57 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 12-11-20

  1. Good morning to all.

    It’s cool this morning but will warm up into a beautiful day. We need some brightness in Georgia. My Friday prayer call is seeming to bring more people to pray lately. Covid has created stronger bonds with those committed to prayer.

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  2. Morning! A beautiful scene up there!
    It is 19 degrees and frosty here this morning. We didn’t get much snow..less than an inch but they say we will get a couple more inches tomorrow…any moisture is welcome!
    There was a large herd of elk gathered at a neighboring property yesterday. There is a open meadow along with a pond over there. The neighbor shared a photo on NextDoorNeighbor…it was a lovely sight to see.

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  3. Good morning. It is looking like a sunny day here.

    This article is written by a non-Christian but has something worthwhile to say to Christians about what Pastor A used to term ‘celebritism’: https://spectator.us/sad-irony-celebrity-pastors-carl-lentz-hillsong/
    “I am not religious, so it is not my place to dictate to Christians what they should and should not believe. Still, if someone has a faith worth following, I feel that their beliefs should make me feel uncomfortable for not doing so. If they share 90 percent of my lifestyle and values, then there is nothing especially inspiring about them. Instead of making me want to become more like them, it looks very much as if they want to become more like me.”

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  4. Ouch (9:35)

    Happy for your good news Jo — you (and others) will no doubt be vaccinated by then which takes most of the earlier concerns away, I take it.

    I was hit yesterday afternoon with just a whole lot of fatigue, headache and general malaise. I took my temperature which was normal (well, mostly, my normal temp is around 97.7, yesterday it was 98.7 and I was feeling just unusually warm).

    I feel better this morning so I don’t think it was anything, but it was just something that hit so quickly and was so noticeable that it had me worried for a bit there.

    This morning’s LA Times included some more grim stats about numbers ramping up still, including in our specific community. I may choose to pass on the underground haircut Saturday after all.

    I have a busy day today, an interview at 8 a.m., followed by the staff call — then I need to finish up a port cargo story and a larger piece about the waterfront.

    And I have to call a couple of Carol’s friends and connections to let them know the news. I heard from her brother late last night, after the facility reached him with the news; he thanked me for my friendship to her and for keeping him in the loop. Seemed he had things under control from there, not sure if there’s anything he needs me to do on this end but I’ll ask later today or tomorrow. I don’t know if he’ll want to collect any of her belongings, but I would doubt it, she had a lot of “stuff” but it was in constant flux as facilities would force her to pare down or box up her things for storage. She had her dad’s old tool box, which I’d found during my garage clean out a few years ago, she’d left it with me at some point. Her brother may be interested in that, it’s very “vintage” and probably holds some memories; but I’m not sure she even still had that, to be honest.

    Carol loved getting new things all the time, the more the better, but didn’t seem especially attached to the old.

    Our weather has cooled off and isn’t quite as dry now, but still no rain in the forecast looking ahead for the next 10 days.

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  5. Last night I mentioned that I feel guilty when someone is in a bad mood, and said that I would explain later. This is something I have been thinking and praying about of late.

    My mom could be emotionally/verbally abusive. (I soften it by saying “could be”, because she wasn’t that way all the time.) She even told me, when I was an adult, that she knew that she could intimidate me, and she would deliberately use that to her advantage. I remember when she would be mad at me, and I would be apologizing in tears, but she would turn her back on me and ignore me until she thought I had been punished enough. Add to that that Mom was pretty moody and prickly, which gave me plenty of opportunity to feel guilty.

    Then I married a man who could be moody, too, and often (maybe usually) thought it had to do with me in some way.

    Now I live with my older daughter, and I find that I am too attuned to her moods. When she is in a good or “normal” mood, I can feel good, too. But when she is in a bad mood, I tend to feel that I need to watch my step, and often feel that I may have accidentally contributed to her mood. At those times, I often start to feel a bit down myself, and sometimes will tear up – or even cry – if she is snappish or terse due to her mood. (But I don’t allow myself to show those tears or my sadness in front of her.)

    Lately, I have talked to God about how I see that I am too easily moved by the winds of Nightingale’s moods, as I was by my mother’s and my husband’s. I often feel that she is mad at me or annoyed by me for some reason when she is in a bad mood, which then affects my own feelings. I am finally realizing that I am not responsible for keeping everyone happy, and that their bad moods are not my fault. I don’t want to be blown this way or that by the winds of other people’s moods.

    I will be turning 60 in January, and although the “symptoms” of this have been slowly lessening through the years, it’s about time I get off that ride.

