55 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 4-22-16”

  4. Good morning. We have been here at the cardio office since 7:30. They just called him back. Traffic is light so early so that starts thing off right.

    Glad to see Chas’ last post on yesterday’s thread. Seems Elvera is a bit better.♡

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  5. I am in the room where Art is getting the electo/cardiogram. It is amazing to see. They have to rule out any clots formed from blood pools that might have happened with his A Fib. The blood thinner hopefully has gotten rid of any. Then they can do the ablation in May without fear of letting loose a blood clot during that procedure.

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  6. Ugh, everything you have been through Janice.
    I was up early getting things ready for the wedding shower tonight. Now I have to run to Wal Mart …and you all know how I feel about that. My iron has rust on the bottom and I think I may have just ruined a table cloth. Off to buy a new iron and get some Oxyclean

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  9. And I was up late filing a story after covering a night meeting last night so my sporadic prayers probably overlapped someone else’s. Got up at 6 a.m. and said a prayer again when I realized it would be 9 a.m. in the east. Glad to see on yesterday’s thread that Elvera was able to eat some breakfast and seemed a bit better, maybe the medication is getting that pneumonia cleared up. Hang in there.

    Prayers for Janice & Art, too. You guys have really been through it for the past several months. Hope you’ll get some down time soon from the array of doctor’s appointments and tests. Exhausting, I’m sure.

    Love the Friday photos today. 🙂

    The trash is hauled out and I have a few hours before my friend arrives to head off to the Pet Expo. I need to read through my story again from last night, though, looks like the editor will run it tomorrow but it’ll be online by late today. I was tired when I was writing that one, it had been a very long day …

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  13. Thanks, Kim. What a lovely dream, Michelle! Thanks for sharing!

    A few months after Mom died, I dreamed I was standing outside and a pickup drove by slowly, and Mom was sitting in the back (in a chair, I think). I ran and jumped into the back and thew myself into her arms crying. She returned my hug, rubbed my back, and said, “Oh, baby, did it [her death] hurt that much?” None of that was like my mom–no way would she have ridden in the back of an open truck, she didn’t call me “baby,” and she was a stoic personality and not a comforter. But I felt as though God had allowed Mom, perfected, to come into my dream and offer comfort. (I don’t think it was a vision, just a dream, but there was a sense that I was interacting with Mom as she would be without her own sorrows of this life that kept her from really seeing other people’s pain.) I savored that dream and still savor it, a dozen years later.

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  15. The header photo and the bottom photo are a male American kestrel. For those who aren’t familiar with the bird, it’s a falcon, our smallest raptor, sometimes called a sparrow hawk because it’s so small. (It isn’t the size of a sparrow, but it is smaller than a robin or a dove.) Nearly all raptors, the female is larger than the male but they otherwise look identical, but the kestrel has a much more colorful male, though both are beautiful. The shot isn’t really clear enough to be blown up this big.

    This is what I wrote to a friend when I sent her the photo: “I got the kestrel shot I’ve wanted for years! It isn’t quite perfect (still too far away for an ideal shot), but it shows the bird’s color and its face, and has an undistracting background, so it’s good enough I’m quite pleased. It’s such a beautiful bird, and I’ve never before lived where they are common–in fact, though I’d seen a wounded one in a zoo once, behind glass, I don’t know that I’d ever seen one in the wild at all before moving here. But basically, with birds like killdeer, red-winged blackbirds, and kestrels, it seems like Indiana is my best opportunity to take good shots, so I’d like to get some while I’m here!

    “This bird (a male–females don’t have the lovely blue) was in the tree he flew off of in that other shot. He flew from the tree to the fencepost, and my camera didn’t want to focus at first. That’s always maddening, because several times I’ve lost good shots when my camera takes 30 seconds or so to focus and finally manages to focus just as the bird flies or the mammal runs away. In this case, the camera finally focused, he looked over his shoulder for just one shot that showed his face and not just his back, and I got my photo.”

