68 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 12-26-16”

  2. Kathaleena!
    NO!

    I have forgiven all sorts of personal offenses and atrocities. But I can’t forgive a mismatch of pronouns.
    I worried about that all during breakfast. Mismatching pronouns and thinking a simple word can make it right again.

    Wanna know what I’m talking about?
    On the R&R thread, Kathaleena got her “they” and “we” mixed up. And she thinks that a simple word makes it OK.

    Now. Wanna know the truth? I didn’t notice ’till she said something.

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  3. Good morning, Janice.

    We had a good time at Nancy’s yesterday. I’m glad to hear everyone seemed to have good Christmas’s. Wifi was down at Nancy’s, and we’re low on data, so I couldn’t post yesterday.

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  5. I just did my Bible reading in Galations about how we are to behave as Christians. I love God’s word and instruction. How sweet the feeling to reflect on a world where everyone at least tries to live by His word, although it won’t happen because of the fallen state of our world. Then I get to think on the hope of heaven. What a wonderful home awaits us and all the believers worldwide who suffer the hardships of war, polluted drinking water, famine, oppression from tyrannical governments, displacements from beloved homes and relatives, religious persecution, and other horrific things like modern day slavery.

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  8. Good Morning! I trust everyone is rested up and ready to hit the ground running this week?!! I’m off to the shoppe today for our 50% off Christmas sale today…it’s gonna be a humdinger!! That one customer on Saturday….the one who came in at 1:50 and did not leave until 2:15 (we closed at 2)…..she announced she will be standing at the door at 9 to be first in line today (we open our doors at 9:30)…. 🙂

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  11. For those of you who have never experienced this delicacy, Mexican Cokes are made with real cane sugar not the corn syrup that befouls most modern soft drinks. They are like the old Dublin Dr. Peppers which Texans craved.

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  14. Chas, I had heard of, in passing, the group WHAM!, but I didn’t know the names of the group. However, a quick Google reveals that I have indeed heard one of his songs, the famous ‘Wake me up…’ Didn’t like it, so didn’t listen to more. I make the effort to understand different music styles, but the electro-pop style of the 80s is one that appeals very little to me. There are exceptions, but WHAM wasn’t one.

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  15. I will attempt to make applesauce buckwheat pancakes to serve with maple syrup. New recipes can go either way, delicious or disastrous. I don’t think there is an in between. Delicious means a very late lunch. Disastrous means lunch at noon.

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  19. When I eat pancakes and waffles, which is seldom, I put yogurt on top–syrup is too sweet for me; I suspect Mexican coke would be the same . . .

    Thinking about affluenza today. I think I’ll give all the Adorables ice skating lessons for their birthdays in 2017. I can’t handle . . . it.

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  21. You guys are making me feel good.
    I thought I was alone in the world. Out of it.

    Last evening, at Brian’s forty first BD party, I mentioned that on my forty first BD, I was just getting ready to go to Purdue for a master’s. Brian said, with a straight face, “You couldn’t do it on line?” Brian is a PhD. Mary got her master’s in nursing from Duke and visited the campus twice.
    I just don’t know what this world is coming to. 😦

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  22. Peter, I used to think that all soft drinks had sugar. They don’t. Almost all now use the cheaper corn syrup. When you drink a Mexican Coke, you will notice the difference and be taken back to the days of your childhood.

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  23. Maple syrup is the only type of syrup I will eat on pancakes or anything else. As a young child, I remember we ate corn syrup, which is surprising considering how conscientious my mother was about eating healthily. However, we were not well off and corn syrup was a lot cheaper than maple syrup. These days, I can detect if a product has been sweetened with corn derived sugar, variously labeled as glucose-fructose, liquid glucose, etc., as there is a slightly bitter aftertaste to the sweet. I avoid it as much as possible.

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  24. Well, I was wrong. The pancakes were okay. I used organic unsweetened applesauce, which did not produce much apple flavor. Little bits of chopped up apple would work better. I prefer orange juice and blueberries but have neither.

