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Our Daily Thread 4-26-13

Good Morning!

It’s Finally Friday! 🙂

And on this day in 1607 the British established an American colony at Cape Henry, Virginia.

In 1865 John Wilkes Booth was killed by the U.S. Federal Cavalry.

In 1931 New York Yankee Lou Gehrig hit a home run but was called out for passing a runner.

In 1964 the Boston Celtics won their sixth consecutive NBA title. They would win 2 more before the streak would end.

And in 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred.

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Quote of the Day

“How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.”

William Shakespeare

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I don’t know why, but the older I get, the more I like country music.

Even this guy. Weird.

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Anyone have a QoD for us?

52 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 4-26-13”

  1. Good morning! QoD? Have you ever used the services of a maid or housekeeper? Do you have any stories to share about that?

    My parents had a maid at one point and for years they would find bits of broken plate in the stove. It seems the maid had broken a plate and wanted to hide it and being creative, she put the pieces into the corners and crevices of the stove..

    I used the services of someone I got through church before I had our son, while I was working. The whole family would come over for four hours a week to clean. They were from another country and there was some language difficulties. It helped when I left written instructions because I think their reading of English was better than the speaking. The only problem I had was that I had some knives that were expensive and not suppose to go in the dishwasher, but they did not know or understand that. Otherwise they made me feel very pampered. I did not have them long enough to take them for granted.

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  3. I used to have Leola. We did whatever Leola told us to do. I also had Marlowe, the Golden Retriever. Sometimes I would come home and find a note from Leola stating, “Bath that dog. He stinks”. I can’t tell you what I looked like 8 months pregnant in the driveway bathing a 110 pound dog because Leola said so. She would also lock him in the kitchen so he couldn’t smell up the rest of the clean house.
    Thankfully I brought BG home on a Thursday and Leola showed up on the following Wednesday. She took over and told me what to do.
    Leola never really moved anything around, but occassionaly she would decide something looked better somewhere else and she would move it…or she would decide to make the beds up differently.

    Drucilla helped my grandmother raise 12 children. When I was a child she lived in a house my father owned. He eventually gave her the deed, but sometimes we would stop by to see her. It was the most amazing thing. She treated him like the Crown Prince come home from war and he turned into a six year old little boy with all the yes ma’aming and no ma’aming and trying his best to please her and make her happy. Whatever she fed him for lunch on those days was the best food he had ever eaten. I will admit she made the best sweet tea I have ever had. Despite my Southerness, I do not make good tea.

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  4. Good morning everyone!
    It’s Friday! You know what that means?
    Thankfully, not much for me. I’ve had enough for this week.
    Already been to the Y. Lions and prayer watch later.
    Back yard needs cutting and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.

    I think “I saw the Light” is a Hank Williams song. I once heard Hank Jr. say that “Lovesick Blues” is the only song Hank sang that he didn’t write.

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  5. Kim’s story reminded me of a true story I think I’ve told before:

    Elvera has a cousin who lives in McCormick, SC. (He’s the one who organizes the family reunions every August.) When he married, he and his wife took a room in the house of a widowed lady. Her husband had been a prominent doctor in McCormick Co. And she had a large house. They had a baby and needed to move out for more room. But the lady gave them another room, same price. Than another boy. Same story. They raised four boys in that house. I don’t think she ever increased the rent. Then, eventually, the lady got frail and they took care of her as they would a mother.
    Then the lady died. In her will, she left the house to them. No surprise there. The surprise was that she had owned lots of land (some say about 100 acres, I don’t know, but several acres). Some of it had been drowned when they built Lake Strom Thurmond. So, they inherited several acres of undeveloped lake front property.
    By then, the boys were grown and gone. I don’t know what they did with it, but I like it when good things happen to good people.

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  6. Fun story, Chas.

    I’ve hired teenage girls from church to clean my house for the last seven years. Sometimes it’s worked well, most of the time my house looks better and the bathrooms are cleaned but we’d all be fired by Merry Maids.

    I’m not a good boss. I chat with the “employees,” mentor them and wave off some of the hard work when I’m too preoccupied to pay close attention. They’re supposed to give me time to write, which sometimes happens, but I’m often frustrated that I don’t ensure they’ve done a good job–particularly when I have company coming soon and have to spend hours preparing because the bathroom was done properly.

