57 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 12-8-17”

  7. I give up!
    I’ve been racking my little brain to think jof the name of those cones on the tree.
    We had lots of them in Charleston. We used to throw them at each other.
    But I can’t think of the name.

    It didn’t snow on them in Charleston.

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  9. Morning! It is dark out there and I need to leave in an hour…hope that sun pops up soon! It is a warm 34 degrees so I am in hopes that ice on the road will be melting quickly!
    Chas is that a sweetgum tree? When I was little we had a sycamore tree out front and I think that tree had round sphere pods but more dense than those up there on that photo.
    Have a good day ya’ll…I’m off to the Vintage market event with an former coworker…Christmas shopping hopefully will be accomplished at the end of this day! 🎄

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  10. Sweetgum balls! Not fun to step on. I like them much better in a picture. Nice shot, AJ. Wondering if you stepped on any getting the photo.

    It’s cold everywhere. Brrr…

    It’s a good day to do Christmas cards while Art is at a seminar.

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  12. Advent posting for the day – this is one that I’ve been searching for every Christmas and finally found a performance of: https://travellerunknownblog.wordpress.com/2017/12/08/the-moon-shines-bright-advent-december-8th/

    Second sibling called yesterday evening and told me about the accident. It was a truck which hit her, and the car rolled into the ditch, landing on its roof. She said it happened so quickly her first thought when the car stopped was wondering if she was dying or living. She was desperate to get out, because her husband’s sisters several years ago had a car crash in which their car caught fire just after they got out. So she screamed for help and unstrapped her seat belt and crawled into the back to get Tiny Niece, who, much to her relief, was crying. She handed Tiny Niece to the people, who by that time were gathering to help, through the shattered window, and then asked them to help her get out, as between the wrench the impact had made on her body and the fact she is in her third trimester, she wasn’t very well able to crawl out the window on her own. Those who saw the car after said it was amazing no one was hurt. Second is fine, and the baby, when the midwives gave a non-stress test, was fine, but she is going to the chiropractor because her whole left side is in pain (the truck hit them on the left, the side both were sitting on). Tiny Niece sounded her usual lively self as I heard her chattering in the background. Second said Tiny got three stuffed animals from the emergency services, as the police, fire, and ambulance all carry soft toys to help comfort children who been through trauma.

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  13. They have to get a new car seat for Tiny Niece, as car seats, like bike helmets, must be replaced after a crash. Second joked that since they successfully crash tested it, they would get the same model.

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  16. Last night, husband took son to a meeting to learn about an opportunity. The Northern Idaho metal working something or other is trying to work out an intern/appprenticeship deal with high school children. They would get high school and college credits for their effort. Another on line course. Son thinks it is the answer to his problems. The head teacher wonders as son has such a hard time finishing any on line course. Anyway, last night, son learned that there are limited slots and lots of applicants and apparently the companies will actually be looking at GPA. So maybe those three F’s are not so inconsequential as he has been saying.

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  21. Roscuro – My prayer is that they will be able to get a great deal on a really good vehicle – one they could never have afforded ordinarily. Maybe someone will give them one! (I’ve heard stories of that happening.)

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  22. Mumsee, thank you for asking. I am quite sore and moving gingerly, but I am moving and made it to work. My office chair is quite comfortable for me right now and our intern has been waiting on me – he’s a blessing 🙂

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  23. On Wednesday, Nightingale & I finally got around to going to probate court. It was really just a preliminary visit, as the nice clerk gave me more information on what else I needed.

    After that, a hungry Nightingale took me to one of her favorite places in that town, Russo’s, which has pizza-by-the-slice, but mostly it specializes in delicious cannoli & other mostly Italian desserts. We each had some pizza & a soda, & brought home our desserts for later.

    After our delicious lunch, we did a little Christmas shopping for The Boy, then went to Marshall’s to look for a classic-type Christmas sweater for Chickadee. Unfortunately, the “ugly Christmas sweater” look is popular, so we didn’t find anything suitable. (I have seen what we have in mind online, so we’ll go that route.)

    While quickly looking through a rack of tops, we stumbled on a couple tops that looked like they might be nice for me. I tried them on, & they both looked nice. Score! For a grand total of $31.01 for both of them. Score again! (Those of you who are my Facebook friends may have seen the photos Nightingale took of me modeling them.)

    At the checkout, Nightingale told me to put my money away. She wanted to buy them for me. ❤ What a sweetheart!

