63 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-30-16”

  3. Good morning, Chas.
    We have to leave for the airport at ten. I’m hoping my tooth doesn’t hurt a lot on the flight…it has calmed down a little–but still is unpleasant….
    Looking forward to being home so I can deal with my various ailments. I will miss the weather here–truly is a beautiful part of the country.

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  5. I slept in this morning. I was so tired last night. I had men come take care of the hedges and do the weed earing for me. They will be back next week to finish. I mowed the grass.
    I had gone to the grocery store during all of this and when I got back home Mr P was using the electric edger. I asked him just what he thought he was doing. Six weeks! He has 4 more weeks to let his back heal. He shouldn’t be doing any of this! The older man scolded me a little. He had broken his neck playing high school football. He told me to let Mr P do something. So I shut my mouth and mowed.

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  6. Kim- It’s hard to keep some men down. My FIL had surgery and was up and doing farm chores long before the doctor said he should. He had no desire to sit in the recliner when there was work to do.

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  12. Good morning. Beautiful header! Makes me long for California again. I haven’t been there since 1977.

    My husband has a hard time resting, too, Kim. He was cleaning out an under-stairs closet with heavy items right after he got home from getting all his wisdom teeth pulled.

    Although I will say he did do pretty well with accepting the restrictions placed on him after his hernia surgery this year. That had caused the most pain he’d ever experienced in his life, so it acted as a powerful deterrent.

    3rd Arrow, 5th Arrow and I went to a concert last night and enjoyed it very much. My friend’s daughter and the guy who is co-founder and co-director of their group with her, the New Mexico Contemporary Ensemble, are on a brief Midwestern tour, and they played very new pieces in the contemporary classical genre, all of them composed in the 21st century except for one piece from 1996. Definitely avant garde, which takes a little getting used to, but except for one piece that was a bit too shrill for my tastes, it all was quite interesting, and ultimately quite pleasing, IMO (and in my daughter’s and son’s opinions, too).

    C (former piano student) & D (her business partner) hire various musicians for work in the ensemble when they are needed, so the group’s personnel is constantly changing to reflect the instrumental needs for their performances. This Midwestern tour it’s just the two of them. D played trombone last night, and C piano, clarinet and bass clarinet. Sometimes she also does accordion, and I know she plays bassoon, as well, though I’m not sure if she does as part of this ensemble.

    Sunday afternoon they’re playing at a church in this area a program of Renaissance and Baroque music, with D on sackbut and C accompanying on organ. I want to try to get to that performance, too, but we’ll see. Never know how the days will unfold, especially lately, it seems!

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  13. Is it me or do those trees appear to be bending backwards so they won’t meet the same fate as the trees below?!! “Tis beautiful out there Donna!!
    The air is crisp this morning and I have the windows opened….fall cannot be to awfully far off can it?
    It’s a good morning to listen to George Jones…husband went outside..he says he will have those songs stuck in his head all day long 🙂

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  14. Some of us had chores to do, Chas,

    I am in no hurry for summer to end as I have many vegetables still marching through their seasons. And I love the Fall. And Winter. And Spring. And Summer.

    Speaking of dementia, my dad had five brothers and one sister. All were active physically and mentally, none smoked or drank. The five brothers all developed dementia, four have died from it. They were all teachers and very interested in learning new things. But I do believe that exercising our brains is as important as exercising our bodies.

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  15. I think some folk need to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Uncle Tom is not what they seem to think he is. If everybody was an Uncle Tom, our world would be an amazingly beautiful place. The care and compassion, the dedication to his fellow man, the understanding of those who mess up, the confidence to do what was before him, the strength to help others in time of trouble. Amazing.

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  16. The photo, a single quickie, was taken with my phone while I was out on assignment one day last week (covering a controversial public art installation in our bluff-top park that also happened to be crowded with Pokemon players that day).

    I love the views from the low, perimeter wall that goes all around the ocean-side of that park (it’s distinctive star cutout pattern also is distinctive and easily spotted in movies & TV shows). You really can stand there and just peacefully stare forever on some days.

    On one end there also are ‘ruins’ from a landslide that took place in the early 1900s — a whole neighborhood with streets, Red Car tracks and other infrastructure went tumbling an, now known as Sunken City, it remains in place, a jumble of concrete slabs now covered in graffiti and an enormously (if legally forbidden) popular place for trespassing among young people & movie folk looking for an interesting place to shoot apocalyptic, end-of-the-world scenes.

