72 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-29-16”

  2. I’ve been up since 2AM…cannot get back to sleep…and I have to work today…gonna be a long one. I’ve been catching up on the news and I see that Coloado Springs had tennis ball sized hail last night causing a mess with houses and cars…I don’t think we received a drop of rain out of the passing storm…
    Our internet hasn’t been cooperating during daylight hours for some reason…but here it is 3 in the morning and it works…good thing I have my day and nighttime hours mixed up!
    Hope you get back to sleep Kim…and that is an amazing photo…is that boat stuck in the sand? It is so close to BG in shallow water….

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  5. The boat is beached not stuck. It had in board rather than out board engines. The water was deep enough at the stern.

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  6. Wonderful header! I don’t think I have ever been aboard a boat of that size. I did, at least once as a child, go aboard my dad’s ship when he was in the Navy at Charleston. And I have been aboard a dinner cruise vessel. Other than that, I have been in rowboats and paddleboats at various parks when younger. And I almost forgot being on a speedboat pulling a skier at one point. And one more is the large touring riverboat style vessel at the Stone Mountain lake. Maybe we need a QofDay about what types of water vessels you’ve been on. Perhaps at least one of us has been on a submarine?

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  7. Must be something in the air, I can’t sleep either.

    I went to bed late and tossed and turned, maybe slept a couple hours, finally gave up at about a quarter to 5. I’ll be dragging by noon, but last night I started reorganizing and clearing out some things in the house, so my mind wouldn’t stop strategizing.

    I’ve already done some work in the kitchen since getting up — and it’s trash day so I have extra stuff to haul out once it gets light. Some guy was walking down the street yelling (to himself, apparently) at around 3 a.m. and banging all the trash can lids as he went. But I was already half awake anyway.

    Annie wants out but we had a cat killed by a coyote at about 4:30 a.m. yesterday just half a block away so there’s no way I’m letting her out this early, even if she stays in the back yard.

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  8. I’ve been on the boats to and from Catalina numerous times — and on a few whale watching boats and media boats and water taxis inside the harbor. But I developed a penchant for getting seasick when I was in my 30s (I’m remembering the time I was covering a whale watch outing on very rough and choppy seas with some visiting prince from Saudi Arabia & a bunch of school kids; both the photographer and I — along with most of the kids and the prince’s entourage baby-sitter — were leaning over the side of the boat half way into it; photographer was pretty humiliated and made me swear not to tell anyone else in the newsroom that he got so sick).

    So I generally try to avoid floating things that go outside the breakwater.

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  12. In my Bible reading this a.m., I was reading about David and Bathsheba having their son, Solomon. I must have skimmed it before, but in 2 Samuel 12:24-25 it says, “…The Lord loved the child and sent word through Nathan the prophet that they should name him Jedidiah (which means ‘beloved of the LORD’), as the LORD had commanded.” So I question why did they continue to call him Solomon, and was that considered disobedience?

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  13. I also was again considering more deeply how the LORD brought about the death of the first baby child of David and Bathsheba because of the father’s sin. Now that is the ultimate in a ‘father wound.’ It does seem contrary to God’s valuing of life, but it shows how sin requires death, shedding of life, to cover it.

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  14. See the Cutie Patootie in the yellow and orange swimsuit with the ruffle around her waist and obvious diaper hiny? That would be BG. It was her first boat ride. Paranoid Mother had been to the store and purchased every infant flotation device known to man at that time. The boat is a Hatteras Sportfisher. Probably 65ft. I can’t remember. My ex-brother in law was the captain of that boat and one of the best diesel inboard boat mechanics on the Gulf Coast. We routinely were able to take various boats out to make sure they were in working order before the owner came in to go fishing. Boats like that spoiled me. Not only do they have bathrooms, they have full bathrooms!

    Boats I have been on:
    Stauter Builts https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS701US701&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=stauter%20built%20boat

    Chris Craft
    Cigarette
    Flying Scots
    Sunfish
    Laser
    Catalinas
    Various Paddle Boats around New Orleans

    Pretty much anything that will float. I never went on the last boat my dad owned. He had a guy come to the house and custom build it. I sold it to someone he knew and had been fishing with him. When the guy came to pick it up I made the comment I had never been on it. He offered to take me out on it. I declined. If I hadn’t been with my dad I didn’t want to go now.

