72 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-24-17”

  1. 😦 I have to take my car to the shop this morning.
    I have a peculiar problem.
    I can’t open the door on the driver’s side from the inside.
    No big problem. I can roll down the window and open it from the outside. But it has to be fixed.

    I’ve never heard of a situation like that before.
    In all my life.

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  2. I have. I have had that problem in the past.
    It is a really long day for me. 8:30 meeting in Pensacola. 45 minute drive. Something within me makes me give myself twice that time to get there, get settled in, etc. The General Manager will be coming today. I don’t like him but am going to have to “make nice” because he can red light or green light what I want to do. I often choose to ignore people I don’t like, but in this case I can’t. Lots of changes and I want to be part of them, not left in the dust.
    I probably won’t be able to check in again, so “Ya’ll behave ya hear”

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  6. Good morning. I made sure Art had his office keys when he left this morning.

    I’ve been thinking about and praying for Kizzie.

    I tend to shop around at a lot of different stores for groceries because it is convenient. I mentioned recently that I want to try Sprouts. The places I currently shop for groceries are Publix, Kroger, Sam’s, and Walmart which are all within a mile to three miles of our home. How far do you have to go to get groceries? Do you only go a few times each month or go several times a week as I do?

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  8. When I was in college, I had a friend with a Toyota that required passengers to wait outside until she started the car — it wouldn’t start with anyone else sitting in the car. So we’d all be standing around her car as she started it and then all fly inside, slamming the doors and off we’d go.

    Praying for you Kizzie.

    I feel a little better this morning but was very tired when I got home late yesterday. All the house work is really getting to me after a year and a half of it, pretty nonstop. I’ll get a second wind, I always do, but for now I wish it were over and I could go back to a normal life, whatever that is.

    Foundation crew should be back on scene today. At least that sewer pipe replacement is complete, that really did give me peace of mind to take care of that last little leg of it under the house. Might as well. Just didn’t think it would cost as much as it did, of course. 😦

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  10. I can now pay all my bills online in something like 30 seconds. Amazing. Remember writing out checks for everything, putting them in envelopes with the statements, finding stamps and then having to drop them off in the mail?

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  11. I still do all that the old fashioned way, DJ. It does take a lot of time. And I drive to the post office to send them off to feel an extra layer of security rather than putting checks out in our home mailbox.

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  12. 🙂 Chas calling himself obstreperous. That is a word I associate with male children who won’t sit down and be quiet on the sofa for five minutes without starting a wrassling match with a brother who just could not find any other place to sit but beside him.

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  13. My car in PNG, the door behind the driver will only open from the inside. The worst problem is that the driver’s window won’t roll down. That is hard after it has been sitting in the sun all day.

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  14. Janice, I went and checked. It is fifteen steps from my front door to the groceries. I usually go about every other day for groceries, though I make the trip every day because I keep the catfood near the pantry.

    Mike on the other hand, does lots of his shopping at Costco, URE, Albertson’s, about once a month. He used to go weekly but now that we are down to just six at home, there is no need for more frequent trips.

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  15. Janice! Just thinking about doing that again is painful. 🙂

    I love 30 seconds, done. Plus the payments go in pretty much immediately, no second-guessing mail time.

    I still write checks for church (even though there’s actually now a mobile app for that), for the gardener and for many of the work crews I’ve used here at the house over the past year and a half (thus I just had to re-order checks for the first time in ages).

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  17. Mike pays most of the bills on line. He ran through all of that with son when he was up here a few years ago to sort out our paperwork as the need seemed imminent. Glad it was not but nice to know somebody is sort of in the know.

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  18. My grocery runs are done on the way home from work (sometimes on lunch hours, I just put them in the work kitchen refrigerator and grab them when I leave work). Sprouts and Ralphs are the two main options as they’re close to home and I pass by them every night, so swinging in quickly to grab things works best for me as a single.

    How often i do that depends, but I’d say between 1 and 3 times a week at most.

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  20. I have discovered another grocery store I can get to by bus. I still have to walk the five or so minutes to the bus stop, and lifting one of those two wheeled carts filled with groceries onto and off a bus is still challenging, but it is better than the weekly 15 minute walk to and from the other store.

