69 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 3-8-18”

  1. Wait a minute, it is only 4 in the afternoon here. How did you all arrive on my day so early?? I haven’t even read the rest of this mornings thread.
    Well, Good morning however early you arrive.

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  4. Good morning!! Finally had time to catch up on the blog. I did get my taxes together last week, but have not taken them to the tax lady yet. That should be a task for tomorrow.

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  8. Kim. I hope you didn’t return the earnest money. That’s what it’s for. To cover expenses of preparing the documents. Whether used or not. It still has to be done.
    It’s like telling a waiter, “I didn’t really enjoy the meal, so I won’t pay the bill.”
    The waiter had to work just as hard.

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  9. Chas, Typically the earnest money is only $1,000. I try to get the seller to give it back and get the property back on the market. If they won’t, I try to get them to split it. Often I have to explain that if it goes to arbitration it will cost about $500 an hour for an attorney to be involved and an attorney does nothing for less than an hour. Often they see the light.
    The other Wild West situation yesterday was that one of my agents was sitting in a development Open House. Some people showed up, he showed them houses, got them in touch with a lender and an insurance agents. He worked with the builder to price out some modifications. The people left and showed back up a day or two later with another agent in tow who said if he wasn’t put on the contract he would take the buyers somewhere else. Now my agent is wondering if he has a procuring cause dispute because the builder and site manager to him he deserved the commission. I have had that happen to me where the builders agent took my client and told them the buyer’s agency agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. I didn’t want to be “that” agent that caused a scene, so it was too bad, too sad for me. This time there is more at stake and I will have to fight for my agent. He does deserve the commission.
    I am showing property this morning. I don’t know that the people are ready to buy, and that really is a waste of time, but it also cements relationships. It also beats sitting in an office all day solving problems. It is gorgeous but cold outside.

    In the category of Be Careful What You Pray For, we have a new Team Leader. He is one of our agents and a part owner in the Market Center. It was announced yesterday at an event and filtered back to our office. I think things were done the wrong way in doing that. I think “my” agents should have known first before it was announced anywhere else. There are several considerations to making him the TL. He is one of the Top Producers in the office and this takes him out of production. I don’t know how it will shake out, I pray it goes well. I like my job and have a contract through July. I don’t want to have to scramble to find something else.

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  10. Morning! It is a cloudy start to the day and rather chilly. I’m hearing folks back east are in the thick of snow and ice….if ya’ll can just blow it back west we would be thankin’ you kindly!! ⛄️

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  11. Good morning. We had a good WMU meeting yesterday although during setup time there was distress over there not being any coffee. Then someone arrived who knew where to find it. I had not considered that as the leader of the group that I would be the designated coffee supplier. I am learning by crisis management style. For years the same ladies did their same duties, but those ladies are not there now. I do not even know what kind of coffee anyone likes. I doubt they would like my preference of dark roast.

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  12. It is cool here with flower petals all over the ground so it looks like the mess when snow is partially melted. At least we have about half the blossoms left on the Birthday Tree for Monday. Tomorrow is our anniversary which we will spend together In the tax prep office.

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  13. Kim, I once found out who my new boss would be in a really unusual way. I was talking to a friend who didn’t work for our publisher, but in an affiliated organization. She commented one of her co-workers was leaving to come to our publisher. “Oh? Where will he be working?”

    “Management editor? Something like that.”

    “Managing editor. That means he’ll be my boss!”

    “Oops. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. But he’s a really good man. You’ll like working for him.”

    “I won’t tell anyone who told me.”

    My previous boss was heading out to go freelance (I thought she was nuts, had no hint I’d follow her someday), but she was still hanging around a bit, and I saw her a day or two later. I thought someone should know the word was getting out, and that they should announce sooner rather than later. So I went up to her and said softly, “It looks like they replaced you pretty quickly.” She laughed and then asked seriously did I really know, and I told her yes, and how I found out.

