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Our Daily Thread 7-20-15

Good Morning!

On this day in 1801 a 1,235 pound cheese ball was pressed at the farm of Elisha Brown, Jr. The ball of cheese was later loaded on a horse-driven wagon and presented to President Thomas Jefferson at the White House. For what reason, I can only imagine….

In 1868 legislation that ordered U.S. tax stamps to be placed on all cigarette packs was passed.

In 1942 the first detachment of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, (WACS) began basic training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa.

And in 1969 Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. became the first men to walk on the moon.

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Quote of the Day

“I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it.”

Edmund Hillary

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Today is Carlos Santana’s birthday.

And it’s Chris Cornell’s too. 

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Anyone have a QoD?

75 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-20-15”

  2. Good Morning. Success!!!!! I am an ant murderer. For the past week I have had ants in my kitchen every morning. I have wiped them up and cleaned with 409/ I have tried to find where they were coming in, but it seemed to be somewhere in an interior wall. Then I discovered them in the hall bathroom. Yesterday they were everywhere. Not wanting to spray harsh chemicals around my kitchen where I could likely make myself sit I took to Google.
    I learned that they leave a scent when they come into a place so that other ants can follow them. Killing the ones you find doesn’t do anything, they will keep coming.
    I found instructions to mix 2 parts confectioner’s sugar with 1 part borax.. I left that in a small container next to where they were coming in by the stove. The plan is that they will take the sugar borax mix back to the nest and kill all of them, but I say dead ants in the mix and the live ones were stumbling. Hopefully some took the poison home.

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  3. I personally do not like this poem, but it seems appropriate this morning:

    Trees
    BY JOYCE KILMER
    I think that I shall never see
    A poem lovely as a tree.

    A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
    Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

    A tree that looks at God all day,
    And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

    A tree that may in Summer wear
    A nest of robins in her hair;

    Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
    Who intimately lives with rain.

    Poems are made by fools like me,
    But only God can make a tree.

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  4. Good morning so far. Hope it turns into a great day. I just took our new garbage container to the street. The county has a new once a week system with huge very GREEN square containers. Words on the top direct you to have the arrows facing forward, but there are no arrows. Interesting. I wonder when I will stop noticing that. The county made an effort to tell of the bargain we received that our bills remain the same even though they now do once a week instead of twice a week pick up. What a deal! Sweet!

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  8. We have ants too, Kim. I’m copying that formula and may use it .
    Like you said, killing them doesn’t do any good.
    Let us know how that works.

    the only lines I know from that poem is the last one.
    “Poems are made by fools like me,
    But only God can make a tree”.

    .

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  9. May I be 1st to claim 100 today? Looks like that is trending on the blog. 🙂

    6 Arrows, that concert, piano and clarinet, sounds divine.

    Miss Bosley just curled up in my arms and is kneading my shoulder and purring big time. In some ways she will always be my Baby Boz. She use to fit like a muffler under my chin, but no more. That does not stop her from trying though.

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  10. Already to 100 at 8:22 a.m. 🙂

    Janice, the concert really was such a delight. The piano duets were quite good, but the clarinet/piano combination was absolutely remarkable. Two young people in their mid-20s playing the way they did — many many hours of practice had to have gone into that. Their technical facility and rhythmic vitality as they played together was stunning.

    I talked to the young man’s mom after the concert and asked her when her son had started playing piano.

    She paused a moment, like she was trying to remember exactly when, and then said, “Oh, he was about 14 or 15.”

    !!!

    I was thinking she would say something like 4 or 5. 🙂 He had played the drums before beginning piano study, so that helps to explain his strong sense of rhythm, but, wow, he sure went far beyond good rhythm in his skill at the piano.

    We gave the performers a standing ovation after they finished last night, and they most definitely earned it. They were visibly excited about that, smiling huge smiles.

    Tonight they have another performance in a different state in the Midwest, where my former student had completed her studies for her bachelor’s degree. They were quite pumped after last night’s performance, and I could see how much they look forward to putting on their show again!

    I just love to see young people so full of the joy of music-making. 🙂

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  12. I wipe down the area with white vinegar, covering the scent. The ants I saw a couple weeks ago disappeared after I did that a couple times.

    I’ve tried lot of things. We had six different varieties of ants trying to make a home with us in our Hawai’i kitchen. And if you’ve ever stuck your hand in an ant’s nest. Yikes. That was me screaming about 18 years ago!

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  13. As I noted briefly on Saturday, I’m back from a successful, albeit fast, trip.