    The second is of course a repeat of the spring beauty. The next photo is a funny one because I was photographing the monarch as she was laying eggs, and I didn’t even see the praying mantis watching her until I pulled the photo up on my computer. It’s only a mediocre shot of the monarch, but the mantis makes it funny. (There is also an out-of-focus grasshopper in the right side of the picture that I didn’t notice until today.) I think this shot is the one that alerted me that I had a praying mantis among those flowers, so after that I got a bunch of photos of her. (Yes, it’s a she. I checked.)

    And the bottom is, of course, a photo of the kestrel in flight. I put the camera on action mode and caught it just as it took off from the left of the branches at the top of the tree. I’d rather have a bird-in-flight shot from the front or the side, but the rear shot is what I got, and since it shows the wings and tail and underside, I still like the shot. I got it a few days before I got the one of it perched on our fence, but it’s undoubtedly the same bird. I saw him mate on the edge of our yard, so our yard must be part of a mated pair’s territory, though unfortunately I only saw them for two or three days and haven’t seen them for a week or so now. (I saw the male several times a day for several days, always at the back of our large yard, but then haven’t seen him again. That is what has happened in the past with this species, though the last year or two, once I had this camera, they didn’t come into our yard even for those few days.)

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  16. Whew, cleaned up my story from last night, and it needed it in a few places. 🙄

    It was a long meeting (police- and homeless-related), the story was long … and I was tired (didn’t finish it until 11:30 p.m.).

    I’m sure I’ll get some text message questions anyway from the editor while I’m roaming around the Pet Expo today, though … 🙂

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  17. My dad died three days after Christmas 2004. On Christmas, he spent the day in his recliner, sleeping a lot, on & off. (None of us knew he was that close to death, though.) Because of him being in the chair, I did not get a chance to give or receive a good hug from him.

    The next time I saw him, on the 27th, he was in the hospital. But he was expecting to be released the next day, & plans were being made for a visiting nurse to come to the house. Again, it was hard to get a decent hug because this time he was in the hospital bed. But I was looking forward to when I could hug him again.

    The next morning, we got a call that he had had a very bad night, had been put into a coma, & we needed to come say goodbye.

    Dad died that night, without us getting to hug one last time. Maybe it’s a small thing, but I was really disappointed to miss out on one last hug.

    Shortly after that, I had a dream, which I believe God gave to me, of hugging my dad. In the dream, he had both his arms (the right one had been amputated at the shoulder three years earlier), & he embraced me in a tight hug. Then he kind of faded away, out of my arms.

    That dream was such a blessing, & I hold onto it in my heart.

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  18. I, on the other hand, dreamed my ordinarily kind and gentle mom was chasing me with the kitchen knives, bent on my destruction, the night before she died. I was sleeping on the couch near her so my dad could get some good rest to fight a cold he had caught. Terrifying. But, it opened up some conversation with my dad. He still remembers that dream. It was rather out of character for my mom.

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  19. My mom wasn’t a hugger. I don’t remember ever hugging her and sobbing–which may have been what made this dream so unusual. My father was acting just like normal! 🙂

    I dreamt about my mother-in-law a couple weeks after her shocking death. I was working in her pink kitchen and turned around to find her sitting on the counter with her legs crossed wearing a dress.

    I was so surprised at seeing her–sitting on the counter–that I blurted out, “Mary, what are you doing here? I thought you died.”

    She smiled her cheery little smile and giggled–completely typical–“I just wanted to let you know I’m fine.”

    “Ah, gee, thanks.”

    And then she was gone.

    I was laughing when I woke up from that one! 🙂

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  20. Sometimes you have to brag on a husband. Mr. P not only puts up with me on a daily basis he also gets on board when I do something like invite 16 people to a sit down Thanksgiving dinner or when I decide to host a wedding shower and ask him to paint a table or make 24 popovers…he goes the extra mile. The patio is swept and clean, the cushions are in the chairs outside, the painted table is where I want it and now he is vacuuming. Me? I am just sitting here eating bon bons and chatting with all of you.