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  17. And I see I’m repeating words this morning, I am still just spacey ad groggy — honestly, I really could go back to bed and sleep some more, but I have way too much to do today. Besides, I must have slept for at least 9 hours last night (after not sleeping much at all the night before).

    Now the cat is walking all over me, her breakfast is late.

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  18. Lots to do here, too. Got behind on ordinary things with all the extra running around on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday with infrequent events and occurrences that all happened at once.

    Time to get started. Ready, set, blast off!

    (Yeah, right. How I wish I had that kind of energy.) 😉

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  19. Lovely photo, Donna!

    My phone is about out of power, and I have lots to do, anyways. Just wanted to check in and say, “Hey, y’all!” I don’t really talk like that, but just trying to keep up my Southern image.

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  20. Yes, you don’t want to be accused of being a “Yankee.”

    So I’ve gotten a lot done in only about an hour, I think I’m off to a good start. Loading up some things in the Jeep to drop off at the hazardous waste site (broken lamp, 2 old fans, old power cords, batteries …). Go-go-go

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  21. A colony of feral cats lives out there in those bushes in the photo, by the way, sometimes you’ll catch a glimpse of one. Cat ladies come to feed them.

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  22. Oh what I would give for some George Jones. I loathe Rush bit my husband thinks I just haven’t learned to appreciate them. He is trying God love him. I think I shall go blow grass clippings off the patio.

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  23. Nancy mentioned the trees leaning.
    If you visit the outer banks of NC you will see the trees seriously bent away from the sea. the wind constantly bends them away.

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  24. Michelle, I assume from your mention of the movie on another thread that you have read Life: Animated, the book? I transferred it to my amazon wish list last Christmas (we usually give each other lists, but this year I just moved several things from my “save for later” to a “wish list” so that family could choose from a range of prices and get me what they wanted). It sounds like an interesting story, but I hadn’t gotten around to buying it, nobody bought if for me, and I haven’t ordered it myself. If you think it’s “great,” I may go ahead and get it this fall.

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  25. So, speaking of bees. Once again we have an amazing amount of berries and fruit coming along. And every day, when I stop, I can hear the hum of pollinators. Not just honey bees, but several other types of pollinator bees and flies. It occurred to me, as I was mowing the lawn, that my lawn is not something most folks would admire. As mentioned, lots of interesting things grow in my yard that would be banned in a lot of folk’s lawns. Today, there was a sweet smell wafting on the breeze and everywhere I looked, bees were busy. They were working on the plantain which is flowering. I try to cut part of the lawn, leaving others up for the pollinators. I work my way along, giving them time to relocate to the sections coming into flower. Large patches of clover also have pollinators working. And teeny pinks, and tall chicory. Perhaps I have so many bees, though I am smack dab in the middle of pesticide and herbicide country, is because I don’t use them and allow lots of interesting weeds to flourish. The thistles are flowering. Now, I don’t let the whole place turn into a thistle patch but do leave a couple of areas with them, and with teasel. Plants the goldfinches like as well as the bees. I am not fond of lush pretty green grass lawns as they seem so dead of other life to me. Just my perspective of course.

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  26. Some men can ignore the doctor’s admonitions to take it easy, & will be fine. But some end up doing more damage to themselves.

    I think some men might think my husband is a wimp, because he is very cautious about how he does things, very cautious about safety & his own health. But the reason he is that way is that he wants to be able to continue working hard to provide for his family, & he knows an injury will prevent that. He may be cautious in all those ways, but he also works through colds & other maladies. I don’t remember the last time he took a sick day, & even that one (probably ten or more years ago) was rare.

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  27. Sometime around mid-autumn, L starts preparing for winter snows – placing buckets of sand & salt, & the shovels, on the porches, near the front & back doors, & whatever else he does for that. Some guy laughed at him once for doing it so early, but then one recent year we had an unexpectedly early snowfall, & he was ready for it. 🙂

    On another matter: Found out the other day that YF has recently found some employment. I think she may be working for the town in which she lives, & I suspect it is part-time (which is better than no-time). She is driving again, too.

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  29. Glad YF is working 🙂

    I think Chas is right, the trees are bent due to the strong winds that come in off the ocean. It’s almost always nice and cool out there (and very cold at night).

    It’s pretty oppressively humid (for us) here today — we’ve been getting these hot/humid spells that hang around for what seems like forever in the past couple summers. At least the midwest gets summer rain, we get nuthin’. It’s just miserable. I was doing some work outside and had to stop.

    I also was looking over the grass seed options when I was at Home Depot, there seem to be some new drought variety options available — but too hot right now to deal with it maybe in the fall.

