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Our Daily Thread 2-19-15

Good Morning!

Today’s header photo is from Kim.

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On this day in 1807 former U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr was arrested in Alabama. He was later tried and acquitted on charges of treason.

In 1846 the formal transfer of government between Texas and the United States took place. Texas had officially become a state on December 29, 1845. 

In 1942 President Roosevelt signed an executive order giving the military the authority to relocate and intern Japanese-Americans.

In 1945 about 30,000 U.S. Marines landed on Iwo Jima. 

And in 1963 the Soviet Union informed President Kennedy it would withdraw “several thousand” of its troops in Cuba. 

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Quote of the Day

“To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge.”

Nicolaus Copernicus

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 Today in 1958 the Miracles released this, their first single.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S92I7PRuYFM&feature=player_detailpage

And it’s also Smokey Robinson’s birthday, as well as being the birthday of fellow Miracle, Bobby Rogers.

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Anyone have a QoD?

44 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-19-15”

  3. Good morning Kim and Aj.
    It’s 4.0 degrees. Paul Speranza says that’s a record for this date in Hendersonville.
    It would be cold even for Annandale, Va. .
    Even for the Dog Park.
    It’s supposed to get colder tonight and then start warming up Saturday.

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  4. 🙂 When I first posted the other header was up. Some friends used to live next door to the people who have these cows and the children were fascinated with them. They are quite the attraction for people to stop on the side of the road and let their children see the oreo cows. One of the routes I can take to work leads me past them. I can either take a 4 lane highway with lots of traffic lights and congestion or I can snake through the back way. It takes about the same amount of time but I arrive at work and back home a lot less stressed.

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  5. Another thing you can know by looking at that photo…Even through there is spring green grass on the ground and some of the trees are budding out…winter isn’t over. Those trees in the foreground are pecan trees. They are the last to bud out. When they do you know that winter is truly over. Just some old country wisdom for you. I will try to let everyone know when they bud out because every one around me knows I wasn’t made for cold weather.

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  9. Good Morning….we are bracing ourselves for a foot of snow this weekend….but today it will be in the 50’s 🙂
    We have a rancher across the road who has oreo cows….the first time I saw them I thought someone had painted a white stripe around their middles….

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  10. Cheryl correctly mentioned in yesterday’s thread that not every incident, e.g. birth of a baby or answer to prayer is a miracle. But there are strange coincidences that make me think that God has intervened in some way.
    I told you several times how I met Elvera Collins on the stairs of FBC Columbia at the only time I have ever been in the balcony of FBC.

    On a very hot August day in 1992, we were in the process of moving my parents from Charleston to Virginia. I had a van loaded to the top with stuff and was driving alone up I-95 just south of Roanoke Rapids, NC. The speed limit on that stretch of I-95 was 70 mph and I was doing about that.. Suddenly a truck cut me off when he veered into the right lane. I slammed on the breaks and pulled onto the shoulder. I almost come to a stop, but not completely.
    The truck was gone. I pulled back onto the highway and was picking up speed, when I heard a loud noise and the van started shaking.
    I had blown the right rear tire!

    I pulled over, unloaded the van to get to the spare and tools. I changed the tire. Just as I was finishing reloading the van, it started to sprinkle. Just as I got into it, there was a downpour. I drove to a Cracker Barrel in Roanoke Rapids and cleaned myself up, but it was crowded and I went to a Waffle House across the street for dinner.
    I didn’t think anything more about it.
    Later, I was thinking about this thing and thought.

    Suppose that van hadn’t cut me off and I blew that tire doing 70?
    A weird happenstance, and definitely not a miracle.
    But it makes you think.

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  13. Chas, I often play that “game” with myself. I can be headed somewhere and the car in front of me is going 10 or so miles under the speed limit. I can speed up and pass (I have found if I do this they usually catch up to me at a light or stop sign) or I can take a deep breath and think God is slowing me down for a reason. I can catch every traffic light while running late for an appointment. I could get frustrated and be tempted to speed, but I tell myself there may be an accident up ahead that God is keeping me from having.
    It may not be Biblical or theologically sound, but it works for me.

