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Our Daily Thread 4-6-17

Good Morning!

This is what wakes me up every morning for the last week. He starts singing from the next door neighbor’s pine tree around 6AM. He gives a second performance in the evening around 7PM. 

The longest tweet ever. 

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Anyone have a QoD?

 

70 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 4-6-17”

  3. Chas, not sure if you welcome meet ups or not, but I am scheming… I have meetings in Orlando the first week of September and I already saw that Southwest flys into Greensboro. You just never know who might show up on your doorstep.

    Liked by 7 people

  7. Good morning from gusty Atlanta. I have been up since 4 a.m. I had a long nap yesterday during a lull in the storms so I decided I would just stay up. Weather wise, I have had much to stay in prayer over.

    AJ, the accountant part of my brain asks if you have counted all those tweets. Amazing!

    Liked by 1 person

  8. Good Morning Everyone. Wow. Yesterday. About 4 I told Mr. P that I was sleepy and didn’t know why. (No allergy meds or anything) I fell asleep in the chair last night watching TV. I got up went to bed and the alarm woke me this morning. I could have slept in if I had allowed myself.
    DJ, you asked a question last night and I didn’t completely understand it. Please send photos and the question again.

    Regarding the Easter discussion yesterday. First everyone should go back and read Kizzie’s link and
    Second why do we Christians sometimes act so pious and rob ourselves of joy and fun. I did this when BG was small. I had decided that Halloween was of the devil and there was no way we would be participating. One of the best Christian women I knew explained why she thought I was wrong so when BG was 3 I allowed someone to give her a hand me down Cinderella costume and I took her to businesses that were giving out treats. They joy she experienced being dressed up like a princess and getting candy too make me question my stance. I still believe that Halloween has been taken over by those who do not celebrate the innocence of it but the other side, but it is up to parents what they do and celebrate.
    Having grown up around the Greek Orthodox religion I admire their celebration of Easter. It is the much more important event in their church year. Christmas doesn’t receive the fanfare the rest of us give it, but Easter? Oh, Easter is a HUGE celebration with baking for weeks, an Easter Vigil on Saturday night and breaking their fast over in the wee hours of Sunday morning. The true gift of Christ happened with the death and resurrection, not with His birth.

    Liked by 2 people

  9. I am attempting to do a Christian book study about Grace with an older women’s missions group at church. We did not start it yesterday because of the storm. I heard secondhand that someone thinks a study of a book on grace is not really about missions. The book is from the publishing house that this women’s group is associated with. I am just curious as to what your thoughts might be on this? Without asking the person, I think maybe foreign missions is all the person is considering. My thought is that in order to be better mission minded people in our community that we can start with grace that will allow us to open up conversations with those we may not have spoken to before.

    Liked by 1 person

  12. Kizzie, thanks for the link. It is nice to see that the results of my own research coincide with other people’s – “In the multitude of counselors, there is safety” (Proverb).

    Kim, I think there is room for two great celebrations in the Christian calendar. Hey, the Israelites got seven, so two doesn’t seem excessive. I agree about envying the Eastern Orthodox church their celebrations. They decorate their eggs so beautifully, and have all kinds of fun traditions. The children’s book The Good Master relates how the Hungarians, who were always a part of the Western church but have more Eastern style traditions, joyfully celebrated both Easter and Christmas. For Easter, they dyed their eggs in complicated patterns, wore their traditional embroidered outfits, and went visiting from house to house, where the boys would sprinkle water on the girls until the girls gave the boys decorated eggs. The city church I attend is technically non-denominational (it is associated with other churches of the same persuasion), and they engage in what Carl Trueman would call liturgical tourism, so they have been trying out Lent. I would rather try out the Eastern Orthodox Easter 😀

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  13. Kim, first I don’t think “pious” is a bad word. Nor do I think piety needs to rob Christians of joy. If you were talking with my husband and me about the elements of the worship service, we would be likely to end up on the topic at some point of why the Lord’s supper is often (mis)treated as a gloomy part of the service. No! Christ’s death has brought us life! And in the Lord’s supper we look forward also to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. It is not a time of gloom and sadness.

    I’m with you on Halloween. It’s an innocent holiday for children. What can be more childlike than dressing up, going around the neighborhood after dark, meeting the neighbors in a friendly way, and getting candy? I don’t like what adults have done with it, but as a child-friendly holiday it excels. I even liked making Kleenex ghosts and construction-paper bats and black cats.

