112 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 12-17-16”

  1. Good Morning Everyone. I have been up since 3:30 when I had to haul myself out to pick BG up from work. On the way I was listening to a Christmas Traditions station. This song came on and revealed the source of another one of my dad’s saying. I used to think he was somewhat clever to make up various little ditties he sang. Now I know differently, but still appreciate what he left me. In case you are wondering what this song revealed to me, it’s “the egg is in the nog”. Has long been a saying to know whether the eggnog was spiked or not.

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  4. I think I am almost ready for my guests today. All the “public” areas have something Christmassy in them. Mr. P has joined in and has decided we will have a ball game on mute in the living room in case any of the men want to watch. We will have Christmas music playing softly in the background and we have a “corn hole” game. It is pretty much tossing a bean bag in a hole on a slanted piece of board. I should be able to seat 26 people. For the two of you who have been to this house you can just imagine. I borrowed a plastic table and 4 chairs from Leesee. The weather is supposed to be nice so I can open both sets of back doors and people can flow in and out. That will be nice.
    The beef daube needs to be taken out of the refrigerator in a little while so it can slowly warm up over a few hours. I hope enough people show up for the preparations I have made. The only thing left is for someone to go to Wal Mart and get benedryl so I can drug Lulabelle. 😉

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  5. Good morning!

    Kim: I hope you are able to take a nap today! 3:30 is a brutal time to be awake in my opinion.

    Today is Becca’s Nutcracker performance. She is excited! It’s not the traditional Nutcracker–just a bunch of snippets from the show. Her dance studio is owned by a woman who is a strong Christian and believes girls should conduct themselves with decorum. It is so refreshing after our experience at another studio that had her doing pelvic thrusts at age five (we left there rather abruptly)…. And tonight, we are going to my brother’s house to celebrate his wife’s graduation from a master’s program in public health administration. They live about an hour from us–I don’t get to see him as often as I’d like–so I’m really looking forward to it!

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  7. We had snow last night, now it’s sleet, but it should be all rain by lunch time. That’s good because I have a 2 hour drive to pick up my MiL. We’re meeting my BiL in Harrisburg this afternoon. Mom will be staying with us thru Christmas when BiL comes to get her. ‘Liz is really excited to see Grandma, so I hope we don’t have to delay it until tomorrow. We’ll see. .

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  10. Chas,

    I have a keyboard issue this morning too. Gemma keeps climbing on it because she sees my fingers moving and thinks it’s fun to play along.

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  13. I must be doing something different with my mouse or keyboard, because I have noticed I “liked” several of my own posts over the last few days. Quite by accident. It must be the way I’m scrolling down. 😀

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  14. Advent- Day 17: It seems fitting, as the 400th year since the Reformation is being marked, to play a song by Martin Luther. No, Luther did not write “Away in a Manger”. However, he loved Christmas, and in 1534 he wrote ‘Vom Himmel hoch’, sometimes translated as ‘From heaven above to earth I come’. He is also though to have written the tune it is set to, and certainly, the tune does resemble that of ‘A Mighty Fortress’. In 1831, the great German-Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn wrote a cantata on Luther’s Christmas song. This performance is the choral excerpts from the cantata.
    To you this night is born a child
    Of Mary, chosen mother mild;
    This little child, of lowly birth,
    Shall be the joy of all your earth.

    ‘Tis Christ our God who far on high
    Hath heard your sad and bitter cry;
    Himself will your Salvation be,
    Himself from sin will make you free.

    He brings those blessings, long ago
    Prepared by God for all below;
    Henceforth His kingdom open stands
    To you, as to the angel bands.

    These are the tokens ye shall mark,
    The swaddling clothes and manger dark;
    There shall ye find the young child laid,
    By whom the heavens and earth were made.

    Now let us all with gladsome cheer
    Follow the shepherds, and draw near
    To see this wondrous gift of God
    Who hath His only Son bestowed.

    Give heed, my heart, lift up thine eyes!
    Who is it in yon manger lies?
    Who is this child so young and fair?
    The blessed Christ-child lieth there.

