Our Daily Thread 7-15-15

Good Morning!

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On this day in 1813 Napoleon Bonaparte’s representatives met with the Allies in Prague to discuss peace terms.

In 1870 Georgia became the last of the Confederate states to be readmitted to the Union.

In 1916 Pacific Aero Products was incorporated in Seattle, WA. by William Boeing. The company was later renamed Boeing Co.

And in 1968 ABC-TV premiered “One Life to Live”.

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Quote of the Day – Think Christmas in July!

T’was the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

Clement Clarke Moore

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Today we have some weather and mood appropriate music.

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Anyone have a QoD?

44 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-15-15

  1. Ugh. I’ve been awake since 3. Somebody snored. Then the neighbor cranked up some sort of loud truck, Dozed off a little after 5 but the Alarm Dog went off at 5:55. He rattled his tags, walks up the bed to make sure I am awake, Lulabelle then joins him.

    I thought of a little boy I taught in 3rd grade named Jacoby. I wonder what ever happened to him.

    I will be back with the song that kept going through my brain.

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  2. Hi Kim.
    Is it just you and me this morning?
    And Aj, that’s a given.
    I’ve never heard “Jet Set ” before. I like to hear George and Tammy sing. But I’ve never heard that. It’s old, you can tell by Tammy’s hairstyle and George’s sideburns.

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  3. It is a good article and appreciated by my friends already.

    I had a dream last night that 2 of Mumsee’s children and I, along with my daughter, set off to drive to her house in a VW bug. We were in Los Angeles, with me driving the stick shift.

    An hour into the trip, I asked how long it would take . . . . I spent the rest of the dream trying to figure out how to sell the VW and rent a bigger car in Sacramento . . .

    So thankful to wake up. I hope they got home.

    Day 3 in the library. I’m on box 9 of 45! Aieeeeeee!

    Weather is nice today. I took a walk last night down streets lined with lush yards and gorgeous homes.

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  4. A thunderstorm broke our brief heat wave last evening. I woke up shivering this morning.

    On the new Harper Lee novel: I consider it dishonest that the publishers have advertised this as a new novel, when in fact it is an earlier version of To Kill a Mockingbird. It would have been fine if they simply had published it as an early version of the book. Any writer who has tried to create fictional characters will tell you those characters undergo many changes as the book develops. It is occasionally necessary to rewrite an entire book because the characters have changed so much. Dorothy L. Sayers, in her bookform essay, The Mind of the Maker, put it this way:

    The judgement of the natural law is not without its bearing on the writer’s claim to autocratic control over the characters he invents… all posses this measure of freedom, namely, that unless the author permits them to develop in conformity with their proper nature, they will cease to be true and living creatures.
    …the free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril. It does sometimes happen that the plot requires from its characters certain behavior, which, when it comes to the point, no ingenuity on the author’s part can force them into, except at the cost of destroying them.

    Most novelists have an entire body of work sitting among their files that had to be discarded or revised. Charlotte Bronte’s early novel The Professor, a mediocre work that flopped despite its occasional flashes of genius, was reworked into her brilliant, if a little bleak, final novel Villete, a much neglected classic that surpasses Jane Eyre in its emotional depth and honesty. So, I consider that To Kill a Mockingbird is like Villete, Harper Lee’s story as she finally told it. Go Set a Watchman is more like The Professor, the beginnings of a tale worth telling.

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  5. Good morning from the office where I think I still see yesterday’s flower picture from Cheryl. It is lovely today, too!

    We drove home in a terrific storm last night. Cars were only moving at 25 mph on the expressway. It does seem that weather is getting a bit more extreme.

    I have another book review to write today on The Song by Chris Fabrey. Since it was based on a movie, it was not his usual novel which we like so much because of his humor. It was still a good story.Has anyone seen the movie? I am late on this review because I was waiting until husband and I could hear the story together.

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  6. We used to make the trip every Christmas time. It took two full days. We stopped in Winnemucca and Lovelock. One for sleeping and the other for breakfast, depending on which direction we were going. It was the six of us in an Oldsmobile. It would have been a Snug Bug.

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  7. My aunt used to make the drive from Idaho to California for the winters. When I went to Idaho I flew — but I remember our family car trips to and from Iowa as I was growing up. Lots of open country and bugs on the windshield. Plus we had no a/c in our old car, of course, so some of that territory was very hot to travel through — I remember my dad always worrying about the car overheating. One year (the last time we drove there, must have been in 1964?), the car literally broke down as we rolled into town. It stayed in the shop the whole time.

