Good morning everyone.
For some reason, I have ‘Where the Seasons Never Change” in my head this morning.
Off to do the Tuesday thing.
Tuesday isn’t much.
Good morning. That is another fascinating header. Those bubble balls remind me of being in the toy section and seeing those fun little bouncy balls that will bounce super high. I always loved those balls but they were impractical for play because they either did damage to things on the ceiling or the ceiling itself, or they got away too quickly and could not be found. Which begs for the question, has anyone here had trouble with a wayward toy, a baseball that broke a window, a kite in a tree, a badminton birdie stuck on a rooftop, a toy boat that went out to sea, a toy that landed in a fenced yard with a bad dog and no one else at home, a toy left behind a car, something that blew out a window or fell on someone, or even perhaps broken a toy in the store that your parent then had to buy?
Janice, or something you said years ago.
This likely belongs on the “politics” thread, but Bloomberg is now wishing he hadn’t said some0tof the things he said when he was just a simple millionaire.
Sometimes, being wise isn’t smart.
Chas, I take issue with yesterday’s statement that young people don’t know how to read maps. I love maps. Each successive grandchild if my parents has been introduced to the wider world via the world map on my parent’s dining room wall (the one I replaced this year for my father’s Christmas gift). I have been reading Tiny the Little House on the Prairie books and she will often ask after we have read the day’s chapters, to point out where Laura and Mary lived (Wisconsin and Minnesota so far), where Almanzo lived (upper New York State) and then where we live. I always use maps, not GPS, to navigate where I want to go. The only time I use GPS is if I am called out on a home visit for work, and even then, I find it more helpful to look at the map on the screen than to listen to the voice of the navigator.
Phos, from a former mapmaker, I’m glad to hear that.
But finding a good map of Greensboro, NC is impossible.
They still make them, but the print is too small for me.
What I want is a book map like the ones I have for Northern Virginia and Hendersonville.
Seems they don’t make them anymore. No need for a map now.
FYI, I was a cartographer, working for the Defense Mapping Agency.
Though I worked on Lunar mapping for eight years. The advantage of that was that it was unclassified.
The mapping we did, of “denied areas” was classified.
Speaking of going out on home visits, I had a surreal work experience this weekend. I worked the last five days, the last three of those being 12 hours. At the end of one of the 12 hour shifts, I was contacted by management to tell me that my last clinic appointments were to be cancelled because I was being sent out on the road to do evening visits for the community. I might note that I was the only nurse in the clinic, which does not belong to my employing agency, who only staffs it under contract for a government agency. Needless to say, it was a highly concerning rrquest. I had no choice but to do so, but it was after dark, I was already tired, and I had never been to the places I had to go before. It all felt unsafe, and, of course, there were pets and dust aplenty in the places I went.
I was talking to one of the other nurses, as she and I happened to have gone through my first nursing program together. I was observing that when I went into the community for training during that program, it didn’t feel unsafe the way going into the community does now. She agreed and observed that the drug problem had not been so bad then. So many people have horrible health effects from injecting toxic and dirty substances into their veins, and they can be both unreliable and unpredictable to deal with.
On the subject of maps😀, as an accountant I use to have to use a Georgia road map and add up the miles between markers to verify the mileage claimed on employee expense reports. It was a very tedious thing and I hated having to do it the first few times, but then I chose to accept it as part of my my work, and I grew to find it rather fun. It was just another balancing act of an accountant. I had the choice of not doing it and just accepting employee’s word for what they put down, but that would have been neglect of my duties. It was not that I wanted to find someone doing something wrong, either in making a mistake or actually trying to benefit themselves dishonestly. Some people would enjoy that aspect of looking for errors. That never was my motivation.
Sorry to hear about that dangerous aspect of your work, Roscuro. Prayers for your safety. I think the company should be responsible and send out two together, even if they have to hire someone at minimum wage to tag along in those circumstances.
Janice, they only do so if enough fuss is made. I once had to make an evening call to a building best described as a slum. I had had no idea what I was walking into as I am not familiar with the area. A week or so later, one of the regular community nurses raised enough concerns about the building that the decision was made to only have two people make calls to the building and not after dark. Needless to say, I was a bit upset that I had been sent to a place that was known to be unsafe without any kind of warning.
Mumsee @ 9:27. I have the song “Where the Seasons Never Change” by Stuart Hamblin in my head and thought I might bring it over.
It is a good song.
Stuart Hamblin also wrote “It is No Secret” which is more familiar.
Hamblin was a movie actor, played the bad guys. And he was a bad guy until he was saved at a Graham crusade. His life changed.
One day John Wayne mentioned it.
Hamblin answered, “It is no secret what God can do”.
John Wayne said,, Sounds like a song to me.”.
The Mayo clinic had a glitch in their system that sent out letters of acceptance to the school in error. Those poor people who had to be told that they were not accepted. What a shock.
Chas, I hear from someone who was one of the musical people who ran in the crowd that the inside joke was to call that song “It is no cigarette.” I think he made his money on cigarettes before he was saved, or something like that.
Roscuro, I have probably told this story before, but the job I worked before going freelance, we had public safety officers, and if you needed to be somewhere after dark and didn’t feel safe going alone, you could ask for an escort. Well, the first few years we were in a building at the very edge of campus, within a couple of blocks of a notorious public housing development where (it was rumored) even the police wouldn’t go after dark.
I was told that if I had to work late, I should not leave my car in the parking lot of that building, as cars had been broken into after dark. Instead, park in the parking garage a few blocks away and, when leaving, get the public safety escort. So I did that one evening–and public safety told me just walk it. Well, I might have done so (I don’t like the sense I’m being mocked or made to be silly), but I happened to know that a woman roughly twice my size had almost been kidnaped on that corner just weeks before (two men tried to pull her into their car, and she only got away by pretending she had a gun in her purse). So I insisted I wasn’t going anywhere until I got an escort. They told me it might be 10 or 15 minutes, and I said I’d wait. (I could stand inside a locked door and watch the parking lot.) They were just being lazy, but it was outrageous that public safety people could play with people’s safety like that, and it was officially the way to do things–I wasn’t asking for any special favors. Anyway, it was only about five minutes before an officer showed up and did the very short task.
