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Our Daily Thread 5-17-13

Good Morning!

It’s Friday! 🙂

And on this day in 1630 an Italian Jesuit named Niccolo Zucchi saw the belts on Jupiter’s surface.

In 1792 the New York Stock Exchange was founded at 70 Wall Street by 24 brokers.

In 1875 the first Kentucky Derby was run in Louisville.

In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled for school integration in Brown vs. Board of Education.

In 1996 President Clinton signed Megan’s Law.

And in 1998 New York Yankees pitcher David Wells became the 13th player in modern major league baseball history to throw a perfect game. 🙂

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Quote of the Day

“Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.”

Alan Kay

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No disrespect to George, or Eric who does it well too, but Peter does it better. 🙂

And I’d hate to disappoint Beatles fans either, so…

But since it’s Friday, and I mentioned Clapton too….

One more, or I guess you could say two. 🙂

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QoD? Anyone…?

56 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 5-17-13”

  2. Gee,

    I don’t know. 🙂

    But in the 5-9 Our Daily Thread I did include this.

    “In 1961 Jim Gentile of the Baltimore Orioles set a major league baseball record when he hit a grand slam home run in two consecutive innings. The game was against the Minnesota Twins.”

    Perhaps you missed it. 🙂

    Plus my wife bought me this lovely little daily calender with Yankee history for each day. 🙂

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  3. My dryer made a loud noise the other night and quit. When I went in the laundry room there was that electrical fire smell, but luckily no fire. Rather than go to the expense of having it repaired we decided to switch it our for the one Mr. P had in storage. I am calling Mr. Mitchell (an ancient appliance repairman around town) and having him pick up the old one to scrap for parts. Mr. P’s youngest son aka Baby Boy (although he is almost 22) came over to help his dad. When they got here with the dryer from storage he got out of the truck and walked over to hug me and tell me happy Mother’s Day late. The three of us went out for pizza last night. He said it was the best pizza he had ever had. He had a good visit with his dad and he and I got along well. More progress?

    George also came by yesterday afternoon. He picked up his first child support check and my dog ran away with him. Actually, it was planned that Amos go home with him, we have to treat the yard and the house for fleas and Amos has been treated himself and needs to be out of the house for at least 8 hours while it is done. This was the best plan. As much as I tried to send the cat home with George he told me I was on my own with that one! LOL

    Things are getting busier at work. All I accomplished yesterday was responding to emails. I did get a couple of good incoming calls and handed them off to an agent. One was a guy looking for a condo between 700K abd 1.5 million. I can’t even imagine having that kind of money.

    I also went to the attorney’s office yesterday to sign the last document before we finally settle my father’s estate. Bittersweet, but it is the last thing to get Bank of America off my stepmother’s back and end the threat of them taking her home here because of the investment properties they bought in South Florida. As I told my step brother yesterday, Regina is 74 years old. She deserves to live out her life in peace. She took care of her own mother until she was 93, her daughter with Down’s until she was 52, AND was married to my father! Now is the time for her to enjoy! He has plans to take her on another trip, perhaps in the Fall to Europe.
    There will be one last check from the Estate for $500. I will put that in the bank in BG’s name so that one day when she gets married I can tell her her Papa helped pay for her wedding.

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  4. Nah, I didn’t miss it. I was just ragging on you a bit. I guess I should be grateful that aren’t posting the American league standings every day. 🙂

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  5. I have to tell you I’m shocked that we’re in 1st. I figured since they were pretty much using the B team that we would be lucky to stay around .500. It’s a pleasant surprise.

    And the O’s are only 2 back.

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  7. Good morning, so far!

    I left a post for Modestypress at the end of yesterday’s thread.

    Is everyone we know okay in Texas from the tornado and other bad weather?

    What tree is your favorite? I really like the impressive live oaks with the giant spreading branches that have the moss beards hanging from them and often have resurrection fern on the upper side of the branches. Those trees are in coastal areas mostly, at least that is where I have seen them the most.

    My husband’s favorite tree is the beech tree. He likes the way it hangs onto its light browned autumn leaves until the new spring growth pushes away the spent leaves.

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  8. Janice, do you know how the Live Oak got it ‘s name. A British woman visiting Charleston noticed that those oak trees didn’t shed their leaves in winter. She said they were “live oaks”.
    Leastwise that’s what they told me.

