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Our Daily Thread 6-15-13

Good Morning!

It’s Saturday! 🙂

On this day in 1752 Benjamin Franklin experimented by flying a kite during a thunderstorm. And the rest as they say, is history.

In 1775 George Washington was appointed head of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress.

In 1846 the United States and Britain settled a boundary dispute concerning the boundary between the U.S. and Canada, by signing The Oregon Treaty.  

In 1916 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill incorporating  the Boy Scouts of America.

In 1938 Johnny Vandemeer (Cincinnati Reds) pitched his second straight no-hitter.

And in 1992 U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle instructed a student to spell “potato” with an “e” on the end during a spelling bee.

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Quote of the Day

“There are no adequate substitutes for father, mother, and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can take the place of the family in the scheme of  things.”

Gerald  R. Ford

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It’s Waylon’s birthday.

And also Steve Walsh of Kansas.

And also Edvard Grieg’s.

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Anyone have a QoD?

48 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 6-15-13”

  2. I’ve always loved Waylon Jennings. I’ve often wondered about survivor guilt influencing some of his actions. Interesting story. Anyway, he has left us with some really good music.

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  4. Saturday was very quiet here. I actually stayed home and didn’t go to school. i am ready for the last day and a half. Looking forward to reading Rants and Raves, my favorite part of the week.

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  6. Linda, I’m guessing your team shutout the Yankees last night? AJ- don’t take it out on the rest of us!

    Re: Dan Quayle- It is my understanding that the media didn’t tell us that the 4th grade teacher handed Mr Quayle the list with potato spelled wrong, though after 20+ years, who cares?

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  8. No Peter,

    Wasn’t us. It was Boston. Which if I have to choose…. Go O’s! But after they’re done with Boston a 6 game losing streak would be good. 🙂

    The Yankees are busy this week getting slapped around on the west coast. 😦

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  11. Roscuro: We were flying a C-97 from Lages, in the Azores to Frankfort, Germany. When we got there, all of Europe was closed by bad weather. We couldn’t make a GCA landing. We were diverted to Prestwick, Scotland. We stayed overnight. We were carrying passingers, not cargo. When we started takeoff the next day, a fire broke out in an engine and we had to abort takeoff. We spent almost a week, including Christmas, 1951 in Scotland. I loved Scotland.

    Most insane? I left Westover ABF, near Springfield, Mass., after work one ovening and drove straight through to Charleston, SC. There were no interstate highways in those days. I was so tired and sleepy at the end, I was worse than drunk.
    Very stupid of me. I was very dumb in those days.
    As I crossed into SC, however, I picked up a couple of sailors hitchhiking, and let one of them drive.
    Another one, I’m too emarassed to tell. Even now. I was really stupid when I was young.

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  12. QoD,

    Flying from McGuire Air Force Base to Camp Shelby, Mississippi in the belly of a C-130, strapped to the cargo net thru what seemed like a hurricane. It was actually only really bad t-storms across 6 states. 😦 Most petrifying moment/4 hours of my life. I used to love flying. I’d pay extra for a wing seat so I could stare out the window the entire trip. Now I wish they would medicate me before I fly. I blame that trip.

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  13. Ooooooh Linda…..

    I knew you’d want to know this so…….

    http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/derek-jeter-yankees-resumes-hitting-fielding-drills-061413

    “Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter resumed hitting and fielding drills Friday for the first time since mid-April, a day after receiving medically clearance to increase his rehabilitation program for a broken left ankle.

    Jeter hit off a tee and took swings at underhand soft toss in an indoor cage before fielding 13 grounders on the grass in front of the infield dirt and 23 more at deep shortstop. He made throws to first on some of the grounders hit to him on the grass.

    “They gave the green light, so that’s encouraging,” Jeter said. “I’m looking forward to it.””

    Awww yeah! 🙂

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  14. What was your wildest/funniest/most insane/worst travel experience?

    I think we all know Phos’s answer to the QoD she asked. Remember her trip to the US to help at some orphanage in Idaho a year or so ago? She should retell it for those who are new.

    And I can only imagine the story Drill would tell. Maybe he is on one of those now and that is why he hasn’t shown up.

    My craziest wasn’t really on a long trip. Some friends and I went up into the mountains one hot summer day for a picnic. On the way back, the master cylinder on my car gave out, meaning I had no brakes for the return trip. I just put it into the lower gears and hoped it wouldn’t go too fast or that I would have to stop suddenly. There was enough fluid that if I pumped the pedal I could get a little braking power. It was scary, but not as scary as when we got into town and had stop lights to deal with. I went slow enough that I could glide to any red lights and stop, or keep going slowly until the light changed. We got to my house safely, and I stopped the car by rubbing the tires against the curb. I had to borrow a car to take a couple of my friends home.

