72 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-26-18”

  3. Yesterday was a weird day. It’s rare when the News beats the Daily, yet it’s happened twice in a week or so. And we still had over a 1000 page views total for the day, which is on the high side. It’s usually 750 or so.

    Weird. 🙂

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  4. Had a nice time with dinner at a friend’s home, four couples nd two singles. A very lively conversation and I just got home. However something had a bit of onion so my tummy is a little off. Hoping this glass of milk will help. I had a crescent roll and cake to try and cut the flavor, but it is still there. Chas, how do we convince folks to quit the onions??

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  6. Mumsee (re: new cat), there might be a trap-neuter-release (TNR) group in your area to help with that. We have been feeding two cats out back that are not quite tame but not quite feral. The TNR lady brought two traps (even brought the “bait”), picked them up when they were trapped, took them to the SPCA where they were neutered, tested, and vaccinated and brought them back the next day. The total charge was $30.

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  7. aJ, I hear you saying that you got lots of clicks, but few comments.
    I sometimes check several times to see what’s happening. If nothing is, I move on.

    Jo. there ae some people who “can’t cook without onions”. But I’m usually successful in avoiding them.
    AnnieLee, Elvera’s sister, would bring a casserole and say, “these have onions Charlie, but you can’t taste them.”
    So I avoided her casseroles. She was a nice lady. Her husband was sheriff of McCormick Co., SC.. He once said that he wouldn’t live in DC if they gave it to him.
    I once said that of the great mansions in Newport, RI.
    I wouldn’t have one of them if I had to live in it.

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  8. Well ya’ll are off and running this fine Friday morn!! It’s still dark outside! Who doesn’t like onions!!?? Now you can have tooooo much onion and some onions are very strong, I preferr green onions as they are not as strong but give a good flavor. You must have onion in meat loaf or spaghetti, even potato salad.
    We had a lovely dinner with some neighbors last night…at a Mexican restaurant in town…we give the food a C…but the company was excellent…and the atmosphere was cozy and quiet…no onions were included on my burrito…. 😊

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  10. Good Morning Everyone. It has been a busy week. I am looking forward to it be about 1pm today. I will try to go home early. I am tired.

    I heard a song on the way in this morning and it occurred to me that this song represents why Country Music no longer rings true. It has lost the experience of life. Most Country music came out of Appalachia where the people were “poor but proud”. Now, thankfully most children wouldn’t have this experience, but have we all lost a lesson because of it? I have known some people this poor and I have looked down at them with pity. (I started to type that I looked at them with pity, but that wasn’t always the truth. I DID look down on them. Not really anything I am proud of these days).

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  11. Then I read this, this morning and thought—We should all have the privilege of dying the good death….
    “Update on mom: Let me begin by thanking every one of you who has offered up fervent prayer for my mamma. Whether you prayed, sent good vibes, performed a dance for healing in the moonlight, or just thought about all of us, we cannot tell you thank you enough. The journey is not over and the most difficult days are ahead, but she is coming home to the place where her mom, my Mamaw, breathed her last. It is a good thing. This old place has seen both the beginning and end of life. It has offered our family comfort and refuge and will, for my mom, as with her parents and grandparents, be the last place she calls “home”. Please continue to pray for my family, most especially for my dad as he says goodbye to his partner of almost 55 years. She has been tolerant, patient, wise, sassy, loving, bossy, and above all a great mamma . We will miss her very much, but we know where she’s headed after this…I hope they are ready up there, cause if those streets really are gold, they are gonna have a hard time keeping her off of them. We love you all…”

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  12. I chopped an onion this week for the first time in 30 years. It was for a salad at camp (I was helping in the kitchen as we were short handed). You can make a lot of things without onion, or even onion powder. I make my own steak spice, chill powder and Cajun spices – all without onion powder. I use the steak spice in my meatloaf along with finally chopped celery – it tastes pretty good if I say so myself 🙂

    I set aside a small bowl of the salad for me, before adding the onion. It doesn’t really bother me, but after 30 years of no onions, one can sure taste them in food – and it’s usually the only thing I taste 😦

    Jo, I often chew a bunch of mint gum right after eating too much garlic or onion and that helps cut the flavour – won’t help the tummy though.