    Welcome to earth, Thou noble guest,
    Through whom e’en wicked men are blest!
    Thou com’st to share our misery,
    What can we render, Lord, to Thee!

    Ah, Lord, who hast created all,
    How hast Thou made Thee weak and small,
    That Thou must choose Thy infant bed
    Where ass and ox but lately fed!

    Were earth a thousand times as fair,
    Beset with gold and jewels rare,
    She yet were far too poor to be
    A narrow cradle, Lord, for Thee.

    For velvets soft and silken stuff
    Thou hast but hay and straw so rough,
    Whereon Thou King, so rich and great,
    As ’twere Thy heaven, art throned in state.

    Thus hath it pleased Thee to make plain
    The truth to us poor fools and vain,
    That this world’s honour, wealth and might
    Are nought and worthless in Thy sight.

    Ah! dearest Jesus, Holy Child,
    Make Thee a bed, soft, undefiled,
    Within my heart, that it may be
    A quiet chamber kept for Thee.

    My heart for very joy doth leap,
    My lips no more can silence keep;
    I too must sing with joyful tongue
    That sweetest ancient cradle-song.

    Glory to God in highest heaven,
    Who unto man His Son hath given!
    While angels sing with pious mirth
    A glad New Year to all the earth.

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  15. Good Fridgid Morning!!! -9 with a wind chill of -30 and a good 4 inches of fresh fallen snow…it is so beautiful!! Not looking forward to driving in this tonight though!
    I thought that dog up there was Lulabelle but it is Donna’s photo…just who does that sweet puppy belong to?

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  16. http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/movies/ct-jimmy-stewart-book-mov-1202-20161201-column.html
    “The war had changed Jim down to the molecular level,” Matzen writes in the book. “He could never begin to articulate what those four-and-a-half years, including fifteen months in combat, had done to him. One thing he could do was express a bit of it on-screen.”

    Once he committed to doing his first film as a veteran, Matzen paints a portrait of what it was like on set:

    “Now he was running for his life, Jim Stewart, former squadron commander of the 703rd. ‘Merry Christmas, Bedford Falls!’ he called into the hot air of Encino. ‘Merry Christmas, you old Building and Loan!’ Suddenly, he wanted to be a part of Hollywood where he felt comfortable and safe.”

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  19. It’s a dog park dog. As you’ll see later, he’s looking for something. 🙂

    And look how cold it is there. It’s snowing…… 🙂

    Oh wait…… 🙂

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  20. I thought it was from the dog park, with all of the snow coming down. I have been out and it is cold. I will be going out again to do chores with the small folk.

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  22. It’s not too cold here, but we got snow and freezing rain last night, with more snow to come- only about 1-3 inches though. The cold comes tonight. Tomorrow is supposed to be single digits all day with -20° windchill. Is that as cold as the dog park?

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  23. For a minute I thought it might be Tess at the dog park wearing a warm coat. Then I remembered how fluffy she is . . . We’ve had an enormous moon out here this week, perhaps that dog is baying at it?

    30 this morning. My Navy guy is jogging. I’m drinking coffee and feeling sluggish. Hill joined us late last night and will do odds and ends using our wi-if this morning after she plays disk golf with my kids.

    She heads back to Sicily on Monday and we’ll miss her. Squeezing in all the time we can, but she does have plenty of family who want to sit close to her, too. Today will be our inordinate share unless she needs a ride to the airport Monday morning.

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  24. Dog is Shaq, the great dane (about the size of a pony) that belongs to real estate pal.

    And yes, it is the dog park (as has already been noted, see the snow?? told ya).

    there’s more

    Wait for it …

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  25. 52 in the house this morning (I hate sleeping with the heat on so it goes off and the bedroom window comes open every night, no matter the weather, pretty much).

    Now the heater is ramping up and I’m drinking a cup of coffee, first time in several days — I’m not a regular coffee drinker and have slipped (again) out of the habit since being off work for the past week. At most I have only 1 cup in the morning, sometimes 1-1/2 or maybe 2 on rare occasions.

    Kim’s off and running, I see. That’s a lot of people to keep fed & happy. 🙂 I don’t even know what beef daube is.

