59 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-25-20”

  3. Good morning. We had a much better night. Heading to get groceries and then taking 2 of the grands home with me. I will be happy to see my guys.

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  4. This is an anniversary for me. 45 years ago today, I walked out of my high school for the last time as a student. I had enough credits, so I took an early diploma. Unlike some of my classmates who did the same, I didn’t go on to college right away.

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  5. Good Morning. Little Miss, Papa and I went to the community park yesterday. We were there about an hour, then on to have pizza–she pretty much at a whole slice by herself, then ice cream- she and I shared a kid’s cup, then home for bath time and watching the zoo animals on Discovery or Animal Planet.
    This morning we have had leftover Christmas ham, hash browns, and scrambled eggs. Papa has been trying to get a photo of her in a dress her great grandmother sent to her for Christmas (this is the mother of the mother that walked away from her children. The grandmother always stayed in touch).
    I am getting offers on some of my listings so that is making me feel better about the year ahead. I did have drama Thursday and yesterday with one of my agents. She took $21,000 in commission advances from a company that does that sort of things and is now furious with me that I am making her pay it back. I didn’t make the decision alone, three of us did, but I am the one that delivered the message, so I am the one who is receiving the anger. She told someone that she just didn’t know if she should stay with the company. I asked if we should have a going away party. Bon Voyage! We wish you well.
    She also wasn’t happy that I told her that she couldn’t do commercial real estate because she doesn’t know what she is doing. Worst part is she took to Facebook to ask questions and thus announced to every agent in P-Cola that she didn’t know what she was doing. Then of course, this morning in scanning through FB she was in another discussion of realtor safety and told about a situation she was once in where she ran out of an open house, got in her car, called the police, and in graphic detail told what the man did in front of her car for her viewing. So classy. Yes, I am proud to have her represent my company.

    Of to vacuum and do my Cinderella chores…oh and watch Elmo

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  6. We’ve been socked in with fog since last night.

    I wanted to sleep in but after letting the animals out at 6:30 I couldn’t fall back asleep so I was up early (for a Saturday). It’ll be a household chore day for me, too. I need to clear off and rearrange the lower laundry shelf above the washer/drier (too many things there that squeeze out room for such logical items as detergent!).

    I see from an email that tomorrow’s sermon will be on abortion (Ps. 82: 3, 4).

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  7. Daughter drove to Lewiston for her med assist class. The instructor told her she was not registered and needed to show proof of registration. We were just on the phone with them yesterday and confirmed registration, no mention of bringing proof of registration to class. She does not have a smart phone so could not provide the picture we were willing to send of the confirmation email. Nor would the instructor allow us to send it to anybody else. Heads will roll on Monday. They will also be expected to reimburse her for the trip to town.

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  8. Good day to all. We had a lot of fog last night, but then it cooled down and the fog left. It was 37° this a.m.

    Remember I said my brother chose to use bleach instead of Comet? I know Comet has some bleach but not so much. I was afraid he might get bleach on the carpet which he did not. I had only wanted him to wipe the walls where pictures had hung and rehang them. I had to take things off the walls while the roof work was done. He decided to wash down the whole wall of the hallway and then wiped down the handrail. I always hold onto the rail these days since I have the leg problem. As I gripped the rail, I felt grunge. I thought he’d used a dirty rag to wipe it down. But that did not make sense. Later when cleaning it, I realized he’d partially stripped the varnish. I have not told him yet. Of course I want to say, “Told you so, but you would not listen.” Of course there was not time to get much else hung back up.

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  9. The header photo is, of course, icicles over the creek. We had lots and lots of rain last week and the creek near me was about as full as one ever sees. (Initially after a heavy rain, the right-turn lane on the street will be flooded, and then the water recedes back into its proper area.) Then Saturday night the temperature dipped and Sunday it never got out of the teens, Monday it got only into the twenties, and Tuesday the predicted high was supposed to be 34–above freezing for the first time in nearly 72 hours, but barely.