    Art is working on our income tax. Not fun to listen to his mutterings. I will find a quiet place to read. Somewhere that I do not hear son using all the kleenexes in the box for his sinus mass production factory along with Art’s mutterings. Anyone need more evidence of a fallen world? And those are just annoyances that won’t be known in the better place God prepares for us. ❤ He is so good!

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  25. Maple syrup is the BEST! And I used to love to drive through the country in Vermont and see whole forests linked together with hoses and buckets.

    But I don’t want any sugar or corn syrup in my Diet Coke. Completely ruins the bitter aftertaste. ;–)

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  26. Michelle, I love to put yogurt on my oatmeal. I never thought of it for pancakes. I’d probably like that, too, but it might gross out others at the table. I do like pancakes plain. I am having limited sweets during the holidays.

    I found I like small sips of Dr. Pepper followed by sips of coffee. That was my treat while on the road.

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  29. Debra, yes, the diet sweeteners have a worse aftertaste than even corn syrup 🙂

    Boxing Day is quieter than usual – there has been some ice rain, so anyone that might have come today is staying home. However, I think it is good. The children are enjoying the things that they got for Christmas. Eldest Niece and Second Nephew are playing a cutthroat game of Settler’s of Catan with their father, from whom they inherited a very competitive streak (we on the other side, who play a game just to have fun, find it a bit exhausting, but they put their whole heart into it). Eldest Nephew, the one who dreams of building things, is constructing a model of a skyscraper. Third nephew is playing an imaginary game in the boys bedroom, accompanying himself with a hummed soundtrack. Fourth nephew is going around, finding all the small forgotten toys his brother got and enjoying them. We will be having what we call Horrible Hash for lunch, a combination of the leftovers from yesterday which, contrary to its name, we find delicious.

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  30. Roscuro, corn syrup was once promoted as a healthy alternative to sugar, as I recall.

    The snow is almost melted here, and fog is blowing across the back field. Very lovely.

    Did anyone recognize what the header is? It’s a coneflower seedhead dotted with ice from our freezing rain a week ago. Usually I don’t dare venture out in ice, but the walks were clear and there was plenty of snow under the thin sheet of ice, so I went out to see what God had created. My favorites were the leftovers from summer’s beauty, left for the birds to eat the seeds. This one was my very favorite, a detailed, perfect ice sculpture. It’s a vertical photo showing more of the stem, but I cropped it for this forum into square so that you wouldn’t have to be scrolling past stem.

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  31. I just saw on my email that two of the church members died, one yesterday and one today, both leaving behind widows. My mother died on the 26th in 2004 at age 84. I read yesterday in the Bible about Anna, the prophetess, who lived to be 84. My mother’s first name was Annie, and she was 84 when she died. The pastor spoke of that at my mother’s funeral. It was sweet. I feel sorry for my pastor having both these funerals to deal with. We’ve had too many.

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  33. Our son-in-law was sick Saturday night, when he and our daughter were supposed to come over for our gift exchange after the holiday gathering at their grandparents’. So they’re here now, for Boxing Day. (No, Roscuro and Kare, Americans don’t celebrate it, but we have enough interest in Canada and England in this house that it got mentioned.)

    The three younger ones are chatting, soup is simmering on the stove, and my husband is watching football, Manchester United (that is soccer to Americans).

    Our older daughter asked for a cutting mat for Christmas, a large one. When we got home from buying it and her other gift, my husband said he wished we had a small one we could wrap as a joke. I brought in a tiny one I have, maybe six inches square, still in the package. (The one we bought is maybe two feet square.) I told him it also saves him from having to wrap the big one. So he got a box, and in it put the small mat, a magnifying glass, and a note he wrote up of “instructions” on how to enlarge the mat. And at the very end of the note he put that she could return the gift to the giver, if she chose, or exchange it for what is behind door number one. While she was looking down as she opened the gift, he slapped a sign saying “DOOR #1” onto the coat closet, which already contained the large mat.

