38 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-15-16”

  3. First?
    Lovely evening spent yesterday with family. The missionaries I mentioned came to visit (no, I didn’t ask about Pokémon Go, although it came up in one, of many, conversations I heard bits of, and yet again, there was nothing said about evil spirits) and so other members of the extended family came over to visit with them. It was generally hilarious, as no story loses in the telling in our family. Thankfully, the weather cooled down enough to make it bearable, as the past week has been scorching and stifling in heat and humidity (Wednesday, we matched the temperatures in the Congo and Jakarta, Indonesia). The two newest additions to the family were held and cooed over by great aunts and great uncles and cousins and second cousins. Little and Baby Niece, who adore their new brother, got to meet their cousin, Tiny Niece, and it was amusing to see Little Niece, who is not yet three, playing with a teen, a preteen, and a primary school aged second cousin. They seemed to be having fun together.

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  6. The header photo is of course from Florida: flying brown pelican with an island in the distance. Since brown pelicans were possibly the bird I saw the most and we were there to see islands, it’s a good “summary” shot of the trip, and I considered it for the cover of the book I’m making.

    In Alabama I got to see brown pelicans diving, which is really interesting. Sometimes they dive from quite high in the air. In Florida they seemed more likely to fly along the surface of the water, wings dipping into the water on every downstroke. (I did get an action sequence of one skimming across the water and it’s going into the book.) I’d seen white pelicans before this trip, but I don’t think I had seen brown ones. At the piers, with fishermen and tour boats coming and going, each upright post (there’s probably a name for them, but I don’t know it) has a bird on it most of the time. Some have a gull, some a tern, and some a pelican. I don’t think I saw any cormorants on the ones near the docks, but I definitely saw them on the pier near an uninhabited island that had its own dock, but one that ended up never being used and so it’s just a place for birds to sit. (I don’t remember, if I ever knew, the difference between a pier and a dock, and since I’m on my way out the door, I’m not going to bother looking it up.)

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  7. Ooh, great shot Cheryl!

    Up early to get the trash out and to be ready for the roofers (again). I hope they don’t plan to work through the weekend, they need some rest and I need some quiet if I’m going to be home. 🙂

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  8. Friend down the street who didn’t know I was having the work done on the house told me she was alarmed a couple days ago when she drove by and noticed my railing half gone and the other half appearing to have been broken and dangling out over the yard. She figured someone may have taken quite a spill.

    Now that I think about it, it probably did look like the aftermath of a fist fight at the OK Corral.

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  11. Roscuro – Did you read the link Yapamom shared last night? A couple of the comments say something very close to what you said yesterday.

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  14. Kim’s poetry ( 🙂 ) reminds me that I recently found out that one of our Stafford residents, a lady who seems to be pretty active in the town, is a published poet. Has anyone heard of Dianne Bilyak? (I realize that poetry doesn’t have a broad audience, but thought maybe someone here had heard of her.)

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  15. While I am hesitant to assign demonic qualities to any and everything I will search around on the internet for information. I don’t think that when I pass a Buddha head on a shelf at World Market I should cross myself and pray for protection. I don’t think the rosary that is in one of my jewelry boxes is possessed. So many bad memories from my childhood and attending a legalistic school. We weren’t to watch I Dream of Jeaniie or Bewitched. We weren’t to go to movies because Bambi and The Happy Hooker could be playing at the same theater and people would assume we weren’t there for Bambi and it would ruin our “Christian Testimony” –Now I ask you how many 3rd graders know what a hooker is much less can get in to see an X rated movie???? We weren’t to dance–that could lead to shhhh now, whisper it with me S-E-X! For shame, for sham, for shame. And of course that Rock and Roll music was demonic and they played it backwards for us so we could here the demons screaming and know that Revolution No 9 by the Beatles, when played backwards said “Satan, he is god”. And don’t get me started on Dungeons and Dragons.

    I will admit when something is not quite right, so this is what I found today on Pokemon. I am sure that some can play and innocent game and not be bothered and some can play what seems like an innocent game and get in over their heads.

    http://moviepilot.com/posts/3420627

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  16. It seems the tap-tap-tapping (or rather, pound-pound-POUNDING) part of the roof job begins today.

    Along with the trash trucks roaring up and down the street, it’s a very noisy Friday morning here.

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  17. I found out something exciting yesterday. There is a man who lives near me who is the last living person to have seen the atomic bomb testing at Alamogordo !!!!! I may get to speak with him. Even if I didn’t get to talk to him much, I still would love to meet him.

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  18. Yep, it is noisy. Already this morning I have heard a sheep baa as she was waiting for me to bring her some breakfast, some goats maa as they ran alongside me, some chickens cluck as the cats came by, (the cats had mewed earlier as I came out the door), some blackbirds were singing and some doves cooing and some hummingbirds humming. It goes on and on. Of course, if they were not making all of that racket, I would have to listen to the grass grow.

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  19. Kim, I copied on cassette, a movie called “The Last Mission”. It’s about the last B-29 raid on Japan. And the farthest a B-29 had flown. They didn’t carry gunners to save gas. But the Japanese didn’t come up to challenge them.
    The code name to abandon the mission because the war was over, was “Apple” and the pilot kept asking the radioman, “Have you hear Apple yet?” “No Apple”. They made it back to Iwo with empty tanks.
    Lots of scenes of B-29’s flying, but an interesting movie.

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  21. I’m off to a change of command this morning, escorting a 98 year-old pal, Jo, who was JFK’s Navy briefing officer before he went out to take command of PT 109. (She didn’t like JFK). She’s also the friend who met Calvin Coolidge as a child!

