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Our Daily Thread 1-20-14

Good Morning!

Since it’s a holiday, only 2 posts today.

On this day in 1265 the first English parliament met in Westminster Hall.

In 1801 John Marshall was appointed chief justice of the United States.

In 1885 the roller coaster was patented by L.A. Thompson.

In 1887 the U.S. Senate approved an agreement to lease Pearl Harbor in Hawaii as a naval base.

In 1937 Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the first U.S. President to be inaugurated on January 20th. The 20th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution officially set the date for the swearing in of the President and Vice President.

In 1942 Nazi officials held the Wannsee conference, during which they arrived at their “final solution” that called for exterminating Europe’s Jews.

In 1981 Iran released 52 Americans that had been held hostage for 444 days.

And in 1986 the U.S. observed the first federal holiday in honor of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

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Quote of the Day

“The time is always right to do what is right.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Yesterday was this lady’s birthday.

Today is Wes King’s.

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QoD?

Do you have the day off, and if so, what are your plans?

51 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-20-14”

  1. I have always loved me some Dolly and had several thoughts running through yearmy mind watching that video. First I remember Dolly once being asked what she thought of Dumb Blonde jokes and she said they didn’t bother her, she knew she wasn’t dumb and she knew she wasn’t blonde. I suppose she fixed her sister up to be a blonde for that show, and it made me wonder if the brother is closer to what Dolly looks like without all the make up?
    I do know that she comes to my town quite often and roams around. Very few people here know when she is here. This also led me to think of my ex husband. He worked for a very large printing company out of Jackson, MS for a while. They published the Hooter’s Calendar one year. He came home so disappointed from the photo shoot and informed me “those girls really don’t look like that”.
    BG had a friend spend the night last night. I am doing an open house again today. They are going with me and I am letting them go to the mall and to a movie nearby. Here is hoping the weather will be nice and people will get out looking at new houses and their holiday.
    I am getting a referral for a listing this week, so that will be nice.

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  2. Good luck Kim.
    Nothing phony about Dolly. She was once asked if “they are real”.
    She said that everything about show business is phony.

    It isn’t phony when you own up to it.

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  3. Kim,

    My wife, who is a natural blonde, insists that when folks refer to “dumb blondes” they mean the fake blondes who dyed their hair that color. It’s the used to be brunettes that give real blondes a bad name. Can’t say I disagree given some of the non-blonde blondes I know. 😯

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  4. I just heard one half of an interesting conversation while waiting to have my blood work done this morning. First I should note that I wasn’t ease dropping, but when you talk on the phone loudly in the doctor’s/testing facility office, folks like me can’t help but hear.

    Apparently the woman signed up for coverage on Healthcare.gov. She selected her plan, insurance company, and paid her premium. She had not received her card yet though. The doctor’s office wanted to see the card or have the insurance company verify coverage. Sounds simple. Until she called the insurance company.

    I’ll skip the cursing part, but I can tell you she was not a happy camper. Seems the insurance company had no record of her signing up for a policy. She was adamant that they already took her money from her account to pay for it too. Her frustration was obvious, and who can blame her?

    Now she had to cancel her appt. and go home to call some number the insurance people gave her. She was very upset. I felt bad for her. I imagine a lot of people are experiencing similar problems.

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  5. BUT! In an Obamacare success story:

    Spoke with a friend yesterday who told me Planned Parenthood approached her local PCC about helping them perform pregnancy tests. Turns out they have to fill out so much paperwork because of Obamacare, they cannot keep up with all their clients.

    PCC is now booked solid and, while the women are there, they’re doing free ultrasounds . . .

    To God be the glory!

    🙂

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  6. The following post is intended to be funny so take it that way. Over the past few days Linda shared about an acquaintance telling her what an inspiration she, herself, is. I commented that one shouldn’t do that. Karen asked if someting was pretentious and I said it was. You should never brag on yourself…..I am such a good ex-wife that I just reminded BG that today is her father’s birthday and she needed to tell him Happy Birthday. Of course, her response was, “Really? I didn’t know that”. How can one 16 year old be so clueless? Oh! That’s right she is a blond! (I think the real answer in in being 16)

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  10. AJ, I have a friend who was blonde when I worked with her though she admitted to coloring. She got a lot of dumb blonde jokes but she was always a good sport about it. I saw her a few months ago and commented that she had let her hair go dark. She said, “Yes, and suddenly I’m going around going….Oh! Now I get it!” 🙂

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  11. As Kim can attest, there is no way to predict the real estate market. When we signed another extension on the contract with our realtor, he told us there usually is not much interest this time of year, so we contacted an auctioneer to begin the process of selling the house in that manner come Spring. He said he would talk to our realtor, with whom he has worked (and known for a very long time).

