50 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 3-13-18”

  2. Someone is on a roll. I don’t usually check the blog at 4:39pm. Welcome to my day. Torrential rain here began just as school was letting out. Wondering how the rest of the employees are going to get home. The rivers are rising rapidly. Even our basketball court was flooding as we tried to yell at the children who persisted in playing down there after school.

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  4. Folks don’t seem to be up quite as early around here. Rain stopped just before dark. I went to Bible study. I even drove, though it was only two houses away. Just felt safer.

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  5. Since the earthquake I am much more intentional about things. Like where I put my keys before I go to bed. We double lock the outside door, so that you cannot even open it without your key. This place is secure.
    Good night all.

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  6. Morning! Is there a Waldo in that photo up there? I can’t see him, but those woods do remind me of my uncle’s woods in Ohio. My cousins would hunt for rabbit and squirrel in woods like that.

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  7. Poured rain all night. I didn’t fall asleep until late, so I switched the alarm from 5 to 6 and told God if He wanted me at the gym, to wake me at 5. I woke at 5:07 . . .

    Listened to the rain and stayed in bed praying for an hour. It was good, though I still feel a little guilty. I told Him if there was sunshine in the afternoon I’d take a needed walk. We’ll see.

    The next 8 hours are filled with activities and meetings. The Bible study this morning is on the Lord’s Prayer. It’s hard to see something new there, so I may have us spend more time praying.

    And so I’m off. Adorables calling . . .

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  8. Good morning. A normal day — the kind that has been in short supply lately — with nothing but domestic tasks to do here. No place I need to go, no music lessons or rehearsals or things to do with anyone other than family. It’s been s-u-p-e-r-b-u-s-y lately!

    Have a great day, all.

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  9. I was up shortly after 6 to move stuff around, I’m hoping dog park worker can move out that giant TV cabinet and a couple other big pieces today, but we’ll see. At any rate, I wanted to clear everything out around the area — one more bookcase to unload and shift. …

    The patio looks much better. The garage, for now, again, looks much worse.

    It’s supposed to start raining again here around noon and go through the night, but I don’t think it will be heavy along the coast. Then more to come either this weekend and/or early next week. Guess we’re making up for all our lost rain during the normal rainy season. Better late than never. I made an appointment to get my taxes dropped off on Saturday. The hunt for paperwork begins.

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  11. Food for thought for the day:

    Yesterday I found an article about stress in undergraduate music majors, and the author mentioned one of her sources as this article: The relationship between job stress, burnout and clinical depression, from The Journal of Affective Disorders. Some of you may be interested in reading this, especially if you or loved ones are in a helping profession like nursing, teaching, social work, or another helping profession, or if you’re feeling stress, burnout, or depression while in your particular sphere of influence, whether at home, work, church, community, or really any place.

    Click to access 4_Fountoulakis_buroutreview.pdf

    Burnout is a problem more common in modern times than generally believed. It has a large impact on both individual and society. Empirical research suggests that burnout and depression are separate entities, even though they may share several common characteristics. Especially in the more severe forms of burnout, and in individuals that have a vulnerability trait to develop burnout (because they receive low satisfaction from work, even in the absence of burnout), it seems that depressive and burnout symptomatology share similar ‘qualitative’ characteristics. This final issue needs further clarification and should be the focus of future research.

    Burnout is difficult to prevent. It is necessary to emphasize team work and to provide with positive psychological feedback which is necessary for the working person in order to feel satisfied from work. Many times it is necessary to change positions and duties frequently, so as to keep the person interested in work. However, this shift should not be too frequent and it should respect the qualification of the person (i.e., it is wrong to de facto downgrade someone just to change his position). Also the early recognition of depression development and of comorbidity are essential because they lead to early full treatment.

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  13. I hesitate to ask, because someone will say it has been up for weeks.
    But. Does NancyJill have a new gravitas?
    Nice, If I didn’t know better, I would think it was a Carolina girl.