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  16. I suppose the worst travel experience might be the Labor Day weekend we were planning to go camping in Connecticut. I had paid for a site at the campground, and we left Trenton, NJ with our 2-year-old son and 3-year-old black Lab, looking forward to a nice weekend.

    We encountered heavy traffic on the highway heading north, and it was a hot day. An hour or so from home (how far we would normally get in an hour, not how long it took that day), the car overheated. It had been having problems with that, despite getting work done on it. So we pulled over and were going to add more water to the radiator. But when my husband opened the hood, he yelled, “Fire! Get out of the car!”

    That was before everyone had cell phones, so while he stayed with the car (and the dog), Zach and I went walking in search of a pay phone or a house where we could use the phone. But we had broken down a long way from anywhere.
    A tow truck happened by and got the car and us to a garage. But it was closed for the holiday weekend, so all we could do was head home. (We were told the car was probably not worth fixing anyway.)

    There was a train station not too far from there, but we couldn’t take the dog on the train. So I took our son on the train, back to Trenton, called my sister (who lived nearby) and she picked us up and took us home. Then I drove my car back north to get my husband and dog.

    So instead of relaxing at the campground, we went looking for another car. That was a very expensive weekend.

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  17. I traveled through the Baltic states and the USSR/Russia without a visa in late December 1991. Vodka was a dollar for a 40oz bottle, the Pepsi chaser was the same. You can imagine someone in their early 20s doing with that price list. Looking back I think I was slightly insane to travel with a bus load of Russia black marketeers to cross the Lithuanian-Polish border. However it was the only semi-legal way out for me and even then I think the bus driver bribing the Polish guards to let the Russians in allowed me in without any questions.

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  18. Well, there was the long layover in Omaha one summer when I was in college, the turbulence that convinced me my life would soon be ended in a fiery crash on the way to Mexico City (also in college).

    But the worst? Pauline’s tale reminded me … It would have to be one of our summer treks back to Iowa. I was a teenager (14/15?) at the time and our old car (no a/c, of course) kept breaking down on the 3-day drive to the Midwest. It was very hot (the car and the temperatures).

    By the time we finally arrived, the car had to be towed to the local shop where it remained during our entire vacation (waiting for a part, as I recall). We were staying with my grandmother who didn’t have a car and I’m guessing car rentals either weren’t readily available in that small town or would have just cost too much. Plus we kept hoping every day that the car would be fixed. The shop kept hinting that it would only be “one more day” … or so.

    Finally, on the day before we were scheduled to head home, the car was declared healed and returned to us. Yay!

    To celebrate, since it was our last night there, we went out to the lake where they also had amusement attractions. We all had a great time and it almost made up for all the frustrations.

    But it didn’t last long.

    When we got back to my grandmother’s it was probably close to midnight. My grandmother was gone and had left a rather ominous note about George, my dad’s older brother, taking ill.

    As it turned out, he’d died very unexpectedly after coming in from working the fields that day (he was a farmer, I don’t think I’d ever seen him not wearing overalls until the visitation at the funeral 😦 ).

    So. Trip extended with a funeral then to plan and get through (my first, which left me somewhat traumatized).

    The car at least made it home to California, however.

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  19. I have had Peter’s experience, but not to that extent. Unfortunately, the only time you don’t realize you don’t have brakes is when you are trying to stop. When I lost brakes, my car had “hand brakes”. (I’m sure most of you don’t know what that is.)
    The parking or “emergency” brake was in the middle on the floor and you could pull it up with your right hand. We used it as a parking brake, usually. But it worked in an emergency.

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  20. 🙂 You may call me “aa87” for short. Some of my close friends say, “g2”, but others go by that moniker also.

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  21. Chas, I used my handbrake quite a lot when I was driving stick shift cars and was caught having to start up from a stop sign on a hill. 🙂 I have an automatic trans in my still-“new”-to-me Jeep, so the handbrake gets used only for parking.