    My husband is not sympathetic–he thinks the fault is mine and he’s probably right.

    If the one I currently have ever moves on to a real job, I’ll probably just go with a service to get the work done and over with.

    Ha. She said.

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  8. Good morning. QoD: We’ve had Connie for 8 years now. She started off as a nanny full-time with Becca due to my my migraines. But, when Becca started school last year, she morphed into our house cleaner two days a week. She is my right hand man and helps me in so many ways. She has become like family to all of us. We love her and she loves us. She is an incredible blessing in our lives and I’m so grateful we found each other.

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  10. Chas, it really is great that all of them met one another’s needs.

    My last seven years in Chicago I rented the downstairs half of a two-flat. Two of us moved in together, initially, but my housemate got married after two years, and after that it was usually just me, with an occasional housemate for a year. Well, our landlady was Puerto Rican, quite an opinionated lady, and she lived upstairs. She had lived in the house a quarter century; the neighborhood had been white when she bought the house but was all black by the time we moved in. (One of my other two housemates was Puerto Rican like the landlady, so that year I was really a “minority.” Especially when the two of them started speaking Spanish.)

    Well, Minerva had had five sons, no daughters, so she was tickled to have two single twentysomething boarders downstairs. Every couple weeks she’d come down the stairs calling out “Yoo-hoo, yoo-hoo!” We’d go to our door and she’d have a covered plate of food–usually rice with some sort of bean in it (cooked in some sort of spice that made it a dirty brown color) and just a little bit of chicken or pork. I didn’t really like it initially, but developed a taste for it. (It never became a favorite dish, but I liked the thoughtfulness and enjoyed getting a free meal.) Sometimes she brought it on a styrofoam plate, and sometimes on a china one; if it was china, we’d return it in a few days with homemade cookies on it.

    She even washed our dishes a couple of times while we were at work, but that made my roommate mad, so we thanked her but asked her to stop. And we asked her to please let us know if she was going into the house during the day (to let the air out of the radiators or check on something), and she honored that request. But she was a good landlady, and the summer I got engaged, when I was in Chicago I went by to see her and spent several hours chatting with her. Her sons lived in the area, and a couple of them did any work needed on her house, including our portion of it.

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  11. Michelle, I haven’t earned enough in freelance to justify hiring a maid, but in Nashville I used to weigh sometimes “If I ever had enough extra to hire maid service or lawnmowing service, which would I get?” and could never quite decide. Now that I’m married, I have lawnmowing service (a very handsome man), and he is even nice enough to clean the toilets if I ask. (That’s my least favorite task, and my hubby told me he’d be willing to do it, but just let him know when it needs it since he probably won’t notice. Though a couple of times he has done it without me mentioning it.) But I’m really not the world’s best housekeeper, and I’d happily hire someone once a month or so, and I’d just have to do it in between visits. I’m hoping we’ll be able to do that someday. I’d willingly do another few hours of editing to pay for it.

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  12. No maids or housekeepers here, but a lot of arrows and a helpful husband, so we got it covered. 😉

    My parents had a housecleaner for a while some years back after my siblings and I were all grown and gone. I’m not sure why they don’t anymore (or why they really needed one in the first place).

    We live on a little dead-end road. There are three other families on the road, and one of the ladies is a housekeeper. She cleaned house for another family on the road (and other people elsewhere). After a while, though, she stopped going to our neighbor’s house. Not sure why, but whatever. Everybody seems to get along well with everyone around here, and that is a blessing.

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  13. Good Morning….loved the video of George Jones….he died this morning…I didn’t grow to love country music until I “got old” 🙂 George Jones was a favorite…
    I was listening to his music on the IPad while I was on the plane…well…everyone on the small plane was blessed to listen to his music I suppose. I couldn’t understand why the volume wouldn’t turn up loud enough on the earphones….seems I didn’t have the plug in all the way…I wondered why that gal next to me kept staring at me…my eardrum had perforated as we were reaching altitude (oh so painful and yes…it did bleed)…so, my hearing was muffled…thankfully, those people on the plane won’t be seeing me again 🙂

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  16. Qod..I have never had a housecleaner or maid…I do it all…and I enjoy it..weird I know…but, it is satisfying to clean. If someone were to come over to clean, I would have to clean before they arrived 🙂
    6arrows….very painful…this has been my fourth rupture during a flight…the pain is so intense, I come close to passing out….I wish I would…then I wouldn’t be aware of the pain…my doctor just tells me to take a decongestant beforehand…this is one of those times that it did not work 😦

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  17. Ah, a maid. Now wouldn’t that be nice? 🙂

    I need to attack the foxtails again in the back this weekend. See, this is why I dread spring so much — no sooner do I get through the nightmare 2 weeks of paying every annual bill I have than the foxtails spring up. Just shoot me.