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  24. The juxtaposition to my above comment is this: The day before that, I had been thinking about how my mom always paid for lunch when we went out, & she would often pay for things I was buying when we went shopping, or would see that I passed on something that I liked but found too expensive, & would buy it for me. I never asked her for anything, & never took advantage of her largess. I think she enjoyed buying things for me because she knew I was very grateful & appreciative, & she could afford it.

    Thinking of that, I cried, wanting to be able to do those things for my own daughter(s), but not being able to afford to. Instead, now it is my older daughter buying me lunch or a treat, & occasionally something else. I do feel supremely blessed, but I wish I could bless her that way, too.

    But I guess my way of blessing her is being here for her son & her puppy. (And often cleaning up after her in the kitchen.) She said that counts for a lot. 🙂

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  25. Kizzie may be onto something with the car. A woman in my Bible study had a bright red BMW sedan before the fires. A woman at the church she sometimes attends has the same car, but lost it and her house in the fires.

    My friend felt God convicted to give her the keys to her friend.

    (Everyone in my Bible study stared at her–these cars were an ’09 and an ’11).

    The recipient is beyond overjoyed and my friend got an even better car (’13). “I think that’s the best thing I’ve done all year! I feel terrific about it and my husband agrees–though, he’s not keen on a black car and that’s what I just bought.”

    And, yes, Kizzie, my mom used to treat me, too. While I can do the treating, my kids treat me now. A blessing all around. I wouldn’t worry about it. You and Lee stood by Nightingale while she made a lot of poor immature choices. You’ve loved her through those, you love her son. It’s all good.

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  26. Yes, cute tops! 🙂

    Roscuro, that accident sounded horrific, so grateful everyone is OK. It must have been very scary for your sister. 😦 Praying for a good replacement car to appear. My friend is getting rid of her Honda, donating it to a charity, but it needs a transmission unfortunately, which is a pretty significant repair (and is quite the distance anyway from where you are).

    Kare, I can only imagine how sore you are today after that fall you took. Take it easy. 😦 (after you’ve fallen, don’t you just love how dogs will then run over to you and stare, like they’re wondering “Why are down there?”)

    It’s 65 degrees here at about 9:30 a.m. (going up to mid 70s and then to about 80 for the weekend highs — weirdest Christmas weather ever). We should be getting back down to “normal” by late next week (high 60s anyway). Our fires continue, from what I read last night it sounds like they’ll be going for a while. And a new one broke out near San Diego 😦

    ________________________________________________

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/southern-california-fires-ventura-county-los-angeles-san-diego-latest-news-map-12-08-2017-live-updating/

    California’s newest wildfire tore through retirement communities built on golf courses and killed elite thoroughbred horses in its first destructive day. The new blaze, in San Diego County, means a huge swath of Southern California is now in flames. December’s shockingly dry, hot and windy conditions brought on unprecedented fire danger.

    The San Diego-area fire quickly grew to more than 6 square miles and burned dozens of homes at Rancho Monserate Country Club. Flames engulfed a horse training center, prompting trainers to unlock stables and encourage hundreds of race horses to run for their lives. It’s not clear how many died.

    The destructive blaze broke out as firefighters tried to corral the largest fire in the state, which was burning around Ventura – 130 miles to the north. It destroyed at least 439 buildings as it grew to 180 square miles since Monday. Fire crews also fought large fires around Los Angeles. The Ventura and L.A.-area fires put tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders.

    According to CalFire, as of very late Thursday night, six large fires had burned 220 square miles, 190,000 residents were evacuated, 23,000 homes were threatened, 500 were confirmed destroyed and there were 5,700 firefighters on the lines. …
    ___________________________________________

    Very sad, all of it. And the hazardous fire conditions, with dry-dry winds, are expected to continue through the weekend. I can’t remember weather like this at Christmas time before. And all following what was a 90-degree Thanksgiving?

    I have a day off today, so am taking care of several errands, maybe finishing my Christmas shopping. I have things to do in the house, of course, like reorganizing all the bottles and things under the kitchen sink that were dragged out while that leak was fixed, and hoping I can find my sheer curtains again — they were taken down last year when handymen, carpenters, etc., began traipsing over to see what could be done about fixing all my windows.