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  15. Today’s header photo shows what happens at the finching hour. Occasionally the feeder tree is simply swarmed with finches. In this case, the photo includes three male and one female house finch and a winter-plumaged goldfinch entering on the right.

    House finches used to nest in front of our kitchen window every year when I was a child. They’re pretty birds and I can’t help but like them, but they are also very dirty birds, they aren’t supposed to be in the east, and our eastern population isn’t all that healthy (having descended from about a dozen birds released into the wild some decades ago).

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  20. They sell lots of frozen dinners. They tell us how many calories and other useless data, but they don’t say if they have onions in them.

    Aj. You had 1000 clicks yesterday. Can you tell where they came from?
    e.g. Are we followed by some of the people who used to be regular here?
    Becky’s blou used to tell where the posts originate.
    Some came from Russia. That was before the Russians began to determine out election outcome.

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  23. My dear mother in law and her cousin Beatrice took a road trip once to FL to visit us….they were like a couple of schools girls laughing and having the grandest time! They walked into our home with Onion Sandwiches!!! ( onion sandwich consisted of an inch thick white onion slice topped with pepper layered between two pieces of white bread) They said they had not had them since being teenagers and there was just nothing like an onion sandwich….now that was something even this “Clemson wife” could not tolerate!! 😜 (we drove our own car when driving to the beach as their car reeked of onion!!)

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  24. Cat post as opposed to onion post:
    The new cat is a very loud nocturnal meower. The meow starts like a purr. It is slightly larger than our other two cats. One of them is black and sort of short hair. The other is orange and white and rather long haired. The new one is white with a very light yellow brown under coat type thing. The body hair is relatively short but the head and shoulders hair is long. Very strange looking cat. Lost cat? Dumped cat? House cat gone wild? Feral cat? No idea. He was quite vocal last night, even a little scuffle with the home cats. No sign of him this morning but he has been around for several days with no sign other than the meowing at night.

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  29. Chas, I’ve never figured out the purpose of putting onions in a dish if you can’t taste them. I know, the idea is supposed to be the blend of flavors. I actually can handle onions that way, cut really small and cooked, though I don’t put them in anything I intend to eat in any fashion, I won’t eat raw onions in any fashion (I really just can’t–they taste horrid to me), and if they’re cooked (on a pizza, say), I either remove every piece or eat something else. But chopped tiny and cooked in a soup, I’m OK with them.

    I once had a housemate who worked making pre-made salads for stores, and she graciously brought home a salad she had made for me. At the time I had a milk allergy and she thoughtfully left out the cheese . . . but the whole thing was filled with really tiny little onions, sesame seed size, and there was no possible way to pick them out or eat around them. Fortunately I had just eaten supper, so I told her thank you and that I’d put it in the fridge for tomorrow. The next day I did what I could to pick out onions from a forkful or two (not quite succeeding), and then threw it away, burying it in the trash and then, I think, taking out the trash. But I ended up getting a couple of specks of that onion in the bite or two I did eat, and it was enough of a reminder of how hideous onion is that I would not knowingly try it again, even to be polite.

    I went through a drive-thru a few months ago and got a Big Mac for me and some other sandwich for my husband. When I order anything form McDonald’s, it’s “no onion, extra pickle.” Big Macs are especially bad. Technically you can scrape all the onion off a hamburger if you need to, but you can’t get all the onions off a Big Mac without getting all the sauce off, too. Anyway, I got home and saw that both the burger and the order slip were backward, “no pickle, extra onion.” Whether I ordered it backward or they heard it backward, I don’t know, but my husband got two sandwiches and I had to look for something else to eat!

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  32. There are sweet onions, you know. I think they are called Vidalias. And it is possible to have too much onion. There is a hamburger chain in St Louis called White Castle that I was told had great burgers. Turns out they are loaded with onions and mustard. Too much! I ordered one with half onions and it still had too much.

