103 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 6-30-17”

  2. It’s FRIDAY!
    You know what that means?

    If there’s something you need to do in June, you need to get to it NOW.
    Chuck & Linda are leaving for two weeks in Spain today.
    Chuck is giving a presentation to a meeting of some sort.

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  3. I don’t know what happened at the first entry above. I don’t recall hitting “enter” at any time.
    Chuck uses PowerPoint
    I used to give presentations with color slides. I was amazed and envious when I saw the first PowerPoint presentation.

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  4. It surely is lonesome in here.
    Do you realize that half the year is gone?
    And we have been living in Greensboro over a year now?
    I’m just beginning to learn my way around. I am told that Greensboro has a “down town”. But I haven’t been there yet.

    Greensboro has a Cornwallis Drive. It’s kinda like Columbia, SC having a WT Sherman boulevard. It doesn’t. .

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  6. Good morning. Just in from the morning rounds. All are looking fine out there. Though eleven year old will need to make room for the new poult that hatched out yesterday. And nine year old needs to water the horses. One fifteen year old is off on his bike the five miles to weight lifting and then off to work swinging a sledge hammer and a fence pounder and wielding a post hole digger. Other fifteen year old tells me the chores I give her are too hard. They probably are so I guess I will give them to nine and eleven year olds.

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  7. Good morning!! Cloudy and cool this AM….and we are predicted to get a tad bit of rain…
    Today is the day I go in and speak with the boss….sensing peace and resolute on this path…so very thankful to the Lord from whom all blessings flow….make it a good one ya’ll…like Chas said…June is fleeing and you’d better get it done if it needs to be gettin’ done in June!! 🙂

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  8. I tried to get on here last night but with all of the pushing and shoving, it did not happen. Now I see why. Somebody was hogging the thread.

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  12. Peter’s pretty aggressive sometimes.

    Christmas is coming.

    But first, the Fourth of July, which sadly falls on a Tuesday this year. No long weekend. Still, nice to have the day off and then to come back for what will be a 3-day week.

    Glad 6 arrows’ tooth is better. And that Kim’s new position is going so well.

    We have our Space X rocket back again sitting on the waterfront (the one from the weekend launch that returned). People love walking out to see that and take pictures. Real Estate Pal walks his Great Dane along that part of the waterfront, near the marina, every morning and was so excited when he came upon the first one that appeared there. He texted me “Hey! there’s a ROCKET out here!”

    Next week there’s a media tour of the Nautilus (which is going to be somewhat based on our waterfront at an ocean research campus) and interviews available with Robert Ballard.

    Looks like the city conservation crew came by my house yesterday and radically trimmed up my tree that they planted (which is doing very well). Now it’s a thin trunk with a ball of green foliage just at the top.

    And some of my grass is coming back with my nightly watering. I’m sure I’m violating the city’s water usage rules, but it’s been a long drought and I’m tired of looking at the brown scrub that’s passed for a lawn out there (not that I’m alone, many people pretty much gave up when the drought ran so long and water rationing became so strict). Hoping we get at least a “normal” rainfall in 2017-18 again.

    They’re redoing a couple houses in our neighborhood, an old craftsman that was kind of ruined when someone back in the day put stucco on it and made some other changes; and a Spanish house on a corner across the street from that house that I’ve long admired. Hope they do them both justice, I’m told they’re both “flip” jobs. I walk by there with the dogs every night and since it’s still light out so late I’ve been able to watch the progress.

    I think I found an HGTV show just for me, “Vintage Flip,” based on restoring old homes in the Los Angeles area. 🙂

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  15. Yes, Chas. It’s not only Friday, it’s the last day of June. Enjoy the last funnies of the first half of 2017. Boy, do they pick on the GOP Senate this time. The GOP deserves it the way they have been acting like the Democrats for months now. But that discussion is better suited for the Politics thread.

    This weekend Hannibal goes crazy as several thousand tourists descend for Tom Sawyer Days. Fence painting contests, mud volleyball, They even have added “Tomboy Sawyer” contest so girls can act like boys. I wouldn’t be surprised if some Liberal activist doesn’t complain about there not being a contest for boys who claim to be girls get to be Becky Thatcher.

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  16. Peter’s pretty aggressive sometimes.

    Ahem. Not a word about mumsee posting 3 in a row, and almost four if nancyjill hadn’t jumped in.

