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

  2. Good Morning.
    As you may remember, my Sunday School leader is also a licensed therapist. She and I were talking yesterday before class began. She pointed out that I like to help people and that I treat people the way I would like to be treated. People tend to take advantage of people who like to help. Bringing it back around to Boundaries–at least I know what kind of person the Partner is before I get too far into the “relationship”. I now know two things about him that I do not like. He encouraged my friend to go look for more space for the office, then pulled out of it, saying that he would build on to the building where we currently are. He made light of not signing my contract in front of me. Who does that sort of thing? Not anyone I want to know.
    Yes, I felt sorry for myself for most of the weekend, but today is Monday. I have today, Wednesday, and Friday to teach. I have one half of a listing and I have a buyer prospect coming in next week that is a referral.
    I am still working on finding the silver lining…

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  5. Four days in a row of childsitting first shift beginning today.

    Glad Little Guy isn’t a toddler anymore. He’s usually pretty easy to deal with, he just gets annoying at times.

    But I think “Be annoying as much as possible” is in the Little Boy Handbook for Handling Parents & Caregivers. 🙂 That is tempered by “Be sweet & cute when necessary, usually after being very annoying. Comes in handy for keeping parents/caregivers from exploding.”

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  6. Speaking of “caregivers”: Isn’t it funny that caregivers take care of people, but are not called caretakers? (Because caretakers take care of property.)

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  7. Or you could say caregivers give care, & caretakers take care, which makes it seem like they do opposite things. But in this sense, taking doesn’t mean what it usually does.

    Words & wording are so interesting!

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  8. Linda – AJ knows who we are by our IP address, which is a unique number that identifies a computer or device.

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  9. And here it is Monday, again.

    As I was on my way to open the doggie door this morning, Tess somehow pealed off the trail and herded Annie into the bathroom — I found her crouched near the tub with Tess looming over her, giving her that border collie “eye.” 😦 Poor cat, she really puts up with the dogs very well, considering.

    I bought my refrigerator 3 years ago with the extended warranty. It’s expired now but they’re offering me another extension. Should I get it? Or roll the dice? I’m so leery of modern appliances. I usually don’t purchase warranties by have heard so many horror stories about today’s appliances that I have gotten them for the refrigerator and also for my washer/dryer when I bought those in May.

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  10. The advice is usually to never bother with those warranties. You seldom get anything out of them, with a few exceptions. The advice is also to simply save the amount you would use to get the warranty to repair or replace yourself should you need to do so.

    Pet peeves: Commercials on auto insurance emphasizing to naïve people that they need to have automobile replacement coverage. Commercials that encourage naïve people to sell annuities for pennies on the dollar. Commercials telling people they should buy home insurance which replaces appliances. All is just a legal way to rip people off. No matter that they will tell you that they just want to help the poor unfortunate souls. Yup! Just like Judas just wanted to help the poor.

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  11. Now that I have sound on the computer again (thanks, hero), I am looking into the Barton system for my reading challenged people.

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  14. Kathaleena, it used to be the advice never to bother with those warranties. However, now salespeople at appliance stores will actually tell you appliances will last five or six years, maybe nine or ten. We bought new fridge and stove after we married (because the old ones broke), and we had to use the warranty to get a new fridge. (We actually didn’t need a whole new fridge, just a new gasket, but they stopped making that gasket apparently, which gave us a new fridge instead, under warranty.) If the warranty is about the cost of a service call, then definitely get the warranty.

    So, unfortunately, my advice on a fridge or stove now would be as long as the warranty isn’t too large a percentage of the cost of a new one, then keep the warranty. You have a better than 25% chance of needing a new fridge within seven years, so paying 25% for a warranty that will cover it for seven years (for instance) would keep you from the hassle and expense of buying a new one–and it also keeps you from paying repair costs if you need that instead. With today’s appliances, you probably have a 10% of serious problems each year of the first two maybe three years, 15 or 20% each year after that.

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  15. My long suffering husband who has put up with me for so very many years, bought a warranty on the dishwasher we purchased five years ago from Sears. His reasoning was, I’d had so much trouble, I needed help beyond his skill set (or interest), coupled with the fact they would come out once a year for maintenance.

    I called for that maintenance appointment every year.

    In that case, it was an excellent investment.

    But then, you know me and my appliance issues.

    Other things we don’t bother with, his engineering mind saying if it is going to fail it will do so in the first year.

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  16. My local family (14 of them) have been gone for a large part of the last 10 days, leaving me home alone, completely alone, for the first time in 37 years.

    I probably enjoyed it too much. 🙂

    I spent a lot of time praying, thinking, reading, writing, anticipating and doing my Bible study ahead of time in preparation for a very busy fall. It was lovely to have a sabbatical from cooking, thinking about other people, accommodating others needs and just doing whatever I needed to do.

    Virginia Woolf famously wrote a woman needed a room of her own to do creative work well. I have had that room for the last four years, thank you, and it has helped a great deal. But having space in my brain the last week and an ability to hear the Word and direction of the Lord because I didn’t have distractions, was also very helpful.

    (It also created several crazy situations, but that’s a blog post or two for another day).

    I’m happy to have my family back, but it’s given me pause. I’m also very thankful.

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  17. Feeling a bit better today, but still have a long way to go.

