107 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 11-4-17”

  2. That insect up there is a monarch caterpillar, nearly full-grown and about big enough to go into a chrysalis and become a butterfly. It’s eating the blossoms of common milkweed. (Milkweed is the only plant monarch caterpillars eat, any of multiple species of milkweed, but they usually chow down on the leaves.)

    Caterpillar skin doesn’t grow, but it is loose on the insect at first and so there is room to grow inside it. But the caterpillar needs to shed its skin several times in the course of getting larger. Each new size of skin/caterpillar is called an “instar,” and different butterflies have different numbers of instars for their caterpillars. The monarch has five instars, each one marked more boldly than the last. This one is either a fourth or fifth instar–I lean toward fourth, but it could be either. This summer I had more than 20 caterpillars in all on the milkweed plants in my backyard, at least two of which became butterflies (a very good percentage, actually, since the mother can lay hundreds of eggs), though I only saw one chrysalis.

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  3. Good early morning! I see the early bird gets the worm…uh, caterpillar.

    I stayed up until 12:30 a.m. watching Inspector Lewis on Masterpiece Theater with Art last night. That was too late for up this early.

    I am looking forward to hearing the pastor of Renovation church tomorrow. That is who we are in beginning discussions with about merger.

    Miss Bosley just jumped up on me for morning cuddle time. She is making bread on my shoulder as she purrs the troubles of life away.

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  5. Hi y’all. Dakota slept from 10:00 until two (and so did I). He needed to potty, but went back in his kennel afterwards and slept until 5:30. Each night gets a little better. Hooray!!!!

    Scott is at our ranch with a few buddies for opening weekend of deer season–he’ll be back Monday evening. Becca spent the night at her best friend’s house. Connie came over last night to visit; it’s always a treat to see her. Lindsey has a horse show Sunday, so will spend tonight at her trainer’s house and won’t return until Sunday evening.

    All is quiet here. Dakota and the kitty have had breakfast. I’m slowly coming to life with the help of strong coffee….

    Hope everyone has a blessed day!

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  8. Good Morning..the moon is so bright I forgot it was night! Lulah seems to have forgotten as well…she is up and wants the day to begin…not happening..not in my world anyway. I need another cup of coffee..or two…or three.
    It is already very windy out there and the winds are predicted to increase.. Army plays Air Force at the Academy this afternoon…everyone in the Springs is all a buzz about it
    Ann your morning sounds like peace filled bliss…and I am so happy to hear Dakota is doing well… ❤️
    Clocks…why do they do this? Twice a year we go on the clock hunt turning them back turning them forward….at least I get an “extra hour” of sleep this go round 😴

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  10. My cup of coffee is just right.

    I am waiting for my brother to come by and help with whatever I can think of as a priority inside if it happens to be raining outside. I have plenty outside and think that is his preference and of course it is what he has years of experience with. He is good with indoor things, too, but some of the things I get him to do such as replacing a window shade, I don’t think he has ever done. It was easier than he thought. I could have done it, but it was nice for him to learn how. It is the kind of thing I keep putting off. Now it is done.

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  12. I just changed my analog watch time. I moved the hands forward eleven hours which takes a lot more effort than moving them back one hour. I heard years ago they must be moved forward so as to not break the workings. Is that true or an urban legend?

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  13. Janice- I think the watch thing is urban legend, or it may depend on the watch.

    I agree with those who don’t like the time change. I say, pick one and leave it. Use DST year around if you want the extra hour at night. I’ve read that there are more accidents for the first few days after the time change because a lot of people don’t get adjusted in one day to the new time.

    In the 60s when we first started using DST every year, Arizona tried it one year, then decided not to go ion DST. So half the year Arizona is with the rest of the Mountain Time zone, and the other half with Pacific Time. It was confusing at first, but we got used to it.

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  14. Best part about this time change is the extra hour of sleep.

    Real Estate Guy is meeting workers at the building supply yard at 7 a.m. and will be heading over here in a couple consecutive trips to drop off cement and equipment. He was hoping the curb space in front of my house would be reserved for them, but I see that one of the people in the 4-plex across the street has parked there. Hoping she’ll leave soon. If not, we’ll have to improvise I guess. My Jeep has been moved out to the curb across the street so the driveway is clear. But most of the curb space parking usually is taken around here.

    Real Estate Guy promises an “exciting day” with lots going on.

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  15. Janice, tell me again what’s led up to the consideration of a merger on your church’s part? Was it a facilities issue or ? Is it your church or other churches initiating the exploration of a merger?

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  16. On Janice’s question from yesterday, the rumour mill has been working overtime: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/01/far-right-conspiracy-theory-us-civil-war.

    In recent days, the story took an absurd turn, and had its closest brush with more mainstream conservative media, when Gateway Pundit, a longtime conservative blog that has recently expanded into news coverage, published a story by its White House correspondent, Lucian Wintrich, claiming that an “antifa leader” had promised to “behead white parents” on 4 November.
    The tweet the story was based on, however, was a joke from an account that had no apparent ties to any antifa groups.
    In a telephone interview, Wintrich conceded that the tweet his reporting was based on was not serious, and that it was unlikely that there would be a revolution on Saturday.

    I’ve just been reading other articles about the Russian fake FB accounts that spit out political memes during last year’s election, and how they targeted all sides and even resulted in a demonstration between two different groups that had both been bamboozled: http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/russias-facebook-memes-have-been-revealed-and-politics-will-never-be-the-same/.
    The world out there can seem a hostile place. It often is, which shouldn’t be surprising. But so often, the things we fear are only paper tigers, manufactured by those who seek to make merchandise of us (II Peter 2:5) – conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, for example, supplements his diatribes with product placements from his own line of products, most of which are pure snake oil. I often find myself thinking of what Peter said when some particularly frightful rumour raises its head, “Be not afraid of their terror.” (I Peter 3:14). Christ repeatedly commands us (it is not a mere suggestion or guideline) not to fear (John 14 & 16). The rumour mill was busy in Paul’s day, which is why he wrote this to the Thessalonian believers:

    We ask you, brothers, not to be easily upset in mind or troubled, either by a spirit or by a message or by a letter as if from us, alleging that the Day of the Lord has come. Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way.(II Thessalonians 2:1-3, HCSB)

    We have a sure defense against those who seek to trouble us – the power of Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit: “For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.” (II Timothy 2:17).