    Liked by 2 people

  17. Ah, you see! That is just it. NancyJill was able to safely jump in. No pushing or shoving, knocking folk off the pier. No running into people with the jeep. Live and let live.

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  19. The Nautilus is going there? We thought it would be SF. Well, that’s interesting. My brother may be off sailing with them right now.

    Mr. Navy charmed his VBS class with photos of the googly-eyed octopus they found while he was on board last year.
    http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/160817-cephalopod-quiz-nautilus-vin

    The kids thought he was making it up until he found the photos on his phone.

    His take? Why would God create such a creature a mike down in the dark that had never seen a light before?

    God loves unique creatures, color and He has a sense of humor. 🙂

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  26. How old is the U.S. going to be this Fourth of July? While I’m good at remembering historical facts, dates themselves, because they are numbers, get somewhat muddled in my head. I wanted to say 1776 without looking it up, but I may have that wrong.

    July 1st is Canada Day of course, and I can remember the year of our Confederation, which was 1867, which means that tomorrow is Canada’s 150th Anniversary. I’m not going home, being somewhat tired from last weekend’s trip, but my nearest cousin and family are planning to pick me up to go see the tall ships at the harbourfront tomorrow. Not sure if the fireworks will be visible, since we have had alternate sun, cloud, and rain this whole week, but I’m going to try to see them.

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  28. Peter, in all fairness, I would rather have pretended to be Tom Sawyer than Becky Thatcher. I was something of a tomboy myself, and my family had a nickname (one of several) for me that was masculine in tone. We sisters played all kinds of pretend games growing up, and there were a fair few in which we were soldiers, sailors, and other predominantly masculine roles. When we met up with our two closest cousins, a boy and girl, and wanted to put on a play based off some book we had all read, at least some of us had to pick up some of the masculine parts, as our boy cousin couldn’t do it all. I remember my eldest sibling, who has always been quite feminine in demeanour, quarrelling with our male cousin over who would take a certain masculine role one time – the argument couldn’t be satisfactorily resolved, and the game was called off, which was a pity. I think I remember the incident because the older of we cousins were almost too old for role playing games, and that was one of the last times such a game was proposed.

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  30. Roscuro, we girls were all ‘tomboys’ in my neighborhood growing up, too — Tom Sawyer, baseball, soldiers, football (!), Davy Crockett … 🙂 And we did have fun.

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  32. Phos, it’s 1776 for the declaration of independence. July 4, 1776.
    The war wasn’t over until 1783. The British won most of the battles. They just couldn’t keep it up. Britain lost that was the same way we lost the Viet Nam wart. US troops won every battle they were in in that war. It was the home front that lost.

    OTOH, I mentioned before. I asked a veteran, “How do you know that you’ve won?
    The Brits were asking the same thing.
    We are in the same situation with ISIS. There will never be a time when they quit.

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  33. DJ, we have photographs from a few of our role plays. A couple of them are from ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ A neighbour girl got to be Riding Hood (we were taught to be polite to our guests and let them go first) and wore a red cape that we dug up from somewhere (we had a box full of miscellaneous old clothes that we would piece our costumes from and our mother frequently went rummaging for other things if we needed them). Second Sibling was Granny with cap and an old fashioned looking dress – she didn’t need fake spectacles, as her first pair of glasses were too big for her small face and she said later she had to continually smile to keep them from slipping off her nose. I was the woodcutter, swamped in a lumberjack-style jacket of my father’s, a knitted cap, and a small hatchet. Eldest Sibling had the honour of being the wolf, complete with a mask that was constructed out of what was once a Wile-E-Coyote pillow (I have no idea where it came from originally) that had been previously converted into a wolf’s head hand puppet (it was used in several puppet plays as well). In one photo, we are posed for a group portrait. In the other, I have apparently slain the wolf, who is lying on the ground, with my small self holding the hatchet as if the blow had just been struck, while Granny and Red Riding Hood cower together in the background.

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  36. Don’t worry Chas, I understood what you meant to say. Do you count the age of your country from the Declaration of Independence or from the end of the war?

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  37. We celebrate July 4, 1776 this coming Tuesday.
    Most people don’t even know when the war officially ended.
    It really ended for different people at different times. i.e. When the British left.

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  38. So, this is the 241st anniversary for you. Just nine more years until your 250th. I suppose it is the same for the different states as it is for the different provinces and territories. Our newest province is actually the site of the oldest European settlements (the Vikings) in the New World, Newfoundland, which transitioned from a British possession to a Canadian province in 1949. Our newest territory was created in my lifetime, Nunavut in 1999.

