36 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-29-15”

  1. Good to hear from you, AJ. Looks like you were putting up today’s threads while I was typing on yesterday’s. How is Cheryl today?

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  2. Sorry about that. I put my phone on vibrate at the hospital yesterday and never turned it back. I didn’t hear my alarm this morning because it was on vibrate. I slept right thru it. We were all pretty exhausted. By the time we got things arranged for Cheryl and got to bed it was after midnight. So we all slept in unintentionally. 🙂

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  5. Glad all is well with the AJ clan. I usually use a clock radio for an alarm, but use the phone when I am getting up at an unusual time.

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  7. I do the same as Peter and Chas. My children ask why have a phone if I never answer it? It’s got the UCLA fight song as the ring tone, the only thing besides one of my children crying I react to instantly!

    But . . . you know . . . Half the time it’s sitting right in front of me and doesn’t ring or ping, so why should I spend my day checking it?

    Glad you’re home AJ. Now the hard work begins, so we’ll be praying for Cheryl’s recovery and the good things God will bring into your family’s life now she’ll be home with you for a while.

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  8. 😦 A rant that can’t wait.
    If there’s a 40% chance of rain for five days straight, it doesn’t mean there’s a 200% chance of rain that week. It means there a 40% chance it will rain that week.
    Some in he area have had downpours. I haven’t had a drop.’
    I’ve started watering my grass.
    I know, Donna has no sympathy for me at all.
    😆

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  10. Neither do I. We’d love a 40% chance of any moisture. 🙂

    For those of you interested and who still, for some reason, need a copy of one of my Christmas books–here’s the link to a blog post about me with a contest. http://gabrielle-meyer.blogspot.com/2015/07/guest-post-by-michelle-ule.html

    What is going on here of interest, to me, is how I got started talking about a pet peeve –the need for more in a romance than just boy meets girl, yawn, etc. and how I try hard to incorporate some actual spiritual meat and real story into my tale.

    I don’t know that anyone will get it, but I tried. (She said, beating you over the head with her theme!)

    Daughter returns to LA today and our house goes quiet. Stargazer has been house sitting for my in-laws who own every electronic device imaginable at the house. He thinks he may just stay there when his aunt and uncle return . . . sniff . . . I said to my husband, “do you think we could lure him home with cable?”

    Both of them laughed.

    It’s so sad to be boring. Sigh.

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  11. Michelle, here’s a scenario for you.
    Boy is sitting in church minding his own business.
    Girl, whom he has never seen before, joins the church.
    Boy is immediately smitten.
    Boy tries to meet girl but is thwarted at every turn.
    Months later, boy and girl happen to meet on the stairs of the church.
    Boy invites girl to lunch.
    It gets complicated from there,
    But boy gets girl and they live happily ever after.

    Don’t say that can’t happen. It can.

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  12. Chas, I think the chance of rain with seven days of 40% chances is going to be higher than a 40% total chance. I don’t know the mathematics of it, but there’s obviously a bigger chance of rain in a month with 40% chance every single day than in a month with one 40% and the rest 0.

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  14. Michelle, when my sister and I were living together when I was 20-22, she bought a lot of those prairie-romance books that were hot in that day. I really didn’t like them very much–I found them quite predictable–but I’d read them because they were available and I’m a bit of a chronic reader. If nothing else is available, then I’ll read the cereal box. Anyway, I decided romances weren’t really my genre of choice.

    In the years since then, I’ve edited a few. But they weren’t “just” romances. I did a pair, for example, that were noir mysteries, one set in New York and one set in a Post-WWII landscape of confusion overseas. The romance was definitely there, but the mystery, the different time period, the different place, made it far more than simple romance. The romance simply added another element to a very good tale. You’ve done the same idea–set three-dimensional people in a story, and have part of the story (not all) be romance, and it’s interesting on several levels. The prairie romances were a bit like that, too, but ultimately they were rather two-dimensional.

    Years ago (18 or 20) I did a little bit of proofreading for one company that specialized in getting books to market as cheaply as possible. They were more interested in quantity than quality. Well, I ended up proofing two romances, and the first one was OK, but the second one was so ludicrously written that it didn’t fit the time and place it was supposed to be set in at all. It was set in the 1700s, I think, maybe 1800s. But a young girl who was under guardianship ended up falling in love with a man who had killed his wife–or had been convicted of doing so, though he denied it. He had been sent to some hard labor camp or something. She defied her guardians by spending time with him, and toward the end of the book he came to visit and they ended up passionately kissing in the living room. When her guardians walk in on them, they walk out again, embarrassed. (Um . . . no, they would have thrown him out of their house.) Then later they tell her they were wrong, that the couple obviously loves each other and they were wrong to interfere. Well, with a Hollywood “true love” theme running through modern romance, parents just might react that way. But it was so ludicrous to set that scene in history. And books like that, which make romance the whole point of the book and no other detail is relevant, aren’t worth reading even if they aren’t sexually explicit.

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  15. Hey, who knew we were really a squad? This is from Katelyn Beattie, editor of Christianity Today:

    “Camaraderie is a powerful force in the world, enshrined this summer in the Internet hashtag meme #squadgoals, attributed to pop singer Taylor Swift and dissected last week by The Atlantic’s Megan Garber.

