60 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-24-12”

  2. Just popping in to let you know that I am going to have to go on blog detox for a few days. I have two books I really have to read and since they are more technical in nature I have procrasitnated. (I went all the way through grad school listening and taking notes-never cracked a textbook unless it was to find some information and quickly close it again).
    I am reading Shift by Gary Keller on the shifting real estate market and I also have to read the Millionaire Real Estate Agent (which comes with MREA manuals that I also need to go through to figure out exactly what the next step of my job is).

    The joke is that Keller-Williams is a education and training company that happens to sell real estate on the side. I am beginning to believe them!

    The only way I can get this done is to eliminate all my guilty pleasures like the blog and Facebook until I get it finished.

    Carry on.

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  3. Have fun, Kim 🙂

    We’re snowed in today – guess I’ll be texting my co-staff and letting them know I won’t make it in to work today. I’m sure glad we hired another staffer to man the front desk!

    It’s incredibly beautiful outside with a foot of fresh snow!

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  4. Sounds gorgeous, Kare2012. No snow here, but my house is sure cold, I’m shivering. I have a sweatshirt on but will need to double wrap myself in a blanket here, too.

    I try never to turn the heater on until November, the high gas bills can get to be a real downer through the winter months — and that’s in L.A. But I have a 1920s house that is freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer.

    And I see that we did get some early snow in our mountains to the northeast of us here in “sunny” Cali, however.

    Today’s the teeth cleaning day for the cat. Oh, she’s gonna love that. 😦 Another fun ride to the vet’s in her little carrier box.

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  6. Haha, Donna J, this 60 degrees is tough eh? We are such cold wimps here. I had to put socks on today. Socks! I always forget what a great little invention those are. My son in-law sent some great pics of knee deep snow at June Lake. Think I’ll make some tea 😉

    Kare2012, where do you live that you get snowed in, but your co-workers do not? Just curious. When I read your post I pictured your front desk staffer living at the office. Enjoy your snow day.
    Adios

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  7. We’ll miss you Kim, drop in occasionally to say “Hi”.
    You say you went through grad school listening & taking notes, not reading.
    A few days ago, I mentioned Jesse Schreiter, the smartest man I ever knew.
    He didn’t attend classes, he read the book. He could take a calculus book and learn calculus from it. He didn’t need classes.
    Makes sense.
    People have different ways of learning.
    I need to do it to learn.
    i.e. You can’t learn math without working problems.
    I learned the Bible more from teaching it, than my students ever did.

    Re: the deer crossing lady. I never imagined that it could be a hoax. Turns out, it wasn’t. But in my eighty two years, I’m still a bit naive.

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  9. We live an hour’s drive out of town and my co-workers are in town. It takes a while for the road crews to get to our road, but we have to wait for a neighbour to come and plow out our yard – I don’t think I could even back the Jeep out of the garage . We have over a foot of wet heavy fun (as my hubby calls snow) and it’s still coming down!

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  10. OK, I’m now wrapped in a faux fur-lined plaid throw and have my sheepskin lined slippers on. 🙂 That’s much better.

    Maybe next time I can “text” in and say, wow, strangest thing, it’s snowing, but just at my house. It’s piling right up high, right against my front porch. So I guess so I won’t be able to make it to work today. 🙂

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  11. Donna! 😀

    Hubby built a roaring fire in our wood-burning furnace and our house is warming up rapidly! I think I’ll keep adding wood until the house is toasty and then have soup for lunch and sit and watch the snow come down.

    Maybe I’ll even get to finish my Bible study book (today’s the last day of the study – guess I won’t be there either).

    If the wind dies down, I may even strap on my snowshoes and go for a hike and see what animal tracks are out there.

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  12. So do you get paid for “snow” days? Or do you have to take it as one of your vacation days? Or not get paid?

    Do you get a certain number of snow days you’re allowed to take each year? It’s rare any kind of weather event keeps us from work where I live, even when we get torrential rains on occasion and there is street flooding. And then it’s even more important for us to be working anyway, since it’s “news” that has to be covered.

    We had some real flooded streets and hard rains a few years ago — I didn’t go in that day but had to drive and slosh around with a camera phone, “covering” how messy everything was, how many cars were getting stranded in intersections.