    (I noticed this again on the 9 hour drive home from Austin–semi trucks we would pass once, we would end up passing two or three times- remember we spent one night in Lafayette)

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  14. Kim, I hated driving in Chicago, partly because one simply had to be somewhat aggressive in driving. For example, if you saw enough space for two cars in the lane next to yours and decided that was a good opening to move over, the second you turned on your blinker the rear car would close up the gap. You simply had to move over without using a blinker, sometimes nudging your way in a bit if, say, your lane was closing and a brick wall was ahead. (I had that literal happenstance once; I was moving too fast to stop in time, and if I had stopped I would never have been able to get over and might have been rear-ended, but the car next to me refused to let me in, so I had to go over anyway and force him to choose between an accident and letting me in. I detest that sort of driving–but in that situation it was potentially life or death and he had to let me in, even if he didn’t like it!)

    But one thing I determined was that there would be plenty of times that I couldn’t move as fast as I might like, but I had to be patient and deal with it. I’d be amused at cars that moved from lane to lane constantly, because they never ever had a net gain, but they kept themselves stressed. I could strategically change lanes and move faster if I had to. (I knew, for example, that on one interstate the pattern was such that no lane was ever the fastest for more than a couple of minutes, so if I was in the fastest lane I would move out, if I could do so safely, while it was still the fastest lane. If I did that three or four times during my commute, I had a definite net gain. But I only did that on days I was running late, since I didn’t really enjoy the game. It just happened to work. Everyone else would stay in the fastest lane; I never saw anyone else making use of that trick. Everyone else would move into the fastest lane when they saw it was the fastest, but by the time they had entered, it usually was losing its momentum. Like timing the stock market, it doesn’t necessarily work.)

    Anyway, I just made the mental decision that driving isn’t worth stress; I would not be impatient. If I’m late, I’m late, but I’m not going to get anywhere quicker by being upset about it, and being stressed about it wouldn’t help me make better driving decisions.

    My husband is not, as men go, an aggressive driver. But he is a man, and if the car ahead of us isn’t going the speed limit and he can’t get around it, he gets upset. (He doesn’t yell; he just gets visibly stressed and looks for opportunities to go around, and he may honk.) I am always tempted to try to get him to take my no-stress-while-driving pledge, because the truth is, when we’re together he almost never has a time he has to be wherever we are going. Taking another 30 seconds to get home, or even another two or three minutes, is inconsequential and not worth the stress. But I just quietly tell myself he’s a man, and men are innately competitive, and that’s OK. But as a woman, I would prefer that he just accept “This driver is looking for his turn and he’s going a bit slow and I can’t get around him, so I might as well be patient. He’ll find his turn soon enough, or we’ll get out of the no-passing area and I can pass, and then I can speed up again. No big deal.” But I don’t think the male brain is wired that way.

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  16. Cheryl, Rush once said, concerning driving in New York, “You don’t ever want to signal your intentions. Someone will prevent you from doing it.”

    My assessment of the traffic control system in Boston. It’s called “chicken”.

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  17. The traffic problem in Hendersonville is that people are too polite.
    We have numerous four-way stop signs here. The problem occurs when the person with the right of way doesn’t take it. You sit there wondering if that person is going to move.
    Don’t be so polite that you don’t take the right of way when you have it.

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  18. Chas, I learned years ago never to signal “go first” to someone, unless you really just can’t move. (If my car is stuck in snow and it will be a moment, then it makes sense to signal “go ahead and go.” Or if I’m waiting for the other car to move because I need to turn and it’s in my way.) In Chicago (or other places), I would be in a parking lot and meet someone at the corner and I would signal “go ahead and go” and the person doesn’t go. So then you’re left with “OK, he’s not moving, but I said I’d wait for him. Do I wait or just go?”