    Speaking of freelance, I signed up on a freelance site — but the jobs they throw out for bidding are so strange. Everything from doing fashion blogs for an employer in some foreign country (not really my expertise) to rewriting someone’s online dating profile. All for pennies, of course, and even then you’ll probably get out-bid by a writer in a third world country who will do anything for way less.

    Guess I’d better not quit the day job? 😉

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  20. I have a houseworker here. Keeping a household clean is hard work, what with the constant dust blowing in the dry season and the mud in the rainy season, the floors have to be swept and mopped almost every day (no vacuum cleaners) and the laundry is done by hand. So, having a houseworker allows us to do our NGO work and gives someone employment. I’ve found it a challenge to know how to direct someone to do the work, between the language barrier and the cultural differences on how a house is managed. I still wash things that are more delicate myself and do my own cooking, but it is nice to have the extra help.

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  21. Donna, what site? I was on elance for a while, and I got two decent jobs through it, but it just wasn’t worth it–I bid on multiple jobs, declined to bed on many others, and only got two medium-sized jobs over several years. I’ve got 20 years’ experience, and I will not bid on something that will end up paying me two dollars a page! I got “accepted” for something once that was apparently a poorly run scam. (Poorly run because they were annoying enough to try to work with them that I gave up trying. And then I googled them and found out that people who worked for them didn’t get paid; the company would just declare bankruptcy and start over with a new name.) I finally decided the site is a good deal if you live in a third-world country and you’re decent in English, or maybe for a college kid who will take just about anything to start building a resume, but not for Americans with some actual job experience.

    Anyway, I just finished job number six since about mid-March (this one was small, just about ten hours), and only have one to go (it will be more of a three-weeks’ full-time thing), so I’m happy. And just got my check for the second-biggest of them, too. April this year has been more like the typical May or June, or busier, so it will be interesting to see what May and June look like.

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  22. That’s the site. I read some reviews that were critical of it after I posted a profile (based on a book on freelancing which recommended doing that). I suspect the site was better at one time. But so far it doesn’t seem to be offering much that would really be worth the effort, from the looks of it.

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  24. Whoops, I meant I won’t bid on something for two dollars an hour. Two dollars a page, depends on the project. 🙂 For proofreading, that’s fine. For detailed editing, no–but it isn’t pauper wages, and two dollars an hour is. I saw people wanting a heavy rewrite of a 150-page book, and listing it in the “under $75” category. Others wanted a ghost writer for their autobiography and wanted to pay $500 or less. Huh? And even after I stopped going on the site, I had multiple people requesting me to bid on a project, presumably because they liked my resume–but then none of them ever chose me, probably because I bid as someone with experience and others placed lower bids.

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  25. Well, it’s official — the snow is now completely melted at our house. Now 6th Arrow wants us to set up the swimming pool. 😉

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  26. Oh 6 arrows, how I envy you. Still over a foot most places here, plus the pushed up piles and drifts of 3-5 feet! But at least we’re hitting above 10C now (last year it was 23C at this time) Here’s hoping there’s no flooding (a big worry now that it is warming up)

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  28. Phos, I saw that Chicken Soup for the Soul is looking to do something for Canadians. If you are interested in writing a short piece for them you may get it accepted and receive a little extra money for your efforts. Look at their site and pull up the part about Submit Your Work and then look at the part about Upcoming Books (something like that, anyways) if you are interested. And for Donna and Cheryl, they have something for those who do Dog and Cat stories and even more. Have you two ever written anything for Chicken Soup for the Soul? What do you think about them. I have submitted one piece to them and will see what happens.

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  30. Chicken Soup is on my list to check out — they’d actually solicited a piece from me once (based on a story I’d done), but that was years ago and I just didn’t have the time back then. But one of my former colleagues has done a number of pieces for them.

