67 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 11-30-15”

  3. Cute header photo. Happy Birthday Cheryl!
    I usually don’t like comtemporary Christian music but there is something about Come As You Are that I like. Maybe it is because of the situation I was in the first time I heard it—This past March at my church’s women’s retreat.

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  5. It is a sad day in the South and I am contributing. We are gradually losing a whole food group. Funeral Food. Yes, you read that correctly. We are losing Funeral Food. That is when women in the South competed for who brought the best dish to the house of the deceased for after the funeral. Recipes were guarded like state secrets. Why, you might even look forward to a good funeral to get one of your favorite dishes.
    Mama Ruth’s funeral is today. Her son in law works for Winn Dixie and they are sending food. Her daughter asked me yesterday if I would handle the rest. I am taking deviled eggs, spinach casserole, and peas & butterbeans that I cooked. I bought the potato salad, the spinach dip, the chicken salad, the rolls, and the pecan pie. I am so ashamed. Now, granted I wouldn’t have actually made a pecan pie–we would have done without, but I should have made the other stuff.

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  10. Rules for a happy marriage:
    1. Never go grocery shopping with your wife.
    2. Realize that when you stop by for one thing she needs, that “Just a sec” or “Back in a jiff” loses it’s meaning when a woman enters a store.
    3. If she stops for that one item, there’s a 98% probability she’ll come out with something she didn’t go in to buy.
    4 Most important When she returns, don’t say anything. Nothing.

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  11. I don’t shop. Ever. Husband does it all. He goes to town with the plan to be back by six and rarely is before nine as the errand stops add up. One thing leads to another. But it all gets done and I don’t have to do it and I am one happy woman.

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  14. So, we had our first Christmas party of the season on the weekend. The party consisted of myself, my parents, second and youngest siblings and their respective spouses, Little and Baby Niece, youngest sibling’s in-laws, and a dear friend (who is also a relative), her spouse, and their three young children. Little Niece, who is painfully shy with adults she does not know, was delighted that the two little boys were close enough in age to play with her. It was preciously cute to see her walking hand in hand with the younger one and trying to help him up when he stumbled. She needs to learn to stand up for herself though, as she only smiled sweetly when they decided they wanted her toy and took it. Baby Niece and the other baby girl were handed from relative to relative. Second sibling’s spouse has a talent for settling babies which will be of great use when their own little one is born.

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  15. My theory is that women are the ‘gatherers’ (and thus, nowadays, mainly the shoppers).

    Men kill stuff. We bring it home in the form of food, a new pair of boots or ________ fill-in-the-blank. Then we find some way to cook it, eat it, wear it, display it or otherwise use it.

    Happy Birthday Cheryl! Get better quickly so you can buy some cool new fashion boots strut around in this winter. 🙂

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  16. ¡Feliz cumpleaños, Sra. AJ!

    I ate the first day back after a long break. The students are not ready for academics and the teachers are too tired. Let’s hear it for homeschooling!

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  17. Interesting pice on Brad Pitt (husband of Angelina Jolie, who directed Unbroken; both reportedly became close with Louie during the process).

    *Sounds* like Jolie was impacted by Louie’s faith, to what extend is hard to say, I don’t think she’s a professing Christian (yet?), but …. ?

    Not so her husband apparently. Those who have ears to hear …

    http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2015/11/29/brad-pitt-rejects-his-southern-baptist-upbringing

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  24. My husband and I usually do the grocery shopping together. If just one of us does it, it’s more likely to be him. If I am present, more stuff gets into the cart, though I’m not alone in buying stuff that isn’t on the list.

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  25. FWIW, to me a shopping list is just a formal list of suggestions. When I was single I rarely shopped with a list. With four people in the household, we need one. But when I was single, I shopped by looking at the ads and seeing who had the most relevant items on sale at a good price. In other words, if I was low on tuna and some store had it at a great price, that store was likely to be the one I shopped that week. I’d look through the selected ad, circle stuff that looked like a good price, and added two or three items that weren’t on sale to the front page. But then, at the store, I’d go down every aisle, and if I saw something I was low on at a good enough price, I’d get it.

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  26. Kim, 6th Arrow looked at the weekend header picture with your Christmas tree, and saw in one of the ornaments the reflection of part of the room the tree is in. She said, “Now I can see what the room looks like that the tree is in. It’s a nice house.” 🙂

    Hopefully someday she will mimic your decorating style, and not mine. 😉

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  28. See, Janice, if Mis Bosley had a Christmas tree to toy with, she would never be bored, whether you were all home or not.

    I’ve been known to go into a grocery or other household supply store for one particular thing … And walk away with everything but the item I needed. 🙄 I think maybe I do need a list.

