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Our Daily Thread 2-24-15

Good Morning!

 Today’s header photo is from Cheryl.

Can you name all 7 species?

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On this day in 1835 “Siwinowe Kesibwi” (The Shawnee Sun) was issued as the first Indian language monthly publication in the U.S.

In 1839 Mr. William S. Otis received a patent for the steam shovel. 

In 1868 the U.S. House of Representatives impeached President Andrew Johnson due to his attempt to dismiss Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. The U.S. Senate later acquitted Johnson. 

And in 1989 Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie to death for his novel “The Satanic Verses”. A bounty of one to three-million-dollars was also put on Rushidie’s head. 

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Quote of the Day

“God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.”

Chester W. Nimitz

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 Today is Samuel Wesley’s birthday. From The Choir of Somerville College, Oxford 

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Anyone have a QoD?

39 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-24-15”

  3. Good morning, Chas & Aj. I listened to the Andy Griffith bit–it was cute! Football is big in Texas, too, and I’ve never understood the allure. It seems barbaric to me, especially with all the head injuries. I don’t watch it–not even the Super Bowl.

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  4. L. was desperately hoping school would be closed today. They predicted ice, but we only got down to 33. Still cold for us, but nothing to the rest of y’all.

    Today is my sister’s 50th birthday. Weird. Hopefully, I’ll get to chat with her a little later via Facebook.

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  5. Good morning. When I took the garbage can to the street earlier there was patchy white on the ysrd and roof. After that previous bitter cold, it hardly seemed cold even as it hovered around 32 degrees. No where near LA Dog Park cold!

    I hope to make Swedish meatballs today using ground turkey meat. I mix it with finely diced sauteed onion, dry oatmeal, an egg, seasonings, and caraway seed. Then fry in a little extra light olive oil until done, drain, and then stir in a can of reduced sodium cream of celery soup with plain nofat yogurt for the sauce. I add a little water to the sause and let it cook down. I serve it with rice. It makes a really good dish whether you use ground turkey or beef. Thought I would share a good winter food recipe for this wintery day in Atlanta.

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  7. Well, I can see there are strong opinions about my meatballs. Sorry, Chas! I’m thinking you don’t like ground turkey, and I know you don’t do onions, and you may hate yogurt.
    🙂
    My husband will not eat yogurt, but he loves this dish. I love it, too. Don’t toss the meatballs until you try them. You may find that you like them, too.

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  11. Morning all. My friend asked me to go through the things I have in her attic. That is an overwhelming job. However I did remember that my house is empty. So I will check out the two storage closets there and see if I can put anything more in. The hard part is crawling on my knees into her attic. I need to take some sort of stool or chair as it gets a little low and I can’t stand all the way. Moving boxes, yuck!

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  12. Mmmm, onions and meatballs. Sounds good to me, Janice!

    All the “0” years seem weird at first. And just when you start getting used to being in one decade, your’e launched into the next. Then you have a whole other “0” year to try to get used to and the former “0” year begins to sound downright young. Yep, weird it is.

    Someone wound Annie up last night, she was tearing back and forth through the house, sliding/sledding on the throw rugs in between.

    From my devotional reading this morning:

    “Admit it, we’re all still a bit of a mess; that’s why we need God’s grace today as much as we needed it the first day we believed … Grace is only ever attractive to sinners. The riches of God’s goodness are only ever sought by the poor. … Face the fact today that you’ll never outgrow your need for grace, no matter how much you learn and how much you mature, until you are on the other side and your struggle is over because sin is no more.”

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  15. Oooh, ooh! I can name the seven species! 🙂 But I’ll wait and give other people a chance to figure them out / guess. I did think it was cool to have seven species, with no bird repeated, in a single photo, though most of the birds didn’t give it their best pose. But I think it’s only the bird on the far right that really probably can’t be identified at all unless you know what bird it is, so for that one I’ll give a hint–it’s a sparrow, but not a house sparrow; it is in the Midwest only in winter months. Most of the other species have had their individual portraits posted on here in the past, at least two of them so far this month.

    I don’t like Swedish meatballs, because I don’t really like meatballs at all. When I was a child, I was happy when I found out that meatballs were an optional part of spaghetti and meatballs, and that spaghetti with sauce was fairly good.

    But I married a man whose mother makes Swedish meatballs often. I take a couple and I’ve learned to like them OK, but they’ll never be a favorite. I suspect her recipe is far different from that one, though, as that one looks like it has a lot of substitutions in it, and she’d never make it with turkey, because she doesn’t like poultry.

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  17. American football: don’t understand it, don’t like it, don’t want to understand it, glad my husband is only vaguely interested. (He prefers the game the rest of the world calls football and we call soccer, and so do I.) The level of injuries in American football is just one factor to me. It just seems like a violent, dumb sport.

    All of my older brothers have turned 50, and I’m next (two more years), and the oldest has turned 60 with my second brother doing so later this year. It’s hard to believe sometimes, as it’s hard to believe that newborn baby niece I cuddled now has three children of her own. I wonder if Melchizedek ever said, “Is Junior really 700 already? Where does time go?”

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  18. I watched a lot of football as a kid — and even played flag football with girlfriends — so I understand the game and am not remiss to watch it. But I don’t follow it now.

    And under the “wow” category — we’ve had a lot of wind this morning, we’re still under a cold front, and the snow covering all the mountains from the weekend was spectacular to see on my drive in to work. Awesome.

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  19. If you have the opportunity to get her recipe, Cheryl, I would like to see it. By the time the seasonings, onion, and carroway seeds get mixed in and the meat is diluted by the oatmeal, there is very little turkey flavor distinguishable.

