50 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 11-14-17”

  1. Good morning everyone
    Pretty flower Aj.
    I used to grow roses when we lived in Annandale.
    I used to say roses were a lot loke women.
    Beautiful, they smell nice. They take lots of care.
    If you neglect them, they get scraggy real quick.

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  2. Morning, all.

    Just posted an update on prayer thread re: latest health scare…I’ll post here, too, that I finally got my MRI results and do NOT have a pituitary tumor. Thanks to everyone who has been praying for me.

    Chas: Love your above sentiments. You frequently make me smile w/ your wisdom!

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  3. Now is a good time to get your good news, Ann! It makes for a great start to the new day.

    I posted late last night that my church is not going forward on our latest merge opportunity. I am very thankful to God. The more I heard about it, I knew it would not be a good move.

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  5. 6 Arrows,
    I know you didn’t ask for advice, but here’s some anyhow. On yesterday’s Prayer thread you said your husband sold his motorcycle to someone who will be paying him in installments. The way it was worded implied that he had let the purchaser have the bike already. PLEASE DO NOT DO THAT. That is very dangerous because if he should be in an accident, both he and the other party could sue your husband because he is the legal owner of the bike. It is not worth the chance. Have the buyer get a loan for it and let him make his payments to a bank.

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  6. Good Morning…it is still very dark outside so it seems like evening….looking forward to a beautiful sunrise! Praise God for the good report Ann!! Thankful indeed ❤️
    That is a beautiful rose up there…I love roses…as did my great grandfather, my grandmother, my uncle, and so many other family members. Seems as though the fragrance of a rose is steeped deep within my memories of childhood….every summer family gathering, no matter which family was hosting, there was a rose garden. 🌹 Unfortunately, our rascally deer love roses too much to grow them out here in the forest…even the variety said to be deer proof…nope…they eat them as well…

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  9. Beautiful roses! They made me think of my mom’s 75th birthday. When my sister’s husband turned 30, she sent 30 roses to his mother, which was a great step in their relationship. So when Mom was fixin’ to turn 75, my sis suggested that we kids send her 75 roses. A couple of my brothers were puzzled. One even said why not something practical, like CDs? I found a place online that shipped them inexpensively, and they were supposed to be really good quality roses fresh from the grower . . . but even that wasn’t exactly cheap. There are seven of us, so no one person paid extravagantly, but it was an extravagance nonetheless, a lot of money for a mere few days of color and scent.

    I pulled up the website and got my sister on the phone (that was more than 15 years ago, and she didn’t have internet, and I myself only had it at work). Together we chose the colors: a dozen each of lavender, pink, red, white, a mixed rose like the one above, and probably peach. We avoided yellow since my sister remembered Mom didn’t like yellow roses. The white and red were two dozen in a single shipment, so they cost slightly less than buying individual dozens, but the rest were all individual dozens.

    But we had a couple minor glitches (once we got past getting the approval and the money of all of our brothers): first, Mom’s birthday was on a Monday, and it turned out the company didn’t ship on Sundays and thus didn’t deliver on Mondays. Second, individual roses cost enough extra each that paying for the three extra to make the total 75 would have been more than paying for an additional dozen. (We’re Scottish and those things matter.)

    So I called our stepfather and was happy that he, and not Mom, answered the phone. I talked quickly before she could get on the extension and said, “Pop, Monday is Mom’s birthday, and we’re sending her flowers, but they won’t get there till Tuesday. We need you to do something for us.” “Sure thing.” “We need you to go to the store Monday and buy her three roses.” “Three roses, OK.” “Thanks, Pop.”

    Most of the cards with the flowers, we just signed “Happy birthday, Mom, from all of us” or something like that. But on one card, since she wouldn’t be receiving the flowers till the day after her birthday, I had the company write, “Happy birthday, Mom! You don’t look a day over 75. We love you!” and then signed all seven of our names.

