80 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 5-14-16”

  5. It’s time for everyone to have a good weekend!
    I just spilled a drop of coffee on Miss Bosley’s paw. I wonder what she will think of the flavor. She has smelled my cup enough that she has a clue as to its delightful flavor.

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  7. Pretty pictures, Cheryl.

    Today is May 14. You know what that means, Wandering Views people?

    Well, besides the fact 2nd Arrow turns 23… and 4th Arrow turns 15… and hubby and I celebrate 33 years since we met each other (and that was a Saturday, too)…

    …it means today is AJ’s birthday!! 🙂

    Happy Birthday, AJ! And I think I remember you claiming the 66th post a few times in the past, so this birthday must be a big one. 🙂

    Have a blessed day, and thanks for keeping this place together. AJ. You know we all appreciate you.

    God bless.

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  8. It’s AJ’s birthday? Is this the big 5-0? Or is 6 Arrows pulling a fast one on us?

    If it’s AJ’s day, then 🎂 🍨 🎂 🍨 ¡Feliz cumpleaños! 🎂 🍨 🎂 🍨 (That’s cake and ice cream in case you can’t see the emojis.)

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  15. Yep. Today is the big 5 0.

    And thank you all.

    Went to a new lake this morning. I got a shot of a couple of snow geese coming in to land. As they worked their way to my side I realized it was a pair of swans. I got some great pics. 🙂

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  17. I don’t know what the tiny white-with-purple flower is, but for size comparison, the little white flower in the bottom photo seems to be is common chickweed, and at a quarter-inch bloom, you can see it’s larger than the one with purple. The white-with-purple is hard to photograph because they are so tiny and grow so low to the ground, and amusingly with one attempt to take its photo (a different flower), I pulled a blade of grass that was blocking the view, and the action of disturbing a neighboring plant was enough that all the delicate little flowers fell off and landed on the ground! But I think they’re gorgeous for something so tiny. I can’t help but think of Jesus saying that if God so clothes the grass of the field in beauty, how much more will He care for His own people!

    The next is, of course, a dandelion going to seed, with the seed parts of the fluff clearly visible.

    And then a red-winged blackbird in splendid form. Take a good look at how sharp its beak is, because that really shows up in this photo. (Bird beaks vary tremendously, and they give you an idea of how the bird feeds; this species has an unusually sharp one. Depending on the lighting, in some of my photos the beak looks almost black, in some more yellow.)

    Finally, more of the white and purple blossoms and one flower of the common chickweed. The common chickweed is tiny, but amazingly detailed. I adore how symmetrical it all is. I have photos of it from above, with the whole flowering apparatus being all so perfect symmetrical it could have been done on graph paper, four green leaves (not quite sure what part of the plant they’re considered) perfectly triangular behind the flower.

    These are weeds, every one, and the blackbird is common in this area. But the beauty of all of them is exquisite. Seeing from behind the lens of a camera that can magnify detail, I see things I never saw before. Without this camera, I likely would have noticed the flowers with purple stripes, but I would have ignored the tiny white chickweed with nothing to call attention to itself until you see its intricate, perfectly measured details, and then it’s as lovely as any rose.

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  18. Last night was the Rotary Club’s Annual Steak Cook Off. I have attend this event for about 4 years and it is always fun. You roam from booth to booth tasting their steak and deciding who is going to get one or both of the two votes you have. People go all out on the bribes too. A taste of shrimp and grits or grilled tuna, or whatever to entice you to vote for them. Last night, because the Rotary Club is shrinking and aging (two of the main people had strokes in the last couple of years) they did not have enough people to run the event and work it as well as the VIP area, so being the good friend who follows my friend M and her husband B (a Rotarian) into various adventures I worked. I was in the VIP area where Master Joe served sushi for the first hour and a half and M set up a cheesecake bar for the last hour and a half. The first half I worked the bar. I can now pull beer from a tap. I poured wined, handed out bottled water and soft drink. The last half I plated cheesecake while someone else gave them their choices of lemon curd, chocolate sauce, salted caramel sauce, strawberries marinated in balsamic vinegar, blue berries, raspberries, toasted almond or coconut, shaved white or dark chocolate, and whipped cream (whipped on site in a copper bowl).
    I have to say I had more fun working in the VIP area than I have ever had just attending the event. It was nice when the committee head who was running the event popped in and recognized that I was behind the bar, walked over and said “I wondered who she would pull in. I am so relieved you are here”.
    Of course during clean up “Grace” here was rolling one of the containers we use to ice down drinks out to the parking lot to drain it, we were on cobblestones, a wheel caught, the top heavy container spilled out onto the patio taking me down with it. I announced, “And THAT folks is how you empty the ice”.
    I came home tired, sore, and my feet were protesting–my individual toes hurt! BUT I had a GREAT time and told them to sign me up for next year.

