43 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-22-16”

  1. Good morning! I went to sleep last night at 11:30 and awakened at 4:30…it’s so frustrating when one cannot sleep…I have an appointment at 8:00 with a new neurologist (she’s Lindsey’s doctor; I really like her).

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  3. Good Morning….praying your appt goes well Ann and that your new doc will have wisdom and insight….
    We are getting snow again tonight….3-5 inches tonight and another inch tomorrow….I’m kind of sick of it by now….and March, “they” say, will be quite the snowy month for us….ugh….need to keep my thoughts on the bright side…moisture…it’s a good thing around here! 🙂

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  4. Hah! I’ve been awake since around 1 am. Finally gave up and made coffee at 4:30. My paternal grandfather was a hypochondriac. Once he was in a discussion with one of my aunts and someone else. They were talking about insomnia and not to be outdone he claimed he didn’t eve go to sleep! I get the mouth guard at 8:30 this morning. Maybe that will help.

    I have a question for my writer/editor friends and anyone else. As I have told you I am re-reading a series of mysteries. The writer says “half a year ago” instead of six months ago. It screams at me every time I read it. Do you find odd writing like that distracting when you read?

    On another note, the header photo is quite peaceful. Good Morning Everyone!

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  6. Kim, your question: “The writer says ‘half a year ago’ instead of six months ago. It screams at me every time I read it. Do you find odd writing like that distracting when you read? Not really; everyone has pet phrases in speech, and words they overuse. I do find it distracting when they use overly showy language, or language that says nothing. Or when they use a cliche, especially when they use a cliche but get it wrong. (Like if someone were to say “it’s raining dogs and cats.”)

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  7. Kim, the first encounter with that wording might give me pause, but if it continued to be used, I probably would not be bothered. If a character is saying something like that, it could just be the author’s way of presenting a difference in speech or habit of the character, in other words, it makes for an easy way to remember which character is speaking if the author does not want to constantly use, “he said,” etc.

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  8. It appears to be a rather dull day, weather wise, with gray skies full of rain.

    Brother and I had a discussion about the sticker vine that I call Devil’s ivy. He called it brambles and said a cousin called it bamboo thorn vine. Then brother remembered another relative called it smile which brother remembered because he said you smile when you cut it with an axe.

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  9. That posted before I meant for it to post.? Why? I do not know.

    As we spoke, I got on my tablet and looked at each and found that it is smilax. The roots are very thick and knotted. My husband and his dad use to do a creative craft with those roots. They dried them and painted them so they looked like funny alien creatures. My brother said his neighbor told him the roots can be hollowed out and made into funny looking pipes. I am wondering if anyone has done anything like this?

    Once my dad made a water paddle wheel from some weedy dried sticks by a stream when I was a girl. It was such a fun thing to see it working in the stream.

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  12. The photos on top were from my walk with my husband last week at one of our state parks. The top one, if my camera had been just a little more to the left, my husband would have been included in the shot, but I had climbed up a bit off the trail to get a better angle for photos of a pileated woodpecker (though I still couldn’t get any shots of him without a twig in front of his face). When I turned to go back down, I saw the gorgeous view in the header.

    The funny thing is, it was about 50 degrees out there, but the lake was still mostly ice. You can see some open water on the left side of the header, but the rest of it is frozen. The middle shot, you can see animal tracks across the lake, and branches from a fallen tree frozen into it. The bottom photo, the sun was shining brightly on those trees in the back, but everything else was in shadow, so the trees were quite pretty.

    It was the muddiest walk I’ve ever taken, with whatever snow might have been on the trial earlier in the week recently thawed in a warm week culminating in temps above 60 by the weekend. So in many places we walked just off the path on fallen leaves, not mud, but in some places the mud was unavoidable.

    But between the bright blue sky, the blue-ish ice, and whatever leaves still clung to many of the trees, it was quite a pretty color palette for a winter day.

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  13. Puzzle of the day.
    How is it possible to lose a single shoe?
    I have lost the brown dress shoe for my right foot.
    How can that happen?
    I have looked everywhere.
    Under the bed, usually where I find it, Even with a flashlight I searched.
    I even looked back in the car. Though there’s no reason it should be there.
    I looked in the closet twice. It’s a mess in there because Elvera collects things.
    And she has three times as many closes as I do. That’s ok. She needs them.
    I found a penny, but I didn’t find my shoe.

    It’s weird. A single shoe doesn’t get lost. It’s driving me nuts.
    How can you lose one shoe?
    It’s not something someone would steal.
    If I were still in the AF or college, I would suspect some “buddies”.
    If I had an animal pet, I would suspect it. But my rock is still on the bookcase behaving itself.
    But that shoe has to be somewhere.

    Kinda reminds me of the time I lost the dental floss. I wrote a poem.
    I’ll try to find it.

