103 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 3-3-18”

  1. Good morning Aj, et.al.

    Re: Karen’s 5:18
    I had a hard time getting to sleep last night. I lay there thinking of Karen’s post. It didn’t keep me awake, I just thought about it.

    “What she shared today (she didn’t write it, but believes it), said something like: Jesus never said anything about gay marriage or abortion, but He did say plenty about caring for the poor.”

    I was thinking about all the things Jesus preached about. It occurred to me that he preached against unbelief and hypocrisy. That’s all.
    One case of thankfulness. You would think “lying’ during the trial, but he didn’t. He blessed the poor, others gave half of what they had upon conversion. The poor woman gave all that she had.
    That’s about it.
    The NT church helped their poor. Nothing at all about the government helping the poor.
    In those days, the government kept order.
    That’s all.

    Liked by 3 people

  2. Good Morning Everyone. Needless to say it has been a busy week. I am up because Amos thought I had slept long enough. I have a little work to get done this morning and then I really want to do nothing.
    I am optimistic that the sun will shine today and it won’t be too cold and I can be outside.
    Last night I worked First Friday at the Art Center. We are getting ready for the Outdoor Art Show, the middle of the month as well. I have never seen anyone act over food like the people did last night. My friend M usually caters it. Last night we had two huge platters, one with vegetables, dips, and sliced meats; the other with fruit and cheese. We couldn’t replenish the platters fast enough. As we were walking into the room with small trays of the replacements they were taking food off of them. They stood around with the SAME tooth pick to get another square of cheese. It isn’t like F—hope has a large homeless population and they are scrounging for food. These people can afford a meal at Ruby Tuesday’s if they are that hungry.
    They also are spring chickens. They had to have been raised to know better. Now let me say we had plenty and even had some items left over, but this was embarrassing to watch people act that way over FREE food.

    Liked by 2 people

  4. It looks like my union will have a strike authorization vote this week. And based on comments at the union meeting yesterday, I expect that most will vote in favor of authorizing a strike. The leaders emphasized that no one wants a strike, they just feel they need leverage to get the administration to offer something better than what they have offered so far, which the union has rejected. A few staff members expressed concerns about losing insurance during a strike, or the possibility that winning a salary increase will result in layoffs to pay for it. But most of the faculty seem to feel that they’ve given in enough over the past few years and now it’s time to insist on something better or they might as well forget ever getting it.

    Meanwhile I’m on antibiotics for a persistent headache/congestion suspected to be sinus infection. I felt like I was getting better, but now I’m back to runny nose and scratchy throat.

    On a positive note, I’ve just about finished the “Turtle Triathlon” at the Y. Less than half a mile to go on both biking and walking. Even not feeling well, I can manage that easily enough.

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  5. Good Morning! Spring one day, winter the next….you just never know what you’re going to see on that header photo!! It is truly beautiful Kizzie….so New England…y…. 😊
    The sky is blue and the temps are to hit 60 here today in this forest. The black Abert squirrels appear to have been populating this winter…they are scurrying about, looking in our windows, gathering whatever food they might find…certainly Spring must be around some corner!!

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  6. Beautiful photo.

    I’ve been up early, watching a skunk across the street foraging in the vacant field near the ravine. The sun is peeking through but the forecast still says more rain today, late morning through mid-afternoon, but I’m thinking it won’t be much for us (maybe more to the north of us).

    The rule of thumb for this year is it’s never as much rain as they say it’s going to be. But I’m hoping we’ve had enough in the past 24-48 hours for some of my newly scattered wildflower seeds to take. I’m not expecting much from that, but a few clusters here and there would be fun.

    My voice seems to be going now with this cold virus. And I am still congested, but a little better. A hot shower will help clear my head and chest. This feels like the longest “cold” I’ve ever had.

    I’m not looking forward to returning to work Monday. Nearly everyone’s gone now. 😦

    But I’m trying not to stress and worry over any of it, God has his plans and I am grateful for continued income for now.

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  7. It has been an incredibly busy week, but I survived it with the Lord’s strength. Now that the term paper is done and all midterms written, the work that is needed to be done each week will hopefully be a bit more manageable.

    As a small celebration, after class yesterday I went to see Black Panther. I find most superhero films boring, but I wanted to see whether the film had captured African culture (there are certain common elements across the continent) as well as people were saying it did. The story was constructed quite well, and the backdrop to the struggle between hero and villain made sense. As for how African culture was portrayed, the landscape and the costumes were on point, as was some of the background music (I was happy to hear genuine African drum rhythms), and most of the actors were convincingly African in mannerism. But many the fantasy elements looked more as if they were derived from Western design ideas, not African ones. The ceremonial grotto was especially laughable – if they had used a hollow baobab tree, that would have been much more convincing – while the plant that gave superhuman powers looked like it came from a European woodland, not an African plain, and the supposed belief system did not reflect African traditional beliefs. There was some social commentary in the film, of course, but the direction of the commentary given was not quite what would be expected.

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  9. Well, it is beautiful here today, then. With sky the color of the sides on here, the big old moon heading down into the west, the sun coming up and reflecting off the snow.

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  10. I took this photo and a couple others with my phone as the sky was clearing up. (This was from a couple snows ago.) There were still some clouds in the sky, but it was sunny and clearing, and beautiful. The photos don’t do it justice.