Just weeks later, at lunchtime, three women were walking together back across that parking lot and into our building–and one was robbed at gunpoint! Suddenly our building went from one where an officer scoffed that a woman needs an escort after dark to one where they built a fence most of the way around the parking lot (all but the driveway), and in the morning when people were coming to work, at lunchtime when employees were coming and going, and at the end of the workday, a public safety officer was stationed in a van sitting at the edge of that driveway! It took a gun crime for the woman who understood her circumstances, and was acting wisely in those circumstances, to be taken seriously. (Later there was a hostage situation the next building over, also during the workday, and for our own safety we were asked to stay in our building until it was over. That was resolved safely, and it turns out the hostage taker only bluffed having a gun.)
Cheryl, the town is relatively small in terms of size, not even a hundred thousand. But the drug problem has increased exponentially, with the town being among the five communities with the highest rates of deaths from drug overdose in the province. It has gone from a humdrum country town to something resembling the inner city of much larger city.
I woke up to no rain, again. Sigh. The drought seemingly has returned, at least for now.
Chas, did you ever get to map those secret UFO areas? 🙂
I love maps, too, but mostly for the ‘bigger’ picture they provide (of where one area or city is in relation to another). There’s always a detailed map that prints out with your online travel directions.
Bloomberg is simply a very annoying personality. I see where he’s qualified for the next debate where he will no doubt be devoured live.
It’s the morning (going into the ‘office’) scramble again for me today, everything’s packed for the road — computer, work files — I’ve had my shower, fed the cat (twice, she will not be ignored) but still have to feed the dogs and rumble over the 2 bridges to work.
On Janice’s question of the day, about toy related disasters in childhood, no, I cannot recall perpetrating any serious incidents. My elder siblings early drilled into me the need for safety, reinforced by stories in readers and novels of the disasters that can befall the incautious child. But, I have been the adult whose window was broken by a stray soccer ball, as those who received my letters from West Africa may recall. Besides the ball that sailed into the window, I experienced multiple balls and stones (some slung to hit the weaver bird nests in the trees above my home and some flung to get my attention) hitting the metal roof, which is a very loud sensation, but less destructive than ball into glass.
My father collects maps from the places he’s been the way people collect postcards (he also collects the postcards). He has the map books of areas and has some recently printed ones, so they are still available. When I was in Nunavut, one of the other nurses was excited to get a package that she’d ordered from a company that customs prints topical maps of the area of choice – she had some printed of the area we were in to put on her wall.
I remember a “toy” near disaster, but it was my older brothers, not me, and it didn’t quite end in disaster. My brothers were teenagers when I was a little girl, and when I was ten or so, a couple of brothers bought some sort of kit that had a crosspiece on which you attached candles and then a plastic piece (parachute-like) up and over it. You lit the candles, held it and waited for the hot air to fill the mini hot air balloon, and then released it. The candles were short and didn’t burn long, so there was no particular danger involved, I assume.
Well, my brothers soon used up the pieces that had come in the kit, and they started to improvise. Perhaps they borrowed candles that burned longer from the kitchen drawer, and I think they also claimed pieces of Saran Wrap (or some sort of plastic other than what came with the kit). They might have even taken sticks from the wood box to make their own crosspieces. Whatever it was they cobbled together, it didn’t actually work the same way. Rather than going up in the air for a couple of minutes and then gracefully drifting down, it went up higher and over the fence, and kept burning. My brothers (and, with them, me) chased it down the street, jumping at times to try to catch it, and maybe eventually trying to knock it down with sticks. I don’t remember the precise details. What I do remember is that it went the rest of our block, drifted the entire way across the city park at the end of our street, and was still high in the air when it got to my school and crossed the fence into my schoolyard. I’m pretty sure they climbed the fence to get into the schoolyard and make sure it didn’t catch anything on fire (I didn’t go over the fence but watched from the outside). I think it finally came to the ground as burning parts they had to stamp out. But they were quite nervous by the time it landed and was safely extinguished.
Ah, Chas, you stirred a long-dormant memory from my years in rural CT when my husband sailed off in a submarine for long stretches of time.
It was a Saturday night, the boys were in bed, the dog at my feet and my husband, I knew, was attending a gala function at the US embassy in Brazil. They were on a UNITAS run.
I had finally cleared out a month’s worth of clutter and got captured by the National Geographic magazine, turning the pages and then pulling out the map.
I spent the rest of the evening examining the map while my husband danced the night away on the other side of the globe.
Glamour?
No, but so very interesting!
When he got home a few months later, he said I’d had a better evening than he had! LOL
The same submarine was somewhere, who knows where, and the OOD (Officer of the deck–the guy in charge) became concerned about the water’s depth. He asked the navigator to examine the charts more closely and called for regular soundings.
As they continue, slowly, along, the navigator gasped and pointed out a piece of history.
Charts always note the depth but also who made the sounding and the year.
That day, the sub was traveling very close to an area last “sounded” by Sir Francis Drake in the 16th century.
Michelle, my paternal grandmother had an atlas that she would pull out to look at when she was hearing or reading a travel account. She told my mother she would use it when reading my letters from West Africa. She would have been so interested in my trip to Nunavut had she lived – she knew I was planning to there and thought it was a wonderful idea. It is very clear where my father and I get our love of geography from.
NB: this phone’s autocorrect is ridiculous. It turned atlas into altar.
Cheryl has triggered a memory for me. It was not something I did, but something I heard my father and uncles (my mother’s brother and brother in law) recount. They were young married men when they made homemade hot air balloons using a garbage bag, two pieces of wood fitted crosswise, and four birthday candles. They would send up their creation to see how far it went until the candles burned down. They have often reminisced about the time one drifted out over the highway next to my maternal grandfather’s large property and how all the cars slowed down to see the UFO.
Janice – I don’t recall any toy disasters like the ones you describe, but since Boy has been here, both Nightingale and I have been hit in the face by balls while playing with him outside – her in the eye with a football, and me in the nose with a basketball. Ouch!