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  18. About two years ago I asked those of you who were homeschooling parents if you wanted a free copy of a couple of books I was working on to get your family’s feedback as I further developed the content. In the next year I will be looking to see if I can get an actual publisher and not self-publish, but in the meantime now that I have the photos I wanted I have self-published it (allowing me to have a PDF version I can send to potential publishers). A friend to whom I gave sample copies of an earlier version just told me she wants to order the books for her grandchildren for Christmas, and so I went ahead and “published” the books. That means I released them to be ordered.

    If anyone on here wants a PDF of the books (woodpecker and/or butterfly), you can e-mail me and I will send you free PDF copies. If you want paperback copies, I have a link on my website now or I can e-mail you the link to the books themselves. Being self-published books of full-color photos, they aren’t inexpensive, but “cheap” as photo books go, $12.49 each. I’m not asking people to order them, just letting you know they are available. The books are written with children in mind, with sentences written on an approachable level, but they are packed with information and photos that adults are likely to enjoy too. There is about three years worth of work involved from the time I started them to the time I was satisfied I had photos of everything I needed to cover the topic thoroughly in words and photos–I have kept these books in mind every time I have gone on a walk, looking to fill in any gaps.

    I counted stuff in the butterfly book to give you the numbers as an example of what is offered:

    52 pages
    88 photos
    24 species of butterflies and skippers (the woodpecker books has focuses on seven species plus one photo of another species) and three interesting moths
    photos of three caterpillars (including the monarch) and the chrysalis of two species
    life cycle photos of the monarch, from female laying the egg, the egg itself, to the recently emerged adult–19 photos of monarchs taken in my backyard.
    5 species of swallowtails alone
    13 defined vocabulary words
    5 “funny flutters” photos (humorous photos of butterflies–I have funny woodpecker shots as well)

    The butterfly book has a monarch chrysalis as its highlight in terms of photos, and the woodpecker one has photos of a pileated woodpecker nest with two young. It also has lots of photos of red-headed woodpeckers, flickers, downy and hairy, red-bellied, and a few of yellow-bellied sapsuckers, and but one shot of the Gila woodpecker (not a great one, since it was taken with a film camera ages ago). Both books have lots of pages of questions and answers about the creature in question, a focus on a few select species of that creature, a photo tip with a couple of photos, a page of vocabulary words, and a couple spreads of funny photos. I have photos of butterflies in flight and of woodpeckers in flight; no mating or defecating photos, but pretty much everything else.

    If you’re interested, check my website if you know its address (it too is up for a makeover) or e-mail me and let me know if you want the PDF (free) or the link to the paperbacks (unfortunately not free).

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  19. No, but the Neighborhood Bully sent me a nasty-gram letter accusing me of “character assassination” and asking me for proof of the things being said about him in the neighborhood. He has given me 10 days to respond and “doesn’t want to involve lawyers as that could get expensive” but then states he has already consulted an attorney. He is also claiming that the two meetings that were held recently were not “legal” therefore he is still the president of the HOA.
    My attorney told me not to respond that he couldn’t do anything to me. I was also advised that since an HOA wasn’t in effect when we purchased this property that we are under no obligation to join and any subsequent HOA does not have the power to place a lien on my property.

    What a nasty, miserable human being he is. THERE THAT”s “character assassination!

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  23. I don’t think Kim does winter clothes, maybe only ‘winterish.’ That HOA man sounds horrible, just try to stay clear of him.

    Mumsee, faux rabbit?

    There’s a march to stop homelessness in our community today.

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  24. Jeans, cute boots, a couple of sweaters. One suitcase is already full. I didn’t want to pack the trunk too tightly just in case the weather was nice enough to enjoy having a convertible car.

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  26. I need cute boots, for sure, AJ. 🙂

    Oh boy, guess the cement mixer & other equipment is on its way over here and it’s all HUGE, not sure where we’re going to park it.

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  27. Sigh… I was hoping my birthday present would be to go back to clinical, but strike negotiations are still ongoing. Still, it could be worse – over half of our year in the program has missed not only the clinicals, but also the three hour class each Friday (we are divided into groups under different instructors for the Friday class and the clinical placements, so some of us have a university employed instructor and some a college employed instructor – it is college faculty that are striking). I have continued with that class, as well as the online Pathophysiology class, and my history elective – the anthropology elective is under a college professor.

    I have term papers for both the history and anthropology electives. Thankfully, we have suggested topics to write about, as it would take important time and energy to determine a topic for what is only an elective. I had already submitted and proposal and annotated bibliography for the anthropology paper before the strike happened, so that is somewhat in limbo, but off to a good start. I’ve started work on the history paper, and it is proving very interesting. The topic is how the peace treaties of WWI shaped modern Middle Eastern history – suffice to say, from reading the literature, one is left thinking that if certain Western powers had been less greedy to secure trade routes to certain ports in Asia, which would become independent from their colonizers in a few short decades anyway, Syria and Iraq might not have become the messy patchwork of opposing sides they are now.

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  28. DJ, yesterday I was reading reviews on the movie “Same Kind of Different as Me,” and someone said something nasty about people who minister to the homeless, because of course there shouldn’t be such a thing as homelessness, because being “permanently housed” is a “fundamental human right.” Um, OK, we have fundamental human rights to food, permanent housing, healthcare, education, all based not on one’s ability to pay or on the choice of other people to see this person as in actual need of help, but based on “it’s a right, so we have to pay for it if they can’t or they just won’t.”