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  39. Roscuro, what was Nunavut before it was your newest territory? I thought it was always part of Canada (“always”, that is, in my lifetime).

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  40. Some music from Newfoundland. The descent of the Newfoundland settlers (tragically, the Beothuk First Nation became extinct in the 1800s) is primarily Irish, so it is hardly surprising that their music should sound Irish, their instruments should resemble traditional Irish instruments, and the famed Newfoundland accent should sound Irish. My Eldest Sibling-in-law is from Newfoundland, and has an Irish surname, as do these gentlemen:

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  41. And since I also mentioned Nunavut, here is an example of one their styles of music. Nunavut is primarily inhabited by the Inuit, for whom the territory was created. They have a style of singing which is unusual, throat singing, which only the women traditionally practiced. It is a playful type of singing, a competition by two women to see who would be the first to break down into laughter. It is now being incorporated into modern pop music, not necessarily to the delight of those who preserve the tradition. Here two Inuit sisters demonstrate:

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  43. Kevin, I didn’t see your comment until just now. Nunavut was taken from the Northwest Territories (I think some of the islands in Hudson’s Bay were part of Ontario and Quebec). As I said above, it was really to give the Inuit a specified place, although Inuit also live in other parts of Northern Canada. The Northwest Territories were named for the fur trading company that once had a monopoly on the trade, as the Hudson’s Bay Company had on the area around Hudson’s Bay. My father met a First Nations man who had grown up in one of the towns on the shore of Hudson’s Bay and he said the company still had such a monopoly when he was growing up (circa 1960/70s) that no First Nations person was even allowed to open a store of their own. It is facts like those which makes us understand just why the First Nations and Inuit of Northern Canada want their own territories, and why having all that territory taken from the Northwest Territories and made into a new one was so significant to them.

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  44. Now that I’ve mentioned the Northwest Territories, I have to share something from there 😉 This is an example of the cross over genres that several First Nations musicians have developed. Leela Gilday is from the Dene First Nation in the Northwest Territories, and as you can hear, she sings in the ballad style of country, with an additional Northern Native twist:

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  45. Just one more, from Canada’s third northern territory, the Yukon. This seems appropriate, given June is Aboriginal History Month in Canada. Jerry Alfred is a survivor of the awful residential school system that was inflicted on the First Nations (I talked about it in a post on here a few months ago and). He was born “Keeper of Songs” to his tribe, as his father was before him, and managed to retain his Tutchone language despite the fact that the schools forbid the children to use their mother tongue. He now sings in that language, but using quite Western/European style instruments:

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  47. ½ (60-40)^2 / 5 + 25 – 3 = an important number.

    Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. 😉

    File-cabinet organizing here, too. I did some weeding out yesterday as part of our basement straightening up — threw out expired homeschool-related catalogs which were in one file drawer, along with a bunch of unneeded papers on the desk. I also came across a Bible study handout from a study my husband had attended, and it reminded me that I have many old Bible studies tucked away somewhere, probably in various places, so Michelle’s post and the discussion about what to do with old study materials were timely.

    Many of the studies I’ve been in have gone very slowly — it’s not unheard of that we might spend years in a Bible book that only contains four chapters, say. So there’s that part of me that says, I hate to throw away what I delved into so deeply. It wasn’t some superficial remnant from a bygone era that is easily tossed. Yet I don’t know that I have ever gone back to reread my notes from those studies. Why am I keeping something that never gets revisited once the study period is over?

    I do still ponder some of what I remember from those studies, though I’ve probably forgotten a lot. It’s a comfort that God assures us His word will not return void, but will accomplish that which He intends.

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  50. I haven’t been around here too much the last few days because I’ve been acting as a single head of household. My wife has wanted for several years to attend an adult choir camp at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in northern Michigan, and finally did it this year. Good for her, but challenging for me to hold everything together at home without her. I’m tired!

    Tomorrow I’ll be driving four hours to Interlochen to hear the concert they’ve been putting together. Then, reunited with my sweetie, I’ll drive four hours back, just in time for the annual family gathering and fireworks show over the lake where her brother lives. I think I’m going to be exhausted.

    I’ll try to catch up on the week’s Wandering Views Sunday afternoon…

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  51. 6, I’ve known My Dear Aunt Sally forever, but her usefulness always seemed limited. Please Excuse fills the gap, thanks for the new tool!