    😉

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  14. Oh Chas! I changed it yesterday…I thought I should update and quit hiding behind Lulah’s face! 😜 and I suppose I am kind of a Carolina girl…part of my heart will always be there

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  15. Well, the game camera photos are in for the day. Lots of cats eating. But when they were not eating, lots of mice and rats eating out of their dish. What? I put it up on a table on the deck to get it away from the mice. The next night I moved the table away from the big box so they could not climb up. I am guessing they are climbing up the cherry tree, going out to the ends of the branches and dropping to the table. I watched one make lots of peerings down over the edge in different places, must have finally decided to jump down. No way they could climb up or down. I ask again, with three cats, why are there mice eating out of their bowl? But it is fun to see their ingenuity. As long as it does not bring them into my house.

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  16. There was a horrible wreck on I-10 this morning. It took 2 hours for me to get to work. A busload of students went off of a bridge at 6:15am. One confirmed dead, one critical, multiple injuries. All I can think about is the parents who are at least 7 hours away having to make the trip into the unknown.

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  17. Good morning! Miguel will be off to therapy in a bit. The boy and I have lots of work planned for the day. I had been a weekend wife for so long, that it is hard for me to get going on projects while Miguel is in the house. I made it a point to spend all my time with him when he is home. I have got to get crackin’ on some things, or we will be in trouble. I work a lot of shifts the next 2 weeks, so today and Friday are my chance to get something done.

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  19. Mumsee, if there is food left in the bowl, you are feeding them too much. Give them a ‘little’ food, and let them hunt for the rest.

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  20. We’re having another Nor’easter, expecting 10 – 16″ in our area. Winter likes New England (and other northern areas) so much, it is reluctant to leave.

    That is why our springs, which come later than many of yours, seem so incredibly beautiful and refreshing. And this is coming from someone who likes winter.

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  22. Oh Kim I watched the footage of that tragedy on the morning news…incredibly sad 😔
    Kizzie how we pine for those snow amounts here in the west…March, April and May typically hold much snow for us…seems we are in a pattern of dry air which is rather disconcerting for many of us….how I am missing those stay indoors and watch the snow blowing about you days! Keep safe and warm…sounds as though Nightengale may be held at work for a while…

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  23. RKessler, before the last vet visit, I had already cut way back on their food. they were getting about a quarter of a cup of dry food, fed up high away from the mice, but in the reach of the birds. After the vet, I cut back even more because they were both upwards of eighteen pounds. Then we added the third cat and I added some but not a lot of food, which they all share, but still the birds and mice and rats get a hardy share. I also discovered that certain people were sneaking into the feed areas and stuffing their pockets with food to feed cats and dogs later. No wonder by animals are so obese! That is all put further away or locked up. And the felines do continue to bring me mice, voles, shrews, birds, rabbits, etc But I think they have their favorites that they share with rather than hunting.

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  24. I hadn’t heard about the bus tragedy.
    But
    An eight day old girl was killed by a half wolf/half dog. I’m sorry about the girl but I don’t feel for the family. It is sheer stupidity to think that you can keep a wild animal in the house.
    I knew a couple years ago, the guy had a halfwolf’/dog breed. Huge animal. He kept the animal as a pet.
    But his wife got pregnant and he got rid of the animal.
    That is what smart people do.

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  25. DJ, when do you consider the “normal” rainy season to be? My recollection was that March could be very rainy.

    In 1992 Mrs B got discount Disneyland passes from her employer that were good throughout March. We planned to go each weekend, but each weekend it rained. Except for the last weekend, when we finally went. It turned out that half of southern California had those same passes and had been waiting all month for a dry weekend. It was the most packed-out I’d ever seen the park.

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  27. I guess we have sou’westers where we are.

    Yeah, I guess March can get rain — but I always think of the real rainy season as January/Feb but sometimes also December.