    I insist that clothing should be a fundamental human right, too, and I insist on “clothing stamps.” Let’s start with $100/month, to make sure my clothing right is adequately met. (That would be several times per month what I paid for clothes even in my “rich days” in Chicago, so I think it would be a good starting amount, though I may increase it to $150 if I decide I need a whole new wardrobe annually, maybe even $200 if I decide to change my style a little to include hats and cute boots.) I’m making sure I’m not being greedy as I ask others to meet this fundamental human right, though.

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  32. Speaking of clothing, I’ve been a good Scottish girl this week. Plaid is really “in,” and I’m Scottish and I don’t currently have any. Well, my husband got some ridiculously good promos on his credit card this summer (11% on select purchases, including hotel rooms and even on gift cards if you played it right–it was on grocery spending, and gift cards bought at a grocery store were not excluded), and we ended up with a lot of free gift cards, including (for me) Lands’ End. Between a 40% off sale and a free gift card, and free shipping, I ended up paying just $20 for two flannel shirts/blouses that would have cost $110 at full price. So I got my Scottish plaid at deals that would please my Scottish parents.

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  33. Of course, I would not have them if I had not stolen my husband’s size eleven side zip camo boots. He noticed and next thing I knew, I had my own pair of excellent well fitting boots. Have I ever told you how much I adore my husband? Selfishly probably. He is always providing me with things before I even ask. Just last Tuesday he brought me a bunch of dirt!

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  36. Lots of noise here, the dogs are clingy to the point of crowding into the bathroom with me earlier. Sheesh. And I’m sure my neighbors aren’t thrilled. Dust and noise. Oh well. It should just be a one-day job.

    Real Estate Guy (who once had the craftsman house next door) and woman who lives there now got introduced finally as we were standing out front. She was saying she and her family used to live in a very big historic house near our housing projects on the east side of town but decided to move when someone found a head in one of the trash cans in the alley. Not a good part of town.

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  37. We did a story this weekend about how communities are starting to lose patience with the homeless situation — the problem is that the truly needy tend to gravitate toward those that offer help and they find ways to get off the streets.

    But there’s another, more maverick segment of folks — younger, most into drugs and other crime — who like the lifestyle of tent-living on the streets. It’s become a lifestyle for some of them and they’re, of course, resistant to all offers of help.

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  38. And there’s another segment, the mentally ill, that poses additional problems. One of the people at the dog park is a social worker for county mental health and she was telling me that there are now monthly shots available as a way of delivering some of the more prominent medications (since not taking daily meds can lead to such instability).

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  39. It isn’t today – it will occur on the day I hoped to go to clinical – but thanks anyway.

    Cheryl, I don’t think in terms of human rights – which is a flawed concept, being somewhat vague – but in terms of human responsibilities. The right to a fair trial, is, in Scripture, the responsibility of a judge to be impartial and weigh the evidence (Leviticus 19:15). The right to life, is in Genesis 9:6, the responsibility not to kill other humans. The right to the necessities of life (failure to provide the necessities of life is a criminal charge) is the responsibility to love one’s neighbor as oneself. As John said to the Church, if you say you love God but ignore a brother in need, your love for God is called into question (I John 3:17). Care for the poor and vulnerable isn’t a responsibility limited to the Church in the eyes of God, since He is described as pleading the cause of the poor and helpless (Proverbs 22:1-2, 23:10-11). The person who criticized helping the homeless was wrong because it is the responsibility of everyone, whether private citizen or public official, to ensure justice to the most vulnerable members of society. The attitude of Scripture is seldom that being poor is due to someone’s fault (the verses against slothfulness are far fewer than the passages advocating for the poor). The idea of poor indicating one’s moral status is actually quite pagan, as it is something that the Hindu concept of karma suggests (their films frequently describe rich people as being good). James, on the other hand, suggests that God has chosen the poor of this world, echoing Paul’s words about God choosing the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Being poor is no disgrace; needing help is no sin.

    While there are various economic arguments for and against government social support, I see no Scriptural reason the government can’t be involved in social support. As James notes in the last chapter of his epistle, the rich seldom have justice on their side, seldom what they retain for themselves is, in the eyes of the Judge of all the earth, justly theirs. My father used to comment on the bitter irony of the philanthropy of J.D. Rockefeller, who built his fortune from a fraudulent monopoly (ruled so in court) that caused suffering to the working men who were put out of work by his manipulation of the markets. So, the argument that each man should hold what he owns, and it is left up to him to decide what to do, to give it in charity or keep it, with it will not hold in the eyes of God, who knows how greed connives to get more than its due. Paul simply tells us to pay our taxes, as Christ did before him – Justin Martyr, commenting on Christ’s command in his letter of appeal to the Caesar of his day, notes that what the government decides to do with that money is their business, whether good or ill, as they are the ones who will have to give an account to God.

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  40. DJ, for the young ‘mavericks’ there have always been a portion of society which dislikes putting down roots and prefers a nomadic lifestyle. In England, those who are commonly called Gypsies, are actually descended from two different groups. There is the Romanichal, who are of the widespread group of Roma people thought to originate from Northern India and found across Europe and the Middle East, and then there are the Travelers, who are actually descended from refugees and migrants from Ireland. The conflict and resentment between the nomadic groups and the settled people persists to this day. My great grandmother, of high born British descent, was bringing a bitter insult against her daughter-in-law, when she observed her daughter-in-law’s children looked like they were descended from Gypsies (thick dark curly hair, somewhat wide mouths with thick lips, and noses that tended to be broad). My grandmother’s family was actually somewhat nomadic, but that was of necessity, in the uncertain economics in post-war Canada – my grandmother’s father was a veteran of WWI and former POW and was trained as a watch maker, but few people wanted watches in those the Depression era. So, they moved around a lot, looking for stable sustenance.

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  41. LA (and probably other major cities) is also hampered by lawsuits filed by advocacy groups. As a result of some of those decisions, the city must now allow people to sleep on the streets (a change in procedure which sent Skid Row in downtown LA into rapid expansion mode so that it now covers several miles). There is only so much that can be done legally with regard to the encampments that crop up. We’ve always had homeless people in our port community (which is part of the city of la), but I never remember seeing street and park encampments before 2 years ago. There’s a section near the waterfront that is pretty much overtaken now with people living on the streets. The city can come in and clear people out with a posted “cleanup” notice that goes out in advance, but everyone just returns as soon as that’s over.