    And I do remember a few rare times when we’ve had some sort of mushy hail stuff that falls & then accumulates briefly on the ground. The kids call it snow, but it’s not snow exactly. There is a specific weather term for it, though.

    But having visited colder climates through the years, there is nothing quite like getting up in the morning to see a fresh covering of snow outside.

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  13. No snow here – it’s warm enough I didn’t even need a jacket. Warm enough, even, that I didn’t wear sweats to bed last night as I had been recently. And that’s without having turned the heat on yet – since our furnace is broken.

    The furnace guy comes tomorrow to replace it. I spent a while last night trying to clean up the mess in that part of the basement so he has more room to work. (Cleaning up consists mostly in moving stuff around to pile it up more compactly. I didn’t have the energy for the kind of evaluate-and-throw-out-junk cleaning it really needs.)

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  14. After a week of sinusitis-related nausea, I’m finally on antibiotics and anti-nausea meds and starting to feel halfway decent. But a lot of smells still make me feel a bit queasy, and there seem to be smells everywhere. I’ve never had a sensitive sense of smell, but now I’m noticing them a lot more. I put a box of baking soda in my office, because there’s some smell that really bothers me. I had thought it was my herb tea, which I put in a file drawer to get it in a more enclosed space. But this morning the smell hit me – and nearly gagged me – because I even got to my (closed) office door. I’m thinking it’s some cleaner they use. Unfortuntely there seem to be odors everywhere, so I’m not sure requesting to work in another area temporarily will help any.

    Even flossing my teeth last night was difficult – the faint remnant of fragrance/taste on my hands, from washing them with liquid soap, bothered me when I had my fingers at my mouth. And everything in the bathroom seems to have a fragrance, however slight. At least I have always bought fragrance-free laundry detergent because of my husband’s and sons’ skin sensitivity, so I’m not assaulted by fragrance from my clothing.

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  15. Oh, Pauline, I feel your pain. Smells bother me as well.

    I just don’t get paid as I only work part time for an hourly wage. That’s okay, I may be able to snag a few hours working on our website from home.

    My husband made it to the end of the driveway and got stuck turning onto the road. He’s staying home to day too, but he has lots of time saved up, so he’ll still be paid.

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  17. Rain gutters! When it starts raining here in redwood country it usually blows. When it blows the redwood trees also drop their leaves. These leaves clog up the rain gutters. Then the rain gutters have to be cleaned out.

    I never had this problem in SoCal; we didn’t have either rain gutters or rain!

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  19. Ah, but you have the beautiful trees and that is worth it.

    We had snow yesterday, a bit left but mostly frozen rain covered everything.

    Had an incident with the poultry last night. Nobody died but a turkey appears almost dead. Working on that.

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  23. Believe me, Karen, I asked myself whether that was a possibility. Tubal ligations do come undone, I know. But my nausea is worst in the afternoon, not in the morning as it was with pregnancy. (And I don’t remember ever being sensitive to smells before.)

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  24. Pauline, my “morning sickness” was almost always in the late afternoon and evening, except with one (the one with whom I was the most sick), where the nausea and vomiting could and did strike any time of the day or night. Even in the middle of the night when I had been sleeping. 😦

    I was always sensitive to smells during pregnancy. I made the mistake of cooking and eating venison for the first time while I was in the early stages of my first pregnancy. The smell of the venison cooking was waaaayy too awful for me, but I tried eating it anyway. Regret! I have never been able to go anywhere near venison again. Good thing we don’t have any deer hunters in the family. 😉

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  27. I think of them as very tasty beef. Think of the best roast you’ve ever had and ramp it up. Of course, it helps if they were young animals and not old trophy ones. Those don’t taste very good.

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  28. So now that we’ve established that Pauline is most likely pregnant …. 😉

    Early Thanksgiving at Mumsee’s.

    I dropped the cat off for her teeth cleaning (and they need to check on one “suspicious” looking tooth, hope it’s not an extraction or other problem though).

    My regular vet is off on Wednesdays so one of the associates saw me and she was so tickled because my cat’s (full) name was Annie Oakley.

    She said her parents could never get her to read anything about humans when she was a kid, all she wanted to read were animal books. But when she discovered Annie Oakley and her horse, it finally provided the bridge. So then all she’d read were books about Annie Oakley and books about animals.

