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Our Daily Thread 11-2-13

Good Morning!

Welcome to the weekend! 🙂

On this day in 1783 U.S. Gen. George Washington gave his “Farewell Address to the Army” near Princeton, NJ. 

In 1867 “Harpers Bazaar” magazine was founded.

In 1895, in Chicago, IL, the first gasoline powered car contest took place in America.

In 1930 the DuPont Company announced the first synthetic rubber. It was named DuPrene.

In 1948 Harry S. Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey for the U.S. presidency. The Chicago Tribune published an early edition that had the headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” 

And in 1962 President Kennedy announced that the U.S.S.R. was dismantling the missile sites in Cuba.

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Quote of the Day

“I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks.”

Daniel Boone

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Today is Stephen Mark Pasch’s birthday.

It’s also Keith Emerson’s.

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Anyone have a QoD?

66 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 11-2-13”

  1. Don’t forget to change your clocks so that we can be an hour closer. I might be able to skype with my grandkids before they go to bed. Looking forward to being closer.

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  2. I have at least a dozen clocks to change. I will start this morning on the ones we don’t use much. The ones downstairs and in the cars. I’ve already changed one in the garage because I needed to replace a battery Thursday and changed the time while I had it down. I need to change the smoke alarm batteries too, but I’m out of 9v batteries. 😦

    That means I’ll likely forget until they start beeping. I hate that.

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  5. Everyone is taking advantage of the extra hour of sleep a day early!

    The leaves are beautiful in Atlanta now. I love these special colors God reserved for this time of the year.

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  6. Good afternoon and evening to our overseas people. Good morning, everyone else.

    It’s been a busy week, and I got behind in reading here and listening to the videos. I’m caught up now. 😉

    Sixth Arrow and I loved the video yesterday with Michelle Tumes (“For the Glory of Your Name”), AJ. We sat here watching it before she went to bed, and it was such a nice peaceful song to wrap up the day.

    The kids (the youngest four) and I saw an unusual thing a couple days ago. We were all in the living room when a chickadee hit the window (that’s not the unusual part). We’ve had birds hit the living room window before. A few of them don’t make it; some of them drop to the ground below and take a while to recover, and then fly away after they get over being stunned; and others hit the window with only a little bit of force and never drop, but just turn and fly away.

    The chickadee we saw this week hit with what sounded like a fair amount of force, but it didn’t drop. After it hit the window, it turned and flew to the porch roof which is a little to the side of the window. It did not fly to the top of the roof, but instead perched upright at the side of the roof with its toes gripping the top and side of the roof.

    We could see it trembling, as we’ve seen other birds that have hit windows do. Then it did something I’ve never seen before. Slowly, while it was still hanging on the side of the porch, it started arching backwards, bringing its head back so far it looked like it was resting it on its back. It then hung like that for a minute or two, after which time, with its head still arched backward, it turned its head sideways and hung like that for a while, too.

    I’ve never seen a bird do those things before, and when it was hanging like that, I kept thinking, don’t fall backwards off that roof while we’re watching! 😉 Yet it was such a compelling sight, we couldn’t take our eyes off the bird.

    Eventually, the bird moved its head back to its upright position, and after about 10 or 15 minutes, the bird jumped up to the roof and rested there, and another 5 or 10 minutes later, it flew away. 🙂

    Third Arrow took some pictures while it was arching backwards, and she also videotaped the bird for part of the time after it had righted itself. It was one of those neat lessons in natural learning that God provides at unexpected times. Well, not as neat for the bird as for us 😉 but we were glad it turned out okay for the bird, too. 🙂

    So… how about this for a QoD: What is the most unusual behavior you’ve witnessed from a creature in the natural world?

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  7. Hi all. I’m kindle-ing this from my mil’s farm house in Iowa. Amazed at the full signal I get now, considering a few yars ago I could barely get one bar on a cell phone. Today I’m getting 4!

    We are here for a wedding of one of Mrs L’s nieces. get to see grandchildren as well. BUt i won’t get to see much football. 😐

    Enjoy your weekend everyone!