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  14. Beautiful winter tableau. 🙂

    Heard coyotes yipping across the street in the canyon early (7 p.m.) last night, such a commotion — it sent chills up my spine. It also unnerved Tess, Cowboy & Annie Oakley who all charged indoors, one right after the other, through the doggie door. I locked it up behind them.

    A little too close for comfort from the sounds of it. … A friend, meanwhile, who lives several blocks up the hill from me said a coyote has been visiting her backyard (which borders the canyon on that end). He came in over a 6-foot fence.

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  16. Chas, did you check your foot?

    My dad turned eighty six yesterday. We got to go visit with him and stepmom for a couple of hours. Always a pleasure. Stepmom is doing very well these days. They are so glad daughter was able to join them.

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  17. Chas look in the hamper….could the shoe have gotten picked up with some clothing and tossed in the dirty clothes? It has happened here….of course if a certain someone had not thrown his clothing on the floor, the shoe would not have gone missing in one fell swoop…not saying you have committed this crime…just sayin’ I know someone who has and does…. 😛

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  18. I have my mouth guard!!!! I also have a prescription for 10 valium. He said to take one each night for 7 nights and hold on to the other 3 should I need them in the future. We are going to see if we can break the cycle in 7 days and go forward with the mouth guard. I am all for that because for all my humor in getting botox is would be at least another 3 or 4 hundred dollars and I would like to keep that in savings if I can. Also, we hear botox all the time but we forget it comes from botulism which people used to try to avoid.

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  19. Chas, I know it’s not funny, but the one lost shoe tickled my funny bone and I laughed and laughed. For one thing, it reminded me of once when the iron tipped over on the ironing board, and the water from the steamer part landed in my husband’s one bedroom shoe and when he put his bedroom shoes on he could not figure out how one of them was wet! I had not warned him beforehand so it was quite a surprise for him. This happened while son was still home.

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  20. I checked the hamper
    Here’

    .The Truant Dental Floss

    Last night I went to brush my teeth
    The way I always do.
    And then I have to work the floss,
    Before the job is through.

    But Lo! It isn’t there I see.
    Now just where could it be?
    I know, it’s with my shaving stuff,
    I’ll find it easily.

    I fumble through the drawer below,
    Stuff for my face and hair,
    But vainly for my dental floss
    It clearly isn’t there.

    What now, sez I, what can I do?
    I must call nine-one-one.
    Some thief broke in and stole my floss,
    Though nothing else is gone.

    In panic now, my floss is gone,
    Oh my, what can I do?
    I know! I’ll just use my wife’s Glide
    ‘Cause every piece is new.

    It puzzles me, I just can’t sleep,
    All night I turn and toss,
    What could have happened to that
    Stupid roll of dental floss?

    Come dawn, now through bleary eyes,
    Say! What is this I see?
    That truant roll of dental floss,
    Just staring back at me.

    That Earhart girl, Virginia Dare,
    Did Oswald act alone?
    Those statues now on Easter Isle,
    Gigantic blocks of stone.

    The Stonehenge., Oh, so many more
    That puzzle mankind so;
    And how that floss got with my socks,
    This world will never know.

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  24. The shoe is lost.
    Most of the poem isn’t true.
    I missed my dental floss, used another from the stuff the dentist gives.
    And forgot about it.
    What started it was when I opened my sock drawer:
    “How did that dental floss get into my sock drawer?”
    Somebody put it there..
    There is a 100% probability that someone was me.
    But I don’t remember the event. If I had been thinking, I never would have done it.
    I’m likely to find my shoe something like that.
    It HAS to be somewhere.

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  25. This writer finds it difficult to read a lot of books these days. I often skim and if the writing is too atrocious give up completely. A wise friend said, “there are just too many good books to read to waste time on bad ones.”

    Amazing how liberating that statement has been for me! 🙂

    Happy to be back to normal. I can’t believe all the icing I ate this weekend . . . 🙂