    I decided to drive to this creek and see what I might find in terms of ice formation. The creek that runs behind our house has places where spray has covered a plant, and frozen, and I thought I might find frozen patches. What I found was even better–icicles the whole length of the creek. I ended up driving to a different parking lot as well, and in all looking at several different portions of the creek and getting photos of each.

    Ever since I first saw icicles, in my twenties, I have thought that someday I want to get photos of them. I did get photos once of an ice “waterfall” down the side of a mountain, but this was my first chance at icicles, and it was a fun opportunity.

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  10. Janice, if adults are cleaning, generally they choose their own method. My husband and I do different areas of our home, and presumably we do them in different ways. If you don’t trust him to clean, then tell him thanks, but you’ll do it. If you do trust him to do it, then let him use his method unless it’s a safety issue (like using bleach and ammonia at the same time).

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  11. Lots of little things for me today, too. We have sunshine here with a storm coming in later. I am texting my son and working on tickets to Denver this week. He has options. It was easy to get there but I couldn’t find a way home.

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  12. Nature’s ice sculptures.

    The dishwasher is going and I’ve identified 3 (4 if I’m really ambitious, 2 if I do the minimum and 1 if I completely run out of steam) areas in the kitchen/laundry/dining areas to clear off and reorganize today.

    The food cupboard also needs clearing out (#5), some (I’m sure) expired spices etc.

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  15. I guess the thing is, I did not ask him to clean, only to wipe the wall off where the picture hangs before rehanging it. I had no idea he was going to turn it into a big project. I could have hung that picture in about 5 minutes. It is other things in other areas that require being up on a stool that I needed help with more because I still have trouble with my leg. I would not have asked him for help if I had known. Once he had it in mind to do what he wanted to do there was no stopping him. I did not mean to appear ungrateful or lazy for not doing it myself. I guess it is hard to explain the situation. I think I just need to ask my brother to help with outside things and find someone else to help with things indoors. Art helped me get things down by standing beside me while I was on a stool. But it hurts (and maybe adds permanent damage to my knees) to do such things right now. I know for those at this age and stage it is difficult to understand. Sorry if I shared too much.

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  18. You are fine, Janice. We all come here to air some frustrations. And we all have words of wisdom. Take the ones that help and ignore the rest, as we all do.

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  19. I cannot imagine how it is to be in constant pain. Watching my husband, I am continually amazed at his pleasant attitude and not too astonished when it slips from time to time. I, on the other hand, rarely have any discomfort and get grouchy way too often.

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  20. Janice, that makes sense. It does fall into the “if you don’t trust him to do it . . .” category, and sometimes it takes having the person mess something up to realize this isn’t their area of skill.

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  21. Kitchen now looks truly awful, everything’s pulled out of a couple cupboards and off of a couple laundry shelves. Now to figure out how to re-position things. …

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  22. This is a live and learn thing. I had never asked my brother to help with something like this before. Maybe he thought what I asked for was too little and he wanted to do more? He is a hard worker, but the fact that he will not listen to me is aggravating. I did help him to learn how to use his new phone yesterday. He was having trouble knowing the very basics like how to answer and how to set up a contact. I showed him how to take a picture and delete it. In the tax work that is needed at times to get a picture of documentation and then send it to someone in the office. He had to get this new type phone for his preparer work. He did not want to give up his flip phone. I think Roscuro said she had to change, too. There is a lot to learn and if someone won’t read the instruction book then they need to get someone to show them the basics.

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  25. We just had supper from Taco Bell. The very friendly, helpful young man who took my order let me know, when he gave me my receipt, that I could fill out a survey for a chance to win $500. I was expecting the survey to ask whether anyone in my family worked for Taco Bell, the way the surveys at some stores do, but it didn’t. So I said what a friendly and helpful young man had taken my order.
    I never thought, when he was younger, that he’d ever do well at a job like that, working with the public, having to work fast and sometimes deal with unexpected situations (which he typically doesn’t handle well). But he seems to be doing very well and is happy doing it.

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  26. Janice – Have you seen a doctor about your leg?