    Figures, she said, that she’d wind up where she did as a veterinarian. She and her husband lived in Sweden for a few years (they have twins) but recently came back to the states.

    Poor Annie girl was pretty scared (and she’s scared of very little). I felt guilty because her fears were pretty valid, to be honest. She didn’t know the half of what she was in for today. 😦 And I kind of missed not having her come out onto the front steps like she usually does, meowing, to greet me when I parked in front of the house.

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  31. What is going on in here??? Brushing our cat’s teeth now? What in the world? Okay, I admit, I have heard of it but have never ever done it or had it done to my poor little animals. Where is PETA when you need them?

    No, we don’t know what killed it, we don’t eat it.

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  33. Annie’s teeth are now officially clean. Vet called, no problems, the cat is now in recovery. 😉 I’ll pick her up later this afternoon. She’ll be all set for a new lizard/mouse/rat hunting season.

    My house is still really cold so I’m wrapped up again in a throw (over a sweatshirt) and I’m back in my slightly Cowboy-chewed sheepskin slippers (WITH socks under those).

    I’m this close to getting out my fingerless gloves. 🙂

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  34. I’m feeling quite sad for Annie right now. The dentist is bad enough for a human as 6 Arrows is quite aware of. At least we can say we have a problem if something goes wrong. All the cat can do is make that exagerated “Me–OUCH!” sound.

    Perhaps I should take our visiting Hissy Cat to the dentist and then he would not come back. He is the most obnoxious cat visitor we have ever known. He is always under my feet, and hisses, and scratches, and even has bit at me, although he did not break the skin, all because I did not bring a treat out for him. He can be quite affectionate, but that does not make up for the bad behaviors. Yes, a trip to the cat dentist might solve not only his dirty teeth problem, but also the hissy fits at the doorway.

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  35. Janice, there was a family I used to babysit for when I was a young, single woman who had a cat who behaved like your “visiting Hissy Cat”. The cat and I mostly tried to stay out of each other’s way, so I never did find out if it had any affectionate tendencies. I think the family said the cat acted the same way with them as it did with me, too.

    Update on the dental front: the child needing dental work done got it all taken care of yesterday and is good to go. And the bill was approximately $9 less than I was expecting, as we had a credit from an earlier overpayment that I had forgotten about. Every little bit helps!

    My work is scheduled for November 14. The good news is that some of the work I’ll need done (about $80 worth after insurance) is not as high priority, so we can delay it until after we’ve paid our property taxes, the fund that got depleted to do the high-priority dental work.

    I didn’t think all of this would be coming down the pike the same year we had major roof damage that ate up extra funds we could have put toward other things (property taxes, dental work, you name it) but the Lord has shown his faithfulness, and I know He will continue to.

    Two days ago I decided to gather up all the loose change I could find around the house. I took the cash to the bank yesterday, and it totaled $58.91! The Lord always provides. 🙂

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  36. I’m glad Donna didn’t have a cat-astrophe with Annie’s teeth cleaning. And I see mumsee had some fowl language in her post. My, my, what’s this blog coming to?

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  39. Well, the internet allowed me on today! Still alive, although I have had my first experience with what Africa can do to one’s digestive system…

    Thank you for your prayer today, Janice, it is very much appreciated.

    Kare: Snow! Must you rub it in? Just kidding. They tell me it is getting cooler here – but I remain skeptical 🙂

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  40. I’ve heard of nasty cats and suppose we even had a couple as I was growing up, including an ill-tempered white cat who insisted on sleeping under cars that leaked oil. But the threshold of expectations for cats — when it came to affection and reasonableness — was always pretty low.

    The white cat simply vanished one day but she seemed not to like any of us very much anyway so she wasn’t mourned for a long time.

    My favorite was old Tom, a big, often battered, stray cat that was hanging around the property when we moved into our house.

    It took considerable wooing before he’d venture ever-so-briefly inside. He used to disappear for days on end sometimes and get into fights (this was before the spay-neuter era), but he’d always come back. He lived to be quite old and I always had a special fondness for him as he was my main childhood pet from the time I was maybe 9 years old on.

    But, yes, poor sweet Annie Oakley. She is a very sweet cat, I really have practically no complaints about her. She’s almost dog-like in some ways, I can’t remember having such a sweet, truly domesticated, affectionate cat.

