63 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-2-16”

  8. I had to deliver W-2s to Art’s church yesterday. I ran into the Pastor’s husband, but since I’d never met him, I did not realize who he is. He is a pastor of another larger area church, while his wife pastor’s our small neighborhood church. He was asking about Art and saying they pray for him. This morning in realizing who I had met, I felt badly that I had not congratulated him about their new baby and I did not ask how the new mom is doing. Life just gets awkward sometimes.

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  9. RKessler’s is up now, and it’s gorgeous. 🙂

    RKessler-

    I got all the pics you sent except for the snow one. For some reason it didn’t come thru in the email, so if you could resend that one, that would be great. Thanks.

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  10. The phone added that possessive apostrophe onto pastor. Silly phone always wants to always interfere. Sometimes it feels like a party line. I still slightly remember that we had a party line when we first got our phone. I can’t remember if there was a special ring for the other family down the street or if we both answered at the same time and if it was not a call for you then you were on the honor system to hang up. Anyone else remember how that worked?

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  12. Very dramatic photo! Lovely!

    Happy Groundhog Day, everyone. Our “winter” seems to have shrunk to two very small piles in the back corner. I’m OK if we get no more this year. But continuing the pattern of one snowfall per month would be OK too. 🙂

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  13. Janice: My family moved from Houston to Bandera, TX (population ~2,000) in 1979. They bought a 120 acre piece of property on the Medina river, about five miles outside the town. We had a party line for the first couple of months….Then, my dad had the phone line upgraded to a single party. It was strange to share a line with two other families.

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  14. Fortunately, we became friendly with our neighbors quickly.
    We were extremely blessed by an elderly couple who lived on a neighboring piece of property. They became my adopted grandparents and played a huge role in my childhood. Their grandkids lived far away and they had so much love to give–it was beneficial for all of us. Their grandkids called them Daddy-Pop and Big-Mama and that’s what I called them, too. They had married when she was just fourteen and he was eighteen. I never witnessed a harsh word between them….and they held hands everywhere they walked. They both had a solid faith and kind hearts. They were always glad to see me–even when I’d show up unannounced on my go-cart, mad at my mom over something and needing to talk. She would always put on a pan of cornbread for me or whip up some yeast rolls. And, usually she had some homemade beans ready to go with the delicious bread. I’d cry and she’d comfort me and then she’d feed me the ultimate comfort food. I’d stay as long as possible, basking in the warmth of their love. We stayed close throughout my life. Daddy-Pop died first, when I was a senior in high school. Big-Mama passed three years later. I still miss them. But, I’m so grateful for them and the memories.

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  15. Party lines, for us, there was a different number of rings for each party. If you only heard one ring, it was family A, two rings for family B, etc.

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  16. Good Morning Everyone. I sent Michelle a Southern Living Magazine link about Crepe Murder. Please, people do not butcher your Crepe Myrtles.
    I watched the Iowa Caucus on TV last night. First time I EVER have done that. Our own WeekenderMan who no longer hangs our with us caucused for Ted Cruz. I followed him and his wife on FB last night as it was happening. BG came out and watched with us which led to a family discussion of politics. She, of course, is for Bernie Sanders. I think he taps into this generations need to accomplish something. Millenials are neck and neck numbers wise with Baby Boomers so it is no surprise to me that The Bern would appeal to them. Mr P asked her to support her argument. She did. Most importantly she can adequately defend her position AGAINST Hillary Clinton….and that was without me educating her on the pile of dead bodies lined up behind The Hildabeast. I did encourage her to do some research into White Water, look up a guy named Vince Foster, and a couple of other things. Mostly she thinks Hildabeast lies about everything. I was so pleased to know that. BG’s Pop and her cousin G all have/had a terrific BS Meter. If any of the three of them take/took an immediate dislike to someone they bear deeper observation

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  17. We have neighbor grandparents like that. Only they are each on their sixth or seventh marriage, they both talk like sailors and both smoke like smokestacks. But they love the children and the children love them.

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  18. Janice, chuckling with you because when I read your third post and my uncontrollable edit-meter went off, I thought, “it’s not like Janice to misuse an apostrophe.”

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  19. Well the first weather guy was correct….I’m looking at about 18 inches of snow on the deck and it continues to snow….not supposed to end until around 3 this afternoon….we are snowbound once again today and I might just lose my mind!

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  22. One position I held in accounting with a family owned business used a large home for office space on the front, and the owner’s parents lived in the back part of the house. They were Big Mama and Big Daddy. Big Daddy came around daily to take out the trash. That was when I was in my twenties. He asked what I was doing working in an accounting office when I seemed more like a nurse. He was always trying to talk about Jesus. We had really good smells coming into our office space from Big Mama’s cooking. Their family liked to vacation in the area where Kim lives. I did visit at Big Daddy&Mama’s church once.