    It has set up a clash of “rights” between the people living on the streets and the residents and business owners who are so negatively impacted by the tents, shopping carts, and sometimes human waste. Permanent housing is being built thanks to a couple tax increases voters agreed to in the past few years, but that will take a while & no one seems to know quite what to do about it all in the meantime.

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  42. Adding the maverick portion of the homeless also has been a well-intentioned California ballot measure (which most of us voted for) that let many minor drug offenders out of the jails and prisons early.

    Law enforcement believes that’s been a major factor in what they’re dealing with now among these burgeoning street encampments. (Unfortunately, the supportive or treatment services that were promised to be in place to help deal with those offenders never materialized, leaving many to just go back to what they were doing before they were sent to jail.)

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  44. Mumsee, I never read about people buying dirt than I think of my mother’s childhood memory of she and her siblings (there were six all told) going behind the house and rolling with laughter because a woman had stopped at their father’s garden stand and asked to buy some dirt. He charged the woman 25 cents for a bushel basket of earth (he ‘cooked’ his own combination of compost and soil in the greenhouse he built himself).
    An opportunistic business man my grandfather was not. He worked a factory job to support his family, although his real joy was cultivating the earth. Throughout his life, he treated the fruits of his labour in the soil as being freely available to all who had need, while his wife tended human bodies with the same care (her bitter-tongued mother-in-law included). Every Sunday lunch at his house, they held a large meal for not only their burgeoning family, but also any waifs and strays that happened to be at church that morning. That is how my father, a new believer far away from his own family, met my mother. My grandparents died with nothing to leave but their house, which went to the son who lived with them. My parents bid fair to follow in their footsteps, and I envy them the blessing of having lived such a full life of quiet service.

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  45. Remember, my brother used all of our top soil to build a septic system drain field. I am composting slowly but not as quickly as husband builds raised beds for me!

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  46. Jo, I don’t think I have your e-mail address. If you have mine, please e-mail me. Or Kim or Donna or Mumsee, e-mail me Jo’s address. Thanks.

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  50. Roscuro, I’m definitely not arguing against care for the poor. I’m arguing, as you alluded to, against the idea that we have specific and ever-expanding “rights” that then become the responsibility of other people to meet. I don’t have a “right” to permanent housing, though I do have a need to some short of shelter from the elements, as well as a responsibility to other people in how I meet that need. I can’t just set up a tent on a public sidewalk and beg for money for food because I prefer that to working a job, for instance.

    And regardless of whether “most” poor people are there by their own fault, it can’t help but be part of the discussion. I walked past enough unshaved, alcohol-reeking people in Chicago begging for money to be quite aware that a good number did indeed get there by their own choices. And it takes discretion to know how to work with them wisely. Two male fellow classmates from my Bible college were murdered by homeless people they took in, and fellow church members in Chicago were “used” by those taking advantage of their generosity. I am not saying that all homeless people are addicts, dangerous, lazy bums, or mentally ill–but a large enough percentage of the chronically homeless fall in any or all of these categories that great caution and wisdom is needed–as it would be in ministering to gang members, prisoners, or drug addicts. Some are called to such ministry, but it isn’t something for the naively hopeful to do and think they can change lives overnight. The idea of simply providing homes and they’ll live happily ever after is a naive dream. Some just need the opportunity for a good job (the chance for a regular shower, good clothes, a phone number and an address, maybe some job training), but some need a lot more than that.

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  52. Jo, I sent the books–both of them, in separate e-mails–but got a message back that the file is too big. That would be on your end, I think, since I’ve successfully sent it to other people in the past. With a lot of photos, it is a big file. If you have a different e-mail address that can take bigger files, please send it to me. I’ll e-mail you so that you have my address.

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  53. Tasha weighed 6.8 pounds at 5 months. “With those paws, however,” the vet said, “she’s not done growing yet.”

    We listened to her tromping up and down the hall on those paws and laugh.

    The kitten rescue people did a great job with her–and I told them so when they called to double check our address “after all the fires,” for the chip paperwork. She managed five children, two other cats and a dog, 6 moves in five weeks and is still cheerful and curious.

    They “domesticated” this kitten very well.

    Now, if only she would stay out of the closets . . . and yes, Mumsee, this appointment was to get her shots so she can go outside.

    Now it’s off to a birthday party. How can my son be 37? That’s how old I feel–most days. 🙂

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  58. I walk past many homeless every day I go out. They are filthy, unkempt, bearing what I recognize as the marks of drug and/or alcohol addiction. Many are profane. Many are obviously mentally ill. Once, the last time I lived in this city, my siblings visited me and we went shopping along the main street. We passed a man huddled in a door, addiction clearly written in his face. We caught some of what he was muttering to himself, about how he was nothing, had nothing, and everyone stared at him. We looked at each other after we had passed, and second sibling said simply, “Poor man.” I still feel the same compassion for those I see, no matter how they came there. Perhaps because I feel keenly that the slender threads of my health (a frayed thread) and my family’s goodwill are all that stand between me and the same utter destitution. I walk a razor’s edge, and much depends on me successfully finishing this course. If I do not, I will again lose my nursing license (the three year rule still applies, and I got my license back in 2015), in addition to losing the student insurance that pays for my expensive inhaler, and I will have to pay back my student loan. It is a grim prospect that faces me each time I feel my health giving way.

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  59. I have compassion for the homeless, too, but also for those who find their homes or businesses surrounded by them in unsafe ways. I have had almost no contact with those dealing with addictions–we did have an alcoholic man who was a member of a church I attended as a teenager–but I have had quite a bit of contact with people who are mentally ill or on the edge, and I know something of how it affects those around them. We really don’t handle mental illness well on any level.