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  22. We’ve had a few adventures with overheating vehicles etc, but my most exciting adventure was 2 years ago. We had rented a cabin on a lake in BC and decided to try and find the road up to the fire lookout. We followed the map and then the signs up a logging road. We turned onto a little road/track and decided the jeep could make it. We drove slowly along – mountainside almost straight up on the passenger side, almost straight down on the driver side. The road started out pretty good, but soon it had narrowed to just 2 wheel tracks, then it got even narrower to about a horse trail. Hubby actually had to get out and walk ahead a few times to make sure we could make it. I was positive we were going to have to call someone to come and get us out. I kept asking him if we would be able to back out and he kept reassuring me that we would. Finally after a long 4 miles we came out on the other side. My first thought was “I hope nobody saw us go in there with a vehicle!”

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  24. I have driven a car with now brakes. I got stopped at a gas station. I called my dad. He told me to bring it home. I did. He got in and drove it around the cul-de -sac and could barely get it stopped without hitting the garage. He got out and said, “The brakes are shot”. Ya think?

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  25. For those of you who have clicked on my name and seen the larger picture of my dad and baby Baby Girl, my friend M described him as looking like a Great Dane sitting on the sofa…all knees and elbows. Now picture that same man crawling around on the floor “teaching” that baby how to crawl. It is surprising that so many other babies have learned to crawl without his supervision. 😉

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  27. Train in the Sonora desert of Mexico; 24 hour trip in the summer to Mexicali from Guadalajara. I was 17 traveling with my Mom, adult female friend, two young brothers and 17 year-old boyfriend/now husband the engineer.

    Air conditioning went out on our car, windows didn’t roll down: sauna in the 100+ degree heat.

    Moms and babies in car, woman traveling with small children in seat behind us had a heat stroke.

    Mexican railroad couldn’t solve problem, no room in other cars. Chugged along miserable for several hours before said boyfriend/now husband asked what the problem was.

    Much discussion in Spanish and English, boyfriend and brother ask to see the control panel that was causing the confusion. It was written in English!

    Boyfriend figured out it needed oil. They had some and the air conditioning started up!

    Just as the sun set.

    We froze the entire night!

    But R was a hero all the same. 🙂

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  28. It seems most of our trip experiences involve car breakdowns. Reminds me of the time my dad, my brother and I wanted to go down and see a small town in Mexico, about 60 miles south of Nogales, Arizona. I think there was an old Spanish mission dad wanted us to see. As we drove through Nogales, Sonora, a traffic policeman told my dad “Your car is taking a leak on the street.” Sure enough, transmission fluid was pouring out all over. There was a garage right there. Since my dad spoke Spanish he got everything worked out. We walked back to the American side (about a mile through the shopping district), hopped a bus and went back to Tucson. Dad went and got the car a week later with a friend. He and my brother went back a year or so later, but for some reason I didn’t know about the trip or had something else going on.

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  29. I’ve never driven a car with no brakes, but I got hit by one. The driver was arrested for reckless driving because he had been told (by the friend who owned the car) that the brakes weren’t working right. Fortunately for me, he was just backing out of the driveway so he was going pretty slowly – but he couldn’t make the turn into the street, just crossed it and went up on the sidewalk and somehow knocked down the fence on the other side of it (I say somehow because I was on the sidewalk, and I didn’t get run over).

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  30. We’re home! Uneventful trip home, but many hours of driving after a long time away–just one overnight short of two weeks, the longest either of us has been “away from home” for many years. (One nephew’s birth 12 years ago was probably the last two-week trip for me.) We left my sister in apparently much better “shape” but she said she knew today would be hard. The girls cleaned the house while we were gone (mopping is what I see, and vacuuming) but they aren’t home. Misten was happy to see us, by no means ecstatic, but staying close. I’m downloading photos from the trip (exactly 300, not counting ones I deleted from the camera). More later, not necessarily tonight.

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  31. in the what was I thinking department – I flew from San Francisco (a three hour drive from home) to Hong Kong to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. In Hong Kong I arrived at 6am and the next flight left at midnight. I knew my way around so went shopping and exploring, That was fine until about the middle of the afternoon when I hit the wall after that all night flight. I knew there were chaise lounges in the terminal where I could stretch out, but my small airline had no one at the check in counter for another several hours. i sat on a bench by the counter with my head on my luggage and every once in a while would lift my head to peek and see if anyone was there to check me in. I figured that the entire trip took 50 hours.

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  32. Jo reminded me of the time in November of 1949 when I finished AF basic training at Lackland AFB in San Antonio. I boarded a bus in SA and went to Shreveport, La. It was around 9 or 10 in the evening and the bus station may have been the only place open in those days. Anyhow, some guys and girls were there having fun. They kept plugging the juke box with the same song and dancing. Every time I hear the Delmore Brothers with this song, I think of this scene.

