59 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 8-13-15”

  1. Morning Aj, you are early tonight. I was just thinking of you all. My friend had lot of appointments to go to. Workman’s comp paid for the miles or paid for a driver or a driving service to take her to appointments. I am thinking that service might help you. You could even go with Cheryl, but with a driver so you don’t have to do all the driving. Just a thought.
    Blessings and prayers from PNG.

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  6. I had a chance to watch Mumsee’s videos. Real scary, but it looks like there’s lots of space between the fire and the house. Is that open field or grass fire?

    I have heard that a prairie fire could travel faster than a horse could run.

    Kim, are you ready to tell us the news? presumably good news from the way I read yesterday’s post.

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  8. Good morning. As I told Michelle when I sent these photos to AJ, they have been digitally deticked, so it’s safe to look at them. 🙂

    I’m guessing the bucks in the header are two-year-olds, though I’m no expert. They are still in velvet. This morning I got a photo of a lone buck that is either the one in the middle (the biggest) or a different buck. He’s looking right at me, so the angle of the antlers if different, but he’s clearly no yearling.

    I liked the middle photo because the fawns were moving. The bottom one isn’t necessarily a “great” photo, but to me the way the lighting hits it and everything, it looks like a watercolor painting.

    In all of these photos, the deer are in the field behind our home, which was planted in wheat this year and not corn or soybeans, and thus it was harvested earlier and this year we have a clear view of the deer, turkeys, crows, and other creatures coming to the field.

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  9. Good morning to most, and happy end of the day to Jo.

    In doing my Bible reading this morning in the One Year NLT I read Psalm 19 and decided I wanted to memorize it. Then I decided I would check out the Psalm in the NKJV to see the flow of the words because to memorize I like to literally turn it into song. I used the Jesus Calling Bible to look up the passage since it was nearby and in that NKJ version. I much preferred the NLT for turning it into song. But while in the Jesus Calling Bible I looked at one of the devotions. I discovered if I change the pronouns so that it is not written as if Jesus is speaking directly then it makes for a good read. It requires a kind of mental flexibility to translate like that, but it redeems it, IMO. Just wondering if RKessler has tried doing that?

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  10. The fire: It did not come very close but it did cover the area from the trees to three quarters of the way to our house in about a minute. That is stubble from a just harvested wheat field. Which is why you can hear the goats yelling from inside that blue pickup. The horses were penned next to their trailer and the camp trailer was loaded and hooked to the truck. The utility trailer was loaded and hooked to the goat pickup. We figured if it got to our willow trees, we would have time to head out. It is dry and the fires are moving quickly, but we appear to be burned around for the most part. Wasn’t that airplane cool?

    For other folk, it does not look so good. We thought some folk were coming here with their animals but their fire was turned as well. But other friends are out and do not expect their homes to still be there when they return.

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  13. Mumsee, I showed the videos to my parents. We are all very concerned, and we are praying for you. It was nice to have a glimpse of you.

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  14. Fires are scary because they can turn and move so fast — I was amazed by you all just hanging out on the deck, watching the flames. 🙂 I’d have been a blur in the video, racing back and forth, arms flapping.

    I had a very long day yesterday, more tiny house coverage that included listening to a 2-hour LA City Council committee discussion on the homeless that ended with the audience erupting in shouts of “Poor Lives Matter!” “Homeless Lives Matter!” and “Black Lives Matter!” — with the chairman finally shouting out “Sergeant! Sergeant!”

    The room apparently had to be cleared and the meeting ended abruptly after that.

    One of our photographers, meanwhile got pelted with water bottles yesterday on assignment as he drove through L.A.’s Skid Row district (which, according to an online source I found, is now considered to stretch for 50 blocks).

    There’s a lot of shouting around the homeless issue right now. No one can agree on much of anything when it comes to how to “fix” it and discussions quickly deteriorate into back-and-forth accusation of heartlessness or mindlessness.

    I do wonder why the numbers (again) have shot up so high in recent years. That’s happened before, I know. Part of the issue may be that the homeless are more visible now that they’re (at least passively in many cases) allowed to “camp” in parks and on sidewalks. Once an encampment gets established & grows, it’s hard to dislodge it from a community (as L.A. has learned after allowing the tents to go up on sidewalks).