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  22. Happy Birthday AJ, looking forward to those photos! Love that feeling when you catch just the right moment for wildlife in motion.

    Sweet flowers, I find myself loving the variety of light-to-dark “blue” blooms the most these days. 🙂

    Annie Oakley seems to be back to herself, now I have to start trying her on that prescription food again (picked up a different kind at the vet’s this past week to see if that goes over any better with her). But her urine sample came back clear, no infection, so the fever she had was something of a mystery (though not uncommon in cats).

    Tess LOVES coffee. Can you imagine a border collie + caffeine? Eek. But whenever I forget and leave half a mug within reach, it’s all gone pretty fast.

    Getting my hair cut today by someone new (since my regular person is on maternity leave with her twins). Gulp. I think my cut is basic enough it shouldn’t turn out too differently, but you never know. And will she charge the same as my other person (same salon)? Guess we’ll see …

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  23. I’ve got a QOD, since I spent all yesterday chained to my desk: When did you get your first computer? What kind was it and Why did you buy one?

    (I guess we can finish the journalism questions–Who bought it and Where?)

    Answer for me: husband left my recovering from childbirth bedside to drive through the CT snow on his maternity leave to buy an Os one personal computer in 1983.

    I couldn’t imagine why.

    His old colleges electric typewriter was good enough for me ( and am improvement over my portable manual typewriter).

    It was small enough he could take it on his submarine– where it had more computing power than the entire nuclear sub USS Skipjack (SSN-585)!

    He bought it somewhere in Hartford.

    We’ve been counting. Since then, we’ve owned five other PCs and one MAC plus a variety–3?- laptops.

    We’re still mourning the death of our HP laser printer which we bought in 1986, rebuilt several times and finally had to bury five years ago.

    The worst computer I our opinion? The MAC– and all the printers subsequent to the great one.

    Now I really am going to the garden shop.

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  24. I don’t know. They just always show up. Seventeen year old son says he remembers when this one showed up about six or seven years ago as a Mother’s Day gift for me. I don’t remember that. I just remember that they keep appearing and I never know why. This is a ….um….uh….well, I don’t know. But it is not a MAC.

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  25. My ex-boyfriend got one of the very early Macs in the 1980s. I couldn’t figure out why, either. 🙂 A good electric typewriter was more than sufficient, wasn’t it?

    I was late to the party when it came to getting my own computer (we got them at work in the late 1980s, as I recall, but no Internet really in those days to speak of).

    I bought my first home PC (an HP, my editor and his wife had just bought one and said it was a good choice, they had me come over to their house to try it out, so I just went with that) in 1998, I believe.

    One of the drivers for me was being able to send and get emails from friends, what an intriguing notion for someone like me! I had been a prolific letter writer in the past (and notorious note-passer in high school) and I loved the idea of “typing” instant messages to people. I would have loved texting back then … Loving it now, though, it’s never too late 🙂

    My computer back then, along with a printer (purchased with an especially large tax return that year as I recall) was SO much more expensive than all of that costs nowadays. I bought it at Best Buy.

    I switched to Macs after our newsroom made the switch around 2005 (?) or so; loved them and have bought Macs for myself ever since (I now no longer use my old refurbished Apple desk top, only my laptop/iPad/iPhone).

    Our newsroom has long since gone back to PCs (laptops only for reporters so we can cart them with us and file stories from anywhere), but I still prefer Macs for my own use.

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  26. Here is a geeky answer for you. My first computer was an Amiga. I had it built by a friend I had gone to elementary and middle school with. I have no idea how much it cost. From there I inherited College Boyfriend’s old computer…we skip from their to 1997 when I bought a desktop computer for home because I was going top try “scoping” for a court reporter so I could stay home with BG. The next purchase was a 2006 Laptop, and now this 2010 Laptop that is on it’s last leg, but I am pampering it because the thought of loading it with the software it will need and getting used to something else is overwhelming.
    I am not sure if it is still true but I used to be able to lock a Mac up faster than anyone you know. I mean almost crash it. My brain likes the “logic” of Windows. I sometimes consider crossing to the dark side and learning to use a Mac but I don’t.