    At some point early this morning I heard something crash in the house but I can’t figure out what it was … That just goes to show you the state of my house these days!

    Oh well. I’ll figure it out at some point. Or not.

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  28. You see, California cold is more intense so what would sound mild to us is actually bone chilling. It is all about humidity and dry air and hollywood and such.

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  29. and global warming of course.

    Looks like the dog is waiting intently for his person to throw the ball.
    Or he is throwing a squirrel.

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  30. Looks like it’s a howling good morning in the header!❤ Well, since it is noon, maybe a howling good afternoon?

    I’ve been busy and lost track of time, LOL! I have not yet read the other posts. I will try to catch up later. I found a cute picture on Facebook that I will try to link here. I am sorry that I do not know how to post so all can see it.

    https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=641129122736453&id=100005181132404

    I carried some cooked ground turkey with onions and a can of low sodium been to Karen last night so they can make chili today. It was impromptu as I was cooking for our family while talking to Karen and she said she was hungry for chili. She had the other ingredients on hand. After dropping that off, I stopped and picked up a key lime pie to enjoy with our son. He flies in later today.

    Have a great weekend getting ready for Christmas Day!❤

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  31. I forgot about the housekeeper and had to hurry to go get her. When I walked out to the garage, no cars!

    So, no housekeeper today.

    It’s probably all for the best. The house is in total almost-Donna-type chaos. This just means I have to, oops, get to iron!

    Sun is out. It’s still 30 degree out there. I sent the disk golf kids off with all our gloves, thermal underwear and wool socks. We don’t have a lot of those out here! 🙂

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  34. So, speaking of the sovereignity or however it is spelled, of God, does He care which shoes I wear? If not, why not? If so, why?

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  35. Good morning/afternoon/evening, wanderers! Hope you’re enjoying your day and all its various activities.

    Do you know how this little place in the corner of the worldwide web feeds my creative spirit? I’ll tell you how it did yesterday.

    After I’d finished a lot of the things I wanted to get done yesterday, I sat down at the piano and played one of my pieces that I’d performed two weeks ago, the Huron Carol. It’s a French Canadian song, and I was thinking that Kare had said sometime in the past that she really liked that one.

    Anyway, when I got to the first page turn, I reached up with my right hand, turned the page, then brought my hand back down to the piano to continue playing. However, instead of the right hand coming down on a rolled chord, playing G-B-G after the left hand’s E-B-E, my right hand played F#-B-F#, which yields an entirely different, and magnificent, sound!

    And that majestic sound, with my two thumbs a major second apart just a little above middle C, instead of a minor third (those of you with pianos at home, try it!), immediately brought to mind the majesty of those mountains in Kare’s pictures, and I knew right then and there that a new composition was born. 🙂

    I finished 40 measures last night, and this morning topped it off with an 8-measure coda. I can’t tell you how much the stunning beauty of those pictures inspired me as I worked and completed the piece!

    Let me just say that all of you who are submitting pictures for the header here, and the word pictures I get from all of you who share your life in words at this blog, bless and inspire me more than you will ever know. The works of God are great and glorious, and I thank you all for the beauty you bring to my life by your willingness to share what He is doing in your lives.

    Blessings, friends.

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  37. Though I of course, cannot really try that on my pianos at home. I have them but don’t know how to do what you said and we have never found a piano teacher. Apparently the one around here signs up the grandchildren of her friends, before their parents are born. And the one in Lewiston never got around to teaching.

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  38. I still have not heard if I have been approved for health insurance. Do I look worried?

    I heard they extended the deadline a few days. That must be for the sake of the providers although they make it sound like it is for the popularity of what they are offering to the consumers. Propaganda to the Max.

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  39. 6!! Isn’t God amazing? So glad I could share his creation with you to so inspire you! I hope I can hear your piece one day (or even send me the music and I could attempt to try it).

    I always feel a deep sense of …loss?, sadness? whenever I’ve been in the mountains and I have to leave them. They speak to me of our Creator and even though I have lived right in the midst of them, I never tire of their beauty.

