92 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-18-16”

  2. Becca starts drill team camp today. It’s all week from 8:30 to 12:30. She’s very excited about it. Her friend from dance invited her, but they’ll be in different age groups. Praying she makes some new friends and enjoys the experience.

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  4. Hopefully Jo is on her way.
    Last night, I was filling out a registration form for Elvera to vote. I came across two questions. I was stumped, so I sent the following e-mail.

    doe@ncsbe.gov
    Jul 17 at 8:02 PM
    I am filling out the registration form for my wife.

    Question:
    What is the difference between “RACE” and “ETHNICITY”?
    i.e. she is a white woman born in the USA.
    How should I answer that?

    Am I the only one in Guilford County who doesn’t understand that?
    Makes me feel dumb.

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  5. Good morning from Atlanta. We’ve been having storms with lots of lightening this past week. The rain is making the grass grow finally. I have not had to mow much this summer. Time to crank it up again.

    I saw a book free for Kindle on Amazon (for Christian fiction readers), Angels Watching Over Me, FYRP!
    FYRP=For Your Reading Pleasure

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  6. If that header is what I think it is, I think I won’the get close to that creature. At first I thought it was a soft furry bunny on this small telephone screen.

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  10. Most of you missed seeing g the Cutest Boy Dog in the World.

    I think by now we have so many “Heinz 57” mixed race people it is hard to tell.

    Cute header photo

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  13. Mystery animal!

    Can you leave it blank, Chas?

    I agree, in future years that question will have to be a lot more nuanced — especially here in California, many people now are bi-racial or otherwise of mixed heritage.

    Another day, another house project. The roofers are set to arrive very early to put the finishing touches on the roof before the inspector arrives … Then they’re ready to start on the patio, but I will have to meet them at Home Depot first to pay for all the supplies. Lots of money going out today for me, but worth it. The patio is supposed to take *about* 2 days, which isn’t bad.

    But I will have to message my editor as this will require a few hours off today to get them settled — I’ll also have to lock all the animals inside while the rip out the old patio structure.

    And Kim is my new advisor on new patio-porch decor for the future and on house colors, she suggested looking into the color palettes used for craftsman homes (which mine is, sorta) and I really am finding a lot of ideas/colors I like. I may try to find someone with the local historical society to provide advice, too, I know several people who are volunteers there. Just need to find a “house” person.

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  14. That’s a porcupine playing soccer with a basketball!! 🙂 Those critters ring and kill our pines…we don’t like those critters around here!! Fly was quilled by a baby porcupine a few years ago…poor baby looked like a cat until we had them removed…it got her right in the nose…thankfully they were small and only about 20 quills….
    It’s a beautiful day around these parts…I did have to get out the hose and sprinkler last night…it’s mighty dry on this forest floor..we could use some of Janet’s rain!

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  15. Anyone else around here feel like that by the time you follow all the “rules” on making a secure password it is so secure even you can’t remember it? Today I had to have one with a capital letter, a number, a symbol, and 8 characters long. None of my dogs have had names that took 8 letters!!!!!! I use a set of numbers NOT my phone number that I remember from my childhood. If I ever lose the notebook all of this is scribble (in code) in I will be locked out of my life! Ugh

    Yesterday was a bad day to be married or associated with me. First I leaned over the back of the sofa to kiss Mr P on top of the head. He reached up and I spilled hot coffee on his head. I was kind enough to go outside and bring in some aloe vera for his burn. There was no blistering. Late yesterday I decided to take Lulabelle for a walk to burn off some of her energy as her human has not been able to do any activities with her. Because it hurts Amos’s feeling to be left and Lou is so bad I can’t walk both of them at the same time I took him first. I wears out easily. Then Lou and I walked just under a mile. When we got back she was hot. I didn’t feel any effects from the walk except that it was hot, but I was fine. She was panting and drank a lot of water. Mr P took her outside and sprayed her down with the garden hose. He accused me of trying to burn him and trying to kill his dog.