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  28. But using PCs at work keeps me Windows-capable

    I still remember our editor telling us how the Internet was going to really change journalism. I don’t think even he realized by how much — I will say I have NO idea how I used to do my job without it

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  29. So new stylist is way behind, my appt was for an hour ago and I’m still waiting — she’s applying color to some really long hair and that apparently takes a very, very long time …

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  32. My first computer at home might have been 1994–and it was virtually useless. We didn’t have computers at work yet (and don’t ask me how we used to edit before we had desktop computers, because I don’t remember; it was only my first couple of years and I was learning the business). A guy friend kept pestering me to let him build me a computer. He said he’d only charge $100 and he’d built one for a different friend. So I finally said OK. When he brought it to me, I knew instantly it was already obsolete. It used the big floppy disks, and the smaller ones were already in use. It had duct tape on at least one part of it. He threw in a free printer–a tractor feed dot matrix, and publishers’ guidelines were already clarifying “no dot-matrix manuscripts.” I typed a couple of small things on it because we did have one computer all the editors could use, and it took both kinds of disks, so I was able to transfer files that way. But it was pretty much useless.

    Then our office leased Macs for a couple of years, bought them because it was cheaper to buy them than extend the lease, and a year later sold them cheaply to any of us who wanted one. I was glad to buy one. It was a huge beast, but I lugged it home, and I wrote my first book on it. Well, mostly I wrote my first book in longhand and then typed it in, which I still believe to the best way to write a book although my second one was written on the computer. (Writing in longhand and typing use different brain functions, so writing the words both ways allows the brain to multi-task while the book is being written.)

    When I moved from Nashville, I knew I didn’t want to carry along that huge Mac, which was already several years old, so I donated it to someone who wanted it and I ordered a computer online and had it shipped to the home I was going to in Nashville. I bought this one (a Compaq, I think), a few years later, and when I married and moved here, we bought a larger screen for it, since I was constrained by the size of my computer desk in Nashville to have a smaller screen than I really needed.

    I transitioned to Word when I went freelance, since most publishing houses weren’t using Macs and Macs cost more, but I was disappointed to leave my Mac. It made more intuitive sense. But I haven’t worked on one for 13 years now, so I don’t know how I’d feel now. (I grew up with electric stove and then used gas for a quarter century. I said I preferred electric but honestly wasn’t sure if I went back to electric if I’d still say that. I went back to electric in Nashville and yes, I still prefer electric.)

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  34. Happy Birthday AJ!!!! How we love you and consider it all joy to celebrate our Lord’s most precious creation of YOU!! ( 50 seems so long ago to me…)
    It is cold here…I’m tellin’ you I thought I would see snowflakes at any moment when I drove into town….it was 34 degrees at noon….it’s up a tad bit now that it is almost 2 in the afternoon and the sun is trying to peep through those clouds..driving home the prompter in the car said to be careful as there could be ice on the road….it was 37…..
    I don’t recall when the first computer entered this home….I resisted for a very long time…I didn’t want to have anything to do with it….now it is an “appliance” in the house!
    Beautiful spring flowers Cheryl….one day we may see them here….I did purchase a geranium at the grocery….it is beautiful ( my friend owns the nursery that supplies Kroger/King Soopers with all the gardening plants 🙂 )

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  35. Gas stove (always) 🙂

    An independent computer repair guy I used to use said Macs are just made better than PCs. My laptop is about 7 years old but photo editor at work says we can put in a new hard drive & something else to make it like new if I want (for about $100, I believe).

    I also remember computers being so bulky and heavy, with those towers and tiny but deep screens (like TVs used to be). Now everything is so compact and thin, much nicer.

    Stylist finally got to me (some mixup apparently in the scheduling) — my hair looks different, longer layers than usual and more of a turned under style but most of that is in the way she dried and styled it, of course. Not a bad cut, just different than the usual, sleeker I guess, but that’s OK.

    I left a card & gift card to Babies R Us for my regular gal, someone there said they’d be seeing her tomorrow and would pass it on to her.

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  36. Our first computer, sometime back in the mid-to-late 90s, was my SIL’s mother’s old computer, given to us when she got a new one. The printer was that tractor-feed kind. Oh, how things have changed.

    Like Cheryl, I was raised with electric stoves, & prefer them to gas. I’ve only had one gas stove, in an apartment I lived in when single, & I never got the hang of it. Good thing I didn’t live in that apartment too long.

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  37. Sadly eye-opening. This says that “more than a million American families, live on less than $2 in cash a day.” Interestingly, they are mostly hard-working (when they can get jobs), & tend to be very grateful for what they do have.