    Funny thing is that the man who told us he was coming announced it as how much time he had spent in the military, and how much experience he had had in hiring and firing, nothing at all about his ability to manage, and I fought back tears in listening because it sounded like he would be a really heavy-handed manager and that he in fact was being brought in to fire people. I knew my own job was not in jeopardy, but I still didn’t want to work for a boss like that–and in fact he was the best manager I have ever worked for, and great at bringing out the best in people. He and his wife also hosted a Christmas party in their home each of the three years he was our supervisor, he posted Dillbert comics outside his office, and I would overhear him on the phone to his wife periodically and it was clear they had a sweet relationship.

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  14. Since we’re talking “business,” my husband’s company, Cenveo, filed chapter 11 bankruptcy two weeks ago. They are a printing company at which a lot of hanky-panky occurred at the ownership and management level and who are now claiming that they were blindsided by the advancement of electronic media.

    Hubby turns 65 this month and could retire any time, so is not stressed by this but rather able to sit back and watch it unfold. His job is not in jeopardy until/unless they fold up permanently. His plant is consolidating with another (Lancaster), which is actually a shorter commute than he has now, although he’ll probably end up working from home most of the time.

    There are threats of investigations and lawsuits. It’s hard to believe they’ll pull out of this, but we shall see.

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  15. The header photo: when I went to our state park a week or two ago, I took the “long” trail, which ends up going around this pond/lake where I have seen muskrat at least twice, beaver once, and four species of ducks. I was hoping to have migrating ducks, or even to see muskrats before the plants at the edge of the pond green up and grow and it gets harder to see what is on the pond. Instead, just three pairs of Canada geese. But this time of year, pairs stay really close together, like this, so it is always really obvious which belongs to which, even with several pairs close together. In this case, there was enough room on the pond that I rarely saw the pairs close enough to interact, and the one time they were, there was no arguing between the pairs.

    Canada geese aren’t my favorite bird. They’re big, and loud, and can be aggressive, and in spring and summer they are everywhere around here, even in people’s front yards after a lot of rain. But they gave me some great shots.

    This one I like because of the patterns, all the way through to last year’s cattails in the foreground. I think the scene would be sterile without the geese, though. That life adds the perfect finishing touch bringing it all together.

    Canada geese come in multiple sizes, by the way. The largest ones were re-introduced to many states a number of years ago, with fear that they were a threatened species. Well, they are nowhere near threatened anymore, and what those who “introduced” them didn’t know or didn’t take into account is that Canada geese migrate in family groups. Ducks and geese lose all their flight feathers at the same time as they molt, and they are thus unable to fly for a few weeks. In Canada geese, it coincides with a time when their young cannot yet fly, so they are land-bound en masse. Once they all can fly (again) they fly around as a family. Eventually the family joins other families and migrates south for the winter. But hand-reared geese don’t make that first trip with their own parents, and so they don’t know to migrate . . . and they don’t. Thus Indiana and many other states have large, resident geese year-round, but smaller varieties that come through (some of them sticking around to breed) in spring and fall migrations. Canada geese prefer a mate around their own size, so the size categories stay in place and we continue with multiple sizes of the bird. The smaller, similar cackling goose was split off as its own few species/subspecies a few decades ago, but it has a bit of a different look to it, and I don’t know if I have ever seen one.

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  16. Good morning. I woke up feeling severely dizzy, and now I have several other symptoms that are not really severe, but are worrying. Hope whatever it is will pass by quickly – I don’t have time to be sick. I passed both my midterm exams, but have yet to get a mark for the term paper. But the two big group projects that I have to do, plus a myriad of smaller assignments will keep me quite busy for the last few weeks of the semester.

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  17. From yesterday: our terrier names were Fuzzy, Bruchko, and Barney. No food names for them, those names are reserved for edibles.

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  20. In more fire news, one of our friends got an estimate on the house they want to rebuild in Coffey Park–which was the area where teachers, firefighters, middle-management folks could afford in our sky rocket prices.

    He probably paid $175K for the house 30 years ago. To rebuild, without the simple upgrades they wanted, will cost $460K adding another $70-100K for the double sink in the bathroom, water over the stove, etc. Not major upgrades but upgrades all the same.

    Their son and young grandchildren recently moved to the Sierra foothills, a much less expensive place to live. He told them to start looking for property.

    “So will you cash out and go?” I asked.

    “My tax guy says I’m a fool if I do that. I have to build the house and sell it to be able to avoid tax problems. So, we’ll proceed. $350 a square foot to rebuild.”