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  18. Donna, @ 9:18 the reason I’m filling out a paper form is because the form they sent me says,’ “Notice of incomplete application from online DMV interface”.

    Everything is so complicated. It doesn’t have to be.

    We don’t have R&R on Monday. But here goes anyhow.

    When we bought this house, someone paid $445.00 for a home warranty. (Don’t know who just now.) Anyhow:
    The toilet in the hall bath leaks. Every few minutes (maybe 30), you can hear the tank refilling. I need a plumber to fix that.
    So? I called the number on the form. It didn’t work, but they gave me another number.
    i called it. They asked for lots of information., which I provided.
    Bottom line. The recording says. “Warranty Global does not service that zip code”.
    I need to do something about this.
    Such a hassle.

    I haven’t mentioned it, some so trivial, but it’s been a hassle since I’ve been here.

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  19. Minor irritation, but the trivial irritations run like this.
    Elvera likes Denny’s for lunch on Sundays because she likes their cheese/broccoli soup. So? I looked up Denny’s on the internet. Got and address. After church, I drove down S. Holden road. I think I was halfway to Charlotte when we got to the address. IT WAS CLOSEDo jAfn

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  20. Speaking of irritants. I didn’t mean to hit “Post Comment” above. I don’t think I did.
    The Denny’s was closed. I turned back and we went to the K&W cafeteria. It was 2 pm before we got home.
    There is no Denny’s in Greensboro. She will just have to suffer.

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  22. Chas, since you just moved, consider yourself Nomadic or Gypsy, or of the Pet Rock Clan. Let’s see…Lions, YMCAers, RetireeExtroidiaires, WASPs, or like my grouping, the Bumblers.

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  23. Moving is always an adventure (usually more frustrating and annoying than fun).

    That is indeed a porcupine and he’s just ambling past the basketball, but it sure looked like he was going to play with it 🙂 He wanders through our property fairly regularly in the evening. I’m sure glad Keva is a cautious dog and doesn’t get too close.

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  27. The first non-cartoon porcupine I ever saw was at the London Zoo with my kids, which is why I urge parents to take children to unique places and then do what they want to do.

    Since then I’ve only seen one other, this one wild, hanging in a tree in Upper Peninsula, Michigan. No, Donna, I don’t believe they’re around Southern California–or at least I never saw one while growing up there!

    My niece the Idaho vet makes a fair amount of money pulling quills out of dog muzzles, but she says it’s a terrible injury for a dog.

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  28. 1st Daughter bought the game Trouble for Little Guy. I’d been saying for a while that that would be a fun game for us to play. 2nd Daughter used to love it, & won most of the time.

    She & he & I played it a little while ago. Little Guy won, his Auntie came in second, & I came in last. But I had been nice, & chose not to land on their pieces (which sends that piece back to the beginning) a time or two. Next time – no mercy!

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  29. Kim – I’ve known for a while that we don’t have to use two spaces after a period, but I do it anyway. But it often doesn’t show up online.

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  32. It’s funny how even after all these years I forget where in space I live. When Jo commented about spending the night at the airport, I thought, “I’ll just go pick her up. She can spend the night at my house.”

    Then I remembered I live 400 miles from LAX.

    So, then I went through my mental roladex–who did I know in LA who could house her?

    My daughter is in Nica, bummer! She would have been totally up to it.

    My relatives–not Christians and way too complicated.

    Friends?

    It was too late to call, so poor Jo got no respite from my people.

    It makes me feel bad.

    Fly through San Francisco next time, Jo!

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  33. Chas, who was your agent in the transaction to purchase that home? You should call them and let them sort out the Home Warranty situation. Home Warranties are for just this type of thing. I am assuming you had a home inspection done on the home or did a final walk through and the toilet was not running at that time. Also look to see what you deductible is on the Home Warranty. Sometimes that is more than the charge from the service provider, unless of course the plumber gets there and you need a new toilet.
    Truly, this is where real estate agents earn their money.

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  34. My aunt would have welcomed her. She would drive to the airport to visit if we were just passing through, and bring us to her house if we would be staying over a couple of hours. But she passed away last year. She was very near the airport. We would get into trouble if we did not tell her we were landing there.

