77 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-18-19”

  2. looks like the same picture to me.
    Good Monday morning everyone but Jo.
    Good Night Jo.
    I heard a train whistle this morning. The track must be two miles away.
    I lived most of my early life close to a RR track.

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  4. Morning! Yes it is President’s Day. Are we still honoring just two President’s on this day or have we added some over the years? Last I knew we combined Washington and Lincoln.
    We have a light fluffy snow and 2 degrees out there this morning…I am staying inside!

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  5. We live close to a RR track. Sadly, our best friends lost a teen daughter when the truck she was driving was struck by a train. They heard the train whistle blaring (it was quite near their home) and still have trouble when they hear a train whistle.

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  7. 😦 I know that people are killed by trains. But I will never understand why.
    It has been explained to me a dozen times, but I still don’t understand how someone would let it happen.
    I know of a Southwestern Seminary couple, and children were killed by a train at a crossing in West Texas. Many years ago.
    In West Texas. see for miles and hear almost that far.
    A train can’t sneak up on you in West Texas.
    My assessment that anyone killed by a train is guilty of excess stupidity.

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  8. We spent a few years close to the railroad track. My brothers put coins on the track. I listened to my parents and played in the swamp but did not go to the tracks. The train people would wave as they went by and toot the whistle. I think they went by about once a day. Now the tracks are gone but a bike path goes along the way from Pullman through Moscow and on to Troy, maybe to Julietta.

    My understanding is that trains are much more efficient than trucks. Steel on steel as opposed to rubber on asphalt. Trains at something over four hundred miles per gallon, trucks at something like six miles per gallon. Ripping up tracks to make bike paths may not have been the best idea.

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  10. Apparently very hard, mumsee.

    There was a track that ran right behind & alongside my grandmother’s house in Iowa — in fact, her house was originally built by/for the railroad for their workers.

    I remember going out to wave at the guy on the caboose when it would go by. They’d always wave back. 🙂

    Chas, I had the same question, today’s a holiday? No mail probably and government workers will all have the day off.

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  11. I have the day off for the high school, but not the Baptist university. I find it ironic that universities tend to take off for MLK day, but not Presidents Day. Wasn’t it a President who made it such that MLK was not born into slavery?

    And to answer Nancy Jill’s question: Originally today was a only a combination of Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays, since they are only 10 days apart. But lately it is to honor all presidents.

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  12. I lived by the train tracks growing up and so did my Mr….when we hear the sounds of a train in the distance we both feel a sense of soothing. We still smile as we sit at the crossing in Palmer Lake…the gates come down and we sit and watch the train go by…trains don’t seem to have a caboose any longer. That was always a thrill to us as kids to see the “caboose man” wave exuberantly to us as he trailed behind.
    I do have a vivid memory of a train “sneaking” up on us one time though. As kids we would cross over the tracks as we made our way to the plaza to play “putt putt golf”. It was me, Judy, Mike and Billy. We were probably in the 5th grade. We were walking down the tracks and suddenly the conductor blew his whistle..we looked behind us and there he was! He had to have seen us and traveling very slowly, then stopped….he was laughing as we jumped about a foot in the air! We scrambled down the path on the other side of the tracks and I don’t think we ever told our parents for fear of being grounded!

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  13. We have a lot of tracks where I live due to the port. Trains with cargo containers crisscross several of our streets, though efforts have been made to elevate them above grade so they don’t disrupt traffic so much. One runs right by our church — we hear the whistle at some point during the service on most Sundays. But we’ve also all learned to travel on roads skirting the tracks as we’ve all wound up getting stuck and being late for church now and again.

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  14. My husband’s international company has today off–I was so surprised I may not have been polite. I have a ton of work to do, preparing for a new Bible study tomorrow and catching up on being gone. But I was nice. We’ll take a long walk when it warms up.

    Gorgeous day, 31 degrees–which is too cold for us Los Angeles natives to walk in–comfortably! 🙂

    I was at a writer’s conference which was interesting for about a dozen reasons and I had a good time seeing lots of old friends.

    At the last session, one friend slipped and fell forward, dislocating her should in two places. It worked out well for me to drive her car, stay with her in the ER and then deposit her and the car at her son’s house, 20 minutes from my home.

    We waited 2.5 hours for an xray and a doctor visit. They’d given her pain meds, so she was relatively comfortable but still–why not ask a question and get the xray done immediately?

    You don’t have to answer that.