    On her face as she opened it, you could see that she was thinking “Well, I guess it is a mat, but not what I wanted.” And then she dug further, found the magnifying glass, and under it the note, which she read aloud with delight. She looked up and saw the “Door #1.” Our other daughter (who hadn’t known about the gift) jumped up to play talk-show host at Door #1.

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  34. Corn sugar is part of the reason be have an obesity epidemic. As for artificial sweetners? No thank you. I will do without. I understand having them for people like diabetics that can’t have real sugar but for the rest of us eat REAL food. REAL sugar. REAL butter. Etc. Just eat less of it…which you can do because it is more satisfying than the FAKE stuff.
    I promise I am not a health nut but once a very educated person pointed out how the food pyramid came into being and the way the USDA changes it occasionally to take up any food surpluses I changed the way I think about foot.
    Who eats DIET food? Fat people who don’t get any skinnier. 😉
    That is my rant of the day.

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  35. We had a good Christmas at H-House. I even got photos of step siblings in front of the tree. It was warm and humid here yesterday.
    BG gave me some boot socks ( I gave her boot cuffs) and an empty photo frame. I searched the house this morning looking for the frame and finally asked her. She took it with her so she could put the photo in it. 🙂

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  36. We were talking about boxing day at the dog park yesterday, one of the regulars, a retired nurse, was raised in Canada (somewhere north of Toronto). And yes, she gets cold at the dog park. 🙂

    Maple syrup only for me, too — my mom, who was a little girl during the great depression in the 1930s, said they always used corn syrup on pancakes because it was cheaper & we kept Karo syrup in the cupboard for that use now and again if we had no maple syrup on hand (pancakes weren’t really a staple in our household, more of a special treat).

    Janice, did you get the health insurance you applied for?

    I heard a crash in the night — a box of metal, light switch wall plates fell along with a box with a glass shade for one of my light fixtures (it didn’t break, still in all that bubble wrap and lots of cardboard). If I had any clue this work would be so delayed I’d have managed to get all of this out of the way, at least onto the patio under a big tarp. But much of it is way too heavy even to push around (the sink is in 2 pieces) and I really thought this would all be done by the end of October … Hahaha.

    Well, here’s to hoping it’ll get done before the end of January — the bathroom and foundation, anyhow. Today I need to get the burned-out light bars in the spare bathroom ceiling taken out and replaced. There are plastic panels below them for a “false ceiling” but they lift up easily. Hope the bars pop out of the frames without a lot of hassle. Home Depot should have replacements.

    And maybe workers can finally be lined up for the next couple weeks, now that Christmas is over.

    I’d heard of George Michael, knew he was a singer, but beyond that I knew nothing about him or his music, really.

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  38. Thanks for the chuckle, Chas. I was recently showing a wall quilt to a visitor. She was very complimentary and moaning about her supposed lack of skill. I told her I could point out all the errors, but wouldn’t. 😀 Sometimes silence is golden–whether written or spoken. 😉

    What a clever way to present that gift, Cheryl! Love my cutting mats and I have the large one and the small one.

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  39. I recognized the picture right off, since we have a coneflower near our back door, which we walk by almost every day. It looks similar, but I never considered taking a picture of it. Good idea, Cheryl.

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  40. I had never heard of Mexican Coke until we started going to TN. I am afraid that other cultures get short-shrift in our food stores. OTOH, there are things we bring down there, because they are not available in their stores.

    I am skeptical about corn syrup driving our obesity. I think it is more about our self-indulgence, in general, and the variety of food available. I am sure all the couch potato entertainment doesn’t help either.

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  42. Actually the agent should be back in the office tomorrow so I might call her then. But at this point I either do or I don’t. I have tried. There must be many who are in this crazy health insurance loopy loop.

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  43. Broken ceiling hall light bulb is still in place, though now sporting bits of raw carrot. I also tried needle pliers, the other recommended fix, but no go. I gave up on that, I figure there will be enough workers around here before long that I’ll just ask one of them to do it.

