40 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 3-25-16”

  1. Good morning! Good night, Jo!
    Love, love, love that Pacific blue! Freshness to wake me up♡
    Thanks, Donna, for those beautiful photos. The Atlantic is lovely, too, but it has more of a greenish/grayish color.
    Now I am thinking about water colors and how swamp water looks black as tar. I remember how surprised I was the first time I saw that.

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  2. IT’s FRIDAY!
    You know what that means?

    No Lions today. It’s Good Friday.
    Does anyone know how it became known as “Good Friday”?
    In South Carolina, they said that if you sowed your seed on Good Friday, you would have a good crop. But I doubt that applies to New England.
    I have no idea where the designation comes from.

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  8. Lovely header photo!

    I actually dreamed about the ocean last night . . . not sure I’ve ever done that before. See, in a couple of weeks I’m making a brief visit (overnight) to a friend in Chicago. Well, I dreamed that I got there and she had decided to make it a road trip. I was too surprised to say anything, and we ended up at some hotel and when she gave them her credit card I was thinking, “I need to offer to pay for half . . . but I don’t know how much it will cost, and I haven’t talked this over with my husband!” Well, she paid for the room and then told me, “I got us a room overlooking the ocean!” Surprised, I asked, “Which ocean?” I woke up about then and realized I’d managed to get back to sleep, but I think I dreamed further in the same dream, because I just remembered I also dreamed I was standing at the edge, on wet sand, and a wave was coming and I thought, “Oh no, it’s going to be cold!” But it wasn’t. (I’m not sure which ocean, but I think the Atlantic. I’ve only seen it from a distance, once.)

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  9. Janice, I have never been out on a boat in the Atlantic, but I have in the Pacific. As blue as that water is, it is just as clear. I think I was in 50 or 60 ft of water and could see the bottom.
    Coming from South Alabama, I was highly disappointed in the Atlantic beaches.
    We have had a lot of rain so the sand is wet and the Gulf is cloudy but this is what I am used to.

    http://www.bamabeachcams.com/pinkponypub.aspx

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  10. So, here it is Friday and I don’t have school. I’m sitting here waiting for our snail-paced DSL to load the blog so I could post the Friday Funnies (find them here) and the phone rings. Our land line never rings this early (it was 7:55 AM). D3 was on the line. Uh oh. She lives 70 miles away with her sister who is out of town this weekend. I wonder what’s wrong now.

    “So, do you want company today?” she queries.

    “Why, are you pulling into our driveway right now?” I tease.

    “Um, yes.”

    I look out window and there is her car parked in the driveway. She had gone to see a movie with friends in Hannibal which got out at midnight. She didn’t call us first and came here (30 miles) and couldn’t get in the house. So she went back to the friends’ house, and when they left for work she came here.

    Got to love surprises like that.

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  12. I didn’t know Catholics celebrated an “Annuncion Day”. This surely isn’t the day of the angel’s annunciation to Mary, any more than December 25 is the day of Christ’s birth.
    I wonder who came up with the idea of celebrating the annunciation?

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  14. Chas- Don’t try to understand why Roman Catholics do what they do. I was Catholic the first 15 years of my life and cannot explain some of their beliefs. Many of the celebrations are based on pagan holidays turned “Christian”, while others were created by various Popes.

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  15. Enquiring minds want to know about the differences in DNA of Mumsee’s relatives. The differences that would not be normally there, that is. Also, did this lead to further enquiry? Why or why not. Oh, the can of worms…

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  16. I think the Pacific Ocean is colder than the Atlantic? So Cheryl was probably standing on the East Coast in her dream. 🙂 I’ve been on the East Coast but actually have never seen the Atlantic, come to think of it. Strange.

    I was out on a dock near the breakwater when i took that shot — the waves were caused by a passing boat not in the shot and I just kept focusing and snapping away at that bird. When I saw what is the header shot pop up on the camera, I thought, “Ah, got it! The ‘money shot.'”

