75 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-8-17”

  4. Good morning everyone.
    It’s Saturday, so you guys go back to sleep.
    I’m not looking for a productive day. I’m hoping for an uneventful day.

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  5. Good morning. The sun is out now, but I expect rain later. A day can’t sneak by lately without precipitation.

    Son was home for a few minutes before heading out to meet friends who have rented a cabin for the weekend. It is a lot of his friends group from Covenant. Either it is a giant cabin, or it will be tight quarters. It sounds like a great time.

    I heard a little more this past week regarding the possible merger of churches. The other church is having extra meetings about the decision that my church site was the one selected to retain. I do not know if things will work out. I will try to remain positive.

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  7. The oriole up there now is a female Baltimore oriole in a tree of white mulberries. The tree is non-native and I think it is considered a pest tree (the species brought over in some failed silkworm experiment or something)–but it sure draws the critters. So far I have seen in it in the last week or so: three kinds of mammals (two species of squirrels and some baby coons), two species of oriole, quite a few cedar waxwings, lots of robins (including the resident pair continually chasing others away, and the fledglings of the resident pair), indigo bunting, female cardinal, female and juvenile rose-breasted grosbreaks, house finches, at least one catbird, song sparrows, a goldfinch, and starlings.

    I’m rather surprised I haven’t seen a mockingbird, since we do have a few around here (only in summer), and my family had three red or purple mulberry trees in our backyard (plus a male mulberry in the front yard), and mockingbirds are the ones I most associate with the trees. (I didn’t really pay attention to which birds came for the berries then, though I know they did. Mostly it was annoying in summer that we got big purple splotches on our patio and our cars after birds ate our berries, and we would pluck a few berries and eat them on ice cream, but the berries weren’t all that good and they ripened over such a long period of time that there were never many both ripe and reachable by a child at any one time; whatever was ripe that day had mostly already been eaten by birds, so I’d look and look to get a cereal bowl full.)

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  9. Good Morning Everyone. They rain hasn’t started yet but the rolling thunder has been rumbling for about an hour.
    I have a lot of studying to do this weekend. I have my Florida licensing test on Monday. I will start teaching Ignite on Friday and the following Thursday I will teach a class about working with sellers–my personal weakest link–so I am watching and listening to webinars, Youtube videos, going through the workbook and Powerpoint at the same time to get my delivery flowing. That one will be an all day class.
    Later this month I will be going to New Orleans for two days worth of classes on Career Visioning.
    I have always said that if money were no object, I would be a perpetual student. Guess I got my wish. 😉 Now would be the right time to say “Thank You, God”.

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  13. We’re in for another hot, too-muggy-for-us day today. It’s better here on the coast than anywhere else in the LA area, but still …

    My fans are getting a workout, my house was still in the 80s (as in mid-80s) by the time I went to bed at close to midnight last night. I was hoping the new back door and window (on the west side of the house) along with new insulation from the roofing job last year might make a difference, but the house still bakes during spells like this.

    I was going to tackle chopping up and turning over some of the front yard dirt to get rid of the weeds that are left out there so I could at least sprinkle some grass seed, but it’s probably not the best kind of day for that kind of work. So I’ll most likely stay in doors and keep sorting and organizing (though it’s hot in here, too).

    My cousin wanted to go see Wonder Woman tomorrow (we’ve been trying for a few weeks to see that and she was busy today), but I said Sunday won’t work out for me. Unless it’s a holiday to celebrate or I happen to have Monday off, church usually is all I like to do on Sundays, followed by reading/napping, all-around relaxing.

    After doing a story yesterday on one of our endangered coastal butterflies, I thought maybe I can plant some of the buckwheat they like 🙂 in my backyard at some point

    http://calscape.org/Eriogonum-parvifolium-(Sea-Cliff-Buckwheat)?srchcr=sc57387c0002e2d

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  14. Kare, I pronounce cicada, si-kay-da. I love to hear them in the summer, and we used to find the shells that they molt. The first time I ever saw a live one was when I was sitting under the trees next to the vegetable stand I was tending. It was crawling across the ground and I couldn’t believe the size of it. The shells are a lot smaller than the fully grown bug.