    After he rebuilds, he’ll sell. He’ll be looking for close to $700K–because that $460K cost doesn’t even include the land.

    Travesty.

    And we’re so very, very sad.

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  21. Chas, sorry to say there are no grounds for coffee in Proverbs.

    We had goats named Cinnamon and Brown Sugar. The only dog my parents ever had (it was hit by a car as a puppy and my father never wanted another) was a Husky named Nanook, which is Inuktitut (an Inuit language) for ‘polar bear’. Years later, when the neighbour took in an Alaskan Malamute that he had found straying, on our suggestion, he gave her the same name.

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  22. no grounds for coffee.

    Oh, ouch.

    Linda, sorry about the company woes. They sound pretty familiar. In our case, the owner of the hedge fund that owns us is a 37-year-old guy who likes buying mansions in Florida. Everytime we have another round of cutbacks we all joke that he must have his eye on another mansion.

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  24. I see now that a hedge fund that has a minor interest in our company is suing the big hedge fund with the major ownership, charging they’ve gutted newspapers nationwide to finance some other very speculative deals. Who can keep up when the rich folks who ‘own’ you start to bicker amongst themselves?

    We had a terrier mix named Fritz — he came to us as a puppy and my mom thought sure he’d grow up to be a German shepherd. He was a funny little dog.

    And we had a big old tom cat named Tom. He “came with” the house we moved into when I was about 9. He’d vanish for days and come back beaten and battered (this was long before the spay-neuter days). Took us a good couple years before we could coax him inside.

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  25. phos:
    Boooooooooooooooooooooo

    Seriously now.
    I was taking a course on administration at Purdue. The professor, half joking, but to make a point, he said that lighting a cigar helps to give you time to think when you need a couple of minutes to think before answering. A woman asked abo9ut what she should do. He said “Beads”. A woman can wear a necklace of cheap beads she can break to cause a commotion and give her some time.
    But that is more radical than lighting a cigar.

    But a sip of coffee might be enough to give you a few seconds to think before speaking.
    Everyone needs a couple of seconds to think before speaking.

    That is Trump’s big problem. He is smart, but his mouth proceeds his brains.
    He is making a speech, “We will build the wall”. Great applause. And without thinking, “And we’ll make Mexico pay for it>” Tremendous applause. So he doubles down. “We”ll make Mexico pay for it.”
    You and I know that the Marines will be in the Halls of Montezuma before Mexico pays for a border wall. But he is stuck with it.

    And he makes an enemy for life when he says about John McCain. “I like people who weren’t captured>” Sheer nonsense.

    Everyone needs a coup0le of seconds to think.

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  26. Dog names:
    Whip the Wonderdog (stray that stayed)
    Igor
    Mowgli
    He Dog
    Shera
    Mickey
    Fuzzy
    Bruchko
    Alvin
    Banjo
    Brutus
    Betty
    Barney
    Jake

    Cat names:
    hey stupid
    hey stupid
    hey stupid
    hey stupid
    just kidding:
    Earl of Leicester
    Lady Jane Grey
    Ginger
    Snoopy
    Hazeleleponi
    Snowball
    Midnight
    Little One
    Bob

    Notice, these are not edible animals. Not once, in nearly sixty years of pet ownership.

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  27. My dogs were named “Rex” and “Pal”. Both died aft4er I had them about six months. I was heartbroken. I never had another dog.
    I didn’t know that animals had doctors in those days.

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  29. Well, technically, ginger was not my cat, it belonged to the family. And Snowball came with the name. But I will concede defeat. We can now eat cats. But not dogs.

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  33. Sixteen daughter is attempting to make Rice a Roni. It is very complicated for her. She struggles with pour in the water while stirring. But she will get it done and be that much more capable.

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  34. Dogs:
    Sam
    Huck
    Hot Shot
    Eustace
    Digory
    OC
    Blue
    Blackie
    Brownie
    Hank
    Hannah

    Cats:
    Gallahad
    Black Knight
    Lancelot
    Loines
    Amerigo
    Vespusi
    Sylvester
    Teddy
    Tuffy
    Tiger
    Pretty Kitty
    Leo
    Sophia
    Black cat

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  35. The new header photo is the third pair of geese landing. They are big heavy birds and have quite a splashdown. I don’t remember if they need to land on water (like swans do), but I imagine they at least prefer to do so.