    “A squad is a group of friends from whom you derive a strong sense of identity and “being-in-ness.” “The squad is, ideally, a solid group of friends—friends who will be with you, season after season,” writes Garber. “Which is also to say: The squad is a friend group that functions, in its way, as a family.”

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  16. Yep, Cheryl. I was reacting to something someone said to me when I suggested she incorporate some subplot into her story, which was about as boring as all get out. “He looked at her, she looked at him. It was love.”

    I gave her a number of suggestions and some questions, including, “why do they even like each other?”

    She replied, “I’d need more than 15K words. Maybe next time.”

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  18. Our weather outlook:

    LOS ANGELES – Another round of high heat, elevated humidity and monsoonal moisture that could generate thunderstorms and lightning strikes will move into the Southland today.

    While the last band of stormy weather was the result of a tropical storm in the Pacific, the latest round of unstable weather will come to us courtesy of Texas, where an upper-level high-pressure system will spin westward and move into the area Wednesday morning.

    According to National Weather Service forecasters, dry lightning is possible beginning early Wednesday.

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  19. Michelle, my college writing professor didn’t allow students to write about parents (unless they were dead) or love interests, because she said college students simply couldn’t be objective about those two groups of people. She did a great spoof of typical romance stories.

    Well, one day a male student started reading his story about his high school girlfriend, which included her having lips like rose petals. It was a creative writing class, with ten or twelve of us around a conference-room table. It was a hilarious spoof of a love story, as ridiculous as the worst of them, and we were all laughing. Gradually we all realized he was serious, and we all stopped laughing and started feeling very sorry for the by-then-miserable young guy who still had to finish reading his story, after he knew it wasn’t evoking anything close to what he intended.

    The professor was the last one to understand. While he read, and the rest of us sat in embarrassed silence listening, she slapped the table and laughed and said how wonderful it was. Eventually she caught on to the silence of the room, looked at his face, and said something like, “You’re serious, aren’t you? I am so sorry.” I don’t remember what happened in the discussion period, just those awful few moments as one person after another gradually caught on that he wasn’t intending to write a spoof.

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  22. That brings a question to mind. At the writer’s group I am attending I have brought in two rather humerous articles that were read. No one laughed out loud but some sort of held in laughter. How am I to take that? Is it a part od doing critiques to not show emotion? They said I have a gift for humor. Just wondering if anyone knows specifically about this aspect of critique groups. It’s not like I want to ask the group about it.

    We have another funeral at church this week. The saint, a lady, who died on Sat.evening will not be buried until Fri. I am not use to people waiting that long. I guess people have to come from far away or something like that.

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  23. Good Afternoon Everyone. I had to hit the ground running today. BG is up and moving too. She is off any pain meds. She still needs to finish out the antibiotic, but I think she is over having her teeth out.

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  24. It’s the problem with the written word; there’s no nuance or facial expression to show you how to take it. That’s why I no longer employ [sarcasm on] without the follow up [sarcasm off] symbol.

    Tragic on that poor guy. But see what happens when you don’t follow the guidelines?

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  25. I always thought that “squad” was a military term for a group of soldiers.

    Re: the rant.
    I spoke too soon. I got a drop of rain.
    I got more than a drop. I got enough to wet my driveway.
    But that’s all.
    😥

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  26. I’ll post some music today. 🙂

    I was listening to Performance Today online, and at the beginning of the show (about one minute into the first hour), they featured a gorgeous piece that the pianist Gabriela Montero performed recently, her composition entitled Improvising Around a Bach Prelude.

    If you go to the link, scroll down slightly and click on the July 29, 2015 button “Hour One” and you’ll hear the piece from around the 1:11 to the 5:21 mark. A peaceful blend of Bach and simultaneous contemporary improvisations. Just lovely.

    And if you listen the extra half-minute or so after the piece ends, to the 6:00 minute mark, you’ll hear the program host briefly talk about Montero’s experience with a teacher who told her to quit goofing around improvising, and the subsequent encouragement others gave Montero to use her gift, and the effects those comments had on her.

    http://www.yourclassical.org/programs/performance-today

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  27. And since Gone With The Wind gets mentioned here from time to time, here are some improvisations on music from that movie, by the same pianist/composer I mentioned above. Her talent is amazing. Music starts less than a minute into the video…

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  33. We sold eleven goats yesterday. The guy who bought them brought us three watermelons and three cantaloupe. They are wonderful! We don’t grow many watermelons or cantaloupe here. And these are fresh vine ripened. Mmm mmmm.

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  34. On a new laptop….wondering if I will ever be allowed to log in….internet working better…but not consistent….praying for Cheryl…sounds so very painful…thankful she has precious ones close by to take care of her every need……. ❤

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  35. I heard a weatherman say that 40% chance of rain means 40% of the area gets some rain. I guess it depends on the weatherman.

    Michelle: An idea. Girl meets boy who is only 17 (she’s 21) while helping a friend helping another friend clean a house to get it ready for rental. Several days later, boy’s older brother (20 yr old) returns from an extended trip. In church, girl attempts to elbow older brother in a joking matter to say hellos, thinking he is the younger brother she just met. In the long story, the older brother and girl fall in love and marry.

    This is based on my older brother (I was the younger brother). Except the woman had two small boys from a previous marriage, and my brother’s marriage to her ended in divorce 6 years later, mainly because the two were immature and never should have married. Oh, well. Not all romances in the real world work out.

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