    For Easter, I don’t like hiding Easter eggs and all of that simply because I think it’s a distraction. That is what “Easter” will mean to a child if you do it. To me, it means the joy of the resurrection and those glorious songs celebrating it, Scriptures such as the beautiful 1 Corinthians 15, and even some lovely poetry. In more recent years it has also meant Easter dinner with family or friends, but honestly I grew up without that and I’m OK with skipping it–adding a big dinner makes the whole day too frenetic.

    Now, if I agreed with my husband that Easter is not a holiday with religious significance–he says that the Lord’s day was given as a weekly celebration and we have no command for a separate annual one–then I’d be inclined to do the Easter basket and egg hunt and so forth and just make it silly and fun. But I think that my parents’ choice not to celebrate it in that way allowed us not to be distracted from the joy.

    It doesn’t bother me if other people include the Easter-basket elements. (Though I don’t like the Easter bunny.) I was in my late thirties or early forties before I ever participated in an Easter egg hunt, but a couple in my church started inviting me to one they did every year for her nieces (and eventually they had a child too–they married around age 40 and weren’t sure they’d be able to). The families got together every year after church, and we ate homemade pizza (her brother was a chef) and then they gave the rules of which eggs the children were to look for and which the adults were to look for. I didn’t go through the event sorrowful that they were corrupting children . . . it was simply a different choice than my own family made, and one they have a right to make. No sin involved either way, but a different angle of emphasis.

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  14. Greek Orthodox Easter is something to behold. The eggs are mostly dyed red for the blood of Christ.
    My former Episcopal church always had the Easter Vigil service on Saturday night. It is my favorite service of the liturgical calendar. If you have never been see if there will be one near you. My church now doesn’t do it and I miss it.
    You may want to Google the Book of Common Prayer and read the service for the Easter Vigil.

    Oh, and I am not saying that they don’t celebrate Christmas. They do; they just put more emphasis on Easter.

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  15. Janice, anything that builds Christian up in the faith is about missions. We cannot reach out to others if we do not know what we believe. A study of the grace of God, if done right, could be just the thing to strengthen a person in their witness. Personally, I shy away from any book studies, as they always leave me dissatisfied, and prefer studies of books of the Bible or major themes from the Bible. I was so delighted to find the adult Sunday School class at my church was going systematically through one of the Gospels last year. It was like cold water to a thirsty person for me. When they finished the Gospel, they decided to go through a book on prayer by a popular preacher. It hasn’t been intentional on my part, since my fragile health this term hasn’t permitted me to get out early enough to go to Sunday School, but I haven’t missed not being there for the study. Speaking about Scripture is a never ending delight, but what delight is there in sifting through the mingled truth and error of a fallible author.

    Liked by 1 person

  16. If we celebrate Easter with family (not every year is the same) we do Easter egg hunts. When we were small, we would go to my grandparents house and my aunt (one of my uncles and aunts lived with my grandparents) would hide the eggs. There were always tales of eggs so well hidden that they were never found until long after – much to the delight of the cousins who lived with my grandparents. I never had trouble distinguishing the celebration part of it with the reason for the celebration as a child, and the same with Christmas. Christians worry too much about whether the simple fun they have is worldly or not. As Paul said, all things are ours.

    By the way, the Easter bunny was originally a hare, which is a much more dignified and handsome animal than the rabbit. There was an old belief that they laid eggs, which is how eggs became associated with the leporids. As for egg hunts, we used to look for birds nests in the spring just to see the laid eggs (we knew better than to disturb the nests), so it is completely understandable how that became associated with Easter. Easter always happens in the spring.

    Liked by 3 people

  17. Ah, that bird singing and chirping really got Annie Oakley going this morning. She was looking and looking … Where’s the bird? Where’s the bird? Where’s the bird?

    One of our editors at our sister paper grew up in a rural part of California (and a smallish farm, though her dad was a firefighter in the nearby big city north of here) and her parents had become new believers when the kids were little. Out with Halloween, in with the church carnival. I won’t/can’t say she seemed bitter about it, but she sure remembered how they were forced to be so different from their friends.