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  35. My house also came with a home warranty but it seemed never to cover the things I called about — including a biggie, the wall furnace. After I called the gas company to turn the pilot on come fall (I’d been living here for about 5 months by then), they declared it to be unsafe to use and they red-tagged it. Yikes.

    Called home warranty people, I thought sure that would be exactly the kind of thing they’d cover. But nope.

    I called on something else, too, and they said the same thing — oh, we don’t cover that. I never did figure out what they “covered.”

    I didn’t renew it at the end of the year.

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  37. I wound up finding some moonlighting guys who put in forced air heat (which cost the same as the plumber’s estimate for replacing the ugly wall heater).

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  38. I agree with Kare, moving is mostly a pain though also something of an adventure. You’ll find new places to love, new routines, but it may take a while. You’ll look back on this period with some fondness, no doubt, but the annoyances in the meantime make that hard to imagine, I know. 🙂

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  39. Porcupines: they live all up and down the west of North America except a tiny bit in southern California, and all across Canada, and dip down on the north eastern portion of the US. I believe they are also in Central and South America but don’t know where. They are cute to see up close, but dangerous for dogs and horses and any other curious animal. They hum and so remind me of Winnie the Pooh. They are very destructive to trees and they love apple branches.

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  40. On Kim’s link- I learned in college to use 2 spaces using the MLA style. Not sure if they still require it. But online comment boxers only read one space, even if you put several.

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  46. I learned to use 2 spaces after a period, too, but I believe that was tossed out (along with those carefully-crafted English-major paragraph structures) when I took my first real journalism class in college.

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  48. Art and I went into fantasy land with two movies over the weekend. We saw Cold Souls starring Paul Giamatti as himself as an actor. It was suppose to be really funny, but it was not, although it was really unusual and as Art said, “a cautionary tale.” The main story line is about a middle-aged guy who has troubles in life and finds a business that will, for a price, remove a person’s soul and keep it in storage. The funniest part is that his soul looks like a chickpea when it’s extracted. There are Russians extracting and selling souls on the black market, and his soul “get borrowed” by a Russian actress who wanted the soul of an American actor. So there is a quest to retrieve his soul. He did not like having an empty space for his soul so he took on the soul of a Russian poet until he could get his back. This movie is rich with discussion materials for Christians. And then, to add extra for discussion, I just started into a book for review, Releasing the Divine Healer Within, and the very first part of chapter one is about organ transplants and how recipients often have new sensations within their bodies that relate to the person the organ is received from. I could not make up the way things fit together like that movie and the book. Just odd.

    The other movie was Big Hero 6, a Disney animated film. The animation alone makes it worth seeing. Wow! And the story has a lot of heart and deals with revenge and its bad consequences and shows there is a better way. It is high action, which is not my fave, but when that gets overboard for me, I just tune out for a few minutes.

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  49. Re two spaces: On most manuscripts I edit, the very first thing I do it open the find/replace and in the “find” I put two spaces, and in the “replace,” one. That gets rid of all those pesky second spaces after sentences, but it also gets rid of accidental second spaces within sentences. (When I proofread, sometimes I see those second spaces within sentences, and I know the editor didn’t know my trick.) Occasionally I get an author who puts in lots and lots of spaces, and in those manuscripts I usually start with five or six spaces in the “find” space, and then drop one space and run it again, and so on until it tells me “0” replacements were made.

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  50. The other thing I heard recently that goes along with what Chas said above is “death by paper cut”. It was told to me by a Navy Wife who said when her husband was home from sea he would leave a bowl of half eaten oatmeal in the sink every morning. She would stumble in the kitchen and it would be dried. She would have to soak and scrape it off the bowl. She was complaining to another Navy Wife who told her the death by paper cut saying. She asked her what paper cut was she. Fast forward about 15 or so years and the husband is lactose intolerant and doesn’t eat oatmeal anymore. She has numerous health issues with debilitating vertigo being one of the results…she said now SHE is the paper cut.