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  8. I guess I need to get out and about more in nature because I don’t recall anything unusual that wild animals have done. I will keep thinking on it and maybe something someone else says will jog my memory.

    That was really neat that your family got to see the process of recovery for that bird.

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  10. Good morning, all. Becca had a friend spend the night last night. I put them to bed at 10:00. When I checked on them at 10:30, they were sound asleep. But, this morning at 4:30, I was pretty sure I heard something. I checked, and both little girls were in the living room, building a fort. I’m pretty sure they will both need naps today! Right now, they are roller skating in the garage, waiting for the hot tub to warm up.

    I’m a hunting widow this weekend. Not sure what we’ll do with the meat if Hubby gets a deer, as our extra freezer is already full of 300 pounds of elk meat! He is having a good time, though, as he loves being in the outdoors. So, it’s just the girls this weekend, which is sometimes kind of nice.

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  12. My cat peers down at me from over the edge of her perch on top of the patio roof and meows at me sometimes. 🙂

    Annie Oakley is very vocal and, as usual, she was meowing non-stop yesterday from inside her carrier as we waited to see the vet.

    So in walks a couple carrying another vocal cat in a carrier and it became a back-and-forth echo chorus that had everyone in the waiting room chuckling and all the dogs tipping their heads. MEOW – meow. MEOW – meow. They went on like that for quite a while.

    We decided they were either commiserating with each other or conspiring on a breakout plan.

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  13. 6 arrows QoD: I grew up on a small ranch, with a menagerie of animals. Once, we had a goat who was born a hermaphrodite. It didn’t live very long (a couple of weeks, I think), but I was fascinated by it. My favorite thing about growing up with animals was seeing the babies being born. I’ve witnessed the births of horses, cows, goats, sheep, dogs, and cats, as well as the hatching of baby chicks and ducks. No matter how many times I’ve seen it, it is always awe-inspiring.

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  15. Finally got that correction made on my website that Peter mentioned about capitalizing Ferris. Also I fixed the ESV Bible quotes (Lord=LORD) and made a few slight changes to other wording. I will slowly be adding on to it as time allows. It makes me all the more appreciative of what AJ does here. And I hear the choir singing “Amen.”

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  16. Not sure offhand what is the “most” unusual thing I’ve seen an animal do, but the one I can think of that was quite video-worthy: I once saw a squirrel run across a telephone line. Only problem was, he had lost his balance and was running upside-down! Periodically he would kinda throw himself, clearly trying to get back right-side up, but he never managed, nor did he fall off. He just ran upside-down all the way down the line until he got to the barn.

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  19. The most unusual wild animal event I’ve seen happened one day when my husband was on call (back in the day when I could accompany him as a ride along). He got a call about an injured plains bison, so we hopped in his truck to check it out. It was a cow bison that had apparently been clipped by a car and had a non-functioning back leg. It would not have survived the injury so hubby got out out and put it down with his rifle. We sat and watched the rest of the herd for a while and all of them came up to the fallen bison and nosed it and gathered around it in a circle for about ½ an hour. It was so neat to see. I had thought only elephants paid their respects (or whatever) like that to a dead comrade.

    I love watching squirrels too 🙂 And ravens – they do weird stuff as well!

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  21. Okay, memory has been jogged. Once when we were leaving for school in the morning a squirrel was in our front yard and it ran up my brother and took some food from his hand. Seems like my brother may have gone to the doctor because the squirrel was not doing a normal thing. I figure someone had raised it in captivity so it was not afraid of people.

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  22. Fascinating about the bird. They hit our windows way too often, leaving their feathers and sometimes other gunk behind. Some are just knocked senseless and do fly off to regain their senses. I would have liked to see that chickadee.

    We were not happy about the grouse who finally broke through one of the windows. They can hit the house, too. This is a low year for their numbers.

    Squirrels numbers are in a very high cycle year. They are fun to watch, but very destructive. My husband looks like Elmer Fudd going after them.

