Good Morning!
On this day in 1813 rubber was patented by J.F. Hummel.
In 1879, in Cleveland, OH, electric arc lights were used for the first time.
In 1945 the Nazi death camp, Dachau, was liberated.
In 1961 ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” premiered.
And in 1998 the U.S., Canada and Mexico end tariffs on $1 billion in NAFTA trade.
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Quote of the Day
“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.”
Will Rogers
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Today is Sir Thomas Beecham’s birthday. From vaimusic
And on this day in 1967 this song was released.
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Wandering Views 
Good morning! Becca had a stomach bug yesterday. I’m feeling a little queasy myself this morning… Hoping I don’t succumb…
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Take care of yourself Ann.
End of the month so now I have to stay up and finish doing the transfers from the offering for the month. Perhaps I will come back and talk to you all when I finish.
I went and took some pictures of the flower in my yard today.
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‘taint funny no more Will. Just not funny.
😦 A big thunderstorm rolled through at 3:30 this morning and Ii reached over to snuggle, and nobody!
We were under a tornado watch until 7:00 this morning. Obviously it’s over. But we have 48 hours of rain and unsettled weather ahead, according to the local weather man.
🙂 I hated cutting the grass yesterday after driving up from MB. But, obviously, I glad I did now. It’s nasty out there.
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Our local weatherman is a Yankee. But he’s been here several years, and we love him. But he still says Appalachian.
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Morning, Chas. Evening, Jo.
Chas: I’m glad you came through the storm unscathed. Hoping the rest of the predicted weather isn’t too bad.
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Mornin’ all! 🙂
WordPress is not loading pics very well this morning. It’s taking forever, and some just won’t. But I’m persistent, so we’ll see how it goes later.
Chas,
I had mine cut yesterday too, with the bad weather coming it seemed the right move.
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Those flowers are tremendously beautiful. I love that raspberry color.
Power is out here. 😦
No other damage so far. 🙂
Bosley is again showing her wild streak. I am so thankful I was able to board her for almost a week.
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What kind of flowers are those?
You all are sure up late. 🙂 Going on 11pm here and I’m sleepy.
Good night, and, yes, I got all the transfers done for the month.
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I hear that bad weather rolled through our area about 2am. I obviously slept through it so I am not complaining. I heard this at the gas station this morning when I stopped to get gas, top off my coffee (free in a small town) and chatted with the owner and another guy that was in the office visiting with him.
My first husband told me early on that if Aretha ever showed up at the door asking him to run away with her, I would be history. Many of you know that we had Marlowe the Wonderdog. He was a very highly bred Golden Retriever and his registered name was Beauregard the Duke of Marlowe. Had there ever been a female Golden he was determined she would be Aretha the Duchess of Marlowe. Fortunately he never wanted to name BG that. She was Chloe Catherine for 5 years before she ever got here.
This is a Continuing Education year in real estate. One of our Brokers is also a certified real estate instructor, but I have taken several years of his classes. One of his rules is that if your cell phone rings during class you have to sing an Aretha song. There is a local woman who has been in real estate at least a hundred years. She came to one of his classes and lo and behold her cell phone rang. Someone had to turn it off for her, but he made her stand up and sing R-E-S-P-E-C-T. She was a little confused to say the least.
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Who is Aretha?
When Elvera parks me in the food court at the mall and tells me to stay there, I say I’ll be here unless Megan Kelly or Shannon Bream comes buy and wants me to run off with her.
That gives her something to worry about and bring her back more quickly.
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I Yahoo’d Aretha and got an Aretha Franklin. If that’s the Aretha former was talking about, he would be a nutcake to swap Kim for Aretha.
😆
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Oh my, starting my day out here with some serious garden envy!! Those are spectacular!! Hollyhocks? Praying for all in the path of the storms….scary stuff out there. We are supposed to experience warmer spring like weather for the next few days…I am so done with this snow…I know Kare is most likely even more so than me!!
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Yep, Chas, I’m sure she’s really worried.
Kim, a few days ago my husband told me a story he wasn’t sure where he read, but a professor had a rule that if a student’s cell phone rang in class, the student had to answer it on speaker phone. A young lady’s cell phone rang one day, and he made her answer it.
On speaker phone, the person at the other end confirmed that yes, the student is pregnant.
The professor was quite embarrassed. He hadn’t meant for his rule to make something so personal be disclosed in front of the whole class.
The student said, “That’s OK. If it’s a girl I already know what I want to name her–April. April Fool’s, Professor.”
So she had turned his own policy against him in choosing a prank!
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Those are some nice looking hollyhocks. We have a few behind the house. We would have more, but I thought they were tall weeds and pulled some. Then I decided that with all the other flowers in the yard I should leave some. They are pathetic looking compared to AJ’s picture.
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😳
I just noticed Aretha Franklin in the list Aj posted above.
The fact that I passed right by her give credence to my comment.
Just not my style, I reckon.
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I definitely have the dreaded bug. So, Becca is having a late start to school today.
Praying for everyone affected by the weather.