    The barn belongs to my neighbor, and is right over the line from my backyard. Their property goes from (looking from my backyard) the right of us, where their house is, and across the back, too. I forget how many acres they have. They’ve had cows and horses out there, but nothing recently, which is unusual for them. They also had pigs and goats at times.

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  11. So, should I who doesn’t like super hero movies see it? I’m tired of all this charges on FB that I’m a racist if I don’t 1 see it and 2. love it.

    Worried about my social standing . . .

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  12. Friends are telling me this alleged cold virus keeps going on and on and on, the cough in particular. Take another day of lying around DJ. It can’t hurt.

    In other news, Son #1 has been at empire training all week in Southern California. Adorable #4 said yesterday, “Daddy’s coming home tonight!”

    “Do you remember what he looks like?” I asked. He’s been gone five days.

    “Yes,” the kindergartner said. “He’s got short black hair {actually, cropped brown with a bald spot] and very furry arms all the way to his armpits.”

    I nodded before turning my head away to laugh.

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  13. Yes, it’s like the super cold. Colds typically come and go in 3-4 days for me, but now this one is on its 9th or 10th day. I’m glad I went to urgent care to rule out other possibilities, but sheesh.

    I’m not a fan of the superhero genre either so probably will pass on the latest film.

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  15. I hate touch screens! One stray finger hit the post button accidentally.

    This new movie seems an effort to avoid charges of racism against Hollywood. The previews don’t impress me in the least!

    There, I said it.

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  16. Michelle, you have made me feel so much better. If you, who was born in Southern California, traveled the world, lives in Northern California are a racist, then I won’t feel so misunderstood when I am called a racist.
    When I was in Anaheim, I met a black guy who lives in Los Angeles. Something was said about Birmingham, we connected and hugged each other in the middle of a huge group of people. I think the people I was with might have thought I was crazy.

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  17. Sadly, in today’s super hero comics and movies, political correctness, virtue signaling, and social justice topics are always present. It’s in all of them.

    But it does present teaching moments, and my teen has become quite adept at noticing when she’s being lectured. 🙂

    I’m now off to the comic book store with Elizabeth.

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  18. Michelle, I haven’t seen such FB posts. I went because I was hoping to see something of Africa again. The place gets under your skin. I sometimes remember so vividly what it was like, that I will gasp with the pain of having had to leave and being unable to return, and I was in a very small portion of that vast continent. The most beautiful parts of the film were the aerial shots, which were of real African landscape – I just wished those shots lasted longer.

    Peter, it tells a good story, and the social commentary arises out of the story rather than writing the story It does not feel forced, and, as I said, it doesn’t take the direction that you might expect. It is hard to explain what I noticed out of the context of the film, but I will say that the only two actors of European descent, both British – the delightful Martin Freeman, who plays a very nice CIA officer (it sounds an oxymoron, but it worked), and the extraordinarily talented Andy Serkis (the man behind Gollum in LOTR) as the lunatic South African front villain (the one who is noticeable up front, but isn’t the arch enemy), both pitch perfect in their roles (accurate accents included) – are well handled and the story conflict is not ‘black vs. white’. The previews are not the film. In fact, thinking of the action shots showed in the preview, namely the car chase, that part of the film was supposed take place (and was shot) in South Korea, and is probably the most throwaway episode in the whole film. The final showdown looks far different. Oh, and the background music to the preview is not in the film.

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  19. I have, via my Eldest Niece who is a Marvel fan and likes to talk about what she watches, been following the Marvel Avengers story arch. Black Panther came into that story arch in Captain America: Civil War. Like Thor, and Iron Man, and Ant Man, and Spiderman, and the Hulk, Black Panther was simply given his own backstory film and if a film is set in an African country, it stands to reason that the cast will look like they are from an African country. That is hardly virtue signalling. All the ‘you need to see it because of racism’ stuff that is being said is coming from the critics and other viewers, not from the film makers. They make films to make money, and if Black Panther was badly made, they wouldn’t make money.

    It occurs to me that some American viewers may associate the superhero Black Panther name with the historical Black Panther organization. The film explicitly and deliberately rejects such an identification. Let’s just say that the arch villain is the one who would most resemble a member of the 1970’s Black Power movement.

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  20. Roscuro – Chickadee and the McK sisters are into the Marvel superheroes. I’ve seen some of the movies, but after a while it seemed there were too many to keep up with. I think my favorite were the Iron Man movies, due to Robert Downey, Jr.’s portrayal, but I’m not sure I’ve seen them all.

    Mentioning that Chickadee and the McK sisters all like those movies reminds me of the fact that “Aspies” often take on the traits and preferences of their close friends. All three ladies, since their teen years, have been into Pokemon, Marvel movies, anime, manga, etc. I’ve often wondered if she bonded with them because of their shared interests, or if she developed those interests because they had them. (I tend to suspect the latter.)

    This is not an endorsement of The Big Bang Theory TV show, which I don’t watch, but. . . Chickadee and Nightingale both enjoyed the show. Then the McK sisters told Chickadee that the show is really making fun of the nerd characters, and she decided she didn’t like it anymore.

    She and I enjoyed watching the PBS series Sherlock. Then the McK sisters told her that the producer (or someone important in the making of the show) seems to hate women, and that is why there were no strong women in the show, So she didn’t want to watch the last season with me.

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  21. If you’ve read Mrs. OC, would you mind writing a review on Amazon for her? The publishers and Amazon watch that number of reviews closely and much better things happen with a book if there are more than 100 reviews. She’s only got 58 right now.