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  21. Janice, from a family recipe book she and an aunt of the girls put together:
    Swedish Meatballs
    Meatballs:
    4 pounds ground beef
    1 package dry onion soup mix
    1 cup ground oatmeal
    1 teaspoon pepper
    1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
    2 tablespoons parsley
    3 eggs, beaten
    Sauce:
    1 can condensed cream of
    mushroom soup
    1 can condensed cream of
    celery soup
    1 cup sour cream
    1 cup water
    1 package dry onion soup mix
    Grind oatmeal in blender. Mix meatball ingredients together. Make into small balls. Preheat oven to 350°. Put meatballs on foil-lined pan. Bake for 30 minutes. Mix together sauce ingredients. Put cooked meatballs in crockpot. Pour sauce over meatballs. Cook on low until hot.

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  22. My mother, a girls junior high PE teacher, taught a football unit. She thought it important women understand the game–including the rules and how to play. I’ve used that information often.

    Soccer? Still trying to figure out the point of off sides . . .

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  23. Good read:

    ” … there are 318 references to Jesus’s second coming in the New Testament—roughly 1 out of every 13 verses mentions it. And nearly every moral command in the New Testament is tied to the second coming. It’s not an embarrassing, uneducated uncle of Christian theology; it’s essential to our faith. The fact that Jesus could return any day at any moment should sober us and change us.

    And it should change us now in at least four ways. … ”

    http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/4-ways-jesus-second-coming-changes-us-now

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  24. Michelle, technically I learned touch football, with at least one PE session devoted to it and probably more. But I hated PE and had no respect for the teacher. She was an older woman and she would stand on the side and tell kids what to do, never participating herself. I wasn’t good at PE (though I tried hard to be–I was the slowest girl in the class, but I tried my hardest in any race), and I didn’t think she liked me. For example, we had a ten-minute run in which we ran as far as we could for ten minutes, and then recorded the number of laps. Several laps (eight?) made a mile, and if you had fewer than that, you didn’t get onto the chart. I was one of maybe three students who didn’t make it onto the chart, and it felt like “Your effort doesn’t matter; you flunk.” I had the same teacher for all of my school years, first through eighth grade, and didn’t like her. In junior high she did this little lecture about how having cramps is never ever a reason not to participate in PE (sometimes it is; sometimes it isn’t). And the first month of the school year in Phoenix, it may still be 100 for a high. Sometimes we’d have PE indoors on the very hot days, but sometimes we wouldn’t, and I finally got a note from my mom to excuse me from outdoor PE through mid-September or when it was above 95, or something like that. She was ticked. When I explained that on hot days I got bad headaches from the sun, she wasn’t at all sympathetic and in fact mocked me a bit.

    The only time I can think of that I might “need” to know the rules of football is if it comes up in a book I’m editing, and I feel free to ask people who know about the subject when something in my books is outside my expertise. None of my brothers watches football, and my husband watches the Superbowl only if he cares somewhat who is playing (if the Packers had made it this year, he would have watched). I figure it’s a guy thing and it doesn’t matter if I understand it, any more than it matters whether my husband understands spices. (I do understand enough about soccer to be able to watch it, and it’s one of only two sports I ever enjoyed playing, the other being volleyball.)

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  25. Michelle: Off sides in soccer is when a offensive player receives a pass form his teammate while beyond all the defenders (except the goalie. There has to be at least one defender between the recipient and the goalie.

    And people think American rules football is hard to understand!

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  26. Just in from chipping another wheelbarrow of sticks into a wheelbarrow of chips. I had to add a few sticks to make it work. But transformed thirteen year old, the one who was baptized last month and promptly became a vegan, gathered my sticks for me. The best load ever.

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  27. We played touch football in our neighborhood. In fact, I had my collar broken playing that. It was a couple of days before I got to the doctor to have it X-rayed. Those were the days when you didn’t take your child in unless it was clearly necessary. My mom felt bad when she found out it was actually broken.

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  32. You would have liked my mom, Cheryl. She recognized not everyone was an athlete, which is why she gave a written test for each unit (including football), so girls like you could still get an A in PE!

    Stargazer is now a PhD. Humbling to realize I had the least math skills by far in that large lecture hall full of grad students . . . .

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  33. Cheryl, I hear your pain about PE. Being quite tall I always got a poor mark in the basketball portion of PE. I just couldn’t play it well, but I tried hard and put forth a lot of effort. I wasn’t able to learn to shoot baskets until my son taught me when he was 15. I agree that effort should be a large part of the mark for PE, otherwise it’s discouraging and why bother to try. I always did well if there was a written test. 🙂

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  34. Ugh.

    My dogs chewed up my favorite mechanical/permanent no-sharpen pencil, coolest writing instrument ever.

    Heaven knows what poisons they consumed in all that, although they’re still alive & seemed to enjoy their walk tonight. I suppose I picked up & “bagged” some of the pencil remains during the course of all that, not realizing — I didn’t discover the chewed up pencil until after we got home.

    I loved that pencil. 😦

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  36. The past two evenings husband and I have been watching movies I checked out from the library. We saw The Jane Austen Book Club last night and The Impossible tonight. They were both good, but The Impossible was so intense, based on a true story of an American family caught in the tsunami that hit Thailand while they were vacationing at the beach. I cried for a good portion of the movie. Miss Bosley had never seen me cry so much. She had to sniff the Kleenex I used, I know that only the curiosity of a cat could make that fascinating. She was actually more settled by movie watching than by the usual high action reruns. I think she also wanted to stay close to me tonight since she wanted to make sure I was okay since I kept sniffling. I have one more movie, a Sherlock Holmes movie.

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  39. Well, let’s see….there is a dove and a cardinal and a junco and several types of sparrows and one that I cannot remember but know I have seen it.

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