59 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-1-16”

  4. Oh, that is early to babysit. Is he quiet in the mornings?
    Morning Chas. I’d best get off the blog now or Chas will know how late I’ve been up. 🙂
    Walked for another hour up and down these hills tonight.

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  6. Jo – Sometimes he’s pretty quiet, & may even fall asleep on the couch (not often enough, though 🙂 ). He is at least more low-key for a while, which helps.

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  8. Lizzie, instead of getting him up and shifting him downstairs to you, have you considered going into their apartment and climbing into Nightingale’s bed, thus not waking him at all?

    Just a thought.

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  9. I read Kim’s article on wine and sleep and realized I had (unusually) had a glass of wine with dinner three nights in a row, so didn’t even touch it last night. Exhausted, I fell into bed and slept two four hour shifts in a row– the most consistent sleep I’ve had in a long time.

    No loss on not having a sip of wine. This will be my new normal until proved otherwise.

    I have to work everyday at my part time job next week so I have to finish off all the book stuff today.

    That will be good, but like any mom of a high school senior, I’m having trouble releasing– and the manuscript isn’t going anywhere until after Thanksgiving!

    I now have an estimate on how much each photo license will cost, which is making me very careful about how many to use. It’s made me a tad bit nervous about the permissions, but I was paid enough to cover all these costs.

    My husband sensibly reminds me, “whatever it costs for the good of the book.”

    Maybe I should have him look at the price and not tell me?

    Yeah, right. 🙂

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  10. I’m bathroom window shopping today, I’ve been underwhelmed and disappointed by the “help” available at the two big box stores when I’ve tried to find these things there.

    So I will go to a door-window place that’s probably more expensive — but it should, at least, offer some knowledgeable assistance. Not planning to buy today, but I need some ideas from people who know about bathroom windows and how best to blend one with the overall (1920s) style I’m aiming for.

    I also want to at least take a peak into the boxes in my living room that hold the sink (in 2 parts) and the medicine cabinet, make sure everything’s intact and nothing was broken in shipping. If I can, I may carry the top of the pedestal sink into the bathroom to get a better idea what the size will look like. I bought the smaller one to be safe, though I wish the larger model would work (but I think it would be too big/wide at the top — this smaller sink should give me a pretty good idea if that would be the case, it may look/be larger than I think).

    On top of that, I have plenty of house picking up to do, maybe I can also quickly clean out a closet or two. The place looks like it’s been tipped upside down.

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  12. Good afternoon. The weather is perfect here.

    Michelle, did you see the tagline discussion on yesterday’s thread?

    Yesterday was a long day. I was up at 5 a.m. and at midnight Art and I were at the Atlanta airport picking up our son. He has an event to attend a couple of hours from here today. At least we got to have breakfast with him. Sure glad he got to see Art feeling well after surgery. I had to miss my writer’s group and a prayer group gathering this morning.

    We had a late night discussion with our son about the foreign films we have been watching. Surprisingly, he was familiar with many of them and was a bit impressed with our choices (soley a factor of the process of elimination since I only get the PG movies from what I find available at the library). The discussiom began when he saw a movie we plan to watch and recognized the director’s name. It is nice to have shared interests with our son. I never had as many things in common with my family of origin.

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  13. I the process of car buying. We test drove a car today. We are home now for Mr P to go through all the USAA stuff. We are supposed to go back to the dealership with information…I don’t know I have never bought a car this way. Anyway my stomach hurts. The Xterra and I may be together another 10 years at this rate.

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  14. Donna, I was going to recommend you open all the cartons if you hadn’t already.

    When I bought my house in Nashville, the previous owners had done some really dumb things (electrical mistakes were probably the worst of those, and they alone were numerous; duct tape on a leak under the kitchen faucet, and many more). They had taken the room that was the master bedroom, moved the wall over to make the kitchen wider and that room smaller, and turned the bedroom into a bathroom. They had also boarded up the window and built a shed outside it. The shed was so badly rotten that I had guys tear it down, and when we removed the bathroom wallpaper (which was actually shelf paper), voila there was a board where the window should be.

    Only . . . the window in a master bedroom is naturally going to be larger than a window in a bathroom, and I was left with a real dilemma of how to put in a window that filled in that space and let in light, but also kept the bathroom private.