    Anyway, the first thing the very young doc did, was have her sit up, bend her left knee, grasp the knee with outstretched arms and then pull back as hard as she could–to try to pop the shoulder back into place.

    It didn’t work.

    He looked at the xray and they decided she needed to be put out so they could manipulate it.

    So, into the ER bay, with a diabetic man on the other side of the curtain five feet away listening in, the anesthesiologist administered drugs, one nurse supervised from the standing desk, a second nurse watched oxygen levels, and three wiry (but all shorter than me) male doctors wrestled that shoulder back into place.

    My friend never removed her cowgirl boots the whole time!

    Fascinating and horrifying to watch the traction and leverage the three straining men had to use to get her shoulder back into place–it had dislocated in at least two spots, don’t ask me how or in what it looked like.

    They finished in 10 minutes and half an hour after the anesthesiologist put the cone over her nose, my friend was coming around. “It doesn’t hurt!”

    Everyone had disappeared except me, the anesthesiologist and the overseeing nurse. It was such a contrast between the very physical activity and choreographed excitement of 20 minutes before.

    45 minutes after it all started, a mobile xray machine came into the bay, took a photo and we saw everything was aligned.

    We left half an hour later.

    Modern medicine may be expensive, but I was impressed by how she was handled. They tried a simple solution, and when it didn’t work got on with the task and sent home a weary but restored woman 2 hours after the intervention began.

    I even made it to bed by 11 myself.

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  15. It is Family Day here. The school always manages to schedule Reading Week so that a holiday long weekend is part of Reading Week. In the Fall semester, it is Thanksgiving, in the Winter semester it is Family Day.

    There used to be train tracks in the rural county I grew up in, but they were long gone by the time I was born, although you can still see the grades crossing fields and marsh, and the roads around the nearest town still go up over long unused railway bridges. A few of the grades around the town have been turned into bike paths, others further out are just overgrown, like raised hedgerows. Transport trucks and personal vehicles really were what killed the railways. There is still a national rail system with two main cargo carriers and one main passenger carrier, but the local railways, with the exception of urban commuter trains such as the GTA’s (greater Toronto area) GO system, are all gone.

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  16. I lived near train tracks when young, and have lived the past 30+ years with tracks behind the houses across the street.

    We played around the tracks while young but were very careful. My brother reminded me this week how we looked for the spikes and he collected bottles by the tracks to earn some money. We put coins on the tracks and waved at people. I remember the build up of excitement as the train got closer, and closer, louder and louder, and then it was gone with a wave to the caboose man. Quiet returned, and we got back to our kid business.

    I had a cousin who was an only child, college age, who lost his life to a train. It was a rainy night when it happened. I have wondered if he might have been drinking. I guess a really bad storm at night would make it easier to get tangled up in a train wreck with a car. As a child, I heard that he’d put his head out the window to see better and that his head was torn from his body. It was gruesome for a child to consider (for anyone really). It did not stop us from playing by the tracks at home though.

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  17. Chas, I would guess that occasionally it isn’t stupidity that kills someone on a railroad track. Several other options come to mind. One would be people with dementia or mental illness (or deafness) who don’t realize the danger–people whose children don’t want them to be driving, but who haven’t understood their children’s pleas. We currently have a family friend in that situation (not the train part, the driving part): Recently all but two churches in his town cancelled services because of ice. He looked out and saw that someone had plowed his driveway, and considered it a sign from God that he and his wife should go to church, and so they did. But he has Parkinson’s and can barely walk, and his reaction times are super slow. He shouldn’t be driving in nice weather, let alone in ice.

    Another option is suicide–people really do kill themselves that way, though it is an unusually selfish thing to do, to ask an engineer to kill you while he watches.

    A third option is the one I think of every time I cross railroad tracks–getting stuck on the tracks somehow, say with a car that stalls, or thinking the cars ahead of you are moving and they are not. I know of a railroad crossing right before a red light, where only two or three vehicles can cross before one is on the tracks, and it’s an intersection that seems almost custom-made for a fatality someday. You think you can move forward–or you stop after crossing the tracks, but not far enough forward–and traffic stops behind you and ahead of you and you have nowhere to go. In some of those instances, if you have enough warning you abandon the car. But trains move quickly and trying that stalled car “just one more time” might be one time too many.