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  24. By the way, in case there was any misunderstanding, I already have Mr. Perfect so don’t need another.

    Though Mr. Perfect did not pass his driving test and they asked him to please stay another week and practice. And, because they like him and really want him to be a driver, they will waive the nine hundred dollar fee for the extra week.

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  27. Karen O, I had the same situation of not getting to hug my mom, but it was because I worked at the preschool and did not get close because I did not want to possibly transfer any virus germs I might have picked up on the job. I felt very sad about not hugging goodbye.

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  28. The last time I saw my mom (with no clue that two weeks or so later I’d be traveling back for her funeral), I asked her if we could go to Peter Piper Pizza. It was a childhood favorite place, and I’d been milk-free for several years due to an allergy and had just started eating milk products again, having apparently gotten past the allergy. She told me no, pizza wasn’t heart healthy. Two weeks later she was dead of a heart attack, and my thought was would a couple of slices of pizza with her daughter have made any difference to her health? (But we did do several other memory-making things on that visit.)

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  30. Nope, that photo of the mantis watching the monarch wasn’t the one where I found out I had a mantis, since she already has her wings in that photo, and I found her before that. But it was a similar concept, I was taking a photo of something and when I pulled it up on my screen, there was a mantis in the shot too. Also, I am pretty sure I didn’t see her when I was taking this one, since I was focusing on the butterfly and hoping to get a picture of her in flight or laying eggs (both of which I eventually got).

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  31. Still watching for an update for Chas. (And I hope this thread isn’t a downer for him.) I’m kind of expecting them to put Elvera in the hospital, but hopefully they will find her beginning to get better and they can avoid that.

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  35. Becca went with the neighbor’s to a little league game. Lindsey is at her best friend’s brother’s rehearsal dinner. Scott’s not home from work yet, so it’s unusually quiet after a week of having the girls home.

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  36. They admitted her to Pardee Hospital with pneumonia.
    It has been a busy day for me.
    Busy consisted of sitting in a straight back chair for seven hours and explaining why we’re here five times.
    The last two hours, someone would say, “We’ll have a bed ready shortly”.
    But everyone was nice. They gave me lots of coffee.
    You’d be surprised at how enervating it can be sitting in a straight back chair so long.
    They say she will be in the hospital about two days.

    Right now, Chas is tired.
    And hungry.

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  37. thanks for the update — she’s in good hands, they’ll hydrate her and get her back on her feet. Long day for both of you, though. Hopefully she’ll sleep tonight and you will too. Continued prayers

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  42. I’m enjoying a rare Friday off, friend and I spent several hours wandering around the Pet Expo in Orange County and it looks like I’m even home in time to take the dogs to the dog park, a rare treat on a weekday. I will wear a sweatshirt.

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  43. Back home after a girls day in Castle Rock….checking in on Chas and thankful for the update…and for their admitting Elvera….they will take good care of her and Chas will get caught up on rest…. ❤

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  44. I forgot to mention last night: Grandchild #5 was born last night at 6:21CDT. We’re seeing him Sunday. We’d go tomorrow, but there is a wedding shower for D2 in Iowa.

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  54. so relieved to be on the computer at school that has a real keyboard and check in with you all. As I said I got two new boys yesterday. The Dutch boy is fluent in English and fit right in. The other boy is from Finland and was so quiet all day, never said a word. In the afternoon, half the class was in the computer lab and the rest were with me and having a quiet drawing time. Little Leevi brought me a piece of paper. It had a stick figure with the word ‘you’ above it. I can see that I am wearing my glasses. He had written ‘mi is happy am go school’
    Such a treasure when I was worried all day about how he was doing.

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  55. Our computer help desk told me that my monitor is totally gone, so I will need a new one. they very kindly lent me a desktop monitor to use. However I can’t get it to work. I will call a friend to perhaps help me later. It is the little things that somehow build up that can wear me down.

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