100 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-2-21”

  1. Good morning everyone. I’ve already commented on yesterday’s blog.
    LindaS is with her now. Elvera is doing as well as expected.
    She is sick, but still TSWITW, hasn’t changed a bit.
    She is blessed in having so many who love her.

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  4. Good morning! And good evening to Jo. I wondered a moment ago as I thought about the folks posting here represent four states. How many states in total does Wandering Views members represent (and nations/provinces, too)?

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  6. Good Morning all. Thankful for the love surrounding TSWITW and you as well Chas ♥️
    Aj I don’t recall even us ever shoveling that amount of snow…just how does one open their door?! I think we may have come close to that number back in 97..the town shut down for a week…praying your electricity and heat remain undisturbed…

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  7. I was supposed to work today but called in sick, as I felt faint and dizzy this morning. It was a stressful day yesterday, as I drove myself to the appointment in downtown Toronto. It wasn’t just the crazy freeways one has to take to get into the city (Toronto is often said to have one of the worst highway systems of any large city, although, having been through Montreal, I think there are worse), but also driving through the downtown area. I don’t mind driving in the city where I went to school, but Toronto’s downtown is an impenetrable maze, and it is like driving in a canyon, because each small city block has about four high-rise buildings on it, so the sunlight just doesn’t reach to street level in many places. Also, during the day, there are streets that are closed off to traffic, not due to construction but for pedestrians. While I am weathering menopause fairly well for the most part, I have lost the capacity to deal with stress, both mentally and physically. My tremour was very noticeable yesterday when I was trying to fill out forms – my writing was not at all neat as a result. I think I just wore myself out completely.

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  8. ¡Buenos días!

    AJ- It was 10 years ago yesterday that we have over 2′ of snow, so I know what you’re going through.

    I know it’s only a legend, but did the groundhog in your region see his shadow? Ours would have were it not for the fog. So I don’t know if that means an early Spring or if the fog makes it a long winter. Oh, well. We’ll survive either.

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  10. The snow missed us. It was thought it might as the storm headed north, but it didn’t – Montreal is getting it. Something to be thankful for though, as that would have complicated driving yesterday. The narrow downtown streets in Toronto were already pretty glutted with former snowfalls. The sun is shining today, so the groundhog would have seen its shadow.

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  12. Roscuro, in general I don’t like driving in any downtown. In the US, many or most downtowns have one-way streets, which can be confusing if you don’t drive them often, and also more pedestrians, and in general more stress.

    I was living in Chicago when they had the second-largest snowfall in the city history–or, more probably, while records were kept of such things. I think it was just under two feet, but it came on top of a snowfall of a few inches and it came just after the start of a new year (when half the city was trying to fly home after Christmas and New Year’s). My workplace decided it wasn’t going to close Monday after the Saturday snow, so I dutifully made my way there, using public transportation since the roads weren’t fully cleared and I didn’t want to drive in it, and that made for a long, snowy commute and a lot of walking in really deep snow to get to the bus stop at both ends of the commute. But there weren’t very many people at work that day, since some hadn’t made it back to Chicago yet (the airports were closed) and some decided not to risk the commute. Later in the week they announced that anyone who hadn’t made it in on Monday could write it off as an emergency day. That made me really wish I’d stayed home, since those of us who had a double-length commute got no “benefits” from having been there that day! They really should have just cancelled the workday, and I’m guessing that in hindsight they saw that.

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  13. Lots of questions on yesterday’s blog. I don’t quite know how to answer all of them, but here’s a summary.

    I joined the AF just out of hs. Smart thing. I changed from a kid to a man while in the AF. Four stripes before I left.
    I got out to go to U. S. Carolina in 1953 spring semester. My HS friends were there and I never had a freshman experience.
    One of the most important things to happen in my life was the time Al Tolly said, “Charlie, are you a Christian?” “Fine, a group of us meet….’ So I joined Inter varsity Christian fellowship.
    Then, one February . evening at FBC Columbia, this young woman joined the church. When Dr. Ellis introduced her, I wrote her name in my bible.
    But because of circumstances, I did not date her until October. We became regular during Christmas and spring breaks. I was working part time and gong to school at the same time and was very busy.
    But we became a couple during this time.
    Lots more, but that’s enough for now.
    Specific questions?

