37 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-28-16”

  3. Just sitting here relaxing as my neighbor company just went home. To do the dishes tonight or leave them… Interesting conversation. I stay here in Ukarumpa and these other ladies know so much more about PNG than I do.

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  5. Good morning coffee is made and it is about time to let the dogs out. Ahhh Friday. It has been a tough week. There isn’t an Alabama game this weekend so that opens up the possibility of doing something fun tomorrow. Perhaps

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  6. It’s been so long that you likely don’t remember. But last August I was ranting that home warranty schemes are a rip off. They just add another cost to closing and don’t do anything for you, etc.
    I had a plumbing problem and was dealing with them and got no response. That’s why I was saying bad things about them.
    Yesterday, I got a check from Warranty Global Group, Inc. for $275.
    It took me a few seconds to figure out what it was for.
    Just because it takes over two months, doesn’t mean they aren’t going to pay.
    So? I take back what I said and apologize.

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  8. Good morning. Off in an hour or so to frolic in my parents’ basement with my siblings. Wonder if we’ll see any couch cushions to do gymnastics on? 😛

    Have a great one! 🙂

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  9. Disclaimer: I really don’t care about football. Aside from my opinion that it really isn’t fair for the University of Alabama to play against other college teams, I do have a certain amount of admiration for Nick Saban. Oh, it isn’t the god like worship the state has/had for Bear Bryant, but Saban is dedicated, focused, a tactician and it shows.
    I received this email this morning from the CEO of our parent company and a former Alabama football player and Marine.

    “It comes from being a team, because together everyone will accomplish much more”

    “There’s a lot of similarities between what you do, and what we’ve done,” Alabama head coach Nick Saban said on Thursday. He was speaking to an auditorium full of Mercedes-Benz International workers in Vance, Alabama- but his speech wasn’t about making cars.

    It was Mercedes’ annual meeting, where Markus Schafer passed the ‘steering wheel’ over to Jason Hoff as the new President and CEO of the North American Plant.

    Nick Saban is a known Mercedes owner. Like a miniature rite of passage, University of Alabama students notoriously snap pictures of his black benz that sits in the same front reserved spot outside of the Mal Moore Athletic Facility. But like Santa Claus, it seems even if you waited, you never see him arrive or leave.

    But on this day, Saban gave a championship pep talk. And if fans were listening, it wasn’t hard to see how much his words resonated with Alabama’s football season ahead.

    In addition to the governor being there, and the introduction for the new president, a number was revealed that must have grabbed Nick Saban’s perfectionist attention. Workers at the plant had a 99.4% attendance rate. As in 99.4% of the workers at the Alabama plant have never missed a day of work.

    Those of us that aren’t that perfect blushed when the number popped up on the screen. That takes mental dedication and that is what Nick Saban loves most- but he still had a word of caution.

    “Just like the success that we’ve had, I want to say one thing to you. Nick Saban Crystal Ball

    “Why do the mighty fall?”

    If you just got a chill that means you realize we are upon a new season and winning is never permanent or ensured.

    Here is what the leader of the most successful college football program in modern times told people who make their living manufacturing automobiles. But if any Bama fan wanted to hear snippets of what its like in the Alabama locker room, all they had to do was listen. Especially now, as once again, Saban must focus a team that has just won 3 out of 4 national championships and tell them they’re not winning it again unless they forget that historic fact.

    “Everybody says its tough to win the first championship, but it’s much tougher to win the second.”

    Or in this case, the fourth.

    It’s easy for young minds to run wild with the thought of possibility. Especially when the jersey they wear has been synonymous with winning for half a decade. But part of the reason Saban wins, is he knows he not only has to wrangle in the minds of football players ages 17-23, but he also must maintain the expectations of a Crimson Tide nation of all ages.

    “People get satisfied, and as human beings we don’t always have our best days after our best days. We have our best days after our bad days.”

    “When bad things happen, like the tornado we had here a couple yeas ago- the community came together like you couldn’t believe. People helped each other, served each other, had compassion… but sometimes when things are going well, people get more jealous and more selfish and want more, ‘what about me?’, don’t help others, don’t serve others, don’t provide good leadership, and then things don’t work out too well.”

    Not only is the target on Alabama’s back growing bigger in the mind’s of opponents in the SEC and beyond, the mental toughness within the Alabama team gets harder and harder with each win.

    “I think Michael Jordan says it best, ‘No matter how many game winning shots I make, the only one that matters is the next one.’ So that’s the challenge we all have. No matter how many games we’ve won in the past- 61 in the last five years, which is an NCAA record,” Saban adds and pauses to the applause of the crowd. But he puts his hands up to stop them.

    “The only one that matters is the next one.” Nick Saban

    So how do you continue to win? For Nick Saban, it is literally ‘simple’.

    “Have a good game plan, have good preparation, be able to adjust to what happens- all that stuff is important. But it’s really a fool-proof system.”

    Okay, Nick Saban. Then why hasn’t everyone figured out how to win 3 National Championships in 4 years?

