67 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-18-17”

  3. Good Morning Everyone.
    Mumsee, I knew you would get a laugh. I can just see you now living inn Boise. There are advantages, you know, about buying the house there. As Michelle said the other day, you could rent it out until you are ready to move and let it be somewhat paying for itself. Your daughter and son in law could keep an eye on things since you won’t be there right now. With hubs medical issues it would be good to have a plan in place for when he isn’t able to do what he does.

    Chas, how is TSWITW today?

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  4. It seems Spring has arrived early in the Middle Mississippi Valley. We had 72° yesterday and are supposed to have near that today. So much for Groundhog predictions.

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  7. Good morning. First and Second Arrows are coming home today! Second Arrow will have to leave again tomorrow, but First has off work Monday, so will be here an extra day. Tomorrow we will all be celebrating the two February birthdays — Hubby’s and Fifth Arrow’s — and my MIL and BIL will be here for the celebration, as well.

    Have a wonderful weekend, everyone! 🙂

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  8. White-crowned sparrow! Cute little bird. I’ve only seen them a couple of times, though I’ve had a juvenile (no white yet) in my yard a few times this winter.

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  10. Here’s a QOD: Who have you known in real life who has the same name as someone famous, real or imaginary? I can think of three couples who were Ken and Barb (Barbie). I was once in a wedding with D. L. Moody (he wasn’t Dwight Lyman, but I’m assuming his parents gave him those initials on purpose, and that’s how he was listed in the wedding program), and my sister knew an Edgar Allen Poe, an old man when she knew him, in his nineties I think, but obviously named for the poet.

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  12. Hmm, I’ll have to think about that QOD.

    So it’s colder here than in Missouri. 🙂 And way colder if you consider the dog park micro-climate, of course.

    We had rain and more rain yesterday, a real downpour that closed parts of the freeway I take into downtown & Hollywood and toppled dozens of trees locally (thankfully not any of mine, even the little Charlie Brown tree stood tall and brown through it all). But I was in touch with my neighbor by text and she was keeping an eye on things when it was at its worst. Just my luck one of the big trees close to my house in the backyard would come crashing down and ruin my new patio overhang and roof.

    Raining still this morning but it’s let up for now. I’m off the vet’s to pick up refills for the dogs & then am meeting a friend for lunch — I wanted to get the pantry cleared out and reorganized today, but Carol really wants me to come visit her at the hospital, too, so I’ll have to see how the afternoon shapes. up.

    Major guilt when I got up this morning to open the doggie door and discovered Cowboy on the other side! I always do a head count but he must have slipped out of the doggie door in between then and the time I locked it up so he spent the whole night out in the backyard in the rain. 😦 Bad owner.

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  14. I used to leave the doggie door open (before all the coyote ruckus) and the dogs actually would spend a good part of the night out there.

    But for now, Cowboy’s all snug on my bed 🙂

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  15. The boy who was born in the same hospital as me on my birthday (his too) was named Edsel Beplate. I have always remembered him. I guess that qualifies as earliest memories. He died about seven years ago.

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  16. And the cat definitely has to be locked in at night with coyotes around. She still goes over the back fence and finds her way onto the front porch now and again (she did it again last evening in the rain, no less) but she mostly hangs out in the backyard/patio. And her new favorite morning spot is lying right on top of the heater floor grate in the kitchen. 🙂

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  19. I don’t lock in my cats at night and I hear coyotes every night. They hang out below the hunting mansion. The black cat used to go hang out at a farm about three miles from here for a few weeks, then come home. He is now neutered and rarely goes so far. He still has the yellow cat to pick on if he gets bored. But we were always surprised to see him back from his forays with all the predators out there. Tough cat, I suppose. One of these days the coyotes will figure out the buffet is open, all they have to do is walk down the driveway into the yard but they seem to think it is a trap. They often hang out at the end of the driveway though.

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  22. Mumsee, maybe its the horns of your bucks and ram that scare them off. Wild goats and sheep are quite good at warding off predators with those things. Cats are hard to kill, and most dog-like animals have a distinct disadvantage to cat-like animals – the cats are better at climbing.

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  23. Llamas will scare off coyotes. But they’ll also stomp out your dogs so it wouldn’t work for us.

    This was the most dramatic thing that happened in yesterday’s rain — just north of the Hollywood hills area in the SF Valley:

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  24. MY SS teacher in H’ville was Dr. George Jones.
    My pastor in Middletown, RI was Billy Graham. Went by “Bill”.l
    A professor at Southwestern could have been called Gene Autry if he choose. He went by CE Autry (E. for Eugene if hoy haven’t guessed.

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  25. I think the reason that people in the city are more likely to lose pets to coyotes is that their pets haven’t developed the survival skills. We have coyotes, well, coywolves, here, but we also have feral cats.

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  31. That’s why I think the “indoor only” cat trend is a big mistake. If those cats happen to get out, they’re really clueless. Keeping them ‘caged up’ like that all their lives takes away all their natural survival skills.

    Our pastor’s family had a cat that would sleep on their front porch and he’s commented in sermons about how, even though ‘asleep,’ the cat’s ears would be turning this way and that, always alert to the dangers of the raccoons & coyotes that were in their neighborhood. He said so should we as Christians always be aware of the dangers of sin and temptation that are around us.

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  32. Not to beat a dead coyote, but the trend I’ve noticed in the coyote reports over the past 1-2 years is getting into backyards with rather tall fences. They are coming in closer to find prey and can easily scale (I’m told) a 7-foot fence. If they can’t get over a fence, they’ll find a way under or around it.

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  33. QoD: me. 😉

    I also know a Deacon Jones (not the former football player), had someone in an aerobics class years ago named Betty Grable, and, while I never met this person, my father-in-law had a relative named Mae West.

