71 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 6-19-17”

  4. Exactly my first thought as an answer. A cowbird. Next we’ll be seeing a catbird.

    I missed saying Happy Father’s Day. I was sad yesterday since it was my pastor’s last sermon at our church.

    In the evening Art’s choir joined with two other small Methodist choirs for a Father’s Day Celebration concert. Donations were taken up to send to the Baptist church in Birmingham that had the missions bus that crashed and killed a seventeen year old girl. The bus was headed to the Atlanta airport as you’ve likely heard. Over $1,000 was collected!

    I enjoyed the music of the choirs. One of the churches was where Wesley had Scouts and earned his Eagle status. But there were only twenty-four singers. There were various instruments accompanying. It was just another reminder of how church attendance and involvement has dwindled within the perimeter of Atlanta. Seeing that along with what my church has been going through added to my sadness.So it was a mixed emotions day. We did hear from Wesley late while we were watching a movie.

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  7. Good Morning Everyone. Michelle, there is power in the whistle.
    I am in Pcola getting ready for my class. Yesterday was good. Mr P heard from 2 of his 3 boys. Needless to say, he didn’t hear from BG. The dogs got him a Father’s Day card. They told him he was a good Dog-Daddy and they appreciated that he bought the really good dog food for them. 😉

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  9. This past weekend, I forgot to mention that we had a Christian Music Festival in Stafford. We didn’t go (Hubby was working & I was babysitting, & still not feeling well), but it looks like it was fairly well-attended. Several churches in town, including mine, participated. I think the pastors each took a few minutes to give a little message at intervals throughout the festival.

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  10. Here’s a question: What would you call a town of about 12,000 people? Small, medium, large? Small city?

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  12. Kizzie, I live outside a town of 12,000+ (under 13), and I think of it as a small town. I once lived in a “town” of about 4,000, and that was really small–but it was spread out over quite a few miles, and wasn’t yet incorporated, so it can’t really even count as a small town. (It now has 8,000; I just checked. It has taken more than 40 years to get there, and since most of the land was unoccupied when we lived there, it had the potential for much, much more growth than that. It had a small store, a church, a mobile home court, and a water company–that was it–when we lived there. Now it has restaurants, a wildlife rehabilitation center, the small church has added several buildings and now has three services, and so forth.)

    So, a town with 10-15,000 would be a small or small/midsize town.

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  14. Kizzie- Around here that would be a small city. If it’s a suburb, then I would say “big city area”. I think anything over 5,000 is considered “city” by the Census Bureau.

    I remember when in college I asked a fellow student where he was from. he said, “A small town near St. Louis.”

    I asked which one. “Kirkwood,” he replied.

    I asked, “How big is it?” “Around 15,000.”

    We were at a small university of a city that size, yet that city was the biggest town of any size for 60 miles. I later found out Kirkwood is a suburb, surrounded buy St Louis and other suburbs. To me, that’s no small town.

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  15. As you can see, it’s all relative, Kizzie. 🙂 There are 80,000 in the harbor community where I live (which is considered a “small” enclave within the city of Los Angeles). It “feels” small for some reason, probably cause we’re geographically contained on a peninsula.

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  16. Also because so many of the family who came here from Europe still have a presence through the generations. Unusual for LA, a lot of people who were raised in this area tend to stay here, it’s an area with deep ethnic and family roots that seem to endure despite the mobile nature of Southern California. Many people know each other — or at least know family members of one another.

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  18. Okay, it is all relative. I’m sorry, but “small town” does not refer to a city of of 10-15,000. That would be “small city”. “Small town” means less than 1,000 in my book.

    So, here is a QoD: What is the smallest town/city you’ve lived in, other than out in the country?
    I think we’ve had this one before so ask a followup: What’s the largest you’ve lived in? Name the two if you want.

    My answers:
    Smallest – Mt. Lemmon, AZ. It’s a ski resort North of Tucson with a year round population of 200. At least it did before a forest fire destroyed it 10 years ago. I drove the school bus from the village down to Tucson.
    Largest – Tucson, AZ. It had around 300,000 when i left in 1979. It’s now over 500,000 and doesn’t have a lot of “suburbs” like Phoenix or other large cities.