    I don’t care what you say; even 1 star is better than no stars to the Amazon lords.

    Thank you.

    Liked by 4 people

  23. Roscuro,

    It’s not the looking like Africans from Africa that’s the virtue signaling. That’s expected, in fact required to stay true to the Black Panther backstory. But there are still signals aplenty being sent, just as an example, the “struggle” the lead character and his wealthy, tech driven country face in whether or not it’s the right thing to share their technology with the world, or hold it for themselves.

    As a huge fan of comics, I can safely say, it’s everywhere. Marvel and DC are notorious for it. It’s also why they had to gay up the superhero genre now too. It’s expected. Black Panther actually took some heat for removing some possible lesbian references from the movie, which were actually referenced in characters comics prior..

    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/20/black-panther-hailed-diversity-has-no-gay-characte/

    “Marvel Studios‘ “Black Panther” is being hailed as the most diverse superhero movie in Hollywood history, but it’s not diverse enough for some progressives who want to know: Where are all the gay characters?

    The latest comic-book-to-film adaptation checked off a number of identity boxes with its almost exclusively black cast and cohort of strong female characters. But filmmakers ditched a lesbian romance subplot from the original comic books, prompting an outcry from the LGBT community.

    Actress Florence Kasumba stoked the flames of outrage when she revealed that scenes of lesbian flirtation filmed during production were left on the cutting-room floor.”

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  24. This is what it looked like here yesterday.

    Today it’s high 40’s and the snow is almost gone. Folks in the Poconos are still buried though.

    Liked by 3 people

  25. Except for the fact that it’s just below freezing here, we are in the midst of a blizzard. It’s beautiful out (now that we’re home again). I can’t believe my daughter has had to drive ambulance on some of the worst winter roads I’ve seen in only her second year as paramedic.

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  26. Michelle – I just wrote a brief review, but I don’t know if it came up. If it does, it might come up in Hubby’s name. After submitting it, I thought it strange that it didn’t ask for a name, and then noticed that I was on Hubby’s Amazon account.

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  27. What AJ wrote about movies and shows needing to “gay up” their products brings up something that I find annoying, and a little distressing.

    It seems almost every TV show or movie is required to have gay, lesbian, and/or trans character. Even my beloved Call the Midwife, taking place in the late 50s to early 60s, had to introduce a lesbian couple, and when they were discovered by one character, that nurse was sympathetic and understanding.

    Now in the recently finished season of Victoria two young men were portrayed as gay and in love, and again, when a character discovers this, she is understanding and accepting. But it turns out that the two men, in real life, were a couple decades apart in age (or close to it), and may have never met.

    (Note: I am not against being sympathetic to actual gay people. My point is that the attitudes towards homosexuality were harsher in the past, and it was unlikely that others would have been so understanding and accepting.)

    Speaking of Victoria, a secret that comes out is that Leopold, uncle to both Victoria and Albert, is really Albert’s father. Does anyone know if there is any truth to that? (I bet Roscuro would know. 🙂 )

    But that leads into another subject, which is that these historical dramas, including The Crown, which many of us have enjoyed, often twist facts and present real people as very different from who they were. That is disappointing, although I know they are really for entertainment, not documentaries.

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  28. The Real, in the context of American culture, perhaps the wealthy country’s struggle could be seen as ‘virtue signalling’ if one interprets it as somehow being a swipe at the U.S. But I cannot think of a technology that the U.S. has that the rest of the world does not have. The fact is that the countries in Africa do have such questions, as some are richer in natural resources and some are more politically stable than other. They are very much involved with each other and have expectations of one another – when the former President of the Gambia was refusing to step done, its bigger, wealthier, and more stable neighbour Senegal was prepared to make him do so, and the other West African leaders were also actively involved. That is how things work there, both in villages, where a family dispute will often have the village elders negotiating, and also in nations. As I said, the background to the story made sense, and I meant in an African context, which was what I was looking for.

    The subtle signal I noticed wasn’t one that would necessarily be popular among the politically correct. That is that the villain, with his imported ideas, didn’t belong in Africa.

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  29. Kizzie, do you mean Leopold I, King of Belgium? I don’t know one way or another, since historical chroniclers do not generally engage in fruitless gossip and if a child was baptized as so-and-so’s son, there shouldn’t be reason to think he wasn’t. According to Wikipedia, Albert’s parents were unhappily married and were divorced, and she married a former lover, which wasn’t Leopold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert,_Prince_Consort

    Whenever I think of Leopold of Belgium, I think of Leopold I’s son, also Leopold. He was a horrible man, who owned the Congo Free State personally and ran it as a company to produce rubber. Some ten million are thought to have died under his regime, which enacted forced labour on the inhabitants and inflicted brutal punishments for failing to meet production quotas. In recent conflicts in the Congolese region, people have been horrified at the mutilations carried out between warring factions, particularly the cutting off of hands – such practices were the legacy of Leopold II’s company. It was missionaries who reported the atrocities to the Western world, causing general opinion to turn on Leopold and leading the Belgian parliament to interfere and make Leopold relinquish his stranglehold on The Congo. There is are multiple veiled references to Leopold’s infamous company in late Victorian literature, among them the backstory to Captain Nemo of the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, who tells the Professor of how his country was taken over by a brutal European power who killed his family.

