71 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 3-24-16”

  2. Good evening, Jo. Good morning, all.
    It’s a very rainy morning in Houston.
    We had a good time with my in-laws yesterday. However, my MIL had cut her hand earlier in the day. She’d bandaged it, but when she changed the dressing, it was apparent she needed stitches. Fortunately, we have an urgent care close by, so he nephews stayed with us while SIL took her to doctor. SIL had tried to get her to go earlier, but she’d refused…
    Why is it that older women’s skin becomes so thin?!?
    Nephews (ages five and eight), had a good time swimming in hot tub and hanging out with cousins.

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  5. I love daffodils. Alas, they will not grow well here. Oh some really determined gardeners can get a few to bloom but they look sickly.
    Our back yard looks nice. The landscapers will finish today, hopefully in time for the rain. Great way to check this new addition out to make sure it works.

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  6. I was pretty much involved with me desk for about 16 hours yesterday, with nary a blog post written. But I made progress, finally on my book and finally, after at least 6 distracted weeks, have escaped Egypt 1916!

    I’m now in Egypt 1917 and the most emotional chapter in the book.

    I’d love to finish writing this chapter on Saturday so I can mourn AND rejoice on another already planned as way too busy day.

    We’ll see. I’ve got Adorables to play with today.

    Did I mention I put a tennis racket into the hand of the 6 year old for the first time, and she hit such a line drive at me I gasped.

    Tears. My mother is alive again.

    So odd how grief, genetics and family history can Shanghai you with emotions at the most unexpected moment.

    (I know the capitalization is wrong but Apple Spell is too hard to fight with this early).

    I’m off to be sporty for the morning!

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  9. I stay continually confused between Jonquils and daffodils. This phone turned it into Jon quilt. Early morning amusements. I’m sometimes smarter than a Smartphone!

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  10. Michelle, do you use a timer to take regular breaks? Sitting for long hours can be as bad as smoking. I am trying to do the 25 minutes and then 5 minute break routine for writing. But it is difficult to stop when I am in the middle of something.

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  12. I got to see the daffodils in TN and will get to see ours, too. 🙂

    We could call them all narcissus, since it is the scientific name of the whole genus. According to my garden book, jonquils have a long narrow stem and leaves and a lovely scent. Otherwise, they all look like daffodils to me.

    Ours are all planted. I was shocked to first see them growing wild everywhere in TN. Oh, what a God we have to give us such beauty. No mechanical, gray world for him.

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  13. Nice thing about daffodils and crocus both–if you like, you can plant them in the lawn, not in a flower bed, and then have the pleasure of having them sprout in the spring when grass is still dormant. I did that with a row of crocus in Nashville, only I didn’t plant enough of them to be very impressive. And I had a bag of mixed colors, and had just decided they were all white and yellow (two shades of yellow) and no purple, when the purple started to bloom too (two shades of purple). The purple ones always bloomed last in that bunch. And then once the crocus were finishing up, it was time to watch for the neighbors’ daffodils.

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  14. 🙂 Because of weird family work schedules, every other Thursday (today) is the only day that both of our daughters have to work and my husband and I are both home. (There are other times both are gone–one might have a date while the other one works, or they go somewhere together–but this is the one scheduled day that they’re both gone and we’re both here.)

    It’s a dreary wet day, but in March it could so easily be snow that we’ll happily accept a bit of rain. We got through the winter with no snowfall of six inches or more . . . just one or two snowfalls per month, November through March so far, of two to four inches. We’ve probably had 18 inches total, which isn’t exactly nothing, but in this region we can get that in one intense snowfall. (And my husband keeps saying the November snow–our biggest of the year–doesn’t count since it wasn’t winter yet. That also means if we have any more snow in March or April, it won’t count either.) Even in January, most of our precipitation has come as rain.

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  16. I didn’t notice the bee either. I thought it was part of the plant.
    I don’t have any crocus, but I had lots of them in Annandale. I need to think about that.
    I was always glad to see them poking through the snow.