    Your mention of having to hold on to the banister going downstairs because of your leg indicates that you didn’t always do so. There are many people who do not hold on to anything going downstairs, and I see that in TV shows and movies quite a lot.

    But the thought of that scares me. Maybe it’s because of my balance issues which, although relatively mild, make me feel that I need to hold on and be careful on stairs. But even people without balance issues can so easily catch a shoe on a stair, or slip a bit, or misjudge the length of their step, or whatnot. It makes me so nervous to see people (like Nightingale) go downstairs without holding on.

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  28. Today on our flight to Philly, my EMT daughter handled a medical emergency beautifully. Patient is fine. Plane did not have to divert and we landed on time.

    Carolyn’s on her way to her medical school interview. #proudmama

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  29. Yesterday there was mention of the tune “Shave and a haircut, two bits”. If I’m not mistaken, that is the “tune” to the playful knock many of us do –

    Knock. Knock-knock-knock-knock. Knock. Knock.

    (Know what I mean?)

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  31. Thanks, Jo. The new photo is frost, as photographed on our car. We had a garage before our move, and my husband wanted one. But he’s the one who suggested we buy this place, and it doesn’t have one. (We do park right outside the door, though–really we’re closer to the car than we were in the previous house, it’s just that it isn’t “inside” anymore.) But the car being outside has given me some great opportunities this winter to get photos of frost and snow. (I also sent AJ some photos of snow in which you can see the patterns of individual flakes.)

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  33. Frost dangle earrings, I’ll order a pair please

    I made significant progress in the house.

    I’ve always heard you should have a hand on the rail when going down stairs especially. As Kizzie said, just in case.

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  34. You know, the Lord is good and was watching out for that man On the plane yesterday. He was sitting in the last row across from the overhead bin where they keep all the emergency medical gear, including the oxygen and AED. There were probably only a dozen of us in the plane’s back ten rows. A nurse case manager sat right in front of him, we were four rows up and a new pediatric resident sat ahead of us. And, of course, I prayed. By the time we landed, he had color in his face from breathing the oxygen and walked off the plane. Thanks be to God.

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  35. I hold on the the railing going down stairs. Not because I have balance issues but because I am a natural born klutz. Thankfully I have never fallen down stairs but I have fallen up them.

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  36. Kim – I’ve done both. 🙂

    I can’t watch when Nightingale walks down the basement stairs carrying her laundry basket, not holding on. When I go down those stairs with my laundry basket, I go backwards, carefully bringing the basket down step by step.

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  37. Related to my prayer request yesterday: Later in the day, Nightingale told me that when they were in the car, she told him – not mentioning any names – that part of life is that some people will disappoint you. They will promise things to make you feel good about them, but then not follow through. It is part of life, and we need to learn to accept that, and not take it so much to heart when it happens.

    Of course, she knows that it is natural for a child (or even an adult) to be hurt and upset when someone they love disappoints them in that way, but she wanted him to be more prepared in his mind, so to speak (not sure how to articulate that).

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  38. Karen. exactly. It’s the “Shave and a haircut” ending some country bands make to their music. VC tried to copy it, but couldn’t.
    I haven’t heard it used in years.
    The reason it couldn’t be copied is that it’s unique to the genre. You have to have the rhythm.

    As I said many times before., I used to operate radios in the AF. Morse code. I still know Morse code. each dot and dash sounds like any other. But after some time, you can learn an operator’s “fist”. That is, there is something that makes each person unique for the same signal. And machine generated signals are immediately recognized.

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  39. The only times I hold onto the railing are when I am having trouble with my asthma and need extra support. Otherwise, I walk down and up the stairs, often with several things in my hands, without thinking about it. I grew up in this house, and had my fair share of tumbles growing up and a few in my adult years, but that also means I know the stairs very well and frequently traverse them without even turning on the light. The household admittedly has an awful habit of leaving things on the stairs that need to go up or down, but due to my familiarity with the proportions and dimensions of the stairs, I can generally sense where the obstacles are. I have yet to tumble over the laundry basket that is not infrequently placed on a lower step to be carried up. It helps that the stairs have a landing halfway down (or up) and change direction 360 degrees at the landing, so one can only ever fall halfway down the stairs.