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  40. Well now I can’t wait for your Ode to the Dog Park composition, 6 🙂

    So I’ve been working in the spare room today, I have a plan to (again, I tried this once before then for some reason decided to discard the practice) box all the Christmas stuff up in plastic bins with lids (already on hand) and cart it all out to the garage.

    Meanwhile, I have a bag full of clothes and some more books and knick-knacks for the Salvation Army (and probably a big, emptied-out bookcase, too, if I can haul it out of there) when the time comes.

    I’m sure they have no pickups available now until after the first of the year — but I should probably go online now and get one scheduled.

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  41. DJ. 🙂 Perhaps I should write an Ode to the Dog Park piece for digital keyboard with barking sound effects — I don’t know if I can make my acoustic piano do that. 😉

    Kare, I know what you mean with that feeling of leaving the mountains. I’ve been to the American Rockies two or three times, but no other mountain ranges, and pictures like yours yesterday made me long to see mountains again. It really is hard to leave those places of natural beauty.

    If I can get someone to scan my composition and show me how to attach it to an email (I have no idea how to do either of those things — maybe I could take it to a library and someone could show me there), I’ll send it to you if I could get your email address (from whomever may have it, if you don’t want to post it online).

    Thank you for your encouragement. 🙂

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  43. Family Christmas 2016 is over and done. Mean Aunty E was nice again today. Someone told me she is medicated. One of my other aunts told me that she had said something about how mean she was to me and it wasn’t going to happen again.
    Everyone cleaned up my house before they left so my feet are propped up. Leftovers in the fridge and I am sipping on a glass of wine that didn’t make it into the beef.
    All is well at H House.

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  44. I’ve been sorting through a box of personal history — but random stuff, a couple old wallets, medical card (anyone remember Maxicare?), a picture of me as a little girl, photos I took of my childhood home’s backyard, a photo of me with my mom’s 2 terriers I ‘inherited;’ an old bridal shower announcement for a co-worker, a couple Versatel (??) receipts (what was Versatel exactly? Like the first ATMs?), a “phone card,” a “welcome” brochure from the Quaker church I attended for several years, a cardboard “love” greeting I was going to toss until I saw the signature and date on the back reminding me it was from a special friend back then; a BSF name tag from when I first joined that Bible study …

    Anyway, on it went.

    Wrapping it up soon, though, it’s been a full day of sorting. And things do look (a little) better in that room, but there’s still the closet …

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  46. We have a very icy backyard. It reminded me that if MIsten had made it through the fall, it would have been “time” by now anyway (even if she was not “terminal” by the time winter was due, I’d realized by late summer it wouldn’t be a kindness to make her endure another winter). Even healthy, she’d have had a hard time walking on this, and if she were the shape she was in by last winter (not failing, but old), she couldn’t have begun to deal with it. It makes me glad she doesn’t have to try.

    We got six or eight inches of snow last weekend, none of which has melted yet, and it now has an icy sheen over it. My hubby had salted the walk, so he went out and refilled the bird feeders an hour or two ago, which is good since they were almost completely out of sunflower seed and they don’t all eat suet or thistle seed. We missed church last weekend–the weather was iffy and my husband didn’t feel well, and I didn’t want to tackle it alone–and it looks like it will probably be cancelled this week. Next week is Christmas Day, and we’re supposed to go to church with his parents (probably his dad’s last Christmas), but if the weather continues like this, who knows what will happen. I would really hate to miss church three weeks in a row, and besides it would be nice to follow through and attend with them their first Sunday in a new church building. I guess that is sort of a prayer request, that the weather this coming weekend won’t be a continuation of what we’re having now. 😦

    Also that our daughter, who is working, would get home safely later. She’s working the nursing home this evening, and that isn’t a job that a person can just say, “Oh, sorry, the roads look bad.”

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  48. DJ. Clearly you need me to come to California and help you Throw Away, Give Away,and Put Away. I am brutal.

    I also think it was decided today that th we baton was passed and I can have B Family Christmas again next year.
    They used the excuse of how proud my grandmother would be of me.