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  33. No such thing as too much onion.
    Back a long time ago, like about twenty years, I used to order those fast food things. Always, mustard only, no special sauce, just the hamburger and mustard. Those sauces and mayo and such actually caused me and those around me considerable grief as we learned when I was a small child. Now I don’t go anywhere near those places at all.

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  34. BTW, when I said I could handle a small bit of cooked onion in something like a soup, I wasn’t saying I would choose that. My mother-in-law invited us to stay for supper one day when we were there, and she had several kinds of soup she had already made. One was a beef barley that had small pieces of onion. Had it been raw onion in something, we would have declined the spontaneous invitation. But I chose to accept, to pick out what onion I could see and not worry if there was a little bit left, as it was cooked and small and I knew I probably wouldn’t taste it among the other flavors, nor would I feel its disagreeable sliminess.

    But Mom just sent over a big dish of chicken noodle soup for her sick son (yes, I cook for him, but she hasn’t seen him for a month now and she misses him, so she sent soup with our daughter); it has onion in it, so I’m eating other foods and leaving that for him. In other words, if she was serving it, I could handle eating it, but since I have other options, I’ll take the other options. But raw onions I decline under any circumstances–yes, even so-called “sweet” onions.

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  39. Busy week, with a two-day trip to Cleveland. I had all-day work meetings the other days through this morning and had to do some of my regular work after hours at home. This lunchtime is the first chance I’ve had to see what’s going on with y’all.

    The news from Cleveland Clinic was good. The new heart valve, and my heart generally, are working fine. My history and my age call for watchfulness, though, so the Cleveland cardiologist wants to see me in six months for a checkup and some additional testing.

    I told him the valve replacement didn’t improve my energy and stamina as much as I’d hoped. He thinks I might benefit from a more structured cardiac rehab program. My local cardiologist’s group has a facility and a program, so I’ll talk with him about that when I see him in March.

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  43. I love cooked onions, but raw onions are too strong for me.

    Kevin – Praying for healing for your heart, and that you will have many, many more years with your family.

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  47. Any onion is to much.
    No kidding. A bit of onion on my tongue is the same as a gunshot in your ear.
    The smallest bit makes it the only thing I taste.
    Onions, liver and sea scallops are off limits to me.

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  48. But I came here meaning to post something and you made me forget what it was.
    I’m sure that it was a world changing observation that would change the course of history.
    Now it’s gone.

    🙂

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  53. Chas, I agree about the tiniest bit of raw onion. As I recall, Mom made me eat everything on my plate, but even she cooked half a meatloaf without onion (she made meatloafs two at a time), she would not put raw onions in anything I’d be eating, and I was allowed to pick out any onions if there happened to be onion in anything cooked. (I wasn’t allowed to pick out mushrooms or anything else inedible, but she respected the onion aversion. It sometimes took me a full two hours to swallow a meal, since I could not make myself swallow anything and was never allowed to say no to any food, and thus something distasteful got chewed for 15 minutes per bite and just slowly disintegrated–not making me more inclined to want it again next time. So to have my onion aversion respected is, in retrospect, good.)

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  54. BTW, notice today’s cardinal isn’t as bright as some I’ve had in the past. I have noticed that individual birds vary in markings and coloring more than I ever saw before I had a camera with a zoom lens.

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  56. I have always rejected the idea of “eat everything on your plate”. My sister didn’t like fish of any sort. My parents always had an alternative for her. Just as they made a separate dish without onions.
    A person should never be forced to eat something he doesn’t like.
    Jennifer (youngest GD) doesn’t like broccoli. She doesn’t have to eat it.

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  57. We used to have cardinals staying over the winter in Annandale.. I never had them in H’ville. Our back deck was 15 feet off the ground and cardinals don’t often get that high.
    But hummingbirds do.
    Mosquitos don’t either.

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  58. My “kitten” is snoozing on my lap and her ears twitched when those mountain lion cubs growled.

    Good day for me; back is feeling almost normal, finished all the 1099s at work. Now we’re off to dinner with a gift card from a niece!

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  59. We don’t do eat everything on the plate, unless you serve yourself seconds, then you better know what you are getting into and not be wasting other folks’ food. But people are expected to make an effort on firsts. I can understand food aversions but when they are averse to everything but one or two, something else is going on. Then I give miniscule servings of each and they are often surprised to learn they actually like it. Or not, which is fine.