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  18. Atlanta was at one time known as Terminus because of the trains. Here is a bit of history about the naming that eventually worked it’s way to Atlanta. From Wikipedia:
    “In 1842, when a two-story brick depot was built, the locals asked that the settlement of Terminus be called Lumpkin, after Governor Wilson Lumpkin. Gov. Lumpkin asked them to name it after his young daughter instead, and Terminus became Marthasville. In 1845, the chief engineer of the Georgia Railroad, (J. Edgar Thomson) suggested that Marthasville be renamed “Atlantica-Pacifica”, which was quickly shortened to “Atlanta.” The residents approved, apparently undaunted by the fact that not a single train had yet visited. The town of Atlanta was incorporated in 1847.”

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  21. The trail I walk on, where other people jog or ride bikes, is a former railroad track. It’s close enough to our house that if it were still a railroad, I’m sure we’d hear whistles (maybe 2/3 mile). In our last house, we were about two miles (maybe even a bit more) from the railroad tracks, but we’d hear the train at night as we lay in bed (very faintly) and very occasionally during the day.

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  23. I remember my dad showing me how to put a coin on the track at Union Station once when we were there waiting for Iowa kin to arrive. My mom later gave him the business, said things like that have been known to derail trains. Funny to think that back then people were allowed to just get so close to the trains and tracks, I’m sure it’s barricaded off now with no public access.

    That shoulder injury sounded painful. Carol fell a few years ago and dislocated her shoulder — she’s never gotten full movement back in that arm.

    I still talk to Carol frequently by phone but haven’t seen her since I went up there in January to try to take her to the notary (and she wasn’t able to get into my car). She hasn’t been outside since then, I don’t think, she’s stuck in her room but she does go to the dining room for meals now at last. I’m not sure she realizes that car outings are probably a thing of the past. I think I’d go stir crazy not being able to get outside for weeks or months on end. This new place where she is has no pleasant outside spots like the other place which had a shaded patio and wasn’t on a busy highway like this place is.

    She does have a TV now in her room at the new place but she watches game shows mostly, which sounds dreadful to me. But it’s what she likes. She reads mostly, though, so that’s good. No improvement on her bathroom issues, unfortunately, which will be another hindrance to her being able to go on any outings, I’m afraid.

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  24. https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=engineers+don%27t+wave+from+the+trains+anymore&view=detail&mid=A208F295E98E4EEA3141A208F295E98E4EEA3141&FORM=VIRE

    I hope this works.
    When I was a kid, we lived right next to a RR track, then across from one later.
    I always played on the tracks and waved at the engineers.
    The big engines reeked of power. Especially when it was letting off steam.
    (An aside: Used to be when someone was ranting about something trivial, people would say, “He’s just letting off steam”. That phrase is not used anymore.)

    Anyhow, in those days, every guy wanted to be a policeman, fireman of engineer when he grew up. I don’t think kids aspire to anything these days.
    But I always ran when I heard the train coming. I would stand about 25 yards away and wave. The engineer always waved back.

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  26. The house in the city where I rented an attic room for two years backed onto a rail line and siding. Trains only went through at night, although there was a fair amount of shunting during the day. The house was a century home, and I could feel my bed sway slightly when the train went by. One year, I caught a glimpse of the Holiday Train that goes from coast to coast every December, with the cars all decorated with lights and playing seasonal tunes. The house where I rent now is a couple of blocks from another section of rail line, but I never hear the trains going through.

    The last death I heard of by train was a suicide by someone who deliberately stopped their car on a crossing. Pastor A was a passenger on the train that hit the car. Before that, a truck driver was killed and a train derailed after the truck driver tried to beat the railway crossing signal. But the worst Canadian rail disaster in recent years was not the fault of those killed. In Lac-Megantic, Quebec, six years ago, a train carrying crude oil stopped on a slope. The brakes failed, and the train came down the hill and derailed in the centre of the town. The fuel cars caught fire and 47 people, most of them working in buildings in the area, died in the inferno. The story has been in the news again lately because Netflix used footage of the disaster in the apocalyptic film ‘Bird Box’. Netflix had apparently purchased the footage from a stock footage company: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2019/01/17/netflix-not-removing-lac-megantic-footage_a_23645753/

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  27. A couple of the things I like about our town is that we can hear the train whistles, and also the church bells. I don’t hear them every day, but often enough to be glad I am here.

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  28. I do have a vivid memory of a delivery guy bringing to our house a text book my Mr ordered for one of his classes at Coastal Carolina. It was a 300.00 book and the delivery guy commented on the thickness and weight of said book. I explained to him the purpose and requirement of the book for Mr’s engineering class. Delivery guy replied he had a desire to work for the railroad too……I just stood there and smiled…. 🙃 🚂

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  29. Even if you don’t like country, Tom T. Hall’s rendition is all true.
    People used to walk down RR tracks to go places.
    Walking down a RR track is not easy. If you walk on the side, there is always lots of gravel you have to walk on. You can walk the crossties, but then you have to adjust your stride, which is uncomfortable. I used to balance myself and walk the rails. A kid can do that for a while. An adult would have a hard time. But then, he could stride the crossties better. .

