33 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 6-3-19”

  2. Morning. A string of night shifts does not sound good. How do you adjust your body’s internal clock? I have such a hard time when I fly home and land in LA at 6am, which is midnight for me.

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  3. Good evening Jo.
    Good morning RK and everyone else.
    Just checking in. I don’t have e-mail. I have to check it out.
    Yahoo says I misspelled something, but that can’t be. I just clicked the link.

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  5. DJ, yesterday you said June brought us closer to Christmas. Actually June is as far from Christmas as it gets. That’s the advantage of a late-June birthday! I had a roommate in college whose birthday was two days earlier than mine; hers was exactly six months from Christmas. When I lived in Chicago, we often celebrated together, sometimes by taking her girls and going to the zoo.

    In spring sometimes the Brookfield Zoo sent out a free ticket to the zoo. We would each get one in the mail and go together. I would pay for parking but my ticket was free; she would pay for her children, but not for her own ticket or parking. And we had two adults to keep an eye on the little ones, and a fun few hours together. Win-win.

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  6. My internal clock ticks to its own beat. Not much sleep in bed. I can usually get up and sit in the recliner and sleep ok. My mind does not shut off.

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  7. And I don’t think we would be doing that anymore, even with free tickets. Their prices have gotten quite high, especially for a city that has a free zoo in it:

    Adults: $21.95 ($20.95 online)
    Seniors 65 and over: $15.95 ($14.95 online)
    Children 3 to 11: $15.95 ($14.95 online)

    Parking
    Cars $14.00
    Buses $20.00

    Without the free coupon, it would cost $36 for one person to go and to park. But with the free coupons, I’d still be paying $14 to get in, and even if she bought tickets online she would have been paying $45 for her three girls. If she and her husband went together, paying for two adults, the four children they eventually had, and parking, it would have cost well over $100! Zoos aren’t inexpensive family outings anymore!

    In Nashville when I was approved for foster care, I imagined taking children with me to the zoo, and I checked online for membership prices. I then had a dilemma, because the “individual” membership only allowed me to take one guest and I imagined I would have two children at a time (as I did). But the family membership cost a lot more than the individual membership, and I wasn’t at all sure I’d even take children to the zoo. (As it turns out, I only had children for six weeks, and the day I thought about taking them to the zoo, my friend couldn’t go with me and the girls ended up being bratty and no way was I taking them to the zoo where I had sole charge of two kindergarten-age kids who weren’t always obedient!) When trying to decide on a membership, I ended up calling them and explaining my situation: I was single and didn’t usually need a family membership, but I might be getting foster kids and might want to take them to the zoo. If they could let me have a family membership at a singles price, I’d get a membership. Instead of telling me yes, it sounded like I had a good idea and they could do that, they tried to tell me the price was already such a good deal that I should be willing to pay it. (I had to go to the zoo several times a year to be worth the price; I ended up only joining one year since it really wasn’t worth the price for me. And in Nashville I was earning very little money most years and didn’t have the money for things like zoo memberships.)

    Had they been willing to work with me, I would have gotten a membership that year, and yes it would have been a family membership at a single price, but since I would have only been going by myself (not with kids), they would not have lost any money on it; they would have had me as a member for a year. Since a family membership offered no additional benefits over an individual membership except that I could take a spouse (which I didn’t have) and take children without making them go as guests, I wouldn’t have been “taking advantage” of the system at all, but bureaucracy says, “no, that isn’t the way we do it around here.” As it turned out, since they weren’t willing to work with me, I didn’t buy a membership at all that year, and I also probably never went to the zoo at all that year.

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  8. A beautiful sunshine day here. Soon folk will be complaining of the heat. Birds are singing, breeze is gentle. I love this time of year. And DJ is correct, Christmas is just around the corner. But I know what Cheryl means: I have a birthday boy on June 26 and another on Dec 26.

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  9. The St. Louis Zoo is free, but parking is $15. There is plenty of free parking along the streets in the park where the zoo is located, if you get there early enough, and don’t mind walking an extra 1/4 mile or so to the gate. There are also extra attractions that vary in price. But if you go at 8:00, those extras are free until 9:00. So once in a while we get all our children and families together and leave our house around 5:30AM to get a free parking space and see some of the extras without spending a lot. Of course, there is the gas for 2 minivans and a car, plus lunch. Oh, well. It’s fun to get the whole gang together.

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  11. Morning! What a lovely photo up there! Summer indeed!
    We are to get up into the 70’s today! I think I shall be pulling some weeds so that more weeds can invade! But the ground is wet enough so that the process of pulling them up should be with greater ease…. 😊
    Dumb raccoon knocked over a hummingbird feeder last night….I suppose he is now sleeping it off! 🦝

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  12. I went to the zoo for free last week with the hordes, who were up for a visit. It was to a small local zoo, in a city near where my parents are. There were not a lot of tropical animals there, which pleased me, since something seems inherently wrong with keeping animals meant to live in southern climates in a northern climate. When I have been to the much larger, and more expensive, Toronto zoo, the lions, elephants, giraffes, etc., seemed somewhat unenthusiastic about their surroundings. The animals we saw in the local zoo were mostly adapted to a colder climate but still a rare sight to the average Southern Ontarian, such as yaks, otter, and caribou. There were monkeys and wallabys, and a python in a glass cage (ugh), but all in all, it was a temperate zoo.