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  30. Oh, see those chairs in the final shot of AJ’s video? Scene right out of the dog park …

    Contemporary political and social messages have long been a staple of modern-day Hollywood, enjoying a heyday in the 1960s and 1970s — and I sense (from what I’m seeing at any rate) that it’s perhaps gaining more popularity once again since the last US election. In most cases, one can expect and overlook those messages. If it’s too heavy-handed. the choice is not to watch that particular show or film.

    ‘Blue Bloods’ last night featured the DA’s daughter as a new intern standing up to a predatory boss. Not overdone, and using current issues in these plots is understandable.

    Gay characters increasingly are standard fare on TV, as Kizzie mentioned.

    SWAT, a show in its first year, is a bit more heavy handed on the political messaging (though I don’t watch it that often). And Law & Order has been sometimes notorious for hammering audiences over the head with its writers’ world view — ministers and priests as secret killers, political conservatives as hypocrites and especially wicked (and often murderers as well), the wealthy as sinister figures (and, yes, usually also the guilty ones cuffed in the end).

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  31. I’m a bit groggy after another 2-hour nap, but was hoping to bundle up and make it to the dog park today. I still may try. No rain today, which was disappointing. 😦 But I believe rain may have fallen in areas to the east and north of us – and more snow in the mountains. Late ski season here.

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  32. Roscuro – Thanks. I hadn’t found anything that would lead one to believe that Leopold was Albert’s father, which led me to believe it was just more fictional fodder for the TV show. I wish they wouldn’t do that. It strikes me as a kind of slander.

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  33. DJ – I watched that episode of Blue Bloods today, and as soon as Nicki (or however she spells her name) was talking to her new cool boss, I suspected where the story would lead. But I think they handled it well. And I respected her desire to handle it herself.

    I wonder if Tom Selleck, with his conservative/libertarian views, has any sway over the tone of the show. Sometimes it takes a more conservative view than other shows might.

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  34. Does anyone else watch both Victoria and The Crown? Have you noticed that the same actor plays Leopold and Edward, Duke of Windsor?

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  35. Interesting topics here today.

    I was really feeling burned out at the office today. We had no late appointments so I left early knowing there will be catch up work to do all next week.

    Maybe I can write a minuscule review, Michelle, but I can hardly do it justice right now. I have started so many books and have not been able to finish reading them although most are quite good. Art does not read in the car since it seems we need two sets of eyes to watch the traffic that seems more aggressive than ever in Atlanta. We would listen to audio books, but for some reason, the inside of our Honda is noisy, and we can’t hear audio books well enough to listen. I miss reading. I miss doing crochet. I miss writing. I miss Miss Bosley. I miss talking to Karen and being her encourager. April 17th…countdown.

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  36. In addition to the aloe juice, we are finding rosehips as a supplement and tea (rosehips with hibiscus) has worked well to keep up our immunity against colds. The tea is sold to enhance the skin, and I notice the day after drinking it that my skin feels smoother. That is like when I feed Miss Bosley the Rachel Ray salmon dried food instead of the chicken, her fur is very sleek and soft. I find all these products at Sprouts. Rosehips were used during World War II to supplement the diets of the children who could not get enough nourishing food during wartime.

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  38. Kizzie – It is a kind of slander, and few will hear the refutation. G. K. Chesterton was concerned about historical films for that very reason:
    “A false film might be refuted in a hundred books, without much affecting the million dupes who had never read the books but only seen the film. [From ‘About the Films’ in the essay collection As I was Saying]

    I do not watch many TV shows simply because I do not like stories which lack any real resolution, and with season after season, characters dying out and coming into the story, few TV shows ever do resolve. But I would be even more cautious of a TV show that was based on a historical character. Docu-dramas are probably the better to watch about historical figures and events, though even there, facts can be sensationalized out of all proportion to their historical importance.

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  39. Blue Bloods is a refreshingly balanced show. What other 21st Century show has a family which eats Sunday dinner together (4 generations!) and shows them praying? Not many, for sure.

    As for the homosexualization of TV, I stopped watching Supergirl when one of the main characters started a Lesbian relationship. Ugh! I don’t even like it when they show heterosexual couples enjoying each other (for lack of a better way to say it).

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  40. Kizzie- Tell your daughter to tell her friends that the reason there are no strong female characters in Sherlock is because Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the original stories, didn’t put any strong female characters. The wife of Watson (Mary, I think her name is) does not appear much in the books, but in the TV show they make her out as a very strong character, changing the original a lot in that respect. Obviously her friends didn’t notice that character.

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  41. Peter – After watching the last season, I told Chickadee about Mary’s part in it, and the fact that Mrs. Hudson mentioned owning other properties. (I think there was something else about Mrs. Hudson, but I forget what it might have been.)

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  42. Roscuro – Watching historical fiction, depictions of real people and events (such as Victoria and The Crown), or documentaries on historical figures or events usually leads me to do some reading on their subjects.

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  43. Here’s a photo I just posted on Facebook, and what I wrote about it:

    “Years ago my mom gave me a pair of fingerless gloves to keep my hands warm in the winter. This year, they began to fall apart.