    Meanwhile, I discovered this whole new “messages” category on FB (it’s where FB throws some messages of people who aren’t you’re ‘friends’). Some were legit, including one from someone here several months ago that I’d missed. Others were in the category of men seeking a long-term ‘relationship.’ 🙂

    Woohoo. Who knew I had all these would-be proposals in the wings?

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  31. Kare, I thought the snow would never go away this year 😉 But we had some warm days interspersed with the snow days (it snowed again earlier this week), and finally, with temps in the 60’s today, it seems like spring. No buds on the trees yet that I can see, though.

    BTW, what’s the conversion from C to F temperatures? I’m trying to figure out just how cold it is where you’re at. 🙂

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  33. Donna, I worked for a for Demand Media Studios for awhile. If you can work fast you can make a little money. I am not fast, I just got tired of not having time to do a good job. Also you get a different editors for every piece and they are really inconsistent. For example, I did a lot of costume making articles and the editor for the superhero costume totally accepted my explanation for how to make a cape and the one for vampire costume didn’t think people would understand “cut fabric into a half circle”.

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  34. 6Arrows, I looked it up. I used to know it, but it has been generations since I used it.

    F=1.8C+32
    C=(F-32)/1.8

    The 1.8 is the part I couldn’t remember.

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  37. It’s actually 57F here right now – I was just outside sitting on the deck watching the snow melt. We don’t have as much as I thought (I got home after dark yesterday) Apparently it melted quite a bit yesterday – even had some dry (brown) grass to walk on. But there’s still way more snow than normal. 23C would be about 73F.
    I don’t actually do the calculations – way easier to Google “Celsius to Fahrenheit”

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  39. We have hit 70F! Woohoo! For Kare, that is 21.1111111111111111111C! 😀 Love it! Thanks for the conversion figures, Chas. 🙂

    And now I’m going to be fixing 2nd Arrow some comfort food to take to her tomorrow when we visit. I asked her if there was anything in particular she wanted me to make for her, and she texted me saying, “I just want home cooked food so bad.”

    Aww, that tugs at the heart strings of this mama. 😉

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  41. I was just outside. The front lawn has now been mowed. One more section tomorrow, and then the whole thing starts over. Beautiful days in the neighborhood.

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  46. Give him a break on this Kim. It will be over in about a week. It wouldn’t take so long except for the television theatrics.
    And think about the things he could be doing.

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  48. I wondered if I should feel guilty for picking on Christians today for believing in myths. Then I thought, “I doubt Christians are happy unless they feel that they are being picked on.” Where do you think words such as “martyr” and “scourge” come from? μάρτυς is Greek,not that I speak it, (though one of my sisters got a degree in ancient Greek). flagrum comes from Latin. Not having a “proper” education, and not being a Catholic priest I don’t speak Latin, either. By the way, is the reason the Protestant Reformation was so successful because of the complex (& nonsensical) arguments by Luther, Calvin, etc., or because even the serfs of the middle ages wearied of having their kids diddled by priests?

    Anyway, besides at least some of you enjoy being picked on because you like to be μάρτυς, and because I like to do it. Let me tell you about this French guy named Donatien Alphonse François, who sometimes called himself Sade. He was a very rude dude and his name got into the English language to describe very rude people (such as me). On the other hand, people who invent a place called “hell” (almost certainly imaginary) and tell their congregations and their children about it, perhaps deserve to visit that location.

    What to do? What to do?

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  49. Um, actually we’re fine with not being “picked on,” Random. 😉

    Really we are.

    This was a nice piece in the WSJ about the opening of the Bush Library and the changing perspectives in the nation:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323789704578445232153839720.html?mod=rss_opinion_main

    From the column: “It’s occurred to me that the Clintons and both Bushes were president when baby boomer journalists were in their 30s and 40s and eager to rise. Everyone was meaner, both the pols and the press, because they were all young. Now they’re in their 60s. When they went through the 9/11 section of the library, the day before the opening, some had tears in their eyes. They understood now what that day was. Young journalists: You’re going to become more tolerant with time, and not only because you have more to tolerate in yourself. Because life will batter you and you’ll have a surer sense of what’s important and has meaning and is good.”

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  52. According to the above article link, Cheryl & I have “likely never met a crowd you weren’t comfortable in, you classic extrovert, you.” 🙂

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