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  21. Athens, Greece, population about 3.75 million, municipality.
    Nezperce, ID, 497, probably within the five mile radius which would include us.

    I was taught that a city did not start until 100,000. We have met people from small villages in China and Africa which had larger populations than 100,000. Perspective.

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  22. That bovine has other structure that would indicate it is not a cow bird but a bull bird. Not to mention the hog panel fence with posts and electric wire.

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  23. I was looking for the cute pictures of our local Scottish highland cows. They are so cute. This fellow would like them, I am sure. 🙂 I must have deleted it, though. 😦

    We have lived in a small town well under 3,000, although we mainly have lived in the country. We have many small towns that number in the hundreds though. Those would have to be the small towns.

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  25. While that one is a male, or bull, don’t let the horns deceive you. All 5 in the pen had horns, and they weren’t all males.

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  26. All the cows we have ever had were horned. All the cows we ever had were milk cows. All of the steers we ever had did not have horns.

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  27. Interesting conversation with a guy at the dog park yesterday (a semi-regular, his wife and teenage son also used to come, it’s mostly him and dog alone lately). Anyway, he apparently had a poor relationship with his own father whom he didn’t look up to and now (the father) has become a Christian, very fervent apparently. The son spoke of being “saved” with noticeable asterisks in his tone, if you will, it’s very apparent he’s not of the faith (but is intrigued by psychics, etc.). Says that his father, while going to Mexico and into prisons frequently to *save* people, has been kicked out of churches & cheats on his income tax with regard to the rental units he owns — at least that’s the son’s perception. Who knows. Lots of resentment there, so his perception is clearly very colored by all of that. He hadn’t called his father yet as of about 6 p.m. on Father’s Day when we were talking at the dog park.

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  28. Stafford has about 12,000 people. Our town is a mix of rural & suburban, & is quite large geographically, so we’re spread out over that large area. There are farms here, a woolen mill, & also a couple more upscale-type neighborhoods. There are a couple relatively small manufacturing plants, but not much other business in town. Most jobs or real shopping has to be done in nearby towns (with the commute being 20 – 30 minutes, depending on which town one goes to). We have some restaurants, but no place to go clothes shopping. Besides the gas stations, the only chains we have here are a McDonald’s & a Subway.

    Our “downtown” is a short walk, maybe 1/4 of a mile long, maybe not even. I think we have two traffic lights now. None of our roads are more than two lanes. Most of us think of Stafford as a small town, it certainly has a small town feel to it.

    The nearest big city is Hartford (which is not big compared to many other cities), & that is a few towns away.

    The reason I asked is because on one our Stafford Facebook pages, a man referred to us as a small city. How can we be a small city when we have no real shopping or industry?

    So I’d say that the population numbers do not tell the whole story.

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  29. DJ – I hope his dad isn’t cheating on his taxes.

    My parents tended to be pretty averse to born-again Christians/Christianity. It didn’t help that when they were selling their house in Wisconsin, the minister who wanted to buy it talked to them privately about going around the real estate agent, & cutting her out of it.

    When we lived in Tennessee for two & a half years, they were turned off by the people who claimed to be Christian, but snubbed them for being Catholic. (I’ve since learned, from someone who ministered in the south, that many know how to talk the talk in a “cultural Christian” kind of way, but are not actual believers.)

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  30. Me too, Kizzie — if he’s a believer he will be convicted of those things at some point. Hard to know whether the son’s existing personal skepticism was coloring his view of his dad — or if his dad’s poor example was at least contributing to his negative view of Christianity.

    In my view, it’s a city if it has it’s own city council/government, no matter how big or small. Thus our community, even though it has its own name & a strong identity, isn’t a “city” (though many mistakenly call it that) — we are part of the larger city of LA.

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  32. What’s the largest I’ve evr lived in? Chicago, with about 3 million people. They would say about 11 million, but that included the suburbs and thus, to me, doesn’t count. Now, in Nashville it’s fair to count the suburbs, since they have a county government and not a city government.