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  18. Rk we are enjoying the warm temps as well…praying your exams go well for you…presence of mind and clarity of thought as you look at those questions 😊 ♥️

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  19. Yeah, Linda’s right, it’s continued to snow all morning. 😦

    And yes Peter, the rodent saw his shadow, so 6 more weeks of winter. I however didn’t need a rodent to tell me that as I was busy moving 27+ inches of winter, which predicted temperatures show ain’t goin’ nowhere for a while.

    The trick is multiple outings to remove the snow from the walks. My assistant (neighbor) and I were out 3 times. I didn’t touch the cars or parking pad until today. There’s just nowhere to put it all.

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  21. AJ, please don’t over do it. Remember your first and second priorities need you!

    It is just real cold here which means the emergency heat takes over and leaves the heat pump setting. That means it is too warm upstairs where I like to be so I am in a short sleeved t-shirt and occasionally putting on and taking off a light weight hoodie.

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  23. I don’t know that she has a favorite color.
    When I started dating Elvera, she knew that I was preparing to go to Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. She readily signed on to all of that.
    It was tough gong for a while, me working part time and going to school. we married in 1957, I didn’t have a real, full time job until 1962 when we moved to Virginia. I gave up the idea of going into the ministry and took a job with the Army Map Service doing top secret satellite mapping of denied areas.
    That turned out to be a good career. I was very successful.
    She was pregnant two -maybe three- times. We only had one and decided not to have any more.
    (She thought she was pregnant and was under a doctor’s care when she got pregnant. That’s why Chuck was born successfully.)

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  25. Mumsee, I can’t see that it affected me in any way.
    She was with me all the way, but didn’t do anything in particular.
    i gave up the idea of the ministry in 1962. I took the Federal Service Entrance Exam and using veteran’s advantage, aced it. I was offered two jobs and took one in Washington. As I said, we mapped denied areas using satellite photography. That was just starting and turned out to be a very successful career.
    One of the things we did was to map the moon for the Apollo landings. I was chief of the Extraterrestrial Branch for that effort. Part of my job was to brief congress and other VIP’s. My training came in handy for that.
    Mapping from satellites takes special skills.
    I’m sure that even I would be surprised at what they do now. Probably don’t rely on old fashioned maps.

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  27. You know, I think I’d rather have our two to three inches that someone else removes. I’m quite happy to have my husband no longer be responsible for it, and he’s happy about that too. It is pretty, though. But those photos made me think too much of the vast amounts we’d get in Chicago, and how quickly it would get dirty, and how hard it would be to find a place to put it. And walking on icy snow, and driving on icy roads with cars parked along both sides. As much as I loved my job, it wasn’t enough to keep me in Chicago! (I actually liked a lot of things about Chicago, including the cultural mix. But the “dislikes” simply weighed more.)

    In the book I’ve been reading about thinking, he spends a few pages at one point explaining that “climate” doesn’t weight people’s experience of life satisfaction. He said his wife didn’t want to move away from California because people are happier in California, and he talked about some studies that showed people in California love the climate and people in Minnesota hate the climate, but people aren’t happier in California. And I thought, OK, but that’s really simplistic in terms of comparison, because “climate” isn’t nearly all there is to know about any location. Do we know whether people who live in lovely climates, but without all the negative aspects of California, are happier? He points out that early on in one’s time living in California or Minnesota, climate is a really big deal, but it recedes over time. It seems to me that that might also be because people who are OK with living in the climate that Minnesota has will stay there, and those who aren’t OK with it leave. Weather was a huge part of the reason I left Chicago. In fact, there were actually quite a few reasons I left Chicago–but weather was far and away the biggest one. If I could have changed ONLY the weather, and kept everything else the same, I likely would have stayed. I almost certainly would have stayed another five or six years, anyway. I loved my job, had good friends, really liked the restaurants and museums and parks and theaters and other cultural amenities. I had found a way to negate the high cost of living. I didn’t like certain aspects of the culture, but that’s true everywhere. I didn’t like being so far from family, but part of that was weather-related too: It was simply too tricky to fly in and out of Chicago in winter. I didn’t like the closed-in feeling and lack of natural spaces, but I could have moved out to the suburbs. But as long as I lived in Chicago, I faced multiple snowstorms a year and some of them a foot or more, and that reality colored all of Chicago for me, and it meant I couldn’t stay.

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  28. AJ, that’s a whole lot of snow. I also thought of those photos you see now and again of people opening their front doors to see snow blocking the way completely.