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  61. Beautiful photos, Cheryl

    I picked up Cowboy’s meds and went out for a late breakfast with a friend from down the street (we both crave pancakes in the fall), then we cruised the neighborhood looking at house colors. White with a color trim (muted green, blue, or brick red?) is still a combination that could work for me. Most of the homes in our neighborhood are Spanish style from the early 1900s, lots of red tile roofs.

    Workers on a run for more cement apparently, a couple of the guys are here but truck and dad are gone. I actually passed them on the freeway earlier this morning while driving up to the vet’s office. That would have been their first run (they were to need 3 loads throughout the day, each brought in separately and within 2 hours of each other). I see they poured cement on the porch where there was a gap forming between the porch and house. I’d love to paint my front porch someday, tired of the boring gray concrete look. But that’s another project requiring more money so maybe later. Or not. 🙂

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  63. Sin makes life permanently messy. Christians need the strength of the Holy Spirit to never grow weary in well doing. The city church stands nearby both the homeless shelter and the library dowtown, which is located in a large mall that has some stores that thrive, since they appeal to the enormous immigrant population (of many origins) that also lives close to the downtown, while other stores do not, because they are targeted to the wrong clientele. The payday loan places and the lottery qiosks flourish. The church could move – it is sitting on prime real estate, and many of the members live in the more well-to-do places around town – but they seek to be salt and light, and realize they have the possibility of being a ministry hub. The last murder here that made national headlines because of how heinous it was was perpetrated by two wealthy young white men, who killed just to see if they could get away with the perfect murder – they didn’t even know the victim. As the mental health textbooks say, statistics show that the mentally ill are far more likely to be victims of crime than to commit crime.

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  64. Ah, that new photo is one of the most beautiful sights I saw all year. I watched the caterpillar hang and wait to shed its skin one last time, to become a chrysalis. I didn’t see the actual transition to chrysalis, but I saw the brand-new chrysalis only minutes old. (I’d seen the hanging caterpillar maybe 15 minutes before, so it had to be only minutes old!) I then researched how long a monarch is in the chrysalis, largely because I really hoped it wouldn’t come out on a Sunday!

    All the sources I looked at said some version on one to two weeks, 10-12 days seeming to be the most common answer (that would avoid a Sunday, thoughtfully). I read also that they nearly always come out (eclose) in the morning, and I already knew they turn from green to orange (like the photo above) the day before coming out, so you know the butterfly is about to come out. (Basically the chrysalis, at least at the end stages, is clear, and the butterfly doesn’t get its color till the last 24 hours.)

    I watched and I watched. As we moved past that 10-12 day mark with no butterfly, a different brand-new butterfly showed up among my mint plants. (I hadn’t seen its chrysalis, never did see it, but like a brand-new butterfly it hung to dry and then excreted the extra fluid its wings didn’t need, so I knew it was a new one.) I had already sexed this chrysalis as a female butterfly, and the other one that came out was a male.

    As we moved past two weeks and then three weeks, I began to fear that some parasite had killed the butterfly or it had died some other way. But I continued to look at it every day just in case I saw color . . . and one day I did.

    The morning I took this photo was 23 days after she made the chrysalis. I got up early to make sure I wouldn’t miss her coming out. It rained a good part of the morning, so I set up a lawn chair and an umbrella, and sat waiting with my camera.

    The chrysalis is surprisingly small–smaller than the end of my thumb. I looked up photos online, thinking that maybe I had a small, unhealthy one, but it matched what I saw online. I know that one of the last things that a caterpillar does after it crawls off its milkweed to go find a place to turn into a chrysalis is to excrete all its undigested food as sort of diarrhea–so it may be that it actually becomes smaller at that juncture. I’ve not read of anyone saying they get smaller, but I was surprised both by how small the caterpillar was when it was waiting to form it (and remember, I’d been seeing the caterpillars for weeks, so I knew how big they got) and then by the size of its chrysalis.

    But the morning I sat in the rain and waited for her to come out, I was most struck by the sheer beauty of this little thing, especially with raindrops on it. The half-circle row of small dots on the upper left looks like drops of gold, though that was far more visible when the chrysalis was green, and there are other larger splotches of gold on it too. I had heard that the monarch has an especially beautiful chrysalis, and she does.

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  65. One of the lapd officers who works skid row (by choice) — he’s young, black and Christian — has some very enlightening stories about how churches especially can help (and not further hurt) the homeless.

    Food? There’s an over abundance of it passed out on Skid Row, both by visiting churches & in the resident soup kitchens that dot the area. A good amount of it winds up in the trash later in the day. There is more food distributed than can be eaten. Hygiene kids are of much more benefit (though it may not feel as “good” to hand those out as it does a sandwich or a meal, especially around the holidays when churches seem to converge on those areas).

    When city officials set up port-a-potties on some corners in Skid Row some years ago — to give the people a decent amount of privacy — the facilities were taken over by the gangster element which then “rented” the spaces out for prostitution and drug deals. Seemed like a good idea but it became quickly twisted and made things worse. Finding out how best to help is trial and error and churches often make many mistakes, this officer has said.

    We have a waterfront mission in our area that is run by a former lapd skid row cop, really sweet, older guy who’s always had a heart for the homeless (it’s the mission our church supports with monthly meals and other donations). Our pastor regularly preaches there as well, he once told us it’s kind of comical as a few of the guys will let out really obvious and loud yawns during his remarks. But sometimes a few of them also show up at our church on Sunday mornings, which is heartening.

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  66. Well, I guess the textbooks of the likelihood of being a victim or the one doing the criminal act, it depends on what is counted as a crime. For instance, if you are looking at homeless mentally ill people, it is likely that they are more likely to be murdered than to commit murder. (I have no idea if that is the case, but the homeless are vulnerable, and it might be the case–but if they are killed by someone else who is also homeless and mentally ill, then the case hasn’t been made.) But if you add in such crimes as public intoxication and public defecation, it changes the matter quite a bit, I would think. I’m not saying those are similar crimes, just pointing out that it depends what you count.