    I tend to assume a region that has 5,000 or fewer is likely not to be incorporated or to have any elements that would make it a “town.” So a small, unincorporated area without a government, a grocery store, or a church might be a community or a village but not a town. That would make anything up to 10 or 15,000 a small town. We’re really more than can be counted a small town, since we have several car dealers, a bunch of restaurants, several hotels, and so forth. One of my brothers was familiar with my town before I moved here because it is “known for” something with which he is familiar. But we still have a “small town” feel, with a walkable downtown, people working in the post office or the McDonald’s for many years, young children riding their bikes around, free cultural activities, etc. So it is “smallish”: small by feel, midsize in reality.

    Other than the two years I lived in the unincorporated community in northern Arizona (between my dad’s retirement and his death), I have only lived in top-25 cities. Well, between Dad’s death and my attendance at college, I actually lived in suburbs of Phoenix and not Phoenix, but that period of life feels like a pause between childhood and college, my young-adult, pre-college years. But having lived in two top-10 cities (Chicago was #3 and Phoenix #9, though Phoenix is now #6), and one top 25 (Nashville), less than 15,000 definitely feels small. We live close to a decent-sized city, but it doesn’t seem large to me since it isn’t top 25.

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  34. My mom’s hometown, Spencer IA, now is 11,000+ but was probably far smaller when she was growing up there.

    The City Council there, in the 1960s, succeeded in taking my grandfather’s home through eminent domain (the house was where my mom grew up and where we often stayed on our visits during my childhood). She and her sister, my aunt, were locked in a years-long battle to try to keep it from happening but after my grandfather died in the middle of it, they gave up the fight.

    Among the locals they had in their corner were an RN at the hospital (the entity that was trying to take the property — she unveiled to my mom and aunt that the property would be used for a parking lot, not a new emergency wing as the City Council originally said); and a newspaper reporter for the local daily in Spencer. I’m finding some of the old paperwork for that as I’m going through the huge family collection boxes.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer,_Iowa

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  35. Ah, population in Spencer when my mom was growing up would have been about 5,000.

    In the mid 1960s it looks like it would have been around 9,000.

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  36. Karen @ 9:40- A town.
    But the place I lived in Virginia didn’t have boundaries. It had a post office but no individual government outside Fairfax County.
    population about 50,000.
    So? It doesn’t really matter what you call it.

    I have lived in Winnsboro, SC, McKnee, SC (It had a traffic light), Charleston, SC and Columbia, SC, Fort Worth, Texas and the DC area.
    It doesn’t really matter the size of the city, after a while, You navigate around the area you know and concerned with.
    I

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  37. My town has a population of 18,089 as of 2014. There is a moratorium on building right now because we are a watershed area into Mobile Bay and the Weeks Bay National Estuary. We are know as the City of Fhope. The problem is that the “city” has to offer police and fire protection outside of the City limits and not everyone is contributing.
    I really get irritated when I hear that Christians don’t believe Catholics are Christians. I know plenty of people who don’t live the Christian life but wouldn’t miss a Sunday in church for anything. I also have very little patience for those “country club” Christians. Either get on the bus or not, but don’t feed me a line about what a good Christian you are and how honest you are. It tickles the hair on the back of my neck and makes me inclined not to trust you. If you are a good Christian and you are honest….I will figure it out on my own.

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  38. Kim – Not only that, but if someone is not a Christian, it is not the Christian thing to snub them, but to be a loving witness to them.

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  39. This is disappointing. I have always believed good things about General Lee.

    “Lee’s cruelty as a slavemaster was not confined to physical punishment. In Reading the Man, the historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee through his writings, Pryor writes that “Lee ruptured the Washington and Custis tradition of respecting slave families,” by hiring them off to other plantations, and that “by 1860 he had broken up every family but one on the estate, some of whom had been together since Mount Vernon days.” The separation of slave families was one of the most unfathomably devastating aspects of slavery, and Pryor wrote that Lee’s slaves regarded him as “the worst man I ever see.” . . .

    Lee’s heavy hand on the Arlington plantation, Pryor writes, nearly led to a slave revolt, in part because the enslaved had been expected to be freed upon their previous master’s death, and Lee had engaged in a dubious legal interpretation of his will in order to keep them as his property, one that lasted until a Virginia court forced him to free them.