    Chas, I don’t think you ever told us about how you proposed. Knee? Ring? Simpler than that?

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  29. I know there is a theory that the monk like leads one closer to God because you can focus on the Word and such. To me, being married gives more opportunity to practice the Truth so either way would be an excellent path to God.
    I second DJ’s question!

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  30. Donna, I don’t think I ever proposed. We just started putting our things together and eventually we decided to get married. I was a student at U. S. Carolina at the time and we decided to wait until I graduated. We married the Sunday after graduation. We lived in a house trailer and took it to Texas.
    My parents BTW, loved her more than I did, if that was possible. My sister wanted a sister, and she was it.

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  31. Our pastor likes to note that being married really, really shines a light on all your sin, in ways few other things in life can (as is somewhat true, also, with any close relationship — but I can imagine that marriage might do that seven-fold).

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  32. What? You never proposed? Wow. Probably a different time and circumstance, but also interesting how natural it all just flowed into marriage.

    I’ve lived in the “Princess Diana” era when weddings took a year to plan and execute, with all the bells and whistles and long bridal gown trains. I don’t necessarily think that’s a better way, but then again they did wind up with a photo album (several, actually).

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  33. I don’t remember my mom ever talking about their proposal, either, and I know there was no fan engagement ring. Just the thinnest of gold bands when they married at the Presbyterian manse with only a few friends and family attending. My mom wore a suit. It was the 1940s.

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  37. “Chas”, BTW, is a computer name. I go by “Charlie” in the real world. Only online is Chas ever used.
    It’s easier to type than Charles or Charlie, which is what I go by in the real world.

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  41. My mom’s dad was “Grandpa Charlie” to me. He was a nurseryman by trade, big-boned and tall, always wore a hat and coat when he came to visit from Iowa, walked everywhere, a quiet man.

    He loved some of the sites in downtown LA and was a big fan of the Angel’s Flight trolly run and the Watts Towers where he’d always go on his trips out to escape the harsh northwest Iowa winters later in his life. Wish I’d known him better but we were both very shy around each other. He died when I was 12.

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  43. My father doesn’t care that his family name ends with him, even though he can trace his ancestral line back over two and a half centuries. If his father hadn’t sold the family farm, he would have inherited it as the eldest son. As it is, he is the last of his line to have lived in the community his ancestors founded. Yet, though he is clearly proud of his long lineage, he is content with the future of it being passed to his daughters. His first name is the same as his father’s first name, but all his life he has been known by a contraction of his second name. Now, all three of his married daughters have a son whose second name is the same as my father’s second name.

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  46. Mumsee, Elvera never taught.
    I have forgotten when I started teaching. I taught over 1000 SS lessons. When I was at Carolina, I preached more than taught. Emory Harper was our teacher.
    I taught in Falls Church for over 20 years, other than that, I don’t remember
    As for teaching, my mother taught the children of children she taught. I thought that was something.

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  47. That is something! I taught a little bit here and there but I am not really a teacher. I did what I could. I was fired on Okinawa but I muddled through a few more places before calling it quits and then just adopting my class.

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  51. Roscuro mentioned confusing city streets which reminded me of the one family vacation we went on with both girls (we took one with only Nightingale when she was two and I was just figuring out that I was pregnant with Chickadee), back in 2003. Somehow, Hubby had won a trip to the Boston area, with the motel being in Chelsea, Mass.

    Chelsea has way too many one-way streets. You may remember that Hubby drove a lot for his work, and he had a really good sense of direction. But even he could not figure out how to get around in Chelsea. One morning, he went out to get donuts and coffee for breakfast. It took him an hour and a half to make his way back to the motel due to all those confusing one-way streets.

    There didn’t seem to be any particular kind of pattern to them, but I thought he should ask at the motel desk if there was a secret to navigating Chelsea’s streets. (He didn’t.)

    It’s not as if he was not used to city streets, as he learned to drive in Boston, and drove in other cities quite often. But there was something particularly confusing about Chelsea’s streets. (I still wonder if there was a secret or pattern to them that we just couldn’t see.)