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  52. Yes, this really is five in a row, but big brother and big sister can be assured I will stand aside when it’s time for their big moment this evening…

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  53. Not sure what we’re doing for the 4th, but Hubby has the day off. My Tuesday student will come on Wednesday instead, at noon, and my regular Wednesday student at her usual 7:15 time.

    I mentioned that my Wednesday student this week was here for a long session. I’d planned two hours (her usual lesson length is 75 minutes — well, that’s the target length, anyway, but a lot of times it turns out to be more like an hour and a half. This week I knew we’d need at least that much time, so I had her come at 6:30 and planned to end around her usual 8:30 target ending time, because I knew there would be a lot to discuss and look at regarding what she composed at her composition camp she attended last week, and the conclusions she drew from the experience.

    Well, she LOVED the camp! 🙂 (I kind of thought she would, but I had no idea how much.) The leader of the camp is a Composition professor at a Midwestern university, and he was so knowledgeable and had many connections in the world of film and TV composing.

    My student composed a piece for flute, cello and piano (all the students — high-school level — had that same assignment), and she was thinking of a ship, specifically the Titanic when she wrote her composition. So she was very excited to hear that that professor knows the composer of the film score for that show! Kids were naming different contemporary composers they’d heard of, and for most (maybe all? I don’t know) of them, he’d say something like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve met him.” Or, “Oh, yeah, I’ve talked to him.” 🙂

    So now my student has another college in mind — the one where this professor teaches. She had her heart pretty well set on a school in another state that has an excellent musical reputation, but now she’s considering this second school, in an entirely different state, and has looked into audition requirements to get into various music programs there. The piano requirements are quite stringent, so she will be going much deeper in depth with some aspects of technique in which she needs more development.

    So between piano with me, and saxophone with her high school band director, and viola lessons starting in August (she wanted to take up a string instrument to broaden her knowledge of the full orchestral palette — she’s already well-acquainted with piano and winds, and percussion to a certain extent), she is going to be one busy young lady her senior year!

    Her mom called me the day after her lesson — yesterday, that would be — and told me about the piano audition requirements for that new college she’s considering. Also, Mom said that when her daughter got home Wednesday night after her lesson (close to 9:30 at night, as we finished piano around 8:30, but then I took a little time to demonstrate some things on viola, as she had brought along her new viola she’s renting, so she didn’t actually leave my place until almost 9:00 pm), my student, immediately upon arriving home, took out her viola and started playing. (“She serenaded me,” her mom reported. 🙂 )

    Is that musical enthusiasm or what? 🙂 Two and a half hours at a lesson, about 40 minutes driving round trip, and then launches right into playing as soon as possible afterwards!

    Hearing that just made my day. 🙂

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  55. Oh, hi, Kevin, wasn’t sure how many posts would come in while typing a couple of long posts, so thought I’d get that 62 in, just in case. 😉

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  56. Interlochen sounds great. I’ve never been that. I’ll bet that’s been an enjoyable experience for your wife.

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  57. Hi, Mumsee, didn’t mean to sound like I was calling you “Kevin.” You sort of sneaked in there while I was typing. 😉

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  58. I was a bit tom-boyish, I guess. I enjoyed reading Hardy Boys books, but not Nancy Drew.

    We also, in our rural neighborhood growing up, had lots of different games the neighborhood kids and my siblings and I would play — softball some, but especially football. Boys and girls. Tackle football. It was all good fun.

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  61. roscuro, I played the distinguished role of Lassie in some of our make-believe escapades. Until one of the kids got a collie. I was bumped quickly back to understudy status. I was more obedient than the real dog, however. The plots took some very unexpected turns with the real dog to contend with and control.

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  64. trying to order an iphone, they want my password, yikes, I already don’t remember it.
    good news at the eye doctor and I had some insurance I almost forgot about
    still can’t use my computer at my friends house.
    all this technology just mounts up against me

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  65. 6 Arrows, I don’t think one has to be tomboyish to prefer Hardy Boys–I did too. (Nancy Drew was just too much “Nancy happened upon a mystery” for my taste; the boys at least had a detective for a father, so slightly more plausibility, if only slightly–I reread two or three a decade ago and was horrified how formulaic and awful they were!) I was never a girly girl–I liked insects and liked to climb a tree to sit and read–but I wasn’t anything close to a tomboy.

