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Our Daily Thread 5-1-14

Good Morning!

I’m hoping those April showers are gone for a while. They sure went out with a bang.

And since I’m looking forward to May flowers, here’s some more……

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On this day in 1748 the ruins of Pompeii were found. 

In 1826 Samuel Mory patented the internal combustion engine.  

In 1863 the first wartime conscription law goes into effect in the U.S. 

In 1865, at the Battle of Five Forks in Petersburg, VA, Gen. Robert E. Lee began his final offensive. 

And in 2004 President George W. Bush signed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act. The bill made it a crime to harm a fetus during an assault on a pregnant woman. 

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Quote of the Day

“If they try to rush me, I always say, I’ve only got one other speed and it’s slower.”

Glenn Ford 

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Today is Kate Smith’s birthday. So here’s a fun one with Dean and Lucy. 🙂

Today is also Johnny Colt’s birthday. So a cover from the Black Crowes.

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Anyone have a QoD?

34 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 5-1-14”

  4. I have spent time organizing local events for the National Day of Prayer. Such a special day. Only prayer can turn things around. Praying with you for our country today.

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  6. Good night, Jo. Good morning, everyone else. Mid-day for me. Packing still, but taking it kind of easy today. Don’t want to collapse. See prayer thread for more. Off to my boxes I go.

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  7. Linda, Kim, AJ, I’m in. Sounds like fun!

    Kim, for a true cattle car experience you need to fly an African airline! (Or ride a bus, but that’s a whole other story.)

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  8. Good morning, everyone! Wish I could join y’all for the get together–but our summer schedule is tight! I know it will be a truly special experience for all who are able to attend. Our eldest (L.) turns 15 September 12, 2014, so she’s taking drivers education classes this summer so that she can get her permit on her birthday. Texas requires 32 hours of classroom instruction in addition to 25 hours of driving practice in order to get a license before 18. Seems like overkill to me–I remember my own drivers ed course as being painfully boring. But, the all powerful nanny state deems it so, so that’s how she’ll be spending three weeks this summer. She already drives the Polaris at the ranch (as well as the tractor, which is a standard), so I’m confident she’ll make it through with ease.

    Today is Becca’s busy day of the week: Tutoring from 9-10; school from 10-10:45; Vision therapy from 11-12 (which is making a profound difference–the letters no longer jump around on the page! Yay!); school (again) from 12:15-1:30; and homeschool gymnastics from 2-3. She absolutely loves gymnastics–and it’s a very small class–just five kids, so there’s lots of personal attention.

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  9. Becca’s day is certainly going to be a busy one 🙂

    Michelle, your conversation with your daughter yesterday sure made me smile. At least she’s telling you what she’s doing/thinking so that you can help look for options for her. I’m still very frustrated with my daughter for not telling us what’s going on.

    It’s going to be a long day for me. Job candidate coming in for an hour or so to test the waters – both for her and for us.

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  10. I don’t know where to begin. I really like the house we are in and the location is perfect. I love sitting in the 1974 dark cheap paneled living room with three extremely heavy sliding glass doors. One won’t open and one won’t lock, but I have ferns and bird feeders hanging where I can sip my coffee and listen to the birds while the dogs run around in the fenced in yard. The kitchen is out dated and needs a new stove, but all of my cookware and dishes are in the cabinets. The garage doors don’t work, but all our junk is in there and we aren’t paying for a storage units. The hardwood floors make noise and rattle when you walk across them. The bedroom that has the “master bath” only has a shower, sink, and toilette–you can’t turn around good in it. We took the larger bedroom with two 1960’s size closets and use the hall bath that is larger.
    I had talked Mr. P into buying it and remodeling it. We approached the owner’s daughter (owner is in a nursing home) through a mutual friend and realtor. We threw out a number we thought was fair. She decided she wanted more and I suggested she get the house appraised because an appraiser can add and subtract numbers that a real estate agent can’t. In all of this Mr. P got his nose out of joint and won’t even consider the house. He wants something more up to date. He found the house of his dreams but it is $349K !!!!!!!!! The thought of that makes me hyperventilate.
    Our mutual friend and realtor called yesterday and the landlord has a be in bee in her bonnet to sell NOW. We have a lease until October but I couldn’t in good conscious stand in her way. Except I don’t want to move. I have moved NINE times in the last ten years! The thought of packing up everything and moving again just overwhelms me. Now I am finding myself detaching from the house. I no longer have dreams of what we could do to it. How I could have a corner banquet, how new appliances in the kitchen would look, how a master bath would look and the flowers I could plant. I couldn’t take pleasure in the birds this morning because …well just because.

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  11. The April showers brought lovely flowers to the blog today. Thanks be to God!

    Kim, your pain over having to drop dreams and gear up for another move is so appropriate. You have gone through a tremendous amount of change in almost every facet of your life during the last few years. I remember doing a checklist of stressing factors once for a class I took. Wow! You could almost check them all.
    Hang in there and know God is in the mix. Lean on Him or let Him carry you through. He is able when we are not.