    But for now, the tiny houses have vanished, deemed illegal by LAPD in our area, anyway.

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  15. Bambi! Very nice photos, cheryl, it all looks so peaceful where you are.

    Good devotion from “New Morning Mercies” today on self-righteousness. I needed that after receiving a really snarky email yesterday from the editor of our far-lefty alternative paper in town accusing me of “biased” (ha!) journalism that only riled up the “villagers,” as he put it, who all grabbed their pitchforks to show up at a community meeting he was chairing. He falsely accused me of a few other things as well (not contacting certain people for my stories — I did, they refused to comment), so I thanked him for his input, explained that I had contacted several people with opposing viewpoints on a very tight deadline and suggested he write a letter to the editor. 🙂

    But it irked me, I won’t deny, and I indulged in a bit of newsroom grousing over the HUGE plank in this guy’s eye yesterday. 😉

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  16. I also like cheryl’s new avatar.

    Peter, my teacher friend also is dreading going back to school … It’s a definite downside to getting summers off, that’s for sure.

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  17. We had done our running around earlier. We had farmers plowing fire lanes and firemen standing ready as well as the air help. It was neat to see the coordinated effort. How things should work.

    Mike noticed he did not quite pan far enough for your dad to see the hay shed he built, Phos.

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  18. Donna, (on the high homeless numbers) it may be an indication of how many have given up hope. There were vast shanty towns during the Great Depression. Of course, those hopeless people naturally seem to migrate to the more temperate West Coast. Vancouver was the city of destination for Canada’s jobless wanderers during the 1930s.

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  19. School work continues here. I had about given up on being able to teach the nine year old in glasses to read (if you watched the videos, that is him in the yellow pj shirt), but husband insisted that if anybody could teach him to read, I could. So we persevered. And suddenly, in the last couple of days, he has begun recognizing his many sight words in other places and is able to read. It does not last long but it is a window of opportunity and I am glad we decided not to send him to the public school. I am fine with the other two going, though. One, because he refuses to work with me (or women, so school may be a no go for him as well) and the other because she is about maxed out on what she can do though we can certainly expand rather than ascend and the public school will help her see that others have expectations, not just me. Thanks for praying on that.

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  20. did you see this amazing photo out of Arizona? http://www.tucsonnewsnow.com/story/29765363/the-story-behind-the-perfect-photo

    Roscuro, you could be right — the numbers are way up along our coast (by 39% this year over counts done 2 years ago). There are an estimated 19,000 people now living on the streets in LA city alone and it’s impacting the port area of LA city where I live as tents, overflowing shopping carts and panhandlers have congregated in local parks & on public sidewalks.

    The city councilman has scheduled a community-wide forum to talk about the issue in September which could get ugly.

    I think there is a growing consensus on a long-term approach (housing along with immersive counseling and training services). But that’s years and years away in L.A. What should be done in the meantime, keeping in mind that a good number (half? I think probably more?) of the homeless are what’s classified as “shelter resistant”?

    Opinions among homeless counselors appear to be mixed on building more temporary overnight shelters. The push now is to build lots of storage space so the homeless on the street will have places throughout the city — within a 1-mile radius of wherever they camp — to store their belongings. But spending what would be a lot of money on some of those kinds of stop-gap measures (that’s a LOT of storage space) strikes me as something that should be at least thoroughly vetted first.

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  21. That is a cool shot, Donna. I remember being out in the desert and watching multiple bolts of lightning and wishing I could photograph it–but I didn’t have the kind of camera even to try. (Now I’d try.)

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  22. Our prayers for rain may be answered in one messy winter — they’re calling it a “Godzilla El Nino” in the making. Mudslides, flooding, “mayhem.” (Although no guarantees, these are projections only and “The Blob” might block some of it.) And while an El Nino might not completely reverse the drought, it clearly would be a big step.

    ‘Godzilla El Niño’ May Be Coming, But ‘Extreme Rainfall’ Unlikely to Reverse California’s Drought

    “This fall and winter’s predicted El Niño has the potential to become the most powerful ever recorded and could bring “extreme rainfall” to parched California, but it may not be enough to reverse four years of drought, federal forecasters said Thursday. … “We’re predicting that this El Niño could be among the strongest El Niños in the historical record dating back to 1950,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. …Becker dubbed the current El Niño “Bruce Lee” back in July because of its strength. … Patzert, a climatologist for the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, told the Los Angeles Times that it had the potential to be the “Godzilla El Niño.” He added El Niño’s signal in the ocean was “stronger” in August than it was in the summer of 1997, when the most powerful El Niño on record developed.” …. this thing can bring a lot of floods, mudslides and mayhem.”