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  24. QoD, I use to work at a job where one of my duties was to check a meter in a small building about 300 yards from the main building. There were several cats that hung out on the property. One was a beautiful Siamese that I named Fred. One day on my way to check the meter I saw Fred had captured a small chipmunk. I stopped and told Fred to put the chipmunk down. He did. Then the chipmunk hopped over to me, looked up then hopped back to Fred, who picked him up and ran off with him.

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  25. We had a grouse hit our living room window one fall – it survived, as did the window. But later in the winter when the sun was low and shining through that window, we could see the imprint of the grouse – it was hilarious! Almost didn’t want to clean that window in spring because we laughed every time we saw the print – one wing outspread, head to the side. Glad it survived though, wouldn’t have been quite so funny. My friend calls grouse stupid chickens.

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  26. My brother had a ‘pet’ squirrel for awhile and brought it to school one day. He decided it would be fun to put it down some girl’s backs. Then he stashed the thing in MY locker. (He had the combination lock number) We were both hauled to the principal’s office. We were both happy that he could not get my mother on the phone. We both received a lecture about how school is not a place for animals.

    Fast forward to next year when I walk into the office and find a rabbit in a box on the counter. It belong to one of the faculty. Oh, did I have to bite my tongue to not restate the ‘animals do not belong in school’ mantra.

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  28. Last winter we watched a shrike dive bomb a mole or mouse for several times. It would hit it on the head to knock it senseless. Then it would wait for awhile, pick it up and carry it off.

    The birds and squirrels all have their pecking order. It is fun to watch the different ones who hog the feeder and the others who then chase them off. Even the ground beneath the feeder becomes a place to chase away the others.

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  29. We had a small hawk hit our sliding glass door one time. It had flown down from the woods behind our house, grabbed a smaller bird at the feeder, and flew right into the glass. It didn’t break it, but I was standing right in the dining room facing the glass door, heard the awful thud, and saw the hawk fall backwards into the snow pile on our deck, dead as a stone, with the dead songbird lying next to it.

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  30. My mom said she had a pet squirrel when she was young.

    There was a baby rabbit at the house my husband and I rented soon after we were married. I’d sit outside with a carrot in my hand, and it eventually got brave enough to come up to me and gnaw on the end of the carrot. I don’t remember how many times it did that (I don’t think it was a lot, and we only lived there about a year), but my husband got a picture of it eating like that once.

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  31. I used to have a bluebird who would see his reflection in a window. He attacked the intruder. Then he would fly away, as would the intruder. He attacked again, and a gaain. The intruder never left until he did.

    I had lots of problems with birds flying into the window in Annandale. The reason is that there were trees nearby and the birds saw the reflection of the trees and didn’t know that the window was there.

    SC is ahead 17/10, but Mississippi State is giving them a fit.

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  32. Apparently this is pretty common behavior for cardinals, but spring before last, I had my car parked in the driveway (no room for it in the garage, since there were already two cars there, and we have since sold mine), and a male cardinal would come, fly at his own reflection, and then perch on the mirror. He’d look down, see that his rival was still there, and fly again. Eventually he discovered the other mirror on my car, so he’d fly from one to the other. Weeks later, he discovered a car in our neighbors’ driveway, and ended up with three mirrors to fight.

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  33. Seems I recall being at the beach and observing a group of seagulls all standing turned with their backs to the wind and in their midst there was another different water wading bird that was turned in the opposite direction. It was a reminder of one of those “outstanding in the field” cards.

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  34. We had one cardinal and one nuthatch some years ago that would attack our bathroom window (not at the same time). We leaned a big piece of cardboard against the side of the house, covering the window so we wouldn’t have to hear that all day! Of course, we missed seeing out the window, though. After several weeks, I think, of leaving the cardboard in place, we took it down, and I don’t recall that we had a problem after that. I think birds are worse with that when it’s mating season. They don’t want competition around. 😉

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  35. Third Arrow has rallied the troops, inviting the younger ones to help her bake some gluten-free molasses cookies, a new recipe. They were all game. I see 5th Arrow has wandered off to occupy himself with other things now, but the girls are all in the kitchen together, throwing together the recipe. (Well, I hope not throwing, literally!) 😉

    Back to the living room for me, my project for the day. It’s shaping up, looking more like I want it to look. Always encouraging to see progress.