    Further, the mentally ill who live in households with families are probably sometimes victims of criminal activity–though the perpetrators might well be mentally ill as well–but the particular cases of mental illness of which I am aware (including dementia) nearly always include a level of violence, at least occasionally, that would rise to “criminal” if it were reported as a crime (e.g., pulling a knife on a spouse), and others have extreme anger that might result in violence except that the family seeks medical help before it gets that far. But I know families where a mother or a husband locks the bedroom door at night to avoid being awakened and murdered at the same time, by a mentally ill family member.

    Add in those who are mentally unstable due to drugs or alcohol, and I strongly suspect that the number of crimes against the mentally ill by those who are not mentally ill is not higher than the reverse. Also, in at least some cases, a person is probably charged with a crime that was in fact self-defense, or attempted self-defense in which the attacker ended up getting hurt. That is, the jury might not believe you that you awakened to a knife at your throat, and in your attempt to push it out of her hands, and in your own terror and half-awake state she got hurt, but I imagine it happens.

    In other words, I wouldn’t take that textbook statistic at face value (personally) without seeing how they got to that conclusion, having known of multiple cases of violence by the mentally ill that were not reported as crimes because they were against family members. Mumsee could probably list a few just in her own house.

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  67. Roscuro, in Chicago I was a member of a church that “stayed” when the neighborhood went “down,” and it was a beautiful thing. Church members (white and black) ended up moving into the hood, the church was quite racially mixed (with a black pastor for most of my years there), and we ended up with a lot of racially mixed families (marriage and adoption, white with black, Asian, and Hispanic all represented). We had a real outreach into the community, and my vision will never be the same after 14 years there.

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  68. From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: https://www.mentalhealth.gov/basics/myths-facts/

    Most people with mental illness are not violent and only 3%-5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness. In fact, people with severe mental illnesses are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population.

    Considering that the page also notes that “one in 25 Americans live with a serious mental illness,such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression ” (i.e. 4 percent of the population), to be 10 times more likely than the general population to be a victim of crime, even taking into consideration that some crimes aren’t reported, makes it pretty obvious that the mentally ill population are more likely to be victims than perpetrators. After all, we know that in cases of abusive spouses or parents, those crimes also go unreported or underreported, and abusive people are often completely mentally normal, so unreported crime rates are probably similar in the general population. Also, even if the rate of violence was high, that doesn’t mean it is due to the mental illness – several of the violent dementia patients I encountered had had a reputation even before their dementia. After all, the person who abused their spouse and children in their younger years isn’t going to change simply because they got old and went into a nursing home.

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  70. I read things like this and wish I could remember what the deinstitutionalization issues were–beyond One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

    I understand, of course, that terrible things can be perpetrated by people in a variety of powerful situations, like that awful Nurse Kratchit.

    But then I ask myself, are mentally ill people better off living on the sidewalks in all weather, being beaten and taken advantage of by others, not taking their meds, not having bathing opportunities and scorned, than being in a facility for the mentally ill?

    The poor we will always have with us, but in the US so much “autonomy” is given to folks who are not capable of making good choices while their loved ones’ hands are tied from even getting basic help, I’m not sure what the answer is.

    And in my well-meaning community, many have dogs. (Having just paid a $179 vet bill, I wonder how on earth can they afford dogs. Are those dogs licensed? Do they have rabies and distemper shots? How can they adequately feed them?). Owning dogs keeps them out of the shelters and in some cases makes them look even more threatening.

    I don’t know the answer, but it’s not what we have now.

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  71. Roscuro, that is a truly horrible story.

    I don’t buy those numbers as valid, though. Three to five percent and one in twenty-five (4%) are the same number. So mentally ill people have the exact same likelihood of committing a violent crime, statistically, as the general population? If nothing else, they have to be leaving out suicide and murder/suicide. But we also have the stereotypical “not guilty by reason of insanity,” yet that should be a bogus defense if mental illness does not increase a person’s chance of violent behavior. The exact same chance of committing the crime, but ten times the chance of being a victim? Where does the ten-times-greater chance come from–what increases the risk that much? (If it were 1.5 times or twice, I’d say OK, I believe that, but people no more violent than the general population treated with ten times the violence? I’m skeptical.)

    And I know that dementia and other forms of mental illness can simply “take the filters off” someone inclined to aggression in the first place–but moving from being an angry person to being a violently angry person is a change. I once knew someone with BPD who was angry enough “filtered” that I would hate to meet her if she were to get dementia. I’ve had a bruise on my arm left by a woman past 70 with Alzheimer’s. I know of two women who went after their husbands with knives, and one who wrecked the car when she attacked her husband while he was driving, a gentle man who ended up verbally abusive (and medicated lest it become more) once he got Alzheimer’s, and two different women (one with a schizophrenic son, one with a son on drugs) who locked herself or her son into a bedroom at night for her own safety, a girl diagnosed with ODD who beat up her grandmother several times and broke her arm once. I can’t see those numbers of “no difference” as anything other than someone playing with numbers; they don’t add up.

    That doesn’t mean everyone with mental illness is violent; that clearly is not true. But by the time I start seeing numbers that say “the risk factor of violence is no higher for x factor,” and the numbers make no logical sense, I suspect a flawed study for PC reasons. A woman with post-partum depression is more likely to kill her child, a man with PTSD to react with violence, a person with depression to commit suicide, and so forth. Those numbers don’t match reality, unless I’m really missing something.

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  72. Michelle, I believe one of the main drivers toward de-centralizing mental health care was the availability of new drugs which at last made it possible for people to lead normally functional lives — to have jobs and even families.

    That all depends on people taking those medications, however, which many don’t, especially after they start feeling better.

    The civil liberty issue was also prominent, the idea that people can have someone locked away, essentially, was ripe for abuse.

    Again, intentions were good, it seemed like a much more humane approach to take. But as you note, the pitfalls in this looser system have been many. And the mentally ill are very vulnerable to drug dealers and others who prey on them (but drug use and addiction then also can lead, of course, to criminal behavior so it is possible then for them to be both a victim and a perpetrator of crime under the right “wrong” circumstances).