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  31. Chas, if there is a high wind or any kind of continuous noise, you might never hear the train coming up behind you while walking the rails.

    It is illegal to walk on or cross rail lines, something which I am always reminded of by announcers when I take the GO train. The continual announcements are needed, because in order to access the commuter trains, especially at Union station in the middle of Toronto where there are many different trains to transfer between, you have to go down the stairs or elevators, under the lines, and back up on the platform for the train you want. It can be confusing trying to find the right set of stairs to the right platform (especially when, as happened to me recently, they change the platform number previously announced), and I could envision someone desperate to catch a train trying to cross the tracks. People have been killed before. When there are several GO trains stopped at once in Union, I have seen passengers use the trains, whose doors stand open on both sides while stopped, to cross the tracks – going in one door and out the opposite one – in order to get to the platform they need.

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  32. I don’t know how it is now, but it would be impossible for anyone who isn’t deaf not to hear a steam engine.
    Actually, you could feel them coming too if you were on the track.
    It was in Spartanburg, SC when we lived beside the Southern RR line. The station was just a few hundred yards from us, but you had to travel over a mile to get to it.

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  36. My family took a steam engine “Fall Excursion” ride from Atlanta’s Brookwood Station up to Toccoa in the mountains to see the leaves. We were given free passes so that was enjoyable when Wesley was young. I also went on a Saturday double date (we were basically just friends) with a fellow and his Brother and Sister-in-Law. They were involved in the hobby of train photography and wanted to get photos of a steam locomotive. It was a perfect fall day, and I enjoyed being outdoors, but it involved a lot of waiting. These guys were Georgia Tech engineers. Their other brother had married my roommate from Georgia Southern and two of the brothers had been my long time boyfriend’s roommates at Georgia Tech. They were really into engineering in more ways than one! Smiling, Kathaleena.

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  38. We waved to the engineers when down by the river at our previous town. We even waved to the barge workers when the huge tug/barge vessels passed by. Occasionally the pilot would blow the fog horn for the children. You could hear it echoing down the river for 30 seconds or so. Train whistles too.

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  42. My husband’s former boss stood at a train crossing in downtown San Jose and when the train came deliberately stepped in front of it to commit suicide. Horrifying for all–particularly the people watching and the train engineer.

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  44. Let’s see if I can post. I was unable to get on yesterday.
    singles van is still in the shop so I walked to school and then the weight room and then home. Took the long way home for more exercise and got caught in a torrential downpour. I found a car port to huddle in for while. When the rain slackened, I walked the rest of the way home, covered in mud. As I got to my house, very tired and proud of my self for making it, here came two teens walking a dog with no umbrellas, just enjoying being soaked.

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  46. Re: folks with dementia still driving, which Cheryl mentioned earlier – This may sound harsh, but I think that when an elderly person gets to the point where they cannot drive safely, for whatever reason, they should either relinquish their keys or have them taken away. I know there are many who would argue with that, and I do feel for them, but it is too dangerous for them as well as for others who might be hurt or killed.

    What if that person kills someone’s mom or dad or child? Imagine the guilt one would feel for not having insisted their relative stop driving. I could be mistaken, but I think AJ’s career-ending accident was caused by a man who should not have been driving anymore.

    I realize there are some elderly who don’t have family around to drive them places, and I don’t know what the answer is for each one. I do know that even in our small town, we have a service that drives seniors to appointments and shopping.

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  47. The GO trains have a bell system that gives a distinct ding when a train is approaching or leaving a station and also at crossings. If you are catching the train, that dinging sound can be welcome or unwelcome. If you are on the platform already, you are glad the train is coming. If you are in the tunnel or on the stairs, you start running when you hear that sound, because GO trains wait for no one and only stop for about a minute at way stations – if the station is at either end of the line or Union, you have a little more time.

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  48. Kizzie, my husband had to intervene when his dad wanted to continue driving by getting the doctor to forbid it. In his case at least, Dad was only driving around the little town in which they live (where the fastest speed limit is about 35) and in a car that had an auto-braking system if it drew too close to another vehicle. This other man is in if anything worse shape than Dad was, and as far as I know he isn’t sticking to the small town–at least he was heard to make plans to drive to the big city the other day, though the one hearing him didn’t know if he followed through. A daughter is involved in their medical care, but I don’t know if she has broached the driving issue.