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  34. DJ, the problem is that cats that get out kill birds. The small possibility an animal that is outside briefly (accidentally) will get killed is less than the near certainty that it will kill, and frequently, if it is outside regularly. I don’t care if cats kill house sparrows or starlings, and they’re welcome to kill moles and mice. But I’d far rather have the bluebird in my yard than the neighbor’s cat, and by the time the cat destroys a nest of bluebirds and leaves its poop where I will find it, I’m pretty close to rooting for the coyote.

    I don’t care that we have a few outdoor cats around here–we’re in the country, and that makes sense, and at any rate they don’t linger in our yard since we chase them out–but in the city, people who have “outdoor cats” seem to me to simply be rude neighbors. The cat isn’t a “pet,” it’s just something they feed, and it bothers the whole neighborhood. Perhaps in a community with rodent problems, they’d be more welcome.

    Speaking of bluebirds, it looks like we have a pair in our backyard–are they pairing up already, or is it just a coincidence they’re back there? (We don’t feed bluebirds, but they nest around here and find plenty to eat in our yard, so spring through fall we have them here, but don’t usually see them in winter.)

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  37. Mumsee, we don’t have a bluebird house, but they raise at least two, maybe three broods every year and bring them to our yard to learn to hunt insects. Whether the nest is in our yard or a neighbor’s, or it moves around from year to year, I don’t know. I’m just happy the starlings haven’t seemed to find it. I haven’t seen bluebirds very often in my life until this house, and here they are very frequent, especially in summer. Both birds of the pair are often hunting at the same time, and then we’ll see two or three babies and a parent. In the fall we watch as some of the young ones molt into bright blue feathers (young males). It’s pretty cool. But the invasion of starlings into this country means most people don’t see as many bluebirds as our ancestors did. House sparrows and starlings (both non-native species) will both willingly kill baby bluebirds (and sometimes the mother) to get a nesting site.

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  39. Here is a question which comes to mind, is the small domestic cat native to North America? If no, who brought it over – did Native American tribes have cats, or did they come on the ships of the Europeans?

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  40. We’re going to be fostering a boxer dog for a while. His owner is a friend of our son’s who recently lost his job and needs to have some flexibility in looking for and possibly moving to find work. Son says the dog is really well behaved so hopefully all will go well.

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  41. It’s a lovely day!! And that is a sweet bird up there in the header photo!
    My Daddy had an uncle with the name Napoleon Bonaparte S—— Who names their kid that?!! We called him Uncle Polie…..

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  42. Cats: I read an interesting article on cats on BBC a while back but can’t find it. It addressed the idea of how cats got to America. I think they thought the ancestry was African and Indian cats. A wild cat very much like the housecat.

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  43. DJ – Part of it, I think, depends on where one lives. A while back, I read an essay by a veterinarian who believes cats should usually be indoor pets, unless one is in the country (& even then, the cat can be dinner for certain predators). Besides avoiding predators & cars, there is also the sad fact that cats are a common victim of those sick people who like to torture animals. From what he wrote, it sounded like that kind of thing happens much more than we like to think. 😦

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  44. A few weeks ago, I mentioned that Other Grandma didn’t want to pick up Little Guy, & have him for Mr X’s visitation with him, every Saturday, but opted for every other Saturday.

    Today she complained to Nightingale that she likes seeing Little Guy, but this seems like too much of a responsibility. Nightingale says (to me) maybe it’s because spending time with her own son is too stressful. Sad.

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  45. Joys of home ownership: “What’s that noise? Is the heater going bad?” No. It turns out our attic vent fans were turning in the wind and making a lot of noise. We just hadn’t noticed it when the heater was on all the time. WD40 to the rescue!

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  48. There was a girl named Robin Hood in school. As a volunteer librarian in my high school library, I checked out a Tony Curtis, & another famous name I can’t recall.

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  49. Whenever people wonder about my last name (many seem to think I’m Native American, kind of like Elizabeth Warren I guess), I tell them “no, it’s English, think Robin Hood and …”

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  50. I thought of a couple more. I attended college in the early 90s, in the heyday of the Bulls. One black woman with whom I overlapped in studies married and had twins, Michael and Jordan. And I’m pretty sure that when I was a child, one of our neighbors (a teenage boy, I think) was Charles Brown, because I can remember my mom making jokes about our neighbor Charlie Brown, and I didn’t really understand at the time who Charlie Brown was and I knew that boy went by Charles, not Charlie.

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  52. A couple of days ago, I noticed a Charlie feather sticking out of Jake’s fur. Sadly, Charlie the chukar is no longer with us. As I am told, fifteen year old neglected to close the dog fence when she took the dogs for a walk. Fifteen year old boy noticed Charlie in the dog run but did not think about it, thinking other fifteen year old would get it out when she brought the dogs back. Other fifteen year old is not capable of such thinking and did not do so. No more Charlie. Back to the idea of doing the chores the way they are assigned for the safety of the animals, not for your personal ease. I doubt any of them will care. But I liked Charlie.

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  64. One of my siblings-in-law’s second name comes from The Lord of the Rings. My father has the names of two prominent historical and cultural figures from ancient Europe.

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  66. QoD: My first job was at a radio station in 1974. We hired a young woman named Gwendolyn Campbell. She went by Gwen on the air. Pretty soon we were getting calls asking if Glen Campbell really worked at our station.

    My wife had a great Uncle Sam (Herr). His brother was Benjamin Franklin Herr. So he was both Ben Franklin and Ben Herr.

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  67. After church today I reorganized the pantry to make space for the counter-top small appliances that were creating way too much clutter. Success. Looks much better.

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