Our back door is a glass one, with full-length glass panels on either side of it. One day when Boy was maybe about a year-and-a-half old, he somehow got a hold of a steel (the long and heavy thing with a handle, used to sharpen knives). He started tapping/banging that on one of those glass side panels, and before he could be stopped, the panel crackled all over. It was quite a sound!
Fortunately, although the glass was indeed broken through, there was something about the way it crackled that kept it from falling apart right away. Hubby quickly put long strips of duct tape all over it to keep it intact until we could get it replaced.
Hubby’s old best friend, who was also his best man at our wedding (but then the relationship cooled off after a few years), just got remarried. So why was I shocked to hear that? Because his wife of 25+ years died only three months ago.
I strongly suspect he must have been seeing this new wife while his old wife was still alive. He had been seeing his now-departed wife while still married to his first wife, whom he divorced to marry his second wife.
Raining here…in frozen form! The forest is a lovely white…still but now freshly covered. More snow tonight…and tomorrow night…and next Sunday…and and and….
I like maps…I do not always like the GPS maps on my phone. One time we were late for a funeral on the western slope because Google kept taking us in circles away from the church! Thankfully we were not the last ones there but they were holding up the service for us…and the other two couples who were late…embarrassing…..
Hot air balloons: the older brother of the three, who left before adoption, tried home made hot air balloons here. I told him how to make them and told him to do it out in the pasture. He stepped out the door and lit it. It was fun and no damage.
Toys: When we lived in the country, I had a baby doll. We also had access with our rental house, to a bit of property where we all played. I left baby doll out there and the next morning, the neighbor boy was there with his bike, saying the property was his family’s and they were going to make use of it. And, oh by the way, I am going to run over this baby doll I found on my property. I shrieked and he ran over it. Don’t think I ever got her back either.
Daughter did a similar thing in Germany. She had a little baby doll, her favorite, who went everywhere with her. Until she left it outside at night. No way to find it in the dark so she went out in the morning to find it. Some child or children in the neighborhood had ripped it to shreds. Daughter was very sad but did not forget any more toys outside.
By the way, today’s bubble photo: I had been doing the same thing I did for other photos, stirring to break the bubbles and get them smaller and more interesting, but after a while there was so much oil on the paper towel on which I was laying the toothpick I used to stir that I thought it might be good to put a little more in the water. I added some, which fell in as a big yellow drop, conspicuously a different color from the oil I’d been stirring for quite a while. I stirred the drop and managed to break it into smaller pieces (still with a yellowish tinge) . . . but unlike the other larger bubbles, these new large bubbles had several hearts in each. The top one even refracted some bubbles right-side up to the original hearts, not just upside-down like most of them, and thus we have X’s where the upside-down and right-side-up hearts join! The new hearts also are more visibly bubbles than the older ones.
This is actually the reason I did the bubbles a third time, because I thought it worth trying the “add more oil after a while” to see if it had a good effect. I didn’t get the same result–really, it turns out different each time I do it, though I use the same props each time. I probably won’t do the hearts again, but I’m going to try stars and/or snowflakes at some point.
It makes me sad to consider children who will demolish the toys of other children. They have no compassion or sense of the Golden Rule.
Thanks to those who have shared about their toys and especially about the hot air balloons. I never knew that was a thing to attempt. We did make parachutes from handkerchiefs attached to little green toy soldiers but those always failed to work.
Janice, if a child finds a toy on the ground that isn’t on an individual’s property, it’s probably considered “lost” and something that can be claimed. So if it’s something you don’t want, but something that will be fun to destroy, yes, I can see children doing that. If they realize that another child dropped it and will be back looking for it later, that’s a different matter–but unless it’s right outside the door of someone’s house, most children would never think of that. As an adult, I probably wouldn’t expect someone to come back and claim it, and depending on where it was, if a child asks me “Can we do this with it?” I might say yes. Generally such “lost” things are free to be claimed unless they are valuable (a bicycle, a wallet).
When I was a child, for a couple of years one of my favorite toys was one I found on a playground at a campground. It was a “camera” but when you pushed the button it showed a photo (scenery) as though you had just taken it. It went through six or eight shots. Eventually I lost it, too, and possibly some other child claimed it.
Michelle, our dining room map was the way we learned geography. Oh, we did geography lessons (I remember a Rod and Staff geography book), but what really made the world real to us was listening to the world news on the radio at suppertime, with our father pointing the places on the map that the stories were taking place. He often had a few facts to tell about the country or recount some of the history behind the story, as he has always been interested in the past and present of the world in which he lives. We were always a bit shocked at peers who expressed boredom at learning about the outside world.
Maps: my mind doesn’t really work that way. Maps help me when I already know an area, to look at it and get a picture of how things fit together. For instance, now that we’ve lived here nearly two years, it would help me to look at a map of our area and see, “Oh, that street joins there! I could drive to the park that way, too.”
In Chicago I learned that maps are of limited usefulness to me in trying to get somewhere. When I got lost in Chicago, I’d pull out a map from under my seat and find what street I was on, and try to find out where I needed to be and how to get there. But it stressed me out, because I could never actually figure out which way I needed to drive on which streets, and I’d get lost again. I learned that for me when I got lost it worked better simply to drive until I got somewhere familiar; if I didn’t find somewhere familiar, I’d change directions and try again.
When Mapquest came out, I loved it. “Go this many miles on this street and then turn left on this street” is the way my brain works. In fact, before it came out, I used to look at a map the night before going somewhere and write down my directions that way. The night before, with me not lost, my brain could figure out “I need to go left.” But looking at a map with me already lost, the map did more harm than good. My husband looks at a map and drives a little map for himself; I have to look at the map and translate images into words.
I don’t know but that boy who destroyed little Mumsee’s doll sounds like a very mean child.
The other day someone from my old hometown asked if any of us still had something from our childhood. I had to think hard because I know I have no toy from that time in my life. I do have a round metal charm with my name on it that was given to all the nieces by my Aunt Ruth. And my Mom gave to me a double heart pin I had given to her when I was 7 years old. I have my very first Bible my parents gave to me when I was 7…other than that…the Barbies and baby dolls are long gone….