    (Btw, Nightingale is not particularly moody, but she can seem like she is in a bad mood when she is merely being serious because she is quite busy or her mind is occupied by serious thoughts. She is very much like her dad in that way.)

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  6. Feeling sad today: Carol (so very sorry, DJ, you were the best friend she had when she needed you), another friend’s husband died, more SIP crackdown, threw out my back at our blow out noisy Adorable Christmas party (will I ever get all the sugar off the floor?), more friends with sad, sad, news, and so on.

    Before I even got up and received all this news, I had been praying for my husband and daughter. He’s already fielding phone calls about COVID, what to do about our church’s Living Nativity, and so forth. My daughter–who can take a COVID test whenever she wants to administer one–will have to decide if she comes up next week or not.

    And so on; you all know.

    What do you think God is trying to teach/impress upon us with this lingering malady?

    That was what we discussed over coffee.

    I’m in chapter 31 of Jeremiah. I admit, my opinion may be biased–and will share it later.

    Good news! It’s raining, sort-of, here!

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  7. And in ridiculous news, the Adorables rewrote the lyrics to a horrible Christmas song for me as a present.

    They sang with raucous joy and laughter. Try the first lyric yourself:

    “Grandma got run over by a vacuum
    Cleaning up the house on Christmas Eve.
    You could say there’s no such thing as Killer Vacuums
    But as for me and Grandpa, We Believe.”

    It goes downhill from there . . . LOL

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  8. This article relates to more than politics, but those avoiding politics will not want to read it. I have appreciated this well-informed group for many years. I think it explains what Chas has mentioned to us about his feelings currently.
    https://www.theareopagus.org/blog/what-was-really-at-stake/?utm_source=The+Areopagus+Mailing+List&utm_campaign=9589341b61-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_07_07_01_23_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2c247a25da-9589341b61-358425709

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  9. God generally has many lessons to teach with every such disaster. There is the general warning that Jesus drew from the disasters his disciples told him of: “Unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way” (Luke 13:1-5). There is also the general calling to believers to minister to those in need in the middle of disaster, as the church in Antioch, Syria did for the church suffering through the famine in Jerusalem (Acts 11:27-30).

    Personally, the lesson I have been learning during all this is of God’s boundless protection and provision. I did not intend to return home after school. I had begun to put down roots in the city, and it was immensely painful to pull them up again. I felt out of place at my parents home – my parents welcomed me, bit I felt in the way of the Second (and Second has admitted that my perception was not inaccurate). I didn’t feel like the church I attended was mine. I just felt lost and wandering. Then the pandemic struck, and I understood. My family needed me, as for a time, I was the only one with work. But I got as much or more than I gave, as my health problems were becoming worse. I could not have found the strength to both work and get meals, do grocery shopping, etc. I can work and run brief errands, but I could not sustain myself day after day. I needed my family to survive. So, the biggest lesson I have learned is that he does shelter me from the brunt of the storm.

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  10. I called Carol’s friend from her former church in Downey — he’s been so good to her, he was a former city councilman and mayor for the city and just took a special interest in her. He once bought her a phone and was there with me for one of her surgeries a couple years ago. He now has a serious lung condition himself and is pretty much homebound, his sons are caring for him, but he sent Carol little ‘good morning’ or holiday GIFs every day, including not too long ago today, he said. He just broke down crying, then I cried.

    I also let her former residence administrator know, but realize I forgot to tell her to make sure her two special friends there, Charles, a “boyfriend” whom she was tutoring in the faith by taking him through morning devotions; and Bethany, who also is a Christian and uses a walker. I don’t have their cell numbers. I took Bethany and Carol to the Christmas Eve service at Hollywood Presbyterian a couple years ago, then out to eat at the pancake restaurant on either Sunset or Hollywood Blvd., can’t remember which, but it was one of the few restaurants open that night.

    Ok, don’t mean to dwell on this on the blog today, carry on. Time for me to hunker down and try to get some stories done today.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. I saw the DJ’s FB photo. It made me chuckle, because growing up, we had what seemed like an everlasting bottle of the stuff. Every time one looked into the turntable corner cupboard, there the bottle was. In my recent adult years, I saw my mother had put Worcestershire sauce on her grocery list. I asked her did she actually use the stuff? Yes, she said, on a regular basis. I wondered then if that everlasting bottle I saw in my childhood had actually been a succession of bottles, and I just never seen a new one being bought.

    Now, a secondary QoD should be, how do you pronounce Worcestershire?