    That’s what the photo guys call them when you get just the right photo you were hoping for and everything lines up. Timing is everything and since there’s a bit of a drag on my shutter time I got lucky with that one.

    So today I’m covering a protest of live-aboard boat owners who are upset following an oil spill earlier this month from a huge ship carrying cars into the port. But after committing to cover it, I realized the guy organizing it is not only an attorney (OK, I can live with that, there’s *always* an attorney, after all) but is running for the local congressional seat. Ugh. A politician to boot.

    Frustrating as I’m overloaded today with another complicated story on the dustup over who gets the contract to ferry supplies over to Catalina Island nearly every day for the next several years.

    A busy Friday ahead.

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  18. Thinking about ‘money shots’ and how an ambitious, eager, long-haired kid grabbed what became one of the iconic shots of the OJ slow-speed chase back in the day and sold it to us (it also has been used on the mini series now airing about the trial, I noticed) — then he was hired and got on staff following another great pic he sold to us of a shark (and his nickname forevermore became “Shark”).

    The long hair and grunge look are both long gone and he’s now wearing expensive suits in City Hall, handling media for our area’s LA City Councilman. 🙂

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  19. I think it is interesting from an historical perspective. Setting the date of Christ’s birth as December 25 did incorporate the date of a Pagan celebration backing up 9 months would have given them March 25 as the date of the Annunciation. When you read the article is says that is the date Mary conceived and the date Christ’s life on earth began. To bring it full circle His life and death occurred on the same date.

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  20. More on the header photos — the bird was settling in (small shot) and floated peacefully for some time. As the boat approached, I figured it would create enough of a stir when it passed to send him into flight.

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  22. “Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows! He was wounded for or transgressions; He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon Him.” (Isaiah 23:4,5)

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  23. I got, or Phos’ link, a pop up that says an important driver is missing. I need to click here to fix.
    I would advise not clicking on any links to fix your computer.

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  24. As regards sowing seed, that does not apply up here. The advice here is not to plant anything before the 24th of May, due to risk of frost killing any early plantings. June is the planting month. Of course, that doesn’t apply to crops like winter wheat, which is planted in the fall and sprouts before snowfall, survives the winter under the snow, and is harvested the next July.

    The connection between the Annunciation and the Crucifixion comes from an old Jewish tradition that the great prophets of God died on the same day they were conceived: http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=16-10-012-v.
    The reason for the floating day of Easter – and thus Good Friday – is because Easter is connected with the Jewish Passover and the Jewish calendar was lunar. However, the lunar months shift widely in connexion to the solar calendar, but we know that the Passover originally happened in the spring – the name of the month, Abib, in Exodus (23:15), means spring – and it would seem, from the Gospel accounts that the Passover that year also occurred in spring. The Nicene Council – whose greatest contribution was refutation of Arianism and the foundational Nicene Creed – also fixed the date of Easter. In the Western church, Easter is now the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, thus keeping the connection with the Passover date, but also removing it from direct association with the Passover. The Eastern Church is some time behind because they still follow the Julian calendar:

    We further proclaim to you the good news of the agreement concerning the holy Easter, that this particular also has through your prayers been rightly settled; so that all our brethren in the East who formerly followed the custom of the Jews are henceforth to celebrate the said most sacred feast of Easter at the same time with the Romans and yourselves and all those who have observed Easter from the beginning.

    Link: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_II/Volume_XIV/The_First_Ecumenical_Council/The_Synodal_Letter

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  25. This is the earliest record we have for the March 25 date of Christ’s crucifixion. Tertuallian (160-235 A.D.) was an apologist and prolific writer. He gave the date in a detailed analysis in one of his apologetic works:

    Therefore, when these times also were completed, and the Jews subdued, there afterwards ceased in that place “libations and sacrifices,” which thenceforward have not been able to be in that place celebrated; for “the unction,” too, was “exterminated” in that place after the passion of Christ. For it had been predicted that the unction should be exterminated in that place; as in the Psalms it is prophesied, “They exterminated my hands and feet.” And the suffering of this “extermination” was perfected within the times of the lxx hebdomads, under Tiberius Cæsar, in the consulate of Rubellius Geminus and Fufius Geminus, in the month of March, at the times of the passover, on the eighth day before the calends of April, on the first day of unleavened bread, on which they slew the lamb at even, just as had been enjoined by Moses.