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  15. Janice, I looked it up. The entire passage is unclear. V. 24 says he named him Solomon. Then he went to Nathan. It is not clear whether David or Nathan called him Jedidah. No indication that he was given that name.

    I visited the aircraft carrier Yorktown in Charleston I boarded a nuclear sub in Newport, RI. I haven’t been beyond sight of land on any ship. But many times on airplanes.

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  16. I can survive a boat with enough Dramamine. But even that is dicey — I was doing fine on a press boat, feeling really good, enjoying to wide open sea, when a colleague and I went below deck to get a couple sodas. On the way back up the stairs, the boat pitched wildly, throwing me against the wall and down onto one knee.

    That did it. I was immediately woozy and never recovered, spent the rest of the trip looking rather green, I was told. It’s something in the ear and with your balance — when I lost mine ever-so-briefly, it was enough to throw my whole Dramamine-dulled system back into 4th gear.

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  17. I posted today’s posts at 3:25 AM this morning. I couldn’t sleep either. But my insomnia was caused by some pretty awful back and hip pain. Not much better this morning. 😦

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  19. Janice, Jedidiah simply means ‘beloved of the Lord’. It is not uncommon for children in the Bible to receive two names and be called primarily by one. Rachel named her youngest son Benoni, but Jacob named him Benjamin (Genesis 35:18). Abigail had a son by David, and in II Samuel 3:3, he is called Chileab, while in I Chronicles 3:1, he is called Daniel. Consider the prophecy of Christ from Isaiah 7 that is cited in Matthew’s account, that virgin would conceive and bear a son and call his name Emmanuel, yet the angel tells Joseph to call his name Jesus. In West African culture, children are often given a public name, but their parents call them by a private name. After all, we do that all the time. My maternal grandfather, was called Oscar growing up, but his real name was after an older brother who died in infancy and Oscar did not appear on his birth certificate. When as a young man, he decided to use his birth name, his family – who knew perfectly well what his real name was – was upset and blamed his wife, my grandmother, for getting him to change it. She hadn’t; he’d had trouble enlisting because Oscar was considered a German name. My father’s first name is an uncommon one; only those who do not know him at all and are simply referring to his ID call him by it. Those who know him, even mere acquaintances, call him by a short form of his second name, to the point where, when they see an address or signature of his, they are surprised to see initials that do not match the first letter of his name. Yet, his first name is as much his as his second name.

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  20. Too many ship and boat stories to tell . . . but I, too, have trouble with sea sickness, much to my guy’s dismay. He and the kids sail the old catamaran, but my issues meant he could never buy a sail boat and sail around the world (Whew! Escaped that one).

    Here is my story.

    Once upon a time the CO of a troop transport ship in Hawai’i volunteered to take the boy scouts out for a weekend while he was training reservists. My husband laughed when I asked him if he wanted to go, so I got to take the trip.

    Worried about sea sickness, I went to the dispensary for what my mom always used on her many cruises: patches she wore behind her ears.

    They didn’t have any.

    They called around for a week, however, and eventually found a pair in the back of a drawer in someone’s office at the Marine clinic on the north shore.

    I put them on and set to sea–I think we had two dozen boy scouts and maybe ten parents.

    We’d barely cleared the entrance to Pearl Harbor when I scratched behind my ear and one flew overboard. The other fell off shortly thereafter and I was on my own.

    The seas weren’t even bad, but there went my stomach. I had to stay on deck, I could not go below without being overcome.

    Fortunately, the CO was a friend and I spent most of that trip on the bridge–which was higher, and thus more stable since I was able to gaze at the horizon, not at the waves.

    That night, my cot was perpendicular to the way we traveled through the water, and it slid from side to side in the stateroom all night long.

    No one expected me to sleep anyway, but that meant I was even more hung over the next morning.

    But, who cares? It was a glorious weekend, the boys finished a couple merit badges, they got to shoot water cannons off the back end, run up and down the ladders and we all had a great time.

    My husband?

    Greeted me with a kiss and said he was more than happy to spend the weekend on dry ground with the three year old! And I’ve never put to sea on a Navy ship since. 🙂

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  21. Correction: My mother clarified that it was the church folk, rather than the family, who blamed my grandmother for the name change. Nevertheless, my grandfather’s family was hard on my grandmother, as he was the only son and she wasn’t considered good enough for him.

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  22. He, however, tells a terrible story of his boat nearly foundering in the Irish Sea.

    A big storm came up on the relatively shallow Sea. They had to transit far enough to dive and got caught.

