42 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-10-18”

  1. Michelle captured the Northern Lights?
    I’ll bet it wasn’t in California.
    However, I remember seeing them once as a child in SC.
    They can come down that far. That was many years ago.

    Like

  3. Is Drill the guy who came up with ideas about the blog?
    A guy from eastern Tennessee. I think he was Gay.
    Used to join our conversations.
    And Sawgunner didn’t come over from WMB. I met him once in H’ville.

    Like

  4. Hi, Chas. You’re thinking of Anlir. Drill was the one who wrote those long, usually humorous, posts with lots of exaggeration, similar to the one Cheryl posted last night.

    Like

  5. And that is a great picture. Must be from Michelle’s travels. There was a time a few years back when we were supposed to be able to see the Northern Lights down here, but all we saw just looked like the glow of city lights. Except that there was no big city in that direction for 100 miles.

    Liked by 1 person

  6. A relative of Michelle’s sent her the photo.

    Those are not the northern lights though. They are the aurora australis, or southern lights. The photo was taken in Antarctica. 🙂

    Liked by 5 people

  8. Yes. Anlir. He was an asset to our group
    Just dropped out and forgot abut us.
    Whatever happens, I will not forget. I remember talking about being president of the Lions and that was a dozen years ago.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. Anlir was a joy. I used to ask him regularly if he was positive he was gay. He drove a pickup and I think started our Football Pigskin Picks. His avatar was Bugs Bunny and it seems that back when I had his email address it was something like that.
    There was another gay man who hung out with us. His partner was involved in Doctors Without Borders and went to work the Haiti earthquake. They ended up bringing a child back to live with them. They had either fostered or completely adopted 1 or more special needs children. Mumsee would probably remember more about that. I think they discussed that at length on the blog.
    Time and distance even makes me somewhat fondly recall Victoria. At the time I thought she was the most caustic and unlikable human on Earth. I finally ceased having anything to do with her. I would always let Cheryl deal with her. She must have had a lot of pain in her personal life.
    I am still Facebook friends with Weekender Man. He was involved in an accident when he was in high school. He was in a coma for a period of time and it is a true miracle that he lived. Now he is chronicling his descent into memory loss. He has had to give up driving and scoots around his town by asking for rides from his local FB friends, a cab, or Uber. He is remarried. He and his wife are planning a move back to Virginia to be near his family.
    Sawgunner keeps promising to bring his Bride and 3 girls to Gulf Shores for a family vacation.

    Liked by 4 people

  11. I miss Drill too. He could always make one laugh. I think he liked his anonymity and as the blog members began meeting up more, he seemed to withdraw more and more.
    Anlir and Victoria were before my time.

    As I attend each new class, I begin to think that not only have we been pushed off the deep end, but the tank is ice cold and full of sharks. So much to do, just for next week alone, never mind all the assignments coming up. Of course it doesn’t help that I’m feeling ill.

    By the way, I meant to let you all know that aside from the incomplete clinical hours, I passed all my courses from the fall semester with A’s. So very thankful – I was especially uncertain of the history course I took, since my midterm exam mark was quite low, and I kept thinking, after I handed my term paper in, of all the things I should have said.

    Liked by 3 people

  12. Yes, that really is lovely.

    The closest we get to northern lights here is fog. Being swampland, we have a lot of fog. Today the snow is melting and we have fog.

    I told my husband it sure better keep going (melting) or we will have a very serious mess on our hands. Right now it is 36 degrees and depending on whether an area is in sun or shade we have everything from slushy snow to two big puddles of iced-over water (one in front of the mailbox, one between the gravel driveway and the house) to big patches of the driveway one must walk with care since the top layer is sleet frozen into the snow. (Our neighbor who used to plow our driveway didn’t have to do it the last two winters–we didn’t have enough snow to need it done–and now he is too old. And my husband has been too sick to use our snow blower on a big driveway, and he tells me it takes more strength than I possess. So we are awaiting melting. There are reasons we hoped to move before winter.)

    Like

  13. Actually it is the northern lights–the photo was taken by one of the relatives who braved the really, really, really cold Arctic Circle to see something special. Out of four below freezing nights for those southern Californians, this was the only night when the lights came out.