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I knew of Aretha Franklin when I was very young because I won a radio call in and was given a free record of her. It did not seem worth the bike ride to go pick it up. But that is just me, a lot of folk enjoy her music.
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Holy hollyhocks! Those are beautiful. If only gardening didn’t require so much work.
Annms, sorry about the ‘bug.’ And you know there’s been a lot of snow when even nancyjill gets tired of it. 😉
We’re headed into a little pre-season heat spike this week, 80-ish+ temperatures are forecast for the next few days.
But the really big news of the day yesterday was that one of our local cities (where the newspaper is also physically located) is losing Toyota — a huge business/economic loss — to Plano, Texas.
Lots of angst and finger-pointing and stunned disbelief going around over that all day yesterday a the mayor held a quick news conference. The planned move over the next couple years apparently a done deal & no one knew about it in advance. Toyota has a 130-acre ‘campus’ here and has long been one of the major employers (as in several thousand employees) locally. The company also pours lots of money into local non-profits and charities, so those organizations also will be hurting from the loss. The head of one of them, the volunteer center, appeared to be in complete shock & denial yesterday.
Pretty devastating all the way around.
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Aretha’s R-E-S-P-E-C-T reminds me of one of our family car trips to Iowa to see the grandparents.
My dad agreed to turn the car radio to pop stations for me every now and again when we could get them to come in (which was rare back in the AM-only days and driving across long stretches of open land with little or no reception for anything).
Must have been the summer of ’67 after the song was released because I remember they played it over and over.
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I was looking for a different photo! No complaints on the beauty of the hollyhocks, of course.
Sleep continues to elude me. This is how it went last night: read half an hour (awful book), lie in dark half an hour, return to awful book half an hour, lie in dark half an hour. It went that way until midnight, though I finally switched to a better book. 1,2,at 3, I turned off the alarm and told God if he wanted me up for the dance class, he’d have to wake me at 5:30.
Bing!
I’ve been dancing . . .
Off to teach on the Proverbs 31 woman to a group of women, half of whom are widows. Should be interesting. I’m learning toward discussing God’s hope for a woman in general–suggestions not requirements. We’ll see. I haven’t liked this IVP study of Women of the Old Testament. We’ll start Women of the New Testament next week, but we’ve got a different author.
A middle-aged man asked if he could join the group. I told him yes, but . . . well, guys, would you go into a great class taught by a middle aged woman with a bunch of elderly ladies who like to give advice?
🙂
Especially a middle aged woman who failed Donna’s recent FB test “how much do you know about the Bible?” 🙂
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Donna, it’s California politicians that ran Toyota out, regardless of what they say about being close to customer base.
Lots of them won’t like Plano. It’s a suburb of Dallas. And really part of Dallas, like Annandale was part of Washington, though I seldom went there.
Plano is cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Not many trees in the area. But gas will likely cost much less than in California. Almost everything will cost less.
But if you like the ocean, it’s along ways away.
Texas is a big state.
You might want to do a story on Plano, lots of people would be interested. Look on the map for Plano. North of Dallas.
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Lots of complaints going around about California’s business un-friendly policies & taxes, to be sure. This isn’t the first company to pick up and move out of the state in recent years.
Toyota’s a good employer, by all accounts — good salaries, bonuses every year, terrific benefits. I’m sure a number of employees, if offered the chance, will make the move. But it will be a big change for many as you noted.
We also saw this last night in the Dallas press:
http://bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com/2014/04/texas-enterprise-fund-will-grant-40-million-to-toyota.html/
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Another 4″ of heavy, heavy wet snow here this morning. Yuck. So slick for driving (and very muddy roads underneath) but, I get to babysit the little guy whose parents we’ve been praying for 🙂
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Cold, windy and rainy here. As someone said yesterday, we had March’s winds in April and it looks like we’ll have April’s showers in May. Delayed seasonal development.
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I blame the delay of spring on the fact that the Great Lake froze 80 percent over – Lake Superior is still 60 percent frozen over. That amount of ice takes a long time to thaw. For the past couple of weeks, even on clear days, there has been a cold, damp wind during the day – I’m willing to guess that it is coming off the thawing lakes.
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They are letting all the schools out at 12:30 today due to the extreme weather.
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Phos, it’s global warming, that’s what it is.
The first car I had had fender skirts and curb feelers.
But it didn’t have a starter on the floor. You had to push a button and pull a choke.
🙂
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And World has done its own piece on the Toyota move:
http://www.worldmag.com/2014/04/toyota_peels_out_of_california_en_route_to_texas
“Toyota delivered a pink slip to California on Monday, announcing the company will move its U.S. headquarters and 3,000 jobs from the Los Angeles suburbs to the outskirts of Dallas. Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Texas offered $40 million in incentives, and Toyota is expected to invest $300 million in its new Plano headquarters.
“The symbolic slap at California is a victory for Perry, who has spent years contrasting the political and business climates of the nation’s two largest states. Toyota’s announcement comes about two months after Occidental Petroleum Corp. disclosed it was moving its headquarters to Houston from Los Angeles.