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  68. Apple password issues are awful to resolve, they have fairly tight security but often it works against the person it’s supposed to protect. It’s never as simple as “forgot your password? Click here to reset a new one.”

    No, it locks you out and you somehow have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get back in. I still can’t connect to the cloud on my laptop after my last password escapade.

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  70. I was a pretty good collie, I think, but your knees started to hurt after a while and you couldn’t talk, so the role was limited.

    The girl whose parents got the collie, Linda, was so happy with her new dog (the rest of us just had cats — try getting a cat to play Lassie, not happening). But the dog didn’t last long, a few months later he/she was gone, so I guess “it didn’t work out” or something.

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  72. Third Arrow and I went grocery shopping today, and when we were home and putting the groceries away, I found a bag with four items, none of which I had purchased — Cool Whip, sour cream, cheese curds and a block of pepper jack cheese.

    All of the groceries we’d bought got home with us, but that extra bag of someone else’s stuff also was there. I called the store and reported that someone else’s purchase got put in our cart. They said that they would have to throw everything out anyway if I brought it back (probably due to the fact it was all refrigerated stuff?), and would just end up giving the customer who purchased those items the same thing in replacement. They thanked me for calling, and said to feel free to keep and enjoy those items myself, or give them to someone else if I didn’t want those things.

    Those are all items that we’ve bought in the past, though not often, but each item would have at least one person who would eat it.

    So we got some free groceries out of the deal. An unexpected blessing from the Lord.

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  73. DJ, that dog looks like the dog our neighbors used to have. He’d hang out over here a lot to play with the kids. He probably heard some classical music, too, but was not as calm as that dog you saw in the video. 🙂

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  74. 6 Arrows, it is not exactly true that the same person wrote both series. What is true is that both series (and the Bobbsey Twins and one or two others) were written by freelancers. They’d get an outline (a detailed outline) and would have to write the book from it. And they didn’t earn very much money from it. There’s a fascinating book about the process that I got from the library a few years ago. I’ll google it and see if I can find it. . . .

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  76. Actually, 6, Nancy Drew was written by ghost writers after the original author stopped writing them. But her name continued to be the by line. I don’t know on the Hardy Boys.

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  80. 6 Arrows, no one person actually wrote either the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books, but they were created in concept by Edward Stratemeyer and appeared in 1927 and 1930, respectively, just before he died. Earlier he had also created the Bobbsey Twins (1904), Tom Swift (1910), and others. He wrote some of the early books, but mostly outlined plots and outsourced the writing to a pool of ghostwriters.

    From Wikipedia on the Hardy Boys: The characters were created by American writer Edward Stratemeyer, the founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a book-packaging firm, and the books have been written by many different ghostwriters over the years. The books are published under the collective pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon…

    The Syndicate’s process for creating the Hardy Boys books consisted of creating a detailed outline, with all elements of plot; drafting a manuscript; and editing the manuscript. Edward Stratemeyer’s daughter, Edna Stratemeyer Squier, and possibly Stratemeyer himself, wrote outlines for the first volumes in the series. Beginning in 1934, Stratemeyer’s other daughter, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, began contributing plot outlines; she and Andrew Svenson wrote most of the plot outlines for the next several decades. Other plot outliners included Vincent Buranelli, James Duncan Lawrence, and Tom Mulvey.

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  82. There wasn’t just Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, there was also the Bobbsey Twins and the Dana Sisters. They were all part of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, written by ghostwriters working for the editor Edward Stratemeyer and later daughters. Carolyn Keene was a pseudonym under which several writers wrote. I remember Eldest Sibling had a set of Hardy Boys (the 1950s era ones) and Second Sibling similarly had a set of Nancy Drew, while I had a set of Bobbsey Twins (if anyone wonders why Youngest Sibling does not get a mention so often in these early reminiscences, it is because of the age gap between myself and Youngest Sibling, which was nearly four years, so she was often too little to join in during those early years). Our two cousins, mentioned above, supplemented our incomplete sets with their own – we were both homeschooled and we had an unofficial lending library running between us. When our mother worked as a librarian, we discovered in one of the two local branches a treasure trove of antique books in a backroom, among which were some of the original Bobbsey Twin books from the 1920s, which were much different from the 1950s era ones. Sadly, several years later, after my mother had given up the librarian job, there was a fire in that library and most of those old books did not survive. I read the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew when my elder siblings decided I was ‘old’ enough, but I think I preferred the Trixie Belden mysteries at the time. However, I much preferred Dickens and Austen over any of them 😉

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  83. The bookshelf picture at the top of the Atlantic article Cheryl linked could have been from my family room. I have a row of Hardy Boys books exactly like that, in order, with different amounts of and wear around the edges and fading of the color. I also have Tom Swift Jr.