    But they dazzled. Though the relative who sent the picture would have been just as happy to have flown into Fairbanks for the night and then left! LOL

    Food was interesting as well–reindeer meat–and they visited an ice hotel which he described as miserable. One of my godsons proposed to his wife in an ice hotel. We watched the video. The diamond made up for the dimly lit cold conditions!

    (After I sent this photo, AJ, you may have gotten caught in the loop where several family members discussed the southern lights since I had asked about them).

    I’m just thankful all my family members have resorted themselves out and are home and back to normal life–they were spread pretty far this Christmas!

    Like

  14. Phos @ 10:23
    You’re the only one on this blog that worried.
    I had a friend in high school named Muriel. Muriel was one of the smartest ones in the class. She worried about every exam.
    I should have worried more.

    😆

    Like

  15. Beautiful photo, I remembered Michelle had relatives who were traveling far and wide to see the lights.

    Drill was funny but it’s true, one knew very little about him — where he lived, what he (really) did for a living — and that was by design, I think. I had the impression that Victoria lived in Malibu. She once said she had a house with a foyer (with a running fountain in it) and she seemed to be a regular beach goer. She had pink shoes. And no, you didn’t want to ever cross her 🙂 Most of us learned that by personal experience.

    Liked by 2 people

  16. I also recall that mumsee was one of the few who could cajole and get Victoria back into a friendly, joking mood 🙂 She was the creative matador dangling the red cloth off to the sidelines, distracting the bull’s attention, appearing often when most needed. A few of use were spared by mumsee entering the ring.

    Liked by 2 people

  17. If I recall correctly, neither Drill nor StuBob (he was an ob/gyn and a Presbyterian elder, for those who don’t remember him) had been around much for our last year on World, and so I e-mailed both and told them we were closing up shop. (I no longer have e-mail addresses for either of them, as that e-mail account ended up losing all my stored e-mails.) Drill came on and made several good posts, and said he would see us over here, and by some of the things people said that last day, I think he did come over here the first day, though I don’t remember that.

    Drill expressed regret that he had painted himself into a corner as only a funny man. I know that when the topic turned to abortion, he turned the “funny” side off completely and spoke wisely and well, and sadly. But otherwise we expected humor from him, and he delivered, but maybe it was harder work than he wished to do all the time. I encouraged him to write and publish–true humor is a gift and he was really good at it–and he e-mailed me and said he might do that someday, and might want me to edit him if he did, and he told me his true profession (no, I’m not telling) but not, as I recall, his real name. (His made-up profession, as you recall, was working in a pallet factory, and I believe he turned out to be a visitor from another planet. And when I was getting married, he kindly offered his cousins as bouncers for the wedding, and even said they were willing to go after the groom if he got cold feet.)

    Liked by 4 people

  18. 😦 Guys on the radio talking about “the dark side of the moon”>
    Don’t none of you make that mistake.
    The dark side of the moon is the part the sun isn’t shining on.
    The correct nomenclature is “lunar far side”.
    The moon rotates once a month. Hence one side is always facing earth.
    We now have pictures of the far side. There was always lots of conjecture before we had satellites orbiting the moon.
    I think I have some pictures of the far side.

    Like

  19. I exchanged emails with both Drill and Anlir (who lived on Long Island and provided travel info on one of my trips east).

    Drill had some difficult things going on in his life and worked a high pressure job (those pallets!) He was moving on to other things in his life but appreciated knowing we still love him last time I contacted him. 🙂

    Ah, Victoria. She unwittingly was used by God for good in my life– though I don’t believe that was her intention. 🙂

    Note to self: one drop of peppermint essential oil is too much to make your mocha a peppermint one.

    But it works well to clear the sinuses.

    Overcast day here, back aching, enormous rewriting project, mood vascilations which suggest I should hang out at Mumsee’s house. 😦

    It’s great to be a writer. 🙂

    I think I’ll go pray first.

    Any sign of Jo?

    Liked by 2 people

  20. Wasn’t Drill having problems with his son?

    I am happy to report that Miguel had his first real physical therapy appointment yesterday, and it went really well. I think the therapist will be a good fit and encourage, motivate, and push him to gain strength. Miguel feels like a truck hit him today, but is excited to feel like he is progressing.