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  40. I am enjoying a few days off. I have worked over 76 hours in a week and three days, plus an hour and half or more (depending on weather) of travel time for every day. It is a good thing I only took a part time job.

    I have worked at least one day of the past three weekends (I worked yesterday) and every weekend there has been a storm. I described the ice pellet drive that prevented me getting home. Last weekend, it was a heavy snowstorm (the tail-end, perhaps, of what Newfoundland), and the roads were not properly plowed when I went into work on Sunday morning (at points, the plow line went up the centre of the lane, as if the snow plow had driven up the middle of the road, straddling the centre line). This weekend, the weather couldn’t make up its mind, and I drove into work through a succession of rain, freezing rain, ice pellets, wet snow, and snow. It was still somewhat confused when I drove home again. Due to changes in altitude (I have mentioned the high hills on my route) and a patchwork of different districts responsible for clearing the road, each section of highway is different in both type of precipitation when the temperature is just hovering around freezing and in how well it has been cleared, so I drove over packed snow, slush, puddles of water, and, the most dreaded of all road surfaces, black ice (when the road surface looks clear and dry, but shimmers ominously in the headlights). Thankful for safety.

    One of my secret weapons in driving on slippery roads (which I did not have that time I landed in the ditch) is my father’s stabilizer, which he has kindly transferred to my vehicle on the grounds that I now drive more than he does. He acquired it in his bachelor days – I thought it had been part of his drag racing equipment (yes, he was one of those people back in the ’70s), but he told me he traded a housemate a TV set for the stabilizer – and it is a heavy steel bar that is spring loaded to swing in the opposite direction of where the car’s back wheels are sliding. I have felt it several times correct the direction of my car’s back wheels on slippery roads.

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  41. Working so many weekends means that I missed two Sundays in a row, so it was good to get back to church today. The pastor of the church I attend now has been going through the book of Mark. This morning he was preaching on the end of Mark 2 and beginning of Mark 3, which both have stories addressing the differences between Jesus’ knowledge of the Sabbath and the Pharisees’ view of the Sabbath, and using that as a springboard to address the differences between the Old and New Covenant idea of a day of rest.

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  42. A good day at church. While we’re going through the books of the Bible in order, one book per week), on the last Sunday the pastor or whom ever is preaching will deliver a sermon on something topical. Today’s was abortion, an issue our pastor has been especially sensitive to throughout his ministry.

    I’ve not followed the debates closely, but he mentioned that at a recent one, all of the candidates “on one side” confirmed they supported third-trimester abortion. It is disheartening how these issues take us deeper and deeper in the darkness once they break through to general cultural acceptance.
    ++++++++++++++++++
    Very sad and shocking news about Kobe Bryant, saw it on my phone after I left church. He was also a local celeb, our former crime reporter, an avid Lakers fan, adored him and met him a couple times — our councilman also posted a pic of him with Kobe today.

    I don’t follow basketball, but we all knew who Kobe was.

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  43. Roscuro (3:10), ah, the bounciness of youth 🙂

    I still need to get a handrail put in for the first set of concrete steps going up to my house — the next set of steps, which turn and take you up onto the porch, are much steeper and have become a bit of a challenge for me (I’m short, remember!) at least have a wooden porch frame railing one can use when needed.

    But now I use mostly the back door (with only one short step up from the driveway to the side gate and then another short one up onto the patio) ever since the new sliding door (that can lock from the outside, the old one couldn’t) put in. It’s so much easier when you’re hauling in groceries or even a work bag and computer.

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  44. I’ve said before”
    When you are 18, you fall or get thrown down, you jump up and run back to the huddle.
    When you are 88; you fall and someone calls an ambulance.