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  19. Atlanta drivers can be pretty aggressive. We are fortunate to usually be going against the main flow of traffic so the folks in the lanes going alongside us are generally in a cheerful mood moving at a rapid pace while observing the other cars across the way backed up in traffic.

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  20. I don’t think that driving profile has anything to do with male behavior. My husband would be far more patient to sit back than I would. He is a good driver, but I can get impatient with it. He does note that most of the passing being done only leads to a minute or two (if even that!) of gaining any distance.

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  21. I do agree about just taking your turn at four way stops. It really slows everyone down to not do so. One of my pet peeves is the person who thinks they have the right of way, because they are BEHIND the one whose turn it is.

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  22. Anyone who wants to see my eagle photos from yesterday (plus some of the river, some great blue herons, some Canada geese, etc.–but half the photos are of eagles), click on this link. I decided to go in and take out my last name so that I can post it on here. (I put the photos into the program and let the software make the photo book, and then I just rearranged a few photos and added captions, so I didn’t really design the book. It’s just a way to share the photos.) With most internet connections, this should load quickly and be easy to turn from one page to the next.

    Click the following link, wait a few seconds for it to load, and then follow the arrows:
    http://www.picaboo.com/?share=bc87b5e67330abc0ea5aa2dca566e2e8&version=532776&siteID=ViaPreview

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  23. Kathaleena, yeah I’ve known some aggressive women drivers, too, and men vary in their level. But my husband is a very gentle soul–he can be passionate about truth, but he is a very gentle man–but in general men seem more inclined to want to be at least a little “competitive” in driving. (Part of my husband’s driving “competitiveness” is getting the best gas mileage possible in the Prius. It gives a running tally of your gas mileage, and that’s part of the reason he hates being behind drivers who slow him down to ten miles behind the speed limit; they hurt his “momentum,” and that affects gas mileage.)

    I used to have a woman friend who was quite an aggressive driver after years of living in Chicago. She consistently did that “second car at the stop sign” trick, and it always bugged me. She didn’t take criticism well and I never called her on it, but I have thought about it and realized I really should have said something. That wasn’t just rude, it was potentially dangerous, but somehow she found it acceptable driving. In Chicago you just watch out for people who make their own rules like that; they are everywhere. But that doesn’t make it acceptable!

    If people were trying to turn left across a street (say they’re coming out of a parking lot) and the traffic pattern isn’t to their liking, they were quite likely to just pull halfway as soon as the chance presented itself, blocking all the traffic from that direction until they got an opportunity to move the rest of the way across. If cars were stopping at a traffic light and traffic was far enough back to block an alley, a driveway, or even another street, drivers would pull all the way forward and block it without thinking twice. Considering others wasn’t part of Chicago driving at all. I resisted that part of the city culture, but if I didn’t pull all the way to the bumper of the car ahead when the light turned red, say, because I was trying to keep the exit lane from McDonald’s open, the driver behind me was likely to swing around me and block it up himself, and he was likely to do it with some angry honking at me for not doing that myself. So by the time the light turned green, there might be five cars at the exit that couldn’t get out while the road would have been clear, and now our light is green and they still can’t go. That was part of the culture of Chicago that I just couldn’t stand, and a big part of why I wanted out.

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  25. I am glad I learned to drive in a city. The people I know around here who learned in the country don’t know how to drive on a multi-lane highway. they don’t know that the on ramp is an acceleration lane, so they are still doing 40 MPH while trying to merge. I get going as fast as possible on the on ramp so I can merge into the 70 MPH traffic without slowing it down. Or else when turning left onto the four lane highway, they wait for the right lane to be clear instead of taking the open left lane.

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  26. Michelle, in Phoenix, I had “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” I was young then, and that was my first car. Since then I’ve never had a bumper sticker. In Chicago I debated getting a specialty license plate, but wasn’t willing to pay the extra cost.

    Hey, that would be a QoD sometime: within the limits of what your state allows (number of characters), if you got a specialty license plate, what would it say? Mine would be “EDITER,” the joke being “Wait–she can’t even spell the word?”

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  28. I drive fine, it’s the other people I worry about.