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  10. Mom’s birthday came, and then the day after. And my mom called, giddy in a way I had never ever heard my mother. “Your roses came, and they are so beautiful! We didn’t have enough vases, and so we went to the dollar store and got trash cans.” (Trash cans?! I included one vase with the order, but figured most households have lots of vases and she probably did too.) “The day they were delivered, the delivery man piled the boxes next to the door, but he didn’t ring the bell or anything. My husband thought he heard a thump, so we looked out, and there were all these boxes.”

    She told me, “I opened the first box, and it had those beautiful lavender roses. Then the next box had pink ones. I figured out that the biggest box must hold two dozen, but my husband was saying, ‘Why did they send all these roses? They must have made a mistake–they ordered a dozen, and the company sent too many.’ And then he said, ‘If they were sending flowers, why did they send me to the store to get three red roses?’ And I told him, ‘Honey, it’s six dozen, and that’s 72, and the three you bought make 75.’ But he said, ‘Why would anyone send 75 roses?'” She said how beautiful it all was, and how lovely the house smelled, and how perfect all the rose were.

    I hadn’t specifically told my stepfather to get red roses (though roses sold individually usually are red, and I figured he would like getting her red roses . . . and hopefully he didn’t feel like he was “upstaged” by us, but like he contributed and completed our 75!). I did tell him we were sending flowers, though I didn’t take the time to explain exactly what we were doing, since I knew Mom would pick up the extension at any moment and I needed to communicate the significant part of the message before Mom could overhear. (If Mom had answered the phone I would have asked to talk to him, but she would have been suspicious, and it was better that he was the one who answered.)

    And my brother who thought we needed to send her something practical and not “waste” money on flowers? That same brother called me later in the day and said, “Mom called and she couldn’t stop talking about how beautiful those roses were. She even said, ‘And they knew not to order any yellow ones!’ I’ve never heard Mom like this. We really made her day. Roses were an excellent idea!”

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  11. Cheryl, if I may ask you in the nicest way possible please stop equating your thriftiness with being Scottish. I am also of Scottish descent and I find it somewhat offending. I like a good deal as much as the next person.

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  12. My grandmother’s casket spray was of roses. There were a dozes red for each of her children. Twenty-six pink for each of her grandchildren and however many white for each of her great grandchildren.

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  13. Yesterday, Chas asked about the concept of asking one’s parents to get married. Having grown up within the ultra-conservative ‘Christian’ movement, I know it can be a dangerous idea. There was one very sad case involving two young people who were both poster images for ATI. They gave talks about their parent-approved courtship and wrote a book together. They were the substitute celebrities for many of the ATI youth, who like any other young people liked a good romance. Then, suddenly, the whole thing was called off. Rumour said that the girl’s father had decided he couldn’t part with his daughter. My siblings and I discussed it, horrified that after being allowed to fall in love, the couple were forbidden to marry. We decided that if the parents permission had been given, it couldn’t then be withdrawn.

    My eldest sibling did go the courtship route. Her future husband, who came from a nominal Catholic background and had only come to Christ in university, showed considerable interest in her the first time they met, and, as he was only visiting mutual friends, surprised everyone by leaving her a letter. Eldest asked my father to contact him – Eldest-in-law later said he was a bit stunned at receiving a communication basically asking him right away to declare his intentions to a girl he barely knew, though he liked her, but everything turned out well in the end. They have been married over 16 years now, and he is a beloved member of the family.

    By the time suitors came along for my other two siblings, we had left ATI behind (we were still members of the program when Eldest was married). Nevertheless, both my siblings still wanted their father’s input. My father doesn’t say much about marriage and relationships, but when he does, it is to the point and worth listening to. Several young men were interested in Youngest sibling, as she has that kind of effervescent personality that people find attractive. One such young man was the son of another couple who attended our church, and had also been in ATI. He was talented and charming, universally popular, and Youngest felt a lot of pressure from his family and others in the church to be interested in him. My father, however, had no use for him, much to Youngest’s relief. The young man went on to marry another girl, have four children in quick succession, and then deserted his wife for another woman. Youngest sibling’s future husband did ask for my father’s permission to first court and then marry Youngest, but he didn’t need to be told, as although he was raised in a more liberal family than we were, he had already decided that ultra-conservative was the way to go. We have concerns now (both my parents have been concerned about what they see developing), but at the time, there was really nothing to find fault with him over. We keep watching and praying for that one.