    A submarine is a cylinder. When the waves started–above the sail!– it rocked and rolled. He had been asleep (Navy trained, the man can sleep anywhere at the drop of a hat), and woke to an inch of water in his stateroom.

    The wardroom was only one deck above the battery. If water hit the battery, the boat would explode (See Scorpion accident). He dashed down the ladder and found the chiefs and sailors ahead of him, strapping mattress around the battery to protect it.

    He ran back up to the control room to demand why they weren’t diving the boat. Chief of the watch pointed to the CO, lolling and nearly incapacitated in his seasickness. It was that bad.

    It was dry up there–the water from topside, where two men were barely hanging on–was going straight down the hatch and by passing their level.

    “Can’t get permission from the CO to dive. Still have the light up on top.”

    R was senior enough, he ordered the men off the top, sealed the hatch and turned to the CO: “Permission to dive, sir?”

    Groan.

    “Aye, aye. Rig for dive.”

    They spent the next several hours bailing water into the toilets. It took them a week to transit home across the Atlantic, by which time all those little life forms present in sea water dried into the rugs.

    The boat stank even worse than normal when it got home.

    My husband got a medal on the pier for saving the boat.

    One of his JOs had the bunk beneath my husband and his dress uniform (very expensive) got soaked. The dry cleaner tried three times to get the smell out of it and it just wasn’t cleaning well. When the wife explained why the uniform had gotten so wet, they told her, “Great story. We’ll clean it for free until it’s done.”

    And they did.

    Thanks be to God.

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  23. My father was called by his middle name growing up. When my mom met him, she considered his middle name to be feminine (the only person I’ve ever met by that name was a man from Arkansas, which was Dad’s birthplace, so in Arkansas it must have been a man’s name and it’s extremely rare anyway) so she called him by his first name, and he was known by it the rest of his life. But it turned out his birth certificate said only Baby Boy D________.

    One of my brothers, my mom occasionally called him by his middle name affectionately, and his middle name is considered a respectable one in society and his first name is considered joke in society, so since he had thoughts of being a lawyer, he started going by his middle name.

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  24. Elvera’s younger brother was named “Teddy”. It’s on his birth certificate. That didn’t matter until he joined the marines. Little things like that can cause lots of trouble.
    Elvera has minor problems with her name. It is almost (not entirely) unique. Some want to call her Elvira.

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  25. lol, Michelle’s flying patch episode.

    Just got in from a pleasant driveway chat with the neighbor (she and her husband have been here forever, raised their kids in that house, now babysitting their grandkids a few times a week). It’s one of the things I like about living in a place long enough to have some roots.

    Trash trucks are running late today, but everything is out.

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  26. Boats:
    canoes, rowboats, fourteen foot sailboats, kayaks, river rafts, trans Atlantic cruise ship, Nile cruise ship, submarine (tied to the dock). And I get very seasick, squelching my husband’s dream of living and sailing around the world as well. The trans Atlantic cruise doctors had me in the office horribly ill while still tied to the dock. They gave me a shot, I slept for two days, and the rest of the cruise was wonderful.

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  27. Neighbor (who’s a few years older than I am and her husband is several years older than she is, 70 now I think, and still working) was almost tearing up, saying she’s realizing lately how much she depends on him. She’s pretty handy with things around the house & yard, but he’s been the one who’s always there to fix anything more serious.

    I was talking to a widowed friend recently whose husband also was really handy (“I’d tell him I wanted something done to the house and he’d just do it”) — she’s now trying to find handymen and other workers for the first time in her life. I’ve always been in this predicament, but for women suddenly without handy husbands, it’s all new.

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  28. You know a local real estate agent would have a list of reputable people to do those things for someone. I put the list together for my office. I had their business license and proof of insurance on file and they had to be recommended and checked out before they went on our list. Or someone with journalism and FB savvy could put something together for the community where she lives.

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  29. Although I’ve found there’s a whole underground of talented, hard-working people who won’t clean out your bank account and are often not on anyone’s (like Angie’s) *official* list. But they’re out there, found mostly by word of mouth through people you trust (in real estate or elsewhere).

    I had roofing bids of $8,000 and $11,000 — but I finally got it done for something like $7,000.

    My cousin who’s restoring a historic craftsman home he bought some years ago in a neighboring community (he’s a historic home purist), meanwhile, is coming over in another week or so to take a look at my windows that were ruined by too much vegetation growing too close to the house for too long.