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  21. Phos @ 10:51 has me pegged.

    I can’t understand way a car will not start with people in it. Doesn’t make sense.

    I pay most of my bills on-line. However the city of Greensboro charges a dollar for each computer or phone payment. I don’t pay it on principle. It’s their benefit more than mine.
    It puts somebody out of work.

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  22. I once lived in an apartment that backed up to a small shopping area that had a grocery store. At first I thought it was convenient until I bought too much for carrying to the apartment in one trip. I learned a lesson then.

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  24. I pay our bills online. I “push” them from our account, thus don’t have to pay anyone for the “privilege.” Our tithe is automatically withdrawn from our account weekly via a program the church participates in. I rarely write a check and haven’t ordered any since we moved here five years ago and changed our address.

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  25. p.s. One thing I dislike about paying online is that we cannot tell if a check has cleared until 90 days after it is sent (at which time the bank automatically puts it back into our account if it hasn’t been used). This has happened twice – once when it was apparently lost in the mail and once when the recipient didn’t cash it in time. I don’t mind them taking the money out of the account immediately since they are due something for providing the service, but because they do that, I never know when, or if, the check has been cashed.

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  26. I don’t have very many checks to write each month. I do the three utilities and two or three charge card bills. And of course when insurance and tax payments are due, I try to pay in large lumps so there are less checks. Now I try to do a monthly check to the church instead of weekly.

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  27. My friend, Karen, gets groceries through Amazon Fresh. I have ordered other items by subscription from Amazon but have stopped that. That box of kitty litter I had to ship back discouraged me from that. I have been pleased by ordering some groceries (nothing perishable) online through Walmart. That can be a major convenience, too.

    Sam’s now has a service where you give them a list of what you need and they pull it all and have it waiting for pickup. I like to select my own even though it takes longer.

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  28. Chas, my Corolla that got totalled . . . I was looking for a newer car as soon as I could afford it, not because it wasn’t running anymore, but because things were breaking down that weren’t worth fixing on a 15-year-old car, and because it was no longer totally reliable. On one trip to my sister in Alabama and one trip to my brother in Georgia, I’d had to call the man of the house I was visiting at 40 or 50 miles out, and that troubled me.

    But I’d already lost the ability to roll down the driver’s window or open the front passenger door from the inside. At least it was the passenger door and I didn’t regularly have passengers, but I did drive seniors to the doctor. (It actually broke when one of them was in my car.) So I would have to tell my passenger, “When we get there, I will be coming around to let you out.” Also, when I was taking my new foster children home and one of them got sick in the backseat, I was driving on a road with fast traffic, and forgetting the passenger door issue, I tried to go out that door. (She was on the passenger side, but in the backseat.) Once I remembered, I had to watch traffic, rush out my door and run around the car–and she was throwing up the whole time it took me to pull over, stop the car, try the passenger door, run around the car, and get her out. My car was very thoroughly baptized by the time I got to her, and so was my girl herself, and it would have been quicker and safer if that front passenger door could have been opened! (At least I did have a suitcase of her clothes in the trunk, so I was able to put fresh clothes on her at the side of the road, but that did little good in the circumstances. And then my washer broke down when the clothes were in it–I would have thrown them out, not washed them, had it not been that someone else paid for those clothes and I figured I needed to wash them!)

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  29. Re grocery shopping: when I was single I shopped about every two weeks, though I would occasionally go to the store on other times if I was too low on produce or was having company. I varied between shopping at Wal-Mart once I got one near me, Publix (esp. in the summer, for produce), and Kroger and Food Lion. Basically when the ads came I looked through them and saw which store had the most things I needed on sale, and I’d go to that store that week. If nobody had much of anything, then I’d go to Wal-Mart unless I needed to stock up on produce or meat, and then it might be Publix.

    My husband is used to going to the store nearly daily. Bananas are on his own “never out” list, and that alone means frequent trips. (I love bananas, but my never-out list is “fruit,” not a specific variety, and in summer I usually don’t buy bananas since there is so much available and because they ripen so quickly in summer.) He has been known to go to the store only for bananas. In fact, one noteworthy day we went grocery shopping, and I said, “I think we need bananas (trying to avoid a trip the next day), and he said, “We just got some yesterday,” and I said, “Yes, but I think the girls ate most of them already.” We didn’t buy any, and when we got home he saw we only had one left. We went into town later that day to visit his parents, and he also wanted us to go to the store for bananas, our second time to the store that day.