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  38. Dogs: Bowser (I don’t remember him)
    Snoopy: Half Collie half German Shepherd
    Beauregard the Duke of Marlowe: Smartest dog ever to live. Also know as Marlowe the Wonder Dog. He was my baby for 7 years before BG showed up and wrecked his world.
    King Amos Isaac: He needs no explanation.
    Lulabelle: She’s going to be a good dog one day.

    Cats: Lucy, Jill, Grey Kitty, Callie Leigh, oh and Mo. All loved me except Mo. We tolerate each other.

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  41. Oh, I had envisioned them sitting on their bar stools, smoking pipes as they mapped out the world for the others to go explore. But that’s okay, they sound good the way they were.

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  42. OK, the exhaustive list:

    Cats:

    Smoky
    Tom
    Nancy
    Liz
    Keeety
    Annie Oakley

    Dogs:

    Blackie
    Snoopy
    Queenie (the real German shepherd)
    Fritz
    Annie (as in Little Orphan but she was big, a shepherd mix)
    Mercy
    Ellie May
    Pilgrim
    Tess
    Cowboy Blue

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  43. We had a Diggory! (Gorgeous Golden Retriever German Shepherd mix)
    Blackie (obvious) (black lab)
    Sebastian (Lhaso Aphso/Chow mix)
    Suzie (Gordon Setter)

    Cats, only 3 in 40 years:
    Cleo
    Kali
    Tosha

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  44. Annie Oakley is the only cat I’ve had on my own, the others were ones I grew up with. We usually only had 1 at a time but sometimes 2 would overlap.

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  47. Dogs: As a child, Baron and Snoopy. I adopted a dog and named her Nicole, but ended up giving her away as I was single and jobless and couldn’t afford it.

    We had a cat named Mordecai that we adopted. It was a mean tomcat that ran away and was last seen pestering a German Shepherd, just out of reach of the dog’s chain.

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  48. My aunt and uncle had a dog named Zachariah, mostly called Zack, so when they got another dog they just used the next on the list of minor prophets, Obadiah, shortened to Obie.

    I cannot remember the names of all our goats, as kids were born nearly every year, but Cinnamon and Brown Sugar were the matriarchs of our little herd. The only chickens that received names were the occasional rooster – we had a Banty rooster once who required you to be quite good in your defense reflexes, as he attacked anything passing by, but I forget his name. I don’t think we named our Muscovy ducks anything either – the last of those died a gruesome death at the jaws of the neighbour’s dog. Muscovy ducks have quite dramatic light and dark feathering, and thereby hangs a funny story. One Muscovy duck was setting some eggs in a separate little cage that had a hinged door. She would come out occasionally, so the door would be left open during the day. Well, at twilight one evening, my father went out and shut all the birds in their cages. The next morning, when my mother went out to feed the animals, there wasn’t a duck in the small cage. There was a skunk. In the dim light, its stripes had looked like the duck’s markings. All the eggs were gone of course, but we always checked twice before shutting the birds in after that.

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  50. “Tom” just seemed to fit. He was gray & huge, semi-feral, looking beat up a good part of the time. I used to try to pretend he was Lassie, but it was a stretch.

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  51. Interesting pet’s names here.

    This is my list:

    Dogs:
    Joe (Border Collie – my grandpa’s dog that he said could be mine but would have to stay on the farm)
    Taffy
    Bear
    Kitten ( a huge black shepherd, husky, lab, chesapeake cross)
    Sam (found German Shepherd)
    Kariboo (Canadian Eskimo)
    Keva (Afghan hound/poodle cross)
    Duke (boxer)

    Cats:
    Priscilla
    Katya
    Keelie
    Karl
    Kchu
    Zeke

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  53. Cats: none

    Dogs: Rusty (briefly), Cricket (cocker mix), Miss Tennessee

    Guppies: Skippy, Peter Pan, My Prince Charming, Irene, and I don’t remember the others

    Assorted other fish, including a swordtail named Sword who ended up getting flushed down the toilet since he was always backing up and stabbing the other fish, and they were getting quite jittery.