    Just saw one of those ‘memory’ photos of mine pop up on FB — taken and posted a year ago of a stack of books holding up my poor broken bed following the ceiling replacement project. From November 2016 through July(?) 2017 it was absolute pandemonium in my house with one thing after another. I shudder just to think of the upheaval and chaos and mess.

    Wolf-dog hybrids are beautiful but definitely not advisable as pet material. They are unpredictable and, yes, quite wild. That was a horrible story about the 8-day-old baby.

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  28. Kevin’s 1:04, talking about Boston and middle of next week (springtime) reminded me of this song from the 70s: Please Come to Boston…(“in the springtime…”). Gorgeous song which I love, though have not heard or thought of in a very long while… Thanks for bringing it back to mind, Kevin.

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  29. 6 Arrows – That is one of my favorite songs. Since our cable package started including some music channels a little over a year ago (not like MTV, but only songs, no talk, commercials, or fillers), I often have the 70s channel on, and “Please Come to Boston” is played fairly often, which pleases me because I hadn’t heard it for a long time before this.

    We have the bottom-of-the-barrel cheapest cable package, so it’s nice to have this added feature.

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  30. And that channel doesn’t have music videos, either. As the songs play, there are some photos of the singers or groups that alternate throughout the song, along with little blurbs of info about them.

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  31. NancyJill – I think the storm is supposed to be over by the time Nightingale gets out of work. The road crews around here do an excellent job of keeping the roads as clear as possible, especially after a storm winds down.

    Knowing that school would be closed today, The Boy spent the night with his dad, who lives in a town about half an hour away. Now I am wondering when he is going to be home, or if Mr X is going to keep him another night.

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  32. Not sure if I ever heard the Boston song before. Nice. We got our wood split. We went with Miguel to the gas station and filled both vehicles to be used for week, with some in a can for the splitter. $80! Trey stacked the wood on the porch, so feel like I at least got a couple things accomplished.

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  33. Don’t think I have either, but when I pressed play, husband started singing it before the singer did. That is a sad song.

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  35. I don’t remember the time change being this difficult before; but I am really feeling the loss of an hour this time around. I do not have any really big assignments to do before the end of the semester, but it seems as if I can barely keep up with all the little ones.

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  36. It is almost funny to hear you all talk about the time change. Coming over here I lose a day and the time change is six or seven hours. When I go back to California, midnight there is 6pm here. But the worst is 6am there is midnight here. Takes me months to really switch.

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  37. Jo, your comment made me try to recall how it was when I was flying (radio) with the Air Force.
    If I remember correctly, we didn’t observe time of day. When we landed on a trip, we went to the transit barracks and racked out. Then, we got up, time of day not considered, and flew to the next place. When we returned home, we had a two day crew rest” which allowed us to adjust to the local time..
    But when I was young, I was more resilient. I did what I needed to do and slept when I could. Usually, but not always, at night..

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  38. It’s raining here — got a text from dog park worker that he fell off my porch so is going home. Say’s he’s OK, just scraped up & had the wind knocked out of him. Landed in the neighbor’s driveway.

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  40. He says he doesn’t know what happened, he was scrubbing/bleaching some mold off the wood on the underside of my porch overhang and all of a sudden was headed off the porch. Sure hope he’s ok. He may be out of commission for a while, at the very least he’ll be really sore for a while, I’m sure. I told him to make sure nothing was broken.

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  41. There’s some talk of math on the prayer thread. The Boy is excellent at math, at least so far, getting 100% on his math worksheets at school. Nightingale and he play a game that has six dice. Most of us would take at least a few seconds to count up the numbers, but he sees the total number as soon as it is rolled.

    But on his report card, he got the second highest grade (M, for meeting expectations), not the highest (M+, for meeting expectations and exceeding them) on the part about being able to explain his math reasoning. Nightingale explained that people who are really good at math often “just know” the answer, it comes easily to them, but they can’t necessarily explain how they reached their answer. (She is great at math, too, and had the same problem.)