    He can at least tell me if he thinks they can be restored or if the wood frames would have to be replicated. Then, when I start getting estimates, I can run them by him & he can probably tell me what sounds like a reasonable price and scope of work — and what doesn’t.

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  30. Great story, Michelle. I read it to my husband.

    Re boats, I have had limited experience. I’ve been in canoes a few times, including one exceedingly frightening experience (which I’ll tell in a moment), but other than that, probably just Disneyland boats (which probably don’t count) and the boats we went on in Florida last month. (One held ten passengers and the captain, with his wife standing up to do the talking, and one held a few more than that in a flat-bottomed electric boat. Both times, they explained if there was a boat accident, don’t worry because the water was shallow enough we could walk to shore.)

    The frightening canoe story: I had only been on canoes a couple of times (one brother owns one) and realistically I don’t have enough arm strength to be all that useful in a canoe. Well, I was counseling at camp, and during a structured activity time they did something I consider quite stupid–they kept the kids together with their cabinmates and moved them around, but they put the counselors in assigned slots separate from their children. So the counselors might have a whole lot of children they didn’t know, and be stuck leading some activity at which they had no aptitude and no liking. I was hoping for craft assignments, but no one asked me my skills or my preferences. Two days in a row I got stuck playing foursquare with girls I didn’t know. (My church sent a few children to the camp, but the vast majority of children, counselors, and other staff were from another church–I was the only adult from ours, and we had maybe five or six kids including some boys. So I was at a distinct disadvantage when they threw a new group of girls with me at each activity, though for the adults of the other church, it might have been a good opportunity to get to know different kids from their own church.) Anyway, the girls were not the least bit excited about playing foursquare, nor was I, and I’m just not the rah-rah type, so we all rather endured the activity.

    The third day they put me on foursquare (undoubtedly with yet another group of kids I didn’t know) I heard another woman complain “I got canoe again, for the third time.” I told her, “I’ll trade you. I have foursquare for the third time.” She happily traded.

    It had been my understanding that each canoe had two adults and three or four children. I was wrong. I went down to the dock to discover each canoe had just one adult–and I was it. And I knew almost nothing about canoes. (I knew that you paddle on the left to go right, and vice versa. And I knew–or thought I knew–that the direction of the boat was controlled solely from the rear.) I told the young men at the pier that I didn’t know what I was doing, and they told me, “You’ll do fine.” Armed with that reassurance (but no instructions at all), I and my girls naively got into the boat, and immediately started going in circles.

    The girls spent the whole trip yelling at each other. I let them, simply because I thought I was the problem and it seemed better to let them yell at each other than to yell at me and distract me. Besides, if they thought the adult didn’t know what she was doing, their anger might turn to fear.

    Eventually we drifted too far out. We were in the ship lane, and a very large vessel was bearing down on us. It wasn’t actually close to us, but it was heading our way, and straight, and it already looked huge. I knew it was my responsibility, not his, to turn. And I didn’t know how. The girls were louder now, but I was silent. I was praying, praying desperately, that I and the girls I was responsible for would somehow get back to shore safely.

    We got out of the boat lane and back closer to shore. I don’t remember any of that. What I do remember is that as we turned into the dock, we had a perfect, smooth approach. I think that angels are better navigators than is an inexperienced woman with a boatful of screaming nine-year-old girls whose names she didn’t know.

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  31. I mentioned the lawn mower breaking down, the wood chipper needing repair, the fridge going out. Now the front door knob broke and had to be removed. Son was working on it but had to go to work. Something about needing to file a bit to get the hole lined up with the knob part. Anyway, husband is off on another adventure. He had hoped to be home last Friday, then Wednesday, then Friday, now Monday or Tuesday. But he is paying the bills and that is a good thing, and having fun and not just sitting in his chair hurting. And we don’t actually need a doorknob. Or the fridge. Or the mower. Or the chipper. So life is good.

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  32. Donna, it’s traumatic (really. I know that’s a big word) for a man who has been doing things all his life to realize that he can’t do that anymore. Chuck was lots of help cleaning out my gutters for me. I really appreciated that. But I really hated seeing him do that.
    I know!
    I’m not the man I used to be.
    Nobody ever says that to me.
    They don’t have to.