    Is it Friday yet? Always a busy day for me.

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  9. JaniceG – I don’t mean to start up the “Santa wars” again, but I was really uncomfortable with your comment that Santa, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny “immitate God’s role” in how He loves us. It associates God with a list of fictional characters (as Random likes to do and was most likely alluding to in his comment) and they don’t come anywhere close to immitating God’s character, anyhow.

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  10. I ;notice my post went up at 8:39. I hit “post” and it didn’t do anything, but say it was going to “wordpress”. So, I went for some coffee, started reading the paper, and nothing happened. Then, I went off to check yesterday’s posts and when I came back, my post had been up all this time.
    Strange.

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  12. Favorite tree? I have a number of them, depending on what the question means. I love stately old trees that have stood for centuries and stand as landmarks. As a child, I loved it that our mulberry trees were “climbing trees,” and I didn’t even realize a lot of species of trees aren’t. In terms of best-smelling trees, far and away a grove of orange trees–and they are also lovely to look at in blossom or in fruit.

    My all-time favorite “to look at” is probably the weeping willow, though I don’t desire to have one in my yard. A good weeping cherry in bloom is breathtaking. And I adore dogwoods in bloom.

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  13. And speaking of trees, I’m going to change my photo and see if anyone knows what this one is. I got the picture this week; I’ve been taking photos of various blooming trees, and I saw that this one had a different shade of pink than any I’d gotten yet, so I made a point of taking my camera and going down that same street the next time I went to town. When I got up close enough to take photos, I realized it was even lovelier than it looked driving by–I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s exquisite. Yes, it’s a full-size tree, not a bush. But the blossoms remind me of double wild roses.

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  15. Linda, I just meant that when parents show love for their children, even in being a character at times for the child’s enjoyment and to give special gifts, that it can be like a small part of what God does for His children. I was not associating God with being Santa, Tooth Fairy or Easter Bunny. I was only trying to make the point that sometimes He might come to us at a time when we need help in the role of a person who is His hands, feet, mind and heart.. We don’t see Him but we see the person representing Him. He was and is and ever will be so much greater than the parents who at times take on special roles for special occasions. I apologize if I have offended your understanding and beliefs in any way. I know people have varying opinions about Santa, Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. My husband was never allowed to “believe” in those characters. His mother was afraid he would confuse them with God. She even said the Easter Bunny is of the devil. So I know both sides of that discussion. I try to think on the positive side and the love conveyed. I thought Random might be able to understand that so the post was directed to him more than to others.

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  16. Looking out my window I see a sassafras tree and that reminds me of my mother. She would tell us about making sassafras root tea and when I got to try some I loved it. When I was young she also showed me how they use to take a twig from a blackgum tree and make a toothbrush from it.

    I also see pine, poplar, magnolia, dogwood and a few others. Sounds like the south to me from the naming of the types of trees.

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  18. My bougainvillea is blooming. 🙂 There’s a lot of bougainvillea in Southern California and the bright blooms pop out everywhere around this time of year. Gorgeous. Festive.

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  21. Glad it’s finally Friday! One of these is “Hillaryous”. It shows the Former Secratary of State behind a lectern. The caption is “Clinton Part II” and she says “I did not have factual relations with the American people.” Classic!

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  22. My favorite tree is the stately saguaro cactus. They live 250 or more years, but take 75 just to get one of the arms going.

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  24. Cheating? It is a tree, is it not? Leafless, perhaps, but a tree nonetheless. But since a fellow former desert dweller objects, I’ll say the palo verde, the state tree of Arizona. Usually a light green color, in spring it turns bright yellow, as you can see here.

    I miss Tucson this time of year 😥

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  26. AJ, I believe Ricky lives Northwest of Fort Worth. Granbury is in Hood county a few miles southwest of Ft. Worth. I doubt the tornado was a factor.
    Otherwise, I don’t know abut him.