    She’s hovered around the faith since then, I don’t know too much about her personal beliefs, but she wound up getting an MA (going part-time while working at the paper) in theology at a local Catholic / Jesuit university and she recently posted a photo of her and her husband at a Methodist church (she was a very strong and early supporter of gay marriage some 15 years ago when the issue was surfacing). My guess is she’s within what some would call the “liberal” Christian church — but she continues to have a warm relationship with her parents, thankfully, who sound like very good and sincere people who were doing their best.

    Anyway, all that to say that sometimes parents’ best intentions can wind up making young kids feel really isolated and ‘weird’ unnecessarily.

    I had to cover a night meeting last night and didn’t get to bed until around 11:30 p.m., but I was up early today. Waiting for the driveway workers, of course.

    And now “I Shot the Sheriff” is running through my head 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

  18. Well, just got a text from the driveway worker, he thinks we need to call in “dig alert” (a city branch) to identify where other utility lines are before they continue, which probably makes sense. We then may wind up having to get and pay for a city permit. Ugh.

    He’s also juggling a 10 a.m. conference call for his “real job” and having to get his mom in to see the doctor, so he’ll be here later, his partner should be here first — but sounds like a little bit a hold for now until we can figure out how to proceed.

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  19. I love to be wakened by bird calls. The rooster crow in West Africa usually occurred slightly before the call to prayer. The most beautiful wake up call I heard was in Northern Ontario, when I went to visit friends, and was awakened in the early morning by a wood thrush.

    Liked by 1 person

  20. Easter has always meant a family celebration and meal to me. My grandmother used to give all the grandmother used to give all the grandchildren ceramic eggs. I don’t know what ever happened to mine.

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  21. Well, I guess DigAlert isn’t a city department, it’s a SoCal thing, but the service is free. Probably makes sense to contact them now that the trench may wind up heading off into the public right-of-way (if we’re unlucky). Still hoping that won’t have to happen.

    https://www.digalert.org/about

    A hawk used to wake us up in the mornings come spring. He was here a few weeks ago but i haven’t heard him since. But maybe that’s because of all the jackhammer noise.

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  22. Easter always meant an egg hunt, baskets, church & Sunday School for sure (we weren’t real regular at church), sometimes taking in the sunrise service at the Hollywood Bowl (my mom’s favorite Easter activity, if we didn’t go she’d watch for the news coverage of it on TV later) — and always a ham dinner.

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  23. We got baskets, placed next to our spots at the breakfast table, with plastic eggs filled with treats. We did decorate eggs a couple of years, but I think my mother found emptying the eggs of their contents via two tiny holes in either end too difficult. I understand the Eastern Europeans simply hard boil their eggs before dying them, which much easier than blowing out the contents.

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  24. That’s how we did them–hard boiled and dyed. But because they were eggs, I didn’t hide them outside, that’s where the plastic eggs came in.

    As it happens, my family prefers chocolate eggs anyway, so we just hide them in the living room. Easy.

    I’m with Kim, Easter is about church, singing, family and a big meal. I’m about to send out this year’s email right now! 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  25. Oh yes, we dyed eggs too — I can still remember the smell of the solution. And eggs (plastic/candy) would be hidden in the backyard. Sometimes they’d be missed and found in the summertime 🙂

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  26. We had dyed eggs and paper bag baskets. Some of my children have looked for hard boiled dyed eggs, some have looked for plastic, some have not looked, some have received an Easter basket from the neighbors. Mostly, I hide books and they are delighted. But we try to emphasize the celebration of new Life in Christ.

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  28. I always had two white ceramic rabbits in my Easter Basket. I always had the same basket year after year and so has BG. The rabbits now live on my book shelves. One’s ear got broken years ago and I was devastated. My father in law who had the hands of a surgeon glued it back on .
    Going to take a photo now.

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  29. Some time back Michelle posted a question about using a certain word in her book. I made the comment that I had learned so much from books and to use the word. I have recently learned something else.
    Soakers- these are knit or crocheted pants that fit over a baby’s cloth diaper. They are made from unprocessed wool which retains its lanolin and absorb the dampness and stay cleaner.

    http://diaperpages.com/soaker.php

    I had been reading Debra Holland’s Montana Sky series and all the women had “soakers” for their babies. I started Googling this morning.

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  31. I have heard of men being named Evelyn.
    But China has a president named Eleven. That’s what it looks like to me.
    😆

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  32. One year my son ran for the ladle hanging on the wall, oh, about July. He returned to the table and put it into the stew pot for his serving.

