44 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 3-4-16”

  3. Good day, night, and all in betweens, to the blog family and any lurkers.

    I am up only because I needed to do Art’s lunch. Just call it the Love Motivator Alarm Clock, or the Guiltilator.

    I was up way too late looking up friends on Facebook that I wanted to do friend requests on.

    My newest discovery that has worked to keep Miss Bosley off of Art’s open keyboard is to put grapefruit peeling on the keys. She hates the smell of grapefruit, so it has worked great. The only drawback is that Art hasn’t touched the keyboard either. He usually plays some Bridge, but somehow, he does not like the idea of competing against grapefruit peels.

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  4. IT’S FRIDAY!
    You know what that means?
    Same ol’ routing for me. The county sheriff is going to speak to Lions today.
    I have another funeral to attend tomorrow. 😦
    Wife of a SS classmate.

    What kinds picture is that?

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  6. Yesterday was a crazy day. Yet another research serendipity–the fifth in two weeks.

    What do you think? Should I write this book? 🙂

    This one is a little complicated. Bear with me.

    On Tuesday night, I went a hunting through Ancestry.com for information about one of Biddy’s close friends during some intense years of her life. I knew a little about her, but I wanted to expand my knowledge base–this is someone Biddy knew the rest of her life, albeit the woman was a missionary to China, so she didn’t see her often.

    Through the intricate research abilities I’ve been able to use to ferret out information, I discovered a family tree and was able to contact the person who had put it together.

    I had an email with information from her the next morning. She lives in Oxford, England and is the niece of Biddy’s friend, G. Her cousin, A, G’s only child, lives in Hong Kong. A is 91 years old.

    Thrilling! A would have at least met Biddy when the family returned to England on furlough.

    A is in her right mind, though writing a book of her own about her family and necessarily suspicious of this American writer.

    And her Internet is off and she can’t respond.

    But after J, the woman from Oxford, forward my emails, A called J and gave her some stories.

    J mentioned A has a number of boxes filled with her mother’s correspondence. “She’s probably got letters in there from Biddy.”

    I was ready to catch a plane to Hong Kong, but my husband pointed out I needed a visa and our passports need to be renewed.

    🙂

    We’ll be expediting them tomorrow–the passports–while I sit back to watch and see what God will do next.

    Regardless of whether I fly off to Hong Kong or not (what an impossible thought, but such an adventure, alas, would mean missing my trip to Fairhope), I’m thrilled by yet another bit of encouragement and additional information to add to my book.

    Astonishing. Joyous, Fun. God is good.

    If only I could sleep . . . LOL

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  7. My thought exactly, Janice. “The Birds” is my favorite Hitchcock movie. Of course, it has been over 40 years since I last saw it.

    And, it is indeed Friday. so enjoy the comics. One is funny: Trump on the roof of Romney’s car in a dog cage.

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  8. Thanks, Peter, I always enjoy the comics.

    In the one with Trump reaping the rage, is the sower supposed to be someone specific? I don’t recognize him, and I’m not sure I get the point of the cartoon.

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  10. Ha! Roscuro, I was thinking about all the red in the photo and how this was an After photo, as in after the birds attacked, a mashup of Hitchcock and Stephen King.

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  11. Yes, The Birds. 😮 I thought of that, too, when I saw the pics.

    Very exciting michelle.

    We had a staff meeting on the updates of our ethics policy yesterday, lots of talk around whether or not we are free to use photos from FB, etc. (when someone’s killed or …. , can we grab photos from social media?). Generally we say no, not without permission, although some cases it’s ok, it’s a case-by-case situation — screen grabs are safer. Lively discussion (social media = a public place), but no hard-and-fast answers covering every case.

    Today the company is providing a worker appreciation breakfast but I originally planned to go out on a story first thing today before heading in; although now I realize I forgot to turn in my timecard at the end of the day yesterday, when they’re due, so looks like I’ll have to go in to do that now first anyway.

    I had some very odd dreams early this morning, complete with long-gone relatives, some very noisy Girl Scouts out in front of my house along with police and a K9 unit … and Donald Trump. Don’t ask. The details of how all that intertwined are hazy at best now that I’m awake.

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  12. The Secret Place, novel by Molly Noble Bull, is free for Kindle at Amazon. I enjoyed a book I read by her in the past, and I see this one has won some awards.

