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Our Daily Thread 12-30-19

Good Morning!

Now that I caught up on the weekend’s blog posts, I see that our non-posting Sunday was actually Kathaleena’s birthday.

So Happy Belated Birthday!!!! 

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Anyone have a QoD?

 

 

46 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 12-30-19”

  4. I have to agree with Chas.
    I am up and at ‘em this morning. Headed in to the office soon.
    Wow! 2020. Who’d-a thunk it?

    Me? I went ahead and started doing the things I want to do in the new year as far as my morning routine. I waste a lot of time in the mornings on social media, looking at email, and generally slipping into my day. I could accomplish a lot in that time my brain is most alert.

    Liked by 2 people

  6. AJ may want to get a shotgun ready (without ammo) for when the young men start showing up. My brother joked about doing that. When his daughters were old enough, he was going to have a shotgun ready and be sitting on the front porch cleaning it so the young men would get the idea not to mess with the girls. I don’t think he ever did that, but at least one of them is licensed to carry.

    Liked by 3 people

  7. I was thinking the same thing, Peter.
    I never had girls, but Chuck had three.
    When guys came for his girls, they had to come into the house. Chuck wanted to look at each guy who took his daughter out..
    When we lived in Annandale, there was a pretty girl living across the street. I noticed, from my upstairs window, that guys would come and honk their horns. And the girl would come out.
    That is not the smart way of doing it.

    Liked by 5 people

  8. Yeah, I know. 😳

    Thankfully she seems focused on going to college and getting her degrees in counseling. She has a young man at church who she likes and who seems to feel the same. I was actually just praying for both of them. He was Elizabeth’s first date I told you guys about. His name is Stephen. Tomorrow I’ll post a picture of the two of them because I also have a prayer request to share with all of you about him. Because where that boy is going, he’s gonna need it. 🙂

    Liked by 6 people

  9. She is so pretty 🙂 And she created a very sweet tree.

    So when to people take Christmas “down”? My friend Carol was surprised I wasn’t leaving the tree up until Epiphany (apparently that’s what her parents did, though they weren’t believers). I told her it would be dry as a stick by then.

    But I do tend to leave little bits and pieces of Christmas around for a while, on the mantel, etc. In fact the copper/brass angel candle holders never did go away last year and I’ll probably just continue to leave them there over the fireplace. I have some of those rustic-looking flickering tapered candles (short) that run on batteries. The batteries had long since stopped working (these candles work on an automatic timer) so I replace all of those and they’re working nicely again.

    Looks like our rain has fizzled, though I believe the storm they were anticipating is still hitting in other places, including bringing more snow to the mountains. In normal/good years, January-February are our rainiest months. Let’s hope we get plenty again as we did last year.

    After the shooting yesterday in the church in Texas someone from our church posted that we do have people in our congregation who “carry.” Yikes. I suppose that’s good, though, as long as they know what they’re doing and how and when to use the ultimate defense. Now I’m wondering who … I think I could name at least a couple likely candidates. 🙂

    But that shooting yesterday surely would have been a lot worse had the shooter not been taken out so quickly.

    Liked by 3 people

  10. “2020” is easy to say, at least. And it’s already familiar due to the lengthy coverage we’ve already had about the presidential election. It’ll be easier to write on checks and other forms, too. I sometimes had to pause a bit with 2019. The years surely do begin to fly by.

    I still remember a girlfriend and I — we must have been in junior high, called middle school now of course — figured out how old we’d be when 2000 rolled around.

    OLD! we lamented. Very old! Like our parents’ age.

    Liked by 3 people

  12. Happy belated birthday, Kathaleena!

    I’m going to start taking down Christmas today, but it will take several days as I want to put things away so that next year it is less of a mess bringing out what I want. The dining room table is stretched as long as it will go to hold things as they come down. Plus our tree has started to needle out (the buds have burst and it’s growing) but it’s going to dry out pretty quickly now.

    Liked by 2 people

  13. Christmas does not come down until after the 12th day of Christmas, January 6. My mother’s youngest sibling had a birthday that day, so my mother grew up with the tradition of not taking the decoration’s down until her sibling’s birthday and has carried it on. We now have a Three King’s day celebration on that day, with small token gifts.