    The la board of supervisors I believe are discussing a change to some of these practices, but it would be a tough sell I’m afraid. No one wants to go back to mandatory “commitment.” That’s why the advent of advances like a monthly, slow-release shot rather than a dozen pills the person has to reliably take daily on their own are (I think, but I don’t know a lot about it) promising.

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  73. Cheryl, the short answer is that you don’t know everyone with a severe mental illness. The statistics look at large samples of the population: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1389236/. Personal experience is anecdotal evidence when it comes to determining if that experience indicates a larger trend. I know of a woman with Alzheimer’s who was gentle and sweet to the end. I know a woman who had post-partum depression, and eventually was diagnosed with major depression, who tried to kill herself, but all who know her say how gentle, sweet, and caring she is – she never tried to harm her children or anyone else besides herself, and her attempts did not succeed. I know a woman who had such severe depression that at one point, she begged her husband not to go to work for fear she would kill herself and her children, but she wouldn’t willingly hurt anyone and never did hurt anyone. I could produce anecdote after anecdote, but I don’t know all the mentally ill either.

    Also, even if the mentally ill were slightly more likely to commit crime, that still doesn’t negate what I said originally, which was that the mentally ill were more likely to be victims of crime than to be perpetrators of crime. The criminal mind picks out the weak and vulnerable to prey on, the ones who cannot quickly cry out for help and be heard – the mentally ill are vulnerable, easy prey to suggestions from con artists that they can be cured, too quick to trust those who offer to take care of them (and their government support check) for nothing, and con artists and swindlers are known to use violence to conceal their deeds. Given that 96 percent of the population does not have a severe mental illness, it is reasonable to conclude that there would be more criminals among those without a severe mental illness than those with such a diagnosis.

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  74. You also may remember Harbor View House, which still exists on the waterfront (on Beacon Street) — it’s reportedly the largest home for the mentally ill west of the Mississippi. (The building, which is historic, is now for sale but it’s housed the mentally ill since the 1960s). It really is a throw-back to the newer, smaller facilities that I can’t help but believe work so much better.

    The residents are free to come and go as they please and having so many (upwards of 160- 200 residents) to look after is impossible for the staff. So the residents wander the town, mingling with the homeless, who camp in that same area, and every day.

    A much better model are the small board-and-care facilities where there are maybe 4 residents and a good 24-hour staff. The residents are free to work if they’re able and otherwise go out, but the smallness of the facility provides them with much more supervision.

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  76. By the way, this discussion is getting my weekly homework done for me – I have to do research on whether community living is more dangerous than institutionalization, so I may have more research for you to consider in a couple of days.

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  77. Roscuro, it would be interesting to see what you find! Yes, for sure criminals prey on the vulnerable (seniors being a major clientele today).

    I’ve long wondered a different but related de-institutionalization: turn-of-the-19th-century orphanages were so rife for abuse, including sexual abuse, that foster care in families seemed a much kinder approach. Yet we know now that some foster parents have horrid motives and that some children tax the ability of their parents greatly. (It is very difficult to properly care for a child who is prone to molest other children, kill animals, set fires, etc. And foster parents often have very limited resources or freedoms.) Today institutionalism is mostly saved for those children who simply cannot be safe residents of a family home. But foster children “aging out” of care (getting to majority and thus being legally on their own) are notoriously unprepared for adult living, even if they have not been abused in care. Is foster care (in general) better than group-home care with a better system of checks and balances than was available then? It would be really hard to say, and no good way to measure.

    If we still had the old-fashioned group homes (that is, if children in such homes were not the most extreme of troubled children) I myself might well have moved into such ministry when I chose to leave the job safety of a full-time career; indeed I checked into volunteering in a group home in order to get the feel of whether it would be a good fit, but it was so erratic even returning phone calls to potential volunteers and I never even got an application, that I finally decided a place so disorganized it couldn’t send an application for volunteer work to someone with many years of experience working with children who had a referral by one of their full-time employees wasn’t necessarily well-organized enough to keep their volunteers safe from their dangerous charges, either, and I dropped the idea and moved forward with the concept of going freelance instead. I did later do foster care, but dropped that too when it became clear that the need for foster parents had been greatly exaggerated. (It made no sense to keep up with many hours of annual training, and not rent out my second bedroom for some income, if I would only average a couple of weeks with kids per year. Clearly they didn’t need me, and I might as well drop out and let what need there was be met by married couples.)

    But I’ve long wondered whether getting rid of orphanages because of abuse might have been throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

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  79. How many years has the football pool been going on?
    This is the first time ever that Chas has won.
    I’ll have to think about the jtie-breaker. I don’t even know who’s playing this week.

    It surely is early to seem so late this morning.

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  80. Good morning, Chas and any other early risers. Dakota slept for a full seven hours last night… and so did I! He needed to go out at what I thought was 5:30–which is when I usually awaken anyway–but, w/ the (to me) extremely annoying mandated time change–it was actually only 4:30. So, I concur w/ Chas’ comment that it is quite early to seem so very late in the day…..

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  81. Chas- I forget when it started on the old WMB with Anlir (was that is name?). We’ve been doing it here for 4 years. I cannot verify if you’ve ever won, but occasionally you were the closest in the tie breaker.

    Oh, and I posted a link to the schedule on the Pigskin thread.

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  82. Congratulations Chas. Your prize is probably in the mail.

    We had some heavy drizzle or light rain last night, big puddle near my foundation! Let’s hope the concrete will dry anyway (I think Real Estate Guy said it would). They’re all coming back this morning at 8:30 a.m. to collect some of the wood and maybe to finish, clean up some more, I’m not exactly sure. But I was up early to get the Jeep moved out of the driveway. So nice to have that extra hour this morning.

    So glad to hear Dakota is doing well.