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  45. DJ, I am not that young anymore 🙂 And my whole family is like that. My mother only started using the rails a few years ago when her knees became too unstable to allow her to step up unsupported. My father still does not use the rails. When each of the little ones were able to go up and down without hanging on to the rail, it was a bit of a milestone for each of them in terms of development. The stairs to the basement is under the the stairs to the second floor, so it has the same turn at the landing, but there is no rail in the centre of the stair column, so that it is theoretically possible to topple over the side of the top half of the basement stairs onto the bottom half. For adult, that is unlikely, as the bottom half of the second floor stairs forms a partial upper wall on that side (to the right going down) of the upper basement stairs, but the danger is real for a little person, so having them be able to walk up and down the stairs without rails is important for them to be able to go up and down the basement stairs unattended. Until that time, we keep a gate across the top of the basement stairs.

    We who grew up in the house were long accustomed to just stepping over the gate, which has been in use on and off as needed since Eldest, the first child of the house, was a baby, but Second in-law would get so bothered by us stepping over the gate, often with laundry basket (the laundry room is in the basement) or other bulky article stored in the basement in hand. Now that Sixth is fully independent of the stairs, we no longer have the gate closed. Sixth has always presented a challenge with that gate, as hitherto, with the four original children of the house, small relatives, children of friends, etc. the gate has been the right height to stop a toddler in his or her tracks. But Sixth is the child of a man over 6 feet high and a woman of above average height and is, at not yet two, the size of a child twice his age. He is the first known toddler to have been able to lean far enough over the gate that he toppled over and rolled down the stairs to the landing. Miraculously, he escaped without injury, despite completely shattering a plastic bin on the landing (the basement landing doubles as the entranceway of the back door, as the house is on a hill). But it unnerved my father, who had built that gate nearly four decades ago. He went so far as to screw on a piece of plywood to raise the height of the gate, much to the consternation of his older grandsons, who sleep in the basement when they come on their long visits and regularly climb the gate to go up and down. So it was a relief to all of us when Sixth was able to walk up and down stairs without holding onto anything.

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  46. I don’t always hang onto the rail when I go up stairs. I seldom do when carrying laundry baskets etc. I am holding on recently because of my foot pain, however.

    Chas, that is so true about older people falling. One of the performers in my husband’s music group fell last winter and has never been quite the same. He was checked out and it could be coincidental, who knows! It is terribly icy here these days and we take much more note of it and care than we were young. I do remember flying out my door after hearing the school my daughter’s attended was closing early. I slipped on ice and flew flat on my back. I did that the last time I ice skated, too. Too bad we really do not appreciate such things when we are young.

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  47. When I was younger, I tended not to hold onto railings. The reality is that holding a railing can present a safety challenge of its own: I’ve gotten splinters from them, and I know someone who badly dislocated his arm when he was holding onto a railing and he fell. Holding on can also affect your balance. Now that I’m older, I do hold on, but with a sense that I’m not adding tremendously to my safety by doing so. Now, last summer when I fell (my feet went out from under me, as somehow the bottom step was slick), the stairs I was on didn’t have a railing, and I could have saved a nasty fall and months of recovery if it had had one. But overall I’d rather not take stairs if I can avoid them, and handrails don’t provide a huge amount of comfort as far as safety. More than anything, I just take steps carefully, especially if they are outside.

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  48. Cheryl, you have a good point about splinters. My mother still has a splinter embedded in her finger that she got at least a decade ago from our stair rail – it was going to cause more damage to remove it at the time, so the doctor decided to let the body take care of it, and the body encapsulated it, so she can feel it and even push it so it shows through the skin. The top rail of our bannisters has a long history, as it was obtained by my mother’s family, along with the vanity in my room and the matching dresser that Youngest has, from the servant’s quarters of the mansion of the man who started the manufacturing business that my grandfather worked for (the mansion is now a public site in the city the manufacturing business built – although the factories are, sadly, no more). So the rail, although not the rest of the stairs, is much older than the house (and my parents built this house over four decades ago), and occasionally, it will send up a splinter, and on one occasion, my mother ran her hand down too quickly and got that splinter.

