34 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 5-9-18”

  1. Morning all. So glad that Michelle even got to meet a bit of my family.
    Someone emailed me today about sending me a gift. Simply amazing. I am totally humbled. Who am I? In some ways I feel no one knows me, Yet God still continues to shower me with His love. God is good.

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  3. I have taught my aide to make cookies. She does this once a year. At home she only cooks over a fire, so this is an accomplishment. We are going to make four batches because a group of four students is just right for doing cookies together. Any larger a group could cause problems and not be such a fun time.
    I keep having to kill ants as they appear on my screen!

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  4. Leaving Jo’s ‘hood in just a bit. I’ve had a splendid time, lots of great conversations, such kind people and gorgeous scenery.

    I’ve been staying at an Air BnB that is silent and dark and so I’ve slept well. It’s been helpful with the jet lag and means I’ll be headed home by 5:30 am!

    Talks seemed to go well; choosing what to wear was harder than talking! (The perennial problem).

    Jo is well loved by a community of fine people. I wish the same for all of us.

    Headed home– for two days!

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  5. 😦 My mind isn’t working!
    I walked all the way out to the truck to get information I have here on the computer.
    It isn’t the trip or the effort that bothers me.
    It is that my mind let me do that.
    I’m losing it.
    One of my great fears.

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  6. Morning!
    Don’t be too hard on yourself Chas…you have a lot going on right now and it seems perfectly reasonable that you would go to the truck to retrieve what you needed….
    I tend to find it difficult to organize my thoughts more and more lately. I even forget things I have written down on a list! I went to the grocery with a list yesterday….forgot several items… 😳
    I have had my two cups of coffee and am sitting here in the living room…it is so peaceful here in the forest this morning…instrumental music playing on the stereo….This is My Father’s World is playing…
    This is my Father’s world,
    and to my listening ears
    all nature sings, and round me rings
    the music of the spheres.
    This is my Father’s world:
    I rest me in the thought
    of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
    his hand the wonders wrought.

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  7. AJ, that is an exquisitely lovely phot of wood ducks, with the focus on the male and his reflection, then you see his mate, and then finally you see the ducklings too. Theirs?

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  10. Do you have people in your life who like to talk about God? That was one of the fun things about my stay in Boise. Daughter has a woman living in her basement as a renter, her friend in her teen years and on. Anyway, she is excited about God so we got to talk about Him. Not many folk in my life want to talk about Him and the things He is doing.

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  11. Ah, NancyJill, that is one of my husband’s favorite hymns.

    I recently heard a story of someone forgetting something in some dramatic way (can’t remember the details 😉 ). I commented that if the person had done it when they were older, they would be afraid it was dementia.

    I remember the women, in her early nineties, who was happy it was her daughter, in her early seventies, who drove the car into the ditch when they were on an icy road. She said otherwise everyone would have blamed her age. 😀

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  12. Chas, you are not losing it. I do similar things all the time, and I’m five decades younger than you. It is called stress.

    Some music for the day, or night: ‘La musica notturna delle strada de Madrid’ (The night music on the streets of Madrid). The composer, Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805) wrote to his publisher about this piece: “The piece is absolutely useless, even ridiculous, outside Spain, because the audience cannot hope to understand its significance, nor the performers to play it as it should be played.” Was he ever wrong. Performers from around the world have posted their performances on YouTube – this group is from South Africa:

    1. The Ave Maria Bell: calling the faithful to prayer
    2. The soldiers’ drum
    3. Minuet of the blind beggars
    4. In the church – the Rosary and prayers of the faithful
    5. Passa calle of the street singers, known as Los Manolos (lower-class loudmouths)
    6. The soldiers’ drum
    6. The retreat of the Madrid Military Nightwatch – announces the curfew and closing the streets for the night

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  13. Yes, stress and distraction, pretty common during certain phases of our lives when things are intense.

    It’s been surreal at work this week, our new editor is out sick (for the week with a respiratory infection), our old editor hasn’t been working in his new position from our office so far (as he usually does) and some people strange to me are working there from one of our other sister papers. Nearly no one in advertising. And absolutely quiet, you could hear a pin drop. It’s all very alien. I need to find a story that’ll get me out of the office today.

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  19. Cheryl, indeed I am. Not sure what I was thinking as I did read your post about the wood duck 🙂

    Feeling sheepish right now.

    I think it just shows I need a rest. We’re in Edmonton right now on a work (for husband)/rest (for me) trip. I am going to have a nice long nap this afternoon.

    Liked by 2 people

  20. Kare, I am back, as of fairly late last night. Over the last week I have read bits and pieces on here, but haven’t read it all and didn’t post.

    We are officially condo owners, and we no longer own a house with an acre of land to care for. 🙂

    I read some discussion on here (yesterday’s news thread? dunno) about how hard it is for first-time home owners to get into the market. We aren’t first-time home owners, but indeed it’s crazy out there. But God has brought it all together, even though it has at times been crazy–and quite a bit more expensive than we were expecting when we made the offer (more expensive for us on both ends of this–on the selling end with an element being “out of code” and not grandfathered in though it was legal at the time, and on the buying end with flooring costing more than expected and with the miscellaneous repairs that always pop up). Still, we were prepared to pay even more if we needed to (though it was hard to spend so much on this end when we were selling a property in really good shape), so overall we are just happy it is coming together.

    At both ends it is a seller’s market with little inventory. At the buying end in particular–our agent was not at all optimistic we could find something (especially when she saw online photos of the house we were selling and she saw our standards were quite high in terms of the place looking nice–but we told her that we were the ones who made it look nice). She told us recently that people are buying sight unseen, several potential sellers are looking at the same house at the same time, and people are paying above listing price.