    Second sibling didn’t wait for her future husband to go to her father. She told him herself, before he seemed interested in her, that she liked him. That was over a year before he decided that he was interested in her. He did formally ask my father’s permission, but we already knew him well and liked him for his own sake before that happened. If I were to marry, I would want to know my father’s opinion of the man I’m going to marry, because I consider that opinion worth knowing/ But I’m now older than any of my siblings were when they married and have lived in various places and seen many things, so I trust more to my own judgement than when I was in my early twenties. Any man who is interested in me (a phenomenon which has not occurred yet to my knowledge) will have to pass my own scrutiny first 🙂

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  14. The rose is lovely. I like roses of just about any colour, but variegated ones seem doubly beautiful.

    I have frequently read that stereotype of Scots frugality. It is like the Irish temper, present more in saying than in actual fact. As someone who is Scots-Irish on the paternal side, I have neither trait – my frugality is not of the stereotypical kind, being more of necessity than belief in its merits, and my temper takes a lot of goading before it flares up.

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  16. Eighteen year old did the same thing. Sold his car to a guy, did not get any money, kept the title, and gave the car to the guy. The guy keeps saying he is going to start paying next week, but next week never seems to get here. Husband warned him about the accident issue.

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  17. Excuse me if this is a dumb question, but with the title still in our possession, and the motorcycle not, we shouldn’t really be canceling insurance on it then, right? And here I thought we’d be saving money because we could take the bike off our insurance. But that would be foolhardy to cancel the insurance under the present circumstances, would it not?

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  19. Kim, liking a good deal as much as the next person IS what I mean by Scottish frugality. It isn’t at all an insult. It may mean being “cheap,” but it may also mean getting a great deal. At any rate, I have a very large family, and a big part of our identity is that we are able to stretch a dollar. It isn’t only a stereotype, but a reality. Before I went to college, I was in a job making $4 an hour (which at that point was about 20% more than minimum wage). I had my own car, shared a one-bedroom apartment with my sister . . . and in the two years I worked that job I saved enough money for my first semester of college. (As I recall, that meant I saved about 25% of my take-home income.) My sister also worked low-paying jobs, but she had two of them and she wasn’t inclined to save her money, so she ended up without a car and instead took the bus to work.

    Before my sister’s husband died, one day I did the math and realized to my astonishment that she and her husband had just about the same annual income (in actual dollars, not adjusted for inflation) as she and I had in those long-ago apartment days–and they were raising five children! I edited a book that was about “how to make your grocery dollars stretch,” and the author had all kinds of tips like buying your meat past the sell-by date but make sure it is not actually rotten, talking the store into allowing you to use coupons that have actually expired, and so forth . . . and when I told my sister about the book, she outright scoffed, because her food budget was half the amount per person that this author was espousing! (Her boys were not yet teenagers.)

    One of my brothers was born in Dallas, moved to Phoenix as a child, and went to college in the L.A. area. (Hint: what these areas have in common is warm weather and little snow, though my family did also spend some time in Illinois and Kentucky when he was a few years old.) He and his wife moved to Tennessee (think much cooler weather) when their firstborn was a month old, and they built their own house. He told me years later that they started out so poor that the first winter they heated only the baby’s room!

    Roscuro, it’s more than a myth. Like most stereotypes, it is a generalization but it has some basis in reality. Years ago I read numbers about what percentage of people of Scottish ancestry are millionaires (considerably higher than the national average) and how much lower the income level was of those Scottish millionaires than of millionaires in general. I’ve seen it with several people in my own family, how they can take a moderate income and over a lifetime come up with an amazing net worth. One uncle shocked his whole family by dying with a very nice stock portfolio, and most of my brothers have far more in “net worth” than their incomes would seem to allow.