    I finally settled on something that is often used in Chicago, plate block windows, and I got it made with a panel in the middle that could be opened. I got it custom-made, a diamond-pattern design, and it was the very largest they made, and shipped in two pieces since it was so heavy. I had the men who were going to install it meet me at the store the day it shipped in so that I would not have to carry it or risk breaking it. We got it home, unwrapped it, and found to my dismay that instead of a diamond pattern, they had sent clear glass blocks. I had already eliminated the option of using clear glass with a curtain over it. The men wanted me to keep it, but I insisted a huge clear glass window would not work in a bathroom. We sent it back.

    A week or two later, I got another call that it was in. This time we unwrapped it in the store–and one of the individual window blocks was smashed to bits. Another reject.

    Finally it came. The men installed the bottom piece, covered the top in silicone and installed the upper piece. There was some reason they couldn’t finish it that day, but one man was going to come back in a couple of weeks and finish it off.

    I was working part-time for my next-door neighbors at that point, in their home office. The day the guy from church came back to finish up the window, I was next door for an hour or two and my sister was at my house, since she had come to help me shop for furniture. She called me at work. “That big crash you just heard was your bathroom window breaking.” “Very funny.” “No, I’m serious–he accidentally hit one of the blocks with his hammer.”

    I rushed back home, and sure enough, this window that had caused much distress and planning, hundreds of dollars, and three attempts to get it right, it was finally in place, but it was broken!

    My friend ran around to hardware stores and managed to buy one individual glass block, cut out the broken one, and fit the new one in place. It worked, and no one would ever know in looking at it. But I wouldn’t want to have to go through that process again!

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  16. Michelle – He wakes up while she is getting ready for work. The good thing is that he rarely cries anymore when she leaves. (For a while, after that incident with his dad, he would cry a lot when she had to leave.)

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  17. I hate shopping. Our new house has odd sized windows (84″ wide by 36″ tall). All the curtains in the stores are 63″ or 84″ tall. I wonder if we could turn them sideways? Oh well. Time to go online to look.

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  18. Peter – I have seen tips from interior designers that show curtains hung well-above the top of the windows. Having curtains longer than the windows is also done. (I would prefer the latter over the former.)

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  19. Janice–No time to think today about the taglines, I’m saying thank you and have copied everything into a document for later consideration.

    Just got an email from a relative of one of my minor characters who has letters, inscribed first editions and possibly some photos from Biddy. In the nick of time, but he needs to hunt a little more. Thanked me for nagging him!

    He won’t need long pages detailing all the quotes for permission, so I gave him until mid-November to clean his attic. I hope he’s fast, but he told me to keep contacting him! LOL!

    I’ve had a fun day so far!

    Stopped at an estate sale while walking home from the library. For $102, I bought five white corning wear microwave dishes, a lidded pot, a quilt rack and a nearly new Lazy Boy swivel rocker. The recliner cost $25–it’s twin (other than the fabric) in my little family nook, cost $475.

    At the present time, it’s in the guest room where Stargazer and the cat are enjoying it! Score!

    USAA has helped us select cars several times–by telling me the difference in cost to insure between two choices and their experience working with the models. I used Costco to buy my last car (Stargazer asked, “wow, how many cars do you have to buy from Costco–do they come two in a pack?”), and it was an easy, efficient and straight-forward experience. I’d do it again if I ever bought a new car.

    My eldest son went with USAA and with happy with their purchase power, too.

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  20. the window place is closed on Saturdays unless you’ve made an “appointment.” Which tells me how expensive they probably are 🙂 I may try to scoot over there on a work day, it’s sorta close to the office and they have regular weekday hours.

    So, I decided to take another spin through Home Depot. Same horrible experience with assistance, I’m afraid.

    I wound up looking at sliding patio doors (which I’d also like to upgrade from my old aluminum model that doesn’t lock from the outside effectively).

    Of course I went straight for the top model, Anderson, a beautiful grid model.

    Anyway, just a lot of frustration dealing with the clerk, it was like pulling teeth getting information out of him. And I had asked about ordering a pet door built into one of these doors — he said can’t be done, you have to order the separate panel. I already have that, I told him, and was hoping to get around it as it really limits how much you can slide open the door.

    So he takes me to his work desk and proceeds to show me pictures of the dog door panel. I know, I said, I have one …

    He said it’s better then to get one in the wall, but added that all the workers and contractors now are seriously backed up because of the coming holidays, so good luck finding anyone to do anything, he said. Great.

