45 thoughts on “Rants and Raves 12-15-12”

  1. 😦 Everyone seems to be sleeping in today.
    🙂 It was an eventful day yesterday, but a very nice party last night.
    😦 Went to visit a fellow Lion at the rehab center after the meeting yesterday.. She isn’t doing well at all.
    🙂 I thought of several rants I was going to mention when R&R came up this week. But i cant remember any. Must not have been improtant after all.

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  3. Christmas is a-coming and I don’t have anything for Elvera. She may not get a present this year. Absolutely nothing to get her.
    No perfume. No Jewelry, No store gift cards (“If you give me a gift card to Belk, I just buy stuff. But if I buy it with my credit card, I get points, so just let me buy what I want”.)

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  5. 😦 Missed a Christmas party last night after having a rather long & (in some ways) trying day. Plus it was raining. I didn’t want to melt.

    🙂 😦 Today it’s off to the vet with the cat to get her staples out — then she’s free again. Also need to do a better check of the backyard fence line to try to figure out how the dogs got out night before last. Didn’t see anything real obvious yesterday.

    🙂 Glad the dogs got home OK despite being sprayed by a skunk. A friend reported to me on FB that she thinks she and her husband saw them several blocks away when they were walking their dogs at 6 a.m. She said they were trotting along the sidewalk and were “very well behaved,” staying together & on the sidewalk. Seems they were heading for home at that point. She made it sound like they were having a good time. That’s nice.

    🙂 Walking them on different routes through the neighborhood actually helps them to know their bearings if they do manage to get out. Another neighbor (who called me at 7:30 a.m. to say my dogs were out) told me as she was walking toward my house they ran ahead of her and bolted right up to the front porch. They were ready to come in, though the way they reeked I momentarily thought of saying, “No, not my dogs,” and shutting the door.

    😦 😦 😦 Yesterdays horrific school shooting tragedy. I can’t imagine what those families are going through after losing little ones like that. There’s just practically nothing you can really say as the horror and sadness of it all is still sinking in.

    We know God is in His heaven and is sovereign over all. But it’s hard sometimes to convey that without it sounding like a platitude to those who do not yet believe. … Perhaps one of those times to sit in silence, mourning with those who mourn.

    Our denomination has a church in Newtown, no word yet on the impacts there.

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  6. 😦 Another school shooting.

    😦 News media over doing the coverage of school shootings. Yes, these are tragic events, but do we really need constant interviews with people who don’t have any answers or need someplace quiet to mourn?

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  7. 😦 A post form a Facebook friend in New York says that an old school friend of his’ daughter was one of the school shooting victims. Now the tragedy has a name. Charlotte.

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  8. 🙂 Supper tonight!

    😦 No presents for hubby and me this year. (Due to paying for a water well)

    🙂 Hubby said if he seemed grumpy about no present, to remind him to go turn on the tap and watch the fresh clear water come out!

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  9. 😦 All ready to go to the vet. Cat carrier open and ready. But the cat has vanished somewhere in the house. Now I have to find a way to lure her out. I try to hide the carrier from her when I’m getting it opened and ready to load, but she saw it this time. 😦 Thus the vanishing act.

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  10. 😦 Dented the new (to us) mini van.

    😦 College football bowl games. 30 some odd, most of which I have never heard of. And only three on broadcast TV. I refuse to pay for TV, so ESPN will have one less viewer for the national championship.

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  12. 😦 Waiting for my sister to call for more information on a serious work accident her husband was in–I know almost nothing about it, and I’ve tried local hospitals, the police department, anywhere we can think of.

    🙂 Otherwise, things are going fairly well, staying on top of work, Christmas stuff, family stuff, etc. But it’s all rather overshadowed at the moment.

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  13. Finally reached my sister, and it is nowhere as serious as we feared. He’s in a lot of pain, will apparently be off work for a while, and may need surgery (it’s a question of whether it’s the type of injury that can be surgically fixed; they won’t know till Monday), but it’s not as serious as any of us feared.

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  16. Good to hear, Cheryl.

    KBells, I’ve kept the carrier in the living room since we’ve been back-and-forth to the vet ever since she got this would 3 weeks ago. Then I try (with the cat out of the room) to position it upright with the door open in an inconspicuous place, hoping she won’t notice. Unfortunately when I was engaged in the final step she wandered back in and that did it. But she forgot about it soon enough and I let her get comfortable again next to me, gave her a little catnip, then went in for the grab.

    Sutures are out, all’s well (but the vet said she had gained weight, which I’d been noticing — being confined indoors and with her feeder out again gave her lots of time to indulge and sleep).