The boy who ran over Mumsee’s doll reminds me of the first Toy Story film, in which two toys owned by a child who loves to play with fall into the clutches of the child next door, who likes to torture toys, mangling and destroying them. That film was very relatable for a lot of people. Most of my cousins were careful with toys, but we had one cousin, on my father’s side, who could be a torment and was not above tormenting us via our toys. We had very few new toys, and many of our second hand toys were slightly damaged or missing pieces, but we made the best use of them. We had friends who always had the lastest rage toy, but they never seemed to enjoy the bounty as we did ours.
Yes, definitely the child who destroyed Mumsee’s doll sounds mean. But some children destroy things for reasons other than cruelty. For years as a child I used to tear all my paper napkins to shreds at the end of the meal. A friend gave me a paper doll that was a cardboard doll with a magnet inside her, and paper clothing with a metal piece on the back of each. I played with it for a while and then grew bored with it, and I dug the magnet out of the doll to get the magnet and play with it (in the process destroying something worth more than that silly magnet, but I wasn’t thinking about that). I think she either asked for it back or she came for a visit and saw what I had done; either way, it wasn’t till I saw her shock that I realized that it might not have been the best way to get a magnet, nor the best treatment of something given to me!
But some children do crush or burn things not to cause mayhem, but out of interest in “what’s inside” or what it will look like to destroy it. And a boy just might do that to an abandoned doll without any awareness of what a doll “means” to a girl. As a child, I would never have done that to a doll, but if I found a toy that didn’t interest me at all in its “whole” form, I might have taken it apart or otherwise destroyed it, and a typical boy would be even more likely to.
I have two toys from my childhood, two of the earliest toys I remember. One is a knitted goose that I would drag behind me on a string on adventures. How a toyade out of yarn survived that dragging when many a plastic or rubber toy fell apart with gentler use beats me. The other toy I still have is also fabric, a printed felt book with Bible story pictures and flannel graph pieces to place in the pictures – I believe my mother got it to occupy me in church. There is a plastic toy kitchen and a Fisher price camper van still in existence that were mine as a child, but they are entertaining other children now and if they suffer accidental destruction at their hands as they age and grow fragile, so be it (Second had a Fisher Price train set, and the engine was accidentally melted by a certain young nephew who had stuck it in the vent of the woodstove – said nephew is now a very young man and regrets the action).
Kizzie. I strongly suspect that “Bob” was seeing “May” as his wife was dying. The witch told me she had called him before his wife died.
He has blocked me from his social media. Whatevs.
I can’t arms fo even look at her.
The boy was a mean bully. Probably fifteen at the time.
Daughter left her baby doll in our military housing area, where most of the neighbors knew each other and the children played together. I suspect bored teenagers out at night.
Hello, I know you all missed me??! 🙂
Power went out Sunday evening at 10:30 and took out phone and internet. But all my service comes through the church and it was a holiday. So it was afternoon today before I have internet and phone again here.
I have been upstairs working on Tai Chi. It has occurred to me and to husband, that if I stay downstairs after daughter gets home for work, she has a million reasons to ask me to hold baby. Which is what I spend my days doing. She is sweet and adorable and I could, but trying to help mommy see that when she moves out on her own, she will have to figure out how to set the baby down at times.
Well, I’m kind of feeling like a baby right now, wanting to cry and pout for not getting what I wanted.
This was a four-day weekend for the school system (due to Presidents Day on Monday and something else), and it was also Nightingale’s weekend to work, and Monday is also one of her regularly scheduled workdays, meaning that I childsat three days in a row. On Monday, Nightingale worked an hour and a half overtime, not getting home until after Boy and I had had our dinner. (She ate on the way home.)
Today was also a day off from school for Boy but it was one of Nightingale’s days off. But due to her having to work on a project that needed more room than her living room has, they were both downstairs with me for much of the day, spanning into later into the evening than they would usually be down here.
I have been so looking forward to tomorrow, when Nightingale will be at work and Boy will be in school. Not so fast, Mimi! Guess who has a fever this evening? Boy does, which means he cannot go to school tomorrow. 😦 (I should feel more sorry for him being sick than for myself not getting some time alone, but I am feeling selfish.)
The only toy mayhem I can think of was when the baseball bat hit my brother. I was probably 9 or 10, he 6 or 7. I was by myself swinging a bat in the driveway, and suddenly it connected with something behind me! The little guy had come up behind me so quietly I had no idea he was there.
I turned around and there he was on the ground, conscious, with blood flowing from above his eye. I was terrified. “Mom!!!!”
He needed a few stitches and has a nice little scar, mostly hidden by his eyebrow.
Kizzie praying with you ❤️ (And I don’t necessarily think it is selfish to desire some time alone. Sometimes it is just taking care of yourself from time to time…don’t be so hard on yourself!)
Oh Kevin I would imagine your heart sunk when you realized it was your baby brother behind you and your bat….Thankful he was ok! 😊
There’s a cat and mouse game in my house tonight; looks like Annie will pull an all nighter. Stalking something beneath the dry sink cabinet … She brings them in to begin with of course. Then, it’s let the games begin!
Even the dogs are participating, except Tess keeps chasing Annie …
Maybe it really is a monster this time ~ I’ll be keeping a few extra lights on tonight
The hunt goes on and has now moved to the bedroom, waking me up with crash and commotion as Annie suddenly sprang off the bed and flew into the closet in hot pursuit.
Wandering Views 
Good morning everyone.
For some reason, I have ‘Where the Seasons Never Change” in my head this morning.
Off to do the Tuesday thing.
Tuesday isn’t much.
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I don’t know what Mumsee was asking about at 11:11 last night.
But in any case. The answer is
no.
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Good morning. That is another fascinating header. Those bubble balls remind me of being in the toy section and seeing those fun little bouncy balls that will bounce super high. I always loved those balls but they were impractical for play because they either did damage to things on the ceiling or the ceiling itself, or they got away too quickly and could not be found. Which begs for the question, has anyone here had trouble with a wayward toy, a baseball that broke a window, a kite in a tree, a badminton birdie stuck on a rooftop, a toy boat that went out to sea, a toy that landed in a fenced yard with a bad dog and no one else at home, a toy left behind a car, something that blew out a window or fell on someone, or even perhaps broken a toy in the store that your parent then had to buy?