    But it isn’t always just patients themselves who make bad judgments on this. A family friend of mine was happy when his father flunked his driving test to renew his license, since he was at the point of needing to have the keys taken away, and a medical judgment is easier than a family member making the decision. Well, the doctor of the 90+ year-old man signed that his vision really was OK, he just had a bad day, or something like that, somehow keeping the license in place. That forced the son to be “the bad guy” and take away the keys, and with doctors inappropriately taking his father’s side, his father was mad at him for a few weeks.

    In our case, Mom already seemed to agree he shouldn’t be driving, and so did my husband’s sister and her husband. But all of them were unwilling to “rock the boat” and it took my husband stepping in and talking to the doctor–who was shocked her patient was still driving, and who did quickly tell him no, he couldn’t drive anymore. After that, the whole family was willing to keep him from driving. But it took someone stepping forward and acting.

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  50. I know several people who died when their vehicle was hit by a train. I know a few who lived after being in a vehicle hit by a train. One had a truck dragged a bit by the train and he lived. The RR company did put up an arm on some of the crossings where someone was killed, but not at all.

    In the case of our friend’s daughter, I believe the sun was in her eyes and she may have had the radio on loud enough not to have heard the train. She was in a hurry to meet her brother and he took it particularly hard. In another case, it was dark and there was nothing but a stop sign and RR crossing signs. With no lights you might not even realize a train is going by in the dark. There was alcohol involved in at least one case.

    I have walked a RR line both as an adult and as a child. As Chas, says, it is not an easy walk.

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  52. I cannot tell you how angry my brothers and I were at my dad’s doctor who refused to sign the paper my dad couldn’t drive because “it would discourage his healing.”

    I told him, then, that I would get a letter relieving us of liability and the doctor could assume liability for my dad’s driving. That was what it took. We were beyond angry.

    My father had sufficient money. We hired a driver who took him anywhere he wanted to go. The first thing my dad did was have the driver take him between six or seven DMV offices in LA where my dad tried to take the test again so he could get his license back. Poor dad didn’t realize the DMV all looked at the same computerized file about him. 😦

    Hire a taxi to drive you around, or a teenager as an afterschool job. It is not only safer but CHEAPER than owning and maintaining your own car. I don’t understand why people don’t understand this. Hire the cab for the day and have yourself driven all over town one day a week to run your errands. It’s more efficient and cheaper in the long run.

    But, as in the case of my father, logic doesn’t hold a lot of argument–it’s about freedom and a refusal to admit they/we are not the same people we always were.

    In my dad’s case, he got swindled out of $15K from a woman who worked in his travel agent’s office. He refused to allow my brother to complain (brother did so anyway, but the woman skipped out with the money.)

    Dad also sued us, my brothers and I, for elder abuse.

    Enormous legal fees later, Dad signed over everything to me to manage. The elder abuser was that lawyer.

    Yes, we all have rights to our own business, but when stroke or disability makes it harder to handle things well, your life and that of your family will benefit from some humility that maybe you need help.

    I’ve already told my nieces and nephews if my brothers begin to cause problems when they get old, the kids should tell me. I’ll call up my brothers and say, “Hey. You’re acting just like dad. Knock it off.”

    I’m sure that will persuade that back into reasonableness. Our father made our lives and those of our children a nightmare for 7 years.

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  54. I don’t drive in cities. I used to but now I don’t. I probably could and would probably be as safe a driver as the rest, but I don’t want to be hit by the unsafe drivers when I am driving. Having driven in many large cities, I have no need to apologize for my stance.

    If and when we move to Boise, we plan to not have a vehicle. The public transport is not terribly good there, at least, I have seen much better, But we don’t have any real travel needs. If we need to, there is always Uber or taxi or whatever. Church is just a couple of blocks away.
    We will see if that actually happens.

    Our World War ll vet stopped driving long ago. The town let him drive around in a covered golf cart for years but he managed to run over himself so they took that away and he now drives a UTV.

    My friend in Lewiston, who turned ninety eight this past Christmas, was still driving, last I heard .She is very good at it and quite conscientious. She stays within the city though.

    I remembered.

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  55. As to Uber, which is another option, . . . . when the family was in Salt Lake City for a wedding, my cousins tried to explain to my quite sharp 89 year-old-uncle how to manage the Uber app on his phone. My 26 year-old daughter volunteered to do training since she was headed to the airport by Uber herself.

