part of the reason is that#2 son now wants to sell the house) . The house we are moving to has a large unfinished basement that we will turn into an apartment for ourselves. I haven’t yet decided if we’ll put in a dishwasher but I’m leaning towards not.
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How are you doing, Random Name? Are you still maliciously thwarting the upward glorious evolutionary track of rabbits, by shooting all the best and bravest of the little fellows?. Said Drill.
Indeed, good sir. If it were not for my brave efforts to defend us from the coming onslaught of ever growing, ever more cunning giant lupi, your dogs would be cowering in the corner as ten foot high gangs of fanged bunnies moved in for the kill. I hope your canine companions are sending their thanks my way, and are taking a vow to kill no more chickens. Not that they do, I am sure. I don’t think they are chicken dogs. Correct?
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Most of all of you have been involved with churches. Some of you have been ministers. I am now the “organizer” of an atheist church. I am raising money by running a farmer’s market. While the $3 I have collected so far will probably not attract the attention of that Mafia gang known as the IRS, at some point they will drag me away in chains. (I did in fact have an IRS lien against me, but that’s another story.)
Anyway, I have started an atheist church. Nor original with me. Is it correct that churches are not taxed? I could go through the trouble and paperwork of forming a 503<c)3 non profit, or I could just say "We are a church" and we don't have to pay taxes. There must be a catch to this. What if anything do churches have to do to not be picked on by IRS? Is there any rule against atheists declaring themselves churches, or all us scoundrels would do so, don't you think?
I am missing something here. Besides God, that is.
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Random, you could just join a Unitarian church.
I’ve only visited one Unitarian church, and that was many years ago. After church, there was a coffee time to meet each other.
I discussed the church with a guy at the reception. He said that a large variety of people who attended that church. Some almost trinitarian, some atheists. All were welcome.
I asked. “If I went over to TCU and organized a mixed fraternity, could that substitute for church for you ?” He said, “Yes, depending on the mission of the fraternity.”
Admitted, that is only one sample.
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Chas makes a good point.
There are a whole lot of churches out there that are quite ambivalent to belief in God. 🙂
I knew someone in a Unitarian church who finally left because she began to believe in some kind of a God. Unitarians are primarily a (liberal) cultural/political fellowship in my opinion.
So there you go.
I mean, why reinvent the wheel? 😉
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Random Name: I don’t know about the tax question, but I sure would HATE to see you administering Last Rites to one of your parishioners.
You will need to work real hard on the “encouragement and hope” angle in your Last Rites, if you get my drift.
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Cheryl,
My sister and brother-in-law have an old noisy dishwasher and they consider the sound of the running dishwasher a “happy noise.” It’s a comforting feeling, I guess, to know that the kitchen is clean and kitchen work is done for the day, and the running dishwasher just emphasizes that feeling.
🙂
And for those who care, the secrets to maximizing the effectiveness of the dishwasher have all been alluded to in other posts from other people. Jet Dry is a given. I think most people use that these days. Powdered detergent is another one. I buy Finish brand powdered detergent at Smart and Final for less than $4 for a big box. Much cheaper than the liquid Cascade I used to use that didn’t even clean my dishes. Finish is the company that makes Jet Dry too and they’re now considered by dishwasher manufacturers to be the gold standard for dishwasher products. They’ve replace Cascade for that honor. But the most effective thing I learned from my dishwasher repairman is how to put back the phosphates the environmentalists took out. Once they took them out of the detergent, no one’s dishes were getting clean unless they were pretty much completely pre-washed beforehand–which makes the dishwasher redundant as far as I can tell. But I now buy boxes of another product made by Finish called Glass Magic. I get it online from Amazon because it isn’t sold in regular stores. Basically it’s just a box of phosphates. It’s expensive. Almost $10 for a small box. But even though it says to use 1/2 cup (or is it 1/4 cup, I forget) per load, I only use about a tablespoon and that’s enough. A box lasts about a month. The only problem with the Glass Magic is that in some boxes, the powder is all clumped together so it doesn’t pour out. But I just tear open the box and put it into a Tupperware container and then spoon it into the dishwasher before I turn it on. Not only does it get my dishes sparkly clean, but the inside of my dishwasher was full of hard water stains and my filter needed cleaning about once a week before I started using this product. Now the inside of my dishwasher shines and the filter rarely needs cleaning.
