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Our Daily Thread 12-12-13

Good Morning!

Only 13 Days Until Christmas!

On this day in 1787 Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. 

In 1800 Washington, DC, was established as the capital of the United States.

In 1896 Guglielmo Marconi gave the first public demonstration of radio at Toynbee Hall, London.

In 1901 the first radio signal to cross the Atlantic was picked up near St. John’s Newfoundland, by inventor Guglielmo Marconi.

In 1917 Father Edward Flanagan opened Boys Town in Nebraska. The farm village was for wayward boys.

In 1951 the U.S. Navy Department announced that the world’s first nuclear powered submarine would become the sixth ship to bear the name Nautilus.

And in 1975 Sara Jane Moore pled guilty to a charge of trying to kill President Ford in San Francisco the previous September.

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Quote of the Day

“With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.”

William Lloyd Garrison

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Today is Sinatra’s birthday, so we’ll start with him and Bing.

Next up, Marilyn Maxwell and Bob Hope.

And some James Taylor to finish things up for today.

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Anyone have a QoD for us?

68 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 12-12-13”

  1. Good morning all. I have been awake since a little after four. Coffee is made, dogs have been out, back in and have food although both seem to be on some sort of hunger strike. Truth is they like a little something extra on their food. Rotten Animals.

    I have a closing today so I will need to prepare for that. Merry Christmas Kim.

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  2. An upate on the story from my Little Corner of Paradise that I shared with you earlier in the week.

    UNBELIEVABLE NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!

    I just got a call from a woman in Montgomery. Her husband, a paraplegic, passed a week ago and she is donating his top-of-the-line wheelchair. God is Good.

    Also, we are now at $2,018 total raised. Many of this is coming in the form of $1 bills so please know, you can donate ANY amount!

    We will now be able to give Charles the chair he needs and the money raised can now go towards the other things he needs! Physical Therapy for one.

    Also needed, a safe to put his personal belongings in. He has an Ipad now and some other items that we’d like to keep secure. Thank you Fairhope and others in the community for opening up their hearts to this cause!!!!!

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  4. I’ve posted this before, but I’ve seen this before and somebody sent it to me again.
    It’s worth seeing again. It’s becoming a Christmas tradition with me.
    I’ll post the traditional poem as we get closer to school closing.

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  6. I had forgotten that Der Bingle and Sinatra sang together. This is the only one I know.
    And the Marilyn Maxwell-Hope was good too.
    I don’t kow if it’s just me, but Christmas used to be a more joyous time.
    Now, there’s so much commotion about Christmas and the Constitution. And the commercialism. We have always had commercialism and railed against it. But there was always a spiritual element and a different spirit. Whatever else, we were always aware that it was about a baby, born to a virgin and placed in a manger.

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  9. The low last night was supposed to be 10 degrees; today the low (for overnight tonight) is listed as 15. But it was -1 at sunrise and has risen to somewhere between 1 and 3 degrees (depending on who is reporting). Brrr.

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  11. STOP THE COUNTDOWN!!!!!!!

    Christmas has come early. 🙂

    My wife just got me an early gift, via her employer. I’m going to watch my NY Giants get beat by Seattle on Sunday! Or maybe they’ll get an early gift too and win it. 🙂

    Hey, I can dream right? 🙂

    Either way, they’re really good seats and a free parking pass to boot. My wife is the best! 🙂

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  15. Cats are scary.

    Kim, that’s great news about the wheelchair — and I was thinking the same thing Cheryl was, how
    wonderful that must make the donor feel, having something of a personal connection with the recipient who will appreciate it so much.

    Chas, that made me cry, too. 😦 In a good way, but still … Now it’s making its way across FB.

    I had a wonderful 2-hour lunch out yesterday with one of the matrons/pillars of our church — she and her husband have decided to sell their home early next year and move to Colo. where most of their children and grandchildren are now. We all knew it was coming, but they’ll really be missed. Her husband is 92 going on 50, he’s a Marine who’s slowed down a bit but is still full of energy.

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  16. It’s Thursday already. And I miss the football picks. I know, I know.
    I see where Wisconsin is favored over SC. It’s only by two points, but they are favored.
    We’ll see in 2014.

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  18. Donna, I do think it’s mean for those pet owners to let cats get away with that sort of nonsense. It’s one thing for animals to figure out where they fit in a family, and for one to be dominant, but to allow a cat to lash out at a dog every time it passes is unkind. (But then, I’ve seen people who allow their dog to snarl at them, and somehow think it’s cute, or allow their child to sass them. I think we’ve largely gotten past the concept of a line in the sand, something that is not permissible in this household.)

    But then, my dog is from a breed that is known to be fairly agreeable, stubborn at moments but overall obedient. But I simply would not own a pet that couldn’t be disciplined in the most basic manners.

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  19. Urgh!!! I hate mortgage companies! Let me tell you, if you don’t currently have a mortgage good luck getting one! This is an FHA loan and we aren’t closing today. Contract date is today but we are having to do an extension because they couldn’t get their act together to get the appraiser there on time so they would get it all through underwriting! Now I have two 80 something year olds in ill health that were set to go and we can’t close today and their son cannot get off of work tomorrow because too many people are out of his department.