    I have more rearranging to do in this house before the window crew arrives early on Thursday morning. But I think I’ll wind up doing most of it Wednesday night 🙂 . What an ordeal it’s all been, I can’t tell you how glad I’ll be when it’s all behind me (though it may be a few more months before I can get to the painting, but that’ll have to be ok — at least the major structural repairs will be done).

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  83. Well, sixteen year old was ready to set out this morning but I told him he could not ride his bike. It is quite foggy and snowing. Why does somebody have to tell anybody that it is not bike riding weather? Oh well, he will catch a ride from somebody. We will see him at church at ten and then he is required to be home at five due to his tardiness the other night.

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  84. I love this time change. It’s usually dark anyway by the tome I get home from work on weekdays so I appreciate more what feel like the longer mornings.

    Foundation workers are back to remove wood and do some other finishing touches.

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  85. Peter:
    I couldn’t open the link. The only two games I know that are going to be played are SC-Florida and Purdue-Northwestern.
    The Gamecocks-Gators game is going to b e too wild for a reasonable guess.
    You may rather choose Purdue-Northwestern or some other. I’m not jealous for the job.
    Just basking in the winner’s spotlight for a week.
    😆

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  87. Question for you musicians
    Have you noticed a difference in the way men and women play the piano?
    Sometimes I can go into church and notice, without looking, that a man is at the piano.
    He seems to be attacking the keyboard. Whereas a woman seems more gentle,
    If that explains what I mean.

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  88. Ah, my sweet little butterfly is up.

    The day she was scheduled to come up, knowing that they “virtually always” come out in the morning (though occasionally overnight), I made sure to be up by the time it was getting light enough outside to take photos. I’d set up my chair the night before, positioned to watch her. Since it was starting to mist, I took out an umbrella with me, and it did rain most of the morning.

    And I watched and I waited, watched and waited some more. A bit after noon I thought OK, she hasn’t come out yet, and since morning is past and there’s no telling when she’ll come out–or even if something went wrong–I need to go ahead and get something to eat, and not spend the whole afternoon out her too. So I went inside, found some leftovers and put them in the microwave, and stepped back outside. It was 1:30, and she was just coming out. I had my camera, but I wasn’t sitting in front of the chrysalis with it aimed at the chrysalis, and I only had a few seconds and she’d be all the way out. By the time I got the camera aimed and focused, she was out. But really, she might have known I was there and might have been waiting for me to leave, so I felt just a little disappointed I missed the moment of the chrysalis breaking to reveal a butterfly, but I only missed a minute.

    She came out and perched on the side of the chrysalis (as seen above–and you can see the gold on the chrysalis in this photo, though not as vividly as when it was green). She has several tasks now before she can fly. For one thing, her proboscis (tongue) comes in two pieces that need to be zipped together–at what point in the process she did this, I do not know, but I purposely sent AJ a photo that shows her proboscis for that reason. But her main task is to push all the extra fluid from her abdomen into her wings to inflate them. I was surprised how quickly that happened. I took several photos in this early stage, but within just a couple of minutes they looked more or less like adult wings, just slightly wrinkly. Eventually she excreted the extra fluid, and after that she just had to hang upside down a few more hours to allow her wings to dry.

    As she dried, she moved gradually off the chrysalis, just a leg or two at a time, and eventually she was standing beside it–though she kept one leg on it for at least another half hour. Over the course of the afternoon, she moved gradually up the stem, finally spending the night on the flower at the end of the stem, perhaps because she got a late start coming out of the chrysalis in the afternoon.

    When I stepped outside and saw her coming out, my husband was in the library, just the other side of a window, and I called to him, “Honey, she’s out” and then “If you want to see her, you might want to come out” and he did. The next morning he went outside for something and when he came in, he told me she was outside stretching her wings. But when I went out, she was sitting demurely. A few minutes later, I went back and she was gone–she had flown.

    The male that came out a couple of weeks before she did was far more active (I think he might have been that caterpillar munching the flower, since that was a very active, lively caterpillar). I never saw his chrysalis, even after he came out of it, so perhaps it had fallen onto the ground or it was very low on the plant. First I saw of him he was hanging to dry, and then he squirted out the excess fluid, and then he kept going higher and higher on the plant, stretching his wings whenever I wasn’t looking but sitting still when I was. A couple of hours after I first saw him, he flapped clumsily from one plant to another, and then he ran up it, opening and closing his wings as he did. It was really quite a lot like a baby bird learning to use his wings. When he sat at the top, I knew he was ready to fly any time, and thus I wouldn’t hurt him if he got spooked a little. I made up some sugar water and put it on a spoon, which I held next to him on the chance he wanted it, but instead he flew and went across our backyard and away. I don’t know how long he would have waited to fly if I didn’t offer it, so I didn’t do that when the female was out there. But his first flight was strong and sure, so he was ready to go.

    Both of them came out late enough in the year that they would be in the generation that flies to Mexico, overwinters there, and doesn’t breed till spring. It’s kinda cool to think of my own little monarchs, bred in my backyard, making such a trip. I hope they made it safely.

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  91. I am trying to buy a ladder. The walmart web site keeps freezing on me every time I try. Now I think I should be a couple of step stools too. Remembering the one time I fell at school moving from one chair to another. And I always need something in my house that is up high. So I am willing to buy more, but can’t get the site to work. aaarrrrggghhh……

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  93. So, I ended up buying a 20 ft. extension ladder, a step stool, and a little stool. I fell once in my classroom climbing on a chair to work on a bulletin board, so decided it would be a good idea to have something easier to climb on.

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  103. Janice and Art had a wonderful meet up with Kim this evening. We are all real people!!! And we know how to talk taxes and real estate along with other important subjects.

    The weather is warm and humid so I think it is very much like what Kim experiences on the coast. It is suppose to get cooler later in this week.

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  107. Jo, the trick to remembering is to take out the other person’s name. Like this:

    ” . . . like you do to meet [Chas and] I . . . like you do to meet I . . .” and you’ll see that “meet I” sounds wrong, because it is.

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