    We all laughed when it came up floating a foil covered chocolate Easter egg.

    I guess it had been a while since I needed that ladle . . .

    Liked by 3 people

  33. We had this big ladle like think hanging in the foyer, it had plastic ivy in it. One Easter it rained so the eggs were hidden in the house. A few weeks later we smelled the missing one hidden in the ivy 🙂 I had forgotten about that until your ladle story Michelle. Yours is funnier!

    Liked by 2 people

  34. We dyed hard boiled eggs. We found that we could draw designs with wax candles on the eggs, and the dye would not color the waxdrawing on the egg. Sometimes we got special dye kits with glitter or other neat things. Early on I think we are the hard boiled eggs we found in the yard. Later we didn’t. I did not care for the candy eggs we got in plastic. We never had many since my brother had diabetes. I do not think the Easter bunny was a big deal at our house. I don’t remember receiving any of those specially filled baskets seen in the stores. We had our baskets for egg hunts and I think my parents let us have artificial grass in our baskets.

    I think Easter was more about going to church and having special clothes to wear to the service. Sometimes we got together with relatives and friends for a dinner followed by an egg hunt. Something very special I do remember was that my cousin’s mom made an Easter cake which was a white coconut cake shaped like a bunny in green died coconut grass. I was in awe over that cake since we only had tiered cakes.

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  35. Good day, everyone. Sorry I’m not on top of what’s going on in your lives lately. I’ve checked the prayer thread, though, and am praying for the needs stated there over the past few days.

    Roscuro, I’d intended to get back to our music conversation from over the weekend, but I’m having a hard time collecting my thoughts on it. My brain is occupied with other matters — new homeschool materials came, for one thing, and I’m looking through those, trying to determine a plan for integrating them in the future, while continuing the present homeschooling routine.

    And then, just when I thought the number of piano pieces I was working on would drop significantly, from 26 to eight (I was preparing four for my April concert, four [different pieces] for the May concert, and had eighteen pieces [I’d previously reported eleven, but, really, it is 18 when you count three separate movements of one large work as three instead of one] for my piano student to choose from last night for her next performance opportunities . . . after all that . . . the organizer of the May show I’m playing in called me Monday and asked me to prepare 20 minutes of music, since they want the show to be at least an hour, and there are only three of us performing! So my four short pieces by Grieg (six minutes total) for that event have turned into ten short pieces (eight from his Op. 12 Lyric Pieces and two from his Norwegian Folk Songs / [and Dances] — all of it music that has some challenge to it, but isn’t too hard to put together) plus Wedding Day at Troldhaugen, which is fiendishly difficult in the LH arpeggiated sections!

    So when I wrote something like “When my very busy first half of this week slows down by Thursday . . .”, well, it didn’t really, and won’t for a while. 😉 At least until May 18, and who knows what could all happen by then!

    In the meanwhile, I’ll give you classical music fans some good listening for the afternoon, if you wish to partake. I’ll start out with the pieces my student chose last night, from the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods. She’s leaning toward Bach’s Prelude in D Major from the Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 for her Baroque number, but is also considering among three movements from his French Suite in C Minor. I’m linking to the Bach Prelude first, followed by her Classical piece, Beethoven’s Rondo in C Major, and third, the Romantic piece, Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28, No. 22.

    Liked by 2 people

  39. Here’s the piece I’m starting with in the April concert, the lovely To a Wild Rose, by Edward MacDowell.

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  40. And this is Grieg’s Wedding Day at Troldhaugen that I’ll play in May. (But not quite as fast as this guy does!) 🙂

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  41. The book on grace is in workbook form and it involves a lot of looking up answers in the Bible. It’s not just what someone thinks about grace. It is a study of Paul and how he taught about grace along with current day stories about people experiencing or needing to experience God’s grace.

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  42. Must be that cardinal singing in AJ’s video that inspired me to post more music. 🙂

    Blessings to all of you, fellow wanderers.

    Liked by 2 people

  43. Janice, having come from a legalistic, hellfire, and brimstone background in Christianity through the school I attended, I subscribe to the “you’ll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar” school of thought. I grew up thinking of God as an angry man sitting on a throne basically moving humans around like pieces on a chess board. I was amazed, stunned, and confused the first time I heard that God was a loving God and He loved ME????? You’ve got to be kidding????
    I don’t know if that applies to your study on grace or missions or not but I would rather obey someone who loves me than someone who is bent on tripping me up.