    The CO of Two Rock Coast Guard Training Station, a friend from church, is going to mention Jo in his speech. She doesn’t know and I’m so pleased.

    I get to wear a fancy hat and my Navy wife clothes!

    I think I’ll write a blog post about the experience–none of my civilian friends (just about everybody in Sonoma County) knows what a change of command is.

    Hey, here’s a QOD–do you know what it is? 🙂

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  24. Yes and I have attending at least two commissionings. The husband of one of my friends was a “plank owner” on the one I saw commissioned

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  26. Kim, that reminds me of an old joke around my earlier circles: Q. Why don’t Baptists have S*E*X standing up? A. Because it could lead to dancing.

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  28. Donna, being from CA, you need to specify that you remember grass in the yard, not just grass.

    I have to go check on the hiding cats. Miss Bosley makes me forget the pangs of rejection each time I return home.

    Art and I watched the movie Cry Freedom last night. It is based on a true story about South Africa. It was directed by David Attenborough and stars Denzel Washington and Kevin Klein. It’s a great movie for those interested in world history. It is pretty neat to do our summer travels by watching films! We get to see some beautiful places without suffering the bugs, heat, and expense.

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  29. Kim, the origins of Pokémon are creepy, but so are the European legends. Take the current Avenger superhero craze. Two of the characters, Thor and Loki, are derived from Norse mythology. In the mythology, the trouble maker Loki (who, in the Marvel films, is wildly popular with fans) is bound by his son’s, err… guts in punishment. And that is only one incident in a mythology which resembles the content of Game of Thrones (no, I have never and intend to never watch that series, but I am aware of its content). The Avengers are one of the series which are celebrated in the Comic-Con events. As we were discussing the other day, it is possible for Comic-Con events to be harmless fun, but some people get entirely absorbed by it. While I do not think addictions are fully genetic, I do think that people self medicate, and sometimes their self medication can be, not alcohol or drugs, but fantasy and/or science fiction films and books.

    As someone who was absorbed in her own fantasy world as a child, I can say that I had very little input from the culture, as we didn’t have television, or read comics, etc. yet my fantasy world was quite a dark place. It was an escape from reality for me. That is one reason I limit the fantasy which I consume – I sense its powerful pull, the way a former alcoholic senses the pull to drink into oblivion. I do not entirely abstain, first because by entering that world with my eyes open, I can use my maturity to guide people like Eldest Niece through it; and secondly, because, as Chesterton pointed out his chapter ‘The Ethics of Elfland’ in the book Orthodoxy, there are lessons taught in fairy tales which help us grow in our understanding of the world. For that second reason, I abstain from all forms of fantasy which are merely hedonistic, and have no lessons worth learning (why I do not watch Game of Thrones). I also have a content limitation, which means I stay away from films and books which might otherwise be good, but have bedroom scenes or meaningless brutality. So Anime sounds as like something I would avoid.

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  30. I was just pondering what Michelle had said about the creepiness of Anime, and I remembered a book I read recently. In preface, I will note that I like most children’s fantasy. I love The Hobbi (more than its sequel); The Little White Horse (J.K. Rowling’s favourite book as a child) is so much fun, I reread it at intervals; and The Gammage Cup was unexpectedly delightful. So, when Eldest Niece said she had enjoyed N.D. Wilson’s (an Idahoan writer) 100 Cupboards, I decided to check it out and expected to enjoy it. I had trouble getting to sleep after I finished it (I read it in one day). It was creepy. It is hard for me to say just why. It wasn’t the wolf men who hunted and tore apart their victims, or the eyeless witch who saw through a cat’s eyes. Not directly. There was something underlying those elements, a nameless evil. It reminded me of the film Pan’s Labyrinth which was a fantasy set during the Spanish Civil War. It was a violent film overall, but the violence that occurred in the real world, while disturbing, wasn’t what chilled me. That kind of violence actually occurred during that conflict and was terribly realistic. It was the violence in the child’s fantasy world which was horrifying to watch. I think C.S. Lewis got it right when he portrayed the demon in Perelandara or A Voyage to Venus as skinning the froglike creature for no other purpose than amusement. Violence for the sake of violence is demonic in nature. It has no purpose, nothing to accomplish, only destruction. It is always cruel, and while justice sometimes requires violence to stop an perpetrator of violence, justice can never be cruel or it is not justice.

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  31. I put the fact that N.D. Wilson was from Idaho and the fact that a certain Doug Wilson, pastor in Moscow, was also from Idaho together, and wondered if they were related. Sure enough, N.D. is Doug’s son.

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  33. I didn’t mean that N.D. Wilson himself was demonic, anymore than I meant Guillermo del Toro (director and writer of Pan’s Labyrinth) was demonic. I don’t know enough about either one to know what they are. I wouldn’t even say that the book or film were demonic. Others may not see anything wrong in either one. But both triggered warnings in me.

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  34. Speaking of Michelle….she must have rubbed off on me last month.

    Technology and internet trouble…Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen…

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  36. I’m so very sorry, Kim.

    I agree wholeheartedly with roscuro and Mumsee. No surprises there.

    I’m going to write a blog post for Tuesday on the change of command. I think I got my military fix for the summer– sure was a lot of fun, though!

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  37. Nobody had anything to say after 4:40?

    Me neither. Though I visited this site a couple of times since then. I usually come to catch up on the posts while O’Rilley’s talking. If it were Shannon Bream, I would be watching.
    😉

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  38. 😦 I see the prayer thread was busy. I do pray about those issues, but some are so nebulous I don’t know how to mention it.

    But God knows. I’m the one who needs to be specific

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