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  14. Kim, I understand stress. And moving is a big one. I also checked off many of the major stress factors some years ago when my mom died just weeks after I’d had surgery — all followed by having to clear out her house to use as a rental and then a big upheaval of a move for me, too, away from an apartment I loved and into a rental house. Ugh. Took me a couple years just to settle down from all that again.

    The pictures of all these beautiful flowers makes me want to plant something. But then there’s the watering and the weeding. I’ve done it before, but have just not been in a garden frame of mind in recent years, especially with the water rationing. But a colorful yard is so much fun.

    We have another hot, dry day ahead today with the desert winds blowing out and pushing back the cool marine layer and breeze.

    It’s better than heat with humidity, I suppose, except that it also comes with the whole fire danger (and we have a big one burning to the east of us, it was still completely out of control as of last night causing a number of forced evacuations as it approached an area with homes).

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  15. annms, your daughter should ace the driving since she’s already been doing it — and she can also drive a horse, right?

    Glad to hear Becca’s vision therapy is going so well.

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  17. I Idaho it is fifty hours with an adult. Except in the case of one of ours, we made her do seventy five until her confidence was up enough to make good decisions.

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  18. Bankers. Today one in particular ranks down there just above politicians and lawyers (except NJL). Our buyer’s banker delayed some inspections so we cannot close tomorrow as planned. Today is the roof and attic inspection we were not told about. The termite exterminator can’t get to us until next Wednesday, so the closing for our current house has to wait a week. Not only that, but the lady at the title company handling our purchase is on vacation next week, so we can’t close on that house until the 12th. We think we can still get to move our stuff on the 10th. Mrs L is upset because our new moving date coincides with a family gathering that has already been postponed 4 times since Thanksgiving. So unless her family wants to move us on that day, we’ll have to try again later (we were going to host it at a park).

    Bankers. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

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  20. Here’s the deal on teaching kids to drive (veteran of four of them, not sure how my husband missed this opportunity):

    *Practice in a large parking lot before you hit the road (particularly true if driving with a stick shift). One friend gave the keys to the kid and sat in a lawn chair reading while her child got a feel for the car.

    *Sitting in the passenger’s seat is an excellent aerobic workout. But, don’t close your eyes!

    * I’ve only heard of one family dying while a kid was driving–and that is was in the mountains and they went off a cliff–I read it in the paper.

    *Keep your voice as calm as possible. Discuss anticipating other cars’ behavior . . .

    *If possible, visit amusement parks with bumper cars and at least once hit the child head on. That saved my life more than once–I remembered the jolt and turned away from hitting a car head on.

    * Remind the child if they have to choose between a tree and a fence, hit the fence. Also discuss centripetal force.

    *It doesn’t matter if people are honking at them, if they need to drive slowly on a street, do so. Conversely, don’t try freeway driving until they’ve mastered other skills.

    *Hire a professional. One son received driver’s training from an off duty police officer.

    *Let your husband ride with the child. My personal favorite option . . . . 🙂

    .

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  21. Ah, yes, stress. So sorry about yet another move; you no sooner start to feel like you’re at home and you’re off again.

    Stress tests: http://www.stress.org.uk/stresstest.aspx

    Here’s a better one: http://www.healthcentral.com/sleep-disorders/stress-test-3454-143.html

    Scoring is over a one-year period. During one 15 month period long ago, I scored 725 points. I sobbed with relief when I saw that score. I’d know the period was incredibly difficult but rather than feel forsaken could only feel gratitude we were okay.

    Not the gospel, but helpful for me.

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  22. Good advice on teaching children to drive, Michelle. I started them in parking lots and once they got the feel, I made them drive up and down several rows. If they drove over any lines they had to go around a row again.

    I also tried teaching them all stick shift first.

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  24. Michelle, I’ve never quite figured out those stress tests. For one thing, why on earth do they include Christmas? Yes, it can be stressful, but pretty much everyone has one! And for some it would be less stress than for others. And divorce as less stressful than a spouse’s death? I don’t think so. (Nor does my sister.)

    Also, what if you have several that can be checked for the same thing? In 2003, I had probably (numbers wise) my most stressful year ever. The last two days in May I moved from Chicago to Nashville, in the process leaving a job with great job security and a “structure” for the unknown, irregular life of a freelancer. That affected just about every aspect of life, from my sleep schedule to my finances to my social life (I had lunch daily with co-workers I liked). Throw into a interstate move to a community where I knew no one, leaving a church I’d attended for 13 1/2 years (and I’d decided a few years before that the move was a good time to change denominations as well). I went from living in an inner-city neighborhood in Chicago and attending a multi-cultural Baptist church to living in an all-white neighborhood and attending a nearly-all-white Presbyterian church in the South. I also went from being around people (at least within a few feet of them, overhearing their phone calls) call day every day to spending whole days alone and generally seeing people no more than half an hour a day, sometimes not that much. I went from a city where I had lots of friends to a city where I knew no one; a huge city to a medium-sized city.