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  36. I have a strange compulsion to grab number 36 on this thread, because the other threads today are currently at 3, 9, and 6, and 36 is a multiple of all those numbers.

    I know, I’m weird. 😉

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  37. Hello all. I am back among you after a week of fighting AT&T for internet connection. We are slowly getting things to rights. Wednesday night we had to ask two of the neighbors if they had room in their trash cans for some of our trash. They did. I think we are going to have to ask again tomorrow night!
    For most of my life I have either not had a headboard for my bed or have had “hand me down” headboards. Thursday Mr. P found a quite lovely sleigh bed in a consignment shop in town ( remember we live on the edge of some mighty fine bay front homes). It was a good price and is now ours.
    One of the things he had was a large wooden trunk. Not your typical steamer trunk but one that is a nice furniture quality wood with a combination lock on it. It is perfect for quilts and blankets and sheets. I have some quilts that my grandmother and great aunt made. They were functional, used for warmth quilts, but ones I would never part with.
    Things are starting to come together around here.

    Baby Girl talked me into a pair of “break my neck” pumps to wear with my dress tonight. I am so thankful that this ball starts at 8 pm instead of 9. Mr. P FINALLY got fitted for tails on Thursday. He looks quite dapper!

    Yep, life is looking pretty good around the ol homestead.

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  39. Kathleena, an ex-coworker had a pet squirrel for years. He had him so long that a forest ranger told him it was probably the oldest squirrel in Alabama. His name was Nutty.

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  40. I had a robin that liked the mirror on my van. But it didn’t attack just looked in the mirror then hopped up on top of it for a while, then back down to look. Of course, there were always little ‘marks’ left on my van.
    We had a large husky dog for a while. You know the noise a dog makes when you are holding a stick and they have the other end?? Well, I heard that noise coming from my dog one night and wondered what was going on. I turned on the outside lights and went out. The dog had a raccoon by the scruff of the neck and was shaking it. I loudly called her name and she looked up and dropped it. Boy, did that raccoon leave in a hurry.

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  43. Jo, our clocks are “falling back” tonight. That puts us one hour further behind you than we were before. Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong, but I think you’ll find Monday’s thread comes up an hour later in your evening, not earlier.

    The good news is we won’t be going to bed quite so early in your day.

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  44. Good evening everyone….it’s been a busy day and I am officially no longer Secretary of our HOA…I turned in all my stuff to the treasurer and said good luck! Such a freeing feeling…I’m going to sleep very well tonight!
    Unusual thing I have seen an animal do? This past week I had the dogs on the back deck, grooming them with a “Furminator”…they had so much undercoat and it was getting on my nerves having to vacuum multiple times a day! I left the Furminator tool on the rail of the deck and actually forgot about it. The next day I heard quite a racket outside and when I looked out the back door, I saw a Abert squirrel trying to carry the Furminator tool away….he/she would put it in it’s tiny little hands…scoot a few inches, then drop it…..it kept doing this until I opened the door…when I stepped onto the deck it began to chatter at me and wouldn’t leave…I stomped my foot and told it to “git”!! I approached the rail and he/she dropped it and went on the other side of the rail and kept on chattering….that’s when I let the dogs out….he/she then leapt to the tree and gave us what for! We have a black squirrel thief in the Forest!!

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  46. Kevin, it all depends on how you look at the time. You can say that you will be 15 hours from me, but I look at the other side which will now be just 9 hours.

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  47. I was driving down a road not far from our house–which was a distance from a small town out in the country–when I noticed several turkey vultures “casually” clinging to a barbed wire fence that demarked a vacant field.

    They looked so out of place, I stopped to laugh. What was up?

    To the east, a line of turkey were gathered–not exactly gathered, because they were in a line, maybe a dozen of them.