    Nice picture of an oriole, Cheryl. I always remember what Baltimore orioles look like because I did a Backyard Birds project when I was about six for presentation to our small homeschooling group, and the oriole was among the birds in that project. I did a display for the project, which is long gone, but I still have my project booklet with my handwritten notes on each bird and pictures I had coloured or cut from my mother’s picture file (she would save nature or geographical pictures from old calendar, magazines and all the other printed material that used to be distributed before the age of the internet, so that we could use them in any project). I developed the ability to make draw a pretty good bird (considering my age) from pictures through that project, and for a while, my small self dreamed of being the next Audubon. I can still draw pretty well, having since taken a night course in drawing, but I lack the concentration necessary to become really good at it.

    Speaking of birds, when I went to get my groceries today, I was thinking, during my fifteen minute walk both to and fro, of playing this (which I did, once, for a wedding):

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  15. si kah duh— The cicadas (/sɪˈkɑːdə/ or /sɪˈkeɪdə/)
    Which let me know I was pronouncing it wrong. I have always said chick ah duh

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  17. Our former (young, attorney, father of 6) elder who recently moved to Tenn. posted on FB yesterday about taking his family to the local theater to see Spider Man (? I think ?) and being rather surprised by one of the previews that showed a gay male couple in bed. He thought the previews had to match the feature film’s rating.

    Anyway, long interesting discussion about it online — he did complain and, by the end of the thread, posted the email the theater chain sent back to him apologizing and saying they were removing that preview from the cycle.

    (There apparently are different sets of previews shown in theaters with one set put together by advertisers, not the theater itself.)

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  18. The second pronunciation key (/sɪˈkeɪdə/), is what I was trying write. I learned to pronounce the word cicada long before I saw the word spelt, so that it took me a while to link the printed word with the spoken word (that happened with a lot of words, since we grew up listening to radio music programs which gave composer’s names and radio news programs which discussed place names and complicated topics with big words), and before I knew that a cicada was an insect. My mother would say, when we were small, when the long, high pitched sound rose in the summer heat, “That’s a cicada!” I think I had the vague idea it was some kind of bird, even though I knew insects could sing, since I knew what a cricket was. Cicadas in the day and crickets in the night – the soundtrack of my childhood summers.

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  23. I’ve always pronounced it si-kay-da, but recently heard Kim’s version on TV and started to wonder if I was correct. We sometime have them up here, but not often.

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  24. No. I think I was reading a Barbara Kingsolver book many years ago and since her books are set in the Southwest my mind made it chik. Anyway, it seemed like every other sentence dealt with the sound of the cicadas. She is definitely NOT my favorite author anyway. There is something about the tense she writes in that I find jarring.

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  25. Cicadas: the version we had in Phoenis, the males had a white bow-tie under their chin. We called them locusts, and they really, really liked the palo verde tree growing at the corner of our house, so we called that the “locust tree.” I liked to catch them, and it was fairly easy to catch five or six from that tree, especially if you avoided the males. They were more wary, I think, and they buzzed angrily if you caught them . . . and about half of them would squirt what seemed to be urine. (The females sometimes would squirt, but rarely. To catch a male, you wanted to catch it quickly and with its rear end aiming away from you, and then you could turn it over and admire its bow tie, while it told you exactly what it thought of you.

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  26. Orioles: when I was in fifth or sixth grade, my school participated in a National Wildlife Federation poster contest. They gave us a large sheet of cheap paper, and I forget what guidelines on what we could draw, but we had to write on it “Save a place for wildlife.” They might have had a specific list of animals we could draw, but whatever the guidelines, I decided to draw a Baltimore oriole. Using colored pencils, I went to the encyclopedia and found a male on its nest, which I drew. I won “first place,” but I have no idea what that meant. (I know I was not the only first place winner, so was it first place in my school district or what? I don’t know.) As a prize, they gave me a potted mum. I decided to plant it in a bigger pot, and it was so rootbound it didn’t have a chance. Oh well.