    Reminds me of a Dave Barry quote….

    “The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion or ethnic background, is that we all believe we are above-average drivers.”

    The trick is you just have to know the local rules, then it’s easier to predict what’s next. Like say I’m in Jersey and some guy /girl comes flyin’ up the left lane as we approach an exit. Since I know Jersey drivers, I let off the gas, because here comes the right hand exit from the far left lane maneuver. You let up, they cross 3 lanes of traffic at 80 and exit while jamming on their brakes, and you go your merry way. 😯

    If I’m in NY the rule was always take any opening you see, because 10 other people are eyein’ it up too. If you ain’t movin’, you’re not doing it right. 🙂

    And don’t make eye contact…. 😯

    Just know the local traditions and you’ll be fine. Best advice I can give…..

    Assume everyone in another car is in fact trying to kill you. Drive accordingly. 🙂

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  31. I think you have to keep up on those LA driving skills. I remember Tom Brokaw saying on the news once that the ability to drive LA traffic is like having a graduate degree in driving.

    When I’m away for a long time, I find it unnerving to join the fray, particularly going so very fast and so very close. It’s no wonder brake shops do such a fine business in LA! 🙂

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  33. Donna,

    Sounds like my wife’s commute. Floor it for 50 feet, jam on the brakes. Floor it for 50 feet, jam on the brakes… repeat for 47 miles each way. 😦

    I don’t know how she does it. I believe I’d go all Michael Douglas in “Falling Down” if I had to do it. 🙂

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  34. A few years ago I went to the LA area to visit three of my brothers (two were living in CA, and another was visiting). One brother was 50 miles or so south of LA (or something like that), and he could stay for an extra day or two on one condition . . . that someone drive him home the next day. I was chosen as the one to drive him. Well, I lived in Chicago at the time and was used to Chicago driving (as much as I hated it, I was used to it). But I’d been on those wide, crazy LA freeways a time or two in the previous few days, and I said no way. Especially not with a car I had never driven. No way. My brothers couldn’t understand that–we could see our brother longer if I just did this one little thing. But I held to my refusal. In the end, another brother (the one who lived in LA) found a way to make the trip. I just wasn’t willing to be on the news: “Chicago Resident Found Responsible for 68-Car Pile-up with Multiple Fatalities.”

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  35. I hate bad drivers like the happy campers in the last eft lane. I have never had car magnet a with my name and number in real estate because I didn’t wanthink people t I be able to call me and yell.
    First I we old never pay for personalized plates
    Second right now there are thousands of 2008 red xterra s on the road. Who me? That wasn’t me. 🙂

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  38. Cheryl’s QoD: Missouri has a specialty plate for the Cave association, with proceeds going to cave conservation (there are over 6200 caves in the state). I would like to get one that says “I GUIDE” on it. Or else “UNIQUE”. But I think I saw that taken already. I suppose I could get creative and use numbers: “UN1QU3”. Or misspell it: “YU-NEEQ”.

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  41. Brother called and we chatted for awhile. Then husband got home and I made late dinner and prepared food for his lunch. Then sorted papers while huband watched tv. Watched the circus of husband doing minor battle with the fly swatter to keep Miss Bosle from being a celebrity “on the” tv. I made roast today in a crock pot i get from Walmsrt for around $16.00. It worked great for my needs.

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  42. I’m getting ready to haul the trash & recycles out for the week since tomorrow is trash day. I’m tempted to leave the chore for morning.

    But I aways hate myself when I do that.

    Oh wait. Maybe it’ll be delayed because of President’s Day earlier this week …

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  43. Rats.

    President’s Day isn’t a “trash bump” holiday in the city.

    Annie’s tearing back and forth through the house, chasing something imaginary.

    Speaking of cats, someone posted a photo today on FB of Jackson Galaxy, the guy who does My Cat From Hell program on Animal Planet, driving in his pink Cadillac (?) with his film crew shooting footage just half a block away from my house. Must be doing a show with one of my neighbors.

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