    Hmmm. *Someone* called “satanarchism” is now following me on Twitter …

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  27. The latest updates from the CBS link above (which also contains a map):

    Creek Fire: 15,323 acres, 40 percent contained
    Rye Fire: 6,049 acres, 35 percent contained
    Thomas Fire: 132,000 acres, 10 percent contained
    Skirball Fire: 475 acres, 30 percent contained
    Lilac Fire: 4,100 acres, zero percent contained
    Liberty Fire: 300 acres, 10 percent contained

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  28. Chas, technology question for you: how do I connect my phone to husband’s so we can follow each other in case we lose our phones? Thanks.

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  29. Kizzie, my dad made more money than I will ever make–He wasn’t a “Boomer” being born in 1938 and as a Gen X I was among the first generation not expected to have a better lifestyle and income than my parents. I enjoyed the times I was able to treat him to lunch or dinner more than I enjoyed all the times he bought me lunch or dinner. It made me feel like a REAL adult. Let Nightingale treat you. She wouldn’t offer if she didn’t want to do it. Be thankful that you have raised her to be that considerate of you, instead of expecting you to do everything for her.

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  31. Kim, your dad was/is eight years younger than I am.
    Mumsee: @1:08 I don’t understand the question; “in case we lose our pones”. The “Find Friends” doesn’t locate a person. It locates another phone. I was teasing a guy once, saying, “Want to borrow my phone for a while so I can run off and……..”
    Your husband has to have a compatible phone.
    As for programming, I have learned that you can get help from almost anyone under 40. And Apple stores have people willing to help. I have consulted them.

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  32. Chas, he would have been 79 last Saturday 12/2. Today I stopped to see his older brother, my Uncle Charles. He is 80, will be 81 in May. His arthritis is debilitating now, and the cold weather has him in a recliner. I baby him and hover when I am around him these days. I helped him sit up and got a pillow behind his back, then got his coffee. It was fun to talk to him and I got one of my life’s little mysteries solved this afternoon about how my dad just appeared at a wreck I had in March of 1990. He was eating at the Chinese restaurant across the street and saw the wreck happen. “Aw h3!!, Kim just had a wreck. Let me go see how she’s handling it”.
    This is where you imagine John Wayne riding in to the rescue. 🙂

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  35. it is really snowing in Greensboro. But it’s 34 degrees and not sticking except of grass, cars, etc.
    Chas has been busy today. I went to lunch with my SS class, then picked Elvera up at the Adult Center. SS teacher asked me to teach again Sunday, so I have been looking over the lesson.
    I just got around to reading the funnies and catching up on the blog.
    I will now get back to the lesson for a while and then fix dinner.
    No! I’m not cooking. I tried cooking some chicken and potatoes last night. Disaster.
    I am not a cook.
    Fortunately, there are ready made dinners available, but they are mostly some form of pasta with a little meat.
    We can’t go out for dinner during the winter months.

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  36. One of the funnies is a takeoff on Mt Rushmore, but I can’t figure out who the people in it are supposed to be except for President Obama.

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  37. Well, yes, when somebody leaves his phone in some unusual place, it would be nice to be able to find it quickly. My older children will talk me through it. The younger older ones talk so fast we are both more baffled than when we started.

    Soon, I will go looking for people. Right now, I am struggling with getting it to turn on when there is a call. So far, there has always been the need to call and recall.

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  38. DJ, yes, the area where Second and family live and have to drive through seems very dangerous to drive – I speak as one who has driven through the area several times. It is a former farming area which has urbanized very rapidly (it is ridiculous and sad at the same time the way the prime farm land has been swallowed up). I would venture to say that Toronto, whose gridlock is notorious, isn’t as bad a place to drive as the area where they live. A month ago, I saw this news report and was briefly concerned that Second-in-law, who sometimes drives that route for work might have been involved: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/highway-400-fatal-pileup-cookstown-1.4381540.

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  43. Re: Phone location devices – I’m like Jo’s children, I do not want to be found. I keep the phone location device turned off. Otherwise, it would pinpoint my location everytime I looked at the map app or embed my location information when I take a picture. I remember when smartphones first came out, and people discovered that you could locate where someone was from photos they posted on the internet due to the location information imbedded in the phone. A lot of people went straight into their phone settings and turned the service off. Marketers love gathering all that kind of raw data on people. They can cross link information about buying habits, location, and FB likes or Pinterest pages to target their products specifically – Amazon stocks its warehouses using that kind of information to determine what the people in close vicinity to each warehouse will want.