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  13. I see son did not come home again last night. I suspect, knowing that he is down to two months and a day, this will be happening more and more often. Especially since he flunked three classes, or maybe did enough good behavior post school to convince the teachers to only give him one of the earned F’s. Maybe I will write a quick note to the local paper, reminding people what harboring a runaway in Idaho can get them. Maybe I will just close my eyes and let it be.

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  14. I am going to post a few pictures of what the flood looks like here. This one is the baseball stadium in Hannibal.

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  19. LA Zoo admission currently is $21 for adults, $16 for children.

    We won’t even talk about Disneyland where it now costs over $100 per person just to walk in the gate. How do families do that? The annual DL memberships are very popular locally but at several hundred $s a pop for a year you have to be a very dedicated Disneyland fan who will go there often (there are many). I have a couple friends who do that so the memberships work out for them, it’s an annual splurge they feel is worth it.

    I like DL, it’s always great fun, but going there once every few or several years is often enough for me. It’s probably been going on 10 years since I’ve been (and that time I was able to use a media pass deal that is no longer available — took Carol’s friend, Gail and she loved it and the free entry really helped her — and me as well).

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  20. I caught one of my favorite childhood movies last night on the BYU (Mormon) cable channel — “Parent Trap” from 1961. I hadn’t seen it in years but it was a huge favorite in our little crowd when it came out. I even had the record. 🙂 Haley Mills was a few years older than we were but she was something of an early movie idol for our girls crowd.

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  21. I won a contest in a Flickr photo contest for a dragonfly photo, and now I get to choose the theme for photos next week. Not everyone in that group is photographing animals or even nature, so that affects what I choose. I could choose something like butterflies, and then people who don’t photograph nature can submit a photo of a sculpture or book or even a person with a butterfly shirt. Or I could choose something that can be interpreted however you like, such as “two of a kind.” I could choose a color except that this week is a color (purple), so I’d rather do something different. I’m considering a sort-of “color” choice, though: that the photo has to be all shades of a single color (it can be multiple greens or multiple pinks as long as the whole photo is that color) or two color (any two colors, but the photo has to have just two colors in it). Or I could say “action shot.”

    I’m leaning toward either an action shot or a shot that includes just two colors. Thoughts?

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  25. Cheryl- It’s “Gay” Pride Month, so be careful of a color theme. You might get a lot of rainbows.

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  26. Peter, thank you. What I was thinking of, a rainbow wouldn’t qualify. I’m thinking of a photo that is just two colors, for instance a flower that is red with green leaves or a creature that is yellow and brown, or a white bird flying in a blue sky . . .

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  27. Thanks Dj…we had a Maytag nightmare set before this Kenmore set…so we are doing more research. Mr took apart the circuit board and it looks fine…then he looked at the belt…fine…then moved onto the thermal fuses…one was broken…he ordered a new one which will be here Wed…he tested the old fuse with a penny and the dryer worked 😳 …perhaps we will eek out a tad bit more time on this set…. 😏

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  28. Well he didn’t put an actual penny in it…he put a wire…he said that was a play on words as that is what they once did in a pinch when a fuse went out in the fuse box at home! 😳

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  29. You’re lucky you have someone to do that!

    My old pair were 30+ years old so it was time. I’ve so far been happy with these new ones (2 years).

    I also wonder if brand names start to not mean so much, especially as technology becomes more standard fare. Or sometimes we may just get a lemon and will never forget it!

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  30. This was a long day in the start of what will be a long week. Tomorrow morning will be chaos with the homeless numbers release followed by the anticipated public meltdowns, I did one story in advance today on the housing that’s (slowly) being built.

    Our young stand-in editor sounded pretty frantic on the phone when I spoke with him earlier today. He has hair that tends to stand up higher and higher the more stressed he gets. It’s one of the things I miss seeing when i work from home.

    I’m also supposed to attend a private meeting with editors and other reporters & refinery execs on refinery issues on Wednesday and then, of course, there are the graduation photo assignments, I think I may have two on Thursday (4 and 7 p.m.).

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  31. NancyJill – We were told by our appliance repairman that SpeedQueen is a very good, high-quality washer, well worth the higher price. We only needed a new washer at the time, so I haven’t checked to see if they make dryers, too.

    I can imagine someone quipping that an appliance repairman just might recommend one that would need his services more. But our guy is a fellow believer who seems trustworthy. And the washer has not needed any repairs so far. (Although we’ve only had it for three or four years.)

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  32. Yes Dj we definitely had the lemon Maytag washer/dryer. The appliance guy told us that on his third trip out…he said Maytag had a “bad batch:”!!
    Kizzie our appliance guy who fixed our new Whirlpool oven (I used the self clean feature and blew the heating element!) said Speed Queen is the best…expensive but the best.

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