    “It comes from number one, being a team,” he said. “Because together everybody will always accomplish more… Because of the individual’s strength of personality, their intensity, their sense of urgency, their discipline to execute and do their job at a high standard. Everybody’s got to buy-in to the principles and values of the organization and the standard that you want it done to.”

    “Cause you know what happens?” He asks the crowd but barely waits for the rhetorical question to set in.

    “You can’t have teamwork if you don’t have that. Because mediocre people don’t like high achievers and high achievers don’t like mediocre people so if you let those two things co-exist on your team it’s never going to work out right. You’re never going to have team chemistry. Everyone’s got to be responsible for their own self-determination and be accountable to do their job. And that’s how everybody can trust and respect each other and that’s how you have success.”

    Oh, well. If it’s that simple.

    “Discipline isn’t something you have or don’t have.”

    Saban’s voice echoed across the large hall as people listened intently.

    “Discipline is something you choose. You choose it. It’s not God given, you do the right thing, the right way, the right time all the time- that’s a choice. It’s a choice for all of us.”

    Who knew that all of us at the Mercedes plant that day would be getting a lesson in football and in life, with the backdrop of a luxury vehicle production line.

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  10. The cartoon with the Russian roulette pistols was most accurate. The Trump pistol had three rounds in the chamber.. Hillary has six. Point is, we don’t know about Trump.. We know Hillary.

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  13. Beautiful photo.

    I love how Michelle is gloating about the rain.

    All week they’ve been saying “we’d” get rain in LA — every day, we all checked the forecast, to see if it was getting bounced or revised.

    Finally, it was set to arrive just before midnight on Thursday. By Friday morning, we’d all wake up to … RAIN.

    Ah, but alas. There was no rain, only clouds. It’s still dry as a stick this morning and the clouds appear to be breaking up.

    They are showing rain for Sunday now in LA.

    Should we even bother to believe it?

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  14. Hmmm, so sorry, DJ. We’re all a bit stunned. We had 2 inches over last weekend and it’s been coming down hard since 3 this morning (don’t ask how I know). We expect 2 more over this weekend, maybe more, and it’s not supposed to stop until Wednesday, then start up again for next weekend.

    The reservoirs this year were at 85% full as of last week, so they’ll be in perhaps too good shape going into the rainy season (which isn’t supposed to start until next week, but no one remembers what our rainy season should be like anymore).

    I suppose it will be feast and famine up here again–too much water and we get flooding along the Russian River.

    I’m just wishing I had planted all the bulbs . . .

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  15. Go ahead, hog all the rain we ever get anymore in this big state. You already stole El Nino from us last year, don’t forget.

    So a handy friend at the dog park — who redid his bathroom (himself) in just the style I’m doing — wrote back with advice on the beadboard & one problem he sees is that the 5-foot line hits just under the very top of the light switch cover/opening. I’d asked the beadboard gal about that on the phone yesterday, she said people figure out how to “cut around it.” But that wouldn’t look ideal, better to have the beadboard land above or below it. But that requires an odd size which I’m guessing will add to the cost. I may just have to live with the ‘cutting around it’ solution.

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  16. Meanwhile, my poor, brown city tree is still sagging …

    But I did figure out who to call about it. LA Conservation Corps told me they, indeed, are supposed to be watering and taking care of these newly planted city trees for 3 years so she promised me she’d dispatch someone out to our block to check out the situation of the dying trees.

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  17. Let me ponder that situation DJ. What is the length of the beadboard to order? Perhaps you just go a couple of inches over the top of the switch all the way around the room? As in 5’2″?

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  18. I will ask about that although I think it will require a special, non-standard cut — which could be more expensive. But I will ask.

    This beadboard is more complicated than I thought it would be, should have been figuring it out sooner I guess. He also said to stick with the craftsman early 20s, straight edges for baseboard & cap — but they offer what they offer so I think the ones we looked at on yesterdays thread are probably the best option. (He did all his own carpentry so made his the way he wanted — he also has an old house, same era as mine, with the clawfoot tub still in place).

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  19. I’ll take a photo the next time we’re at my former home. We cut the beadboard around the electrical outlet and put a typical plate of it–I don’t recall it being difficult at all (but then, I, of course didn’t touch the appliance, the workers did). It looks fine to me, even with the plastic plate.

    You may be overthinking this.

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  20. It may work that way OK — and I have black craftsman light switch plates so it could be fine. I was hoping the vertical boards sat on top of whatever baseboard I chose — that would boost it up a couple inches — but the clerk said the baseboards go on top of the vertical beadboard pieces that begin at the floor.

    OK, I can do this …

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  21. And it must be a very busy business as she has a hard time remembering who I am when I call.

    Don’t worry, honey, you’ll remember me only too well by 7th phone call — by the time I finally get through all my questions and decide I’m ready to order.