    A thoroughly frustrating day.

    But I do have very good taste in sliding patio doors. 🙂

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  21. Before going to the window door department, a clerk suggested I talk with one of their designers about bathtubs. The desk was empty. I stood there for maybe 10 minutes, no one ever came (this happened at Lowe’s a few weeks ago, too). So I gave up

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  22. USA did make it easy. It’s a Volvo T 5 convertible. It isn’t a manual transmission like I wanted and it is white. It is a 2 door car with a back seat. That made the difference to Mr P. The interior is large enough to be comfortable for him.
    There was some sadness in giving up the Xterra. Amos chewed a corner of the center console when he was a puppy I bought it because my dad had had knee replacement surgery and it was easier for him to get in and out. I took him to the hospital init. It was around for most of BG s school career.
    I like my new to me car.

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  23. I loved my Volvo wagon. I mourned when my kids’ knees outgrew the backseat and we went to a van. My husband promised a “new” one (we bought our one and only with 69K miles on it and drove it 100k more without any trouble) when the kids were gone, but the backseat of a 2006 wagon model was too small for my family’s feet to fit comfortably!

    I don’t get it–the Swedish are tall–so I went with a Honda with far more room in the back and higher off the ground. Should I replace the Honda CRV, I’ll just buy another one. I’ve loved this car, too.

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  25. I always cry when I sell or turn an old car in, I tend to keep mine for many years so they really do wind up representing entire ‘eras’ of your life

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  26. Those who have seen my facebook page know that I once had a convertible. An eighty three Mustang. Fun! But it went the way of my Facebook page only more so as we traded it for work on the deck.

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  29. Medicine cabinet is adorable, but seems small to me, of course (because the one former owners put in is gigantic and it’s solid, ALL mirror on the front, no cabinet trim showing, so it’s quite ugly — this one as beautiful trim and molding, but the mirror, inset into the cabinet door, as a result, seems tiny). I will miss the depth also – old one was 6 inches deep into the wall, this one is only 3 inches — and smaller, of course, besides, so it will be a lot less cabinet space overall.

    The thing is, whoever redid this bathroom in the 50s-60s used furnishings that were WAY too big for the space. The vanity, the medicine cabinet, even the window — all oversized, which makes everything look & feel even more cramped and crammed together.

    I think going with the smaller medicine cabinet (it came in a larger size, but that would have been as wide as the current one, going all the way to the tub/shower space) and smallish pedestal sink will do a lot to make it feel and look more balanced. But there will be challenges.

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  30. Mail just arrived, looks like our health care plans are getting a shakeup this year at work, they’re offering “Health Savings Account” plans (gold silver or bronze tiers) for both Anthem & Kaiser rather than the plans we’ve had in the past. Sounds confusing, also probably more out of pocket for us, but I’m not sure.

    But it never really gets less expensive, so I think my ‘more out of pocket’ guess is probably going to be pretty accurate. 🙂

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  32. I drive cars until they fall apart. My ’01 Malibu is still going strong with over 297,000 miles on it, so I’ll keep it a little longer. At least until it gets to 300,000. I bought it at 94,000, so most of the miles are mine and my daughters’. I guess my son drove it while he lived with us and didn’t have a car of his own. Yeah, it has some sentimental value now.

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  34. Peter, you don’t know falling apart until you see the cars in Ukarumpa. We just keep driving them. Some are pretty funny. Some folks get new ones, or mostly new from Japan. But then there are the ones like mine that have been here a loooonnnng time. I am so proud of this car cause it will go up the hills with ease s it is all wheel drive. My van I had to plan my route carefully as there were several hills it could not make it up. I think that the van was 12 passenger, so as old as it was, it still cost more to register because they go by seating. This station wagon is a lot cheaper to register and gets much better mileage. I only fill up every other month.

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  35. Michelle, it’s interesting to think it’s only been five years since that first book–it seems I’ve been thinking of you as a fellow author “forever.”

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  38. We were up at 5 a.m. to get son to the airport by 6 a.m. I learned it is possible for him to shower in 10 minutes! Good thing he does not shave.

    I went back to bed so no church this a.m. Miss Bosley thinks that’s great since she got in her morning snuggles when she thought she’d lost out.