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  60. Chas, cardinals are the state bird of more states than any other bird has (seven), including Indiana, although several species have multiple states. But just out of curiosity a few months ago, I looked at a map and saw that the seven states with cardinals are all contiguous. States such as Tennessee have cardinals and haven’t chosen them as the state bird, but there must be something special about this region and cardinals. I personally would choose the great blue heron as the Indiana state bird, as being a better indicator of something “different” about our state than to have a bird also chosen by six other states, but the cardinal has been one of my favorite birds all my life.

    My husband also had to eat everything on his plate–and he threw up peas more than once. To this day he absolutely detests them, and I never eat split pea soup when he is around. Eventually his parents realized the rule wasn’t helping him and they dropped it. It’s funny to me that they ever had it, since his mom is every bit as picky as he is (she won’t eat poultry of any sort, fish, or eggs, and probably some other foods . . . but imagine going through life in America not eating chicken or turkey!). My parents never rescinded the rule, and one of the benefits of moving away from home was that I could finally stop eating eggs, turnips, etc.

    One year in college, I went through a few months that the last bite of anything–even a brownie–seemed unappetizing. I don’t know why it was, but I was now an adult and if I didn’t want to eat it, I didn’t have to. It somehow really bothered another girl on my floor, and she would encourage me to eat the rest (probably because I was a bit underweight and maybe she feared I was anorexic), but her pushing me to eat it was not helpful. I needed freedom to eat or not eat, and I didn’t need a student younger than I was encouraging me to eat, though I know she meant well. I told her several times that growing up I had to eat every bite on my plate, and I don’t have to do so anymore, so please let me be, but she continued to press and nag at me anyway.

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  64. My parents pushed us pretty hard to finish everything, but mom gave me grace when it came to the cooked canned spinach she fixed. It made me gag. She didn’t serve it to me at all. She also let my brother pick the mushrooms out of his spaghetti. (I loved that because I got to eat his.)

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  65. Mumsee, I had no plans to make kids eat everything on their plate, but I just figured I won’t do alternate cooking. That is, if you don’t like the food that is served, I won’t make you a pizza instead. And you have to try everything at least once or twice, and you can only say “no thanks” to one food item per meal. Those were my intentions. As it turns out, my husband doesn’t like lots and lots of foods that I love, and has others he will eat occasionally but that aren’t serious favorites, so I often make a different food for him than for myself.

    Oh well.

    My sister has the idea that it’s impolite to be a guest somewhere and not eat everything that is served, and so she makes her kids eat everything for that reason. (She allows each one “no thank you” item–not one per meal, one total–and her oldest has taken her up on it by not eating peas, also on my husband’s list.) One Thanksgiving I ate at her house, and her cooking is far more spicy than mine (including using onions), so I made a mental list of which three items to avoid (including the gagginlgy infamous green-bean casserole) . . . and her kids asked if they had to eat some of everything, and she said yes. Turns out several of her kids had the same three items on their don’t-eat-it-unless-I-have-to list. Well, since they had to eat everything, I took some of everything, too, and realized one other side to making kids eat it all–making guests feel like they have to eat everything too!! Thanksgiving has so many dishes on the table that it really is too much food if you take some of everything, so that one of all meals should relax the standard. After that meal I determined that I wasn’t her child, I disagree with the some-of-everything rule, she cooks with onions and sometimes lots of spices, and I just wasn’t going to bind myself to her household rules on that one. But in that meal it felt unkind to skip all the foods her children wanted to skip just because I was an adult and I could.

    In my experience, most hosts understand if you skip some food item on the table. And if I’m going to be a guest somewhere overnight, I explain that I don’t eat eggs so that I’m not left doing so in the morning with a hostess already making them.

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  66. My husband and I were once in a situation where we were going to be seen as rude guests no matter what we did, so we chose an option that left our hosts bewildered, but there was really no explaining.