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  17. I just got three of the four books of “seasons” that I made with photos I’ve taken. I ended up putting extra pages in them, so I didn’t have enough on the voucher to order them all. I decided to hold off on “spring” since it is the approaching season and I may end up with some new photos to put in it. (If anyone wants to see them, send me an e-mail and I’ll give you the links.)

    So far we’ve had a few crocuses, and the grass is green and growing. I have a hunch we’ll see an early spring, which would please me greatly–I detest having to wait until late April or early May to see blossoms on the trees!

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  18. We’ve had a mild week here, though lots of wind that someone claimed produced a tornado over her house just a few blocks away from me. She said the wind hit so hard that her french doors to the backyard flew open and her little dogs got out (which is a worry since coyotes have been visiting her backyard, despite her 6-foot-tall fence, and killed one of the outdoor cats she feeds about a week ago).

    She gathered up the scruffy little dogs and had to tie the french doors together to get them to stay closed.

    I asked her if she spotted a witch riding a bicycle flying by when she went outside …

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  20. Send me the links please, cheryl. 🙂

    I saw a funny video yesterday of puppies meeting cats for the first time and one clip showed a collie puppy who was oblivious to the cat above him on a piano bench. Puppy was just bee-bopping around, clueless that there was a cat glaring at him from on high.

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  21. The problem I have with those things growing in the yard is that they don’t seem to bloom before time to cut the grass.

    Our daffodils and jonquils and crocuses and mountain lilies are all blooming. Sometimes through snow, sometimes through hail, sometimes through rains, and sometimes through sun. Must be Spring.

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  22. Mumsee, I had them planted in a shady area between trees, where the grass didn’t grow very fast. I sometimes had to mow around them once or twice in the spring, but since they were in a straight row, it was easy to do it. And once they had finished blooming, I didn’t worry about them. Very low maintenance.

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  23. The people who lived here before had them planted in a neat line between apple, lilacs and spirea, so it was well shaded. I used to mow around them but then they stopped blooming at all for whatever reason. They made me happy to see them.

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  25. I don’t think it’s just pixel count, it’s also the sharpness of focus. A lot of photos look good at 4 x 6 that can’t be made into enlargements because they’re just not sharp enough. I have a large-screen computer. (I like to be able to have two pages side by side on the same screen if I happen to be comparing two documents, and it’s also helpful to have a large screen when making photo books.) When I open a photo on my screen, it’s huge (9.5 x 12.5″), so I can get a pretty good idea how well it will enlarge. (Though sometimes photos look sharper or less sharp on paper than on the screen.) But sometimes when it’s just not totally sharp, I decrease the size a little to see if it would at least work as a 4 x 6. But sometimes I crop a photo, and then it isn’t clear any more since I’ve made it too big for its level of clarity. (That happened with my red-winged blackbird the other day.) Not many photos are really sharp enough to show their best at the size of this blog’s header.

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  26. The only spring flowers around here are the ones I purchase at Trader Joes!! :-). We figure we got at lest 16 inches of heavy wet cement type snow yesterday….they opened the interstate at midnight so Paul set out on his journey home….it was fine until he got off the interstate….heavy icy fog and cars sitting in the middle of the road, stuck in snow drifts….but he made it at 12:30 in the morning….he had gone into work at 4:30 yesterday…made for a very long day for him!

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  31. If I see a blurry photo, I prefer to think it is one of those soft glow effects type pictures. Of course I saw the jonquil on this tiny phone so it does not looked blurred on it.

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  32. Perfect timing, Kim!

    We have the Georgia yellow haze of pine pollen happening in our area. Sometimes you can see a big lot of it blowing around like a fog rolling in.

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  34. Tychicus, that was lovely, but really could have only been de-stressing without the two-second cuts. Show me 30 seconds anyway; don’t show a creature jumping and then cut to something else before it even lands!