    To the west across the field was another line of turkeys, facing them. A cry went up and the rows dashed at each other, calling and swaying as their bulky figures headed out–looking like a line of armies going to battle.

    The vultures sat up straighter, and I felt so uncomfortable, I drove away, shaken. A turkey battle.

    I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.

    I stopped the next day to see if anything remained. Not a feather. Turkey vultures are efficient. 😦

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  48. I don’t think that I would have stayed either, Michelle.

    Just read a profound blog post by Michele Phoenix michelephoenix.com
    called ‘With-ness’
    What is the essence of our life?

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  54. Good morning everyone. I am back among you. We finally got internet at the house. It has been a long battle with AT&T since last Monday.

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  55. The time may be one hour closer for Jo, but it is one hour extra for us.

    QoD: The most unusual animal behaviour I have witnessed was three snakes who seemed to think that my house was an ideal home…

    Birds are a bit featherbrained. We had a female goldfinch two summers running, who spent her most of each day pecking at her reflection in our window – we figured there was something wrong with the bird, as it looked malnourished and didn’t display the vigilant outlook that small birds normally have. We also had mourning doves and a cowbird who would sit by our open windows when the radio was playing classical music and coo or trill along.

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  56. Some birds in the dog park made a nest out of the remnants of a frayed rope dog toy. They used a nice crook in one of the trees to set it all up, adding other elements to the building materials (plenty of fulminated dog hair can be found on the grounds, for example).

    Unfortunately, building your nest in a tree in a dog park proved to be not a good plan.

    The dogs liked it, though.

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  57. Donna, seems that it wouldn’t matter if you built the nest high enough.
    I tink I told you before that a bird started building a nest in my garage. The door was open and she was hard at work when I discovered her. I did her a great favor and destroyed her nest befor she finished.
    I pointed out that this lesson could apply to us at times. I’m sure that bird thought she had been dealt a terrible blow. What I did was save her from trying to get to her nest when the garage door was closed.
    She never knew.
    Inside a garage looks great, but it’s a terrible place for a nest.

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  60. Interesting stories. We have had birds fight the bird reflection in both windows or car mirrors.

    My husband’s family had a pet crow. It would come after any interesting objects carried by someone and hide them. I believe a watch and many other things were lost that way. Not a good ‘pet’.

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  62. It’s good to hear that Kirstin Powers is a Christian. I see her often on Fox News. I don’t often agree with her. I hear that others are Christian, but I don’t know who. I know that Shannon Bream graduated from Liberty University. That says something abut her, but I don’t kow what.
    O’Rilley is a committed Catholic.

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  63. Monday morning here and time to head off to work. God has given me several creative ideas, so we will see how it goes. One is to actually act out the Bible lesson and get them moving – fun.
    My kids are all great cooks, so I have been trying to learn some new things. Made a cheesecake yesterday that took quite a while. Then adapted a recipe to make mango chicken, since mangoes are in season here. yummy

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  65. In Nashville I occasionally went to one dog park that was rather large, with some hilly terrain and a lot of trees. One had to move around to keep track of one’s dog, since there was no spot where you could see the whole park.

    Anyway, once in a while a squirrel got into the park, and would leap from tree to tree, with hounds baying below it and terriers running around yapping. One squirrel fell once, and didn’t survive long. Everyone present looked unnerved by it.

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  66. Fun reading all the animal stories yesterday and today!

    Jo and Michelle, good articles you mentioned/linked to.

    Hubby has one more week off this week, and will be back to work 8 days from now. First Arrow also had off last week (from work, but not school), and was going to return to work tomorrow, but he got called in this afternoon, so he works today instead of tomorrow, and several more times in the next week.

    I have more processing of clothing to do this week — the summer stuff isn’t cleared out yet, and we have some “new” fall and winter hand-me-downs we recently received to get tried on and put in drawers, closets or storage for a later date.

    Still lots to do, but I’ve made fairly good progress so far on my goals for this two-week period that hubby is off, and I’m hoping the momentum will help me have another good week.

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