    Liked by 7 people

  21. the Dark Side of the Moon was an album, as I recall.

    A short-term boyfriend loaned it to me one summer in the dark ages of record albums, I gave it back when we broke up.

    Like

  22. Yes, Anlir started the Pigskin Picks. And he always had Tennessee as the tie breaker, unless they weren’t playing.

    Someone mentioned Drill posting the first day of this blog. Yes, he was here with these posts;

    Drill | August 29, 2012 at 5:38 pm
    Hey, I am on too! Drill. Impresive, AJ: Are you interested in being head of IT for Drill Enterprises, Inc.? Some headhunters from off-planet apparently hired away the last guy I had in the job. Well, I assume it was a headhunter outfit – that’s all they took, anyway.

    Drill | August 29, 2012 at 6:08 pm
    Hi Mumsee: You have been put into storage until your paperwork has been properly completed. In order to get out of storage, you will need to provide (to the responsible authorities) your paperwork, in originals and in triplicate, with raised embossed seals.

    However, your paperwork is currently at Headquarters, not in storage with you. You can, however, pick it up at Headquarters. Well, you could, if you could get out of storage. But you can’t. You probably need to fill out some kind of form about this problem. When we get your form, us Headquarters people will form a committee and eat doughnuts. Then, if we have time we will look into this issue and maybe get back to you.

    Liked by 3 people

  24. The Aurora Borealis have made an appearance in the night sky around my parents’ home a couple of times in my memory. What I remember, aside from the shifting kaleidoscope of colours, is the crackling sound as the colours shifted – they are after all, due to electrically charged particles responding to the earth’s magnetic field. Scientists have only recently acknowledged that the Aurora do indeed make noise: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/06/auroras-sounds-noises-explained-earth-space-astronomy/

    Chas, I’m not really that smart as I would never be able to be a member of Mensa since my math abilities are only mediocre and logic puzzles just confuse me. I have two points in my favour: a very good memory and the ability to fit my memories together like a jigsaw puzzle – Eldest Sibling and family got a copy of the 221B Baker Street board game for Christmas (a mystery solving game that is a bit more complicated than Clue) and Second Nephew always wanted to play on my team, since I solved the case almost every time we played – but both those assets get somewhat overwhelmed when I’m taking in a lot of information without the time to process it all properly, and I really did do quite poorly on that midterm. So, every time I succeed, I consider it a gift from God.

    Liked by 5 people

  25. Michelle, I think you might be thinking of someone other than Anlir. He lived in the south and last I heard from him he was doing some insurance work in Louisiana.
    Cheryl handled Victoria better than anyone in my opinion. Cheryl might seem sweet and docile but when she feels she is right, she can give as good as she gets.

    Liked by 2 people

  26. My Nightingale continues to surprise and bless me. We have our minor tensions here and there, of course, but in general she is so good to me. I don’t deserve her.

    I mentioned on here recently that she is going to be baking me a “princess cake”, because I said I wanted to be a princess on my birthday. (Yes, I know I’m more than a bit too old for that, but that is my whimsical side taking over.) A couple days ago, I said something to Chickadee about that, and Nightingale said something like, “Are we still on that?” So I thought she thought I was just being silly.

    Today, she texted me from work (during a rare slow period) to tell me, “I bought some goodies to make you an awesome princess cake!!!! And a crown.” That made me smile, but also cry, out of such deep gratitude to her and to God. (And also crying out for God to save her.)

    Liked by 8 people

  27. Kizzie, It’s quite obvious that you have a very kind heart. Is there any question that your daughter has learned that from you? You do deserve her. Hugs.

    Liked by 6 people

  28. Now wait a minute Michelle. The title of your email was “Photo from antarctica”

    Now I find you have me spreading fake news. What is the world coming to…. 🙂

    Liked by 5 people

  30. Kim, thank you, but I never thought I “handled” Victoria well. She got my goat, and I have a (bad?) tendency to assume that if something is only explained well enough, the other person will understand it. When she was rude on stuff like God must not have wanted me to marry and have children (as though I must be being punished, or that is sure what it sounded like she was hinting at) I tried to let her see that such thinking was false and that it hurt people. I always got the feeling she particularly disliked me, but I worked to be kind and thought eventually she might soften. I wanted her to. Personally, I hear “Victoria” and I hear lace and roses, and I wanted to be able to see her presence among us with joy. As it was, I nearly left over her, and was relieved when she was banned but nervous because the ban was temporary and she might return.