    I did get the tube bulbs out from above the false ceiling in the spare bathroom, however. The “ceiling” panels — very lightweight plastic sheets — proved a little difficult due to the bulbs’ long length and awkward placement, but I finally got them down. Will go to get replacements at Home Depot.

    Hate those lights and would love to get a tasteful real ceiling fixture in there (do away with those plastic panels), but that’ll be for a later time. Right now I just need some light in there.

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  45. As dangerous as it is to walk or drive on, ice really is beautiful. I remember being in big ice storms a number of times when we lived in Indiana. You could walk (or more properly–skate, slide, or slither) on top of a foot (or more) of snow. But it’s the tree and shrub branches that were really remarkable, especially when the sun came out. The branches glittered like silver. But when you got up close enough to see, they were encased in glass-like ice. I’ve seen a branch with red berries encased in the ice, looking like a detailed glass sculpture sparkling in the sun. It never failed to give me a rush of wonder in the glory of creation….at least until I landed hard on my tush and reality came flooding back. Ouch.

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  46. Debra, that day we only had a light coating of ice, and it was on top of several inches of snow, so I only worried about the walks, and my husband had salted them well. On the ice/snow itself, I simply put each foot in front of the other and made sure one foot was set before I picked up the other. But each foot punched down through the ice easily, and had a snowy footing, so there was no real danger of slipping.

    I remember one day in Chicago looking out the window to everything encased in medium-thick ice (more than this), with even the power lines glittering and lovely. I wanted to go out and get photos, but I didn’t trust my ability to get safely down the concrete-plus-ice stairs, so I gazed from inside. The camera I had then could not have captured it, anyway.

    One Christmas during my college career, I flew to my sister’s house and she and I drove to one brother’s house (she was in SC and he is in NC) and then after however many days visiting there, on to our brother in the Chattanooga area. I had not driven during my time at college, which I think had been three years and a semester; I’d kept my license, and looking ahead to graduation in a few months, I drove the rental car a bit. But when we started seeing signs of ice, I pulled over and let my sister drive. Then we drove through an area where water flowing down the sides of the mountain had frozen into icy waterfalls. I’d never seen that before (it is still the prettiest I’ve ever seen), and I was enchanted. We were already behind schedule, with the drive taking longer than we expected (in the days before we had cell phones, so we couldn’t call ahead and say we were running late), but I simply had to have us pull over and get some photos. Well, we walked out on snow, in front of those stunning, shining ice waterfalls, and I took several photos. And then I realized we were hearing flowing water from somewhere, and if chunks of that ice fell, we could be in real danger, and so we headed back to the car and got out of there. But I’d take the same chance today–it was that lovely to see an entire mountain encased in ice, from many feet above our heads.

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  47. Yes, ice is beautiful, so I enjoy it, but I always pray it will melt quickly. Branches coated in ice are easily burnt by the sun, and towards spring, as the leaf buds begin to form in late winter, an ice rain can destroy the buds by either making them brittle so they break off in the wind or by causing them to be burnt by the sun. This time, the ice isn’t sticking around on the trees, as it is now pouring with rain. It’s making the ice coated roads very slick indeed, since it isn’t quite warm enough to get rid of the build up of ice and snow where it is packed down.

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  48. Got the new tubular lights in, there were 2 rods. First one went in easily, the 2nd not easy at all, especially as I was teetering on the 2nd step of a step ladder in a bathroom that’s tiny (so I could only get so close, not quite close enough). It was a sustained physical stretch just to get the 2nd tube positioned correctly on both ends, I finally got it after several tries.

    The plastic sheets that served as a false ceiling to hide the ugly ceiling fixture and soften the harsh white lights cracked up into pieces, however, as I began trying to put those back up. So those are shot and now the light fixture, unfortunately, shows in all its glaring, mid-century glory. But at least there’s now some light in there. I’ll deal with replacing it later, maybe when it gets painted sometime in 2017.

    Ice falls hurt and it does make me glad that I don’t live in that weather. Aren’t there some mesh, spiky, wire shoe add-ons that help a little?