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  20. And I’m on interminable hold with the canon printer folks trying to reconnect my printer to the laptop — forced to listen, by the way, to the kind of “Christmas” music Peter hates. We just heard “Suzie the Snowflake” ….

    Cheryl, lucky for me that Annie LOVES her dogs. I’ve never seen her take even an air swat at them (though she probably was justified a time or two when Tess insisted on herding her out of the kitchen).

    They’re not close friends by any stretch, but Annie does rub up against Cowboy whenever she has a chance and, for the most part, they all co-exist quite peaceably.

    Oh, “Joy the World,” that’s better.

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  21. You don’t have a cat, do you Cheryl? 🙂

    Mine has been slashing at the hand that feeds her for 17 years. Last night after I fed her, she threw up all over the clean bedspread and then jumped to the floor to finish leaving landmines for innocent people walking in the dark . . .

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  23. Mumsee – (From last night) The Chuckie movies? Haven’t seen those. My own nightmares are bad enough! (I don’t have them often, maybe about once or twice a year, but they are very creepy!)

    KIM – A couple of 80-something-year olds in ill health are buying a house? Or are they the sellers?

    Michelle – That was horrible! There must have been hundreds of bats under those tiles! (I don’t have audio working right now, so if an estimate was given, I wouldn’t have heard.)

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  24. michelle, that’s probably why Cheryl doesn’t have a cat. 😉

    I must say, I really lucked out with Annie — she’s even tempered, even sweet, a real lover, quite openly affectionate. None of our cats when I was growing up was quite this nice!

    She can be demanding when it comes to food or wanting to be let out in the morning. But otherwise she’s a real sweetheart.

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  26. I will say, though cats simply cannot be “disciplined” to be polite. 🙂 Essentially they’re much less domesticated than dogs are. But I suppose that’s part of their appeal.

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  28. Michelle,

    “EWWWWWWWWW THE CAT THREW UP!!! is how my daughter announces finding such “gifts” from the cat.

    And one thing they do have in common with their canine friends is the inability to throw up in one place.

    😯

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  29. Karen the 80 year olds are selling. The buyer hurt her knee and is having surgery next Tuesday. She wants to get moved in this weekend and the lender just had the gall to say, “Why are we rushing around like this. Why don’t we just wait and close it next week?”!!!!!! Argh. I guess HE doesn’t have bills to pay or Christmas stockings to fill or any of a mulitude of other things.

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  30. my dad trained his cat with a spray bottle of water. He didn’t like the cat meowing to come in and would squirt it everytime. The cat learned to just sit at the door quietly.

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  31. Katy the young cat gets along better with the dog than she does with the old cat. Piper, the old cat, doesn’t really like anyone but her daddy. Katy does steal Chasey’s bed sometimes. Chasey just lays down on the cold hard floor beside the bed.

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  32. free parking pass to boot.

    Why boot it? Don’t you want it?

    Chas- Though AJ wouldn’t like most of our choices, we could all guess the score of Army-Navy. Mine? Navy 35-10.

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  33. Just got the outdoor Christmas lights strung, more or less. I don’t think they’ll look as neat as they did last year. 😉 #impatient.

    But we’ll see when it gets dark and I turn them on.

    Also got the Christmas wreath on the door along with the sleigh bells.

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  34. Wow! What a neat opportunity! We just got a phone call from second son telling us about his fini flight. That would be his final flight in the F15. He was able to map it out so he went over the National Forest, through some canyons not far from us. We jumped into the car, raced along for an hour and a half into the mountains and just as we arrived, the team flew over. It was only a five second glimpse, but they turned around and flew back again so we got another glimpse. Amazing to see and amazing to think how they can get the timing down so precisely. Seventeen year old thought it was a pretty cool birthday present.

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  35. Mumsee, as opposed to highway speeds where other prople enter into the equation, an airman can determine that at such a speed, he will arrive at some point in 1 min. 13.7 seconds. That is important in ground support fire, etc.
    Having said that, I notice that my GPS Garman is pretty accurate in estimating my times of arrival at a location 500 miles away.

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  37. Our cat gets along very well with our dog. I think he thinks he’s a dog. The dog loves to run at the cat and pretend to jump on it, cat rolls over and then they both run off together 🙂

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  39. Chas, I asked him how long it would take to get up here (it is a six hour drive from here to his house). He said it would be twenty five minutes. I told him no way, it should take at least five hours. He said not at five hundred knots. I told him I did not think my van could go that fast. He left his base an hour after we left home and returned there an hour before we got home. We had to cover about sixty six miles, he had to cover about three hundred miles.