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  35. Janice, Tennessee is the only place I’ve ever had a yellow car. It was a pretty weird thing, the few times I experienced it, to have a car just covered with a fine yellow dust of pollen.

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  36. Oh we have yellow cars, dogs, patio furniture….yellow dog prints all over the wood floors….every year with the pine pollen….we just don’t know exactly when we are going to get it….I’m guessing it’s going to be a while since now we are having white cars, dogs and patio furniture…..and wet dog prints all over the wood floors. 😛

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  37. Question about how long do I sit at the computer? At most an hour. I’m usually doing a host of other things–laundry, cooking, bed making, door answering, cat in and out, moving trash cans, answering the phone. If my husband comes in to talk to me, I stand up and lift small weights. I can’t possibly sit for 15 hours at the computer–I was involved with it that long! 🙂

    It’s the best part about working from home!

    Though, sometimes it’s good to write far from the Internet, sigh.

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  38. I ;had the same comment as Cheryl at 4:45. but I didn’t make it because it was the same comment I made to Kim about the clop that showed her daughter. It’s so frustrating that I get angry about those kind of clops. In a couple of them, the picture was gone before I realized that I had seen a snake.

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  40. Actually, Mrs L took the photo on her Android phone and has trouble holding it still. I do too, so the pictures often come out a little blurred.

    When I got home we covered our lilac bushes (the smaller ones, anyway) since there is frost predicted tonight. It was 63° at midnight. That was our high for the day. It is now 35° and falling to a low of 29°. Brrr! Winter is trying to get one last blast in.

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  42. Well, we have at least one Lulabelle print in the cement of the catch drain. We had quite the storm move through and the landscaper came back to see how it handled everything. One part of it “floated” but he thinks that may have been caused from an air pocket of the fill dirt that was put in around it. He will send his guys back on Monday. Not much else will get done from tonight until Monday morning. Tomorrow is Good Friday and most people take off if they can.

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  43. We get lots of pine pollen, as well. There is no use in washing windows before we get it. It is amazing to see when the wind gusts and a cloud of yellow sweeps across the yard. Not good for allergies.

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  44. Got the dog DNA back:

    Cowboy’s mom: Australian shepherd and border collie

    Dad: American Staffordshire terrier and ‘mixed’ terrier 😮

    A night that wasn’t supposed to happen — probably a broken gate somewhere!

    Tess came back pure-bred border collie, both sides

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  46. Funny, the one side of Cowboy’s family going back to great-greats were all Aussie-border collie match ups (one parent of each).

    The other side is a rogue group of pit bulls, terrier mixes and the ever-pervasive ‘mixed breed’ mash-ups

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  48. Donna, that side of the family probably doesn’t talk about their daughter much, and when they do it’s in hushed tones. (“I never did know what she saw in him.” “Yeah, we used to be a distinguished family. Sigh.”)

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  51. so, does anyone know how long it typically takes to get your refund if you efile??
    Just got my taxes today and am excited to see that I will get a refund from all they took out while I was in the states for six months. I signed the forms, scanned them and then emailed them back again.

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  62. Ok, after thinking about it I think the terrier traits he inherited are seen in his somewhat wiry coat (especially on his lower back toward his tale); his skin issues; and his penchant for finding a way to escape the backyard.

    I’ve had a few of those terrier mixes in my time 🙂

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  68. No, I am crazy. Totally, I admit it.

    I decided to do the Ancestry dot com DNA kit for me and then … Well, the canine DNA kit has been around for a while — and realizing my dogs were getting up in years now — I decided I’d just go ahead and make it a family project

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  70. A co-worker — who must be 7 feet tall — wants a surprise akin to his being part Asian.

    He’s one of 3 of us in the newsroom waiting for results.

    I’m hoping to find some American Indian genes or some other surprise beyond the Scottish-English-Irish-German heritage I know about already

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