    So far the dogs haven’t escaped again. My neighbor’s going to come over later to walk the fence with me, see if she sees anything. Weird. Unless somehow they pushed out the gate almost inadvertently if they were excited about something, I do need to better secure that anyway. And my neighbor told me all our (4) dogs were barking a lot for a short time the night mine went missing.

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  18. Donna, I had a problem with a dog when I lived in Falls Church. I had a chain link fince around my back yard. Another dog taught him to climb over the fence.
    I had to get rid of the dog. I hated to do it, but I couldn’t keep a dog I couldn’t contain.
    That was my last dog.

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  20. When I was a child, we had a dog who would climb the fence–we didn’t have him long. (He had other issues too.) Misten could get over this fence easily, if she ever realized it. It was built to contain a terrier, and if she go onto her hind legs against the lowest part of it, a very good portion of her would be over the fence. (She could hook her front legs over a taller fence in Nashville.) But she has never been inclined to try to escape–she’ll take advantage of an open gate if someone isn’t there telling her “wait,” but she’ll wait if you tell her to, and she has never tried to dig under or go over a fence. And she was seven when she moved here, not a puppy, and it simply has never occurred to her to try to escape. I did worry about that a little bit before I moved here, because I thought if she saw something exciting enough on the other side of the fence, she could jump against the fence and be over it without really every trying to be. And she could yet, but in a year she never has, and every year she gets older is a year she’s less likely to. (And she always wears her tags, and isn’t inclined to go far if she does get out–just to the next-door neighbor’s yard the two times she has gotten out the gate, since she likes the neighbor and she likes his dogs.)

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  21. My 2 dogs have never been ‘escape artists,’ being very content with their yard and house.

    They’re not climbers so I’ve ruled that out (and my wood fences are TALL).

    Talking more with my neighbor, we’re more inclined to think “maybe” (because her dogs and mine were barking at one point around 3 a.m., she thinks) something or someone was on my driveway and in their excitement my dogs wound up pushing the rather weak gate planks aside and just pushed through what would still be a very narrow opening. I have barricades there now.

    The only other time they got out was during a wind storm that blew open that same gate. Too much temptation for them to resist.

    And mine always wear tags also, my neighbor called the number on the tag first (I didn’t get up fast enough to grab the phone at 7:30 a.m. on a Friday morning while on vacation). My address is on the tags, too, but I think she just figured out they might be mine (she’s seen them a few times through the years on walks) and she began calling them and walking in my direction. The dogs took it from there and raced up to the porch.

    It was time for breakfast, after all, and they were awfully thirsty … 😉

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  22. So I got the dogs in the Jeep to get ready to go to the dog park but had to dash back up to the house for my purse which I’d forgotten.

    When I looked down at the curb, there was Annie (this was her first day back out), standing on her hind legs trying to see into the window where the dogs were … She finally jumped onto the hood then the roof, peering down through the windshield at the dogs. What a dufus cat.

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  23. Chasey is normally dumb as a sack of rocks but when it comes to getting out to he fence she’s Houdini but she wasn’t as bad as the little stray we tried to adopt. We got her fixed and got her her shots but we come not contain her. One day she disappeared.

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  24. Some dogs really are escape artists, we’ve had a few as I was growing up — dogs that would, in a flash, dart out of a crack in the door faster than you could imagine.

    My 2 now have actually been the easiest dogs (all the way around) that I’ve ever had. No worries, no problems. (Except for Tess’ annoyance with other dogs & the usual health things that can be very costly, but not a lot of those compared to past dogs.)

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  26. 🙂 A nice date with my husband this morning — Christmas shopping and lunch out.

    🙂 Found some good gifts for each of the kids.

    🙂 Having kids to come home to, hug, and share the rest of the day with.

    🙂 No rants. Anything I could complain about pales in comparison to yesterday’s tragedy in Connecticut. Indeed, there is no comparison whatsoever.

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  27. 🙂 Fake-fur, red-lined reindeer coats. For my friends’ first 2 granddaughters. 🙂 Eeeee. They were bought and wrapped today, but I still need to get them shipped to NY on Monday.

    Babies. 🙂

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  29. 😦 I agree with 6 Arrows about no other rant being able to compare to what happened here in Connecticut.

    😦 But I have a rant anyway…The people on Facebook who are vehemently anti-gun, referring to those of us who believe in responsible gun ownership as “ignorant”, “idiots”, etc.

    🙂 My Chrissy “took care of” me yesterday, when I was having a bad day. She stepped in to help by making dinner & helping a lot with Forrest.