    It never is the really big things. You see them coming. Is is the slow erosion or the multitude of “paper cuts” that do most of us in.

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  51. Writing in reverse alphabetical order (first the journalist answered, then the editor and now the author) I’m with Cheryl, I do the same thing, find and replace. At this point, I’m so used to one space, I rarely think about it anymore.

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  52. So, basically ‘race’ would be the colour of your skin/shape of your eyes, while ‘ethnicity’ would be the country/tribe/region of origin of one’s ancestors? It is such a meaningless distinction. For example, the ‘African’ race is taken to mean one whose skin produces a heavy pigmentation of melanin, accompanied but tightly curled black hair and brown eyes, and broad noses and thick lips. However, Africans have many shades of complexion and variations of hair type and modifications of , from the ‘Mediterranean’ complexion of North Africans to the straight hair of the Fulani to the small noses of Ethiopians. I’ll bet that ‘ethnicity’ options for those of the African ‘race’ don’t include tribal and linguistic distinctions like Berber, or Fula, or Tuareg, or Wolof, etc. Probably, those of ‘Asian’ race are similarly frustrated, as Uyghurs and Tibetans would rather not be confused with the Chinese. Speaking of Asia, there’s the variation in appearance between the light skinned northerners and the dark skinned southerners of India, or the fluctuation between Asiatic, Melanesian, and Polynesian features in the Pacific Islands. Then there is the vast range of ethnic origin in the Hispanics of Latin America, from Native to European to African. One of my Spanish teacher from Columbia mentioned that his wife, of Castilian descent, would call him, of slave descent, ‘Negro’ as a term of affection. That isn’t even taking into account that there is a wide range of differences in Europeans from Russia to Ireland and Finland to Italy.

    Myself, I’m from a relatively narrow subsection of European descent, but I still include English, Scottish, Irish, Alsatian, and Acadian in varying degrees. I suppose I could be called Caucasian due to my light skin, but dark curly hair, broad noses, and thick lips run in my family, without us having any genetic connection to Africa. My mother used to be tormented by children who called her ‘liver lips’ (it was many years before women got botox injections to puff up their lips), while my upper class English great grandmother would bemoan the fact that her black haired grandson looked like he was of ‘Gypsy’ descent and my eldest sibling would complain about how bushy my curls looked in photographs. Race is a meaningless attempt to classify people according to appearance. Ethnicity is a fascinating study of people’s history and culture, but it is too complicated to fit into a form. Maybe they should ask for mother tongue instead. That would tell a lot more about the person’s cultural background, and help to start erasing the habit of dividing people into non-existent races.

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  53. I’m pretty sure the APA formatting I had to do for research papers required the two spaces after the paragraph. But when I advised the budding author, who is self-publishing, she gave me to understand that I was behind the times. I think the double space makes it easier to read. Otherwise, sentences blur into one another.

    I just checked. Yes, APA recommends the double space: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/24/

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  55. Rant: I would hate to know that I was returning from a week in the Bahamas with my family and is a miserable as Guy. He has called and emailed every day, multiple times. He is flying today and has called me 3 times already and has yelled each time. If I were his wife and son I would leave his miserable self here next time.

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  56. Oh, and the properties he wants mapped and put into a package. I only have 2 of them. He can’t remember what the 3rd one is and said there are probably going to be 5 all together. How can I create a map or a package if I don’t know all the properties. n ARGHHHHHHHH

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  57. Kind of at an awkward spot as the inspector now isn’t coming until between noon and 2 p.m. — and we can’t buy the materials for the patio yet in case the inspector would see them all piled up in back (we aren’t permitting the patio as I want it the same as the old one, attached to both the garage and the house, and the city doesn’t allow that anymore).

    This guy also will do he gutters, he’s really been great, kind of a one-stop person whose bids are under those of the other “contractors.” I guess I should just go into work and then maybe we can get the patio materials first thing tomorrow morning, although he’ll probably start taking the old one down later today … Ah well, it’ll all work out.