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  23. The family owned a chain of plant nurseries, and my dad had been in the Navy with the owner, but that had nothing to do with getting the job. I found an ad in our county paper.

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  24. Haven’t been on this thread in forever, it seems, but in coming to the site to read/post a prayer request, I just had to pop over here to comment on that gorgeous sunrise! Beautiful, RKessler! Thanks for sharing it.

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  25. Oh, and party lines: When our family (in which I grew up) had a party line, our ring was one long, followed by a pause, and continuing in that pattern; our neighbor’s was two short, followed by a pause, and so on.

    Neighbor would listen in on my phone conversations with my best friend in junior high, and sometimes if the conversation waned a bit, and neither my friend nor I could think of anything to say for a while, but we didn’t want to hang up, so we’d just sit there thinking a while (anyone else do this? 😉 ), the neighbor would sigh audibly.

    I guess she didn’t like when we weren’t providing any juicy tidbits or something.

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  26. Gorgeous photo! I loved New Mexico when I visited, liked it so much I thought “maybe I’ll just move here someday.” I loved the mix of cultures and the ‘western’ feel of it.

    The young reporters in my office all like Bernie, too. I thought he’d do better last night — he doesn’t seem to have quite the mystique and ability to draw out non-traditional voters as Obama did in ’08.

    This generation’s frame of reference is different than ours. Socialism in my day was very radical; now, not so much, especially now that we’re half way there anyway.

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  27. Although Bernie did well enough to keep him very much alive, at least for now — and that will be enough to further damage Clinton, I think.

    Wonder if it’s too late for another Dem to jump in, say a Biden? Probably, but if Hillary starts looking too weak, it wouldn’t altogether surprise me.

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  28. We, too, have an interesting character that serves the grandpa roll for our son. He is a contrary little man who was one of the founders of the motorcycle club, the Cossacks. He has been anti government for all of his adult life, therefore has very little social security coming in. We try to feed him, and keep him in warm clothes. He brings a totally different perspective to things and he loves our son. It does my heart good to see him soften when our boy tells him that he loves him.

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  29. Gorgeous sunrise! It’s hard to get a picture that captures those vibrant colors.

    I think we had a party line for a short time when we first moved to a tiny town when I was four. Seems like we got a private one pretty quickly. My dad was the pastor so it wouldn’t be right to have everyone’s business broadcast on party line.

    In that same little town we had neighbors that I adopted like grandparents. I lost my only living grandparent when I was 4, just a couple months after moving there. As a 4 year old living in a house with 4 teenage siblings (and often invaded by the teens in the church youth group), I would go next door to just sit and cuddle and talk. It was nice to have adults who weren’t distracted. I think they moved just a year or to later. Maybe to a nursing home? I don’t remember.

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  30. When I was about 11, a Mormon family moved in next door–an older couple and the granddaughter they were raising. The little girl asked Mom if she could call her Mom, too, like we did, and of course she said yes. Since we didn’t have grandparents (all had died before I was born), we then thought it fair that we call her grandparents by grandparent names (their “names” were mangled childish ones). But I never thought of them in any sort of family way other than that.

    As a teen, though, I got to know a lady at church, and she was my father’s age but thus old enough to be my grandmother (50 years my senior), and she ended up playing that role in my life until she died a few years ago.

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  31. That is a lovely sky picture. I have noticed that anywhere I go, each region has its own beauty, and also has its own sky.

    When I was small, we had a party line (and a dial phone). Gradually, everyone around us bought there own private lines, until we were the only ones on the party line, so we had a private line by default. The dial phone was not replaced until I was 11. My father had a serious car accident and complications from his injury placed him in intensive care in a Toronto hospital. My mother went to stay with him (she slept in the waiting room), and we four were left to take care of ourselves. Eldest sibling was 16, and between her and second sibling (14) the house was run smoothly. Friends who brought meals when they heard about the accident said they never realized my mother wasn’t there. We discovered how many friends my father had by the amount the phone rang. Since there was only the one dial phone, my sisters got good at getting down the stairs and over to the phone within two rings. So after a few days, when my father’s bachelor brother flew in from out west to help, he decided enough was enough, and, with the help of one of my mother’s brothers, installed another phone line, and while he was at it, replaced the dial phone with a newer model.

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  32. Roscuro, at 16 I was the oldest of the three of us still at home when my dad was in the hospital for two months (and then died). But Mom would take one of us with her for a few days, then return and pay bills and go grocery shopping, and go back to the hospital (100 miles away) with a different child. We kept the home running smoothly, although none of us could drive yet and I don’t think anyone brought us any meals. And then, after Dad died, Mom went back east for two weeks (by then I was 17 and we were no longer living in the country), leaving all three of us alone. But we were back in the Phoenix area, and my oldest brother lived a few miles away; though I don’t remember him or his wife checking on us, I imagine that they did so.