    Anyway, no insult is meant, and no offense intended. Nor do I mean to suggest that “all” Scottish families are like mine–but that is definitely a Scottish trait and definitely a part of my own family’s heritage, red-headed mother and all.

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  20. Ann, that’s good news about the MRI.

    2nd day of vacation, 2nd day sleeping in. I could get used to this. 🙂

    The neighborhood is all aflutter this morning over an escaped cooper hawk who still has a leash dangling, everyone’s on “NextDoor” reporting sightings, including my neighbor who said she thinks she saw him on the electrical wires behind our houses.

    I’ve been turning on the heat for the first time this year in the past 2 mornings also, just for a little while. Have to watch that gas bill which can go sky high this time of year.

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  22. Re the roses for Mom: If I recall correctly, they were $30 a dozen (probably including shipping) and $12 for an individual rose. So paying for an additional three roses would have meant paying $36. Had my husband been in the picture at that time, he probably would have said something like “Yeah, that is a bit of a conundrum. But if the point is getting her 72 roses, then basically you either pay that $36 or get another dozen and figure she got nine extra roses.”

    But Mom wouldn’t agree with that reasoning, nor would any of my siblings. If we’d only had to buy one rose at the high price, oh well, but paying more for three than for a dozen just doesn’t work. But I knew they cost less than that when sold individually in the store, so getting my stepfather in on it and letting him buy three of them was a perfect solution on all fronts.

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  24. Thanks, Linda and DJ, for your comments on the weekend’s R&R thread about Medicare and Health Savings Accounts. I did some reading last night and found a few more details.

    You cannot contribute to an HSA when you’re on Medicare, but you can use it. Even if Mrs. B does go on Medicare, our HSA is through my employment, so I can continue contributing to it and she can continue using it.

    I’m also pretty sure Mrs. B. does not have to sign up for either A or B at this time, and there is no penalty. If you are drawing Social Security, which she will not be right away, you must enroll. If you don’t have other medical coverage you must enroll. If you are covered by your own or your spouse’s employers group plan in a group of less than 20, you must enroll. (In that case Medicare is primary and the group coverage is secondary.)

    However if you are covered by your own or your spouse’s qualifying employer group plan and the group is larger than 20, then the group coverage is primary, and Medicare is secondary and not required, and there is no penalty for enrolling later. Our group is gigantic and I have paperwork confirming that that plan is “qualifying”.

    We’ll run this by an expert long before Mrs. B’s birthday.

    Anyway, I wish all the people selling Medicare plans would stop calling us. 🙂

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  25. I did contribute to mine, but the broker I’m using doesn’t seem to think it’s a major cause of concern; I also have a call in to HR to ask them about it.

    A friend at church didn’t retire until 66 and she told me to be sure to sign up for medicare part a, whether you’re using it or not, as she had to pay some kind of a fine or penalty for not having done so (she kept using her work plan). So my impression was you do have to sign up at 65 for at least Part A to be in the system (although my broker tells me I “should have” also signed up for Part B at the same time, so now I’m having to do that belatedly). I think signing up just gets it in place, you can still opt to use your work plans

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  26. Why it’s all so complicated and difficult, I’m not sure.

    But yes, the mail — ugh. And I guess that will happen every year as you can change plans every year — so you’re a potential “new customer” for all these providers every time that rolls around. Total chaos. My problem also is I simply don’t have the time to figure this all out. I’m working, I’m single and I have a house to fix, it’s just too much.

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  28. Thank you for the prayers. Unfortunately, the conversation didn’t go well. (Neither did the life insurance conversation last week.)