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  52. Reading of Chas’ non proposal…I don’t think Paul every actually proposed…we just started talking about when to get married and such 😂…. And when we had our first child it was nuts trying to name him. My Mother insisted he be named after my Father and that wasn’t going to happen…we didn’t want a John Smith. Paul want him named after his best friend’s middle name Carey…I didn’t want a Carey Grant in the family. We were going to name him Charles Matthew but my hospital roommate named her newborn that name. We decided upon Jacob…then husband decided the middle name should be Edward after his maternal grandfather. But when the in-laws came to Myrtle Beach to meet their new grandson, mother in law asked about the middle name…I told her it was after her father…she gasped and said “my Dad’s name was Everett”!!! Well it was a good thing my Great Grandfather’s middle name was Edward so I could attribute my son’s middle name to someone in the family!! 😂

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  53. oh, my goodness, such a wonderful conversation and I just got up
    Time to go to market. I am almost afraid to go outside the caution tape, but it is the only time each week that you can get fruit and vegetables. Hoping someone will give me a ride up the steep hilll

    Chas I am loving the answers and Mumsee you are so good at questions. I have already saved them all..

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  54. NancyJ. That’s what happened with us. Elvera knew that I was going to Texas after graduation. We started talking about “us” moving before I actually proposed.
    In fact. I don’t know that I ever proposed. But I did buy a ring during summer break. We had been going together seven months by then.
    My parents loved her and likely suspected the binding before we actually did.

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  56. Chas you did one better than Paul…he didn’t give me an engagement ring. We had been dating for 5 months then ran off and got married. His family … well his Mom..didn’t like me because we eloped and didn’t tell anyone for a couple months. But she ended up liking me quite well 😊 Paul signed up for the Air Force a couple months later and off to Myrtle Beach we went. He served 4 years and then went to Coastal then to the “dreaded” Clemson 😂 Here we are wrapping up our 46th years together…praying we make it to where you and your bride have…we love your love story ♥️

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  57. Chas (4:14) It kind of reminds me of a “falling oops” photo — you know, when the camera goes off as you’re about to hit the ground?

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  59. Chas – My parents guessed that Hubby was going to propose to me before he did. I had no clue, but I “knew” inside that he was the one I would marry.

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  61. Janice said, “How many states in total does Wandering Views members represent (and nations/provinces, too)?”

    That’s an interesting question. Here’s what I can think of:
    US States: Connecticut, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri, Texas, New Mexico, California, Colorado, Idaho, Minnesota, Iowa, Michigan. So that’s at least 15. I can’t remember if Cheryl’s in Tennessee or Indiana now – I think she moved from one to the other. So Indiana might make 16. What others?

    (I “cheated” and looked up a couple on FB that I wasn’t sure about.)

    Canada provinces: Ontario and Saskatchewan, so at least 2 provinces.

    Other countries: Czech Republic and PNG, at least. Someone in Latin America checks in occasionally, but I can’t think of her name or country. And someone in Africa whose name and country I also can’t remember, but I haven’t seen her here in a very long time.

    What have I missed?

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  62. My husband was very diligent in conversation topics he wanted to cover before we allowed ourselves to get serious, conducted by e-mail, and after we got through those really long e-mails (more than 100,000 words in six weeks), he knew he wanted to marry me, though we hadn’t even met in person yet. (I was 90% there, too, but I needed to spend time together in person first.) After several weeks of e-mailing we talked by phone for several weeks before meeting in person. In one of our first phone conversations, he said something about “my first wedding” and then he caught himself and laughed. He was already making plans for a second one. 🙂

    We had an elder from my church and his wife very involved in the process. They hosted him every time he came to town (to make sure it wasn’t a financial burden on them, he left a gift card for them after every visit). The first visit, they apparently hadn’t caught that he already knew he wanted to marry me. Initially I had planned to go to my part-time job the first evening while he was driving down to Nashville, but take off the second night. Then I decided it would be better to take off both nights so that I could see him the first evening too, but I didn’t tell him. (Some of my female friends thought I was “playing games” by not telling him. I wasn’t. I knew he would be more nervous if he knew I was going to be there, and his drive to Nashville would be easier for him if he thought he wasn’t going to meet me till the next morning. He confirmed that I was right in that.)

    Well, he was very, very pleased that I showed up to have supper with him and his hosts, rather than the original plan that he would have supper with them and then meet me for breakfast the next morning. But during supper he joked that he should be careful, because Mike might jump out of the closet.