    When two of his slaves escaped and were recaptured, Lee either beat them himself or ordered the overseer to “lay it on well.” Wesley Norris, one of the slaves who was whipped, recalled that “not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.”

    He also enslaved free blacks captured in the war. 😦

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/

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  40. i have tried and tried and my computer will not let me on this site. Explain to me why the computer will only go to facebook and google, nothing else. I even restarted the modem. this is my ipad and it has no problem connecting here and it is the same wireless connection. I hate trying to type on an ipad, but just remembered that I bought a keyboard last summer. Mystifying…

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  43. I want Rite 1. It has the more formal language.
    After that I want a reception where everyone laughs, cries, and tells their funniest memory of me.

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  48. Largest city I’ve lived in? That would be where I am now, in a city of over half a million.
    Smallest (not including my childhood home in the country)? A village of a few thousand in West Africa.
    I would call a community of 12,000, a town, which is medium sized. A city is big, a town is medium, and a village is small. If you have a very big city, you could call it a metropolis, while if you have a very small village, you could call it a hamlet.

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  49. Received almost simultaneous calls, texts from neighbors asking if that was my dog that was out running the neighborhood … he’s home now but I need to figure out if he slipped out the gate while the gardener was here (gate was closed and gardener was gone when the neighbor right next door called), or if there’s another way out he’s found

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  51. VBS went well. Answers to prayer in that the temperature was just fine. Thanks be to God!

    We have five rules:
    1. Do not die
    2. Do not get injured.
    If you suspect either of those things is happening, contact one of us so we can save your life.
    3. The point is to wiggle and move. Everyone wiggle to demonstrate you understand.
    4. If you are wearing flip flops or sandals that will not allow you to run, please remove them.
    5. Have fun.

    Seems to be working so far . . .

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  54. It is kind of popular for some to say that they don’t want any kind of funeral or memorial service. Quite frankly, I think that is false humility. The funeral or memorial service is not for you, it is for the benefit of the people who loved you to say goodbye, & have some kind of “closure” (for lack of a better word).

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  57. Smallest town I lived in may have been Chamblee, GA when I was growing up. I do not know how small it was back then, but it contained the Atlanta Naval Air Station in the 1950’s. Of course it is now just a suburb of Atlanta. Then I lived in a dorm for two years at Statesboro, GA. I think the college had about 6,000 students back then and would have been the main thing the town was known for. It was about an hour from Savannah. Then I moved back to Dekalb County where I have lived all but those two years. We live in Unincorporated Dekalb which recently meant there was a push to graft us into one of the small cityhoods that are happening all around us. We pay enough taxes already without that. The houses in our area are skyrocketing in value. A lot of people are selling for that reason. The amount of building in our general vicinity seems overdone. I do not know where all the people are coming from and how they will make enough money to support the cost of housing.

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  58. Largest city I’ve lived in: Los Angeles, 3.5 million when I left.

    Smallest city: Ann Arbor, 115,000

    Smallest (and current): Pittsfield Charter Township (35,000).

    Michigan has two forms of municipal government, city and village. The difference in definition is in the structure of government, not the size, but villages are generally small.

    Another administrative division is the township. Every Michigan county is divided into townships, which cover all the areas not incorporated into cities. They collect taxes and conduct elections, and may provide some other services. (Pittsfield, for example, provides water and sewer and has an extensive parks and recreation program.) There are things they are not allowed jurisdiction over, such as roads. They are also subject to having areas annexed by neighboring cities and villages.

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  60. Somewhere along the line I heard that you’re in a town if the population is less than 10,000. I don’t recall what the dividing line is between “city” and “metropolis,” if there is one. Seems like I might have heard a number that distinguishes one from the other, but if I did, it wasn’t very meaningful, having never lived in a city over 50,000. (And that for only two months, a city of pretty close to that size.)