    And then there’s Christopher Cool, a short-lived Stratemeyer series from the 1960s. Anyone else heard of it? Chris was an Ivy League student recruited to be part of TEEN (Top-Secret Educational Espionage Network) to aid in the fight against TOAD, an international criminal conspiracy. I know that sounds like Get Smart, but it wasn’t comedy. When I was 10 I thought it was pretty, well, cool.

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  84. Now that’s one I never heard of, Kevin. Our cousins not only had complete sets of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, but they also had some of the Dana Girls, and maybe even a couple of the Happy Hollisters (the name rings a bell to me). The Dana Girls were about twin sisters, around the same age as Nancy Drew, and sometimes their stories, even to our still-forming literary tastes, seemed like Nancy Drew times two. We didn’t read many comic books, and certainly none about superheroes, so I guess the Stratemeyer Syndicate was our DC or Marvel.

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  85. July 4th we will go to our dear friend’s home and gather with other precious friends. We do this every 4th and we will have a front row seat for the fireworks show at the Air Force Academy…her deck looks directly towards Pikes Peak and the AFA…cherished moments…just not certain if the fireworks show is going to happen this year due to the dryness in our area.
    Today was my last day of work. My boss and I had a very good and healing talk. She apologized to me and cried…she said she will miss me terribly. I will miss working there, but I know this is the path the Lord has laid before me…and I told her as much. We parted friends (I told her I would make a better friend than employee) It is well and I am looking forward to spending more time away with my husband 🙂 Thank you all for covering me in prayer…I cherish you all ❤

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  90. Thanks for the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew answers, everybody. Good links, too. The Atlantic article with the first 15 Hardy Boys books brought back a lot of memories, especially those first three titles. My brother (13 months younger than I) enjoyed those books, too, and we’d talk about them a lot, and probably read the ones the other checked out of the library. My sister (the next one after my brother) read the Nancy Drew books, and I think tried to convince me to read them, too, but nah — didn’t care for them. I don’t recall if my youngest two sisters read them, either. It seems they didn’t read as much of anything as we oldest three did.

    Roscuro, when you mentioned that your youngest sibling was quite a bit younger than you, I was trying to remember if I’d heard how many years it was. I got to thinking, was it six years? Seven? Eight? Nearly four years doesn’t seem like a big gap to me. 😉 But then my perspective is kind of skewed, having all my children farther apart than a lot of families do. 3rd Arrow, for example, is right around four years younger than 2nd Arrow, and four years older than 4th Arrow. There was a time when she was the only teenager in our family, an unusual occurrence for a middle child. The rest of the children are between 33 and 43 months apart from one to the next, with that shortest gap (between 4th and 5th Arrows) the only time I had two consecutive children less than 3 years apart. Took us 17 years and 5 months to get six arrows. 🙂

    My family of origin, OTOH, was five children in six years and a month. Whew. We fought a fair amount (my parents might dispute that “fair” adjective), a lot more, anyway, it seems to me, than my children do. I have an idea age differences may have something to do with that.

    My kids connect well with each other, though, despite their age differences. 4th & 6th Arrows (ages 16 & 9) enjoy each other’s company and spend a lot of time together, as do 3rd & 5th Arrows (20 & 13). Those aren’t the only pairings, of course, and the way they express themselves with each of their siblings ebbs and flows over the years. Pretty cool to observe.

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  91. Jo, hope the phone and computer issues get resolved soon!

    Kevin, I’d never heard of that series Christopher Cool. It sounds interesting. I’ve never seen Get Smart, but did hear of it.

    NancyJill, so glad things worked out as they did for you today with your boss. A very good answer to prayer. Enjoy your time away with your husband. 🙂

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  95. It’s only 10:30 here, the pre-Fourth fireworks at the harbor finished not long ago, unnerving the dogs. The cat slept through it all.

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  97. Good thing that I know God is in control or I would be even more frustrated. I finally got the order almost done, but cannot have a Po box for an address, okay I will use my friends, but your address has to match the address for your credit card bill, which is my Po box. Time to either trust Him or tear my hair out.
    Plus my eyes have been dilated all day due to the eye appointment

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