    I’m done with all finance-related discussions with him. You can pray I don’t walk away from home now, or if I do, that it’s only for a temporary vacation in a sunny place using my accumulated piano earnings. I’m about at the end of my rope and feel utterly useless here. 😦

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  29. In December of 1951 I spent Christmas in Prestwick, Scotland. Not because I wanted to.
    Our C-97,loaded with passengers, caught fire on takeoff. We aborted the mission.
    So. We were stranded in Scotland for almost a week.
    While there, I went out with a couple Scottish girds.
    That was the only experience I had where the female was concerned about the amount of money I spent.
    No kidding. They were frugal ,not only for themselves, but for me too.
    It must have been part of their culture.
    Scottish girls were very nice. For years I wanted to go back there.

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  30. I was always taught that if someone else is paying, you don’t order the moon at a restaurant (or the filet mignon along with dessert and an expensive side drink, in other words).

    Carol apparently wasn’t taught that, she always orders BIG when I’m paying, even at a fast food drive-through — we can barely get out of there for less that $12 (and that’s for her alone)! 😦 I probably need to give her a limit next time.

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  32. KJ went to class and then saw the doctor, I guess a different one from last week. He was surprised she hadn’t had a chest x-ray and ordered one so we’ll see what that shows. In the meantime she has a different inhaler and another 5 days of prednisone.

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  33. Cheryl, I’m catching up with yesterday’s thread and can’t figure out what’s behind your comment about last night’s Jeopardy: “It would seem that racist, sexist America is rooting for the white male instead of the two contestants “of color,” one of them a girl. Figures!” I think you were kidding, but I don’t get where it comes from. Was there some publicity that everyone was rooting for Austin?

    I had mentioned early in Austin’s original run that he irritated me; I guess I’m used to a more stodgy Jeopardy and he’s pretty quirky. But he grew on me with time. He always applauded enthusiastically for the other players, and I loved it when he high-fived the challenger who beat him.

    I really liked Lilly too when she was in the college tournament. How can anyone so young be so smart?! I also hoped she and Austin would meet in the final round but it didn’t work out that way. I would have been happy to see either of them win, the white man or the Asian woman, and sad not to see the other make it to the finals.

    Tonight I’m going to be rooting for ABB, Anyone But Buzzy. I never got over being annoyed by him, I’m afraid.

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  34. Dj, Or next time, you could just let her order and you sit and watch her eat. Explain that you did not have the money for both of you to eat. But it is highly likely she would not take that hint either. Set a reasonable low end limit. If she does not stick to it, tell her she is paying. If she does not have the funds, let the personnel deal with it. Or set a reasonable limit and tell her you will be ordering for her. She can tell you what she would like and if it fits your number, order it, if not, order something less expensive. We have never ordered anything but water on our dinners out. We are still alive.

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  35. We’ve been having the “money” conversation for a while now, but I am beginning to think she will never change. She spends whatever she gets within hours and then begs and borrows from whomever will give her money (I don’t) for the rest of the month. She pays some of it back. Which makes her short again going into the next month.

    Once I remember taking her to Denny’s and just ordering a 1/2 plate of nachos for me as she was ordering a humongous meal, a very big burger, fries, dessert and a shake and/or diet coke I believe.

    Sometimes, if she’s out with me and misses her regular meal time, I’ll just buy her fast food (just for her) before dropping her off.

    She really wanted to go to a Burger King the other night because of their onion rings and I kept thinking (beggars can’t be choosers), I did finally say we’ll go through whatever drive though we see first on the way home. It was a Jack in the Box. Their onion rings would do.

    It’s hard, too, because I wind up being angry when I talk to her about the money issue. It’s just that I don’t understand how someone can “presume” others will pay for them, over and over again. She may not (and probably won’t) ever change in this area, I realize now.

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  36. Kevin, didn’t you see Ree asking me the same question last night (and my answer)? I was joking about rooting for the white male. It would seem that Austin is insanely popular, but it isn’t because he’s a white male but because he’s so quirky, doesn’t seem to be arrogant, and because why on earth is a bartender mowing down people who design robots or whatever?

