42 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-13-15”

  2. How can I be first at 7:57. I was going to apologize for being so late, and here I am first.
    I have been up a while. I log on, and see on Yahoo that Spurrier has retired all of a sudden.
    Like last night.
    I just wish they could convince Charlie Strong to leave Texas and come to SC.
    He used to be defensive coach here and everyone loved Charlie.

    And I had to send a “Happy Birthday” to Chuck.
    Chuck will turn 57 at about 2:30 this afternoon.
    I figure he is the same age as some of you . Except Kim. Kim is 39. I just know, that’s how!

    :lol:I

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  5. Morning Chas. That is funny that you were too chatty to be fist!
    Getting late here so time to say Good Night.
    I had some good sharing today with others who felt as I do about the situation we have now. It was good to talk and pray together. helps me to rest and trust in the Lord with the situation.

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  6. Hey, y’all! Just keeping up with expectations with that greeting. Seems I slept through a storm last night. That is rare for me. God’s peace was with me. I notice that Miss Bosley has not eaten the usual amount of food. She must be pining for me with the long hours spent at the office yesterday and as a result losing her appetite. She can stand to lose a little weight.

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  8. I’m hardly ever first — unless I can’t sleep and am up when the day’s new posts are loaded. But then I’m not in a very celebratory mood. 🙂

    I stopped in at the neighbor’s last night briefly (had some of their mail which I’d collected while they were out in the desert for the past 2 weeks). They have a-c in their house so it felt so good, they almost didn’t get rid of me. 🙂

    It’s still in the 90s here and now the humidity has returned so it’s no fun. I walked the dogs last night at around 8:30 and it was so hot and still outside, not a hint of a breeze.

    Sigh.

    Today I’m doing a story on people preparing for El Nino by booking roofing companies (that are getting pretty nonstop work, I hear — I know one roofer at the dog park and he said he’s booking jobs through November now). I had a hard time reaching folks yesterday though as it was a holiday.

    And while everyone else in California was celebrating the more politically-correct Indigenous People’s Day yesterday, our older group of Italian-Americans (we have a lot of them in our town, descendants of fishing families who settled here long ago mostly, but some who still go out on the boats) got our Italian-American councilman to block off a street for their Columbus Day bash.

    Everyone else may have abandoned poor old Christopher Columbus, but not his own ethnic tribe, they still embrace him with enthusiasm — which is kind of refreshing.

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  12. I had to put in my WordPress password, and I had a senior moment. Then I remembered 🙂
    That was refreshing!

    I had to change the office I am working in because another tax preparer will be in whose office space I use most of the time. Now I am far from the madding crowd. I wanted to work on setting up a blog but then I discovered that our computers are so not up to date that I may not be able to do that on the website I had set up. Husband had planned to put in all new computers before his health took the nose dive. Then I decided I would listen to Platform University seminar segments and discovered this computer did not have sound. But then husband took time to fix that although the sound will not be very loud. Let’s hope my ears are not as bad as my eyes.

    Jeff Goins is offering a blog challenge to help people get started on blogging. It is free, but people have to have a website and host, but since I already have that, I thought I can at least give it a try and see what I can learn. So if anyone is interested in experimenting with and learning about blogging you can get in on it at GoinsWriter.com.

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  13. 6 Arrows, I made some comments about bifocals last night, but I see no one has posted on that thread since then, so if you happen to check in here and haven’t read there, you might go there too.

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  14. Jo, I really like your bird photos. When I looked, I was puzzled, since I don’t recognize the bird at all. Then when I saw they were from you, I knew why I didn’t know what they are. Do you know the species?

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  15. Yes, the bird photos are lovely, Jo. Nice to see some new to us birds. But all birds are really fascinating with their similarities and differences in looks and sounds. Do these birds sing or chirp or caw?

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  16. I posted this on the secret room thread earlier, in separate posts, but decided to share it with all of you, because I’d been thinking of writing this on here anyway…

    Have you ever had an answer to prayer that later turned out to seem to be a seemingly (or for real) bad thing?

    When Chrissy was elementary school age, she went at least a couple or more years with no friends. (One friend she did have for a while, turned on her & ended up bullying her a bit.) She did have “Allie”, the daughter of my friend, but they lived in a different town, so the girls didn’t see each other much, except during school vacations.

    For a while, I prayed for God to bring a good friend to Chrissy, particularly a good Christian girl, even one to live in our own neighborhood.