    Ran into a community member while I was there so we talked for quite a while about local news & what was going on with downtown development, coyotes, the homeless, efforts to get another dog park or beach established in town (which is how I initially crossed paths with him for a story I was doing a few years ago) — met his partner for the first time today (gay couple), though I know him via FB, of course. They also have a 1920s house (and dogs), they were buying flowers.

    I remember buying and planting flowers.

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  30. Cheryl–I have a number of friends with children on the autism spectrum and I went out of my way to pick up the book at the library as soon as it came out. I read a fascinating article online 2 1/2 years ago–can’t remember where–and was intrigued by the way these clever and talented parents found a way to break through to their son. As soon as I finished it, I took it to a friend to read and she’s passed it around–or maybe bought her own book by this point–to encourage parents to not give up.

    I recommend the book. The movie was a documentary mixing family movies, current interviews, animation, and Disney clips. The animation was interesting–ink drawings and watercolors of a story the “hero” Owen created himself to cope with the challenges he faced. I enjoyed the movie and am glad I saw it, but as my husband–who barely remembered me reading the article out loud to him as we waited in a line to cross back into the US from Canada–observed, it was hollow, particularly in the spiritual sense I look for in a story.

    I’d still recommend seeing it for insight into the autism spectrum and how one family dealt with it.

    In the book, Ron Suskind (the father and producer of the film; he is a Wall Street Journal reporter) observed that his family was able to pay the extremely high costs of raising this child because of their skills, social connections and hard work. I thought of that several times over the course of this film. Owen was raised with a literal team of professionals who, starting when he was three years old, monitored everything in his life to encourage and give him every possible opportunity.

    It would be prohibitively expensive for an average family to pull that off, even if they had the sophistication to be able to do the research and be willing to go toe to toe with the professionals, confident in their own ability to know and understand their child best.

    Parents like that always impress me, and make me thankful I did not have to become such a parent for the sake of a disabled child.

    To that end, sometimes I wonder if reading a book like this one, seeing a documentary, actually adds to the grief for less accomplished and wealthy parents dealing with similar issues. I don’t know the answer. We’re all made in the imago dei–but how does that play in the extremes some people have to go to to provide their child with a meaningful life?

    Interesting things to ponder and worth discussing, both as a church reaching out to minister and as a society which is increasingly seeing children growing into adults with the autism spectrum as part of their lives.

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  31. Michelle, when I was in college, I found a book on the library shelves called Sonrise, written about another father whose son had autism. They also used intensive therapy and saw a measure of success. Both accounts show the parents learning to communicate to their autistic child by entering that child’s world. That is probably the most valuable lesson that can be learned from such stories, that the autistic child is thinking and trying to communicate, if we only take the time to listen to them. I think the high speed world we live in is incredibly detrimental to understanding the disabled. We find the language that was formerly used to described the mentally disabled offensive, but if we look at the literature of those times,the writers value the contribution such characters make to the world around them. In Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, a disabled man witnesses a vital piece of evidence, though he can barely communicate it (his speech pattern and content would indicate that Sayers had observed people who were what we now call autistic); Mr. Dick, mentally disabled in adulthood by a severe illness, is one of the heroes of David Copperfield – the world of literature is populated by wise idiots and sage naturals.

    A slower paced community life has more tolerance to those with weak minds. In West Africa, I saw not only visibly disabled people with conditions such as Downs, but also those who appeared normal but their actions and speech made them eccentric. I remember going to another village. It was even more traditional than the village I lived in, and the men wore the long shirts and closely trimmed hair typical of that culture, except for one. His graying hair and beard were long and unkempt, and he wore a threadbare, crumpled, three piece suit of black with an equally crumped white dress shirt. We were eating, as it was a celebration, and he had wandered over to see what was happening. When he saw our food, he told our host that he was hungry too and was given a bowl to eat by himself. That is usually when I saw the mentally disabled, at a celebration, often dancing to the drums. Nobody would drive them away or seemed uncomfortable with their exuberance. They were a part of the fabric of village life.

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  32. Donna – We usually have pretty high humidity out here in New England, too. But it hasn’t been too humid this summer, except for a few days. Then again, along with that comes the moderate drought we are in. (I don’t know if the two are actually related, but they are at least correlated this summer.)

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  33. Thanks, Michelle. You may be the one who posted the link I saw way back then. It fascinated me, too, but I didn’t buy it at that time.