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  31. I have been thinking of those ranters and my own stance on weapons. I enjoy going out once in a while to see if I can hit a target with my bow and arrows. I enjoy going out once in a while to see if I can hit a target with my pistol. I am not a hunter and I am not a shooter of people. It is just something quick and easy that I can do to get my mind focused on something other than what I always do. It is entertainment and sport mixed together. It has nothing to do with killing. Of course, I could pull out a tennis racquet, drive five miles, and play on some concrete without a net. But this is much quicker. When not in use, my gun goes back into the very strong gun safe which my husband often asks me to open because it is difficult to do. The people who believe in guns for protection would call me crazy but then I have children in my house who well might become unstable.

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  32. 😦 Cowboy got out of the yard again this morning, sometime between my getting up at 7 a.m. to open the doggie door for everyone (cat pushed her way in front of the dogs to pop outside first!) and when I got out of the shower maybe 20 minutes later and was getting ready to feed the dogs.

    Tess showed up in the kitchen for breakfast. But no Cowboy. Anywhere.

    So I quickly got dressed and began cruising the neighborhood; I was driving slowly on a 2nd pass along my own street when a man driving the other direction slowed down as we passed & asked if I was looking for a dog. He said a dog just made a left at the corner and was headed east.

    Cowboy was up on someone’s front porch, sniffing around.

    So he’s back home now and I think it may have been that missing section of fence plank that is the escape route — I thought it was too small, but maybe not.

    Wondering if maybe the best way to find the breach was to let Cowboy “show” me, I let him out after he ate and just sort of hung around to see where he’d go in the backyard. He seemed to immediately go up to that area along the back fence.

    So for now, they’ll be shut inside while I’m at church; I’ll deal more with it when I get home. My neighbors yesterday said they had some wood I could use to pound over that particular hole.

    But meanwhile, Cowboy’s discovered the joys of being a ruffian street dog. I’ll have to keep an eye on him now that he’s got a taste of freedom after living here nearly, what, 5 years now? 😦

    Interesting that Tess didn’t go with him this time. Good Tess.

    Karen, hope you’re having a better day today — blessings to Chrissy, what a good daughter. 🙂

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  35. Elvera made sausage balls to take for the SS department. She took them into the Dept meeting room before going to church.
    She forgot that there is department that meets there during the early service.
    There were two sausage balls left when we got there.

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  37. 🙂 Thanks to a kind & handy neighbor with a power drill and plank of wood, Cowboy’s underground-railroad fence escape route is now closed for business.

    🙂 😦 As communion was being passed today, the pianist played a solo that included Away in a Manger. Behind us, a little girl began softly singing along, it was such a sweet, sweet sound.

    But then I couldn’t help but think of the families who lost their babies just about her age on Friday. 😦

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  39. 🙂 We attended the Christmas concert at our church tomingh. Very good.
    Someone, I think KarenO once asked apout raising hands in praise during worship. Ours is the only church where I have seen that done. But many women do. Mostly women, very seldom a man. But they do here.
    Several occasions for it tonight.

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  40. I have mentioned before about the importance of audio-visual in modern churches. The A-V man is very important and close coordination is required.
    In the sermons, but especially in presentations like the one tonight.

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  41. Our church used to be audio-visual savvy, but has chosen to move in the opposite direction (no screens, anyway, though we do have to use microphones).

    Counter-intuitive, I suppose, in today’s church culture. But it suits me. 🙂

    And I think when once the question was raised to a guest speaker about raising hands in worship, he said being Presbyterians, we’d all have to agree exactly when to raise our hands so we could do it in good church order, in unison. 😉

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  42. Donna (37), Away in a Manger was one of the songs in the Sunday School Christmas service today at our church. Children from grades 1-6 stood up at the front and sang the first two verses, then we, the congregation, joined in on verse 3. I was in tears a lot of the service seeing all those young children up at the front and thinking of the children who lost their lives in Connecticut two days ago, but that particular hymn was the hardest for me to sing along with, with these words:

    Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask you to stay
    Close by me forever and love me I pray.
    Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care,
    And take us to heaven to be with Thee there.

    It’s just so hard to think of those sweet little ones. 😦

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  44. Living as I do, in the adjoining county to a lot of survivalists/preppers, I am taking it with a huge grain of salt. But….what is this about him spending hours alone with violent video games???

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  45. Our thirteen year old used to be the A-V guy at our church. Now he is fourteen so our fourteen year old is often the A-V guy at our church. But I would not say he was connected. Other folk put together what they wanted him to push buttons for and when.

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