    Son got in around 1 a.m. from Chattanooga where he had been to a reception for a newly wed couple. Son is running on very little sleep. Maybe someone will wake him when it is time to get off the plane♡

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  39. Yesterday I wrote out a long and detailed prayer over on the prayer thread that covered a bunch of you on current requests and past happenings such as Cheryl’s loss of Misten. Near the ending of the prayer my tablet lost power and just like that my prayer disappeared. But the lesson of that is that our prayers reach God that quickly and He can choose to act that quickly or to take all the time He needs to bring all the ingredients together to create the very best outcome that will glorify Him. So I praise Him and rejoice this day because He has given me the gift of faith.♡ I praise Him for the continuing faith of each of the believers here on this wonderful blog site.

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  42. I cleared off another book case this afternoon (though am keeping probably 1/3 of the books). Then I had to do about 15 minutes of work to add something into a story that’s running tomorrow.

    When i first got the text from the council office I just groaned, but it wasn’t as much effort as I thought it might be, considering this is Sunday after all.

    I’m also thinking — since the bathroom project is on hold — that I’ll move forward with getting that back sliding door replaced. That also will require getting a new doggie door punched into the wall next to it, which shouldn’t be a huge deal and will make the back entrance to the house a lot more usable for me.

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  44. Among the books I came across, interestingly, was the apparently prophetic ‘Unriddling Our Times: Reflections on the Gathering Cultural Crisis’ by Os Guinness (1992):

    Events in Washington over the past year alone make it difficult for thinking Christians to deny that there is a crisis of truth in our nation. Character has become unimportant. Personality has taken its place. How can the people of God resist being swept under by the mounting waves of relativism?

    Unriddling Our Times: Reflections on the Gathering Cultural Crisis, edited by Os Guinness, reaches to the heart of the problem by presenting short selections that illustrate the need to listen to the voices of prophets who warn of our impending moral drowning.

    An excerpt from a German novel portrays a brave sixteenth-century Spanish monk who challenges his king.

    An intimate portrait of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn shows how he became a twentieth-century apostle of truth.

    A chilling 1948 short story and contemporary reflections on it point vividly to the danger of amorality facing our nation.

    Anyone concerned about the erosion of truth in our culture will find insight and courage from these prophetic voices from the past.

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  46. Which would have placed it right after the Bill Clinton scandal w/Monica Lewinsky

    But I guess we didn’t heed Guinness’ warning very successfully as a nation, did we?

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  47. Well, my washing machine has added interest to my Sunday. I have been doing a load a day just of Art’s clothes, towel, washcloth, etc. to make sure everything is uber clean and sanitary for his continuing incision healing. Well, the washer stopped running right before the spin cycle leaving the things submerged in their rinse water. I removed and squeezed out the water piece by piece and took them individually to the dryer via outside to the utility room. The mass of water remained in the washer. A bit later I told Art I would make some rice while he got his shower with the uber clean and fresh items. I got out a measuring cup and the bag of rice and since the washer is in the kitchen, I gently plotted the rice bag on it before pouring into the cup. That little gentle pat on the washer started up the spin cycle. All the water is drained now. It all is baffling and illogical to me.

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  48. The moral of my story is, if you need to fix a broken washer, don’t call the repairman, just get out a measuring cup and bag of rice😃

    This afternoon I’ve heard more than the usual noise. A child was yelling out, “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” It was a ways down the street. I have no idea about the who or what but it was distressing.

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  49. No, baseball. Cubs’ 103rd win of the season. Ninth inning, down by two, two outs . . . and they got four runs! They just have to keep the Reds from scoring three in the bottom of the ninth.

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  50. They succeeded. Another Cubs win. Go Cubs!

    When I was living in Chicago, sometime in the 1990s a cheeky ad on the back of the city buses said something like “Remember the Bulls of 1994? Bears of 1982? (or whatever years) Cubs of ’08?” It was kind of an “oops, it has been a while, hasn’t it? Oh well, we love ’em anyway” tease. To see them doing really well is a treat.

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  54. Chas – Cheryl is referring to the old Road Runner cartoons in which Wile E, Coyote kept unsuccessfully trying to kill the Road Runner. Anvils seemed to be a favorite of his. 🙂

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  55. Janice – re: your comment about the prayer that went missing – Often when I am praying, a thought will come into the back of my mind to add something to what I am praying about, or for something else I need to pray about. My memory isn’t so good these days, & I will often forget what that thought was. But I tell God that I know He heard the thought anyway, even if I can’t remember what it was. That is comforting. 🙂

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