    Yet she was surprised we bought the unit we did, and not till we did the official walk-through on the closing date did she understand what we saw in the unit. By that time the ugly curtains had come down, most of the random junk had been removed (it still remained in the cabinets and underneath and behind stuff) and the place was a little bit cleaner. But her assessment of why we wouldn’t want the place may be the key to first-time home buyers (and others, like us) buying a house even in a tight market. She told us that most people “can’t see past the dirt.” My sister talked about a friend’s house that had been listed for months, with no takers, and she and her kids painted the house and it then sold within days. See, the rooms were painted boldly, and people didn’t like the colors . . . and apparently most buyers aren’t willing to paint or to clean!!

    Well, in our case it needs wallpaper removal in several rooms (we are waiting to do that), and the walls are quite scuffed in addition to the dirt, so we have painted several rooms and will paint the rest. (We had quite a bit of help from our new church the last two days.) But the carpet had big wrinkles in it (and she had a cat–I sneeze a lot in the house, though less than the early days before stuff got cleaned; vents got cleaned this morning and we imagine that will take care of the rest of it), so the carpet definitely needed to be removed/replaced, and linoleum in the bathrooms hadn’t been laid well and wasn’t in good shape, so we’re just replacing all the flooring. The toilets flushed slowly (they are from 1980), so we are replacing them, and getting the sinks and vanities while we are at it (definite signs of wear on those, including some splintered wood). We are also replacing most inner doors, including those on the laundry room and pantry. (Cat damage to bedroom doors, broken folding doors too old to have replaceable parts.)

    Would a first-time home owner be willing to do all that? A financially savvy one would, in a tight market! See, we are getting the unit for at least 20% less than it would cost in good shape–especially in a tight market. Had it been in ready-to-move-in shape, we ourselves would have paid 30% more. Well, we are paying the better part of the 20% in our updates and fixes (and we are paying the additional 10% or so on the issue at the selling end). One always has to do something in a new home. And the reality is that the stuff we are putting into it is not bottom-of-the-line or close to it. In fact, I think we got the top quality or close to it in everything. A buyer who was strapped for cash could pay far less OR could wait and not do most of it right away. Cleaning was definitely necessary–the seller was in it 14 years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she never cleaned it at all. She had friends coming in and cleaning while we were getting the place inspected, so I’m guessing they cleaned the bathrooms and kitchen before we saw it. But doors and corners of walls were brown with dirt, but took no scrubbing at all to get clean–a simple wipe with a sponge got most of it. I ran a duster over the master bedroom ceiling fan, and dirt poured off the sides and the end. Dust on the blinds was at least 1/8 inch thick. It didn’t “show well” at all. But honestly, if she had hired a cleaning lady, fixed the broken drawer in the kitchen, and taken care of one or two other visible things, she could have charged $10-15,000 more! (She was asking in that range initially, last fall, and I really think she could have gotten it easily if she had made a few cosmetic changes.) Had she been willing to remove the wallpaper and replaced a couple of doors, she could have gotten more.

    The funny thing? Yesterday two senior ladies from our new church were in the bedroom helping me clean and paint, and it came up that the seller was five years younger than the older lady. Both stared at me and expressed shock. They were thinking, with the state of the unit, that it was some really frail old lady who had let the cleaning go because she couldn’t keep up with it. Yet here was a lady older than our seller sweeping the whole house and the patio, scraping, and generally working as hard as any of us!

    The seller was so relieved to finally get rid of the unit and its mortgage (she moved out months ago) that she was going in to work after the closing and giving her notice to quit! She sold her home and retired the same day.

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  22. One of my Facebook friends posted in the middle of last night, “Whose awake?” I was tempted to reply, with the same misuse of a possessive, “Your awake!” But I figured the humor wouldn’t be caught, as the use of “your” where “you’re” would be correct is so common.

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  23. When we sold our house, twenty five years ago, we had to remove the solar panels that the previous owners had put on the roof. Good panels providing lots of passive solar heat. And they were officially put on but then it was determined they were not legal in town.

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  24. Mumsee, I definitely don’t live in a spotless house either, though we worked hard to make this house be its best when we went to sell. We didn’t update the kitchen–it didn’t seem worth the money, and our agent said it was optional–but everything was in good shape with lots of extra built-ins. But there is a difference between “not spotless” and “ewww.”

    Liked by 1 person

  25. One of the things I love about living here is being able to talk about God and His work in my life and the lives of others all the time. I share things like that even with my Kinder students.

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  26. One of my children loves to talk about God with me. The one who asked me to begin praying with him at bedtime a couple of years ago. Eleven year old. One time four year old in glasses.

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  27. Cute Duck, Duck, Ducklings!

    Son and I are at the library. He just submitted his student’s grades for the semester. Earlier we visited a used bookstore north of here that friends at church told me about. And real early I rode with Art to the office to work on the Website Creation course.

    It’s funny to be at our neighborhood library that has been renovated and remember that I brought him here for the programs for two-year-olds with their mommies. I need to make better use of this library and it’s WiFi.

    Now I need to read back through all the comments for today.

    Miss Bosley let Wesley brush her last night and she purred quite loudly during the grooming. She loves to be brushed and even tips her head up to get her nose brushed. She continues to exhibit dog like traits.

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  28. Mumsee, my brother got a headache from mowing my yard yesterday. The neighbor’s Ligustrum is blooming and that gives me allergic reactions each year. It is my worst time of all. I hope you find relief.

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  29. As a child I got really bad headaches form mowing the grass. I never told anyone, since I figured my parents would just figure it was an excuse to get out of mowing. But they may have been the worst headaches I’ve had in my life other than two or three bad migraines. I was quite nervous about mowing in Nashville, and ready to hire it done if the headaches presented themselves, but it’s a different variety of grass there and apparently I wasn’t allergic to it.

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