    But I never saw an oriole in real life till after I married my husband. I looked out the window one day, and there was a bird so brilliantly orange I almost gasped. I’d seen photos, but photos don’t do it justice. This one is a female. Females vary greatly in how bright they are, some looking fairly close to a male’s coloring, but most being around this level of brightness.

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  27. In mentioning which birds I have seen in that mulberry tree, I forgot to mention the red-bellied woodpecker. Yes, it was eating berries. I went down there again this morning, and this time I saw an immature red-bellied woodpecker (it was a male I saw before). I also saw a kingbird, which I hadn’t seen before down there. (An eastern kingbird–no yellow.)

    This morning’s visit was rather like a play, with lots of action and a bit of a story line. For one, the kingbird showed up. Now, a pair of robins have this tree in their territory, and so that pair and their fledglings feed in the tree, but he’s kept busy chasing other robins. For the most part he ignores birds that aren’t robins, but he took off after that kingbird. Now the kingbird is a smaller bird than the robin, but he’s “king” because he thinks he is. The robin took off so hotly that several other birds left the tree at the same time, afraid the robin was chasing them. But the kingbird went out a little ways, looped around, and went right back to the tree. And to rub in his insistence that he was not to be chased away, he landed just a yard away from the robin. After that, both birds ignored each other. 🙂

    Also, the female oriole and at least four fledglings were all in the tree. The female and one fledgling had bright reddish purple on their heads, so someone has grapes, plums, or cherries that are ripe. A female orchard oriole may have been in the tree too, but this time neither of the adult males showed up. But with that many orioles in the tree, I got a lot of looks at them, and a fair number of photos. (They were there the whole 20 or 30 minutes I was, I think.) At the end, the adult female was high in the tree, at the edge, with bright blue sky behind her, and a young one farther down the branch. Then the female took off, and immediately several yellow birds (her young) flew after, then one more, then one more. At least four young total, possibly five.

    Finally, what was especially cool about this visit is that apparently the cedar waxwings have seen me enough that they have deemed me not to be a threat. They are a shy bird, usually flying away as soon as I come. (It’s kinda sad to see four or five of them flying away as I walk up and not be able to watch them.) Over time they will come back to the tree, but they stay in the back part of it, and I have to get what photos I can through gaps in the leaves, which doesn’t always work that well, or one will come to the front briefly but then go to the back quickly when it sees me. Today they were flying around, ignoring my presence, and thus giving me several decent chances to photograph them.

    I left when the family of orioles did, and walked away thanking God for providing such a colorful variety of birds, and berries that we and they can eat.

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  28. And here I thought the Baltimore Orioles was a baseball team.

    For those of you up on contemporary children’s literature, here’s one of our former elders’ view (same guy mentioned in the movie preview post above):

    “I read the 2 or 3 biggest kids books of each year, just to keep in touch with what’s going on. So far there hasn’t been one I could let my kids read. But as an observation, the publishing culture is obsessed with magic, the occult, the perversity, ignorance and corruption of parents and authority figures, gods and godlike powers, the hopelessness of the future, and most prominently, the absence of the one true and living God. It’s a veritable famine of the heart and intellect, 100 pages at a time.”

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  30. I am almost embarrassed to admit this, but I went to Walmart a little while ago to get an auxiliary cord so I can listen to books from my phone. While I was there I roamed through the ice cream section, and here is the shameful part, I bought these Puppy Dogs some Frosty Paws. For those of you who may not know what it is, well, it’s peanut butter flavored “ice cream” for your dogs. I have two pups who think I am the best human in the world right now. 😉
    I am saving the other two containers until the next time they need to take their flea and tick medicine. Master Amos is the worst about taking medicine. You may think you got him to swallow it but he is very good at hiding it in his mouth.

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  31. Which leads to my other question. If I pay $9.00 for a book, why do I have to pay an additional $7.00 to get the audio version? And why can’t I just buy the audio, because I already own the book in hard cover?