    I have long thought of doing a dissertation on the subject “Not the Man I Used to be”. It would be entertaining and instructive for those of you who have that ahead of you. (It applies to women also. Some of you are encountering that now.)
    But I likely will never do it because I can’t give it an honest try without dealing with the Viagra thing. (I won’t say it doesn’t work. It does. But not like on TV. Not at all like TV.)

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  33. On seasickness: I grew up paddling around in canoes, and ferry rides, even the ocean ferry between Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, don’t bother me; so I always assumed I was a good sailor. When I came home from Mumsee’s I got terrible vertigo and threw up on the plane (yea, that was embarrassing), so I knew I got airsickness, though I managed to stave it off on the flight to West Africa. Then, early one morning, I was going to the city from the village with a teammate. She knew her way around, and decided to take me on the long boats. They look like a large dory, with brightly painted symbols and designs. At one point, they would have been rowed, but now they use old, sputtering diesel engines. So, we were carried, on someone’s shoulders, to the boat, and started across. I was enjoying it, as the longboats moved much quicker than the creeping ferries, and not even the fact that they were bailing due to a slow leak bothered me. Around the midway point, as the waters of the Atlantic met the river waters and created waves, vertigo struck and it was all I could do not to throw up, or worse, faint and fall overboard. The stench of diesel fuel and engine smoke didn’t help. I was grateful to be carried off the boat and onto solid land.

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  34. I’m considerably younger than you are, Chas, and I was thinking this week along the same lines–all the things I’ve had to give up because of my hands: sewing, weeding (!), tennis, bike riding–all these I’ve done effortlessly my entire life.

    Now, they hurt too much even with the improvement I’ve had through exercise.

    I’ve told my husband I have to die first, I simply cannot live in the modern world (see: appliances) without him around to bail me out.

    His answer?

    “Okay, but I did give you a bunch of competent sons.”

    Thanks. He’s getting oat bran for dinner . . .

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  35. Cheryl, the canoe can be steered two ways. More experienced canoers, like my father and uncles, can steer from the back of the canoe by using their paddle as a rudder, while the front paddler kept going forward. We children steered the canoe by both front and back paddlers paddling in the opposite direction to one another. One of us would paddle as if to go forward, and the other paddled as if to go backwards. That would swing the canoe around pretty quickly. It is over a decade since I last used a canoe. I prefer the kayak.

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  36. Our pastor has said he used to ponder why people had to grow so weak as they aged and were, on top of it, faced often with difficult illnesses. He came to the conclusion that perhaps God ordains it as a way to pull us all that much closer to him in the latter part of our lives.

    We no longer have our physical (or sometimes mental) strength and abilities to rely on, things we took so much for granted all our lives. Instead, we are forced to grasp and understand more deeply (through our physical weakness) our complete spiritual dependence as those things slip away.

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  37. So the “up” side, as it were, is our deepening spiritual growth as the decks began to be cleared of all other earthly distractions and crutches.

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  38. My old-house original glass door knobs often come loose (and sometimes come off entirely, always a fun surprise for guests) — it’s time again to find some of those little screws to tighten everything up. I love the look of the original knobs and don’t want to get rid of them, but they do have to be handled & turned with care.

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  39. A few months ago I read that the incidence of Alzheimer’s in this country is much, much greater than in some other countries, and the conclusion reached was that cultures that value their elderly people, who see them as repositories of wisdom and people who give advice and have it followed, have elderly people who stay sharp. Whereas cultures that value youth, elderly people see what they do not have, and what they do have (wisdom, perseverance, etc.) is ignored, and they may tend to retreat mentally.

    The negative parts of aging (and I definitely experience them in part, and I’m amazed that I’m within a year of turning fifty–so quickly) are a result of living in a fallen world.

    After my mother died, my sister had three more babies. We had been in the house where my mother lay dead for two days before we called police and had her found. My sister knew the smell of death. And she said the smell of the decaying umbilical cord is the smell of death. As soon as we are born (no, before we are born), we begin to die. That is life in a fallen world. Death is an enemy, and it is an enemy that stalks us from the womb.

    But Christ has overcome death, and for the believer, resurrection lies ahead. Death (the enemy) becomes a mere door. It is an enemy only from this side, though it is a fierce enemy from this side.