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I’m thinking for comforting words to the dying Random could say something like, “Well, now you won’t have to deal with any more elections.”
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Ree, thanks for the tip about Glass Magic – definitely going to look into that! 🙂
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See, Ree, you’ve just pointed out why Scottish people would rather wash dishes by hand. Ten dollars a month just for one element of the dishwasher (not counting the detergent or JetDry, let alone buying and servicing the thing in the first place). I prefer the three dollar jug of detergent that lasts several months. (Although I must admit I do like it when Hubby washes a load of dishes and I don’t have to, which he does two or three times a week.)
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Chas: Random, you could just join a Unitarian church.
My wife and I were married in a Unitarian church. As unchurchy as they are, they are too churchy for me. Some of the people in my group have been Unitarians. Humans are restless, lonely creatures. Religionists constantly form new denomintions and new religions. Columbus saild across the ocean. Pioneers traveled across the plains to California. Humans landed on the moon, and are working on a Mars trip, after sending robots. NASA is working on a “1000 year star ship voyage” plan where humans will travel to other stars, either by suspended animation or in several generations.
No doubt, if we find intelligent creatures, we will seek to convert them to our religions, or they will seek to convert us to whatever strange idols they worship. And some of them would worship Christ and some of us would worship Beezlebub. Wait! What is that strange sound outside? What is that big ship landing next to the chicken coop? Oh, my gosth, are those giant chickens emerging? Quick, I better rush down and kneel before my chickens, to demonstrate I worship their gods!
It’s too late . . . I see a giant beak descending on me! Call the naval growler station on Whidbey Island!Send fighter planes!
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Would ya’ll email me dishwasher makes and model numbers? I’m looking for new appliances, and would like to know what to steer clear of, as well as what I should look at.
jpunderw at yahoo dot com
We’ve put off getting new ones since it’s so hard to find anything that will realiably do the job you bought it for.
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Drill Random Name: I don’t know about the tax question, but I sure would HATE to see you administering Last Rites to one of your parishioners.
I am hiding in my basement with my laptop as the house shudders grom giant beaks pounding at it. Drill, I need you to come quick and administer Last Rites to me.
Serious question to all: Have you ever seen a humn being die? What lesson did you draw from this experience?
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from</B< giant beaks. "Grom" is a word from the giant chicken language. I think it translates as PECK THE UGLY GIANT MAMMAL TO DEATH!!!
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In between the silliness, the question is serious. Have you seen a human being die?
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Random, I saw my mother die.
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Speaking of rain (OK, much earlier in the thread):
WHY DOES MY INTERNET GO OUT EVERY TIME IT RAINS?!!!
Alright, I’ll quit ranting, but whenever we get rain in anything more than a miniscule amount, we get some white noise over our phone (land line), and we lose our internet service (which is provided through our phone company), and nobody can seem to figure out why it happens.
We call our service provider, and after spending about 10 minutes going through the memo, punching numbers into the phone for where we want to be directed to, we finally get a live person who is sitting behind a desk in a different state (probably looking out a sunny window) who has no clue what to do.
I wouldn’t mind so much — we have cell phones we can use, and it doesn’t hurt to take a break from the internet from time to time — but when we’re paying over $100 per month for our land line/internet bundle, it frustrates me that our service is so spotty or completely out, sometimes for DAYS at a time, whenever it rains.
Let’s see if I can get this posted before internet goes out again… 😦
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Will wonders never cease…I got that posted!
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Testing.
I’ve tried a couple times to post a comment about dishwashers, but for some reason they’re not going through…
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Okay, trying again (please forgive me if about three of the same comment come through):
Regarding dishwashers: there was one built in when we moved to our present home. I don’t remember which brand it was, but it never worked very well. We didn’t use it often, as we didn’t have many dishes to wash in those days, being childless. The few times we did use it, it would almost always leak on the floor. When our family grew considerably, my husband just tore the dishwasher out from under the countertop and built in shelves, which have served us much better than that dishwasher ever did. 😉
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I quit!