    Speaking of little boys being annoying, yesterday we were talking via the internet with Eldest Sibling’s family, meaning we could both see and hear them. Fourth Nephew, who recently attained his fourth year, was being as annoying as possible while Eldest Nephew was playing for us the music track he is creating. Fourth was chiming in with a silly singing voice (he actually has a very good ear for music and was singing in tune despite the silly voice) and dancing crazily on the bench both boys were sitting on. Eldest Nephew was surprisingly patient with his youngest brother, as Eldest N. has inherited the proverbial Irish temper from his father’s side and his Asperger–like traits make him very particular. He becomes a teen in a couple of months, and it is good to see he is maturing and gaining control over his emotions.

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  18. Good afternoon. It is rainy here, again.
    That keeps it cooler so that part is nice.

    Last night Art and I watched the Martin Sheen movie, The Vessel. On the DVD cover a quote reads, “Worthy work of cinematic art as well as a stirring spiritual parable.” I guess that is a good summary. It was beautifully filmed, but the storyline was so broken into pieces that it was difficult to develop interest. It was basically about a seaside village that suffered great tragedy when a tsunami type wave hit the elementary school and killed all the children. The town is stuck in its grief. Sheen is the Catholic priest trying to help the people. A lot of the movie seems a bit crazy, but I guess that was what happened to the town. There is a very slow unfolding or wrangling like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis as the town folk go back and forth moving out of grief to more optimism. It was such an unusual film. I do not know whether I would recommend it to others. It would really depend on if people like action films. If they do then this would be a don’t go there.

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  20. Janice – I like movies that are “different” or “quirky” in some way, like some indie films. But I also enjoy some of the more run-of-the-mill popular kinds of movies at times. Nightingale & I have discovered that we have similar tastes in movies, that we often like films that are referred to as “character studies”, or other types that others think of as boring. 🙂

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  21. On the topic of stories that are different, I just finished reading The High House by James Stoddard. It is a fantasy novel, but less in the style of Tolkien and more in the style of George MacDonald. Reading the reviews, it seems people either love it or hate it. I’m somewhat mixed. I like its creativity, the characters are fairly well written, and the dangers and challenges are convincing, but there is something wanting. Perhaps it reminds me too much of a recurring dream I have periodically of being in a house with enormous rooms and endless passages. The book was interesting enough, however, that I would like to read the other two books in the Evenmere Chronicles.

    Speaking of George MacDonald, I do not like his books. I’ve tried reading them many times, both fantasy and romance (?) novels, but they do not hold my attention. Even the children’s The Princess and the Goblin did not appeal to me. It is strange, because I like authors who admired MacDonald, such as G.K. Chesterton (though his fantasy novels are my least favorite of his works) and C.S. Lewis, but I do not see what they saw in his work. Maybe it is because he was experimenting with a new genre, while Lewis and others worked with the established genre and were thus able to write stronger stories. MacDonald’s stories, aside from their pessimism (whether they end happily or not), have a dreamlike quality to them that makes me want to stop reading in order to wake out of the dream. It could also be the era he was writing in, as I’ve noticed adventure and science fiction novels of the late Victorian era, such as King Solomon’s Mines or The War of the Worlds, have a similar dream/nightmare atmosphere to them.

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  22. Roscuro, I like some of MacDonald, and I like all of Chesterton except his novels. With MacDonald, though, the more I find out about his theology, the less I like his writings, because his writing is more deliberate in terms of teaching his theology than it might appear. His emphasis on death, for instance, is likely to have led to a few suicides–I don’t know how it couldn’t. I used to think he saw death as a friend because it’s the doorway to meeting Christ, or maybe in his imaginary world it is somehow a good thing, but no, it’s part of his heresy. As much as I like some of his writings (particularly the shorter fairy tales), I find him almost unreadable now.

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  23. Cheryl, I was aware of MacDonald’s heresy, but I wasn’t sure if I was the only one who saw the pessimism (portraying death as a good is pessimistic) prevailing in his works, since some of my favorite Christians writers speak of him so highly.

    Out of Chesterton’s novels, I understood and was amused by the messages of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Return of Don Quixote, Manalive, and The Flying Inn; thought The Man who was Thursday completely missed its mark; and found The Ball and the Cross disturbing. None of them held my attention to the point that I have read them through again, though I have found parts of The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Flying Inn quotable. On the other hand, I have read and reread his short stories, not just the Father Brown mysteries, but also the collections in The Poet and the Lunatics, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, The Club of Queer Trades, Four Faultless Felons , and Tales of the Long Bow. My mother doesn’t much care for murder mysteries, even in short stories, so I couldn’t read her the collections of mysteries, but she did enjoy the last three collections (I also read his Orthodoxy to both her and my father).

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  26. AJ – On my Kindle Fire the butterfly looks like rusted metal. So is that an iron butterfly?

    Speaking of butterflies, Mrs L and I went to the Tucson Botanical Gardens this morning. I tried to get photos of some desert butterflies on our inexpensive camera but they wouldn’t land. But I did get several cactus plants and flowers I’ll send to AJ later. We don’t have access to a computer to upload pictures here.

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  28. Cheryl, I did see that story because Kim posted it on FB — very strange. Sounds like a neighborhood civil war in the making. 🙂

    Warranties — Kathaleena, I never get them … BUT the exception recently for me has been as I’ve had to replace all my old appliances. I, too, realize that the “new” appliances simply don’t last as long so there’s definitely more chance you may have to use them.

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