    I’ve told him I just don’t like going to the store every single day. (Generally, not always but usually, we go together.) So now we’re down to shopping two or three times a week, though we have been known to go three days in a row, and then I remind him that I don’t like this “daily” stuff. As a widower who works from home, going to the store was an excuse to “get out of the house,” but he isn’t a widower anymore, and to me going to the grocery store isn’t an event that brightens my day; it’s simply a task that needs to be done!

    We usually go either to Kroger or to Wal-Mart, since they are our local stores. An Aldi is just being built, though, so I imagine we will go to it occasionally once it opens, if we still live here.

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  30. We also occasionally go to Fresh Thyme, particularly on Thursdays, though we have to go to a larger city to go to those stores. (Their ads start and end on Thursday, so Thursday is double-ad day!) And this last year we were members of Costco and went there several times, but our membership ran out in the summer and we didn’t renew since the place we are moving doesn’t have a Costco.

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  31. I also should pay online to the church, I just haven’t set that up in my own bank account yet but we’ve had that option for years. The mobile app takes a fee, I believe, so I won’t use that (although it was designed by one of our church members and is under a charitable/nonprofit umbrella group). Maybe I’ll look into adding the church to my regular list, it would probably be easier than writing a weekly check although I kind of like that physical aspects of doing that.

    Produce is what requires me to go to the store as often as I do.

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  32. We send money to the church online. That bothers me. I suppose because it seems to make it more a bill than a gift. But I am not the one doing it so it does not matter. It is definitely easier for us and for them.

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  34. 🙂 I was watching on TV the President arrive at the Senate office building for lunch.

    Seeing all those men in dark suits and red/blue ties reminded me of something.
    I used to go to meetings and reviews with a female colleague named Katie.
    Katie once said, “All men look alike.”
    She was right in that from a distance, it was just a bunch of men looking the same.

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  35. Morning!! Those birds up there I calll “nasty birds”….they are so mean!! They strut around seeking what they might destroy….I shoo them when they come around!
    I drive about 20 minutes to get to the grocery and I never make a special trip. When I am on an errand run, I try to get it all done at the same time. Perishables like fruit and veggies keep me going weekly or stopping in for a quick grab of those items (of course I always come out of the store with more than the veggies and fruit…. argh!!)
    I only pay two bills online (bill pay so I have control over the acct…I never let “them” have access to my acct) I use e-checks for health insurance and college tuition payments. Like Chas said…the utility dept, gas company and internet provider all charge a “fee” to pay online…so they get a check as I refuse to pay for them to get their money more quickly! 💰

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  36. I’d rather write a physical check to church. I do have a couple of places to which I give through monthly deductions, but not church.

    Fresh produce is important to me, but some kinds of fruit “keep,” and frozen produce is good, too, so I don’t go weekly just for produce, though I will go if I run out or if I see that they have great prices on cherries this week, or whatever. In Chicago I had a couple of fruit markets I frequented, one in Chicago itself and one in Michigan–I went only once or twice a year to the one in Michigan, but it was great to go up and load my car trunk with peaches, blueberries, and so on. I’d dry some, freeze some, eat some, make pies . . .

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  39. Shopping: Mrs B does most of it, but I sometimes accompany her or stop for a few things on the way home from work when she asks. Most of our groceries come from a weekly trip to Meijer, a regional chain something like a Super WalMart. Once a month or so we go to Sam’s Club for stuff we buy in quantity (paper products, cereal…). Both of those stores are within 2 1/2 miles of home.

    A couple times a month we hit Trader Joe’s for some good gluten-free products and some other odds and ends that they do particularly well, but that’s 6 miles and takes us deeper into town with more traffic.

    We also tried Aldi’s once, and were impressed with the quality of the products and the prices, but it’s on the far side of town about 12 miles away and feels like a big effort to get there.

    Bill Paying: I pay most bills through the bank’s bill-pay service (push). A couple of utilities are authorized to pull from our bank account. We have a couple of online options for giving to the church automatically, but I still like to write the check and drop it in the offering plate.