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  29. And as one commenter put it (with regard to “terrorism”):

    There is a false dichotomy drawn between Robert Lewis Dear (Colorado shooter) and Muslim extremism that is pretty easy to spot past all the media rhetoric. Namely, individual madness is a pretty big difference from organized, deliberate terror campaigns.

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  31. Music post. (Are you sick of these yet?) 🙂

    One more performance this year, coming up Sunday afternoon. I’ve met with my duet partner two times so far for this show, and we’re practicing once more before the concert — on Wednesday. Our biggest challenge is not getting my left hand tangled up with her right hand, LOL. There are several places where one of us has to play on the outer edges of the white keys (usually me) and the other deep into the black keys so the knuckles are almost touching the fall board. Yikes! Challenging, but lots of fun.

    She (the organizer of the show) mentioned she’ll probably put my solos last on the program. I’m doing three songs, and the last of them, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, she thought would be a good send-off song for the audience.

    I’m looking forward to the show (as I always do). My three solos (We Three Kings, What Child Is This, and the aforementioned closing number) are different in character, and are quite enjoyable to play consecutively.

    From mysterious to majestic to melodious. 🙂

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  32. I just came in from shopping with a list and picking up extras– for the whopping total of $409.00! The second most expensive trip ever and the topper–$450– was 17 years ago with teenage boys at home and 20 coming for dinner.

    I did buy $85 in gift cards, but this is crazy. Little meat, I’m not sure what was so expensive, though I bought items to mail to Hillary in Sicily and some cookie party baking goods that were on sale.

    I hope my husband is hungry when he gets home– the refrigerator is stuffed!

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  33. looking forward to shopping in one of your stores! Here, if you see it, buy it! You never know when you will see it again. Store is out of cheese and that is an everyday lunch for me. Trying to eke out my last little bit. Planning on bringing cheese back from my trip. Oh, out of cheese because of new regulations regarding importing vegetables and the cheese comes in the same large containers.

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  37. My hubby is the shopper. I am a buyer. I know what I need. I enter the store, go to the items I need and put them in the basket, then I check out and go home. My husband wants to go down every isle and see what looks good. I look at price, he does not. We make it work. 🙂

    I agree that funeral food is going away. We used to have full meals in the fellowship hall after the service. The mode now is finger food. I never have finger food at home. I had to come up with something a couple of weeks ago, so made tortillas, covered with cream cheese and green chile for rollups. They were eaten.

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  38. Funeral food was big in the Midwest, too. I still remember the huge spread in the church basement when my uncle died. I was probably 13 or 14 years old, thoroughly shaken by the ordeal of the hours-long funeral activities (and suffering from a headache) and found the food and sitting down to eat somehow horribly morbid.

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  39. I hate it when you spent 2-3 hours cleaning and working in a particular area and only that particular area now looks good. 🙄 I guess I’ll just have to go stand there and appreciate it some more before moving on.

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  40. We had a whole meal catered for my dad’s funeral. Our church has casseroles/desserts etc. which members bring. I have not been to many funerals without food. A few, which take place at the funeral home, have had no food or visitation afterward.

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  41. Ugh. There is a trend for the funeral home to cater a meal AT THE FUNERAL HOME!!!!! You pay for that along with the other costs. I cannot think of anything more gross than eating food at a funeral home. Disgusting. They did it for my uncle’s funeral a couple of years ago and just recently someone told me the attended a funeral where that was done. It turns my stomach just to think of it.

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  43. Multiple replies:

    👉 Yes, Kevin, there are times when I have to bite the bullet at school, so I ate it today. (That was a typo originally.)

    👉 When mom died, neighbors brought us meals for a week. Around here, churches have a pot luck for funerals.

    👉 Since Mrs L doesn’t drive, D3 or I take her shopping when she needs to go. Once a week is the norm, but I occasionally stop on the way home for necessities. We don’t have a grocery store in this little town, so it is not something we can do quickly.

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  45. I do enjoy finding BONO items in the grocery store. I tend to stock up on those. If I send Art with a list, he will often buy more than I wanted and then I feel burdened by the extra need to cook what I had not planned. That has not been a problem lately.

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  47. HAPPY 🙂
    BIRTHDAY !!!
    ♡CHERYL♡
    ~JACKSON~☆☆☆☆☆

    ♢♢♢♢♢
    |||||||||

    @@@@@@
    CHOCOLAT
    ○VANILLA○
    M&MM&M
    Peppermint
    ●●●●●●●●●
    ●●Patties●●
    Cheesecake
    ~Pumpkin~
    ~~Praline~~
    @@@@@@

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  50. I know I’ve heard that lighthouse song; I think one of my brothers has played it a few times when I’ve been in the car with him. (The one who lost his wife to cancer a few years ago.)