    It was so cute watching the two of them work through it together with me and five male cousins observing.

    When the Uber driver arrived, we all went outside to watch the “meeting.”

    I told the guys, “look mean like you’re appraising him. Put up those Sicilian eyebrows and we’ll make sure she gets safely to the airport!”

    This small dark man got out of the driver’s seat to open the door for CR and stopped at six men and me, all with our arms crossed. “You make sure you take care of her,” my uncle said in a thick John Wayne-type voice.

    The driver nodded, “Yes, sir!”

    We waved them away.

    CR said that as soon as they got out of sight, the driver asked, nervously, “who were those guys?”

    “My bodyguards.”

    🙂

    No worries about getting to the airport safely. I haven’t heard if my uncle’s tried Uber yet . . . . LOL

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  62. Two inches of snow can stop a town that isn’t used to it.
    I was in Charleston SC (County) the only time Charleston had a white Christmas.
    It wasn’t even two inches, but it stopped all activity until the sun came and took it away.

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  64. Michelle, my mom got in two accidents a couple of years apart, one which needed the jaws of life to get her out of her car. She’d never been a “good” driver (she drove with one foot on the gas and one on the brake, and entering the expressway she would stop and watch for an opening–the two examples my sister used when telling me to get someone else to teach me to drive), but in her older years we didn’t particularly trust her driving. Both accidents were (to hear her tell it) the other drivers’ fault. The second one might have been, I don’t know, since she was hit by another elderly lady who got out of her car admitting fault. The other driver in the first, however, was a 17-year-old, and to Mom that was all she needed to say to prove the other driver was at fault even though the police said Mom was, and my oldest brother, being taken later to the scene of the accident–sans cars, I think–said that the way it all happened, Mom pretty much had to be at fault).

    Well, my older brother tried to tell Mom she could sell her car and hire a taxi for what little driving she did, and she would save money and also save the hassle that comes with car ownership. She said no. Well, when she died we found that she had kept careful records of mileage; every time she filled up with gas she recorded the date, gallons, and mileage–and as I recall she had only driven 200 miles or so her final year, or maybe it was 300 or 400. Her car sat in the carport with its tires dry rotting while she had no great need of it. She wanted the independence that comes with owning one’s own car, but she made no great use of it, and she still had the responsibility of it.

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  67. I think a car represents independence to those used to “up and going” wherever, whenever. I knew an older woman who had to stop driving due to macular degeneration and she said it was the hardest thing for her to give up (more than reading!). So she managed to keep a car and have her son drive her places. That was before Uber so taxis probably were pricey — and again, it’s not the same as just jumping in the car and “going” somewhere, anywhere.

    I wonder if people had the same problems giving up their horse and wagons?

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  71. DJ, I sympathize with the independence aspect. Except that a person who rarely leaves her house isn’t as “independent” as she believes herself to be, and at some point it is wisdom to listen to your children telling you that another option would be better for you. When you drive old cars and rarely drive, the hassle of getting the car to a mechanic periodically is about as great as the hassle of using a taxi or having someone from church pick you up, I think.

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  72. Yeah, but … If you Need to go somewhere … Well, you know how it is, people like having it “just in case.” Even if they never use it.

    But I agree, it’s not rational and puts you and others in danger.

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  74. It is 3 degrees and snowing that light fluffy snow again. I suppose this snow is defined as a dry snow…I kind of like the heavier wet stuff myself!! ⛄️
    My dear MIL was so sad to give up driving. She did not give up her car…she kept it in the garage for those of us living out of town so that we would not need to rent a car when flying into Cincinnati. She was moved to an assisted living situation which meant she could no longer see her car parked at her home. After I used the car I would leave it parked in a space outside of her window at the assisted living home so that she could see it and my brother in law would come by later and drive it back to Mom’s house and park it in the garage. She just wanted to know where it was…just in case she needed it! Of course we would always take her for rides in her car when we visited! She loved that, especially if we stopped for a chocolate milk shake along the way…
    Not being permitted to drive at night has taken away some of my independence and it is not pleasurable for me. I suppose driving during the daylight has taken on a new sweetness for me!

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  76. Dj, one of my childhood friends flew into Vegas yesterday to “get away from” the cold, damp, snowy weather of Ohio.. She was keeping us abreast of her fun times yesterday when she landed…we haven’t heard a peep from her today!! She must be snowed in somewhere! ❄️

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