    I own two books written by authors who brought their children out of autism; I hold onto them in case I ever know someone who needs to do such work. On my husband’s late wife’s side of the family is a family of three children (young adults); the oldest two are severely disabled with autism and I have never met them. After the third was born, her parents realized she was descending into it, too, and they rescued her. She is now in college, about to start a practicum working with the disabled. I chatted with her at the family reunion last weekend; she’s a bright, healthy young woman. My sister also has two children who she feared were heading that way, and she made them do such things as make eye contact. How serious the danger was in their case I don’t know, but one son is still a loner and I can see him pulling inward if given a chance. And we had two families in my last church who had such children–so I’ve seen enough to have a personal connection and to care, and I also find people’s life stories interesting. (And I read the autobiography of one, was it Temple Gradin or something like that [Grandin, so I was close], quite a number of years ago.)

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  34. Donna, everyone keeps referring to the header photo as “trees.” Am I correct that they are not trees but blooms, of agave or the like (the spiky plants at the bottom)? Basically some blooms have finished and fallen over, but those aren’t fallen trees?

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  37. Cheryl, I have no idea. I just take the pictures. 🙂

    Karen, I saw your FB post the other day about water conservation in your area so I figured you were sharing a little bit of our pain.

    It’s almost 9 p.m. and 72 degrees — with the humidity at 78%. Ugh.

    I just walked the dogs and was drenched by the time I got home. It’s raining in our desert and mountains, but not at the coast.

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  38. The bush kind of in the foreground is plumbago which I love and was tempted to plant once — until I read that it’s extremely invasive and sticky, so it will be all over you and your pets.

    But I love the colors of the light (cornflower) blue flowers contrasted against the plant’s dark green leaves.

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  40. I guess I started it by calling them trees – I’ve been watching shows about New Zealand and Australia coasts and they have cool trees sort of like those. I still love them! So unique.

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  42. They’re spindly, so probably are outgrowths of something else rather than trees per se.

    I had strawberries and yogurt for lunch/dinner yesterday.

    It’s only 73 degrees so far today (going up to 77) — but our humidity is already/still at 76% which makes it feel so much hotter.

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  44. I am off to see what Jason Bourne has been up to.

    Dinner last night was good. We all had a nice time. Well as nice as you can have with two opinionated liberals who won’t let anyone else get a word in edgewise. 😉
    Mr P had an ally last night

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  45. Pkease say a prayer for BG. She was just in a fender bender. She is ok but she can’t catch a break. Her Daddy is on his way. I told him to stay calm and nut yell.

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  47. Our nineteen year old daughter got stopped for speeding. Again. And again, she got off. He asked where she was headed (in Canada), He knew the place and knew she had another five or more hours of driving. Asked her how long it would take her, she told him and told him it could be less if she went faster. He laughed and let her off.

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  48. And I just booted fourteen year old boy out to the hunting mansion. He can live there comfortably and he and I don’t need to interact.

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  50. Is this the mansion in your yard? or somewhere else?
    My tiredness caught up with me this weekend. I was too tired to do much of anything after school and four nights out last week.
    Now it is Monday morning and off to work.
    But…. I have my car aand computer.
    We are ignoring any mistakes the a key mkes.

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  52. In our Q&A session after church today, our pastor made reference to this statement of Hillary Clinton’s (in which she was speaking about abortion, as it relates to women’s rights in her mind):

    “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will,” she explained. “And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed. …”

    Interesting days ahead for the church.

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  54. The hunting mansion is in the yard. The other boys all got to live out there and he has been asking to. I just decided, since he continues to go against our stated wishes, he can move out there and be somewhat independent. Actually, it was husband’s idea.

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  55. Pastor Billy really blessed me this morning before church started. He told me (& L, too) that he thinks we are great grandparents. Then he laughed & clarified that we are grandparents who are great, not great-grandparents. 🙂

    I told him that I look at taking care of Little Guy as both a privilege & a responsibility from God. That touched him.

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  58. I have checked on my Girl. I also managed to see Jason Bourne. It wasn’t the best movie in the series but it sets up for the next one. Will he or won’t he. It was worth the price of admission. I will probably also pay to see the next one.

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  62. Happy Birthday Elizabeth – Cats!

    I saw Matt Damon in The Martian on TV this weekend, which was a pretty good movie. I’ve not really followed the Bourne series but I see the first one is one tonight, maybe I’ll try it.

    Karen, glad Heidi is OK! That’s something a puppy would do

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  63. Not the first Bourne film, rather it’s the most recent one — 2012 — (before the current one that’s in the theaters now).

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