    Horned toads: Rusty and Rosey

    Crayfish: Crabby, Grouchy, Itzie, Bitzie

    The goats and chickens were before my time, something my older brothers experienced but I didn’t. One of my older brothers had a hamster; the rest of these were my pets or in some cases family pets.

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  59. Our horse was called Rebel. She came – courtesy of the neighbour whose dog we helped to name – with that name, and it was something of a misnomer, as she was very gentle and careful with small children, of whom there were two (I was one) in the household at that time. Only during the spring did she act up and then only with an adult on her back. We only had her for one spring, as she got hoof problems from the constant wet that our property, which backs onto swamp, is in spring (also, the drug dealers next door had pit bulls which would come and chase her, though I never remember them bothering the goats). We had to board her with our farming friends, and my parents struggled to pay the vet bills, so the decision was made to sell her to a camp where other children could enjoy riding her.

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  61. Cats (when I was growing up): Stripey, Koshka (I always imagined it spelled Kushka, but I remember it was supposed to be Russian for cat, and I just looked it up and it says that Koshka is the word for a female cat. We probably mispronounced it, plus I seem to remember that cat having been a male. Maybe the people who gave it to us thought they had a female when they named it. Or maybe I just remember wrong, so many years later)

    Dogs: Mandy (short for either Melinda or Amanda, she was officially either Melinda Amanda or Amanda Melinda, but we just called her Mandy), Fritz, Duke, and our current dog is Kyra.

    As a young adult, in the mid-1980’s, I lived briefly with a family who got a puppy they named Charles Barkley. Some years ago when I bought a dog hand puppet to use in Sunday School, I adapted that idea and named him William Barkley, or Will Bark for short. (I also had William Barclay in mind, since my husband makes frequent use of Barclay’s commentaries.)

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  62. I guess I could also have listed the gerbils we had when I was growing up, but I can’t remember them all. The mommy and daddy were David and Julia, and after the third litter, David went back to the pet store along with all of his male progeny. (David was sold to us as a female, and David wasn’t his name initially, but after Julia got pregnant we had to rename him.)

    A few years ago, my husband officiated at the wedding of a couple named David and Julia. I found it a bit disconcerting, since the combination of those names always evokes memories of gerbils.

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  63. Remember pet names was a pleasant diversion from the news I just got by email. Our union president let us know that the strike authorization vote showed overwhelming support for authorizing a strike. 😦

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  64. My brother and his family had a basset named Charles Barkley! That was in the 90’s though. I remember because my sis in law was very excited to come visit us at our last place and thought it terribly cute that her basset was trying to herd my donkeys. And was running under one of them. And I told her that people keep donkeys because they will kill coyotes and strange dogs in their pasture. He survived, I think they had figured out he was a visiting pet. I am not fond of people coming to visit and thinking it cute when their dog chases my livestock, but it happens and I get over it. I am glad Barkley did as well.

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  66. That’s too bad, Pauline. I’m glad that so far our union has not had a strike vote. But the Quincy AFT union has voted a few times recently, but never had a strike.

    On a lighter note, I just finished the Jeopardy! online test. I had to wait until 10:00 PM, though, but this was the only night of the 3 I could take it.

    Ironically, the “dreaded” opera question was about “The Magic Flute”, asking who wrote it. The irony is that I had Mozart organ music playing while taking the test. Baroque music, especially Mozart and Bach, is supposed to be good for the brain. It must have worked, as I feel confident that I got over 35 of 50 correct. I think 35 is the cut off number. At any rate, I know of 5 that I had no clue about.

    So, Kevin, did you take it this time?

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  69. Peter, I like listening to Baroque music while I do things like balance the checkbook or plan lessons. I just put in a CD of music by Bach (usually) or Handel or Vivaldi, and it keeps me invigorated for the task, without being distracting.

    P.S. Just a little FYI: The Baroque era was considered to have ended around 1750, the year J.S. Bach died. Mozart was born in 1756 and is known as a Classical Period composer. But his music makes good background music for activities requiring mental concentration, too. 😉

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