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  50. The idea, I think, is to lightly have your hand hovering/skimming over or near the rail as insurance, just ‘in case’ — for the reason Kizzie points out, a free-fall tumble to the bottom of a staircase rarely bodes well for anyone

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  51. Attended Freedom Church in downtown Philadelphia today. WAY too loud during the worship part (during which I got bored with the continual repetition of the same words, lovely the first time, endless by #37), but sermon was absolutely fantastic. I took lots of notes!

    Afterwards, we spent the day in the Revolutionary War section and ate crab cakes on garlic noodles with asparagus at The Boiling Pot; a terrific meal.

    Tomorrow we’ll spend some time on the Med school campus and then visit a few art museums. Weather has been cold for the Californians (I may have bought the last pair of mittens—in January? — at the Burlington Coat Factory), but beautiful and sunny.

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  53. Kizzie, lots of things can lead to death. A splinter can lead to death. The badly dislocated arm I mentioned above (when someone was holding onto the handrail and he fell)? He died. People do occasionally die falling down stairs–but not usually healthy young adults. And young adults who hold onto handrails every time they go up and down stairs are probably, in most cases, not emotionally healthy. (They may simply have really bad balance and truly need to hold on. But if they do it from fear of falling, that probably isn’t good.)

    I don’t think we need to go around morbidly worried that anything and everything can kill us. We need to be realistically cautious, and part of that realism is knowing your own individual weaknesses. For me, I’m not terribly sure-footed, so I am cautious on stairs. I also walk on the snow next to the sidewalk rather than the sidewalk itself on a snowy day, if the snow isn’t very deep and the snow hasn’t been cleared–in fact, sometimes I’m even more inclined to walk in the grass if the snow on the sidewalk has been cleared, since walking in snow is safer than walking on ice or wet pavement.

    Recently I read that playgrounds are starting to return to some risk-taking equipment. For a period of time, monkey bars, teeter-totters, swings without dense amounts of mulch underneath, etc. were just not being included in playgrounds because kids might get hurt. But it turned out that (1) those totally safe playgrounds were actually rather boring and (2) kids ended up being way more fearful than is healthy, because people actually learn their bodies partly by testing what is or isn’t too dangerous.

    In other words, we need to be careful, but beyond that, we need to trust God’s sovereignty and know that our safety (and that of our loved ones) is not really in our own hands. I could be super fearful if I allowed myself to be, because my natural inclination is caution. But I recognize that being overly cautious is actually not healthy, either. I also recognize that other people will draw the “caution” lines in different places than I do: some more tightly, and some more loosely. And unless that person is a minor under my care, then I pretty much have to accept it. When my husband and I hike in state parks together, we have to be aware of this, because he has better balance than I do, and so he’s far more open to walking on potentially treacherous spots. But I push myself a little, and he helps me when I just can’t navigate a spot without his help, and we avoid trails that are beyond my ability. One time he bodily lifted me when I “froze” and I just couldn’t move down a slope that felt too steep. I’m naturally cautious–but I don’t want that caution to be fear.

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  54. I use stair rails out of habit. Mainly because when I was younger I took stairs two steps at a time going up and the rail was good for pulling me up. Going down was a different story.

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  56. Kizzie, I usually have a hand at least hovering close to the rail and when carrying a laundry basket, I use one hand for it and one for the rail. I also sometimes bump it down behind me 🙂

    I cannot turn around on stairs, even with a rail, without feeling like I’m going to fall. I usually go the rest of the way down to turn around.

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  59. Besides, the Internet says this:

    Follow these tips to stay safe on stairways:

    * Use handrails.
    * Put your mobile device away.
    * Take one step at a time. …
    * Make sure you can see the stairs. …
    * Keep stairways clear of clutter. …
    * Carry only what you can handle, leaving one hand free to use the handrail. …
    * Do not underestimate the risk of using the stairs.
    ________________________

    Peter, I’ve used the arm hoist going up when having to scale some of the steep “ladder” steps going from one deck to another on the navy ships I’ve had to tour for my job.

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