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  27. Sea lions. Lots of ’em recovering right now out here, but my first attempt at a mini 15-second ‘tout’ video (and, really, it was quite compelling, though brief) vanished somewhere into my phone. I can’t find it now. 😦

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  28. Last week, Lion Jerry mentioned that the Manna Food Bank has lots of eggs to deliver to the Salvation Army. But the eggs are in bulk. Would we bring some egg cartons to the 17 May meeting? I couldn’t imagine where they would find any unused egg cartons. But I mentioned it to Elvera last night.
    She went downstairs and brought up 19 one dozen egg cartons!
    😯 She still amazes me! I know she saves stuff. But egg cartons?
    Jerry was glad to get them.

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  31. Peter, yes, I definitely should have mentioned the palo verde. I’ve described it lots of times to people who aren’t familiar with it, and I have some good photos I’ve taken. If I were in Arizona, I’d definitely want one in my yard again, as we had when I was a child.

    For those who don’t know the tree, “palo verde” means green stick, because the bark of this tree is green (often with patches of rough brown). Most of the year it has only green needles. If you get rain, each needle gets covered with multiple tiny leaves-they’re temporary leaves, and you can take your finger and run it down the needle and wipe them all off. And when the tree blooms, it’s spectacular and bright (as shown in the photo Peter linked): bright yellow flowers cover the tree, and seed pods grow among them. But the tree also has thorns; it’s not for climbing!

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  33. Extra egg cartons are good for giving to people with chickens so they can fill the cartons and sell or give away the eggs!

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  35. Once for VBS we made some mancala game boards using egg cartons (just the part with the indentions for eggs) so I had to collect a large number of them for all the different age groups of students. We glued the base of the egg carton onto a piece of wooden board cut to fit. Then the students used a woodburner to decorate the edge of the board. Dried lima beans were used for the counters and we had little net bags closed with ribbons to hold the beans while not in play. It was a game they could carry with them anywhere to play with friends old and new that they might engage in coversation about Jesus.

    I found out that Mancala was a game often played in Africa where 12 indentions would be made in soil or sand and beans or pebbles would be used for counters. So it goes along with the sowing of seeds story in the Bible, too. When the slaves who had been brought to America wanted to play this game or do other things related to their homeland they were not allowed to play the game, etc. I found that history about the game to be very sad. Mancala is a good game to play for teaching math skills. It is a lot of fun for anyone who has never played it.

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  36. We use them when we are getting lots of eggs and giving them away. We use them for starting seeds, then just cutting it apart and setting each section in the ground (not the plastic ones, the paper ones). And for paint. And for counting skills.

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  37. QoD: My favorite tree at home would be the sugar maple. Not only does it produce delicious syrup, but it also has the most beautiful foliage in the fall. There is one outside my bedroom and it is never the same colour twice. I will miss seeing what colour it turns this autumn.

    My favorite tree here is the adansonia digitata: http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=ADDI3, known popularly in the West as the baobab. I’ve included a link, but the pictures do not do it full justice. They are magnificent and somewhat mysterious looking trees. Many villages have one as their community tree. A bride coming to her husband’s house is led or carried three times around its trunk. There are great hollows in the massive trunks, in which some tribes bury their dead. Legends of the trees swallowing people or being the birthplace of a tribe abound. The fruit, sometimes called monkey bread, is a curious white pulp with the consistency of Styrofoam peanuts, mixed with short pink fibres. Dissolved into juice, it tastes delicious and is very nutritious, being a pro-biotic, multivitamin, mineral supplement and natural medicine all in one.

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  38. Donna, you mention your bougainvillea. We have them here, and they bloom even in the dry season. My backyard gets coated with the fallen blossoms. Which presents a problem. Back home, I waded and jumped in fallen leaves with nary a thought. Here, I’m always wary of long, thin, legless reptiles. Not without reason. I was standing regarding the piles of fallen flowers today, thinking I needed to have them raked up again. I heard a slight rustle, and looking down, saw a snake’s head poking up out of the blooms. Needless to say, I retreated discreetly and minded my own business. I couldn’t see its body, but the head denoted a worthy length, and it was a non-descript brown that could have covered a lot of snakes, venomous and non-venomous. No jumping in piles of leaves or blossoms here!

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  39. (If this is a repeat, forgive me. It doesn’t look like the first one posted.)

    I also like the flamboyan tree found in the Caribean. It has beautifully brilliant red flowers, as you can see from the photo.

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  40. I am learning about a whole lot of trees I have never even heard of. That is so neat.