    So I went on Amazon to see what they had for fingerless gloves. These were perfect for me! I love bows and cute things.”

    https://scontent.fzty1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/28577114_2333996513292649_7024545516986808314_n.jpg?oh=37e3d62c53c19a358f85ba148c0608d0&oe=5B10387B

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  44. Eldest Niece and I have discussed the trend of creating homosexual characters. We agree that it often seems forced and out of place. Dorothy L. Sayers, in her book The Mind of the Maker observed that a literary character (every written character, whether in film, play, or book is literary) generally took on a life of his or her own and that to force that character out of that life would bend the story out of shape.

    In Black Panther, to portray the film’s strong female characters as lesbian simply because they were strong would have demonstrated a lack of knowledge of African culture. The tradition of strong African women goes back a long way. The Amazons of ancient Greek legend were supposed to have originated in Africa – Libya to be exact. The ancient Mandinka kingdoms of West Africa were matrilineal – in order to be king, one had to have married a woman of the royal line. The strength and confidence of West African women always impressed me. It takes great strength to carry a container of 10 or more gallons of water on one’s head, and I saw a girl of ten do that once; it takes great strength to split wood with the density of mahogany using an axe that looked like its design hadn’t changed in 5000 years, and I saw a visibly pregnant woman doing that once. Aji Suun once quipped that nothing frightened a West African man more than a crowd of angry West African women. Having an all female bodyguard, as the Black Panther does in the film, is a real African phenomenon – the late Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi had such a bodyguard, and then there were the women soldiers of Dahomey : https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/dahomeys-women-warriors-88286072/.

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  45. The only character who ever outwitted Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle’s stories was a woman, Irene Adler. I understand she is portrayed in the second season of ‘Sherlock’, but I only saw some of the first season.

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  48. Roscuro- Yes, Irene, or “That Woman” as she is called in both the show and books, is in the 2nd season. I didn’t like how she was portrayed, however. Too risque.

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  50. I had to look up “virtue signaling”: “The conspicuous expression of moral values done primarily with the intent of enhancing standing within a social group.” (Wikipedia)

    I’ve seen plenty of it, I just never heard the term before.

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  51. Anyone who doesn’t like largely make casts sure wouldn’t like Lord of the Rings (book or movie). But that’s how it was written, and it was an adventure story.

    Roscuro, like itself is like that, never having full resolution. You resolve who is going to marry whom, who will win that lawsuit, what job a person will have, what home to buy, whether the baby will survive the illness . . . but it’s on to a new challenge.

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  52. We enjoy Blue Bloods too. I was disappointed though that they killed off Linda. I understand it was because the actress wanted to leave the show. Back in the day they sometimes replaced one actor with another, but I guess they don’t do that any more. It might be hard for the audience to accept that change. But I would rather have had that than lose Linda.

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  53. In Chicago, a housemate and I nearly always watched ER. (We usually didn’t watch any other TV, but that one was set in Chicago and well done.) The stupidest aspect of that show was that nearly all the doctors and nurses were represented as single (the one exception was a man presented as a loser, and unsexy), and they were constantly dating one another. Periodically they would have an episode featuring a date, and they would soon end up in bed. We’d turn off the TV and turn it back on in 20 or 30 minutes, and they’d still be in bed. We learned that if we needed to turn it off, that episode was done.

    Several seasons in, one of their minor characters was shown to be a lesbian. They brought it into the storyline a bit (though not much) by having a female doctor pondering whether she herself might be a lesbian, and the other character let it be known she would willingly date her if she ever figured it out. It was a minor part of the storyline, annoying but little more.

    They ended the season with meaningful eye contact between those two women. I knew the whole next season would feature their “love story” and I didn’t turn it on a single time the next season (I had just moved to Nashville, or maybe it was my last year in Chicago) and rarely watched it in subsequent seasons, either.

    But it also did something else to me. I grew up not making good eye contact, didn’t really think about it until it was pointed out by someone doing a recommendation for me to get into a course I took at 18, and I strove to unlearn it. And here I was, half a lifetime later, being shown a scene in which two women making eye contact was the hint to viewers that they were going to have a “love” affair the next season. As I moved to Nashville, I had to fight against discomfort at looking any woman in the eye lest she misunderstand my look. Intellectually, I knew that was silly, and here I was in my mid-thirties and not desperately impressionable . . . but a few seconds of film managed to convey lust between women by showing nothing more than lingering eye contact, and it took a few months for me to get past it.

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  54. Good Sunday morning! I am looking forward to church this a.m.

    I think the cow fell in the ditch at work yesterday so I am pondering whether or not to work to salvage it later today.

    We begin our church wide study of Experiencing God this morning. It will be difficult for me to do a big workbook study at this time of year, but I will invest an effort to keep up.

    I looked through Michelle’s reviews and saw several from our blog family members. ❤

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  55. I have a friend who used to call all of her female friends her girl friends. Her husband didn’t want to go to her 30th class reunion, she didn’t want to go alone, so she dragged me along. She introduced me to the people I didn’t know as her girl friend, Kim. You should have seen the eyebrows go up and heard the not so subtle questions to clarify that statement. I think it was made even funnier because I had bought a really nice pair of jeans that were too long for me and had realized it would change the shape to have them hemmed, and somehow they fact she was wearing jeans I gave her added to the confusion.

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  56. This may have already been addressed on news and politics, I have not been around as much. The family in the “box”. Why exactly, were they arrested? I like what it appeared but don’t know if there is more. A couple (husband and wife? father/daughter?) lost their home and moved onto property in the dessert (was it theirs?) They had a trailer and built a shelter. Much larger than a tent. They dug holes for outhouses. They had plenty of food and they had water. The children had food, shelter, and room to roam. I don’t know if they were receiving an education in books or not. But an education can be made out of library books.