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Random, I’ve never seen anyone die. However, I was with two of my friends on the days of their deaths, having left a few hours before they succumbed to cancer.
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I once witnessed an accident where the driver of one vehicle had a heart attack and died, causing the accident. I saw him slumped over the steering wheel, left there whild the surviors were helped. I haunted me for a long time. My biggest fear was finding my father dead. Thankfully that duty fell to my stepmother. I will always appreciate her from shielding me from that.
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Random
I walked out of the room seconds before my father died, and back in seconds later when my wife and cousin called me to come in, so I wasn’t there at the actual moment of death. I was present in the room when my wife’s grandmothere died.
In both cases, it was just a gradual stopping and not being there.
Followed by a feeling of – now what? There’s no emergency, no alarms to be rung, the death watch is over.
Both felt profoundly eerie, and the images seared into my mind three years later.
My mother had passed about 45 minutes before I could get to the nursing home. So, it was a different, less eerie, feeling as we waited by her bedside for the necessary business side of death – paperwork, undertakers, certificates – to kick in.
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6 Arrows,
I had the same problem with my Verizon internet and phone. I called about it several times, only to be told their equipment showed everything was fine, and the problem must be in the house. I checked everything, the line, connections, jacks, you name it. I finally got so frustrated with them I called them and told them I wanted to cancel my inernet and phone because I was sick of it and was going elsewhere. They finally sent someone out and the problem was a bad connection at the pole. When the line got wet, this loose connection allowed water thru which disrupted my service. They fixed it and I haven’t had a problem since. You should call your provider and tell them there’s a problem, fix it or else you’ll go elsewhere. They seem to require this motivation for some reason. 🙂
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I’ve never seen anyone die, but last year, on the day after Thanksgiving, my sister watched her terminally ill boyfriend? common law husband? partner? (whatever the best term is for a guy she’d been living with for ten years), shoot himself in the chest after a long battle with cancer that he would have succumbed to within weeks or months. She was in the living room, and he stepped out on the front porch. It was moments between the time she looked and realized what he was about to do and the moment it was all over. Apparently he looked her in the eye with a look that seemed to be asking for forgiveness or understanding or something. Thankfully, his home-care nurse was there at the time too, so she was able to tend to things in the immediate aftermath. But it was horrific. And this was a guy who, just a couple of weeks earlier, was telling me on the phone (they live on the other coast) that he believes that we’re all appointed a time to die and there was nothing we could do about it.
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Ree,, I am not excusing the man who shot himself. I have never experienced the pain of cancer, but I can tell you that my father had the highest pain tolerance of anyone I know of (even his doctor’s said so because of the stage the cancer was in when he finally sought treatment). My father begged me to give him something for the pain.
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Thank you for the phone/internet info, AJ. And I see one of my dishwasher posts has shown up now!
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Ree, that must have been horrible for your sister to be there when the man committed suicide.
I did not know this until very recently, but one of my great-grandfathers committed suicide because of the tremendous pain he was in due to cancer. My grandmother, probably in her late teens or early twenties at the time, was the one who found her dad’s body, where he’d hung himself in the barn.
My grandmother lived to the age of 91, and I never once heard her speak of that. Must have been the old stoic German in her or something.
I never knew that there had been any cancer or suicide on that side of the family until I found this out just months ago.
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Thank you to the people who answered my serious question about seeing someone die. We live in a time when people live longer than they used to, and the actual event of dying is more often removed from casual view and handed over to specialists (such as doctors, nurses, and EMTs). My father died in a hospital. My religious sister cared for my mother, who had been in an Alzheimer’s haze for years, until my mother died.
When I was about 20 years old, I was walking through a mall in Los Angeles. I came upon two EMTs trying to revive a woman on the floor, attempting to restart her heart with a defibrillator. Her husband was standing nearby with a shocked, disbelieving expression on his face. I was among a group of rather voyeuristic people standing and staring. After they emergency workers had several times tried to rescusitate several times, they told her husband that there was nothing more they could do. I thought it was pointless and in bad taste to stand around staring, so I moved on.