    It was a hard time in many ways, including the fact that my mom’s grief meant that in effect we lost both parents. But in another way, we learned what we were capable of doing, and we did it.

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  33. The sun is shining and the snow has ceased to fall….it is beautiful and cold outside and I am suffering from a touch of c a b i n f e v e r…..my schedule is thrown off and I am getting a bit testy…..I am now hiding out in the guest room watching Murder She Wrote…maybe not the best for someone in a testy mood!! 😛

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  35. Cheryl, the time waiting to see if my father would survive seemed almost unreal. I cannot imagine what it would have been like to loose him then. My mother realized then that she needed to do things like make sure the bank account was in both their names (hitherto, she had left all that to him). She still speaks of that time with mingled awe and fear. She also felt a little vindicated in her decision to homeschool, as one of the friends who was surprised at how well we looked after things had criticized her decision to homeschool by saying we would be tied to our mother’s apron strings 🙂

    On surrogate grandparents, I had my mother’s parents and my father’s mother (my father’s father died before any of us were born) growing up, although my father’s mother lives down east. Nevertheless, we had several surrogate grandparents. There was the elderly lady who was related to a famous Canadian pianist at whose house we spent many afternoons while my mother worked with her in the garden, and who taught second sibling to knit. There was the elderly Dutch immigrant couple who lived up the road, the wife of whom would crotchet (and taught second sibling to crochet) beautiful things for us and have us to tea. There was the elderly English gentleman whose daughter is a lifelong friend of my mother’s, who would talk to us of classic literature and history when he came for visits. There was the elderly man, whom we would visit on Sunday afternoons and sing hymns for him, and, when I started taking violin, play them for him, and who gave me my violin. He had lived his entire life in the area and told fascinating stories of daily farm life in early 1900s Ontario, and he made whimsical mechanical toys out of everyday objects. None of them probably set out to influence us, but they all contributed to the people we are today.

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  37. Some of you had a rough time. I thought party lines and such would have been out by the time you came around. I talked on a phone the first time when I was eleven. But that was back in the dark ages.
    I never had any grandparents, after I was about two, that associated with me. Nor grandparent surrogates. We moved around a lot. We had a rough time too, but that was depression years, and expected. My son, who turned 57 in October, had no financial problems like some of you did. .

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  38. We never had a party line although my ex mother in law tells of being on one when she was a teen. They would all listen in on the man down the road who would call his lady friend in town while his wife was away. Nosy you say? I say he deserved it if he was stupid enough to call his mistress when he KNEW he was on a party line!!!!

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  39. Well, I just blew it. I thought it had been a week since son had spent a day in the principal’s office for misbehavior, I will give him a break from the eight mile walk/ten mile bike ride and let him start riding the bus. I let the Principal know so he could tell the bus folk. The Principal emailed me and mentioned that Marc and three of the JH boys were spending PE with him because they were messing around in PE yesterday. Guess I jumped the gun on that one. Not to worry, I will send him for a walk around the block before school, that is just under four miles.

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  40. 6 Arrows, it was Glenn Gould. Apparently, he once came to visit her, and played for her on the piano of the church where I went as a young child.

    Chas, in rural Canada, progress moves slower than other places, because of distance and low population density. There are still places up in the Far North that do not have cell phone and internet service. I remember recently hearing an interview on the radio with a community leader from around the Hudson Bay region (can’t remember just where), who was concerned because the phone companies were ceasing their paging service. He said that was what healthcare professionals in the community used to communicate, as there was no cell phone service. Even where I am, internet service is limited depending on whether there was enough customers that wanted cable to be laid. We have high speed because there is several places where cottages have been converted to residences by people coming out of the city, who want their amenities, but even so, it never is very fast because the cable only comes as far as two roads away and the rest is still copper wire.

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  41. The low population density is also why we are less averse to social programs. The only way to get modern improvements was for everyone to agree to work together. The railroad, hydro (electricity) and telephone lines were all only able to work because the government agreed to work on it together. It used to be that all the utilities were provided by Crown Corporations, publicly held companies. Several of them have been sold off now – Ontario’s phone company went public quite a few years ago, and its main competitor is not well thought of, thanks to sly techniques like negative billing. The current Ontario government, having a majority, has decided to privatize the hydro corporation, which angers most people, including the conservative opposition. The company belongs to us, the taxpayers, and the government shouldn’t be able to sell it to pay their debts.

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  43. Phos, both our phone and electric service are co-ops. Large companies would never be able to make enough money to justify the infrastructure.

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  44. It is interesting the differences in the use of political words. Up here a caucus is a convening of all members of Parliament and senators belonging to a particular party to discuss policy. They meet every Wednesday morning when Parliament is in session. That is where they all were when that lone wolf terrorist entered Parliament in the fall of 2014. Had he opened any of the doors along the hallway that he walked just before he was shot down, he could have killed a number of parliamentarians. When party members select a party leader who could become the next Prime Minister, they do so at a leadership convention.