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  32. Donna, I keep up with Children’s Literature fairly well as I read alongside my Eldest Niece, though technically, she is now a young adult and reads young adult fiction. As a result, I’ve read things like The Hunger Games – the first book is a classic dystopian novel in the making, the other two were redundant – and The Lunar Chronicles – encompassing the retold fairy tales Cinder, Scarlett, Cress and Winter, the first of which was quite a creative take on Cinderella, the next two were too much the teen romance novel for my liking, and the last bore a remarkable resemblance to the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy. Some of her favorite novels in the genre are written by one N.D. Wilson. I read the first of those 100 Cupboards, which I found so psychologically disturbing (the evil character of the book, an eyeless witch, was strongly reminiscent of the Pale Man in the Spanish fantasy-horror film Pan’s Labyrinth) that I couldn’t bring myself to read anymore of his books. N.D.Wilson is, ostensibly, a Christian novelist, being the son of one Doug Wilson. Despite that I wouldn’t say that is a famine for the heart and intellect. After all, when I was a teen, Harry Potter was all the rage, and the same things were said about that series (and worse), yet now people are beginning to view the original books as classics (I tried reading the series, but the first book seemed to be Narnia and Enid Blyton rolled into one, which didn’t intrigue me enough to continue). I think the rumours of the demise of Children’s Literature are, in the immortal words of Mark Twain, “greatly exaggerated.”

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  33. A few years ago I read well over a hundred children’s books as I was preparing to start writing my own series (which I have not yet completed). What struck me was that every single book (written for age 8-12, usually) had one scene that “parents wouldn’t approve.” It was typically small, the main character saying the s-word or giggling because her father did, but always one edgy scene. Sometimes they horrified me, like the one where the single neighbor is invited to dinner with the family, and he explains what he does for a living, and he writes books. He explains that the books have romance and adventure, and he says, “And sex, of course,” and the family’s ten-year-old daughter (or was she 12?) replies, “Of course.” Do we really want to present it as “normal” for ten-year-old girls to talk casually, even peripherally, about sex with single men?

    My thought on reading book after book that all did the same thing is that parents are willing to put up with one thing, as long as their kids are reading. But every single book has that one thing, and the cumulative effect is a lot of coarseness, at least for readers like me, who might check out a dozen books a week over the summer when I was 10 or 12.

    Some books have more than one scene, but all written since about 1970 have one. (The sole exception I found was the girl-and-horse books.) It was disheartening, and is one reason I have a large library of children’s books that don’t glamorize coarseness.

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  36. It would be interesting to apply DJ’s elder’s test to classic Children’s Literature:
    “the publishing culture is obsessed with magic, the occult, the perversity, ignorance and corruption of parents and authority figures, gods and godlike powers, the hopelessness of the future, and most prominently, the absence of the one true and living God
    – “…obsessed with magic, the occult…”: That rules out the Hobbit, Narnia, and, of course Harry Potter, which was the eeeeevil influence that good Christian parents should fear in the fundamentalist circles in which I grew up, and most of them frowned on Tolkien and Lewis too. Technically, none of the above books deal with the occult, accusations that JK Rowling was Wiccan notwithstanding, but in my experience in those circles, if a book had a witch or a wizard, it was occult.

    “…the perversity, ignorance and corruption of parents and authority figures..”: Well, there goes Anne of Green Gables and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, since Marilla and Aunt Miranda never could understand Anne and Rebecca. Come to think of it, Eustace’s parents were not very well portrayed in The Silver Chair, nor were the authority figure at that school of his, while Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy’s parents were always absent.

    “…gods and godlike powers…”: No more classic Greek and Roman mythology, such as Pandora’s Box – the foundation of a classical education in Victorian times – not even Aesop’s fables, which sometimes feature the gods. No Arabian Nights or any other collection of fairy tales, and no comic book superheroes.

    “…the hopelessness of the future…”: I do not like unhappy endings in books, but I understand their artistic necessity at points. The tragedies of Shakespeare have lessons to teach. However, I would agree that The Lord of the Rings could use more hope at the end.

    “…most prominently, the absence of the one true and living God…”: Of the above books, only Anne of Green Gables and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm mention Christianity, and it is the nominal form that existed in society at the time period. I cannot think, besides a number of rather anemic Sunday School books, of children’s novels that talk about God.