Although that was almost 50 years ago, that scene is still vivid in my mind. I don’t know if they taught CPR classes in about 1964 or so, but at some point or other both my wife and I began to take such classes. I always feel stupid and awkward when I take such classes, but I know I would feel much worse if I came upon a situation calling for interaction and I had no idea what to do. My continued motivation to be prepared is the main result for me of actually seeing someone die.
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OK, now I will continue to be silly. As you probably guessed, the giant chickens from outerspace bent their beaks trying to get at me, so I am no longer in danger. At least, until the chickens land again, bringing artificial nitrogen-propelled beakhammers. Maybe I can convince my chickens to intervene on my behalf, though perhaps the space chickens will not understand earth chicken clucking dialect.
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Although your faith seems fairly strong, and while it is not my intention to shake it, the possibility always exists that I might undermine it, especially when I posts links such as http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49074598/ns/technology_and_science-science/ where bogus scientists erroneously claim that science makes God unnecessary. Perhaps 1 out of 10,000 people might click that link and perhaps 1 out of 10,000 people who click the link might actually read it, and perhaps 1 out of 10,000 of those people (I think we are talking about a trillion now but I don’t have enough fingers to count that high), might actually lose their faith as a result.
I don’t want to be responsible for anyone here losing his or her faith. Perhaps we should set up an atheists anonymous or doubters anonymous network. One person would post a phone number or email or twitter feed where they could be contacted by a distressed person saying, “I read a message by Random and I am about to lose my faith.” Drill? Do you want to leap into the breach? If you post a phone number where people facing crises of faith can reach you, I promise to avert my eyes and not read the number.
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I don’t think the following should shake anyone’s faith in the slightest. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49075679/ns/technology_and_science-the_new_york_times/
Anyway, everyone knows that Jesus wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.
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Random,
Yeah, I’ve seen the Jesus had a wife stuff earlier. I wasn’t really impressed.
But I will now take my cue from the religons of peace. They’ve provided the model for responding to insults. You and the NYT have insulted my religon. Rioting begins in 30 minutes and violent mass demonstrations, and I will issue a fatwha or whatever you call it on your head and the NYT within the hour. Now see what you’ve done? I’d expect officers/brownshirts at your door late tonight, who will whisk you away for questioning. I will also demand that the govt remove this hate speech of yours from the internet and newspapers everywhere.
But then again, I’m actually civilized, so maybe not. Perhaps the threat of future action will be enough to stop your and the NYT’s nonsense. I may ask the Pope to charge you with crimes in Italy, where you’ll be convicted in absentia. Well, as long as he takes calls from non-Catholics that is.
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I miss not being able to get here at school. I used to read a little during my planning period and lunch. But now I have to wait until I get home. So I am catching up from yesterday.
Congrats on the anniversary, Tychicus.
Mumsee said: I would never stoop to grabbing a number. Perhaps because I never know what number we are on. Perhaps because I am more mature than that.
Turning fifty five sometimes does that. Makes one a little more mature, that is. But guys take a little longer. And since the counter shows the current count as 66, I guess I can claim 67. But I have nothing of significance to go with that number.
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Thank you, AJ. I am still being serious. The path is erratic. However, I think most people, religious and irreligious, are becoming more peaceful. In a past life, I insulted people at worldmagblog and people at worldmagblog insulted me.
So far I have not insulted many people at wanderersviews and hardly anybody has insulted me. Does that mean that it is time for . . . for you know what? Get ready folks, He’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain When He Comes. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-izXeiz0jJc
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Yes, two people.
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Is that how many people I have insulted?
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On the other hand . . .