    Anyway, in the last two weeks we have had two showings, and a young couple who came the other evening wants to see the house today in day light. Because of this, the auctioneer wants to wait, and we agree. So much for not much interest in the Winter. And, as our pastor says, “It only takes one person to buy the house.”

    Pray that this young couple does buy.

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  13. No holiday here. Our next one is Memorial Day which makes going from New Year’s until May a long slog for us. 🙂 At one point they threw in Veterans Day for us, but that only lasted a couple years until they rescinded it. I think it was a consolation prize for one of the years when they were making us all take unpaid furlough days (followed by the notorious across-the-board pay cut which still stands).

    I took a lot of video at the cowboy bash the other night so maybe I can work on that. I’ll see how much I remember from our video editing training a couple weeks ago.

    Meanwhile, it feels nothing like winter out here, we’re headed for another week in the sunny, high, dry 70s.

    Hope people buy houses today for Kim and Peter.

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  16. Just popping back in to let you all laugh WITH me laughing at myself. Several years ago I told you all how I just didn’t think I would ever like an e-reader, Nook or Kindle. I am eating those words. In keeping up with daily, ok sometimes every other day–but I make it up, Bible reading I am using BibleGateway on my computer. I love choosing a different version of the Bible each time to read a passage.

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  18. Bible Gateway is a wonderful tool, so much faster & better than a print concordance when you’re trying to find a verse in which you can remember only a couple key words. Like magic.

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  19. Just reading the history trivia for today. It is amazing to think that the British Parliament has existed for nearly 750 years. It has fluctuated and changed in structure over that time, but the germ idea that people should be involved in the legislation of their country’s laws has remained.

    The other one that I noticed was that the ‘Final Solution’ was determined on this day. There was a movie made of that conference called Conspiracy. The makers used the transcripts from the conference and just re-enacted them. I haven’t watched it, but my WWII expert sibling did and said it was well done, though hard to watch. It was chilling to watch humans discuss the extermination of other humans so cold-bloodedly. The conference wasn’t about whether the Jews should be exterminated or not, but what was the best method of extermination.

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  20. Michelle: The site just left me puzzled, I suppose, and wary. I suppose among agnostic people, there is not much discussion of children’s spirituality. However, there are many Christian books written that presume children have a spiritual nature, especially books on teaching or rearing children

    It was the blog on learning more from our children, rather than teaching them. Listening and learning where our children are coming from is important. As a Christian, learning and listening to what God says about children is even more important. We all learn from our children in one sense. However, we are responsible to teach them the truth about who God is, what he has done and what we need to be doing etc.

    My husband talks about knowing there was a God when he was very young. I believe children can be very young when they become Christians. I remember having a young mother tell me of an issue she was having with her son. She is either an agnostic or atheist. I pointed out that the issue was a spiritual one and had to be dealt with in that way. I have no reason to believe she believed me, although she was polite. She clearly had not thought the issue WAS spiritual in nature, so I did give her another way to think about it.

    Perhaps, that is the case with this blog. It is the vagueness that bothers me. Terms can be used in different ways. Spirituality is one of those. Perhaps that is a deliberate thing, but it leads me to wonder how helpful it is.

    This is just my two cents, FWIW.

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  21. A day late, but Chas, what a precious little one your new great-grandson is. All the pictures on that blog post are sweet. Thanks for linking.

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  25. We don’t have a politics thread today. So, I’ll post this here.
    From Charles Karuthammer’s Things That Matter, p. 359.
    “This deliberate choice of strategic retreats to engender good feeling is based on the naïve hope of exchanges of reciprocal goodwill with rogue states. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the theory – as policy – has demonstratably produced no strategic advances. But that will not deter the New Liberalism because the ultimate purpose of its foreign policy is to make America less hegemonic, less arrogant, less dominant.
    In a word, it is a foreign policy designed to produce American decline .– to make America essentially one nation among many. And for that purpose, its domestic policies are perfectly complementary.”
    (boldprint mine)

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  27. Kim, never ever.
    Even as a young man, a teen, have I driven somewhere that I didn’t have a destination when I cranked the car. We never drove around. I said we’ve never eaten in the car, but Elvera says we did go to a drive-in once. The only time I’ve been to a deive-thru window was in tha back seat of another (Chuck’s ??) car.
    I never liked “riding” that much.