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  40. Cheryl, I met people with dementia in West Africa. Most of them are not given a formal diagnosis, but that does not thus mean that dementia doesn’t exist there. Furthermore, if there are less people with dementia in other countries, it may well be that is because those who have dementia do not live long under less rarified conditions. In my nursing training, I encountered dementia patients whose advanced state of debilitation would have caused their death in rural West Africa. Electric wheelchairs with special extensions, hospital beds, and nutritional food processed for easy swallowing were simply not available in a place where foot travel and horse cart are the common method of personal transport and even the healthy adults suffer from the effects of malnourishment. There were probably less people with dementia a hundred years ago in North America too.

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  41. Mumsee, the only thing on your list I can fix is the door knob problem. I am somewhat of an expert. Everything else will require someone else.
    Ex mother in law just turned 79. She still maintains 5 acres with flower beds. She has a riding lawn mower and does her own weed eating. I cannot weed eat. Until a few years ago she was still climbing on the roof to blow off the pine straw. Now her son and son in law try to keep an eye on it and beat her to it. If not, up she goes.
    I have recently taken on some of the outside maintenance that I had not been in the habit of doing for a few years. While we have a self propelled lawn mower I didn’t realize I wasn’t using it until Mr. P asked me why I wasn’t. No wonder! Once I started using the self propelled again I cut my time in half. Last Saturday I mowed, edged, and blew. I also trimmed up some crepe myrtles. I was sore for a couple of days. There was a great sense of accomplishment in doing it. Next I am going to have to vacuum. That is really hard on your back whether you realize it or not. Mr. P is not supposed to do anything strenuous for 6 more weeks. I would rather do it than mess this thing in his back up and have to shoot him. He was a little embarrassed by all I did last Saturday, but I was more embarrassed by the next door neighbor asking me if I was going to edge and if I would like to borrow his blower. I realized quickly that was his subtle way of telling me I wasn’t “keeping up with the Joneses”

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  42. I am doing a standby at a playday rodeo, so finally have time to comment.

    Boats and I do not get along. I have been on a ferry, rowboat, speed boat, canoe, paddle boat, and yacht. The old time I don’t get seasick is when going fast when water skiing. Trolling is torture for me.

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  43. Son was wrong, no file needed. I just used a small screwdriver to pull the piece into place. But lining the screws up is for a more patient person so I am off to pull weeds.

    Well, I was in such a hurry to pull weeds, I forgot to send this fascinating bit of trivia.

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  44. So I finally got caught up on all the blogs I missed.

    The question about traffic tickets made me feel like a criminal. I think I have more tickets than any of you. I never had a ticket until I was 36 years old. I have paid 3 speeding tickets, all on rural highways, for 10 over. I have had mercy extended to me a few times. I did go to court and have one dismissed, as my hubby was picking at me for going too slow. I felt like it was his ticket. I pled guilty.

    I think the reason I have so many more tickets than yall, is that it is so far to everything here. I drive between 500 and 1,000 miles each week, with nothing between here and there. (That is me justifying my sin) 😦

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  45. My old dog died this week. He was 15 years old. He was a faithful companion and protector. My youngest daughter came dragging him home 13 years ago. I said he wouldn’t last 2 weeks. When my grandchildren were learning to walk, he would put his nose on their back and follow wherever they went. The day before he passed, Connor Matthew was sitting with him in his dog bed.

    For us, dogs and cats are not just pets. They all have a job to do. The dogs must guard, and not eat the poultry. For the little ones to have freedom on our place, they need need that protector and companionship. The herd of cats are to keep rodents under control, thereby, discouraging rattlesnakes.

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  50. I am on a roll! Have finished writing chapter 17 and am three pages into chapter 18–with hope I can finish it as well before 7:30 tonight. That will leave only 1.5 chapters and then I’m done! With the rough draft, but I’ll take it.

    I’ve got 10 days away from the manuscript owing to obligations starting tomorrow–maybe I can stretch it to noon if my husband is willing–so this is wonderful.

    Of course, my third revised deadline was August 1 and I should miss that, but I’m close and I know exactly where I’m going and how.

    I think.

    🙂

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  51. Sorry about the loss of your dog, RKessler.

    Ann, from yesterday’s thread (just caught up), sorry about the tooth break and infection. Sounds painful. I pray you’ll heal well with that. (And with your stomach aches, too.)

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  52. QoD: My parents co-owned a speed boat with another couple. Sometimes both of our families would go out on it together, but most of the time, IIRC, our family used it alone. We kept it on our farm, in a shed, as our place was on the way to the river for the other family, but I don’t remember them coming to get the boat for themselves much, if at all.