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Just a note, AJ, to thank you for the “Favorite Scripture” post you put up today. I should have gone to that thread when I first came here today instead of ranting all over the place on this one first. Anyway, the scripture thread was very nice and soothing to read and helped settle me down. 😉
Here’s a positive report from me: I started giving two of my middle kids piano lessons again yesterday after taking the summer off. I had an epiphany a couple weeks ago about teaching them in a different way than I had before as far as lesson scheduling goes. Whereas I’ve always scheduled my kids’ piano lessons the way other teachers frequently do (one lesson a week), now I’m giving them five mini-lessons per week. Each day’s lesson introduces a different musical component; for example, technique earlier in the week, method-book work a little later, supplementary repertoire latest in the week, etc. They practice each piece or exercise for one week (or longer, if needed) from the assigned date, but most every day (except Saturday, and Sunday–a day on which I don’t expect them to practice) they quite likely finish something and get to start something new. That way there’s a lot of variety day by day, but there isn’t the matter of getting a whole bunch of unfamiliar stuff all on one day if they had prepared the previous week’s music well. And the lessons themselves don’t last a long time, either, like they did when I only sat down with them once a week.
Plus, this week, the first week we’re trying it this way, the kids get to ease back into piano slowly, yesterday only playing out of one or two books, and today adding an extra one or two, and so on. So far, it seems to be going quite well, so I’m hoping that will continue. 🙂
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Random, I clicked on the link, but as I was clicking, I noticed that the source was MSNBC. Since I know their basic philosophy, I immediately hit the back arrow.
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6 Arrows, that sounds like a really good way to teach the piano lessons.
Random, I was with some other family members in the hospital room when my mother died. It was a very sweet parting with us holding her hands and telling her that we loved her. She quietly departed to be with Jesus.
I was with my mother right outside the ICU room when my father died. The medical crew removed us from the room as they were trying to revive him. They had called for us to come while we were having lunch in the hospital cafeteria. So we were in with him and then they made us leave. I wish we could have stayed in the room. He’d been afflicted with a major stroke. My mother was really upset to see they had a fan blowing on him to cool him down because he had a brain fever. I had a more peaceful feeling about when my mother died as compared to when my father died. But one thing that was good was that even though the nurses were not getting any response from my father after the stroke, at one point I told him to wiggle his big toe if he could hear me. I watched for what seemed a minute or two and sure enough his toe wiggled. Then I knew he could hear me say “I love you.”
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Oh Janice what a sweet memory.
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Random,
Meh, big deal. All cult leaders claim special access to God and some type of Messianic complex. If they can’t claim some divine gift they’ve got nothing, they’d just be considered a nut. But false prophets will rise and fall as they are doomed to do. The Bible warns about this type of thing. He ain’t the first, and I doubt he’ll be the last. Just decline the cool-aid if they offer it. Just to be safe.
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A J, I want to thank you again for starting this blog. The prayer requests thread was a very good idea, and you are doing a great job of running the site. Even though I am a “newcomer”, I would have really missed the interaction with the “regulars” if you had not created this site.
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Amen. What Ricky said. Maybe MIM should make AJ a scepter.
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Ditto Ricky and Kevin.
BTW, thank you to all who answered the QoD yesterday about your K-12 education. I’m always interested in education-related issues as I’ve been a student and a teacher in a variety of different education settings. I find it interesting, especially now as a homeschool mom, to study the impact folks’ educational backgrounds may have had on their adult lives.
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You’re welcome.
😳
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Chas: Random, I clicked on the link, but as I was clicking, I noticed that the source was MSNBC. Since I know their basic philosophy, I immediately hit the back arrow.
Close call. I am glad you escaped.
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I was braver than Chas. I clicked on the link and read the article. It seemed to me to completely miss the point in regard to what a worldview must need explain. It seems to assume that God is just proposed as a hypothesis to explain mysterious physical processes as opposed toHim being presuppositionally necessary to even begin to explain knowledge itself. It just misses the point on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin to engage it.
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I read it too. I readily admit I’m not a very deep thinker, but what struck me was that just because you can explain how everything works in physical terms, that in no way proves that there is no God. The most you could say is that you don’t need “the God of the gap” to explain how the universe works. That is a far cry from proving there is no God.
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Ree reminded me of the glass magic, I’ve been lax at using that in my dishwasher. I typically don’t run the dishwasher often, maybe 1-2 times a week, but again, I’m hooked on that particular appliance.
Just saw the last NCIS from this past season, the new one starts next week. Hope they all survive … ???