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  25. 1. Mumsee, I don’t know the end all be all latest in teaching but they used to suggest putting sight words up all over the bulletin boards and walls and letting the children see them and occassionally pointing to them to ask the child what the word says.

    2, Donna and Michelle, How long before the spike in breast cancer in California due to the drought. I saw on the news last night that they put brown plastic balls in the reservoir to help with evaporation but they tell us not to drink water from plastic bottles that have gotten hot.

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  26. I don’t want to be the wet blanket about deer but I don’t like them. I am tired of them coming by and eating our strawberries. They cruise through and eat things in our garden.

    Racoons are also pests. They mess up the potatoes, eat the worms in the compost pile and destroy tulips. I don’t want our dogs to try to jump them. Guess who would win that confrontation?

    Then the rats going through the compost pile and coming into the garage to eat bird seed.

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  27. I TOLD of all you that Mike was a talker. He and I talked all the way from Fairhope, to Orlando, to the airport, through security–they separated us on the plane. Then we talked all the way from the Funny Farm to Boise. I can’t even tell you what all subjects we covered.

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  29. Bob, Michelle doesn’t like them either. I think they are beautiful and amazingly graceful. And until this year I’ve never gotten a chance to get anything more than mediocre photos of bucks. (That one at the top isn’t wonderful–it was grab a shot quick before they get over the rise–but it was way cool to get three together, and I’ve gotten some decent ones of individual bucks.) Now, if I can just get some more shots after they lose the velvet . . .

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  33. Thanks for the picture, Guess Who. I can even picture where the photographer was when he took it, though I never spent much time in that part of the Tucson area.

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  34. Four in the afternoon, and still over a hundred in the shade, in August. July is our hottest month. Supposed to be some more significant lightning and winds tonight and tomorrow and then cool down.

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  37. I was not complaining about the heat. I was complaining about the extreme fire danger. I enjoy the heat and the cold and the rain and the snow.

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  47. Donna, I have an accuracy-check question. From a book I’m editing: “She [the journalist] only took a couple of minutes and agreed to e-mail him a copy of her story before she printed it.” It seems to me, if I remember correctly from my own journalism classes, that a journalist doesn’t generally agree to this. ??

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  49. AAAKKKKK

    NoOOOOOOO!

    cheryl, you’re right. We do offer (if they ask/insist and are especially skittish or demanding) to personally run direct quotes by them before publication on the phone or in an email, but nothing else. We never show them the story before it’s published.

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  51. So, there’s a big homelessness forum planned for 9/3 on our town that I’ll be covering. Among those set to be on the 5(?)-member speakers’ panel will be this guy — I’m looking forward to it:

    http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/02/us/skid-row-cop/
    _____________________________________

    …. (Deon) Joseph is senior lead officer for the Los Angeles Police Department, and Skid Row has been his beat for the past 17 years. … he knows nearly everybody — The Hurricane, Bow Leg, Slow Bucket, Thick ‘n’ Juicy — and they know him, too. Some like him, some don’t. Most respect him. Some say he’s their angel watching over them. … He is not jaded or cynical, and he doesn’t view the world as LAPD blue against everybody else. He is a man of deep, abiding Christian faith, and he considers Skid Row his mission in life. He says he wouldn’t dream of working anywhere else. … ”
    _____________________________________

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  54. I am not talking about dog parks. I don’t even believe they exist. That would be insane. Imagine, taking your dog for a walk to go play with other dogs. Bizarre. Next thing you know, they will be making little jackets and boots for them….and the owners will wear matching….

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  55. Haha — reminds me of when a friend and I were browsing/window shopping in a very fancy dog “boutique” at the beach a few years ago and the clerk asked if we’d like to buy matching somethings for our dogs AND for us.

    My friend hastened to insist that *we* were NOT a “couple.” 🙂

    Eeek.

    Goes with living in L.A.

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