    I never had trouble with motion sickness on the boat, or during the canoe ride I went on with a friend one time, though I’ve experienced motion sickness at times while riding in a car.

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  54. RKessler, my condolences about your dog.

    Whereabouts do you live that everything is so far apart? I’ve somehow missed that detail.

    Regarding boats, I’ve been on docked museum boats and ships, canoed and kayaks in lakes and rivers, ridden Puget Sound ferries, and sailed and ridden pontoon boats on lakes. The only times I’ve been on the ocean were a couple trips back and forth to Catalina to camps there. I didn’t suffer much from seasickness, but got a bit queasy on one trip back from Catalina on a boat that was smaller than usual in water that was choppier than usual. Never been on a big ship that wasn’t docked.

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  55. Kevin- I think rkessler lives in New Mexico. 5th largest state in area with one of the smallest populations. Lots of empty land there, but lots of beautiful land as well.

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  56. A little bright spot from those hours I spent at the clinic yesterday:

    6th Arrow did not know that that thing you sit on while the medical practitioner looks you over was called an examining table. She started out sitting in a chair next to the desk in the room, and after the NP asked her a few questions, she said to daughter, “You can hop up on the table now.”

    Daughter jumps up from her chair, looks all around, then stares at the desk/table, wide-eyed, as if to say, “You want me to hop up on that table?!”

    I smiled and pointed to the examining table before she got any ideas. 😉

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  59. I just refreshed the page, expecting to see 56. When it was 58, I knew you must have gotten your 57, Peter. 😉 And yes, you’re right, 62 is my number. I’ll see if I can get it without doing about four posts in a row before I leave for a concert tonight.

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  61. My friend’s daughter is back from the conference she spoke at in Europe, and is giving a concert tonight at the same venue where my daughter and I perform. Looking forward to hearing her and a friend of hers from New Mexico tonight, and in catching up with her about the Yiddish Conference she attended.

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  63. so nice to have a free Saturday after really pushing it for the last two weeks.
    I love boats and my kids gave me a kayak. The night before I left my grandson, Jack, gave me a new kayak paddle. Mine was an old one from a yard sale.
    In New Zealand one of the things that I wanted to do was go on a ferry ride. I always sit on top and enjoy the wind.

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  64. yeah!! I finally looked up and entered my password on this new computer so now I can click like on the comments. Let’s see if I am still anonymous. Oh, got to enter some information first.

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  66. Yard looks nice. Tomorrow Mr P and I will clean the common area of the house. We have friends coming to dinner tomorrow night. The wife was her last night but the husband hasn’t been. We haven’t done anything either them in a year.
    We will have shrimp cocktail, west indies salad, Cornish hen, wild rice, green beans and rolls. In typing this I real I ze I forgot dessert. Ugh

    Liked by 2 people

  67. I feel like I am Chas. I finally figured out whata to do to get my picture back.
    ignore the bum a key on this new, refurbished, computer

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  68. Roscuro, if I remember correctly (I might not) one of the countries with far less dementia was Japan, and it wasn’t a culture with poor medical care (and thus people dying before reaching typical dementia age). I do know there is strong evidence that people who exercise their minds more are hurt less by dementia. One remarkable case I read about, a chess master toward the end of his life was only able to work seven moves ahead instead of twelve as he’d been able to as a younger man (or something like that) . . . and after his death an autopsy showed his brain so twisted with Alzheimer’s he should have been unable to communicate. But his brain had received so much exercise through the years that he kept it agile enough to cope with Alzheimer’s. In contrast, men and women who sit in front of soap operas for hours a day can succumb fully. That doesn’t mean that anyone who goes deep into Alzheimer’s is stupid, just that there is evidence the effects can be counteracted by the right use of the mind.

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  70. Yeah! Just finished writing chapter 18 and now, 15 hours after I first sat at this computer, I’m going to the movies! Live, Animated starts in 28 minutes.

    Only two more chapters to go. Gratifying and thanks be to God!

    Liked by 1 person

  71. Rk – so sorry about your dog – hard to lose a friend and companion like that.

    I have been in/on canoes, kayaks, speedboats, wake boats, large ocean ferries, smaller lake ferries, even smaller river ferries. I like canoeing and kayaking best – but not on whitewater.

    Today I sent out an email to the wrong 742 people instead of the correct 71 people. Ugh. So many panicked parents thinking they had registered their child for the wrong camp. 😦

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