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  45. We had a party line both when we were children and later as an early married couple. I once had an emergency and had to ask the teen next door to get off.

    Mister Hobbs Takes a Vacation has a couple of wonderful party line scenes. It always brings a chuckle to my family.

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  46. 6 Arrows, I don’t know. I have a relative who played in a lot of piano competitions, and there was one of her fellow competitors who had apparently decided that his best chance of success was to imitate Gould. He not only carried his own bench, but he fussed about his hands. She privately labeled him Bench Boy. We encountered him once, and his affectation was a source of mirth for quite a while.

    RKessler, since the phone company has gone private, the upgrades have slowed, which is why we still have copper line.

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  47. We had a party line for a few weeks, maybe a few months, when we first moved out into the country in northern Arizona. My parents were asked their choice among several options, private line, three-party line, and five-party line, or something like that. They chose “private” and were told oh, sorry, those are sold out, but we can put you on a waiting list. Do you want a three-party line or a five-party line while you wait? They chose the one with fewer people. It wasn’t long before we had our own line, but I do remember picking up the phone to use it a couple of times and hearing people talking, and quietly hanging up again. I don’t remember how rings were signalled.

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  48. Phos, We still have copper, though they are in the process of installing fiber optic throughout the area. Not sure when they will hook it up to the houses. We did not have a phone until 1985 when the co-op came into the area.

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  49. phos, we have satellite internet service – just a dish on the house and no lines to run. Others near us get their internet from a tower (we don’t have sight lines to it).

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  50. I had a cousin who worked for the phone company. He use to tease me and say he listened in on my telephone conversations with my boyfriend. I really never knew if he was joking because in his job he could have done that. I would go in the bathroom and close the door hoping for a bit of privacy when I talked on the phone. Our house was so small that my parents could probably hear every word I said. They never asked me about anything so I don’t know if they listened or not. They were probably bored with the chatter. Now kids can take their phones anywhere for privacy. They just don’t know what all we went through. But it probably helped us to not get in as much trouble.

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  52. rkesler- You must really be remote if you didn’t get phone service until 1985. I’ve driven though New Mexico a lot and know it’s sparsely populated, but I didn’t realize it was that sparse.

    I had a 12 party line in the mountain village North of Tucson back in the late 70s. But it was a village full of summer cabins, and I was there in winter, so only three people were on the line.

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  54. We never had party lines, but my Aunt did….I always thought that was strange 🙂
    In our part of the forest we have no fiber optic lines for internet….we have a microwave antenna/plate on our roof….it’s pretty awful. Our neighborhood recently came to an agreement with Comcast to help pay for the infrastructure to be laid in our area for real internet service. We have 70 neighbors who have signed contracts with Comcast, which was their requirement….we each are paying 2500 dollars for the cables to be installed…on our bill it states it is our “infrastructure contribution”….ha….if it is a contribution, shouldn’t we get some sort of tax credit?!! They tell us the line will be in by month’s end….um with over two feet of snow on the ground, that’s not going to happen and they know it! We are hoping by summer’s end, we will have real internet!

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  55. Peter L- It is not hard to get rural in NM. Our county, which is 4,800 square miles, has a population of just over 20,000. I would guess that Mumsee is in much the same type of area.

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  58. Well, I’ve somehow “lost” the dogs’ flea medications — 2 new boxes from the vet’s, and they’re not cheap.

    Can’t find them anywhere. I usually kept them in a wire basket near where I do the dogs’ feeding, but I’ve been shifting things around there in the past few weeks so may have misplaced them … Still, they’d be somewhere in that general vicinity, I’ve looked in every drawer, every pet-related canister, they’re nowhere. So curious.

    I looked in the backyard this morning, fearing the dogs may have hauled them out there as they do so many things, but didn’t see any sign of the boxes. And the dogs are both still alive and don’t seem sick. But after looking EVERYWHERE that they would/could be again tonight after I got home, I’m going to check the yard again in the morning. Can’t think where else they may have wound up.

    Just so weird …

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  59. Hate it when that happens, I feel so scattered and then get obsessed with it all, wondering how I could be so absent minded …

    Argh. Nothing more I can do about it tonight.

    Time to let it go.

    Isn’t that a song?

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  61. Nancy Jill, we had an offer something like that from the utility company, because we have iffy connections out here; they offered to lay cable if we could get a certain number of subscribers and we each paid a chunk up front and/or extra on our bill. Our own service has gotten better since then. (We had a couple of months when I had to wait till after midnight to get any decently reliable internet–during the day it was mostly impossible.) We all chose not to do it. At the meeting to discuss it, my husband suggested a lower figure that he thought people would accept, but they came down only a little and it wasn’t enough.

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