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  40. See what I mean Cheryl…it is swallowing “something”…although at this time of year I would guess it would not be another’s baby hatchling…but I have witnessed them robbing nests while the mama bird is squawking and quite distressed! 😞 They are pretty on the outside…but they do have quite an attitude…which makes them unlovely to me….
    World Series! Sad the Yankees will not be there though….go Dodgers!

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  46. Linda…because I don’t know how 😊 We pay our credit cards off every month and our bank knew the routing numbers and such for our two CC companies. I typed in our utility,gas and internet provider names on bill pay and they required info I didn’t know….I decided to just keep writing checks to them. And the only options I read on our bills were to either charge it automatically to a CC..for a fee…or allow them access to our checking acct to take out the amount for that month….we had trouble with that option with a life insurance company abusing the withdrawals and the bank allowed it. We will never allow someone access to our checking acct again.

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  47. I have all my utilities on my bill pay (so I decide what and when to pay them, they don’t have access to my account).

    It’s 105 here, but it only feels like 104, according to the weather people. That’s because it’s a dry heat.

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  50. It’s a beautiful day here. I actually wore flip flops to work today. It’s usually boot weather by now. I won’t complain – we’ll transplant one of our cherry trees after work today since it’s so nice.

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  52. Oh, there are stacks of firewood and mountains of pumpkins at our stores and corner vendors.

    I hate it when the phone rings at work and my headphones spring out of my hand and slap me in the face. Trying to look professional.

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  53. In my church they encourage the writing of the check, driving to the church on Sunday, and dropping it in the offering plate yourself. They have found that when people pay through their bank and transfer funds that it can encourage members not to attend.

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  59. We could arrange to have the tithe deducted automatically.
    However, i think that the tithe is a part of the worship service.
    If it’s deducted already, why do we have an offertory prayer?

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  62. DJ, did you see that the Dodgers got a home run on their very first pitch to them in the World Series?

    Hey, has anyone seen “Same Kind of Different as Me”? My husband said it doesn’t look that great in the ratings, but if it’s a halfway decent movie I’d like to see it, and could persuade him. Anyone?

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  63. The little bird is a chipping sparrow, I think a juvenile (its cap doesn’t look as red as that of an adult, which has a reddish brown cap). It’s on grasses in front of the cornfield behind my house. I was out by my neighbor’s apple orchard to photograph warblers, but this shot presented itself and I took it. This species is only with us in the summer months, and I think it’s our smallest sparrow. You know it’s around when you hear a quiet little “chip, chip, chip,” thus its name.

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  65. Yes, saw that homer. Our editor, die-hard Dodger fan, had just stepped out of the newsroom and missed it. He says, so what did he do? “Home run.” “Nahhh.”

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  66. Mumsee, you can transplant right up until freeze up – once all the leaves have dropped. Water it in well and it should be good. Or you could move it early in spring before the leaves come out as soon as the ground has thawed.

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  67. I grocery shop as little as possible. I watch the ads and will go in when there is a good sale. I use my freezer well. Even produce can keep for quite awhile when properly stored.

    My husband likes to run into town far more than I do. I used to grocery shop every two weeks right after payday. Now I do it either for the sales or being actually out of something necessary. We usually go together and will combine it with other errands.

    That movie is not here yet, but one of my daughters heard from a friend that it was very good. I am looking forward to seeing it, so hope it comes around here.

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  68. I’ve read the book, which is why I’m interested in the movie, but my husband quickly checked the reviews, and his initial response is “Doesn’t look highly enough rated to bother.”

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  69. Kare, that is what I thought. I have had several I have wanted to move but either the leaves don’t fall before the ground freezes or I don’t get it done in the spring. This year it looks like they may lose their leaves in time. But the ones I want to move are still green. Others are turning. I have just gone ahead and moved trees in the summer and with a lot of water and God’s pity or whatever, they make it. Others I have tried and I get a dry stick.

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  70. Dodgers win 🙂

    As I walked the dogs I could hear the game from houses we passed, got home to see the top of the 9th. They did good.

    Very hot tonight still, I got my little city tree watered when I got home from work and the fans are helping; I may grab a cold shower before bedtime tonight

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