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  12. DJ, we are family, we are hear to listen. Your heart spoken to us incites us to deeper prayer for you, for Shirley, for Chas and Elvira, and on and on.

    Liked by 4 people

  13. I told my mother about DJ’s photo and she laughed. She said she hadn’t used it much during out childhood, but had started using it more when we were grown up, so maybe it was the same bottle in my childhood. My mother said the photo’s question should apply to Tabasco sauce.

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  14. I use wur chess sure sauce for mealoaf and any time I want to make meat taste better. But I rarely cook anymore unless it is surprise cooking like yesterday and today when something came up and husband took off and I was left to figure something out. But he keeps the pantry and freezers and fridges well stocked so never a problem.

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  15. Today for example, he had to go to Lewiston to get some chairs repaired and a generator repaired. We are forced to fend for ourselves so it will be baked salmon with asparagus and fresh baked sourdough pita bread. Not the typical go together but we are not quite typical.

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  16. DJ, I’m so sorry to hear of Carol’s passing. I will echo others in saying you showed yourself to be a wonderful friend to her. My condolences to you on the loss of your friend.

    Worcestershire: I pronounce it wersh tuh sher, and am probably very wrong. 😉

    What a crazy busy week it’s been for me! And the new students seem to keep a-comin’. I’ve gotten three new ones just since Thanksgiving. One started last week, one this week, and one will next week, a day ahead of the arrival of the family’s new piano. They’re so excited to begin, they didn’t want to wait until after the holidays! So the girl will have an introductory, exploratory lesson on Monday, my last week of teaching before Christmas, and then we’ll launch into her formal studies in January.

    I also received viola music on Sunday this week that I will be playing at our Saturday evening service tomorrow and at two of the Sunday services. Six days to put together five pieces. So my spare time around homeschooling, teaching piano, communications back and forth with the new students’ families, dentist appointments (which I forgot about until the reminder call the day before) is being used to practice my viola music.

    Breathe…I have to remember to tell myself. 🙂

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  17. One of my neighbors came to my door a couple weeks ago asking if I had just a little bit of Worcestershire sauce she could have in the cup she brought over.

    I think I used to have some, but I really didn’t think I had any on hand currently.

    Kind of a random thing to borrow.

    (Last time she needed to borrow something — I forget what now — I did have it in the cupboard.)

    Liked by 1 person

  18. With all the lamenting we do over our country, I found this interesting.

    “The Year of Peril: America in 1942 is our history winner in another year of peril, 2020. Although I know the end of the 1942 story, author Tracy Campbell made me feel I was reading a novel in which it wasn’t clear that the hero would survive. It’s hard for us to believe now, but in 1942 War Production Board chairman Donald Nelson had good reason to say, “The awful realization was slowly coming over the country that America was losing a war.” . . .

    Big media echoed that concern. Time on Feb. 23 reported on “the worst week of the century” where the “fate of the nation” was up for grabs. Life proclaimed 1942 “the critical year in the existence of the United States.” Three out of 10 Americans hoped for a negotiated settlement with Hitler. . . .

    Philip Wylie’s best-selling Generation of Vipers said American high schools “teach nothing but gibberish” due to the “pee wee caliber of teachers” within an educational system that was “a public swindle, an assassination of sanity.” Recruits did not have basic math skills, and 82 percent of colleges and universities did not require students to take a course in U.S. history. Pollsters asked, “Do you think some form of socialism would be a good thing or a bad thing for our country as a whole?” One-fourth of Americans said “good,” and 34 percent more said they did not know.”

    https://world.wng.org/2020/11/mint_cigarettes_and_gas_rations

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  19. I got a refurbished upright piano for Christmas the year I was six and in first grade.

    We’ve hauled it all over the world and it’s sitting downstairs right now.

    It could stand a tuning. 🙂

    I think that may have been the most exciting Christmas gift my parents gave me. It was my father’s idea–he also bought me a clarinet six years later. It’s snuggled against the piano right now. 🙂

    Music is never wasted. 🙂

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  20. When I began reading out loud to my mother, one of the first books I read was Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’. In the second chapter of the book, I stumbled over the pronunciation of one of the characters names, Sir Leicester Deadlock. My father, who was washing dishes as my mother dried them while I was reading, stopped and came to look at the page. He informed me that Leicester was pronounced Lester. That was the beginning of me realizing that Gloucester, as in ‘The Taylor of Gloucester’, was pronounced ‘gloster’ and its county of Gloucestershire was pronounced ‘glos-tuh-sure’, and so on through all the -shires of England.