    Link: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ante-Nicene_Fathers/Volume_III/Apologetic/An_Answer_to_the_Jews/Of_the_Times_of_Christ%27s_Birth_and_Passion,_and_of_Jerusalem%27s_Destruction
    So, since the tradition was that Christ died on the same day He was conceived, that is why Annunciation Day is on March 25; and that is also why December 25 is the date of His birth. In other words, it isn’t pagan tradition which determined the date of Christmas, but Jewish tradition. I have also seen an analysis based on the course of Abia (Luke 1:5; I Chronicles 24:10), which was Zechariah’s priestly course. Apparently, the course of Abia would have been in the early fall;Zechariah then returned home, and Elizabeth conceived (so around October); the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary six months later (so around March); and then Christ would be born nine months later. I’m still looking for further references to whether the course of Abia was in the early fall; but it is another demonstration that the dates of Easter and Christmas do not have as many pagan connections as modern skeptics would have us think. As I’ve been reading the early church fathers (I’m on Irenaeus right now, who lived just a little before Tertullian) it is quite clear that they kept as far as possible from pagan associations.

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  26. It is also worth remembering that in the first few centuries of the church’s existence, there was not a Roman Catholic Church. I’m not trying to claim they were Baptists; but whether we are Baptist, or Lutheran, or Presbyterian, or Anglican, etc. we would have been in far more agreement with the Nicene Council or the early church fathers than most of us find ourselves in agreement with the present Catholic church. The bishop of Rome in those days was simply a bishop and while, as representing the church of a large city, he did have some weight, he was more on a par with the bishops of other large cities like Alexandria and Antioch. It wasn’t until after the Coptic (Alexandria) and Assyrian (Antioch) churches split from the West in the 400s that the bishopric of Rome began to hold more sway. What most Protestant think of as the glaring faults of the Catholic church only began to appear gradually.

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  29. I have seen the Pacific in CA back in 1996. After I saw it and realized I did not put my foot in it, I rather regretted I did not do that. It did seem like the beach was pretty chilly there, so close to the LA dog park and all, even if it was up the coast a bit.

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  30. Home from work…it is snowing….again…but it is amazingly beautiful in our forest right now…wish ya’ll could be sitting here with me…you’d have a smile on your faces…yes you would!! It is breathtaking!!

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  31. We had lots of beautiful snow today as well, but none of it stuck. Just springtime moisture. The sun was shining while it was practically a white out with snow. Pretty spectacular.

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  32. Finally, this day and week are over. Long and cumbersome and plagued with work computer issues (I got the blue screen of death several times today).

    And the entire office (advertising) had cleared out by about 3 but for some reason they never said we could go early, so there we were, stuck waiting out the afternoon with nothing to do as all of us had turned our stories in.

    Since getting home I’ve spent my time going through the huge pile of paperwork from the past year as I have my tax appointment in the morning. Only thing I can’t find is my car registration, but I think I probably still have the receipt in my email (I pay online) or I can go to the website and maybe find it.

    Apparently there was a big bank of very thick fog that moved into the port around 4 but it had dissipated by the time I got home at 6:30 or so. Someone posted a photo of a container ship emerging from it, very cool.

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  37. Well, sort of a break — my cousins’ Aunt Rosalie passed away and they’re going back Thursday through Sainday for the services; I’m contemplating joining them. Will see them Sunday and (maybe) discuss —
    kind of spontaneous, but that’s me …

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  38. We’re all from morthwest Iowa, my cousin’s dad and my dad were brothers, but this is all her mom’s side so not blood relatives to me — but still kind of the last of the ‘older’ generation passing away

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