    Liked by 1 person

  44. This is interesting and gives me a writing idea in house history projects …

    Spoke to my insurance agent today (and no, none of this is covered, but …) he’s a long time local guy who says the guy who live in my house for ages way back when (I’m guessing it was under his watch that the peach tile bathroom and add-on kitchen were done) is now living in NM and still returns for visits now and again — he’d be maybe around 80(?) maybe later 70s, and my agent is still in touch (they had lunch not long ago — plus my agent grew up in my neighborhood, he was born 20 years after house was built).

    Anyway, he said he’d let former owner know I’d like to pick his brain a bit someday.

    Sad note though: former owner’s wife committed suicide by hanging herself in the (now my) garage, which I wish I didn’t know …) 😦

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  45. I’m shocking a co-worker who is a very by-the-book, permits and contractors for everything type when it comes to home repairs.

    My rogue house repair ways and all … “Oh, you should have never done anything before first getting all the proper inspections and permits and contractors on site. No-no-no.”

    Yeah, well. You do what you have to do.

    Call me a child of mumsee.

    Liked by 2 people

  46. 6, Grieg’s ‘Wedding Day at Troldhaugen’ was what my dear friend played for the recessional at my eldest sibling’s wedding. I could never master the piece, due to the hand span required, but I like it a lot and it does make a perfect wedding recessional. I’ve played ‘To a Wild Rose’ but just sight reading for relaxation. I had to do one of Bach’s prelude and fugues for my Grade 10, but a French Suite was also an option, and I’ve wondered if that would have been better – Bach’s fugues are a weak point of mine. I did a waltz by Chopin for Grade 10, and a nocturne of his for Grade 9 – once again, his preludes are beyond my hand span, which is kind of strange, because Chopin was a small and frail man.

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  48. Article ideas:

    * Thinking about “just one minor house repair?” reconsider what it might entail.
    *What do you need to know about fixing old pipes in old houses?”
    “Many houses in town are over 60 years old. What does that mean to the owners?”
    “The adobe clay soil of the PV Peninsula and how it sculpts our lives.”
    “When were clay sewer pipes replaced by something else?”
    “The home permitting process in Los Angeles County.” (Or your city. They differ here and the city is a TOTAL nightmare–everyone tries anything to avoid it.”
    “How much obtaining a permit can add to the cost of your repairs.”
    “The joy of upgrading to the past when replacing a bathroom.”
    “Wood, plastic or metal, which window is best for our climate?”
    “How do you know when you need a new roof?”
    “How do you hire/find a repair person or contractor?”
    “Are home repairmen/women a dying breed?”
    “Living in a house where a death occurred? For you or not?” (Some nationalities will NOT live in a house if someone died there–it has to be disclosed, for that reason, when you put a house up for sale.”
    “Got electrical, water, sewer, phone lines crossing your property? How to find them.”
    “Helping pets with household repairs–what to do about all that noise?”
    “A month without a bathroom–how to cope.”

    Is that enough yet?

    Returning, now, to 1970 Frankfurt where I’m catching a train to Hamburg . . .

    Liked by 4 people

  50. What I’d love to know from this former owner (assuming he’s the peach tile guy) is what the bathroom before that (original, I’d presume) looked like.

    So often I wondered about that as I tried to put the “new” vintage look together.

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  53. michelle, you’re right about city permits in LA — expensive and entangled (although I did the new roof with a city permit and there weren’t too many glitches or holdups).

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  54. Janice, a workbook sounds better than just studying a book meant for reading, which is the current trend among trendy churches – if I have one criticism of my city church (which I love) is that they are too trendy. I read a lot of different Christian writers, and I like to discuss what I read with friends, but on Sunday morning or for Bible study, the book I want to discuss is the Bible.

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  55. Oh, my! In reading Michelle’s list of questions, I misread one word: The adobe clay soil of the PVC Peninsula and how it scuulps our livers.” I have obviously been around too much surgery during the past year!

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  58. We just separated the kids from the does so I am woken each morning by the maaing of goats. And several times at night. But they will get over it. Then it will be back to roosters and coyotes, and other interesting things.