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  41. The basic untrainability of cars is one of many reasons I won’t own one. (That and my husband dislikes them more than I do; I think they’re beautiful, and I like individual cats. I just don’t want one! And we’re both mildly allergic.) But cats aren’t completely impossible to train, in that most of them can be trained that some specific action is absolutely intolerable. When I was about 13, I trained a cat to stay out of our yard (it was climbing the tree in our front yard and destroying the nests of the doves nesting there). Basically I just made it too unpleasant for him to be there, but without hurting him, and he got the idea.

    I wouldn’t put up with a cat (or dog) biting or scratching a member of the household (including another pet) without very good cause. If the cat scratches someone who steps on him during the night, that’s one thing. But scratching a dog just for walking by, that’s impermissible. And an animal that can’t understand that very basic level of “no” isn’t going to remain in my household. I’m not a person who “gives up” and allows the dog in my bed because she really wants to be there; the animal isn’t the household boss. And I know cats are different, but whether it takes swats with a newspaper or something else, some things aren’t permitted. And the dog who will not learn not to snarl or the cat that will not learn not to scratch won’t be my pet past a reasonable chance at retraining.

    I forget where I read it, but I read some time back about a dog or a cat that continued to attack the child of the household, and the parents explained that they didn’t give up the animal because they didn’t want their child getting the idea that you have to be perfect or you will be given away. Since the pet is “family,” if they give him away, the child might be afraid he could be next. Um, no. First off, the pet isn’t family, it’s an animal. And by not giving it away, the parents are demonstrating to the child that his own comfort and peace in his home are of secondary importance. The animal is more important than he is. And that’s just the wrong message to give. Train the animal if you can; if you can’t have a safe pet after a reasonable attempt to train it, then it is time for that animal to leave.

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  42. “The basic untrainability of cars is one of many reasons I won’t own one.”

    Hmmm. Maybe a bike is easier to train than a car. I haven’t had luck with either one, though.

    (Sorry, Cheryl. Couldn’t resist.) 😉

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  43. Cheryl, that’s hilarious. About how you won’t own a car and all because they are untrainable.

    My cat thinks she’s a dog, too.

    I don’t get the note from Bush, who was it written to?

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  46. Well, my name isn’t on any car ownership papers, so technically I don’t own a car. (We sold the one I had when we married, and we haven’t bought any new ones, so my husband is listed as sole owner of both.) But you knew what I meant. 🙂

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  48. LOL, I read (in Donna’s 9:33 post) “Bush’s not” as “Bush is not”, but then couldn’t make sense of “Bush is not is an Alabama football thing”!

    Take “note”, Cheryl, I’m picking on Donna, too. 🙂

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  51. I’m a slow thinker and writer. I’m amazed sometimes to see how quickly you can put together a well-stated post, Donna, when I see you do multiple posts, some of them rather long and following quickly behind the previous post. I just think to myself, “How does she do that?’ 😉

    Practice, practice, practice, I guess.

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  53. The basic untrainability of cars is one of many reasons I won’t own one.

    But railroad cars are trainable. You just need an locomotive to make them move anywhere.

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  59. Nancy, look at their little faces sometimes (unless it’s a vampire bat); they really can be cute. So can another much-hated rodent, the mouse. But bats are far more useful, both as pollinators and as ravenous insect eaters. And it can be spectacular to watch a large group come out at dusk. I went years ago with a brother and sister-in-law to watch a cave of bats empty, and it was really remarkable to watch. One time I was heading in to church and saw a single bat sleeping a couple feet above the door. I had to show someone, so I called the pastor’s teenage son and showed him, and he also thought it was quite cool. But I didn’t have my camera with me, so I didn’t get a photo.

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  60. I think bats are fascinating. You don’t usually see them out during the day so it was neat to have it fly out – I think it wanted to hide up the leg of my shorts, so I had to do a quick sidestep out of the way. That would not have been fun. It was the largest wild bat I have ever seen – very exciting to me. And they eat bugs.

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  61. I don’t think 2nd Arrow found the bat flying around her head at work last weekend too fascinating, Kare. 😉

    I was wondering what that 8D meant, Kevin. Are train cars eight-dimensional or something? 😉

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  63. I love electric trains. I remember when my cousin got one for Christmas one year and they had it set up to run around the bottom of the Christmas tree.

    And my friend’s dad had his whole garage decked out in an intricate electric train layout, complete with miniature trees and people and buildings.

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  64. what fun posts today. Oh, I am done with school and all prepared for my sub on Monday.!! YIPPEE!
    had bats in my attic at one point. I did not like hearing the fluttering of their wings right over my head. You cannot use exterminators to get rid of them, it’s illegal, but they don’t like ammonia sprayed into their space and they leave.
    Mumsee, what an exciting adventure you had today! A special treat.

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  65. Kare, I used to be quite terrified by bats until I saw one waking up in Okinawa. One of those big fruit bats. It was very cute and fun to watch. Changed my whole outlook on bats. Now I am just very bothered by them, but I like to watch them when they are keeping a good distance between us. They rarely do that.

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  66. Yes, Jo, it was great fun! Kind of sad for him as well as it will be his last flight in the F15 and probably in anything unless he gets a private pilot license. Which could happen.

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