    “What It’s Like to Live On Less Than Two Dollars a Day
    Sociologist Kathryn Edin talks about what she learned from spending time with families that live on less than the price of a gallon of milk.”

    http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/may-web-only/what-its-like-to-live-on-less-than-two-dollars-day.html?start=1

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  38. Happy, Happy, Happy
    BIRTHDAY, The REAL AJ!
    🐕🐶🐩🐈🐱🐀🐁🐭🐹🐢🐇🐰🐓🐔🐣🐤🐥🐦🐏🐑🐐🐺🐃🐂
    All the animals came out for a parade to celebrate!!!
    Now we need 6 Arrows and Roscuro to play a classical piece about those animals on parade along with the Birthday song. Since Kim has been serving beer and wine, she might sing or play, “Pink Elephants on Parade.”

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  40. I am trying to remember about the computers. I know my husband got a big old system pretty early on so he could do his tax business on that. But it was awhile before we had any online access at home. I know we had a computer that our son could do JumpStart programs on which he did for most grades and he also did Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Those were some of the excellent learning games he had. He and I used the library computers to get online. Finally my husband bought me a laptop and we got AOL at home. It was dial up and ridiculously slow and had so many problems that we dropped the service. Later my husband got me a lap top and we got CLEAR when it came into Atlanta but eventually it had so much downtime that we dropped that frustrating service. Why pay for something you can’t use? Now we have several computers at the office and I have the phone and tablet for online at home.

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  42. Here’s that Carnival of the Animals. I love this whole performance, but if any of you wants some visual and aural humor, start around the 17:10 mark and watch/listen to the pianists. 😉

    And around 21:22, AJ’s swans “appear.” Very lovely.

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  47. I bought my first computer in 1990, I think. I was in college and used the college computers for the word processors. Mrs L got annoyed that I had to be gone so much when a paper was due, so I went to rent a computer. The guy there said he could sell me a used computer for $300, so I bought it. It was a 286 PC clone running DOS (I forget the brand). It had no graphics, but all I needed was a word processor so I could type at home and carry a floppy to print at the college. I used it for 5 years. Then my parents bought us a new computer when I graduated: a 486 PC with Windows 3.1!

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  48. First computer? Well, the first computer we had was an Amiga. We did the Mavis Beacon typing program on it for school, but mostly we played games: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago? (using an old World Almanac to look up the flags of the countries), Zany Golf, King’s Quest, Wings, and several others. We also used the screen with a VCR player to watch films – the first film we got was the 1936 ‘Adventures of Robin Hood’. It wasn’t the first film I saw, since we saw programs on our grandparents’ television, but it was the first I remember seeing. The computer was still working it when we finally retired it, although some of the programs had been infested with a virus of some kind. My father got a Windows 95 from work and after that, a Windows computer was always in the house – though, judging from the finicky and frustrating Windows 10 which my father now fights with, Windows’ days in this house may be numbered.

    My first computer was a used HP laptop with Windows HP. It was helpful for school, but elderly and frail. I soon had to replace it with a Windows 7 netbook made by Acer, which I used until the battery burnt out. I got another of the same kind, which I’m still using. It has survived a journey to Africa and back, but it is slowly dying. Eldest sibling has said her contribution towards my schooling will be a new computer. I’m very thankful, as I need it, but I’m dreading the fight with Windows 10.

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  49. 6 Arrows, I had to chuckle at how the Variation on Happy Birthday in the style of Franz Liszt sounded like a souped-up, flashy version of the Variation in the style of Frederic Chopin.

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  52. The ergo for my daughter seems to be missing. The tracking says left at front door, but the address was a po box. And my friend is leaving for New Zealand and upset to deal with this.

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  56. How did the house showing go yesterday Chas?

    My social calendar for today: After church: reading, a nap, then bundling up for a trip to the dog park

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  58. social events? Church nearly every week. That is all. Just about the only time I see anybody other than the folk who live here.

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  59. That didn’t last Mumsee. I cleaned the kitchen, the bathroom, and have a load of laundry ready to go. I have to wait for Oxyclean to get blood off of my pants leg from the other night. I scratched my legs until they bled. 😦

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  62. Kathaleena (if you get back here today) – How do you pronounce Annika? I looked it up & found that there are a few ways to pronounce it – ANNickuh (short “i”), AnEEkuh, & a couple variations I forget.

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  63. I know two girls/young women named Annika (that might not be their exact spellings); both have names with the emphasis on the first syllable (almost said “first beat” — ha, music teacher brain!). Anyway, one’s first syllable is pronounced “An” and the other, “On.”

    ANNickuh and AHNickuh. AHNickuh was born a few years earlier; when ANNickuh was born, I kept wanting to pronounce her name the other way. 😉

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  64. Roscuro, I enjoyed the Liszt variation, too. He was such a flamboyant fellow. 😉

    A piano student I had years ago selected one of the Liszt Consolations for her solos/ensembles piano contest solo. The piece is fairly restrained for Liszt, but the contest judge told her after her performance about Liszt’s generally flamboyant playing style, and that she should have played in a more unrestrained way to reflect that. There weren’t really a whole lot of opportunities to play that way in her particular piece — a few accents in a forte section briefly about 3/4 of the way through the piece, but mostly piano/pianissimo.