    Around middle school, Chrissy & Allie (who have known each other since they were very little) started becoming best friends, instant messaging each other on the computer, & seeing each other when Allie’s mom came here for Bible study when Allie was on school vacation (by this time we were homeschooling).

    Then we decided we needed to rent out the upstairs, rather than living in this whole house by ourselves. I thought it would be great if we could rent to the McKs (Allie’s family) because we were all friends, & I knew they were not happy where they lived. But I didn’t think they were looking to move.

    Well, it turned out that they were indeed wanting to move, & were thrilled at the opportunity to move here.

    God had given my daughter a good friend, & now this seemed like the answer to the rest of the prayer – a friend in our own neighborhood, right upstairs!

    And we enjoyed having the McKs here, for quite a while.

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  17. You know the rest of that story, don’t you? Allie turned out to become a lesbian, an “activist” one at that (she started the Gay-Straight Alliance at her high school, & ran a gay newspaper at the community college she goes to). She & her sister, although raised in a conservative Christian home, have both embraced very liberal, ungodly views. (The “YF” I write about sometimes is Allie’s older sister.)

    These two sisters have had an undue influence on my Chrissy, & have led her away from her faith & her home. I have sometimes heard YF’s words come out of Chrissy’s mouth, occasionally even in the same cadence YF uses. (People with Asperger’s often take on the traits of their close friends.)

    This is all quite heartbreaking to me, & I often wonder if Chrissy’s & Alllie’s friendship, & the McKs moving here, really were answers to prayer. They seemed so “right” at the time.

    Recently, I was crying to God about the situation with Chrissy, & I asked Him why He allowed this to happen. What I thought I “heard” from the Holy Spirit was “So the glory will be greater,” which I took to referring to when Chrissy (& hopefully the McK sisters, too) come back to Him.

    I hope that was truly God, & not merely my imagination.

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  18. Good morning, everyone.

    Cheryl, I was just over on yesterday’s thread, reading what I’d missed after going to bed last night, and I thought I’d come over here and continue the bifocals discussion — and here you are talking about that very thing. 🙂

    I told my husband when he got home from work last night that I had ordered the no-line bifocals. (He’s got different pairs of glasses for different uses, and I couldn’t remember what he had in the way of bifocal type.)

    He reminded me then that he’d tried no-line bifocals first, but hated them, and switched to different bifocals.

    A number of years ago, at a piano teacher workshop I attended, there were a few people discussing bifocals, reading glasses, etc. and what their preferences were for reading and teaching music. Unfortunately, I only half-listened to that conversation, and couldn’t remember yesterday when I was at the eye doctor what had been said by my fellow musicians.

    I’ll never need those, I was apparently thinking. 😛

    The ones I’m getting have three different areas to look out of, I guess. (Shouldn’t they be called trifocals then?) The top is for distance, the middle for arm’s length reading (people like that distance for computer reading, I was told, and it sounds like it’s the right length for reading music — my eyes are about 24 inches from the page when the piano bench is the proper distance from the piano, and I’m seated correctly on the bench), and the bottom is for close reading — labels, books and magazines, etc.

    They told me that part of the adjustment is with depth perception, so one needs to be careful walking down stairs, for example. Well, I’m up and down the stairs something like a thousand times a day, so… I better watch out. I don’t really want to fall and break my arm or something.

    It’s probably good that I’m not getting these in winter, though. I hope to have adjusted to them before snow and ice come.

    They do have a 120-day guarantee if you’re not satisfied. I don’t think I would wait that long to get different ones if these don’t work out. I wouldn’t have the patience.

    Thanks for sharing your experiences with bifocals, Cheryl and Donna.

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  19. 6 Arrows, here’s my two cents, FWIW.

    I started wearing bifocals in college. In my mid-20s, when I was in front of a monitor all day, I started having problems. If I looked at the screen through the upper lens I got eyestrain. If I tilted my head up to look through the lower lens I got neck strain.

    So I got a second “mid-range” pair of glasses, and have continued to switch between two pairs of glasses for over 30 years.

    I tried progressive lenses a few years ago. Theoretically a portion of the lens was just right for the computer distance. But I think it was too small an area, I’d have trouble finding it, and then would have to move my head up and down to look at different parts of the screen. I never mastered it and finally gave up and went back to the separate mid-range pair.