    Austin has been used in a commercial or two here, he has been on a bunch of TV shows, the Jeopardy website has a bunch of short videos starring him, he whizzed to #5 in all-time earnings including two individual days in the top five moneymaking days, and all-around he seems to have caught people’s attention as “not your average nerd.”And because his style of play is so bold, you just never know if he’ll pull it off another day. Yesterday he was saved because he didn’t get the daily doubles, and those who did get them knocked themselves out of contention. And so far he has gotten 14/15 of his Final Jeopardy questions–a really impressive number (though the one he missed was an amazingly easy one, about “Our Town”). As my husband says, he wears his emotions on his sleeves and he’s just utterly unpredictable. I would have liked him and Lilly to face off in the finals, and either one win, but now I’m pretty much just down to rooting for Austin.

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  39. He said the 2 replica wood windows should last 50+ years but my 10 originals, now restored, will last another 100. Douglas fir, they used good, hard wood back in the day — and they made things that were meant to last.

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  40. Six, sorry to hear of your continued frustration. Some things are not worth arguing about and money is one of them. You do what you do. Raise your children, teach music, take care of the home. Keep your eyes on God and watch what He does. You are loved.

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  41. Dj that reminds me of the time Paul took his parents out to breakfast with our son. Dad S was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s and was not. “himself”…. he still thought he was picking up the tab as he was known to do in days gone by…(Paul was paying for breakfast for everyone) Our son ordered a large orange juice…it was overheard Dad S whispering to Mom S…”the big hog”! We still laugh about it to this day 🍊

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  42. I can’t ever remember Mumsee goading me. I can be intense without actually feeling the emotion of anger, but that trait comes from my mother’s side, which is entirely English. Sometimes, my mother would get so intense in telling us something that we would ask why she was angry and she would say, “I’m not angry.” Now, I realize, from seeing how people sometimes react to me talking about something that I really care about, that she really wasn’t angry, it is just that she was putting all of her heart and soul into what she was saying.

    Cheryl, there is some scientific basis for thinking that red hair could cause people to be more irritable (the gene mutation that causes red hair also has other effects) but that doesn’t mean all red haired people are fated to have hair trigger tempers. My father is the one with the Scots ancestry, but he is the parent who is less careful with finances (he isn’t a spendthrift, but rather a bit too impulsive), so that any economical thrift I learned wasn’t a cultural inheritance from the Scots ancestral line, despite the fact that all four surnames of my paternal great grandparents are originally Scottish in origin (two of them via Northern Ireland, and a third via the north of England).

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  43. Well, I had myself a good cry this afternoon, then pounded the @#$%&^ out of the piano, and followed up with a nice, gentle playing of it. And I felt better. Then I read Mumsee’s 6:08 and that soothed me even more. Thank you, Mumsee, and all praying.

    Linda and all of you who have given me financial advice, especially over the last week, I hope my “I’m done with all finance-related discussions with him” comment doesn’t come like a slap in the face. If you have any regrets about having given me advice when things at home went as they did today, please don’t feel bad. (You didn’t make my day worse, if you’re thinking anything like that.)

    I am grateful for the collective wisdom and love I find expressed here. How my husband responds to our situation is up to him, and the necessary adjustments I have to make to work through the circumstances as they are sometimes means having to set aside good advice for something else (like silence).

    It maybe isn’t necessary to say all that, but I just want to make sure no one feels bad about any input offered.

    Thank you, friends, for caring and praying.

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  47. so I had two grandkids over yesterday. The 12 year old was trying to do Netflix on my tv and now I can’t get it back to tv. Frustrating.
    He also signed me out of Netflix on my ipad, which I have never done. my son signed me in years ago and I do not know any password.
    Kids!!!

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  48. That too, Cheryl. 🙂

    Jo, kids are supposed to fix the electronic stuff, not break it.

    I do love Christmas and this time of year, catalogs and sappy girl-movies included.

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  50. Cheryl, I am, also, a frugal person. I will pay for quality, if it is an item to be used for many years. I still try to get the best deal possible. I think I get it from my McCasland grandmother. 🙂

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