I was in the room when my aunt died following a stroke maybe 10-12 years ago, it was a difficult, sad, slow — and breathtaking, if that’s the right word — experience. I remember quietly, almost under my breath, saying the Lord’s Prayer. She was a believer which made it easier for me, but most of her family who also were there were not, so I think in that sense it was harder on them.
Creepy story in our paper coming out tomorrow (on the website tonight) based on some shocking testimony that was given in a trial being covered by our cop reporter.
The trial is for a local man who is charged with killing his wife — they owned a local restaurant together — but the wife’s body was never found.
Turns out he cooked the body at the restaurant and then disposed of whatever was left. Our reporter covering the case has known this little tidbit for a while, but he never was able to get any of the authorities to go on the record with it so he couldn’t ever write about it before.
At the trial today they played the confession tape in which the defendant lays it all out (the tape was made at the hospital — the defendant had leaped off one of our local cliffs in a suicide attempt as police were getting closer to arresting him, but he somehow survived).
Stranger than fiction, I’ll tell you.
We’ve been the main news outlet covering the case for a couple years since it all happened, but I’m guessing it will now make it onto a lot of the national news sites.
I drive by the restaurant every day on my way home from work (it’s now under new ownership, obviously). I’m guessing this really will taint that building forever.
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Brave Ree. I am sure you can engage it on thousands of levels, and undoubtedly will do so. I can’t explain it to you how you are wrong and you can’t explain it to me, no matter how diligently you strive to do so. It all boils down to: We have no free will. For whatever mysterious purposes it pleases (the imaginary God you so fervently imagine) to do so, He created me unable to believe in Him. The universe exists. We are aware of its existence. In my case, that is pretty cool I live on a beautiful five acres with a wonderful wife and five cute chickens. I have a wonderful daughter and a wonderful daughter-out-of-law and a wonderful non-genetic grandchild. However for people who live in Somalia or Darfur or Ivory Coast, or wherever miserable place you want to choose, the universe is not so wonderful. If very sweet (if deluded) people such as yourself fail in your effort to turn back Washington state’s perfectly reasonable attempt to let same-sex people marry each other, they will have a wonderful wedding. I regret that you would not be invited, but you can go to Kim’s wedding. We all have to suffer some disappointments in life. And in the long run, we all die. Then there is nothing. Big O.
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Wow, Donna, that’s unbelievable! How awful. I hope they don’t have any kids.
Kevin, you’re right about that. Early in the scientific revolution, the scientists believed the secrets of the natural world were comprehensible because of the nature of God and of man. God made an orderly and majestic universe and revealed His attributes to man through nature and the conscience. He made man a creature who could discover truth because he was able to perceive reality through the senses, through reason, and through emotion. Some later scientists somehow turned that on its head and decided that, because they could understand some things about nature, that must mean that there is no God. How in the world they can think that follows, I’ll never know.
I have a cartoon on a bulletin board in my kitchen that I’ve kept for about twenty years now. It has one hand puppet saying to another hand puppet, “Sometimes I wonder if there really is a hand.” That’s exactly the mindset of the naturalist.
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Donna, we had a similar story in the very sweet town near us on our island. There are a lot of peaceful, optimistic elderly hippies who live here. They can’t imagine anybody would be bad. A nice couple — both very educated and distinguished scientists — decided to settle down and start a pizza restaurant. He fell in love with someone else. He (allegedly) murdered his wife. The sheriff’s dept had no trouble finding the body. In the meantime, someone else bought the pizza restaurant and everybody else seems to be pretending everything is wonderful in our cloud cuckoo land. There is evil. It doesn’t come from God or the devil. It comes because we evolved to be a mixture of good and evil because we are the meanest ********* on the planet but also sweet kind animals at the same time. It’s no accident — well, it’s completely an accident — that we are at the top of the food chain. God won’t call us (or at least believers) to Heaven. We will destroy ourselves. A bombs, engineered viruses, global warming, take your pick. Sweet dreams. We’re toast. Cheerful despair is what my business card says.
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If we’re just matter in motion, Random, there is no evil. There’s just what is.
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It is what it is. Or isn’t. If it’s moving, make sure you lead. If it’s still, step on it.
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