    It isn’t as much a hassle as it sounds managing two pairs. I don’t cart th mid-range pair around – it stays at my office where I most need it. At home I’m usually on the computer just for short stints and keep the bifocals on. I also have an older mid-range pair at home in case I’m on the computer for awhile.

    I’ll be interested to hear what works out best for you.

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  20. What? Baby brother wears bifocals? The things we learn….anyway, I got progressives about twenty years ago. It took a couple of days to adjust but they work fine. But then, how much help does one need for sitting around eating bonbons and watching soap.

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  21. My husband uses graduated bifocals and I have never heard him complain. I use two pairs of glasses, one for distance and the other for reading. I do have a lot of different pairs of the cheap reading glasses which seem to break frequently.

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  22. Karen, I think we can discern what God wants us to do in a situation, but sometimes we don’t keep asking Him about if He wants us to continue doing what the original arrangement was as things change. I went through difficulty in discerning what I should do about moving from my husband’s church to where I am a member now. The first time husband and I attended his church the pastor was doing a sermon on a passage I happened to be reading at that same time in the Bible. That felt like an indicator that God wanted to speak to us through that pastor in that church. But over time I grew as a Christian and another pastor came to the church. I felt like I was not able to grow as a Christian under the circumstances. I moved to where I could continue growth. So maybe there was a time when you needed to look seriously at the situation and pray over the changes you saw happening and ask God what to do then. It seems, knowing you, that you probably did, but maybe you waited longer than you should. I don’t know for sure. And I also had to break some ties with people in the past because they were on a more liberal path that I could not travel. It meant a more isolated life for me, but I could bear that more than trying to be kind and listen to people put down my candidates and worldview. But if you had broken ties with that family then maybe you would not have any communication with Crissy. So perhaps what you have now is still preferrable to the other scenario?

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  26. Life is complicated. Romans 8:28 assures us everything will work together for good for those who love God, but it doesn’t tell us how. Even martyrdom and betrayal fit in that “everything.” I have a friend whose son killed himself and left a note about how bad his parents were and other very hurtful things. I can’t imagine much worse stuff happening to a parent, but that too fits in the “everything.”

    I have a former friend whose role in my life during my college days, and a few years after, was absolutely life-changing, in multiple ways, most of them good. She was generous to me, one time even paying for me to see the eye doctor and paying for my glasses when I was a student struggling even to pay my school bills. She bought me an outfit to use for interviewing when I was ready to graduate from college, along with a couple of pairs of dress shoes. She was influential in several ways in me getting my first post-college job (among them, hiring me for my most important college job). She helped me socially and emotionally in ways that helped me finally learn how to make friends. A friend since my college days recently described how I came across as a college freshman, and apparently the image from the outside of a desperately lonely girl was every bit as powerful as the isolation I felt. My little brother was astounded at the difference in me after my first year and a half of college, and it’s largely due to a wise older woman coming alongside me and helping me.

    Years later, when I was succeeding as a professional, with lots of good friends, a great job, useful and satisfying volunteer work in the community, a published book to my credit, and so forth, this same friend was threatened. I no longer needed her “in the same way.” She simply couldn’t handle that; she needed me as her inferior looking up to her. She once told confidential information about me to one of the authors I was editing (one of her colleagues), apparently to make me look like a needy little girl who wouldn’t be able to survive without her. She also told a stranger confidential information about me (in front of me) that was no longer true, and then turned to me to give the woman more juicy details. (No sin of mine was involved, but it did involve the sin of someone I loved.) When I arranged a really nice restaurant meal with her and two other friends, at the end of the meal she said out loud, “By the way, Cheryl, a standard tip is 15%.” When her best friend was shocked that she felt the need to publicly tell me something so basic, she said, “Well, Cheryl asked me to give her guidance in social situations.” Um, yeah, I asked that 12 years ago when I was a clueless college student, and I didn’t ask for you to show my incompetence by saying such things aloud in front of everyone present.

    When I was getting ready to move out of Chicago, she had me come to her office, and she spent more than two hours telling me everything she thought was wrong in my life, and why I couldn’t move away or I’d be an utter failure in life and probably end up in a mental institution. She even told me that I was dependent on her to such an unhealthy degree that I needed to get counseling to break the dependency before I would be healthy enough to move. (Um . . . I was “healthy” enough to choose to move away, because her role in my life wasn’t so huge that I couldn’t bear to move away. If I had taken her advice it would in fact have been proof that she was right, that I was so dependent on her that I couldn’t exist without her. The fact that I disregarded it should be proof of the reverse, that it was she, not I, who needed the relationship to continue with me as the lower, subservient one.)