    That was the trip when my Uncle George, a farmer, died very unexpectedly the night before we were going to head back to California — which extended our stay for the funeral. Very sad and very upsetting for the whole family, especially my dad (his brother) and my grandmother (the mom). Several more family members then came out from California for the service.

    I woke up around 2 a.m. and read, stayed awake for about an hour. I’m reading “A Praying Life” by Paul Miller which really has me hooked.

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  8. I love Meeting in the Air and am glad it has stayed with you. I don’t know where these songs come from and why they appear in my sleep. I used to hear music as I was falling asleep. It wasn’t anything that I had heard consciously. Most of it was music my brain made up. Sometimes it was just the instruments and sometimes I could hear words. (No I was not falling asleep with the radio on). Eventually I lost it and the music doesn’t play in my head like that anymore, but quite frequently now I have been waking up with known songs playing in my head. Strange, huh?
    Who knows?

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  9. The songs I get in my head are songs I hear. I don’t invent/compose songs. But I’ll admit that I interpose a Merle Travis break when It comes to June’s strumming. Strumming loses the tempo of the song.
    I had a Statler song earlier because I had the Statlers on my CD on the way to the Y.

    Re: the weather theme, we had a messy/dreary day yesterday. But only half an inch of rain. We need more.

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  10. It’s dry as usual in California … but anticipating our promised El Nino.

    Our governor yesterday signed a bill so residents won’t get fined for having brown lawns anymore. 🙂 You shouldn’t be able to tell people not to water and then slap them with a fine when their yard looks bad.

    Although theoretically that’s what the government has been allowed to do. This is California, after all, where no fines or taxes or fees go to waste — but rather disappear into the black hole of the government money pit never to be seen again.

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  11. This comes up on my Milk-phone radio quite a bit. Buck Owens is credited with the “Bakersfield Sound” that Dwight Yoakum revamped in the 90’s. Chas’ mention of guitars reminded me of it.

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  12. I pulled this little tidbit from American History: I did not know that Grant wanted Freed Slaves relocated to Santa Domingo in the Caribbean. 1870

    January 10: Grant proposes a treaty of annexation with Santo Domingo in an attempt to find land for freed slaves to settle. Under Grant’s plan, freed slaves will be able to relocate to the Caribbean island (the Dominican Republic today). The treaty is opposed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, headed by Charles Sumner, and will never be confirmed.

    January 26: Virginia is readmitted to the Union.

    February 3: The 15th Amendment is ratified.

    February 23: Mississippi is readmitted to the Union.

    March 30: Texas is readmitted to the Union.

    July 15: Georgia is the last former Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union.

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  13. I realized that I forgot to tell you all. Remember all that fuss about that form I had to get as soon as possible to Africa? Well, it got there, and was filled out and sent back to the regulating body. I still haven’t heard back from the regulating body; but at least that form has been taken care of. Thank you for praying.

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  14. Donna, a Prius can go as fast as you need it to go. Only thing is, unlike many cars, it’s more fuel-efficient at lower speeds (around town) than in highway driving. But yes, it can go 80, and it can accelerate to pass a slowpoke. It’s just that it hurts gas mileage to do so, and with the dashboard constantly telling you your gas mileage so far on this tank, the Prius driver is more likely to be the conservative driver than the racer. (Probably the person buying the Prius is more likely to be conservative in the first place.) I don’t like driving ours, but my husband knows all the tricks.

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  15. Kim, on hearing music when falling asleep: I have experienced that. It is an identified phenomena, called a hypnagogic hallucination. Hypnagogue comes from the Greek hypnos, meaning sleep. It is quite common – another such hallucination is that sensation of falling which causes so many dozing people to suddenly jerk awake. When I was sick as a child, I used to get such hallucinations frequently when I fell asleep or woke up. I would feel like I was turning to wood, or see complex patterns expand and contract, or hear distant, indistinct voices speaking. I later wondered if I was delirious at those times, though I do not think my fevers were very high since my mother monitored my temperatures carefully. When I studied mental health, my teacher played a tape put together by a schizophrenic to demonstrate what his auditory hallucinations sounded like. I recognized the same kinds of voices that I had heard as a sick child. It was another piece of evidence that schizophrenic hallucinations are physical in origin.

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  16. I’ve actually had a Prius as a loaner when my Jeep was in the shop. I also heard that cyclists aren’t fans of them as they’re “too” quite as they’re coming up alongside

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  17. Thank you Roscuro. You have solved so many of my personal mysteries. You told me about night time or sleeping paralysis. I have had that on several occasions and it is terrifying! Now you have explained the music. You may eventually cure me of all my disorders…LOL 😉

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  18. You are welcome, Kim. I sometimes think that studying in the medical field has been mostly to my personal benefit, as it has explained so many things I noticed about myself and others which I wondered about as a child. Whenever I find the answer to one of those childhood mysteries, I have a ‘Eureka’ moment and the information sticks in my mind. I’m glad it can benefit others too.