    I was only in southeastern Connecticut for 48 hours, but it was so beautiful and peaceful. I kept thinking, just as I had in Hawai’i 18 months ago, I’m so happy to be home again.

    Not exactly home, of course, but staying at a house I had watched being built when I lived there and which I’ve visited a number of time since: a large country house on 5 acres of land where our spiritual mentors have lived ever since. They’re 87 and 88 now, and L is suffering from Parkinson’s, badly. I’m so sorry it’s taken me three years to return for a visit.

    She’s mostly gone, which was poignant. I scheduled my trip to visit with their only daughter and only granddaughter, and I spent a lot of time talking with those two. A son came and there was a family gathering on Saturday, which somehow I fit right into. It was a good time, but L was rarely there mentally.

    She came to as I said goodbye, and gave me a blessing. I cried then and I’m crying now. I doubt I’ll “see” her, or she’ll see me, again. That was hard.

    Weather was glorious, CT smiling; we watched the sun go down at Stonington Point and then invited a family camping across America to camp at the field in front of the house. A youth worker who had just left his job, he fell into conversation with us and we were glad to give his family a beautiful spot for the rest of the night.

    R said later, “well, Michelle, I’ve decided my role this late in life is to be a philanthropist. I’m delighted they came.”

    A fun fun two hours with my former priest and his wife, who moved to Charleston two days later, left me feeling filled to my emotional and spiritual tank.

    But it was the third good bye to people I cared about in the last two weeks. Maybe this is just a summer of goodbyes for me, or more tellingly, a series of “I’ll see you in heaven, later,” for Christians who have blessed my life.

    I wish I’d had more time. To visit Karen, McMurry and a host of other friends in New England. I would have loved to have driven around my former homeland and appreciated the scenery and the folks who lived there.

    Another time. I had work to do in Chicago.

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  14. The only problem in Chicago was with toll roads.

    When I picked up the rental car, the guy behind the desk asked, “will you be driving on toll roads?”

    I was so tired from not sleeping, I stared at him. “How would I know? I’m going to Wheaton, Elmhurst and Geneva. Will I be driving on toll roads?”

    He said it would be $10 a day for the toll pass to work.

    “How do I drive the roads without it?”

    “You pay the tolls yourself.”

    “I’ll skip the pass.” Which was fine. I paid a grand total of $4.16 in tolls.

    The problem is the remaining 14 cents I did not have at a coin only gate.

    I’ll be trying to figure out how to pay that probably the rest of the day in the hopes of missing a whopping $50 ticket. Sigh.

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  15. I spent five days in the special collections library scanning almost everything I saw on Biddy Chambers. I’ve been given an opportunity to pitch a biography of her, that’s what I was doing in Chicago.

    If the publishers agrees to take it, I’ll explain all the other ins and outs with this project.

    In the meantime, there I was scanning away using my portable scanner directly to my laptop.

    Perfect.

    Except the scanner, a $50 model we bought a couple years ago on the Internet, quit on Tuesday.

    It revived that night.

    And quit Wednesday morning first thing.

    I abandoned everything and drove to Office Depot, bought a $100 portable scanner and was back in business about an hour later.

    It was the most sane thing to do, though it took awhile for me to figure out how to get the most out of this new, too smart for me, machine.

    I’ve got plenty of information to go through, the summer’s work is now in hand.

    It’s hard to read Biddy’s writing which way too often slinks off toward shorthand.

    But I’ve got a good start. 🙂

    There are some tricky things worth discussing, but in the interest of privacy and her late daughter’s concerns, I’ll have to really listen to how God wants them, if he wants them, revealed.

    It was poignant to read about Biddy’s last years in light of seeing L just the day before.

    But God often sets things in motion to his timing for his purposes, and I’ve learned to trust that.

    I’ve got a lot of thinking and praying to do.

    If I survive this heat wave. All the people I stayed with in Chicago had air conditioning. Not so here in CA. Yikes!

    To the gym and then, the Illinois toll website . . . I hope not for the day!

    LOL

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  16. Ants, we use terro, which is corn syrup with borax. And yes, they pick some home and take it home to the family. Soon there are none left. It only takes a drop. I tell the children, when they see an ant in the house, to watch it and find out where the line of ants is. That is where we try to put the drop. But if no line can be found, a drop goes near the ant. It finds it quickly and goes back to tell the others and a line of death is formed.

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  17. I once heard to smash some ants and mix them with something and leave the concoction where they can small the dead ants and they won’t return. Also heard dishwashing liquid will do the trick also. We are having large black ants that want the watermelon rinds I put in the trash. They are ending up in the big GREEN trash can outside.