    If she were to return today and say she missed us, and she knows she came on too strong, I would willingly accept her as a friend. I would assume she had had a few years to grow and mature, as have the rest of us, and I’d happily welcome her back and would willingly assume she would be able to be polite. But within the first four or five months of her ban I would not have willingly seen her name on a post.

    Liked by 2 people

  32. Kizzie, I in no way want to explain away Lee’s death, but it does enter my mind that you and Nightingale have grown closer since then and she has taken on more responsibility of her own free will.
    I told someone just yesterday that if my dad were still alive and Mr P’s mother still alive we wouldn’t have survived this long being married. I was a daddy’s girl and he was a mama’s boy. As it is we are all each other has….lol
    We don’t understand why God “let’s things happen” that we don’t want, but again, with time and distance we can see where things worked out as they should.

    Liked by 1 person

  33. Cheryl, I just remember when Victoria was attacking me, you would come into the conversation and explain what I was trying to say to her in a much better ways than I was. It became somewhat of a joke with me.
    I would state something and tell everyone that if they didn’t understand what I was talking about, you would be along soon to explain it to them. 😉

    Liked by 4 people

  34. Leme see if this works:

    I can’t imagine that all those instruments just showed up. I suspect that it was like those choirs that assembled in the malls at Christmastime a few years ago.

    Some of you will like tis.

    Like

  38. Kim – Nightingale and I were close before Hubby’s death, but yes, this has drawn us even closer. We are now partners in this life, which is kinda weird. (My current life does feel odd to me lately.)

    It is almost, but not quite, as if she is the husband and I am the wife. She even joked recently that I am her wife. She has a job, and enjoys doing yard work, and I am the one who stays home, cleans house, and watches The Boy when she’s working. (Of course, there is more to our roles than those things.)

    Besides any emotional attachment, we are currently dependent upon each other, and bound together, by financial need. Neither one of us could make it alone at this point.

    (Well, she could probably get by on her own if she had a little, inexpensive apartment just for her and The Boy. But she likes having a yard to take care of, to have gardens, and for her son to play in. And she wouldn’t be able to afford any apartment that would allow dogs, if she could even find one.)

    Like

  39. My first dustup with Victoria came shortly after I began to chime in here. The topic of “Will pets/animals be in heaven” came up and I took the same position as RC Sproul had taken — we really don’t know.

    Well, she went ballistic, insisting I was pushing the idea that pets WOULD, indeed, be in heaven. I calmly said no, that’s not what I said. I said …

    Back and forth it went, I was completely exasperated, she would not let it go. She seemed to get angrier and angrier.

    I think I emailed mumsee asking what I did wrong and she reassured me that my position was stated clearly but had been misconstrued (despite my numerous attempts to clarify!) over and over again. Eventually I had the good sense to drop out of the conversation.

    Cheryl also came into it, trying to clarify what I did and didn’t say, but it was of no use. After that I was wary of her. But we did have some pleasant interchanges as well. (I believe Cameron also had some difficult times with her as well — predestination made her bristle! — and she once suggested Cameron couldn’t understand something — I forget what — because, well, after all, she wasn’t ‘a mother,’ so sad. Condescending, way off topic and irrelevant, to say the least.

    I’d forgotten she was banned. But I, too, would be glad to see her should she say she’d come on too strong in the past or something at least close to that. 🙂 She was, back then, anyway, very contentious by nature, or so it seemed. But she also could be nice. Go figure. I often wondered what she would really be like in person. …

    Liked by 1 person

  40. Cameron was dealing with infertility, if I recall correctly, and one time, after the two of them had been arguing about something, Victoria said that there was a reason God hadn’t let Cameron be a mother. I remember gasping, and re-reading her comment a few times to make sure it said what I thought it said.

    The good news is that Cameron went on to have a baby girl, a preemie with some serious health issues. Victoria commented on their Caring Bridge site, with compassion and encouragement, as I understand, which was a blessing to Cameron. (Cameron has also now had twin girls, and all three of her daughters are doing well. Praise God!)

    Liked by 6 people

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.