    His hosts were puzzled–who’s Mike? Well, they and I went to the same church, and Mike was our pastor. The joke was that the bride had showed up and surprised him, and maybe the pastor would show up to marry us. They were shocked indeed when they realized that he was comfortable enough with the topic of marrying me that he was joking about it within 90 minutes or so of meeting me in person. 🙂

    He did actually propose to me, though. It was a technicality in one sense–I’d already tried on the ring weeks before, we already had reserved the church for the wedding and the honeymoon cabin, and I think we’d reserved a honeymoon suite for our wedding night too. And he hadn’t officially told me he was going to propose that night, but he hadn’t kept it a big secret, either. He wasn’t going to propose until I’d met the girls, and that night (two or three days after meeting the girls) we were going out to eat at a fancy restaurant, so it was pretty obvious he was going to propose to me that evening. But he proposed earlier than I expected (not at the restaurant, but before we went) and thus still caught me off guard a little bit.

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  67. Kim’s family is knocking it out of the ballpark.

    Seriously, though, I’m sorry to hear that and hope it passes through quickly and with few issues.

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  68. I worked all day on a story about an underground, 7-mile-long waste water pipe that’s being installed over the next several years. This is what real journalists do.

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  72. Which state is Pauline in? And Yapamom? And that Weasel on the political thread is in what part of Canada? At one time we had two others in GA posting, MakeItMan and someone over near the AL line, and there was NJLawyer.

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  73. Pauline is in Iowa.

    I forget which part of Canada HRW is from. (I still call him “HRW”, which is what he went by on the WMB, rather than “hwesseli” because it’s quicker to type. 🙂 )

    Speaking of HRW, I have wondered if some on the prayer thread have assumed that he is too liberal, and so discount anything he has to say. There are times he has good points or further information worth considering. And he is calm and respectful in his comments.

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  74. Janice – When you referred to HRW as “that Weasel”, how do you mean that? Was that merely a playful play on his name or do you think he is a “weasel”?

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  75. I thought about adding New Jersey to the list, but I don’t think NJLawyer ever came over to WV after WorldMagBlog kicked us out. If we want to go back that far we could count Washington – I can’t think of his name but he made fun of us for believing in our “sky god” and eventually got banned. If we go back to WorldMagBlog there are a whole lot of other people we could bring in.

    Bob Buckles is in California, right?

    If we just leave it at relatively current members, we have 16 US states, 2 Canada provinces, 2 other countries, plus wherever Yapamom and HRW are.

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  77. Kevin – Random Name is the guy from Washington. He started getting even more belligerent, and from a comment he made about his daughter’s concern for him, it sounds like he may have started to decline mentally.

    I followed his blog, which has been inactive for quite a while now, and he and I exchanged emails from time to time.

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  82. Yes, I went to market and got a ride home. Then soaked the produce. Later I walked to the store and then finance and the post office. Coming up the hill was difficult after being confined for so long and we are at 5000 feet. Now I have had lunch and the lunchtime rain is done, I hope, so it is time to visit school.

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  83. HRW is from southern Ontario and has said before his upbringing was Dutch Reform. There is quite an influential network of Dutch/Christian Reform around the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). I have encountered both those who have forsaken their upbringing (such as my Greek professor in university – although a skeptic, he did have us read John 1:1 in Greek) and those who held to their upbringing. Among my parents’ friends was a minister in the denomination. I have several cousins, who although raised in the Baptist church, attended a private high school and university run by Christian Reform. Tim Challies, whom several here have mentioned reading his blog, is also in southern Ontario, and he is Christian Reform. As I said, very influential network.

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  86. That is a good explanation of how immunity develops. My textbook and lecture slides on immunology had a line graph of the immune response with first and second exposure. The first exposure line stayed flat for a week after the initial exposure, as the body took time to recognize the invader, with antigen levels rising slowly and steadily for the next couple of weeks (hence the 21 day wait between the first and second shot). The second exposure line showed an abrupt and immediate rise of antigen levels to three times the peak amount of the first exposure.

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  87. Kizzie, with my poor eyesight, everytime I focus on that name ‘weasel’ is what I think it is at first. I also think weasels are good fighters, and I have thought he is pretty strong in defending his opinions. I am sure with the name being what it is that it’s not the first time someone has called it that. Do you think I need to apologize? I don’t think he would be offended, but if so, I can apologize. Does he even read the posts on this thread? I actually thought I was being kind in including him. 😀

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