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  19. Donna, I think we have gotten closer to wildlife in the Prius, too. My favorite was the day we pulled up near a hunting fox, rolled down my husband’s window, and took pictures out of the window for ten minutes. But I also took photos very near a deer in the same way. Birds usually panic and take off when you get too close, but the chances are better in a Prius.

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  20. I googled it. I don’t think I have schizophrenia and I most certainly do not have narcolepsy. Once I am up I do not go back to sleep. I am running low on sleep so insomnia may be the problem and who doesn’t have stress in their life????
    It really isn’t anything that bothers me. It has always been music for me and I somewhat enjoy it and you guys are getting to experience the weird choices of music my brain it settling upon.

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  21. I hope no one reads my thoughts to suggest those who experience hypnagogic hallucinations have schizophrenia. I just meant that schizophrenics, for some reason, experience while fully awake the same phenomena that many normal healthy people do when they are falling asleep, which is good reason for thinking that schizophrenia is physical in origin.
    Did you see this link? http://patient.info/doctor/Hypnagogic-Hallucinations.htm

    •Hypnagogic hallucinations can occur without narcolepsy. People may be reluctant to admit to them for fear of being thought mentally ill.
    •Sex ratio is equal.
    •A telephone interview of nearly 5,000 people aged 15 to 100 in the UK showed that 37% of the sample reported experiencing hypnagogic [going from waking to sleep] hallucinations and 12.5% reported hypnopompic [going from sleep to waking] hallucinations. Both types of hallucinations were significantly more common among subjects with symptoms of insomnia, excessive daytime sleepiness or mental disorders. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations were much more common than expected, with a prevalence that far exceeds that which can be explained by the association with narcolepsy. Hypnopompic hallucinations may be a better indicator of narcolepsy than hypnagogic hallucinations in subjects reporting excessive daytime sleepiness.

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  22. In other words, up to 1/3 of the population may experience hypnagogic hallucinations, and they can’t all have narcolepsy.

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  23. Oh I didn’t mean to imply YOU said it. The article I read at patient.com said some of the causes were schizophenia, narcolepsy, stress, insomnia, night terrors, etc…

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  24. Christmas in July? I came home today to find the wallpaper on our computer screen had changed from an American flag to a snowy scene of our yard. What a coincidence. So, AJ, did you contact Mrs L to conspire to make me think it is not summer? 😉

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  25. My third piano student started lessons with me tonight. She has studied with one or more other teachers before, so is not a beginner. She is the one I told you about who would like to do some composing, so I got her started with that, as well as doing other things to advance her skills in the areas in which she’s had previous experience.

    I was so pleased to find an excellent series of books on the fundamentals of composing. It will save me a lot of time developing a strategy for teaching her composition, though I will tailor-make part of her composing program.

    For example, this week, in addition to her assignment in the composing book she’s starting in, I’m also having her compose a harmony part to the melody of “Happy Birthday to You.” 🙂

    I’m excited to hear her play next week on her first prepared assignment for me. I really enjoy the variety of students I have, and the varying ways they approach the piano. It inspires my own creative spirit.

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  26. That is a really sweet flower.

    I cut a simple dark pink rose from my garden to take to Norma’s memorial earlier this week. There were some nice professional arrangements people had ordered from the florist, but a few of us brought home-grown ones. My single flower wasn’t overly impressive, it looked a little limp next to the others, to be honest, but I know Norma would have smiled and liked it. I’m still missing her, it hit me again this morning on my drive to work. Odd since we didn’t spend a lot of time together, but it was just knowing she was always there, always there to cheer me on, always there to listen and to encourage me when I needed it.

    Interesting 5:11 link on sleep disorders roscuro. I’ve had that happen where I feel awake but am asleep (or is it the other way around?). I’ve also had that thing where I’m sure I hear something and jerk awake — the sound was so real, but I finally realize it must have been a dream of some kind.

    I also read once that resting deeply with your eyes closed, even if you’re still technically awake, counts for sleep.

    I rarely have trouble sleeping, but it hits now and again (usually waking up around 2 a.m. — and almost always due to stress and worry about something). But most nights I sleep straight through and 9 hours (a lot, I know) seems to be my natural sleep time when I can get it.

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