    I grew up on a farm, in an unincorporated part of a city of 25,000. We were rural route 3 for postal mail purposes, and later got a box number added to the mailing address. Now people’s addresses there are the 5-digit fire number and the name of the highway that runs by the house. There’s still a green sign marking the name of that unincorporated section when you roll in to that part of “town.” There were (are?) probably around 150-200 people in that little area.

    The town we live in now has tripled in size since hubby and I moved here in 1988. It was about 3,100 then, and the population now, as of the last time they updated the sign (a couple years ago?) is 9,005. It’s grown a lot, but not as much as our family, which quadrupled in size between then and the 2010 census. 🙂

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  61. We added a third traffic light last year. There may be a fourth one coming soon when our grocery store relocates, with a bigger store planned.

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  64. Kevin, we are in a township, but with the town’s mailing address. Since our township chooses not to tax residents for the library tax, if we want to use the local library we pay an annual fee. In our nearly six years of marriage, we had a library card just one year, so we save money not being in town. 🙂

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  65. The smallest place I’ve ever lived was the village of Little Chute, Wisconsin, which had a population of about 5000 when I lived there in my last couple & a half years of high school.

    The largest place was a suburb of Dayton, Ohio – Centerville. I looked it up, & found that it currently has a population of around 24,000, & is considered a city. I don’t know how large it was back in 1969 – 1975, when we lived there, or if it was considered a city back then.

    After I wrote that, I thought of another town I’d lived in, Vernon, Connecticut, that I thought could have been larger than Centerville, so I looked that one up, too. Vernon has a population close to 30,000, but is considered a town.

    And Stafford is indeed considered a town.

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  66. Finished reading Senator Ben Sasse’s book, The vanishing American adult : our coming-of-age crisis–and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance. Good book, though I didn’t agree with everything he said. Most of it, though. If you liked the interview of him with Bill Kristol (posted on the news thread about a month ago), you will likely enjoy the book, as well. Great thoughts on work and education, especially for those with children or other loved ones who are young adults or getting there.

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  67. I’ve only lived in five different zip codes, all under 10,000 except the first two. But the first one doesn’t really count as a city for me, I don’t think, since I was in the rural (farmland) part of that zip code.

    Country girl at heart. 🙂

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  68. The rural counties of Ontario were generally divided into townships, which have councils headed by a reeve rather than a mayor. However, many of them were amalgamated into municipalities by a former Conservative provincial government, which took the measure to reduce costs. Long story short, consolidating local government does not reduce costs, it increases them. My parents live in one such amalgamated county, and their property taxes, which go to the municipalities, not the province, increase by a large amount every year. The current municipality is always in deficit, while the former township that we lived in had a surplus when it was, without the agreement of its residents, amalgamated into the municipality.

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  69. Roscuro, thanks for posting that link over the weekend about domestic abuse. Emotional abuse and such that don’t leave physical marks can be so hidden from others. Some of those people can really turn on the charm and deceive outsiders into thinking they’re nice people.

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  70. I tend to assume a region that has 5,000 or fewer is likely not to be incorporated or to have any elements that would make it a “town.”

    You’ve not been to Missouri, then. It has incorporated towns/cities of less than 100 people. They have to have a mayor and town/city council and offer services, either directly or by contracting it out.

    Dictionaries don’t help, though. Merriam-Webster says, “City- a place where people live that is larger or more important than a town : an area where many people live and work.”

    Dictionary.com: “1. a large or important town.
    2. (in the U.S.) an incorporated municipality, usually governed by a mayor and a board of aldermen or councilmen.”

    It looks like the main difference is not size, as one person here says, but population density. So we can all agree that whatever we say a city or town is, is what it is to us.

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  71. Cheryl, I live in a schizophrenic location, between the cities of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. Our jurisdiction is Pittsfield Township, but our mailing address is Ypsilanti, and we’re in the Ann Arbor school and library districts. We usually just identify ourselves as being from Ann Arbor, which I guess we identify with because we lived in the city before we moved here.

    We were big library users when the children were younger. My wife commented once that she was glad we lived in the Ann Arbor library district since it cost non-residents $100 per year for library privileges. I was curious enough to look at our tax bill and discover $110 per year of our property tax was for the library. So much for the advantage of living in the district.

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