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  15. Re the photo: I had my bedroom blinds open, taking some photos in my bedroom and wanting the light from the window, when I saw a flock of more than a thousand birds across the street and down a couple houses. I went outside, and they had moved to my side of the street, still a couple houses down. A few birds peeled off from the flock and landed in our trees, and those were common grackles, so without thinking I assumed the whole flock was grackles. (Grackles can come in some amazingly large flocks. Halloween 2014 I photographed a flock that I estimated at 10,000 birds, and it was mostly grackles.) Thing is, at least this time of year, “blackbird” flocks in this area are quite mixed: grackles, red-winged blackbirds, starlings, and sometimes some cowbirds. As the birds took off, I snapped a couple photos, thinking I’d just get photos of grackles in flight. But my camera flashed red and I realized half of the flock was redwings. (I see a lot of grackles in there, too. They’re the ones with the purplish heads.)

    I pulled the top photo up on my computer and said out loud, “Wow!” I’ve never seen The Birds, but I knew it would make people think of that. For a long time I’ve wanted a good photo of a red-winged blackbird in flight, as I think they are stunningly beautiful birds, especially in flight. But this one is the photo I wanted, multiplied exponentially. And I think it’s way cool that some birds show the red from the wings, some show the yellow from the wings, and in a few it’s mixed into orange. They aren’t nearly as close as the photo makes it seem; I was zoomed in. But that photo is not cropped at all; the whole frame was filled with birds, and that obviously is not even close to the full thousand birds.

    Later in the season, when I walk down my street, a couple dozen male red-winged blackbirds will scream at me within a couple of blocks. When my husband and I walk through our favorite state park, they’ll be there by the dozens as well (though they won’t be responding to us territorially there). Males arrive in town before the females, and they claim nesting territories, and then the females show up and choose a male and his territory. Males can have more than one mate, and they don’t help feed the young birds, but are very vociferous in defense of their territories while the brown, camouflaged females take care of nesting duties.

    And someday, Mumsee, I also hope to get a photo of a red-winged blackbird clinging to a cattail stalk, because that’s what I think of too. There are cattails on our road and in the state park, with blackbirds hanging out in vast numbers both places, but somehow I’ve never gotten that photo, though I’ve looked for chances to get it.

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  16. Michelle, sounds very interesting, not to mention fun. You don’t need me to caution you to be careful of A. Perhaps you have some interesting tidbits she does not that she would welcome for her book.

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  17. When we are out on the deck, we usually hear them before they come in sight from behind the house. The murmur gets louder and louder until suddenly, they are right above us.

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  18. PS The second one is cropped a bit. It’s more along the line of what I was imagining getting with a red-winged shot, just with one or two birds and not a couple hundred. That first one, I never even imagined one like it.

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  20. Beautiful photo, Cheryl! I did not think of “the Birds”. We only occasionally get a few stragglers. We do get the yellow headed blackbirds in a fair quantity.

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  21. Janice, how gruesome 😯 😉 The most gruesome scene in that film, that of the farmer who was the victim of his own chickens, was entirely a glass painting, and that menacing scene of the gull wheeling over the burning gas station is mostly glass painting, since the only building on the bay was the restaurant, and the town was too far inland.

    This is pretty neat. There is a button over each section to see how things have changed over 400 years: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/03/london-skyline-1616-2016-interactive-faders-visscher

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  23. God rearranged my plans for the day. I am at Hospice with friend Mary from church. She is sleeping now. Church ladies are doing some shifts so she will always have someone with her. This is a beautiful place a few blocks from my high school yet I had never been on this road across the street from my school. There are so many places I have never been in my home town even.

    One of the ladies I relieved is the mom of the guy who was falsely accused of being the Olympic bomber when it was really Eric Rudolph. I have never asked her about that horrible ordeal. Her son, who was falsely accused, has already passed away. People go through some horrible things sometimes not of their own making.

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  24. So glad you were able to be with her today Janice — sounds like a good group of friends. And I remember that faulty arrest with all the publicity, so awful. 😦

    Thinking of Hitchcock, does anyone remember Charade? He didn’t make it, but the 1963 film was dubbed “the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made.” Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn

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  26. Well, I don’t remember when it came out 🙂 But yes, I have seen ‘Charade’ several times. It’s a cleverly comic suspense film. Then there is the music by Henry Mancini. I think it is better than the Hitchcock suspense films of the same era. I enjoyed some of ‘North by Northwest’ – the cropduster scene and how he gets out alive of the art auction – but it was over the top; the final scene, scrambling over Mount Rushmore, jumped the shark for me. ‘Charade’ is much more taut and well constructed. I prefer Hitchcock’s early suspense films, which he made in 1930’s Britain, like ‘The Lady Vanishes’, ‘Young and Innocent’, and ‘The Thirty-Nine Steps’. I do not like his horror films.

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  28. Amazing birds.
    I got an email from Amazon about my kindle. I never have the wireless on on my kindle. It is old style not the touch screen. I download books to my computer and then use a cable to transfer them. In this email Amazon said that they needed to update my kindle and that it needed to be done or my kindle would no longer work after March 16th. They want me to turn on the wireless, plug it in and leave it on all night. They say it will then restart multiple times through the night as they update it.
    We pay by the megabyte and there is no way that I want to give them access to my Kindle.
    Any thoughts??