    When my son was probably middle school age he was involved with 4-H and did the course for Forestry competition. He had to learn to identify many trees in this area and also how to measure the amount of lumber you could get out of a tree so that part involved math. As I recall, the hardest part of that for him was walking in a straight line to measure by his footsteps. And no, he had not been drinking 🙂 It was a really neat program and the competition was usually won by those from the more rural areas. I remember my son placed in the competition so that was a really neat thing for our more urban county.

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  41. I am now convinced that civilization could not have progressed this far but for egg cartons. 🙂
    But I don’t have nothing to say about no trees.
    Except to say that I wish those evergreen (cedar’s I think) behind my house were half as big as they are.

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  43. Donna, I have been trying to figure out where the word Tout comes from. The best I can figure is from: That abOUT sums it up! The T in that and the OUT in about. So what do you think or know about it?

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  44. That’s the way I usta talk until I got Miss White for an English teacher in the 11th grade. She cared. Miss White is the only person in my life, until that point, who believe that I would ever amount to anything.
    She was wrong, but I appreciated it.

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  45. I love bougainvillea (though mine blossoms randomly, I have yet to figure out exactly when — seems like I get blooms suddenly throughout the year, but then it just goes green for some of the year, too; some other bougainvillea around here look like they have more of a year-round presence, so it could just be a different variety).

    Snakes would definitely keep me out of the pile, though! Mine has bad thorns all over it, so it makes it tricky sometimes to trim and pick up.

    Janice, I have no idea where the “Tout” name comes from, although I’d guess it’s like you’re touting something.

    As in, “to make much of — promote, talk up (touted as the summer’s blockbuster movie)” ?

    So I’m touting my hungry sea lion.

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  47. Donna, that makes sense. Tout is a word that I have never used and may have heard only a few times in my life so I should have looked it up in the dictionary. I do need to work on increasing my vocabulary. I think I may have regressed in that area during the days I was a preschool teacher. It was sometimes a stretch to understand the words the kids said, but the vocabulary was quite limited 🙂
    “It’s mine.” “No! It’s mine!” “Whaaanh,, whaaanh, whaaanh!” And the priceless argument over Mommy. “Mommy can’t be your Mommy because she is my Mommy,” was too funny 🙂 🙂 Two funny!

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  48. Chas, you did have something to say about trees. You told about the Live Oak trees. Thanks for the info.

    Good work on the sea lion Tout, Donna!

    I went to a restaurant somewhere in Florida, maybe around the middle of the state when I went with a friend’s family (in high school days) and we went to a really fun restaurant that was situated around a big old tree and named after the tree. Maybe it was Kapok? I will have to see if I can look it up. Does anyone else know of that restaurant?

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  50. If anyone goes to the vicinity of Myrtle Beach, you should go to Brookgreen Gardens. It is south of MB on the way to Beaufort. It was once a plantation and has a long row of live oaks leading up to what was once a mansion. The entire plantation is a garden now. Beautiful all year, but especially in spring, as you would expect. Cost $12.00 and the ticket is good for a week.

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  51. I would really enjoy that, Chas. Do they also have the really old Crepe Myrtles that are at the plantations around Charleston. I love those beautiful old Crepe Myrtles, too. I guess they count as trees, too? Somehow they seem to be a cross between shrubbery and trees to my thinking.

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  52. I just received an e-mail asking that people wear khaki and white on Thursday to show support for the Boy Scouts of America.

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  53. Khaki and white is such a great look in the summer. 🙂

    Going in and out of the park where the sea lions were today I passed a hillside that long ago was dedicated as a place where people could come and plant their living Christmas trees after the holiday was over. The man it’s named after — a geologist and professor, long active in the community, tragically died unexpectedly about 15 years ago while hiking (he was in great shape). His wife is still plugging away in community meetings (she was also a professor, now retired).

    I still remember getting the call from her (at home) the night he’d died, asking if we could get something in the paper.

    Anyway, the trees are really tall now. Seems I can’t drive anywhere in town without remembering someone or some story, happy and sad both. The memories all seem so attached to places – street corners, houses, parks, tree groves, the mural on the building honoring a family of immigrants lost 3 of their 4 children in a tragic car accident with a police car …

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  54. Roscuro, having read a lot of books set in Africa (fiction and nonfiction), I’ve read about the baobab tree, but never been quite sure how to pronounce it.

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