    We were going to the Chattanooga area for our denomination’s general assembly. We went a couple of days early to spend some time with my favorite brother. My husband noticed that the Triple Crown Belmont Stakes race, the one in which American Pharoah was expected to win the first Triple Crown in 37 years, was happening during that time with my brother. Both of us expected he would probably win the race; I had never seen a Triple Crown winner (since my family didn’t have a TV last time we had such a thing), and he hadn’t seen one in many years. He commented that the trip was going to be all business for him, a lot of driving and a lot of work, and that he was at least going to see that race. I wanted to see it, too, but I was going to have other pleasures that week (to me the week was a vacation).

    Well, the afternoon of the race my husband said he wanted to watch it, and he and my brother attempted to find the station, but it turned out that it was one my brother doesn’t receive. My husband was disappointed by that, but I told him listen, we can go out and find a store that sells TVs, or go to an Applebee’s, and watch it. He agreed. I told my sister-in-law we were going out for a while, and she asked if we would be home for supper. I told her I didn’t know whether or not we would, but that it was probably better to plan as though we wouldn’t, if that was OK, but that we would be home in time for the birthday dessert for my nephew later.

    We went to Wal-Mart and found out that they only play their own channel, not actual TV stations. I suggested again that we go to Applebee’s. My husband said it was suppertime and we’d probably need to get a meal if we did that, and he’d rather not spend the money, so let’s just figure we missed it, and that’s too bad, but that’s life.

    I then pulled my trump card. I told him what we were having for supper.

    I cannot eat tomatoes very often, and I do not eat onions. My husband can’t stand peas, doesn’t even like them to be on the table and see other people eating them, and he also doesn’t like squash. I told him that the main meal was chicken, and he could eat that, but that one side dish was mixed vegetables (including peas), and the other was a mixture of squash, tomatoes, and onion (in other words, a dish neither of us would want). I knew that the combination of missing the race and having two out of three dishes that he would not want to eat–that he might have trouble politely refusing both–was enough to get him to go ahead and eat at Applebee’s (and I was right).

    My brother is not much of a TV person, and for all I know he equates horse races only with gambling. I knew he would be completely befuddled by what would appear to be choosing a horse race over time with family. But I also knew the race was very important to my husband–and that we were probably going to offend our hosts either way.

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  67. Donna, this one is for you, on border collies. http://www.akc.org/content/entertainment/articles/worlds-smartest-dog/?utm_source=akc.org&utm_medium=content-page&utm_campaign=right-side-bar-blueconic&utm_content=algo-1

    I admit, though, that this quote amused me: “If you want that Border Collie pup to live up to her potential, you must be prepared to devote a lot of time. Take Chaser, the wonderdog CBS 60 Minutes declared the smartest in the world. She understands more than 1,000 words but those words didn’t pop into her head overnight. After owner John Pilley retired from his job as a college psychology professor, he started teaching his black-and-white student, who is the subject of his book, Chaser, Unlocking the Genius Behind the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words. Pilley tutored her four to five hours a day for nine years to give her that prodigious vocabulary. “Lazy, loafing, slacking off,” and “lounging” are obviously not on the list.”

    Why is that amusing? Compare it to how naturally human beings learn their first 1,000 words. And it might be worth mentioning that the child can actually say (and read and write) those 1,000 words before those nine years are up, not just understand them.

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  68. Onion rings are great! At least the kind where there is actually a ring of onion inside the breading. The so-called onion rings that are made of chopped onions mixed with batter and shaped in a ring aren’t worth bothering with.

    I only once remember having too much onion. I was probably around ten or so, at a cookout at my great-uncle’s, and I put a nice big slice of onion on my hamburger. It tasted great, but not long after I had heartburn. I’d never had it before but I figured from the pain that must be what it was, since I was too young to have heart trouble. I went inside and lay down on a bed until the pain went away, and made sure I never had that much raw onion again.

    Other favorite ways to eat onions – creamed cooked onions (the little ones), chopped red onion in salads, fried onions on a cheesesteak sandwich, French onion soup. Unfortunately my husband can’t eat onions, ever since his gastric bypass surgery. So I just put them in my own salad. And tonight when he was out for dinner, I stopped and got Chinese – some of my favorite dishes there have plenty of onions.

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