    And then, as if that was not enough, I decided that financially it made more sense to buy a house than to rent a bedroom in someone else’s house (which I did that first summer) and try to fit my business and my bedroom into one small room. So I bought my first house in July and had to fix it up (strip wallpaper from every room, hire an electrician to do $4,000 worth of work, replace the ac/heat after it went out on Christmas Day, replace both toilets and just about everything else that had water going through it, etc.).

    And then, fairly unexpectedly, my mother died the end of September. So I was an “orphan” in a brand-new city where I was only just getting to know people, new at being a home-owner, new at freelance (and not earning nearly as much as I had expected).

    There’s simply a lot of ways some of those things can be categorized. And a year when you have four or five “home” telephone numbers gets complicated! (Let’s see . . . I had my Chicago phone number, and then I had the phone number I was supposed to get in the Nashville area. But since that was going to take 30-60 days to hook it up for some reason–I was getting a second phone line installed in my bedroom–I was using the home phone number temporarily. Then the phone company made the “brilliant” suggestion of getting another phone company to hook up my phone, and then transferring to them once it was hooked up, so I did so–and somehow phone companies couldn’t transfer phone numbers that were reserved but not yet used, so I lost the phone number I’d told all my companies was eventually going to be my number, and got a different number instead. And then I ended up buying a house, but the new house was far enough from the old house that I couldn’t transfer that phone number, and had to start all over again. Oh yeah, and my Chicago phone had “This number has been disconnected; this customer’s new number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.” But they had the number I was supposed to get, which I never got. And Chicago couldn’t change the recording, and the Nashville phone companies weren’t willing to put any sort of recording on the number I was supposed to be getting, so here I am, newly freelance, and any company with my resume had no way to reach me by phone! (That did give me a perfect excuse to send out updated resumes, though.)

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  25. I think you get points every time, Cheryl. The importance of this test is to recognize that even good events (Christmas) come with some degree of stress and it mounts up. Moving twice in six months (which I did that one year and Kim has apparently turned into an annual event), is stressful, even though in my case it meant my husband was finally home from sea.

    But having him home from sea meant a change in “normal” life. I was pregnant twice that year, but miscarried–double points on pregnancy. One child was pre-oped SEVEN times that year before they finally could do the relatively minor surgery–but each pre-op visit was stressful for a variety of reasons.

    I run this test for friends when they’re feeling beleaguered and not always understanding why everything. just. feels. so. hard. When you’ve been running at a high pitch to get everything done and under control, sometimes a relatively minor event–say, a child starting kindergarten–blows into an enormous deal simply because so many other changes have already taken place and taxed your resiliency.

    I have no idea how they arrived at the point count, I just accepted it as it was and have found this a useful tool.

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  26. I actually wanted to comment on Kate Smith, who was grand marshal of the Rose Parade in Pasadena the year I marched in it with the UCLA band. I’d never heard of the woman before, but she was very gracious, smiled and waved beautifully, and loved the band. (Well, who could blame her?)

    She sang “God Bless America.” A little old and wavery, but we all loved her.

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  27. I went to the Day of Prayer event at the court house today. It was a religious/patriotic event with various local pastors participating. It was a nice event, but as you know by now, one of my pet peeves is people use prayer to preach. Prayer is to the Lord, not the audience. It only happened a couple of time.
    They took turns praying for, government, military, media, business, education, family and church. And the East Henderson High School Choir sang. It was a worthwhile event.

    Afterward, I walked up to Mikes on Main for lunch. When I walked in, I noticed that everyone was looking at the menu, so I left and went to McDonalds. 😦

    Kate Smith tried to have “God Bless America” to be our national anthem. I was in favor of it. “Star Spangled Banner” is about a flag, not the country. And it’s hard to sing.
    Of course, God Bless America would be unconstitutional today. It wasn’t in 1942.

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  28. I believe it is time to turn the song around: America, Bless God! He has blessed this country already. And what have we done (collectively, I mean, not individually)? We’ve mocked him with pseudo-Christianity and outright banned him from the public square. Why should God bless this wicked nation any more than another?

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  31. Lou Dobbs, on Fox News asks a poll question of viewers:
    “Do you believe Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton will face each other in 2016?”

    They don’t have a place to say, “It’s too scary to think about.”

    😦

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  32. Apparently I have very little stress in my life 🙂

    Kim, we moved 13 times in our first 10 years of married life. Sometimes in the same city/community but most often to an entirely different area of the country. It was hard and yet easy at the same time. Each move meant getting closer to our long term employment goals for my husband.

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  34. Busy-busy day with the arsonist & our congresswoman making news at the National Day of Prayer event in DC.

    It’s very windy here tonight — wind like this always makes me think of that Bradbury novel (and the 1983 film of the same name that was well done), “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

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