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  50. Another exam down, one more to go…
    I slithered home this evening. Thankful for the last few months of lots of walking and learning to keep my balance while riding on the bus. That muscle training helped keep me upright a few times. Those portions of sidewalks that go past driveways have a wicked slope on them when coated with ice.

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  52. Waiting to see what the dogs are looking at. I’m guessing squirrel. Tree-climbing rabbit? Treed cat?

    AJ has enough photos for now, it sounds like, but I have one I’ll send him someday. I had my camera on action mode and was photographing a goldfinch looking for seeds in our spent coneflower. Well, I wasn’t actually taking photos, but was watching for a good shot when another goldfinch came in at the upper left, fortunately within my lens width (rarely does it happen that way!), and I hit the button as the first bird attacked, got a sequence of four or five shots including one that is about the best action bird shot I’ve taken. (I always prefer to take photos with natural settings, not bird feeders.) If I’d been zoomed in a little closer to the first bird, I would have missed it–as I did miss a flicker flying away out of the tree (I got just one beautiful wing, since he flew a different direction than I expected). Birds can offer such explosive action, but it’s nearly always short-lived, and if you aren’t already zoomed in right there, usually it’s the shot you might have gotten . . .

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  54. A long time ago, I had eldest son teach seventh son how to take out and clean the filters on the dishwasher so he could teach me when he got old enough to move out. Somewhere along the line, he forgot and had only been cleaning out one of the filters. So today, we took it apart and I worked on getting the mineral deposits off with the idea if I put it together, I would know how to take it apart. Well, he is gone to do whatever and I was putting it back together when suddenly a mysterious part dropped down into my work area. I have no idea where it came from or where it goes. Guess the project waits…..

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  55. Well. What was I thinking? You remember four year old in glasses who was never really going to learn to speak or sit still for a second? As I knelt into the dishwasher, looking for the place missing a piece, I hear a voice. No, not that kind of voice. Ten year old in glasses who used to be four year old in glasses.

    “Mom? I can help you fix that.”
    “Well, we need to figure out where this piece goes and then put all of these other pieces back together.”
    “I found it. And this goes here. And that goes there. Oops, we need to take it apart and put this in. Now it’s done.”

    “Thanks.”

    And off he goes to spin in the living room.

    Thank You, God, for knowing just which children needed to be here and I needed here.

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  56. The new dog is Honey Bun. 🙂

    K, I’m pretty brutal actually. It’s just something I tend to put off doing so stuff accumulates. Not the most enjoyable job. But I’ve got several bags of give-away things and several throw-away bags now. We’re gettin’ there. I scheduled a Salvation Army pickup for Dec. 30 (I was surprised they had any available appointments before January).

    It was cold again at the dog park (50s), but the wind isn’t blowing today so it didn’t feel nearly as cold as it did late yesterday.

    Now both the workers are coming tomorrow morning (bathroom/tile person + foundation guy, aka, roofer — they’re buddies, live in the same inland community about an hour’s drive from me). But real estate pal is meeting them here along with me, it’s only a consultation on the job, and so I’ll be able to leave when I need to and get to church from the sounds of it.

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  58. The spare room closet still has a lot of boxes of things from my mom’s house clean out — photos (loose), etc. — so it just takes time to sort through it all and figure out where to put what I’m keeping.

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  63. My daughter is back here in California from South Carolina for Christmas break and even though the temperature there is lower, she says she’s much colder here, because it’s cold everywhere you go. The house never stays warm, we went to lunch at El Pollo Loco, and it was freezing there, we did some grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, and, of course, it felt like a refrigerator in there. Nothing is heated sufficiently. The only time you’re warm is in bed with lots of blankets.

    My sister said the same thing when she visited here from Massachusetts one cold winter a few years ago. She said she feels much warmer at home. No kidding!

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  65. Well, I’ve never lived in California, but I grew up in Phoenix, and I can say for sure it is colder in Illinois or Indiana than in Phoenix. See, even though my family teased me about wanting a sweater if it was under 70 (and I literally did often put one on when it was only a degree or two below), I never owned a sweatshirt until I was moving away from Phoenix, and for a good part of my childhood I owned neither a coat nor a long-sleeved shirt.