    It is a bit amusing, in a dark way. In my young years at the tail end of the Cold War, the idea of communist/socialist governments creating a Big Brother surveillance caused people to be resistant to the idea of the government collecting any sort of data on people. Fast forward 25 years or so, and it is corporations in a capitalist society doing the surveillance and the mind manipulation, and everyone who was concerned about the government interfering is fine with the corporations doing it. When I hear the right wing fussing about how Apple or FB or Google is manipulating data to support or undermine one or another cause, I think, well, everyone was willing to give corporations a free hand where governments were restricted. Did people honestly think corporations would be free from the hunger for power that they feared in governments?

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  45. I say that, but although I take delight in confounding the algorithms on FB – they still haven’t figured out what advertisements to target to me – I’m not that concerned. The fear of having a Big Brother take away one’s freedom is a prison of its own. Every once in a while, you hear of people who isolated themselves to live and die in utter loneliness because they feared that the government, etc. would control them. Then you hear of prisoners in camps in places like North Korea or Nazi Germany, whose lives were one long nightmare of control and surveillance, and yet who lived in the liberty of Jesus Christ. Christians are told to love our neighbour, so we cannot isolate ourselves from the world; yet we have liberty in Christ, so we are free even if we are, as Paul and Peter were, chained between guards. We carry our freedom within, as a gift of God which no man or any other created thing takes from us. If the Son makes you free, Christ promised, then you are free indeed (John 8:39). So, I make use of the internet corporations and the government laws as tools to serve the Lord with, and have no worry, because they can have no power over me that God does not allow them to have.

    I was reminded of the power of God related to the stories of Joseph and Daniel finding favour in the eyes of otherwise tyrannical rulers today. One of my classes, which consists almost entirely of group work, was overseen by an instructor this semester who made me and everyone else in the class extremely nervous. This instructor appeared capricious and controlling. To have such an instructor mark your evaluations, tests, and assignments is nerve wracking. I finally got my marks for two of the evaluation measures today, an in-class performance evaluation and a paper which was worth a third of my mark – a paper for which we received no instructions on what to write from the instructor and about which I was concerned due to the capricious nature of the instructor’s marking methods (I know, because the instructor seemed to give different students different marks for what was essentially the same answer on a short answer test we did). Out of the percentage which this assignment and evaluation were worth, I am only lacking 0.6 percent. That is the Lord’s doing, not mine. As I told my mother, he can make otherwise unreasonable people behave reasonably toward you if it is within his purposes.

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  46. There’s a “Find my iPhone” setting, but that won’t work if you don’t have an iPhone.

    Busy day for me, but how I love not working 🙂 And I love these weeks leading up to Christmas.

    I didn’t make it to the window screen shop, but I did find out that my eye doc office accepts our old prescription glasses, I have several pair around here. I used to see the Lions canisters around town, but haven’t lately — but, of course, the docs at my office are members of the Lions Club so we can just drop them off there. Good to know.

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  48. I like snow…I don’t mind the cold…I just don’t care for a mixture of snow/cold/extreme wind…wind absolutely scrambles my brain…and we had an extremely windy day here today…brain is officially scrambled…. 😜

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  50. Sweetgum Balls! Thanks, Janice. Now I have a name for those. I remember my mother using these in flower arrangements, among other natural items. She was an award winning flower arranger. I enjoy seeing flora from other areas of the country.

    Roscura–so glad your sister and niece were relatively ok!

    I know one woman who has gotten several cars for free or dirt cheap. She has also gotten them fixed over and over. We sold her one for a pittance, because we knew she needed a car. She proceeded to run it out of oil and ruin the engine. This was after we noticed the license was over due and had not been renewed. We reminded her about that and took care of the title change ASAP. Fortunately, not all people who are the recipients of such generosity are so careless. This woman is very generous, however, in her own right.

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  52. K, thanks. My nephew is also relatively OK so far, but I do wonder if he might arrive a bit earlier as a result. Second said that the midwives said he had shifted to a breech position, so we are hoping he will right himself and go head downwards again before deciding to exit.

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  53. Second put up a picture of the car on FB. The rear side door was badly warped and the roof over Tiny Niece’s seat was caved in – proof that car seats do help in an accident. As one of our relative noted, it is a good thing she wasn’t a full sized adult.

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  55. Re how wildfires spread:

    How to protect your house from a wildfire with plants


    ___________________________________

    Fire threatens a home in three ways:

    1. Embers: Embers can move up to a mile ahead of a fire in windy conditions. This makes good roofing and removal of flammable material within 5 feet of the house critical.

    2. Radiant heat: A nearby fire can heat the surface of building materials to a point where combustion occurs.

    3. Flame impingement: Transfer of heat by direct flame exposure.
    ______________________________________

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