    We are currently iced in, with it coating every surface. The power has already flickered ominously. Hoping that the lines stay up and the ice melts. I have to work the next three days, and I do not want a slippery drive. The highway I travel on is already quite treacherous (where there are no sharp curves, there are steep hills), without adding ice to the mix, and I have already had too many nail biting drives into work and home from work (whiteout conditions, ice, etc.). My car sprung an oil leak and the local mechanic is not back to work until after New Year’s so I will have to borrow my parents’ vehicle.

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  14. I discovered, turning on my work phone in preparation for tomorrow, that they left a message asking if I would work last Friday and/or the weekend. I couldn’t have, because I was sick (it is still touch and go, and I’m hoping that these next few days don’t cause a relapse), but they usually call my personal or home phone if they really want to get a hold of me, so it must not have been really important.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. Elizabeth is pretty! Love her glasses!

    Hubby used to joke about having a shotgun ready for when a boy would come to call for one of his daughters. As a result, Nightingale kept her relationship with X secret. 😦

    Liked by 2 people

  16. We usually take our (artificial) tree down at Epiphany or the weekend after. But this year it didn’t go up until four days before Christmas. Then none of our ancient light strings worked, so we left it dark until I bought new ones this past weekend at after-Christmas prices. Now that the tree is finally lit, I think we’ll leave it up until just before Lent.

    Liked by 4 people

  17. DJ, I chuckled at your cute/cut tree from yesterday. It reminded me of the time when Flyboy was small and wrote that “Buffy [our dog] is a very cut puppy.” It became part of our family dialect. We often comment on how cut our current dog is.

    Liked by 4 people

  19. Happy Birthday Kathleen.
    Re: The shotgun. All a joke, I know, but seriously. Be nice to the guy. He is nervous, as he should be, when picking up his girl for the first couple of times. You can ruin your daughter’s life by scaring away the guys. You need to think he is wise for choosing your daughter.

    Liked by 3 people

  21. OK, the day is planned out — end-of-decade pieces (short) on port automation & homelessness (and where the issues go from here — it’s a given that both these issues will “go” on and on into the next decade); and a possible story on how the New Year’s Day ocean swims might be affected (or not) by storm drain issues following the recent rains.

    Our immediate/direct (hipster) editor told me he’s hoping to take Friday off to visit a wolf sanctuary in northeast LA County with a friend for friend’s birthday. Sounds fascinating and I’d never heard about a wolf sanctuary in our area. Hope he can wrangle the day off to go.

    Most of the ornaments and lights are down, wrapped and ready to pack away for next year, it will require a couple trips to the garage where I’m hoping one of my still-empty ‘trunk’ sized clear garage storage boxes will hold everything. At least I’m getting the Christmas things all in one place again, though there are still missing boxes from previous years buried in there somewhere … I wound up buying new plug-in lights this year for the tree, it took 4 strands and they were really quite cheap at Home Depot.

    I didn’t decorate until late either — bought my tree very late, within the week before Christmas. So Christmas this year, with the late Thanksgiving and the weird bifurcated holiday/work weeks, didn’t seem nearly long or leisurely enough to really enjoy.

    Liked by 1 person

  22. I was able to find one of my older photos (of the blue telescope view finder overlooking the port) on that sidebar and then look it up in my old emails. We wound up needing it for a story I did last week, who would have thought? But it came in quite handy after someone stole one of the viewfinder scopes over Christmas. Popular story, as it turned out, with a few thousand page views so far.

    Liked by 2 people

  23. Growing up, we always waited until January 6 to take down the tree. Puerto Ricans celebrate El día de los Tres Reyes (Three Kings Day) that day. Also, we rarely had the tree up before December 23rd, so leaving it up later than our neighbors was practical.

    Now-a-days we don’t even put up a tree. Originally it was because we were never home, but at my in-laws. Now, neither Mrs L or I care about having all the decorations. We go to D1’s house to celebrate, since that is where (currently) all the grandchildren are. But now that D2 is expecting grandchild #6 any day, we might alternate between her house and D1’s.

    Liked by 1 person

  26. Christmas decorations: raised with putting up the tree Christmas Eve and taking it down New Year’s Day. But we put it up a few days earlier, decorate it Christmas Eve, and take it down about January 6. We only put out a few other things. A string of lights on the doorway, another on the Christmas Cross, and random things on the two pianos. Fairly easy and the youngest two do all of the decorating and setting up, I do the putting away.