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  30. Chas, I’ll be leading the study two weeks from today, on Friday, March 18. I would love to hear your suggestions! 🙂

    We started 2 Peter last October, and have been slowly moving through chapter one, verses one through eleven, most recently beginning to do word studies on these words in verses 5-7: diligence, faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, patience, godliness, brotherly kindness, and charity.

    Today we looked up verses for godliness (Greek eufebeia), and next up is brotherly kindness. My friend who ordinarily leads the study gave us the verse references for brotherly kindness (Greek philadelphia), but we didn’t have time to read and discuss the passages, so that is what I’d like to do next time, when she is away and I’m leading. There are only four references, though, besides the mention in 2 Peter 1:7, so we might proceed beyond that into charity (love) references, which I’m pretty sure we won’t get completely through in a one-hour study!

    Any thoughts, suggestions, notes, etc. you have regarding this section of Scripture would be most welcome and a great blessing, Chas! Thank you, sir. 🙂

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  32. I was a little young to see Charade when it first came out, but I did catch it for the first time as a teen in the late 1960s on TV while I was babysitting one night, I believe. Good and fun movie. Whenever it’s mentioned I can’t help but start humming/singing the song. 🙂

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  33. Sir? I only get that when she wants something. I have this on my word processor, so I map post it again tomorrow But tomorrow morning is busy for me.

    . Here is some comments I gleaned from my notes and my loose leaf Bible concerning II Peter 1:5f. You will gather that I don’t think those verses have any meaning just standing alone. The context is the lesson.
    I hope this helps some..
    Comments pro & con are welcome. We can all learn.

    II Peter 1.
    You can’t take verses 5f in II Peter, without the previous discussion.
    This is about Spiritual maturity. Peter is asking, essentially, Why are you here? What do you want out of life? He says, in V. 3 that we have “divine power” over all things pertaining to life and godliness. That is, “not according to works that we have done” but by His spiritual power. (See Eph. 2:4-10)/
    In verse 4, Peter says we become sharers of the divine nature. This is heavy stuff and those of us who have studied it for years don’t gather the full significance of this. No man stays stationary, he grows until he begins to die. There is a certain progression to Peter’s list. He likely didn’t mean it that way because the easiest to obtain is knowledge.. Self control likely the hardest. Though it may vary with people.

    You have to want these things that Peter mentions in v.5f. No person remains stationary. He advances or falls behind. And in falling behind he loses his war. He becomes ineffective spiritually, (v9) And unfruitful (John 15:5-6). Here is the formula for becoming partakers of this divine nature. It begins, as Paul says in Galatians 5:16f. “Walk in the Spirit”. In this way you will gather virtue, knowledge, self control and all those other evidences of a spiritual life.. But no one ever gets to the point where “he has arrived” Even Paul (Phil 3:12f) says that he has not arrived, but presses on to the goal “of the upward call of God in Jesus Christ”.

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  34. Thank you very much, Chas. (Or shall I say Sir Chas? Have you been knighted?) 😉 I guess calling you Sir got quick results, anyway!

    I really appreciate it. And you are right — context is important.

    Have a good morning tomorrow.

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  35. Jo, I would question if that email is from Amazon. Check to see if the email address is the usual Amazon customer service address. It may be a phishing scam. I do not have a Kindle, but I also keep my e-reader offline and I plug it in to my computer when I load a new book. More than once while I was in West Africa, I would get an update notice from the e-reader program on my computer that I needed to download a program update. I would have to wait until I went to the city to do it, because it was just too slow in the village, but in the meantime, the e-reader itself could be used without a problem. If your Kindle is always offline, there should be no reason it would stop working.

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  38. I got the same email but have had mine plugged in and on wifi so presumably whatever needed updating was (saw nothing in settings requiring action) — so yeah, see what happens on the 16th — I’ll also try to google it to see if any info comes up

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  41. Jo, in Donna’s first link, in the discussion, it seems that those who understand these things think that if you always have your Wi-Fi disabled on your Kindle, you will be able to continue to use your Kindle to read books and to load books onto your Kindle via your computer. The repair Amazon wants to do seems to be related to the ability of the Kindle to connect directly to the Amazon store via Wi-Fi. So, carry on using your Kindle. Since you don’t use the Wi-Fi on your Kindle, you don’t need the update. The part about the Kindle not working after March 16 is just meaning that your Kindle will not be able to connect to the Amazon store directly through its Wi-Fi connection after that date. You will only be able to load books onto the Kindle through the computer.

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