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It’s raining again. Seems there is no escape from the onslaught, much like political ads.
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Janice, or something you said years ago.
This likely belongs on the “politics” thread, but Bloomberg is now wishing he hadn’t said some0tof the things he said when he was just a simple millionaire.
Sometimes, being wise isn’t smart.
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Chas, I take issue with yesterday’s statement that young people don’t know how to read maps. I love maps. Each successive grandchild if my parents has been introduced to the wider world via the world map on my parent’s dining room wall (the one I replaced this year for my father’s Christmas gift). I have been reading Tiny the Little House on the Prairie books and she will often ask after we have read the day’s chapters, to point out where Laura and Mary lived (Wisconsin and Minnesota so far), where Almanzo lived (upper New York State) and then where we live. I always use maps, not GPS, to navigate where I want to go. The only time I use GPS is if I am called out on a home visit for work, and even then, I find it more helpful to look at the map on the screen than to listen to the voice of the navigator.
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Phos, from a former mapmaker, I’m glad to hear that.
But finding a good map of Greensboro, NC is impossible.
They still make them, but the print is too small for me.
What I want is a book map like the ones I have for Northern Virginia and Hendersonville.
Seems they don’t make them anymore. No need for a map now.
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FYI, I was a cartographer, working for the Defense Mapping Agency.
Though I worked on Lunar mapping for eight years. The advantage of that was that it was unclassified.
The mapping we did, of “denied areas” was classified.
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Speaking of going out on home visits, I had a surreal work experience this weekend. I worked the last five days, the last three of those being 12 hours. At the end of one of the 12 hour shifts, I was contacted by management to tell me that my last clinic appointments were to be cancelled because I was being sent out on the road to do evening visits for the community. I might note that I was the only nurse in the clinic, which does not belong to my employing agency, who only staffs it under contract for a government agency. Needless to say, it was a highly concerning rrquest. I had no choice but to do so, but it was after dark, I was already tired, and I had never been to the places I had to go before. It all felt unsafe, and, of course, there were pets and dust aplenty in the places I went.
I was talking to one of the other nurses, as she and I happened to have gone through my first nursing program together. I was observing that when I went into the community for training during that program, it didn’t feel unsafe the way going into the community does now. She agreed and observed that the drug problem had not been so bad then. So many people have horrible health effects from injecting toxic and dirty substances into their veins, and they can be both unreliable and unpredictable to deal with.
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I’m not good at this. Lemme see if this works.
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Sorry ’bout that
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On the subject of maps😀, as an accountant I use to have to use a Georgia road map and add up the miles between markers to verify the mileage claimed on employee expense reports. It was a very tedious thing and I hated having to do it the first few times, but then I chose to accept it as part of my my work, and I grew to find it rather fun. It was just another balancing act of an accountant. I had the choice of not doing it and just accepting employee’s word for what they put down, but that would have been neglect of my duties. It was not that I wanted to find someone doing something wrong, either in making a mistake or actually trying to benefit themselves dishonestly. Some people would enjoy that aspect of looking for errors. That never was my motivation.
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Sorry ’bout that.
Chas
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And on the map subject, we had that wonderful computer program for Wesley, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? He learned a lot from that.
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Sorry to hear about that dangerous aspect of your work, Roscuro. Prayers for your safety. I think the company should be responsible and send out two together, even if they have to hire someone at minimum wage to tag along in those circumstances.
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Will we ever know what Chas was trying to tell us?
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Janice, they only do so if enough fuss is made. I once had to make an evening call to a building best described as a slum. I had had no idea what I was walking into as I am not familiar with the area. A week or so later, one of the regular community nurses raised enough concerns about the building that the decision was made to only have two people make calls to the building and not after dark. Needless to say, I was a bit upset that I had been sent to a place that was known to be unsafe without any kind of warning.
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I had to go back and watch that Target piece with husband. He laughed and laughed, so did I. Thanks again, DJ.
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Mumsee @ 9:27. I have the song “Where the Seasons Never Change” by Stuart Hamblin in my head and thought I might bring it over.
It is a good song.
Stuart Hamblin also wrote “It is No Secret” which is more familiar.
Hamblin was a movie actor, played the bad guys. And he was a bad guy until he was saved at a Graham crusade. His life changed.
One day John Wayne mentioned it.
Hamblin answered, “It is no secret what God can do”.
John Wayne said,, Sounds like a song to me.”.
That’s the way I heard it.
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The Mayo clinic had a glitch in their system that sent out letters of acceptance to the school in error. Those poor people who had to be told that they were not accepted. What a shock.
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Sent out letters of acceptance to applicants seeking admission to the school.
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Chas, I hear from someone who was one of the musical people who ran in the crowd that the inside joke was to call that song “It is no cigarette.” I think he made his money on cigarettes before he was saved, or something like that.
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Roscuro, I have probably told this story before, but the job I worked before going freelance, we had public safety officers, and if you needed to be somewhere after dark and didn’t feel safe going alone, you could ask for an escort. Well, the first few years we were in a building at the very edge of campus, within a couple of blocks of a notorious public housing development where (it was rumored) even the police wouldn’t go after dark.
I was told that if I had to work late, I should not leave my car in the parking lot of that building, as cars had been broken into after dark. Instead, park in the parking garage a few blocks away and, when leaving, get the public safety escort. So I did that one evening–and public safety told me just walk it. Well, I might have done so (I don’t like the sense I’m being mocked or made to be silly), but I happened to know that a woman roughly twice my size had almost been kidnaped on that corner just weeks before (two men tried to pull her into their car, and she only got away by pretending she had a gun in her purse). So I insisted I wasn’t going anywhere until I got an escort. They told me it might be 10 or 15 minutes, and I said I’d wait. (I could stand inside a locked door and watch the parking lot.) They were just being lazy, but it was outrageous that public safety people could play with people’s safety like that, and it was officially the way to do things–I wasn’t asking for any special favors. Anyway, it was only about five minutes before an officer showed up and did the very short task.