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  53. Lee does our shopping, since I don’t drive. It is usually more convenient for him to do it on the way home from work, but every now & then we do it together on his day off. He is a better shopper than I am.

    It occurred to me that my saying that Lee is delivering baked goods for a bakery could make some wonder just how many deliveries does a bakery need to make. Diana’s Bakery started out as a local bakery, but over the years, its business has expanded to providing bakery-quality baked goods to some stores, & to many restaurants.

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  54. The kind of funny thing with this job is that the hours are pretty much what he was doing while he was on his bread route (not quite as long, though, & no orders to do when he is home). He still gets up in the wee hours (12:20am now rather than 11:50pm then), still goes to bed about the same time (although I want to push the time back a half an hour when we can, so he can get a bit more sleep), & he gets the same days off. And I am back to making his sandwiches for him to take, & making sure the coffee pot is set to turn on for him.

    It’s almost like we haven’t skipped a beat.

    The difference is that he doesn’t have that great stress on his shoulders, & once he is off work for the day, he is really off work.

    So far, he has been working mostly 12-hour days, but that may lessen as he gets more used to the route. But at least he gets paid for all those hours, & if it continues, he won’t have to get a part-time job (which he was thinking of doing).

    He’s happy, & that makes me happy.

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  56. That’s great, Karen!

    Shopping: Me. And hubby. And 1st Arrow. And 2nd Arrow when she’s home. But none of us at the same time. Usually.

    I’m the label-reader. The rest of the above are the junk-food bringers.

    Which means I try to do most of the shopping. 😉

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  57. Finished my revised piano lesson policy. Saved to my computer, and all copies printed out, ready for distribution at piano lessons this week.

    I’m hoping for little to no sticker shock when I unveil my new rates that will start in six months. 😉

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  58. Cheryl says Thank You! to all of you. She appreciates it, and you cheered her up. 🙂

    Now about those cat eyes….

    Look closely. One is green, the other yellow. And Elizabeth’s are red. It’s like a traffic light. 🙂

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  60. 6 Arrows, when I first moved out of my mom’s house, to an apartment shared with two other girls (my sister and a friend from work), I was trying to figure out a budget to see how much I/we could afford in terms of apartment rent. I knew the range of prices for apartments, knew how much my car insurance cost, already was paying health insurance from my paycheck, etc., but I’d never paid for groceries.

    As I was trying to make it all add up and come in enough under my income to leave some money for savings, I asked my mom, “Is $30 a month each enough for groceries?” (This was 1987.) She said, “No, figure about twice that.” I did the math and did the math, and finally figured $30/ month simply had to be enough. So each month, each of the three of us put $30 cash into a drawer, and then whoever bought groceries would take out that amount of money and put the receipt in the drawer.

    Over time I ended up doing nearly all the grocery shopping, for two reasons: (1) There was a grocery store in the same strip mall where I worked, so even though I didn’t do all our shopping there, between the drugstore where I worked and that store, I could buy a good percentage of our food and toiletries (the toiletries mostly through sales at work combined with my discount); (2) I was the best at shopping the deals. If tuna was on sale three cans for a dollar, then I stocked up; if it wasn’t on sale, cravings for tuna had to wait.

    It turns out that not only could I stick with $30 a month for groceries most months, but I could include household toiletries in that. (Not shampoo and other personal items, but paper products, dish detergent, cleaning products, etc.) Some months I’d tell people, “$25 is enough this month”; sometimes I’d say, “32 would be better if you have it,” but I kept our average at just under $30 a month. That was with way more ramen noodles than would be ideal, and not a lot of meat. But we always had milk, peanut butter, and a few other staples on hand, and we never ran out of toilet paper or anything else we needed. I learned that I enjoyed the challenge and I was good at it.

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  61. Wow, that’s great, Cheryl! I knew absolutely zero about budgeting when I moved out of my childhood home. Money was never a problem for my parents, and they had generally frugal habits, so they never found themselves short, that I know of. I lived at home for all but my last year of college, and they paid all my school expenses while I lived at home. When it was time to register for the next quarter’s classes, they’d give me two blank checks — one for the registrar’s office, and one for the bookstore. When I’d tell them later how much I’d written the checks for, they told me it didn’t matter; they never balanced their checkbook.

    And never got overdrawn either.

    And a budget? They never had such a thing. I suppose they’d internalized frugality so much that nothing ever needed writing down? I don’t know.

    I balance my checking account to the penny every month, but never had a budget until recently.

    $20 a day for food, for one thing. Lots of growing kids and a skinny mom — we need pretty close to that amount.

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  63. Watched A Charlie Brown Christmas — how sweet is that show? — and walked the dogs.

    Meanwhile, made some progress on clearing out some of the back kitchen cupboards today and I have some stuff for the Salvation Army, with more to come (especially when I migrate into the bedroom closets later this week).

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