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  59. I wish we lived near Chas – I’d send #1 son, the plumber, over to fix his toilet pronto (and at no cost). And I can guarantee you he wouldn’t tell you a new toilet is needed unless it really was.

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  60. I’ve been reading through Leviticus the last month and today, examining chapter 26–which is grim and describes who the Israelites finally were removed from Israel–I saw this in my Lutheran Study Bible notes:

    “Failure to obey God’s statutes, rules and laws results in punishment. God’s discipline intensifies as the disobedience intensifies against Him. One by one, God removes His blessings in order to lead His people back to Him in repentance, that He may again shower them with His grace (2 Pet 3:9).”

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  61. Oh, ouch!!! I was showing something to Mr. P in the front yard and something stung me. I think it is yellow jackets that nest in the ground. We had no aspirin to make a paste. No one smokes any more so I didn’t have a cigarette to get the tobacco from and I don’t use meat tenderizer. I crushed up acetaminophin and made a paste but my big toe is swollen. Every time my heart beats my foot hurts. Whine, whine, whine…back to work now.

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  68. Nope. We have Pro-Heath and Crest Whitening with Scope toothpaste. Mr. P is about to go get dog meds so he is going to bring back aspirin and Benydryl.

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  69. Amputation … We had a free weekend of HBO so I watched “Everest” last night since I’d taken a long afternoon nap and wound up staying up rather late. Good movie, but …

    Sheesh. I guess I understand the challenge of people wanting to make those summit climbs, but it sure can exact a heavy toll when things go wrong. A nose, hands … And he was one of the lucky ones who survived.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everest_(2015_film)

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  70. Michelle (11:31), this editor is also a published author. 🙂 I know, on here my primary “job” is seen as editor, but I primarily think of myself as a writer, and have enough in print to back up the claim . . .

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  71. I went to the pharmacy myself which was a good thing. They had Scott Towels and Scott Tissue on sale. On my way home I called my stepmother to tell her. She has 48 rolls of Scott Tissue. I only have 24. 😉

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  73. I went over to Karen’s to return her key and visit for a bit. The one cat, Rocket, came out to play, but the other two stayed hidden away. I did not pet Rocket, but he seems to think I am acceptable to be in the same room with now. He can really leap high in the air just like Miss Bosley does. It was fun to watch him play.

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  79. For those who may want to take note of my aspirin treatment. You can see where I was stung. My foot feels a little bruised but isn’t. I am itchy but will wait until I go to bed to take Benedryl because it will make me drowsy. So if you are stung make a paste of aspirin and put on it.

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  82. Ah, Chas, it isn’t as simple as that. Sometimes, I can detect that Anonymous is Michelle, sometimes it is The Real, recently it has been Kim, but there are a few times when I’m not sure just who it is, and I suspect it may have been one of the lurkers.

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  84. I had learned that about the two spaces after a period and that we weren’t supposed to do that anymore. When one is texting (at least on an iPhone) and you use 2 spaces, it automatically puts in the period – very useful.

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  85. The lily is the provincial flower of Saskatchewan and they grow wild in the ditches and forests around here – they are protected or I would go dig a bunch for our property.

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  86. Husband began his new job today. He said it was neat because it appears everybody in the company is a Baptist and it was interesting to be at a trucking site and hear no cursing. He knew they were church folk and knew they were from the Ukraine but apparently there are also people from other eastern European countries so it should be interesting. But he has been in lots of pain lately so he is not sure he is going to be able to keep at it. His next infusion is not until September. Hopefully, they will work with him. They say they are very happy to have part time help.

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  91. Beautiful pictures. Summer is so colorful most everywhere. 🙂

    I got home and see that the guys have torn down most of the patio structure, they were busy.

    I had a turkey breast in the refrigerator I’d bought several days ago so I finally got that in the oven tonight along with some chopped onions and potatoes.

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  92. Ah, loons. I’ve never seen them, and would like to. That little butterfly, though, is one of my own local favorites, assuming it’s the same one. But it looks like it. Tiny but very pretty.

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