    I use the quote, not to mock the writer, but rather to use a reduction ad absurdum argument. The prevalence of all these elements, except the last, has been in children’s stories since stories were told to children. As for the omittance of the last point about God, is it reasonable to expect secular authors to understand about God? I would rather they didn’t write about him, as they only get it wrong when they do. We have a book full of stories about Him already, and incidentally, quite a few of those stories contain the other elements listed. I grew up hearing that any story with a witch in it was bad, even if the witch was portrayed as a bad person – that kind of thinking would rule out a reading about a certain incident in I Samuel.

    I have read Sunday School books ranging from a tiny book full of moral tales from sometime in the late 1800s, illustrated with engravings, to full-colour paperback covered ones published when I was a child, and they are the poorest literature I read as a child and teen. The Victorian era one I mentioned was full of the most horrific ends for unrepentant children, and I think Dickens had its type in mind when he skewered the ‘moral’ tracts of his day. The newer ones had unconvincing conversion stories and weirdly promoted a belief in karma, since good things happened seemed to happen to Christians and bad things to non-Christians. Paul quoted from the poets and philosophers in the culture of his day and they were almost universally pagans. I do not think we need to fear to read that which secular writers write.

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  37. Roscuro, we don’t need to “fear” what secular authors write, but we do need to read their books with discernment and teach our children to do so . . . and exactly the same is true for Christian writers. Christian fiction, as you have indicated, is often the worst, for multiple reasons. (Manipulated plots, bad theology, and more.)

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  38. The header photo is the closest things birds get to a kiss: courtship feeding. I didn’t know goldfinches were breeding yet (they wait till late June or early July, till seeds are plentiful, because unlike most other birds they feed their chicks only seeds, not insects), but Mr. Goldfinch was on the feeder, and Mrs. Goidfinch went over to his side, and she kept looking at him. Courtship feeding is very quick–blink and you’ll miss it–and my camera was not on action mode and I was afraid I’d miss the shot if I took time to adjust it. So I simply focused and watched, and got the shot at just the right second, when she leaned down and he reached up to feed her a morsel.

    Not all species do courtship feeding. I’m not sure which ones do, but I have mostly seen it done by cardinals, and also mourning doves and house finches. The idea seems to be that egg laying takes a lot of energy for the female bird, so the male helps by giving her some food that he has already caught, husked, etc. It is also said to prep the male for helping with the young, but I think the theory that it provides her extra nutrients, and perhaps helps seal the pair bond, is the best. With doves in particular, courtship feeding is often followed by mating.

    In many species, the female is the one that does most or all of the brooding of eggs and young chicks. In some of these species, the male provides all the food during this time, making it unnecessary for her to leave the nest except for brief breaks.

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  39. Absolutely, Cheryl, discernment is needed. However, outright condemning books as bad for having such elements in them and then forbidding children to read them isn’t encouraging discernment. It only, as I testify from how I was as a child and teen, makes them more curious to read it, to see for themselves. Some of what Eldest Niece has read has had me raising my eyebrows – nothing has crossed the line to what I would consider pornographic or otherwise immoral, just I wouldn’t choose to fill my imagination with it – but I find when her father or mother or I do not react with shock or horror, but rather discuss the book calmly and rationally and give her time to think it through, she often will end up deciding herself that it wasn’t all that great. She is learning to set her own limits and form her own convictions about books. She recently read a young adult novel that was quite popular and had rave reviews and she wrote her own review which criticized it. She received attacks from the books fans, but others defended her and said she had written her criticism well. It was a good learning experience for her.

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  40. I guess you’d have to know the guy who made the comment – far from ‘prudish,’ funny, very adept at analyzing the culture (and he keeps up with it, hardly “condemning” all things popular — I think one of the last sermons he gave before they moved included references to the Where the Wild Are; in fact many of his sermons left older folks like my friend Norma pretty much in the dark for their references of popular cultural books, movies, etc.).

    His threads typically draw very interesting and diverse commentary, lots of back and forth (I believe fairy tales came up in one of the last comment I read; I’ll have to go back and catch up with where the dialogue has gone since then).