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  23. Art and I voted this a.m. I hope that statement is not getting too political. I won’t go into details of the who and why, but it was nice to be at the where. We were at a county recreation center where Wesley took gymnastics during the summer the ladies Olympic team used it as their practice facility. They brought in all new state-of-the-art equipment. Seems I remember the ladies team signed the equipment. It was a fun season to be there, and it’s always fun to go back there.

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  24. Soothing header photo. I once took a similar one when Art and I were waiting outside a funeral home and the weather was misty.

    I have been having another sneezy morning. Maybe all our dry warm weather has airborne allergens creating havoc. We are so dry that I noticed azaleas looked like they were withering yesterday.

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  25. OK, I confess. I stole the photo onto my computer. I didn’t go to the gym. I hope I don’t take this rebellious attitude to work this morning . . . I’ve been good otherwise. Maybe it’s the evil influence of Dracula that I wrote about on my blog this morning . . .

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  26. I love that photo.

    Donna, we have the opposite problem here – they keep promising sun and warmer temperatures and that forecast just keeps getting pushed from day to day while we’re stuck in gloom and rain.

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  28. That photo wasn’t supposed to be quite like that. I was taking a picture of the fall-tinted leaves in the mist, and in flew a flicker to give the photo something bolder and brighter, and life. It was like he was saying, “Hold on, hold on, I’m late but I’m coming!” And then “Should I face this way, or do you want something else?” I ended up having to crop the leaves a bit and show fewer of them to let the focus be where it belonged–on the flicker who pulled it together.

    I took the picture a year or two ago, but held onto it since it was a fall photo.

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  30. Guy: “I need to know how much the land by the bridge sold for”.
    Me: “Can you dial that in a little better?”
    Guy: “In front of the hotel”

    I searched the GIS Map until I found the satellite photo of the two hotels near the Intra Coastal Canal. I got the Property I D Number from GIS. Then I searched a different program for the PPIN numbers and found the sales data. Easy huh? Now do that for 17 properties with that kind of instruction on each. Map them all. Create a package. Put the package in order of the attached spreadsheet with pricing, acreage,price per front feet, sales date, price per acre.

    Now I wonder why my neck hurts and my head is splitting. Oh and my eyes are crossed. It is 3:36pm here and I only changed out of my PJ’s recently. Oh the glamour!!!! It ain’t pretty.

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  33. Well, we didn’t do any gymnastics today, but siblings and I took a great trip down memory lane, going through things in Mom & Dad’s basement. Found a high chair down there from when the now-adult grandchildren were toddlers; old tinker toys my sibs and I played with for years and years; lots and lots of newspapers which Mom wants to keep, so we didn’t bother sorting through them. I did happen to pick up the top half of one of the stacks to pull something out of the middle that I could see sticking out and that wasn’t a newspaper. After removing that item and the papers that were above it, the top newspaper on the newly-shortened stack was the special edition paper that came out the afternoon of 9/11.

    We found some old notes my grandmother (Dad’s mom) had written in 1977, the year that my parents, siblings and I drove out to California on our 2-week vacation. She noted that my other grandma was very worried when we missed our nightly phone call to her one time along the route. We’d gotten so busy and simply forgot until it was too late at night to call. (Or so we thought. But we could have called, had we known that she hardly slept the whole night, hearing that there were wild fires in California, and thinking that something awful had happened to us with those. No cell phones in those days, and she wouldn’t have known which motel to call, as we didn’t do any advance reservations — we just stopped driving around 4:00 or so each afternoon and checked in for the night at any motel with a vacancy, and would be on our way early the next morning to however far we got over the next 9- or 10-hour leg of the journey.)

    Lots of old pictures, including some when my dad’s parents were young adults. Grandpa & Grandma were born in 1895 and 1894, respectively. We found a certificate for perfect school attendance awarded to Grandma in 1906. Also, there was an old bible of hers that I remember, held together with three strips of first-aid tape. In another area of the basement was a rolled up scroll of papers, yellowed and brittle, that included her baptismal certificate.

    Saw a framed picture of my brother at about age 8 or so who looked amazingly like my sister’s 10-year-old son does now. They don’t bear a close resemblance anymore, but it’s so neat to see and talk about the “I-never-realized-they-looked-so-much-alike!” phenomenon apparent in so many of the pictures we found.

    We didn’t get through everything, but each of us found some interesting things to take home, some nice memorabilia for Mom & Dad to keep which they had forgotten was there, and several bags and boxes of things to donate to Goodwill.

    Basement cleaning Part 2 will be another time. We made good progress, though, and the day was filled with good humor, camaraderie and great blessing at the reminder of the Christian heritage in which my sibs and my dad grew up.

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  35. The booklet, Jo, is 250 pages long. This ballot is a nightmare! My boss spent 2.5 hours on it; my husband a couple. It made them angry because it so obviously displayed the incompetence and the refusal of the state government to do their jobs. Several of the measures contradicted each other, everything was tricky, nothing was straight forward and I can’t bear to think of what I’m going to have to go through to figure it out.

    Still, you should have received your ballot.

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