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  27. Mumsee—-

    The call came from a DHS supervisor at midnight: “We have a 3-year old girl at the hospital. Her mom was shot and is not expected to live through the night. Her dad has been arrested. Domestic violence. All clothing was taken by police as evidence so if you could bring a blanket that would be great. Can you come pick her up?”
    ‘Yes.’
    The call came from a CPS worker while I was making dinner: “I just came on the scene to find a 4-year old boy sitting in the back of a police car. His clothing is soaked with urine from his mentally unstable mother; he may have lice, and he is filthy. Can we bring him to your house?”
    ‘Yes.’
    The call came from another county as we were getting ready for bed: “We have a 2-year old who is sound asleep at the DHS office now. She was brought to the ER with an injury. Her mom was so high on drugs she could hardly function. This little girl is adorable. We just need someone who can take her for the night. Could you-”
    ‘Yes.’
    The call came from the placement desk while I was in the middle of a run. “We have a tiny 10-day old baby boy. Things aren’t working out with his current foster home, and we need to move him. Do you have an infant car seat?”
    ‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.’
    My husband and I are biological parents to two young kids, as well as foster parents to a revolving crew of kids under the age of five. A friend, who also fosters, once told me that calls from DHS are like a Create-Your-Own-Adventure Game. Each ‘Yes’ takes your family on a wild new adventure you never expected. I always wonder what adventure we are missing out on with the calls we can’t take.
    We say yes because these broken babies need a safe place to land. They need a mommy to wrap them in blankets and tuck them in at night. They need a daddy to hoist them up on his shoulders and gallop them around the backyard. They need clothing that fits and food that nourishes. They need to be tickled and trained and taken to the zoo. They need boundaries. They need love. I have been surprised to find how much we need these little people, too. They are sweet and feisty and stubborn and funny. They keep us on our toes and teach us lessons we need to learn.
    People tell me all the time, ‘I don’t know how you do it! I could never become a foster parent. It would be too hard to say good-bye to the kids once I’ve gotten attached.’ And I get it, I do. I used to say the exact same thing. But now, I wonder what in the world I was thinking. Was I serious? It would be too hard for… me?
    Make no mistake. It is hard. There are plenty of days when I feel like I just don’t have it in me to do this. My ideas and energy and patience fall flat. There are endless meetings and appointments and phone calls. There are false accusations and frustrating decisions. Foster parenting can be tough.
    And yet these kids are forced to do hard things every single day, through no fault or choice of their own. They are abused and neglected and forced to fend for themselves. They are separated from siblings and shuffled from place to place. Kids in the foster care system have endured more hurt in their short lives than most of us will pause to think about, let alone experience, in our own.
    The next phone call will come. And my husband and I will say yes. Not because we are some amazing poster family for foster care. We will say yes because these kids are forced to do hard things. The least we can do is look into their broken eyes and say, ‘Yes. I will do hard things with you. I will hold your hand and kiss your head and calm your tantrums. By God’s grace, we will figure this out together.’
    When it is time to say good-bye, I will wash their clothes and pack their stuffed animals. I will ache and cry and wish it could be different. But I will never regret saying yes.
    Emily is a foster mom in Portland, Oregon and a volunteer with Embrace Oregon.

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  29. No shoe.
    Ain’t funny. The mystery is worse than the loss of the shoe.
    It’s driving both of us crazy.
    I came home wearing two shoes.
    I changed clothes and shoes.
    I hung the clothes up, but presumably, left the shoes on the floor.
    Leastwise, that’s where my left brown show was.
    Bout no right brown shoe.
    We have searched the entire house.
    I’ve looked in the car. Though there was no logical reason to do that.
    I’ve looked under the bed with a flashlight 13 times.
    We haven’t left the house between the time we came home and went to the Y this morning.
    But the shoe was missing yesterday.

    WEIRD

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  31. SHE FOUND IT

    Elvera went downstairs and found the shoe.
    We knew it had to be somewhere.
    Having found that, I still don’t know why I took a shoe downstairs.
    But the mystery is solved and I’ll try to dismiss the rest and move on.

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  32. Glad to hear it. Reminds me of the time I could not open the shampoo. Somebody gave us a whole bagful of partially used shampoo bottles. I had one in my shower that I thought might be nice but could not get that thing open. Tried for months. I finally gave up and asked husband. Oh, that is this kind and opened it right up. I did not kill him. I said thank you. And I said don’t ever tell anybody about this. And here I am, telling you all.

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  37. Justifiable homicide. From the New York Post via Drudge.

    Briitish hairdresser was sentenced to life in prison last week after she plunged a knife into her boyfriend’s heart — because she felt he spent too much time on Facebook.
    Terri-Marie Palmer, 23, broke down in tears as she was convicted of 24-year-old Damon Searson’s murder following a one-week trial, where the details emerged about the fatal end of their rocky relationship, according to multiple reports.

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  39. One of my go-to places when something is missing, aside from under the couch or bed, is under or between couch cushions. Lots of Forrest’s toy parts end up there. Emily’s phone has ended up there a time or two.

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  40. Looks like an interesting new book coming out in April:

    http://www.challies.com/visual-theology-seeing-and-understanding-the-truth-about-god

    ________________

    We live in a visual culture. Today, people increasingly rely upon visuals to help them understand new and difficult concepts. The rise and popularity of the Internet infographic has given us a new way to convey data, concepts, and ideas. But the visual portrayal of truth is not a novel idea. God himself used visuals to teach truth to his people. If you have ever considered the different elements within the Old Testament tabernacle or temple you know that each element was a visual representation of a greater truth. The sacrificial system and later the cross were also meant to be visual—visual theology.
    ___________________

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