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  18. michelle, we don’t need a/c, remember? 🙂 Trouble is, now we’re all used to it everywhere we go. I often wonder how my grandparents and other family survived Iowa summers without it.

    As they say, it’s not so much the heat but the humidity that is the killer and we’ve had it here in the past few days — we’re not accustomed to it.

    No ants here, it’s a problem I somehow have avoided in this house for the most part, thankfully.

    I’m off to pick Carol up in Hollywood then we’re going to the Calif. Science Center to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. Carol had seen all the freeway and street banners promoting it a few months ago when she was being transported from facility to facility and got sort of fixated on the idea of going. So I’d promised we would get there before it left in September. Since I’m off this week, I figured it would be good timing.

    This will be the first time I’ll use the toll pass I bought on a weekday, though, and I think the price they charge skyrockets M-F, unfortunately. If the lanes aren’t moving all that much better than the regular lanes, I’ll just skip using them. Seems dumb to pay that money only to go (mostly) as slowly as the rest of the freeway traffic is going.

    We got vouchers to the exhibit at work, meanwhile, so that should help me with our admission costs. But we may have to be on standby, I’m not sure. Hopefully we can cruise through the rest of the regular free exhibits to pass whatever time we have to wait.

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  19. Re ants: Terro ant killer. About three years ago we had ants in the bathroom and the ant traps weren’t working. (For a small ant problem in the kitchen, I’ve successfully used a trick I learned as a teenager: take some dish detergent suds and dot them on individual ants. Ants that come in will carry off the bodies and will stop coming. I’ve seen it work several times, but really only if you catch the problem when you only have a few small ants.) Anyway, we went to the hardware store and asked about ant poison and ant traps, and the employee showed us where they were. But my husband told the guy we hadn’t actually found them to work, and did he have a brand recommendation? So then he showed us the Terro. It’s a liquid that you put on a piece of cardboard, and like Kim’s formula the ants carry it back to their nest. We’ve seen the inch-wide dot of liquid disappear in just a few hours, they eat it so fast, and they’ll come in large numbers for two or three days, but then they’re gone. With the first infestation, it might have taken more than a week, but they were really bad by then. Usually it’s within a few days.

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  20. The following are the three clarinet/piano works we heard last night at the concert, for any who are interested. Videos (of other performers) to follow.

    Fantasiestucke, Op. 73, by Robert Schumann
    Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, by Leonard Bernstein
    Andante et Allegro, by Ernest Chausson

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  25. Thank you for listing those, Six. I can’t get the videos on this phone.

    I am indulging in a strawberry popsickle. I have gotten sweaty from carrying things out to the car to donate. The car is by the door, but in this hot and humid weather, if you stick your toe out the door it will be covered in sweat in a moment. This heat is making me happy to have Miss Bosley be an indoors kitty.

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  26. Oh, I see that skipping to the end of the comments to recommend Terro before I forgot about the ant discussion earlier in the thread means I was repeating Mumsee’s recommendation. But it’s a good one; the stuff works. Last time we used it, we had a circle of ants around our drop that was so dense that my husband compared the ants to piglets drinking from a sow.

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  28. Something amusing happened before I got out of bed. I was making some circles with my feet to limber them up before I got out of bed. I wanted to do this especially since I had sort of hurt my foot yesterday. I looked up on the dresser where Miss Bosley was lying down with one arm dangling off the side, and she was circling it around. Monkey see, monkey do?

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  29. Lovely picture for the header.

    Donna, from yesterday, the bookshelf is lovely.

    I may use that remedy against ants. There were ants crawling over the piano and I yesterday at church.

    My father is doing well. He wanted to get out and do things; but I warned him that he wasn’t out of the woods yet and could have a relapse if he overdid it. He only pulled a few weeds 🙂 Second sister was our gardener until she married last year. I wasn’t sure if we would be able to keep all the vegetable gardens going; but they have become my father’s raison d’etre. They are a thing of beauty.

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  30. No go with the toll. I’m 12 hours late after assuming 7 days grace meant 7 business days. Was it worth it to use my credit card on an unsecured ISP to pay the remaining toll?

    Frustrated and resigned to paying, I hope, about $25 for the missed 14 cents. The only consolation is maybe the fees will go towards the roads . . .