    These two sides of the same relationship are both true. I can still think with affection and gratitude of the hugely important role she played for a decade or more. And I can still be sad that a good friendship ended so very badly. My husband has a hard time when I speak of her fondly, since he knows the genuinely bad stuff. But the good stuff is just as real, and ultimately it’s the good stuff that changed my life, not the bad stuff. (Now, the bad stuff did leave me a little bit insecure just when I was starting a life of freelance, and my mom died just about the same time our friendship was screeching to a halt. There was a time that it was hard not to think “If someone who knew me that well could tell me I was bound to be a failure, what’s the chance that I’ll ever have someone in my life who doesn’t someday reject me?” But I knew that the “issues” at the end were fully hers, and I just had to tell myself that repeatedly.)

    All that to say, life is complicated, and I think we can go crazy trying to make it all make sense. It doesn’t. Romans 8:28 is still true, and in retrospect I imagine we’ll see more than we do now. I imagine that more “makes sense” to Chas about his life, and he is able to accept the unresolved areas more, than the rest of us can say.

    Early on in my life as an editor, one of my coworkers lost his job in a way that seemed unfair. After he left the last day, I was crying at my desk, and a coworker in her seventies came by and saw my tears. I didn’t want to get into why I was crying (sadness for him, but also a bit of insecurity about my own fairly new job), but she saw me and she hugged me. And she said gently, “The older I get, the more I know that God is good.” She had no idea how much those words of quiet reassurance helped me. Sometimes that is all we really “know”: that God is good, and He loves us.

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  27. My editor friend….My good friend L contacted me last night. She is writing her dissertation for holistic nutritionalist something or other. She asked me to be her editor. There was a time in my life I could crank out a research paper like you wouldn’t believe and even made a little cash typing them up for others, but this has to be 45 to 75 pages long with charts and graphs as additional pages. She sent the first 15 pages to me today.
    1. Do you read the whole thing through once without making any changes?
    2. Do you go ahead and make grammatical and clarity changes?
    3. What is the proper/easiest way to do this? Do I go ahead and correct typos as I see them?

    Thanks

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  28. Kim, everyone does it differently. For me personally, especially with nonfiction, I read through the whole thing once rather quickly. Since typos and obvious errors jump out at me, I correct them when I see them. (I do a few “clean-up” tasks, such as changing all double spaces to single spaces and all — to em dashes, and I run spell check, before I even start the first edit.) If I see something more complicated than a quick fix [I flag it with a note in the text like this], so that I can search for brackets and find all my notes on a later run. Sometimes I flag with something as simple as [edit], meaning “the grammar of this paragraph is horrid, but I’m not going to take time to fix it now.” Other times, it will be [Didn’t the author say this already?] or [I’m pretty sure he left out an important step. See if he mentioned —- earlier.] Or any number of things. But I’m reading through it quickly, mostly as a reader reads it, and though I do want to catch those “first-impression” errors, I don’t want to slow down to edit them. (By the way, it really can be helpful to flag on the first reading. By the time I’ve read a book two or three times, of course I’ve seen this passage before, because I read the book already. But on that first pass, if you’ve already read what he is saying, then it means he’s repeating himself, so flag it.)

    After I’ve finished the first edit, I go back and correct as many of the flagged things as possible, and send any questions that need the author’s input to the author. After I’ve done all of that, I print out the manuscript and read it on hard copy the second time (since the brain sees different things that way). If I’m editing fiction, I usually do a third reading as well, just to make sure everything flows well as a story once all the editing has been done (e.g., we didn’t decide that the puppy was distracting to the story line, but leave one mention of the puppy). But usually with nonfiction, I do two complete readings of the text, but other looks at specific things (e.g., looking up Scripture quotes, looking at subheads).

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  30. Thanks for all the bifocal commentary, And, Kevin, your two cents was worth more than that. 🙂

    The last time I went to the eye doctor, I had only been wearing one pair of single-vision glasses for everything, but they weren’t working well anymore for close reading, so I got a new pair of glasses specifically for that purpose, and kept my other pair for driving and other tasks where I focused on distant things. I remember them saying about my new glasses, “You’re not going to be able to look out the window and see the kids very well with these,” or something to that effect.