    Liked by 1 person

  27. I have a very simple existence. I took the wreath off the door, wrapped it in plastic and pit it away. I have some Christmas cards on display that I will later take down. The cards have special meaning to me since they serve as my main indoor decoration.

    Liked by 1 person

  30. Thank you, Janice. Actually, due to weather we were homebound, therefore it was a very usual day. The only thing unusual about it was that church was canceled. I decided to make cardamom bread, but after the dough was in the bread machine for quite awhile, I realized I couldn’t smell any cardamom. Yes, I had forgotten to put it in! Not to worry. Cardamom bread became caramel rolls. Doing any baking on a Sunday is something I seldom do. Having a birthday between two holidays (and a child with one during the same time period) has made me quite flexible on any celebration.

    Liked by 4 people

  31. Don’t think I’ll tell the editor we’re “off” on the decade story since the entire staff has been involved in producing all of that for the past week.

    Is that an actual cat from the household on that other ornament?

    Did my decade stories but I’m still waiting for a call back from the county storm drain person.

    The gardener (his brother, anyway) was here ever-so-briefly. They’ve had to skip their regular appearances due to rain in the past 2 weeks, they’ll probably be back into the swing of it next Monday. My one neighbor is kind of tough on them, though, she called me complaining that they may be slacking off but I told her I’m sure it’s the weather complications.

    Now I think I’ll try to work on re-connecting this printer again. I have one last thing to try — re-downloading drivers from the printer website — and if that doesn’t work I’ll have to find someone who can or will come over for a fee to do it for me.

    Liked by 1 person

  35. Sad occurrence in our community last night. A man who grew up locally was taking his mother home for a few days, as the daughter who lives on the ranch and helps care for her has the ,flu, lost control of the vehicle and the mother was killed. The man was heartbroken. I am afraid I was not a lot of use on scene, as I felt so sad for the family. and was comforting him.

    Liked by 4 people

  37. We have been productive today. I have 13 jars of posole in the cooker right now, and a large batch of beets ready to pickle and put in the cooker. Trying to tie up loose ends of things lying around. I have a box of asian pears and another of plums which I could do up. That will probably wait until I go to work, as I need some more pint jars. I have boxes and boxes of quarts. Never the size you need.

    Liked by 1 person

  40. I’ve never heard of posole before. Is this it (from Wikipedia)?

    Pozole (Nahuatl languages: pozolli Spanish pronunciation: [po’sole], pozole), which means “hominy”, is a traditional soup or stew from Mexican Cuisine. It is made from hominy, with meat (typically pork), and can be seasoned and garnished with shredded lettuce or cabbage, chile peppers, onion, garlic, radishes, avocado, salsa or limes.

    Pozole is typically served on New Year’s Eve to celebrate the new year. Pozole is frequently served as a celebratory dish throughout Mexico and in Mexican communities outside Mexico. Common occasions include Mexico Independence Day, birthdays, Christmas and other holidays.

    Sounds good to me!

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  41. I ran a few errands this afternoon and walked around the big antique mall in the Springs. That airs my head out and it is enjoyable to look at what dealers have displayed in their booths (although most of them are delusional if they truly believe their offerings are worth as much as their price tags indicate!) I purchased an 1852 leather school book for 10 dollars and it was 20 percent off…that was a good deal!
    I am enjoying still our tree and garlands…and the Christmas piano music playing on Pandora…not done yet! 😊 🎄

    Liked by 2 people

  43. Instead of pork, maybe one of those rodents 6 arrows’ kin likes to eat could be thrown into the pozole, just to keep folks guessing.

    Oh, antique shopping — my mom and I loved to do that. But she’d see things she grew up with and declare they weren’t “really” antiques. I kind of do the same thing now. “It’s not *that* old.” lol

    Liked by 1 person

  44. Using my grandsons strong muscles, I got moved into the missions house. Then he wanted to go out for sushi. After that it turned out that the girls were going to Little Women so I tagged along. It’s been years since I have seen a movie.
    Grocery shopping will have to wait until tomorrow. I got milk and eggs.

    Liked by 4 people

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