    Now, pretty much every day from December through March I wear a T-shirt and a sweatshirt or a sweater and two pairs of socks if I’m not wearing slippers or shoes. I’m not inclined to go outside unless I have to for several months of the year. The heat here is nowhere close to a typical Phoenix day; even the hottest day here doesn’t approach the typical day from mid-May to mid-September. In Nashville I experienced days where the temperature and the humidity were both above 80, and I finally realized why people complain about humidity, but we may get one day per summer that I would consider uncomfortable, and even on those days I’ll readily go outside.

    So to some extent you do “acclimate” to where you live (I would not have been able to endure negative wind chills as a teenager–my first experience with twenty degrees was brutal, even with several sweaters layered in lieu of a coat), but 120 really is hotter than 85 and 10 really is colder than 55. Phoenix may not have had that problem with everything being chilly in winter; growing up, my problem was more that everything was chilly in summer, since stores and churches had air conditioning and I wasn’t used to it. So I carried a sweater in summer.

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  66. It is 3 below zero right now…we made it to and from our Christmas gathering…icy icy roads…by the time we drove home the plows had finally made it to our side of the county road…and they even managed to pile up a nice bit of snow in front of our shoveled driveway!! Off to bed for a long winters nap…sweet dreams ya’ll 🙂

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  67. Advent- Day 18: It is time for another version of the Magnificat. This one is by Johann Pachelbel – yes, the one who wrote the famous Canon. It is in Latin but the words of course are Mary’s song in Luke 1, with the addition at the end of a Doxology:
    My soul doth magnify the Lord,
    And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
    For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.
    For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.
    And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
    He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
    He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
    He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
    He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;
    As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.
    “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: as it was in the beginning, both now and forevermore, world without end. Amen.”

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  68. I just went out and found some of the delicate finery from summer (Queen Anne’s lace, that sort of thing) and took photos of the glazing God did on it last night. I don’t know yet if I got anything particularly special. Usually I’m afraid to go out when it’s icy, though I want the photos, but with several inches of snow underneath a thin sheet of ice, it’s fairly easy to walk on, and easy to stay safe when you do. After I warm up a bit, I’m going to try the front yard. 🙂

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  70. Well, anywhere’s colder than Phoenix, right? 🙂

    But when it comes to heat misery, few things can beat that Midwest humidity. Ugh. I’ve never been on the east coast in the summer, only in early (sometimes there was still some snow) spring and winter, but I hear the heat and humidity are pretty bad there as well.

    When I look at the dogs above, my head starts singing “Do you see what I see?” Must be almost Christmas.

    Workers should be here in about another hour to “look” at the bathroom & foundation jobs, so I’m going to get ready for church early so I can scoot out of here to at least get to church. Determined to get there somehow, even if I’m late.

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  72. I note that we have several musicians in our midst.

    We had a guest preacher this morning. (You know that our pastor died suddenly.)
    He preached a good sermon. Toward the end, he started mentioning the “greatest song ever written”. I kept thinking of “Amazing Grace”. But at the end, he said “If you know it, sing along at the top of your voice.” Turned out, the “greatest song ever written” was the Hallelujah Chorus.

    I can’t argue with that. Except:
    I don’t thank of that as a song.
    To me, a song has to have melody and discernible words.
    That is my quarrel with most modern church music, vice traditional.]

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  73. To me, the music they sing at the “standing and clapping service” is not music.
    1. It doesn’t have to rhyme.
    e.g. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
    that saved a wretch like me.
    I once was lost, but mow I’m found,
    Was blind but now I see.”
    2. It doesn’t have melody. That is: No chance you will go around humming while you are piddling around doing stuff.
    3. It has to be led by a guy with a guitar and wearing jeans.
    4. I used to be irritated when the organ drowned out the voices of the multitude of Christians singing God’s praises.
    Now, the drummer does that.

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  76. Guess that was seventy five.

    Anyway, eighteen year old needed to go to Lewiston today. Husband is speculating to pick up other son but we are out of the loop. A vast conspiracy surrounds us. I will wait until I see the whites of his eyes.