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  43. Seriously Dj…math makes my head hurt. My engineer was discussing meters and other sorts of measures and speed of light on the way home from church on Sunday….daughter was chuckling because she knew what it was doing to my brain…there was a lull and he asked me what I thought about it all…I told him I just wanted to cry…it was so cruel to have that discussion in a car going 75 mph…!

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  44. Eleven year old is like that, he can look at the problem and immediately know the answer Except when he cannot. He can not tell the difference between coins for example. But he knows his addition and subtraction facts and multiplication and division and fractions (finding common denominators is almost instantaneous for him, as is cancellation) and decimals. But he cannot be told to write the number “twenty” and come up with the right answer. It is perplexing and amazing at the same time.

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  47. Mumsee, there is a savant man with Asperger’s, Daniel Tammet, who can automatically do enormous calculations in his brain. He does it by synesthesia – he sees the numbers as shapes which when combined create the shape of a new number. If he sits down and tries to work the problem out, he is no quicker than the rest of us. Only by not trying to do math the ‘way’ math is done can he do the calculations. I suspect eleven year old may understand numbers in a similar way, using some type of synesthesia. That may be the reason money confuses him, since they are concrete representations of different numbers – it could be that whatever method his brain uses to recognize numbers can’t factor in the shapes of money as representing numbers.

    I understand his difficulty somewhat since my synesthesia has always got in my way when it came to math. My form of synesthesia is to perceive all numbers and letters as having gender and personality, and the numbers always seemed, in the back of my mind, to be constantly quarreling and in competition when they were being calculated (letters on the other hand, worked peaceably together when spelt). Although I learned math very conventionally, with flashcards and practice problems, when I calculate sums in my head, I do not do it in the systematic fashion that I was taught (e.g. 15 times 25, 5 times 5 is 25, put down the 5, carry the 2, etc.). Rather, I break the numbers apart in a sum such as the above, calculate them separately and then combine them again. It takes me much longer to type my method – 10 times 25 is 250 and 5 times 25 is 125, so the answer is 375 – than it does to calculate the problem. I once watched a video clip where someone did a calculation my way and someone in the comment section noted that was how Common Core taught math. I was never taught it, rather I learned it by recognizing recurring patterns in calculations. I do have to be careful, as I will sometimes make careless mistakes – e.g. I almost wrote the above answer as 350, until my pattern recognition told me that a number ending in 0 combined with a number ending in 5 cannot end in 0 – so I sometimes need to write out the numbers just so that my pattern recognition can note any irregularities. Pattern recognition, as in the above example, is actually using my synesthetic perception – the personality of 0 when combined with the personality of 5 cannot result in a number ending with the personality of 0. I am a verbal learner and numbers are alien personalities to me, but I can use their patterns to control them.

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  48. So after the worker goes flying off my front porch in a crumple on the neighbor’s driveway, I get a call at work late in the day from Real Estate Guy who says, “Hmm, there’s a photo of a stray dog in your neighborhood that might be Cowboy.”

    STRAY DOG LOOSE the headline read — yep, it was Cowboy. Just what you want to see on FB, your dog the focus of a neighborhood search. “He looks like an Aussie?” “Does he have tags?” “Can anyone get close enough to get him?”

    I assured them he wasn’t an orphan, he was mine, and a friend (Real Estate Guy) was trying to round him up (which happened quickly, thankfully) since I was still at work.

    So I’m home and done with this day.

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  50. I like math. Numbers make sense. I do some of what Roscuro does in figuring out patterns and putting numbers together.
    Names however, are difficult. I was sitting in Bible study last night with the folks I have been with for a couple of years. Just a few of us and I am looking at the couple right across from me, thinking, what are their names??? I could have told you all about them, where they are from, etc. but not their names. It came to me after a few minutes.

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