Just weeks later, at lunchtime, three women were walking together back across that parking lot and into our building–and one was robbed at gunpoint! Suddenly our building went from one where an officer scoffed that a woman needs an escort after dark to one where they built a fence most of the way around the parking lot (all but the driveway), and in the morning when people were coming to work, at lunchtime when employees were coming and going, and at the end of the workday, a public safety officer was stationed in a van sitting at the edge of that driveway! It took a gun crime for the woman who understood her circumstances, and was acting wisely in those circumstances, to be taken seriously. (Later there was a hostage situation the next building over, also during the workday, and for our own safety we were asked to stay in our building until it was over. That was resolved safely, and it turns out the hostage taker only bluffed having a gun.)
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Leaving Dallas. It was fun. Leaving just in time. The temperature is dropping rapidly
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Cheryl, the town is relatively small in terms of size, not even a hundred thousand. But the drug problem has increased exponentially, with the town being among the five communities with the highest rates of deaths from drug overdose in the province. It has gone from a humdrum country town to something resembling the inner city of much larger city.
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I woke up to no rain, again. Sigh. The drought seemingly has returned, at least for now.
Chas, did you ever get to map those secret UFO areas? 🙂
I love maps, too, but mostly for the ‘bigger’ picture they provide (of where one area or city is in relation to another). There’s always a detailed map that prints out with your online travel directions.
Bloomberg is simply a very annoying personality. I see where he’s qualified for the next debate where he will no doubt be devoured live.
It’s the morning (going into the ‘office’) scramble again for me today, everything’s packed for the road — computer, work files — I’ve had my shower, fed the cat (twice, she will not be ignored) but still have to feed the dogs and rumble over the 2 bridges to work.
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On Janice’s question of the day, about toy related disasters in childhood, no, I cannot recall perpetrating any serious incidents. My elder siblings early drilled into me the need for safety, reinforced by stories in readers and novels of the disasters that can befall the incautious child. But, I have been the adult whose window was broken by a stray soccer ball, as those who received my letters from West Africa may recall. Besides the ball that sailed into the window, I experienced multiple balls and stones (some slung to hit the weaver bird nests in the trees above my home and some flung to get my attention) hitting the metal roof, which is a very loud sensation, but less destructive than ball into glass.
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My father collects maps from the places he’s been the way people collect postcards (he also collects the postcards). He has the map books of areas and has some recently printed ones, so they are still available. When I was in Nunavut, one of the other nurses was excited to get a package that she’d ordered from a company that customs prints topical maps of the area of choice – she had some printed of the area we were in to put on her wall.
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I remember a “toy” near disaster, but it was my older brothers, not me, and it didn’t quite end in disaster. My brothers were teenagers when I was a little girl, and when I was ten or so, a couple of brothers bought some sort of kit that had a crosspiece on which you attached candles and then a plastic piece (parachute-like) up and over it. You lit the candles, held it and waited for the hot air to fill the mini hot air balloon, and then released it. The candles were short and didn’t burn long, so there was no particular danger involved, I assume.
Well, my brothers soon used up the pieces that had come in the kit, and they started to improvise. Perhaps they borrowed candles that burned longer from the kitchen drawer, and I think they also claimed pieces of Saran Wrap (or some sort of plastic other than what came with the kit). They might have even taken sticks from the wood box to make their own crosspieces. Whatever it was they cobbled together, it didn’t actually work the same way. Rather than going up in the air for a couple of minutes and then gracefully drifting down, it went up higher and over the fence, and kept burning. My brothers (and, with them, me) chased it down the street, jumping at times to try to catch it, and maybe eventually trying to knock it down with sticks. I don’t remember the precise details. What I do remember is that it went the rest of our block, drifted the entire way across the city park at the end of our street, and was still high in the air when it got to my school and crossed the fence into my schoolyard. I’m pretty sure they climbed the fence to get into the schoolyard and make sure it didn’t catch anything on fire (I didn’t go over the fence but watched from the outside). I think it finally came to the ground as burning parts they had to stamp out. But they were quite nervous by the time it landed and was safely extinguished.
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Ah, Chas, you stirred a long-dormant memory from my years in rural CT when my husband sailed off in a submarine for long stretches of time.
It was a Saturday night, the boys were in bed, the dog at my feet and my husband, I knew, was attending a gala function at the US embassy in Brazil. They were on a UNITAS run.
I had finally cleared out a month’s worth of clutter and got captured by the National Geographic magazine, turning the pages and then pulling out the map.
I spent the rest of the evening examining the map while my husband danced the night away on the other side of the globe.
Glamour?
No, but so very interesting!
When he got home a few months later, he said I’d had a better evening than he had! LOL
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You’d also enjoy this story, Chas.
The same submarine was somewhere, who knows where, and the OOD (Officer of the deck–the guy in charge) became concerned about the water’s depth. He asked the navigator to examine the charts more closely and called for regular soundings.
As they continue, slowly, along, the navigator gasped and pointed out a piece of history.
Charts always note the depth but also who made the sounding and the year.
That day, the sub was traveling very close to an area last “sounded” by Sir Francis Drake in the 16th century.
They turned.
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Michelle, my paternal grandmother had an atlas that she would pull out to look at when she was hearing or reading a travel account. She told my mother she would use it when reading my letters from West Africa. She would have been so interested in my trip to Nunavut had she lived – she knew I was planning to there and thought it was a wonderful idea. It is very clear where my father and I get our love of geography from.
NB: this phone’s autocorrect is ridiculous. It turned atlas into altar.
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Cheryl has triggered a memory for me. It was not something I did, but something I heard my father and uncles (my mother’s brother and brother in law) recount. They were young married men when they made homemade hot air balloons using a garbage bag, two pieces of wood fitted crosswise, and four birthday candles. They would send up their creation to see how far it went until the candles burned down. They have often reminisced about the time one drifted out over the highway next to my maternal grandfather’s large property and how all the cars slowed down to see the UFO.
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Janice – I don’t recall any toy disasters like the ones you describe, but since Boy has been here, both Nightingale and I have been hit in the face by balls while playing with him outside – her in the eye with a football, and me in the nose with a basketball. Ouch!
Our back door is a glass one, with full-length glass panels on either side of it. One day when Boy was maybe about a year-and-a-half old, he somehow got a hold of a steel (the long and heavy thing with a handle, used to sharpen knives). He started tapping/banging that on one of those glass side panels, and before he could be stopped, the panel crackled all over. It was quite a sound!