    If the same family was living in the city with the other fifty thousand or whatever homeless, they would have been offered all sorts of support. Along with the opportunity to endanger the lives of their children, learning to urinate and defecate on the sidewalk, and all the other fun that comes with being homeless in the city. Instead, the parents took them to a safer area and one that probably cools down at night better than the city.

    What actually, is the crime? Being poor? Not living like other people? If it is truancy, wouldn’t they be given notice and possibly a fine first? I am baffled.

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  58. Okay so not the dessert but the desert. It still bothers me. Nobody was being held captive or forced into anything. Now, the children are probably in foster care and, while there are good homes there, there are also some really bad ones. The children are now being exposed to all sorts of things the parents probably would have preferred they not be exposed to.

    And that other family, with the malnourished children. Those children are going to have some significant mental issues, Throwing them into modern society so abruptly is probably going to cause them even more damage.

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  59. The box family was actually living my idea for the solution to the homeless challenge. Let people live outside the city so they can have fresh air, not so much crime, etc.

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  60. Kevin, yes, poor Linda, that was pretty sudden. I think it ‘happened’ over the summer break and we slowly had to figure it out with flashbacks in the first couple shows of the new fall season. She was just Gone. Stunning.

    Kizzie, I suspect they realize their audience is likely of a more conservative bent. There are some more liberal story lines here and then but, yes, overall I’d categorize Blue Bloods as a more conservative show with values that are more familiar to some of us. Pretty straight arrow.

    Never saw ER (sounds like I didn’t miss much). Yes, spare me that kind of show. I actually didn’t watch much tv during my college years or in the 2-3 decades following, although I did tend to go out and see (real) movies much more often than I do now. Too busy with life for tv and so many of the shows, especially the “comedies,” struck me as vapid and yes, with too many not-that-funny sexual innuendos. Guess the dramas were worse, based on ER. I still stay clear of “comedies.” But there are some good programs out there in the NCIS vein.

    The best, of course, is “This is Us.” Can’t say enough good things about that show.

    I’m staying in from church although I do think I may (at last) be feeling better. Not great — I’m still coughing and as of late yesterday have a very sore throat. But I’m not as congested in my sinuses. It’s back to work for me tomorrow, ready or not, so I think I’ll try to lay low for one more day to try to kick this thing.

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  61. Here’s a link to the story mumsee was referring to:

    http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-joshua-tree-couple-20180302-story.html

    Friends say Joshua Tree couple is extremely poor, not abusive

    ________________________________

    The plywood shelter is covered with tin and an aqua kiddie pool.

    Twigs and mattress stuffing line the roof, apparently for insulation. Nearby, in this remote stretch of desert just outside Joshua Tree National Park, canned food sits on shelves beneath a camping stove. There is a trampoline and many children’s toys, bikes and storybooks on the ground.

    A San Bernardino county sheriff’s deputy was patrolling here this week when he discovered a family with three children living in the shelter.

    The children, 11, 13 and 14, slept for four years in the 4-foot-tall makeshift home of about 200 square feet, authorities said. The land had no electricity or water. There were holes filled with trash and human feces around the property.

    … Authorities initially reported that the children were living “in a box,” and the situation drew comparisons to the Turpin case, in which 13 children were found living captive in their parents’ Perris home in January. Capt. Trevis Newport of the sheriff’s Morongo Basin Station later clarified that the children were not being held captive.

    “They’re homeless,” Newport said of the Joshua Tree family. “It’s a shelter, the shape of a box … nowhere near what it sounded like when it came out.”

    … Friends of the family say their situation is not at all one of criminal abuse, but of extreme poverty.

    They describe highly intelligent children who were involved in soccer and scouts and who were cared for as best they could by struggling parents.

    “The Sheriff’s Department is punishing those kids for being homeless,” said Leanna Munroe, who has known the family for nine years.

    The family owned the property where they lived, records show. …

    … On Friday, Jackie Klear, of Yucca Valley, visited the property to collect some of the family’s things for safe keeping. She said Kirk and Panico were not criminals, but were in need of help.
    The children, she said, “were very much loved.”

    Klear is the leader of the Phoenix Scouts, a local scouting group. The three children were members, she said. They attended weekly meetings, went camping and made crafts together, she said. On Christmas, the children marched in an annual parade with matching red sweaters and Santa hats.

    “I know this looks like crap,” Klear said, looking at the shelter. “But they were very well taken care of.” …

    The children were home-schooled, and the mother and her children were constantly at the library and the Hi-Desert Nature Museum in Yucca Valley, Klear said. The children were all well read and educated, she said. Klear described the father as a genius and said his oldest son was “just like him.” …
    __________________________________

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  62. I now admire this family much more than I ever did and I did a lot. They are doing an amazing job with those children. So, of course the State must step in! What was I thinking? Not only must we steal from the rich, but we must force the poor to accept our help.

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  63. The story of the family living in a tent reminds me of our situation in 1952. We had moved from Charleston (4th floor of a 3 story apartment). to a wooded lot my father bought.
    We lived in a tent house with no facilities. We had a pump for water and the woods for what else. We had a trash burner for heat. Mother washed our clothes and hung them in front of the heater to dry in the wintertime. We lived there while dad and Uncle Pete built a two room house next door. We then had an outhouse and a way to take a hot shower. (We built a fire around coiled pipes that heated stored water.
    My dad was a smart man, but he couldn’t handle money.