    I pronounce Worcestershire, the county of the town of Worcester, as ‘wors-tuh-sure’, but I wanted to see if that was correct. I looked it up online, and found a hilarious compilation of serious and silly guides to pronunciation of the sauce on YouTube, among them an Italian chef mangling the name entirely by using Italian phonetics and a man with German accent pronouncing it perfectly. I do not endorse the inane title of this pronunciation guide clip, but, since the speaker is British, it is the most accurate and the explanation is the clearest:

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  21. OK, I’m set to get my hair cut at 1 tomorrow. I asked my former editor — considering the crazy and intense arguments that are breaking out over whether to follow the restrictions or not — if it would appear to be a conflict of (reporting) interest as we are now often writing about these things (only to see both sides erupt online and viciously attack each other).

    What if someone sees me patronizing a local biz that should be closed and is violating the ‘order’?

    Former editor told me to “wear a disguise.” I already am going in with wet hair, I think I can maybe wear 2 masks and sunglasses and bring a floppy hat.

    I just don’t want my picture to end up in the left-wing weekly (though my ex editor said it might improve my “brand”).

    I just want a quick, simple haircut, in and out.

    Liked by 2 people

  22. Karen @2:23 I remember 1942. At no time did we think we might lose the war. i.e. What would “losing” consist of? The worst thing Germany or Japan, or both could do is put boots on the ground in the USA. Can you imagine a small country like that trying to occupy the USA. Especially when about 10% have weapons and know how to use them.
    It is possible that Germany could occupy Europe and sign a peace treaty with England. And Japan might try to surrender. But McArthur would have none of that. And he was running the Pacific show.

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  23. Hitler made the common mistakes of egomaniacs. He bit off more than he could chew. If he had stayed out of Russia and N. Africa ,Europe would still belong to Germany.

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  24. Chas – That quote came from Donald Nelson, who was War Production Board chairman at that time. Maybe the government had doubts that the general public didn’t know about?

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  25. I always have Worcestershire sauce on hand because it is in the recipe for sausage strata, our family’s breakfast every Christmas (and once in a great while at other times if I feel like taking the trouble to plan ahead, since it has to sit overnight). I also use it in meat loaf, and occasionally other recipes. No idea how long I’ve had the current bottle, but no longer than the refrigerator, which is a few years old (we threw out nearly all the condiments when the old fridge died).
    As for pronouncing it, I tend to call it the “worse … wuss … wooster … whatever it’s called sauce.”

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  26. I’m sorry DJ. Grief takes as long as it takes.

    I live Worcestershire sauce. I put it anything beef related and some soups. It’s a key ingredient in Salisbury steak and it’s also good on Uncle Ben’s Ling Grain and Wild Rice.

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  27. Let’s remember Pearl Harbor
    As we go to meet the foe
    Let’s remember Pearl Harbor
    As we did the Alamo
    We will always remember how they died for liberty.
    Lets remember Pearl Harbor
    And go on to victory.

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  28. I saw nothing in our local paper concerning Pearl Harbor day. Thought it was just me but saw a letter to the editor a couple days later commenting on the total lack of acknowledgement.

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  29. Mumsee, with all the pandemic and post-election drama in 2020, we almost missed it, too; thankfully a source connected with me the night before and we were able to do something on her dad who survived Pearl Harbor (we’d written about him before).

    Next year will be the 80th anniversary, so that likely will get much more attention. But it’s sad that most of those guys now are gone. Those stories (for us) fade as they pass from the scene and are no longer available to interview first-hand.

    WWI battles (and all wars) also fade as those who knew them first-hand pass from the scene and generations go by.

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  30. Meanwhile, the deadline crisis tonight involves 200 containers of LOL dolls that have been “stuck” at the port of LA for 3 weeks now — and Santa needs them now.

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  31. Worcestershire sauce is used in Chex Mix, which is usually something I make for Christmas. I won’t this year, since I make it mostly for company. I do use it in some soups. It is good on hamburgers, but I haven’t done that for years.

    There is a bluegrass group named the Earls of Leicester and it does take one by surprise to hear it pronounce Earls of Lester.

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  32. Ah yes! Mike always makes Chex Mix. He uses a 10.5 ounce bottle. He makes a lot of chex mix. He uses about sixty five ounces of chex and some rye chips and three pounds of mixed nuts…. He makes it for all of the children as they all seem to clamor for it.

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  33. I haven’t had Chex Mix in years, probably decades. We finally stopped including Wheat Chex (do they even still make it?) since it always burned, and then we really liked it. But I’m not sure I’ve ever had it as an adult.

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