    Not being a consumer of children’s contemporary literature, I have no valid first-hand opinion so I’ll stay out of that dispute. 🙂 But I do trust his judgement and find his commentary on cultural matters sharp and usually pretty on target.

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  42. As for discussing books and films with his kids — I can only guess those discussions are lengthy, deep, intelligent — and fun. 🙂

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  43. Roscuro, absolutely. I was an avid reader, and I remember once when I was in maybe sixth grade, a librarian I really loved recommended a book, and I read a few pages, felt uncomfortable, read a few more, and took the book back unread. It had sort of a “witchcraft” feel to it and it made me uneasy. I don’t remember the book, nor know whether my conscience was over-scrupulous, but even today I rarely stop reading a book I have begun, and I chose not to continue a book even though it was recommended to me by an adult I adored.

    Meanwhile, I know people who insist on reading every book before their child can read it . . . which is going to set huge roadblocks in the way of any avid reader, since parents simply cannot keep up with the reading that multiple children can do, not might it seem as high a priority to them and read and sign off on a book. I’m all for reading along with children, and discussing books, and even looking through books before passing them off to your children. But at some points, we are going to interact with our culture.

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  45. Kim (3:55) — I’ve recently noticed that if you have purchased a hard-copy of a book from amazon the kindle edition can be added for just 99 cents. (Though I realize your question was about audio books which is different).

    Just had a huge bowl of cut fruit (watermelon, pineapple, grapes, strawberries, cantaloupe) for lunch. We’re sweltering today and that tasted SO good.

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  47. I’m a horrible dog owner, I’ve never bought my dogs frosty paws. Maybe this weekend I should try to find some for them. They’d really love that. 🙂

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  48. DJ, as I said, I wasn’t attacking the person who wrote the words. He probably had no intention of sounding exactly like the naysayers of my youth, but the statement sounds exactly like what they said. If they weren’t tying themselves in knots over Harry Potter’s occultism, they were mourning that all current books, and films/TV shows, portrayed authority in a bad light – by the way, I knew I was forgetting a prime example of a young person’s novel portraying authority in a bad light, and I’ve just recalled it: David Copperfield, where the majority of the authority figures in young David’s life are negatively portrayed, ranging from cruel (stepfather, Mr. Murdstone, and schoolmaster, Mr. Creakle) to weak (David’s mother and Mr. Micawber). I just find it funny that, when you really think about it, those general objections could be applied to almost any era of literature. When I started to fully understand Shakespeare’s poetry, I began to realize that the amount of err, innuendo in his comedies particularly, is quite high. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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  50. And I suppose that’s one of the limits of social media comments — I follow people I personally know and I can put the comments and them in a broader context. Funny to see a characterization of someone that couldn’t be more off the mark, but I can see how just one comment might leave that impression.

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  53. It’s been years since I read Heidi, but didn’t it contain some Christian references, & references to God?

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  54. Kizzie, yes, Heidi also discussed her grandfather’s reluctance to go to church (he was angry at God) and Peter’s grandmother’s love of hymns.

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  56. There was some magic in the day today — there’s a cool breeze outside, the dog park gathering (some 15 dogs at one point) was relaxingly joyful, saw the guy who did my driveway for the first time in a few weeks (and I may have found a solution to my wish to get A/C in the house); I’m finally repopulating the bedroom storage spaces as I’m washing & sorting sheets and blankets, putting them in see-through storage bags; and my little dangly string of decorative solar lights I put up 2 years ago is finally working — like magic.

    Real Estate Guy called roofers and left a msg about the foundation yesterday, hasn’t heard back from them yet — but when I asked if it’s possible we’re at a “dead end” with them and that game plan, he insisted no, it’ll happen.

    Real Estate Guy spent today at a probate auction in one of the nearby beach cities, the property — with a 1920s house on it that needs work & thus will probably be torn down for a McMansion — sold for $1.7 million. It’s several blocks from the beach, no view. Property and housing prices are going through the roof here again which is somewhat scary.

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  57. Of course, it’s sad to me that another quaint home near the beach is going to probably be torn down. 😦 People built those back then as little summer cottages for the most part. Now, there are a few remaining but most of the area is built way up with high-rise condos and apartments. Sigh.