Fortunately, although the glass was indeed broken through, there was something about the way it crackled that kept it from falling apart right away. Hubby quickly put long strips of duct tape all over it to keep it intact until we could get it replaced.
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Hubby’s old best friend, who was also his best man at our wedding (but then the relationship cooled off after a few years), just got remarried. So why was I shocked to hear that? Because his wife of 25+ years died only three months ago.
I strongly suspect he must have been seeing this new wife while his old wife was still alive. He had been seeing his now-departed wife while still married to his first wife, whom he divorced to marry his second wife.
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Raining here…in frozen form! The forest is a lovely white…still but now freshly covered. More snow tonight…and tomorrow night…and next Sunday…and and and….
I like maps…I do not always like the GPS maps on my phone. One time we were late for a funeral on the western slope because Google kept taking us in circles away from the church! Thankfully we were not the last ones there but they were holding up the service for us…and the other two couples who were late…embarrassing…..
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Hot air balloons: the older brother of the three, who left before adoption, tried home made hot air balloons here. I told him how to make them and told him to do it out in the pasture. He stepped out the door and lit it. It was fun and no damage.
Toys: When we lived in the country, I had a baby doll. We also had access with our rental house, to a bit of property where we all played. I left baby doll out there and the next morning, the neighbor boy was there with his bike, saying the property was his family’s and they were going to make use of it. And, oh by the way, I am going to run over this baby doll I found on my property. I shrieked and he ran over it. Don’t think I ever got her back either.
Daughter did a similar thing in Germany. She had a little baby doll, her favorite, who went everywhere with her. Until she left it outside at night. No way to find it in the dark so she went out in the morning to find it. Some child or children in the neighborhood had ripped it to shreds. Daughter was very sad but did not forget any more toys outside.
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By the way, today’s bubble photo: I had been doing the same thing I did for other photos, stirring to break the bubbles and get them smaller and more interesting, but after a while there was so much oil on the paper towel on which I was laying the toothpick I used to stir that I thought it might be good to put a little more in the water. I added some, which fell in as a big yellow drop, conspicuously a different color from the oil I’d been stirring for quite a while. I stirred the drop and managed to break it into smaller pieces (still with a yellowish tinge) . . . but unlike the other larger bubbles, these new large bubbles had several hearts in each. The top one even refracted some bubbles right-side up to the original hearts, not just upside-down like most of them, and thus we have X’s where the upside-down and right-side-up hearts join! The new hearts also are more visibly bubbles than the older ones.
This is actually the reason I did the bubbles a third time, because I thought it worth trying the “add more oil after a while” to see if it had a good effect. I didn’t get the same result–really, it turns out different each time I do it, though I use the same props each time. I probably won’t do the hearts again, but I’m going to try stars and/or snowflakes at some point.
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It makes me sad to consider children who will demolish the toys of other children. They have no compassion or sense of the Golden Rule.
Thanks to those who have shared about their toys and especially about the hot air balloons. I never knew that was a thing to attempt. We did make parachutes from handkerchiefs attached to little green toy soldiers but those always failed to work.
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Roscuro— doesn’t everyone listen and read to stories with a map open?
Or maybe it’s a grandmother thing. Or the daughter of a geographer’s?
We have a world map on the wall near the dining room table. I consult it all the time when people describe it adventures— or I open up Google maps.
That’s also why I knew where you were in Nunavut. 🙂
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Janice, if a child finds a toy on the ground that isn’t on an individual’s property, it’s probably considered “lost” and something that can be claimed. So if it’s something you don’t want, but something that will be fun to destroy, yes, I can see children doing that. If they realize that another child dropped it and will be back looking for it later, that’s a different matter–but unless it’s right outside the door of someone’s house, most children would never think of that. As an adult, I probably wouldn’t expect someone to come back and claim it, and depending on where it was, if a child asks me “Can we do this with it?” I might say yes. Generally such “lost” things are free to be claimed unless they are valuable (a bicycle, a wallet).
When I was a child, for a couple of years one of my favorite toys was one I found on a playground at a campground. It was a “camera” but when you pushed the button it showed a photo (scenery) as though you had just taken it. It went through six or eight shots. Eventually I lost it, too, and possibly some other child claimed it.
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Michelle, our dining room map was the way we learned geography. Oh, we did geography lessons (I remember a Rod and Staff geography book), but what really made the world real to us was listening to the world news on the radio at suppertime, with our father pointing the places on the map that the stories were taking place. He often had a few facts to tell about the country or recount some of the history behind the story, as he has always been interested in the past and present of the world in which he lives. We were always a bit shocked at peers who expressed boredom at learning about the outside world.
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Maps: my mind doesn’t really work that way. Maps help me when I already know an area, to look at it and get a picture of how things fit together. For instance, now that we’ve lived here nearly two years, it would help me to look at a map of our area and see, “Oh, that street joins there! I could drive to the park that way, too.”
In Chicago I learned that maps are of limited usefulness to me in trying to get somewhere. When I got lost in Chicago, I’d pull out a map from under my seat and find what street I was on, and try to find out where I needed to be and how to get there. But it stressed me out, because I could never actually figure out which way I needed to drive on which streets, and I’d get lost again. I learned that for me when I got lost it worked better simply to drive until I got somewhere familiar; if I didn’t find somewhere familiar, I’d change directions and try again.
When Mapquest came out, I loved it. “Go this many miles on this street and then turn left on this street” is the way my brain works. In fact, before it came out, I used to look at a map the night before going somewhere and write down my directions that way. The night before, with me not lost, my brain could figure out “I need to go left.” But looking at a map with me already lost, the map did more harm than good. My husband looks at a map and drives a little map for himself; I have to look at the map and translate images into words.
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I don’t know but that boy who destroyed little Mumsee’s doll sounds like a very mean child.
The other day someone from my old hometown asked if any of us still had something from our childhood. I had to think hard because I know I have no toy from that time in my life. I do have a round metal charm with my name on it that was given to all the nieces by my Aunt Ruth. And my Mom gave to me a double heart pin I had given to her when I was 7 years old. I have my very first Bible my parents gave to me when I was 7…other than that…the Barbies and baby dolls are long gone….