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  64. I agree that an excellent education is available at the taxpayer’s expense at the local county library.

    Church was wonderful this a.m. I feel extremely blessed to be in the small breakout group I landed in. I am doing much better with doing an introduction of myself than I use to do. I have always hated doing that kind of thing, but I think it flowed smoothly. I also have someone to help with the WMU program just when what I thought we would do fell through. I am highly encouraged by this.

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  67. Cheryl, life has resolution. It is the hope of resolution that Christians look forward to in the future, but even now, there are times of relief from trial, recuperation from sickness. A pregnancy generally ends in birth. A courtship often ends in marriage. A child stops growing when they become an adult. Sometimes, the ending might be tragic, but even a tragedy is a resolution. Life goes on, but different stories are told and resolved along the way. Television shows, on the other hand, have been known to wind up to a cliffhanger and then be cancelled the next season.

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  68. Ah yes, government-run libraries paid for by taxes, a feature of living in the wealthy West where governments run such superfluous social programs. It is a dangerous kind of wealth redistribution, taxing those wealthy enough to be property owners in order to buy books and upkeep an building to store the books and a pay a librarian so the homeless and other people who cannot afford their own home can read books and learn things. Why the poor might learn how to start a business or go to school to become a highly paid professional. The idea! Books neither feed nor cloth people and are not necessary for life. Surely, those who cannot afford to buy books of their own should simply work harder or be satisfied with no books at all. After all, in the good old days, when society was much more moral, the poor didn’t know how to read. They kept their place and didn’t get any ideas above their station. Teaching them to read and write was the beginning of this social decay, and making any kind of book available to them hos only hastened the end. Socialism has invented many evils but chief among them was the public library. The state should keep out of the business of book preservation and distribution.

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  69. The two salaried jobs that my mother worked were as a public school teacher and an assistant librarian – and she has absolutely no remorse for having taken money from the taxpayers in order to teach children whose parents couldn’t or wouldn’t give them private instruction. She was a good teacher – we have encountered former students who remembered her decades after she retired from teaching.

    Of course, I was homeschooled (some of my lessons were done in that public library where my mother worked) but my parents didn’t object to paying property taxes that would go to the school board. We were poor – my parents lived in a tent while they built their house, but the house was all closed in by the time any of us were born, although certain rooms were never completely finished – and the tax money was always a hardship to pay, but it was paid without repining. My siblings and I enjoyed being at the library, and reveled in the stream of books at our reading disposal – to this day, entering a library gives me a feeling of being in a safe place. The city library I have access to has the most wonderful things – I put up the photos on FB of their model of Gutenberg’s printing press, and almost every time I go up to the second floor, I can hear someone playing in the piano practice room – and I see a stream of immigrants, homeless, and everyone else go through that place. It is a hub of the community – I noticed, in community efforts in West Africa, that one of the things more successful communities were doing was to have a community centre, where the inhabitants could access general resources. Wealth does not only lie in material goods, but also in knowledge, and sharing knowledge is a type of wealth redistribution.

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  70. Which is why I am so baffled as to why these children needed to be removed from apparently loving parents who were seeing to their education in a fine acceptable way, partially supported with the property taxes they were paying on their property.

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  71. I have known several people who have lived a year or more in tents or cargo containers or abandoned homes they rented. I have known millionaires worried where the money for their property tax bill would come from. A lot of people pay to live like that. For all we know, the trash around the property was donated stuff from caring people, more than the family needed.

    Foster care is incredibly hard on children.

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  72. I made a trip to Home Depot and picked up new bulbs for the kitchen ceiling lights (there are 8 of them and 4 were out). Beautiful day out today, sunny and cool (60 degrees).

    Rescuer’s list of life’s resolutions reminded me actually of a current tv show — This is Us. 🙂 Russell Moore was among its early and enthusiastic fans (it’s now in season 2).

    Liked by 1 person

  76. I’ve long said it’s illegal to be poor in America, and that would seem to be Exhibit A. The idea that “neglect” (really limited means based on poverty) is seen as abuse is absurd.

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  77. Roscuro – I don’t think Janice’s comment about the library being available at taxpayer’s expense was meant as a complaint about that. Janice has often mentioned utilizing the library herself when she was homeschooling, and currently, too. I realize the wording could sound like how you seem to have taken it, but I really don’t think she meant it that way.

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  78. Cheryl – Years ago when I lived in Wisconsin, there was a case of a woman who had her children taken away because her electricity, and thus her heat as well, had been turned off because she couldn’t afford to make the payment. Someone remarked, and I agreed, that it would have been more humane, and probably cheaper, too, if the state had paid her electric bill and then found a way to help her continue to pay it.

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  79. There is a saying that it is expensive to be poor. If you get behind in your bills, there are expensive late fees tacked on. Discounts are often made for people who can afford to buy a lot of a product, but none for only being able to afford one at a time. Costco is great, unless you don’t have a car, or can’t afford to pay for items in bulk. Things like that.

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  80. I know I said I wasn’t going to mention YF anymore, but she posted something yesterday that had me shaking my head, and praying again.