    Annie’s ears will go down a bit (and she gets one of her you’re-really-irritating-me-now “looks”), but I’ve never seen her take a swipe at Tess who mercilessly harasses her at times, trying to “herd” her out of the kitchen (or at least into a corner) when it’s meal time.

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  44. Michelle, I have a question for you, if you’re around here. A while back (I think it was in the WorldMagBlog days) you mentioned a friend of yours, I believe, who had written about her knowledge of and/or experience with Mormonism. You provided a link to what she had written. I would be interested in looking again at what she had to say, if you know where I can find that information.

    Sorry if I’m being too vague.

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  45. You know, it’s interesting that when a person wants to compliment a cat, he says, “She’s a lot like a dog”–but never vice versa. So why don’t people just get dogs in the first place?

    🙂

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  48. The cat is home, she has stationed herself by the food which I cannot give her until 8 p.m. She has two shaved spots on her front legs which look kind of bad, but the fur will grow back.

    And for some reason they’ve sent me home with a virtual plethora of homeopathic and regular antibiotic type medicines, all of which need to be mixed and shot into her mouth at different times, on different rotating schedules. Sheesh.

    I’ve had animals with rather serious illnesses so I know my way around animal medicine (although giving it to a cat is harder than it is to a dog who eats anything wrapped in cheese or peanut butter).

    But this is strange because I’m sitting here with all these syringes and applicators, special “mixing” directions (with bottled water only), different bottles — after just a routine teeth cleaning.

    And all the cat wants is her stupid dinner already, she’s starved.

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  50. I know, mumsee, it really is pretty funny when you think of all the bacteria she probably ingests on her daily forays. They said not to let her out until morning, that she’d act a little “drunk” tonight, but she seems pretty normal to me.

    Sassy. Demanding. Annoyed because, per directions, I’m not feeding her.

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  51. While I’m waiting at the vet’s, I often glance at the signup sheet just see pet names, always a fascination for me. Today I spotted a “Buttons,” a “Lola” — and (my favorite), a “Pistol” (who was in for acupuncture).

    I also saw a few more Obama bumper stickers today, including on the car of one of the veterinary clients who was there at the same time I was — but I actually was surprised I didn’t see more Obama stickers, my vet is located in a heavily African-American community.

    Now the cat is crawling into a living room cabinet, one of her favorite exploratory spots. Honestly, she acts completely normal (for her).

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  52. “Pistol”. LOL, Donna. 🙂 That reminds me of my niece, whose dog is named “Bandit”. My mom one time forgot the name of the dog and called him “Bullet”. 😉

    Acupuncture? Really? 2nd Arrow worked for a vet for two years, and I don’t remember hearing anything about acupuncture for animals. It was a small town pet clinic, though, so maybe that’s more the thing in urban areas than rural. Still…what will they think of next?

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  55. The massage therapist in my office takes her dog to the chiropractor – says the dog walks straighter afterwards. And the low level laser course I took had an alternate stream for vets.

    We only take our pets in for their annual vaccinations which include a short check up.

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  56. Anyone ever try to give liquid medicine to a cat by putting a dropper in their mouth?

    Can’t be done.

    The cat clamps mouth shut as you prod the dropper trying to gain entry.

    Cat eventually totally freaks out, starts flipping all over the place, legs everywhere, flies out of your arms, sending the dropper onto the kitchen floor.

    Battle over.

    Cat 1, Human 0.

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  57. Sheesh, Donna–for a person who lives in a climate where the temperature doesn’t range more than about 20 degrees, you sure complain a lot about the weather. Weren’t you just complaining about the heat about 3 days ago?

    😉

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  58. Ree, Yes! Very perceptive!!

    The heat, the heat. Oh, don’t remind me. 😮 😮

    And since you mention it, we’re supposed to have an almost 80-degree day tomorrow.

    Life is tough.

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  59. We could use 80 degrees. The road has been ploughed (I really think that should be spelled plowed) but no ones driveways or yards have been plowed out yet. It could be fun getting out tomorrow morning.

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  60. 80 degrees sounds wonderful! Nice and cool.

    I have one of those hissy cat visitors too. She’s been visiting for about 7 years now. I guess since her original family has left the country, she has now officially been abandoned. She used to like me and be affectionate on her terms, but now she’s holding a grudge.

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