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  59. And, actually, the sheriff and several of the deputies are fellow believers in Christ. Nice people. But that reminds me of that eating establishment in the Italian Alps, where the waitress was singing along with the American music they were playing. She seemed aghast when I told her what she was singing.

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  61. DJ – Yesterday I mentioned the trench we had when we had to put in that pipe out to the brook that runs through our neighbor’s yard.

    One reason we did that, as I mentioned, was because our basement flooded whenever it rained too much. But another reason was because those neighbors were threatening to sue us. (The husband is a very prickly man. He’s the one who no longer plows the lane when it snows, even though he has a plow.)

    We had a hose coming out from the sump pump, & the run-off would go into their yard, & they also had (& may still have) basement flooding problems. The problem was that their property is at the bottom of the slope of the lane, so water just naturally flows & collects there. We tried avoiding that, but the water would go there anyway.

    So, being at the bottom of a “hill” (long slope in this case) has it’s downsides, too.

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  63. Kim wrote: I am not saying that they don’t celebrate Christmas. They do; they just put more emphasis on Easter.

    Shouldn’t we all put a lot more emphasis on the death and Resurrection of Christ than on His birth? After all, it wasn’t the birth that set us free from sin and death. It was necessary to show His humanity along with His death. His resurrection showed us His divinity.

    As for celebrating, I don’t mind the egg hunts. But having the Easter Bunny in church goes too far as it takes away the Christian aspect of the day. And I don’t care what anyone says, the name “Easter” is derived from the ancient Germanic goddess Ēostre.

    Ostara, Eástre seems therefore to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning could be easily adapted by the resurrection-day of the Christian’s God. Bonfires were lighted at Easter and according to popular belief of long standing, the moment the sun rises on Easter Sunday morning, he gives three joyful leaps, he dances for joy … Water drawn on the Easter morning is, like that at Christmas, holy and healing … here also heathen notions seems to have grafted themselves on great Christian festivals. Maidens clothed in white, who at Easter, at the season of returning spring, show themselves in clefts of the rock and on mountains, are suggestive of the ancient goddess.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre

    So, I refuse to use the pagan name in relation to the Resurrection of the Savior of all, God incarnate, the Lord Jesus Christ.

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  64. Progress! Sections of the trench are filled in (with presumably new sewer pipe installed below). Still no word on our longer term prospects, whether we’ll wind up having to excavate beyond my driveway, but let’s hope not.

    Lots of the old clay pipe now piled on top of the heap in the bin holding all the busted-up concrete.

    I can see roots sticking out of the sides of the dirt in the trench.

    Kind of fascinating.

    To a point.

    Anxious to get it all covered back up and pretty-looking. 🙂

    Liked by 1 person

  65. Peter, I prefer to celebrate the resurrection.

    I shot the sheriff…well, that did actually happen in our ED on Saturday night. A psych patient managed to get a gun from the deputy investigating another crime the patient was thought to be involved in. He shot the deputy, and would have shot others, had the gun not jammed after the first shot.

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  66. Peter, there is no evidence that Bede was correct in his assertion – no such deity exists in the Germanic mythology. Bede admitted that he sometimes stated his own opinion. If you read that Wikipedia article all the way through, you will see that the body of the article admits the uncertainty of the introductory assertions. And Charlemagne, who was a scourge of Saxon paganism (he basically massacred pagans) renamed April “Ostermonath” – is it likely he would have named the month after a pagan deity?

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  67. In other words, Bede’s one comment is the only source we have for a supposed link between Easter and a hypothetical pagan goddess. All the other sources for such a connection come from skeptical scholars who lived over a thousand years after Bede, who decided to build a prototype of the goddess. Furthermore, Bede was not a complete authority for pagan traditions, partly because England had been Christianized for about a hundred years before he wrote his work. I’m not saying he was totally inaccurate in all he wrote, but he was given to speculation – for example, he tells of a dream someone had of the afterlife, in order to prove that purgatory existed. So, while he is a good source for main events, we cannot always be so certain of his details. I have read his work, which is very interesting, but I had to take some of it with a grain of salt. So his assertion of the existence of a goddess name Ostre, which appears in no other written records of the era, is not conclusive proof. Even the law of Moses required two or three witnesses, and we only have one.

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  70. Hi, Jo, if you’re reading this (I’ll post it again on today’s thread) – VERY cool that you saw Carl. Isn’t that a neat triangle of friendship?

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