    Well, it wasn’t long before I started wearing my new glasses for everything I did around the house, not just reading and playing piano, and I could look out the window and see the kids fine if I wasn’t out with them.

    Over time, it got so that those “up close” glasses were the better choice for things like reading the screen at the front of the sanctuary during worship services. (We always sit near the back, and our sanctuary seats about 500 people in four sections of pews, so we’re pretty far back from the screen.)

    Then once or twice I realized after driving home from, say, the grocery store (where I’d have taken off my driving glasses so I could read labels better), that I had never put my distance glasses back on after walking out of the store. I got all the way home and discovered that I could see the road and everything else on the way home well enough to not notice I’d forgotten to switch glasses.

    Finally, yesterday, I was sitting in the bank drive-up, waiting for the teller to finish my transaction, and, while wearing my distance glasses, I looked at a billboard across the highway from the bank and thought it looked kind of blurry. I took my glasses off, put on the “up close” ones, and, lo and behold, the sign was clear.

    My “up close” glasses then got me down the road to my eye doctor appointment. Now my distance glasses are retired, my “close up” glasses are my only ones, and next week, my new glasses will be the only ones. Maybe.

    I guess it was a good time to make the “transition.” 🙂

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  33. We just got home. I was bleary eyed driving home. We saw an overturned vehicle on I-285, the perimeter expressway. No emergency vehicles had arrived. I hope the people survived.

    My day turned out differently than I expected. My husband’s fix on the sound on the computer did not work as it required a plug-in according to the message I saw at the Platform University site. Then I decided to look back at the blog challenge and was able to work on that on the computer where I was at work. I got my WordPress blog set up and did a blog post. I need to see how it looks on WordPress, and I need to fix the appearance of it on my website. You may be able to see it on wordpress at janicegareyblog. I am very tired and Miss Bosley wants lots of attention.

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  34. Cardinals!! Yay, Kim!

    6 – my mom got trifocals specifically for reading piano music. It worked for her but it was a hard adjustment.

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  35. My question was actually mostly rhetorical, as I know we’ve all had perplexing situations in our lives. I’ve had more than a few myself. 🙂

    Janice – I didn’t really know what was going on with Allie & YF at the time. It took me a while to figure out that Allie feels that she is a lesbian (I won’t say “is a lesbian”). She “came out” to her parents in high school, but her mom, my friend, didn’t say anything to me about it. She claimed that Allie only started the Gay-Straight Alliance group because she didn’t like seeing gay kids being bullied. (And Chrissy didn’t tell me about Allie, either.) I didn’t realize YF’s extremely liberal views until a couple years ago when she started posting a lot of stuff on Facebook.

    Cheryl – Like you, I certainly realize that life is complicated. I know that God allowed all this for a reason, but seeing it affect my daughter’s life so deeply is very difficult to bear at times. I keep surrendering her (& Emily, too, of course) to God, especially when the fears & sorrow come over me.

    I’ve used a story similar to yours in trying to counsel someone about not writing off fellow Christians they dislike. (The story involved one woman deeply hurting another, but then later being a wonderful blessing to her.)

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  36. 6 Arrows – I’ve had both kinds of bifocals, & found the ones with the line more difficult to adjust to than the progressive ones. It does sound like you are getting trifocals, though.

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  37. I guess the correct term for what I’m getting is “progressive lenses,” which are a bit different from bifocals and trifocals. This short article I just found helped me understand better what I’m actually getting, and everything in the progressive lenses section at the link well describes what I ordered. Especially the blurry peripheral vision part — I’m getting the type of progressive lenses that minimize that.

    http://news.essilorusa.com/stories/detail/the-differences-in-bifocals-trifocals-and-progressive-lenses

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  38. A different site talked about the difficulty some can have with navigating steps, sidewalk curbs, and the like while wearing bifocals, etc. They suggested wearing regular single vision lenses for that for safety, if navigation is a problem.

    I may just do that, especially at the concert venue where I’m performing in November and December. It’s in an old building, and there are no elevators, so one must walk up three flights of stairs to get to the concert hall. I’ll be heading there several times in the next couple months to practice with my duet partner for both shows, so I think it will be a good idea to bring along the glasses I’m wearing now, as I expect walking on those stairs with my new lenses will be tricky for a while.

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