    But! I should be thankful for something . . . will work on that! 🙂

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  32. Do you mean we are ignoring you, Mumsee? Or that with all the nestlings temporarily out of the nest, you feel ignored. In either case, you aren’t ignored. My father and I piece together all the goings on in your household between this blog and email updates; and my father prays for you every evening. It is good that your husband feels well enough to drive the small folk around.

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  33. Phos, about ten years ago I had a hernia operation. Outpatient, I was in the hospital several hours, but out later in the day. I was to go home to recuperate. After a couple of days, I felt better and went out to pick blackberries for a couple of hours.
    It set me back for a week.
    With your training, you likely know this better than I do.
    Just because you feel better.it doesn’t mean that you’re well.

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  34. Just Cheryl, ignoring my terro comment. Nope, they are all home and we have done our schoolwork for the day. They will be heading off for karate in a bit. Then it will be my day off. Sort of.

    Thanks for thinking of us and praying for us, Phos. We appreciate it. And I believe God is using those prayers and those of many others to do remarkable things in these children.

    How is your dad doing today?

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  35. Chas, on the other side of the equation, if the doctor says that post-op exercise is good, then do it. One of my brothers had knee surgery, and he was so afraid he’d hurt the knee that he did the bare minimum post surgery . . . and ended up with a blood clot that could have killed him. And my brother-in-law had arm surgery, and post-surgery exercises he rarely did . . . and died of a heart embolism that my sister thinks was likely related to his not having done the necessary exercises.

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  38. catching up here as the sun rises behind the clouds. Had to put on a jacket and socks and cover my legs with a blanket before having a quiet time this morning. As I said last night on yesterday’s thread, I could not stay awake after 8:30. I keep finding things my aide has already done, so nice. and I paid her to come chop down the bougainvillea that was covering my window. Time to be up and at em for me.

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  48. Oops, I got sidetracked. Instead, I made pillows. Remember that toaster oven Donna refused to donate to my good cause? Remember husband bought me one for Christmas a few years ago? It is being put to good use….fresh cherries from the cherry trees….mmm mmmm….

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  52. So what does my father go and do? He goes outside again, and gets stung by a hornet. On his upper lip. Which then swelled up. I told him that he looks like a rabbit now. This taking care of parents is uphill work.

    Chas and Cheryl are both correct. You need to rest and recuperate – so don’t do a whole lot of work just because you’re feeling better. But do all those post-op exercises they tell you to do.

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  54. I’m not little! I stand 5’10 or 10 1/2 in those heeled shoes you all convinced me to buy, and I can sling them off and wield…

    oh, never mind.

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  58. All the people who like 57 got scared off by your spiky heels description. They aren’t spiky! They’re blunt. Not scary at all.

    Was there someone scowling around here? There’s smiling right here. 😀

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  60. Wise idea, Chas. 🙂

    And I’m surprised to see you around here this late at night. Did Cheryl’s yelling at 9:13 wake you up?

    😉

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  63. Oh, the toaster oven, I almost forgot …

    So I picked Carol up and we saw the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit (complete with the 3D movie on Jerusalem) — very long day, but amazing artifacts to see and just such a marvel at how God ordained the preservation of these mere scraps for future generations.

    There were a LOT of people there, many Jewish people (and a Hebrew school that arrived by bus). I was surprised at the crowds on a Monday, but lots of people on vacation, kids out of school, and a very special exhibit, so that all made sense.

    Carol was done in (we’d also stopped at Walmart to get her a new lamp), all the walking left her pretty sore and tired (she needs knee replacements, too, but not sure she’ll get those under the circumstances — she has lots of health complications + is very low income).

    Traffic wasn’t too bad on the way home, thanks to those toll lanes. But I didn’t get home until 7 pm., it was a much longer/later day than I’d planned. But that’s OK, it was worth it.

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  67. Everyone? Does that make me a nobody?

    Honestly, I’ve never seen so many insults in one day. At 4:28 my name is used in vain; at 9:03 I’m threatened and at 9:24 Chas refuses to defend me. And then at 11:17 I’m just plain old non-existent. And that’s on top of AJ falsely claiming 100 last night when I’m the one who really got it, and everyone else saying that it’s his blog, his rules.

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  68. Done. We got all of the smoke detector batteries changed for the year. It is supposed to be on my birthday but since the alarms went off at four this morning, I elected to do it early.

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  73. I am here. I can’t sleep. I’m burning off steam, venting to my sister-in-law via email. We each are the other’s go-to person when extended-family matters get challenging and/or irritating. We’re both firstborns, and tend to be kindred spirits, helping each other through when the angst starts building. 😉

    Time for me to finish the email. Then I’ll feel better.

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