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The boy who ran over Mumsee’s doll reminds me of the first Toy Story film, in which two toys owned by a child who loves to play with fall into the clutches of the child next door, who likes to torture toys, mangling and destroying them. That film was very relatable for a lot of people. Most of my cousins were careful with toys, but we had one cousin, on my father’s side, who could be a torment and was not above tormenting us via our toys. We had very few new toys, and many of our second hand toys were slightly damaged or missing pieces, but we made the best use of them. We had friends who always had the lastest rage toy, but they never seemed to enjoy the bounty as we did ours.
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Yes, definitely the child who destroyed Mumsee’s doll sounds mean. But some children destroy things for reasons other than cruelty. For years as a child I used to tear all my paper napkins to shreds at the end of the meal. A friend gave me a paper doll that was a cardboard doll with a magnet inside her, and paper clothing with a metal piece on the back of each. I played with it for a while and then grew bored with it, and I dug the magnet out of the doll to get the magnet and play with it (in the process destroying something worth more than that silly magnet, but I wasn’t thinking about that). I think she either asked for it back or she came for a visit and saw what I had done; either way, it wasn’t till I saw her shock that I realized that it might not have been the best way to get a magnet, nor the best treatment of something given to me!
But some children do crush or burn things not to cause mayhem, but out of interest in “what’s inside” or what it will look like to destroy it. And a boy just might do that to an abandoned doll without any awareness of what a doll “means” to a girl. As a child, I would never have done that to a doll, but if I found a toy that didn’t interest me at all in its “whole” form, I might have taken it apart or otherwise destroyed it, and a typical boy would be even more likely to.
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I have two toys from my childhood, two of the earliest toys I remember. One is a knitted goose that I would drag behind me on a string on adventures. How a toyade out of yarn survived that dragging when many a plastic or rubber toy fell apart with gentler use beats me. The other toy I still have is also fabric, a printed felt book with Bible story pictures and flannel graph pieces to place in the pictures – I believe my mother got it to occupy me in church. There is a plastic toy kitchen and a Fisher price camper van still in existence that were mine as a child, but they are entertaining other children now and if they suffer accidental destruction at their hands as they age and grow fragile, so be it (Second had a Fisher Price train set, and the engine was accidentally melted by a certain young nephew who had stuck it in the vent of the woodstove – said nephew is now a very young man and regrets the action).
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Kizzie. I strongly suspect that “Bob” was seeing “May” as his wife was dying. The witch told me she had called him before his wife died.
He has blocked me from his social media. Whatevs.
I can’t arms fo even look at her.
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The boy was a mean bully. Probably fifteen at the time.
Daughter left her baby doll in our military housing area, where most of the neighbors knew each other and the children played together. I suspect bored teenagers out at night.
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Elvera still has a doll she had as a child.
That doll is over 80 years old.
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Hello, I know you all missed me??! 🙂
Power went out Sunday evening at 10:30 and took out phone and internet. But all my service comes through the church and it was a holiday. So it was afternoon today before I have internet and phone again here.
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Is everyone having a long dinner? We have been having so much rain that our driveway could almost support a sailboat.
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I have been upstairs working on Tai Chi. It has occurred to me and to husband, that if I stay downstairs after daughter gets home for work, she has a million reasons to ask me to hold baby. Which is what I spend my days doing. She is sweet and adorable and I could, but trying to help mommy see that when she moves out on her own, she will have to figure out how to set the baby down at times.
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Well, I’m kind of feeling like a baby right now, wanting to cry and pout for not getting what I wanted.
This was a four-day weekend for the school system (due to Presidents Day on Monday and something else), and it was also Nightingale’s weekend to work, and Monday is also one of her regularly scheduled workdays, meaning that I childsat three days in a row. On Monday, Nightingale worked an hour and a half overtime, not getting home until after Boy and I had had our dinner. (She ate on the way home.)
Today was also a day off from school for Boy but it was one of Nightingale’s days off. But due to her having to work on a project that needed more room than her living room has, they were both downstairs with me for much of the day, spanning into later into the evening than they would usually be down here.
I have been so looking forward to tomorrow, when Nightingale will be at work and Boy will be in school. Not so fast, Mimi! Guess who has a fever this evening? Boy does, which means he cannot go to school tomorrow. 😦 (I should feel more sorry for him being sick than for myself not getting some time alone, but I am feeling selfish.)
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But I will get over it.
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Kizzie, praying for you with understanding.
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The only toy mayhem I can think of was when the baseball bat hit my brother. I was probably 9 or 10, he 6 or 7. I was by myself swinging a bat in the driveway, and suddenly it connected with something behind me! The little guy had come up behind me so quietly I had no idea he was there.
I turned around and there he was on the ground, conscious, with blood flowing from above his eye. I was terrified. “Mom!!!!”
He needed a few stitches and has a nice little scar, mostly hidden by his eyebrow.
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Kizzie praying with you ❤️ (And I don’t necessarily think it is selfish to desire some time alone. Sometimes it is just taking care of yourself from time to time…don’t be so hard on yourself!)
Oh Kevin I would imagine your heart sunk when you realized it was your baby brother behind you and your bat….Thankful he was ok! 😊
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oh, please send that rain to California. We have had none this month and this is the month when we usually get most of our rain.
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Sheesh, Kevin
I second what Jo says about rain
There’s a cat and mouse game in my house tonight; looks like Annie will pull an all nighter. Stalking something beneath the dry sink cabinet … She brings them in to begin with of course. Then, it’s let the games begin!
Even the dogs are participating, except Tess keeps chasing Annie …
Maybe it really is a monster this time ~ I’ll be keeping a few extra lights on tonight
Things that go bump in the night
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3:40 a.m.
The hunt goes on and has now moved to the bedroom, waking me up with crash and commotion as Annie suddenly sprang off the bed and flew into the closet in hot pursuit.
I’m on the sofa after ceding the territory.
It’s gonna be a long day.
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And I really want a glass of milk, or something, but I have a fasting blood test scheduled for 9:15 a.m.
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