    Anyway, if you knew the girl who was playing — well, she always chose the most mellow pieces of any I’d offer her for contest or recital possibilities. Flamboyant was not at all her!

    Her older sister, on the other hand, the firstborn of the family — everything had to be fast and loud with her, whether it was marked that way or not. 🙂 That girl really got into Beethoven. 🙂

    Very interesting differences there can be among siblings.

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  66. Watched an old, old TV show today that I vaguely remember as being part of my childhood — Cheyenne, an hourlong black and white show, which spanned the late 1950s through the early 1960s. I remembered the theme song but little else about it, the show clearly was something my parents watched. Interesting as the lead character was a genuine good guy, polite, even-tempered, soft-spoken, honest (and so unlike the characters who are portrayed today, both in the media & real life 😦 ).

    “The show starred Clint Walker, a native of Illinois, as Cheyenne Bodie, a physically large cowboy with a gentle spirit in search of frontier justice who wanders the American West.”

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  68. Oh I remember Cheyenne!! Clint Walker was so handsome! Perhaps he still is at 88…men seem to age like a fine wine ya know! 🙂 My Dad loved anything cowboy on TV…so we watch all of the shows….
    Chas there will be just the right ones for your home who will fall in love with it and want to make it their very own….praying for them to find “home” soon!
    Went to SS and Church, came home, had lunch, took a nice nap on the living room sofa, now making pumpkin bread to take to our care group fellowship tonight….and it’s raining….it will turn to snow on Tuesday 😎

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  69. Westerns were big in those days and we watched them, too — Wagon Train, Have Gun Will Travel, Bonanza, Maverick (my mom had a secret lifelong crush on James Gardner).

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  71. Oh yeah, and a great theme song, too. I don’t think I watched that show but it was pretty pervasive in the mid to late (?) 1960s TV culture.

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  73. I had to find the theme song for Rawhide a few weeks ago. I am sure they were all suitably impressed. But since I had been singing it in the morning during chores…..

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  76. 6, I couldn’t play Liszt – my hands are too small to manage too many octave reaches in a row. My hands get really tired by the fourth page of the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’. Lizst’s music is out of my reach, literally.

    And yes, there is a great difference between siblings. Eldest and youngest sibling and I took piano from the same teacher, and youngest and I took violin from the same teacher, and they would comment on the difference in our styles. I was a quieter musician – partly due to my small hands – than either of them. Eldest was calm and competent with a natural strength; youngest would have made a good folk musician, very energetic and always forgetting to pay attention to the music in front of her. I miss not having one or the other to play music with – eldest is too far away and too busy, and youngest is very busy with little ones.

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  77. Oh! That cowboy music foes bring back the good old television days with our beloved black and white tvs.

    My phone is having major problems since it had malware diagnosed
    Even the ring tone totally changed along with notification sounds. All the names of contacts are gone leaving me with only unlabeled numbers.

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  79. Roscuro, I forget where you are in the order of your family. I’m assuming you’re one of the middle two (the eldest and youngest whom you refer to being the eldest and youngest of all four of you, not being the oldest and youngest of the three siblings you have, whatever your position in the family)?

    Don’t know if that makes sense. 😉

    Did one of your sisters not take any music lessons? Or maybe something other than violin or piano?

    For the record, I have long fingers, but there’s a limit to some of the technical things I can do without fatiguing, as well. The first movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, with all the LH octave tremolos in the early part, becomes very tiresome on the repeat. The pinkie side of my LH cramps up by the second time around, and I have great difficulty maintaining my starting tempo.

    I can understand your missing having your musician sisters available to play music with. I’m blessed that my 19-year-old daughter, who is living at home, enjoys playing piano. We sit down and do duets together sometimes, and we are performing Robert Schumann’s piano duet Evening Song together Saturday night.

    I hope you’ll find someone with whom to play music together, if you’re in a season where you’d be able to do that. (Sounds like you’ve got a number of other significant things going on in your life, though, if I recall correctly.) That camaraderie in shared music-making is hard to beat, though I’ll bet there are a great deal of fond memories in that vein with your siblings, which I think makes the bond even more touching than simply “jamming” with friends does.

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  80. We’re having a heatwave at 47 degrees tonight, compared to snow and sleet yesterday! Strange weather here, too, Janice. We got to over 90 degrees a couple of weeks ago. From summer to winter. Where’s spring? 😉

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