“Texas boasts low taxes and low regulation, said Michael Barone of the American Enterprise Institute. Gov. Jerry Brown’s California does the opposite, and Toyota’s decision is consistent with that, Barone said.”
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Businesses want to thrive rather than just survive. The moves make good sense and since they will probably have higher earnings that means more than likely they will pay more in taxes so big government must be happy.
Being where I am, it is hard to imagine still dealing with snow. As Bosley is lying in my lap and feeling quite warm, I am thinking a lap cat may not be the best thing for summer in Atlanta. I would make her move, but I am still trying to pamper her a bit since she is still healing from surgery.
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Donna, there is a real estate company called San Diego’s Finest Realty or something like that. Several years ago I had some dealings with the broker and she told me then that businesses were leaving California and she was advising her investors to get out of the housing market and purchase in other states. Somehow she based this on how many moving vans such as Uhaul were rented one way.
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The flowers are beautiful. I can just about imagine Spring actually coming here someday.
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People will still want to be here for the weather and the ocean, though.
So they finally announced the arson arrest today. Talk about waiting for the other shoe to drop for 2 weeks running (everyone knew who the main suspect was, but it took forever — or so it seemed to us — for them to connect enough of the dots to arrest the person). He’s a 78-year-old retired longshoreman, so there you go, there can be things you can do do after retirement.
Just filed a story from home after the news conference, but still need to talk to someone at 5 to see if we can get any more info.
And it’s crazy hot out here today, like 90 degrees with a hot wind blowing. It’s supposed to get close to 100 by Thursday, then we’ll be back in the low 70s, high 60s, this weekend again.
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Donna, most will like to live where they can get a job. Soon California will be all hippies.
When we were living in Virginia, Elvera and I were coming out of a hardware store and noticed a lady trying to tie a couple on long pieces of wood to a small car. I went over and told the lady, “that will never work” What to do? We were in our van, so I volunteered to take the wood home for the lady. Elvera rode with her and I followed in the van, with the wood. A week or so later, we received a nice thank you note from her.
I told you that, to say this: I was coming out of Home Depot today and saw a lady trying to put a long plastic pipe in her car. She had it stuck on the car with part sticking out of the passenger rear window. I was driving my truck. I stopped and stood there about 30 seconds. Then I left.
Though I would have liked to help, my instincts told me that I should let that lady work it out by herself. I still kind of regret it, but still think I did the right thing.
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Donna if people need to make a decent living they will go where the work is and travel to the ocean. Remember I live in what was an agricultural count. Now we are a bedroom community. The fields are subdivisions and our biggest industry is tourism.
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Well, we can only hope that the state powers-that-be start getting the picture. I think some in the city of LA are waking up.
But someone on my FB post yesterday about Toyota’s moving actually commented “Good Riddance!”, going on to say that all these companies are looking for is to pay their workers less money so they can get bigger profits. So let ’em go.
Sigh.
There is a certain mindset among some people out here. They really just don’t quite “get it.” Not yet, anyway.
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Chas, I remember my husband tying boards to the side of our car once. It did work. Glad we have a truck again. I do remember a couple of times things flew out the back of that, though.
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Chas,
Soon? 😯
You mean as soon as Michelle, Donna, and Bob leave. 🙂
Janice,
Give Bosley some tuna. That always makes my kitties feel better. 🙂
Donna,
I read the comments on what you posted on Facebook. I kept my mouth shut.
You’re welcome. 🙂
But seriously, the attitude expressed by some is exactly why they are leaving. It’s the same attitude that says “hey, they’re rich, make them pay more,” which is what got them here in the first place. And they’re also wrong about the taxes for Texan workers and residents. When it’s all added up, it’s lower in Texas.
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Donna,
http://bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com/2014/04/toyota-workers-who-move-to-texas-from-california-could-save-big-on-taxes.html/
“Toyota employees who decide to move to North Texas from California stand to gain significant tax savings over their lifetime, according to data from Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis’ state tax calculator.
Toyota said yesterday it will consolidate three North American business headquarters at a new campus in Plano, investing $300 million and generating about 4,000 jobs. Those jobs include people who may move to North Texas from California, Kentucky and New York.
“In general, people of all incomes will save in Texas,” said Pamela Villarreal, senior fellow at the conservative public policy research group. “People will save on the lower cost of living in Texas, but depending on their income and property taxes, they may not save a whole less.”
The overall cost of living in Plano is about 31 percent lower than in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area, which includes one of the Toyota headquarters in Torrance, Calif., according to ACCRA indexes.”
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That’s nearly 1/3 less in taxes over your lifetime. That’s huge. California can’t compete against that. At least be close if you want to. The biggest issue is social services, rampant in CA, not so much in Texas. Texas let’s the feds handle it, but Cali. has tons more state programs. That costs a lot of money, but it does ensure political dominance by the one party handing it out, so the end, means, and all that.
Business, where they steal it from? Not so much.
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There is also the “right to work” status. I was in Dallas last February. It can compete with any city. The state has a lot to offer. Hill country plains Gulf of Mexico.
I went and read the Facebook comments. I know it is a blow
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Thanks AJ, I shared that on FB too — sent the link to our editor.
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