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  60. This is the book that had me going back to my former Christian school searching the library because I couldn’t think of the name of it. I finally found it and bought my own copy, although I don’t know where it is at the moment. Reading the reviews on Amazon, it seems there is an updated version someone “wrote” for the 70th anniversary of the original. Don’t buy it! It has to be an abomination! I may have to go up in the attic and find my copy and read it for the umpteenth time.

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  61. Good Morning! We had a most delightful rainstorm yesterday. Now the morning air is fresh, crisp and most of all everything in this forest is wet!! 🙂
    Grandkids are coming over today and this clean house will no longer be clean…but there will be laughter and chaos…we can all use a tad bit of that from time to time!
    DJ..prices are skyrocketing in our housing market as well…it is definitely a sellers market…you certainly can sell your house quickly but finding another to purchase is difficult…or so I am told…we aren’t planning to leave this place anytime soon….

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  62. Nancyjill, that’s the issue here, too, the inventory is very low, not a lot of houses for sale, although the prices going as high as they are might prompt some to consider cashing out. But then what? I literally could not afford to rent anything our here right now.

    Slept like a rock last night and had the hardest time getting up (late, at that). Gotta rush now to feed the animals and make it to church.

    Hot (80s), humid (currently 70%) day again for us today, groan.

    It’s summer.

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  63. Dreamed I went back to one of my former churches and was in a SS class but it was being held in a swimming pool (I must have been hot) and Annie was with me and someone complained that her fur was clogging up the pool drain.

    Dreams can be so strange sometimes …

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  64. Gen. 15 for our sermon today with elaboration on the nature of covenants and the foreshadowing of Christ.

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  65. Ah-HA. I found the 1998 receipt for when the central heat was installed (by a moonlighting maintenance crew from Kaiser) in this house. This is good as is provides the make and model of the heating unit (for if I need to replace it or can simply *add* an A/C unit onto it).

    They charged $2,400 for everything, putting in the ductwork all included. Amazing as a plumbing-heating company at the time was going to charge me more than twice that amount just to replace the ugly wall heater that was here and had failed.

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  66. The header photo now is not a great photo, but it’s a cool one simply because it is “another” species of oriole other than the typical Baltimore oriole. It’s an orchard oriole, a male, red instead of orange and smaller than the Baltimore.

    A week or so before I photographed a bird I thought was a female Baltimore oriole, or maybe a juvenile. But when I looked at the photo at home, I saw she had yellow by no orange at all, and Baltimore orioles seem always to have some orange. So I looked up the bird and determined she was a female orchard oriole–and since it’s breeding season I figured she probably had a mate around somewhere and I hoped I could see him. But I didn’t know, when seeing this bird, what I was seeing. (You can see he is pretty much the same colors as a robin, and that tree has lots of robins. I assume I thought he was a robin when I took the photos.)

    At any rate, in this mulberry tree I have seen male, female, and fledgling Baltimore orioles, male orchard oriole, and possibly female orchard oriole. Since oriole sightings are fairly rare, going down to a tree where they are pretty much “guaranteed” right now is pretty amazing. (Seeing them is virtually guaranteed, but getting good photos of them is not!)

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  68. I read “Men of Iron” by Howard Pyle, every year from about 9 years old until I was in college. No mention of Christianity there. Nothing objectionable either.

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  69. It is supposed to be 69 degrees tomorrow. And 67 degrees for the next couple of days… I don’t miss L.A. at all. Not one bit!

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  70. And that bird is a cedar waxwing. For some reason I rarely manage to get the wingtips in the shot, and when I do manage to do so, they usually don’t have waxtips. I have read that first-year females don’t always have the waxy tips . . . but “first-year females” can’t, I don’t think, explain the high percentage I have seen without them. At any rate, this one has wax and this one has a cool expression on its face (looks like it’s upset), so even though it wasn’t eating a berry, I liked the shot.

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  71. Kim- the publishers make you pay $7.99 for the audio for one two reasons: royalties to the person who read the book out loud; or greed.

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