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  49. It’s quiet now at the L house. D1 and family left this morning for SoMO to visit SonIL1’s family. Son and D# left earlier this afternoon. I went to see Rogue One with D2 and SonIL2. They just left for their house. I guess I now have no excuse for grading those 50 or so semester exams.

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  50. A long time ago I rode the bus into workdowntown when snow was on the ground. It melted during the day, and then froze into ice before I returned home. Our neighborhood is hilly, and the only way I got home from the bus stop was to go through the middle of people’s yards and sort of slide my way home. Thoficed asphalt on the street was treacherous. I will always remember that remarkable evening slide to home.

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  53. So today we went to see Fences with Denzel Washington. Mr. P liked the movie. I didn’t. I know that story all too well. Denzel gave his usual performance as Troy and I bonded with Rose, his wife. The story disturbed me. The father loved his children he just didn’t know how to show it.

    Last week we saw Collateral Beauty, even though it dealt with the death of a child I liked that movie better.

    Both are worth seeing and as far as I can remember there was only one curse word in Fences and if I were Rose I would have probably said something equal.

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  59. Once a year, I try to hike up the highest mountain in Texas (Guadalupe Peak). While the peak is higher than anything east of the Mississippi, it is a little under 9,000 feet in elevation and the climb is only about 3,000 vertical feet from the base. In 2010, the mountain loooked a little different (sort of shiny) when my son and I arrived at the base on New Year’s Day. There had been a snow storm four weeks earlier and the snow had refrozen as ice on the part of the trail (about 40%) that was shielded from the Southern sun. There were no problems on the way up, but it took us an extra 90 minutes to get down as the ice was treacherous.

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  60. A gorgeous day in northern California; as I drove across the bridge, San Francisco looked so close across the dazzling water it was as if you could touch it.

    No politics, lovely visit with my friends and I shot a bunch of photos between houses in the Berkeley hills looking out over the bay. I may post on FB.

    The friend my EMT went to visit, shook my hand politely and asked if I was joining them for breakfast. I said no and scurried to the restroom. They were still waiting for a table when I exited and he gave me a big hug, “merry Christmas and a happy new year.”

    Thanks.

    But I’d never met him before.

    Hmmmm. Maybe I should have asked more prying mother questions? He sure worked to accommodate seeing CR during this trip–this was the third attempt to get together.

    We don’t live that far, he could have come up for a visit . . . Christian engineer she ministered with in college, whom my husband thought had a fiance two years ago at graduation.

    As I’ve reminded myself many times about many people this year, “it’s really none of my business.”

    🙂

    Off to dinner for a fourth night in a row with Adorables . . . . this time we’re all bringing our leftovers! 🙂

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  64. We’ve had a wonderful Christmas! Our children have all left for home so we’re relaxing and watching the Fellowship of the Ring. Husband and I have a few days off together so we’re taking it easy. Tomorrow we’ll start the laundry and the clean up.

    Daughter hit a coyote on her way home – she’s fine, the car lost it’s front bumper but nothing is leaking and car is running fine. Poor kiddo – she just can’t seem to catch a break 😦

    We played many a round of Pandemic with our son and his fiancee – so much fun!

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  66. The new ice sculpture in Queen Anne’s lace. With the gardener preoccupied with other things the last two summers (the man she married this summer), a few wildflowers got in there, though I did enough gardening to take out the most egregious. (I didn’t want to step on her turf, and she still did occasional gardening. After she moved out, I did more of it but it had gotten kind of bad by then.)

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  67. The photos are beautiful Cheryl… ❤
    It was a humdinger of a day and the customer who said she would be in line at 9? No she was not amongst the ladies waiting at the door (one lady was jumping and flailing her arms at me at 9:20 thinking I would just open the door ten minutes early….I didn't make eye contact with her 🙂
    So, the customer who kept us late on Christmas Eve…and said she would be first in line today….she came in at 5:10….and didn't leave until……5:45….kept us 15 minutes late…again…she is headed back to CA tomorrow… 🙂

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