    She shared something that claimed that the high divorce rate is actually a good thing, because it means that fewer people are staying in abusive marriages or bad relationships, and that it is also good that fewer young people are marrying, as that is a sign of positive social progress. (She also believes that it is harmful to remain a virgin until marriage.)

    I could understand an unbeliever having those socially liberal views, but a professed believer? Please pray with me that God will get a hold of this young woman’s heart and do a great redemptive work in her life. And the same for her sister, and for my daughters, and all your own loved ones who have been led astray in one way or the other. May God draw them all to Himself and change their hearts and minds.

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  81. It would have been much less expensive, in the long run as well as the short. If you can imagine social workers coming into your home, often with a police officer, swooping in and swooping out with you, leaving your mom and dad and your pets and your stuff except for maybe what fits into a grocery bag. A bunch of people pawing at you and fawning over you, giving you all sorts of things your parents didn’t, and then abruptly dropping you off in some emergency placement, only to pick you up again in twenty four hours, interrogating you, and then dropping you off somewhere else. What do you suppose that does for your trust. In the short and long terms?

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  82. No, Kizzie, I think Janice saw the same irony I saw. I agree that the family seems to have been ill treated, and I pray that right will be done. But the system that was being railed against for maltreating the family was the system that the family benefited from when using the library. Those property taxes pay for both the library and the office of the sheriff, do they not?

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  83. Sure there are good things the government does but that does not excuse the bad. I just wanted to know what the family did that warranted handcuffs and large bail and foster care. I am glad to see the community is pitching in to help, according to the Desert Sun.

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  84. I suspect the other case was hot in the minds of people and they overreacted. That does not take away the pain to the children. Hopefully, the parents will handle it well and not make the police and social workers into bad guys, but just people doing their jobs as they see it. That attitude will help those children.

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  85. Kizzie, I suspect your YF makes such posts after having read an article on the topic which has got her all fired up and so she makes a comment parroting whatever the article said on FB.The unhealthy to remain a virgin until marriage view is somewhat archaic. I do wish people would stop dragging defunct Freudian theories about sexual repression out of the dustbin of history – when I took an introductory psychology course in college, I distinctly remember the professor saying that Freud’s theories had been discredited and were no longer used.

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  86. Nice, one of our laid-off photographers is covering the Oscars tonight for Tribune on a freelance basis.

    He’s also now driving for Uber and making more money than he did with us, which isn’t a huge surprise.

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  87. I suspect authorities spotted the scene and reacted to make sure the children were safe.

    I’ve always thought we should be wary of both big government and big business.

    I put in the new ceiling lights in the kitchen — LED warm — and what a big difference it makes.

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  89. Mumsee, the bad does not negate the good either.

    When I was a child, I got sick with breathing problems nearly every spring, and my mother would take me to the doctor and the doctor would diagnose me with pneumonia and prescribe antibiotics, which my mother gave to me faithfully – I still remember the look and taste of that pink syrup. When I was eight, we went through the same routine, but this time, the medicine wasn’t helping me. My mother gave me a bath and noticed my feet were turning blue. She phoned the doctor, and got an appointment for that day. When the doctor saw me, she said I needed to go to the hospital. She offered to send for an ambulance, but the hospital was down the road from the doctor’s office, so my mother said she would drive me. I was admitted and placed under the care of the hospital pediatric specialist, who diagnosed me with asthma. While I was there, I witnessed a terrible scene of a mother weeping because her little boy, who had fallen when she was out of the room, was being placed with the Children’s Aid* agency. I became petrified that the pediatrician might do the same to me. I did not know it then, but when I went home, I learned that the pediatrician had called my mother out for not calling an ambulance, and had said that if I was not been homeschooled, I would have been diagnosed with asthma long ago. But that traumatic incident did not embitter me toward all the health profession. I actually wanted to be a doctor – but it was the nurses on the pediatric ward, two in particular, one man and one woman, who helped me get through my fear when my mother couldn’t be there, so perhaps it is fitting that ended up being my profession.

    *The Children’s Aid in Canada was originally formed to protect the Home children, who were impoverished children sent from Britain to have a ‘new’ life. The Home children were widely abused by the families they were placed with – in those days, a belief in eugenics insinuated that children from poor families had bad blood and the settler families of Canada, proud of their own successes in a land that afforded better opportunities, treated the Home children as lesser beings – and at least one woman was tried and acquitted by a jury of her peers of murder when the Home child in her care died in horrible conditions. My great grandfather, father to the grandmother who is still living, was a Home child. He was adopted by the family who he was placed with, but they never let him forget his supposed obligation of gratitude to them. An elderly man who attended the family church until he passed away was another home child – he, like my great grandfather, bore the emotional scars until the end of his life. The Children’s Aid was needed for these children, who had no one else to advocate for them. There are some systemic problems that have developed with Children’s Aid, but there are still very badly abused children – there was an infamous case not far from us, where two children were found locked in cages (they were let out during the day to go to school) – and they still need to be protected from those caregivers who rape, brutalize, and threaten their life.

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  90. Roscuro – I am obviously missing something in the discussion about libraries, because I thought you sarcastic comment about libraries being taxpayer-funded was aimed at Janice’s comment.

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  93. Pauline, I sure hope you do not have to go through a strike. We have been through several and they are very unpleasant to say the least. 😦

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  95. Hey, I’m not anonymous, what happened?? I’m Jo.
    Torrential rain this afternoon. I was planning on doing my running at school, which I did. But I did it inside my 75 foot long classroom.

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