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  78. Speaking of harmony.
    Did I mention harmony? Anyhow:
    At the end of Crosby’s song that Kim posted early yesterday, is a chance to hear the King’s Singers. Terrific harmony. Real music. I thing it is a German sextet.
    Not that Crosby isn’t I like hearing Bing sing.

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  79. Peter we so appreciate Paul Washer…..we have watched the Behold Your God series in which he was a part and they are now coming out with another series this coming year….very good studies….
    I’m with Cheryl….when DO we get to see what’s up there…the dogs certainly are interested…and so are we!!!! 😛

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  82. At church today before singing the cantata, I learned the pastor who has lost his mother and the daughter of one of his closest friends in the last week, forget to mention folks should bring cookies to the cookie carol at 3 this afternoon.

    We left our daughter behind to do set up and hurried home to bake cookies in the 90 minutes I have before I have to pick up three Adorables for the day. Hark, in went the Ghirardelli brownies from an easy mix. (My husband, “wow, that was quick.”)

    Then, I saw the unopened two pound box of Sees candy we received yesterday.

    Hark! It’s going to the cookie carol in an hour! 🙂

    So, I’m done–for the moment!

    47 degrees at 1:30; it was 27 when I got up. See? We get cold here, too–though I never go to the dog park.

    Liked by 3 people

  83. I was late, but I got to church. 🙂

    So guy who does tile looked at the bathroom, looked at the tile I bought, seems to know what he’s doing re floating, etc., says he can also dry wall it & has a friend who can handle all the plumbing if we want. He’s supposed to call real estate pal with an estimate. No indication of “when,” though I assume sometime after the holidays, hopefully in early to mid-January sometime. But maybe sooner if he needs the money, who knows.

    Roofer was supposed to come by later (after I left) to check out the foundation issues.

    We sang God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen a cappella this morning which sounded wonderful. 🙂

    Good final sermon and discussion in SS of Rom. 13:1-7 (that passage alone constituted a five-part series for us on our ongoing trek through Romans).

    It’s a crisp, clear, sunny day in LA with the mountains (with snow on the peaks) standing out in full HD relief around us. 🙂 Beautiful.

    Liked by 2 people

  85. Of course it’s a rodent of sorts.

    Chas- though the Hallelujah chorus is not singable for most people, it is one of the greatest choral pieces ever written. I agree that it would do for a congregational song, though.

    Liked by 2 people

  91. That’s uh,……. some Christmas tree there Donna. 🙂

    I’m pretty sure it’s dead. I wouldn’t put any lights on it, it would probably go up in flames. 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

  95. Surprise! Husband came home, he was not stuck in Seattle. He met our Navy man at the airport with the eighteen and a nineteen year old and came home with them! Kind of like old times but better!

    Liked by 9 people

  107. That’s the free tree provided by the city of Los Angeles.

    Taxpayer provided I guess.

    I called and they insisted they’re
    providing all the care and water it needs for 3 years, we need to do nothing.

    I am tempted to hang a red ornament on it.

    All the ones on my block have turned brown.

    Liked by 1 person

  108. Then we received this tonight:

    A SoCalGas® Advisory is now in effect. Please conserve natural gas.

    Help Southern California conserve natural gas by dialing it down.

    Lower your thermostat to 68 degrees
    Wait a day to use major gas appliances
    Wash laundry with cold water, when possible
    If you would like to receive a text message for any future advisories, text “ADVISORY” to 39044.

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  111. It’s because of that disaster in the Magic Mountain area. Mr. Energy can explain all, but local officials are not letting Southern California Edison use the storage area anymore and you should expect to have gas issues . . . forever thanks to environmental insistence SCE should not be allowed to build more storage facilities. It’s a storage issue.

    Liked by 1 person

  112. Watching as the Lord shows me His plans for this school break. I think my theme will be ‘serving.’ Another teacher is here and had knee replacement surgery. So I have been driving her around. Today it was to the doctors as she was developing a fever, then to the lab, then to subway, then to the store for juice and then home.
    That was after driving someone else all over to find things like lights for their home in Ukarumpa. Someone blessed me so now I get to pass on the blessing.

    Liked by 5 people

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