    The Trailways bus took me straight through from Shrieveport to Orangeburg, S.C. It took all day and part of the night. It dumped me off in the early morning. The bus station in Orangeburg wasn’t open and I had to wait on the sidewalk for about four hours for the bus to take me to Charleston.
    It took a day and a half to get home in those days. Not that the bus was slow, but there were no interstates and lots of towns to stop in.

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  33. of course traveling in PNG is always an adventure. If you look at a map you might notice that there are not very many roads. So much rain that they get a lot of mud slides. We are at 5,000 feet, but the trip to the coast at Lae can be interesting. One spot that winds down the mountain has been single lane for all the 8 years I have been here and the Highlands highway is a main route from the coast, or should I say the only route. One time the bridge was out near here and they were working on repairing it, so we had to ford the river. Our vehicle, along with many others, routes the exhaust pipe upto the top of the cab instead of out the back, just to take care of situations like this. Any trips we make by road around here are made very prayerfully. I love our planes! Of course, I mostly only get out of our one square mile centre once every three months or so.

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  37. I have been up late baking some cookies for the children to decorate in Sunday School to give to their dads. Miraculously the computer is up when I have no time to be on it. Anyways, if the computer is down tomorrow and I don’t have a chance to say it other than now:

    Happy Father’s Day to all you dads on this blog! I hope you all have a great day.

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  40. All of you ladies need to be nice to us fathers today.
    Elvera already started off wrong. Chuck sent a card that said something about my “wisdom”. She thought that was stretching it a bit.
    😦

    I would have a QoD about favorite memories about fathers. But I don’t have any to share. My dad was a good man. He was a hard worker and provided for his family. His only bad habit was cigars. He never cursed. Not around us, anyhow.
    But we never did anything together. I can’t think of a thing he taught me.
    He never had a dad. Or mother.

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  41. I just had to share this with all of you…we went to the Brad Paisley Beat This Summer concert last night at The Wharf in Orange Beach. You know how I love to people watch…It was almost like a uniform, all the girls/women (some too old for it) were wearing strapless, sleeveless, wispy, summer dresses with big belts and cowboy boots. A few were able to pull off the look but most were not.

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  42. In reply to my QoD yesterday – Peter is right. The border crossing while going to visit a certain person is definitely my wildest/funniest (in a darkly comic way)/most insane/worst travel experience to date. Crossing a body of water here can get interesting (lineups, line jumpers, hot, dusty, tired, thirsty, hungry, in need of a washroom, hours and hours…), but not as interesting.

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  44. Travel stories: could have been the time daughter and I were taking the train to Venezia from Turin (Venice from Torino) and there was a train strike so we were delayed several hours, or the time daughter and another woman and I were taking the train from Turin to Marseilles in France and there was a strike. We got booted and watched as all of the other passengers left the terminal and they began to shut it down. Then we left and found a hotel in Nice instead of our reserved on in Marseilles. Later we discovered that buses were taking people on to their destinations. But we did not want another hour or two or more on the bus. So we enjoyed Nice for a few days.
    But most likely it was flying from Athens to Spokane with third son. We were held up at Heathrow for two hours while a part for the pilot’s seat belt was found and installed which made us late in Seattle so we missed our flight. We heard our names on the speakers and raced for the plane they had directed us to as a replacement, only to learn it had departed but another was available. We did not see anybody at the gate so raced down the jet way to the plane itself, sure surprised the pilot and crew. But they let us on, we had left our luggage in the line by the check in when our names were called and the guy said he would handle it. Anyway, we got to Spokane with our luggage ahead of the plane we were supposed to take as it had been turned back for a dust storm. All this after Sept 11 so security was tight. But we must have been profiled as innocents abroad or some such thing.

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  45. Mumsee, your escapade reminds me of the time our plane was delayed because someone had taken the “the seat coushon may be used as a flotation device” tag off the back of one of the seats. (Quote may not be exace, but you’ve seen them.)
    They (unknown government officials concerned about our safety) wouldn’t let the plane fly without it.
    I understand the pilfering of these is common. Seems they would have extras handy.
    This flight, BTW, was between Washington Dulles and St. Louis.

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  46. We learned a new song in our SS assembly this morning. It isn’t in the hymnal, so the leader made multiple copies of the song. I was so impressed that I choked up while trying to sing it. I think Elvera noticed.
    The song is entitled, ”What a Day That Will Be”. I’m sure some of you know it.
    This rendition is by Jim Felix. Not the best singer, but I like his straight ahead style.
    If you visit the site, you might like Guy Penrod’s version. I don’t care so much for Gathers. But any rendition of this song is good.

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