    When I was a kid, my uncle Fred would take us for Sunday rides in his Hudson Terriplane.

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  28. Do any of you have any thoughts or opinions about this book?

    My church is doing a women’s retreat in February and this is the book we will be using. 2014 is a year of strengthening the sense of community in our church. The end of February will be the men’s retreat and in the Fall the whole church will do a retreat.

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  29. Amazing how many hours a kitten can sleep during the day, but at night…very little.

    My family took rides back in the days of my childhood. Mostly I remember doing that to see the lights at Christmas. I think we also took some rides to look at houses when I was older. But it was not a major activity. I think most of my family was into doing rather than sitting and seeing.

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  35. Bosley was interested in the sounds of Simon’s cat.

    I talked with someone at church today whose most beautiful cat got ran over and killed. He said he was going to have a taxidermist preserve it. I have never known anyone to do that with a pet except there was a novel in which someone preserved there pet dog, Sorrow, in that manner. That was fiction. Just wonder what anyone thinks about this kind oc thing?

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  38. Janice, I’d be inclined to think of taxidermy for a creature you think of as an “it” (a creature you shoot), not one you call “you.” I want Misten as a dog, not as a stuffed animal. After she’s dead, I’ll have photos to remember her by, but I don’t need or want her ashes or her pelt. But I can’t see it as being wrong, just different.

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  39. I did not ask for details on how the cat would be displayed. I can’t even imagine. I know I can not fully understand another’s grief over the loss of a pet…but I can’t get close to considering what would motivate a person to want to have the stuffed reminder of what was once their lively pet.

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  41. Well, my hunch is it’s one of those things that “sounded good at the time” and he will regret later. (And what do you do with the thing if you decide it was a bad idea? Put it in the garage? Sell it on ebay? Bury it?)

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  42. Eeewww. that’s what I think of that. I have a beautiful fox skin (a found item in an old house I was redesigning) but a pet? I don’t think so.

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  43. Husband just told me it was the book by John Irving, Hotel, New Hampshire, that had the stuffed dog, Sorrow.

    Husband is trying to have an egg salad sandwich while evading Bosley who earlier would have little to do with the plain chopped up egg I fixed for her. Yes, getting to be finicky as cats are known to be. I will wait until husband finishes his sandwich before I tell him about the stuffed cat.

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  44. Janice 🙂

    I just chatted on FB with my son’s new girlfriend. She’s seems very nice. A Christian from a Christian family. She’s 18. Son’s 27. !!!! But son is having coffee with her dad this week – that sounds like a good thing.

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  45. Nice video, HRW. Joni’s got a beautiful voice.

    Just last week we finished a devotional book, Hymns for a Kid’s Heart, by Bobbie Wolgemuth and Joni Eareckson Tada, which included a CD of the twelve hymns featured in the book and was sung by Bobbie and Joni and children’s voices.

    We enjoyed the devotions. In each one, Bobbie wrote an interesting 1-2 page history of the composer of the featured hymn, Joni wrote a single-page “From My Heart To You” devotion on a topic related to something mentioned in the biographical material; then there was a copy of the words and music of the featured hymn, and a Bible verse and prayer. Really a nice little book and well-done CD.

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  49. KI, she’s trying to be deliberately vague so as to provoke discussion. She’s a solid church planter and I know she’ll appreciate the feedback.

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  51. Jo, I think both you and the children would love it. And I forgot to mention there’s a small glossary in the back of the book that defines words the children may not be as familiar with. The words that are defined have a little red marking (looks like a plus sign) next to them where they appear in the text. Also, I’m just noticing now that there are a few pages in the back that are mostly blank, but with a delightful little illustration of a child dressed in clothing of a previous era. The pages are labeled “My Personal Notes”.

    Oh, and there may be more books, as mine says, in very small print under the title, “Volume One.” I’ll have to check that out to see if they did more. It’s published by Crossway Books.

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