October 23, 2020 thought for the day: If you don't want to be deceived, you must have as many eyes as hairs on the head. German Proverb

It’s been an active day. I doubled up on the printing at church yesterday. I called the lady who helps with finishing the newsletter and asked her if she would mind coming in on Thursday instead of Friday as is our custom to help with the folding, sealing, labeling, stamping and mailing. She was happy to do it. The three printing projects for the day went well after I was able to figure out why the computer, monitors and copier went off, (it was a problem with one of the power strips) went out half way through the jobs. Her help let me clear today for a doctor’s appointment that I had forgotten. 

Yesterday’s photo theme was “running water”. After running water from my faucet, which I have a problem capturing in an image, my next thought was the fountain in the park down the street. I wasn’t satisfied with the preview in my camera monitor so I went on to shoot a “spring-like” feature at the end of the pond in the park. I don’t know what that “spring-like” object is or what it is for but I am guessing that it is some sort of aeration system. Whatever it is it is running water. 

Sue went along with me to the doctor. She needed to have some blood work done and the lab is in the same building as my doctor’s office. I got the flu shot out of the way and some of my own blood work done too. I had an informative chat with both the doctor and the lab technician about some of my own pandemic safety measures as well as why the “old” Mt. Carmel was moved. We are in agreement that it was desperately needed where it was in the first place.   

We both had grocery lists to tend to so we stopped at Kroger to get that task out of the way. On the way home from our adventures, I wanted to stop by White Castle for a light “brunch” and then into the affects of another kind of adventure. There had been a fatal shooting at the business earlier in the morning. So the whole White Castel lot was taped off. As we headed on down Broad Street we noticed that the bank across the street from White Castle had been taped off too. Then, still further, across the street from the corner of my street the filling station was also taped off. I found out later that the shooter had shot out windows at the bank and went further to try to rob and hide in the rest room at the filling station. 

Once home, I got back to work. I got part of the groceries put up before I watered the plants and finished loading the near full dish washer. Back at the computer, I got back into some other multitasking. I checked and answered emails, took a quick break from that to get back to the church messages ready for handing out. Also got one big bill paid and ordered some furnace filters. I still have about half of those to do and then back to putting the rest of the groceries up. Hopefully I will have those done before the twins get here for their overnight. 

The word today is open. You cannot open a book without learning something, Confucius. Youth comes but once in a lifetime, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Luck generally comes to those who look for it, and my notion is that it taps, once in a lifetime, at everybody's door, but if industry does not open it luck goes away, Charles Spurgeon. One day is worth a thousand tomorrows, Benjamin Franklin. Each day of my life I am sowing seeds that one day I will harvest, Gautama Buddha. One moment can change a day, One day can change a life and One life can change the world, Gautama Buddha. There's no use in comparing one's feelings between one day and the next; you must allow a reasonable interval, for the direction of change to show itself, Lewis Carroll.  Let us make education brave and preventive. Politics is an after work, a poor patching. We are always a little late... We shall one day learn to supercede politics by education... We must begin higher up, namely in Education, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written, Henry David Thoreau. 

The photo challenge today is “an empty table”.  Many years ago my aunt gave me a table that had been in her lake front home for as long as I knew the home. It is a gate-leg table. (Here is a definition of a gate leg table: A gate-leg table is a type of furniture first introduced in England in the 16th century. The table top has a fixed section and one or two hinged leaves, which, when not in use, fold down below the fixed section to hang vertically. As such, gate-leg tables are a subset of the type known as a drop-leaf. The hinged section, or flap, was supported on pivoted legs joined at the top and bottom by stretchers constituting a gate. Large flaps had two supports, which had the advantage of providing freer leg space in the center.) I think the photo shows the character the years have imparted to and on this eighty-plus year old table. 

I latched on to this article particularly due to something I heard in the campaign speech last night. FORMER Vise President Biden said Lincoln was a racist. That shocked me, another shock similar to the destruction of historical statues in this season of the apparent restructure of America. I don’t understand how he could have been after what he did for slavery and his efforts of trying to make a solution for both the slaves’ lives and “owners”’ lives to be safer and happier. These kinds of things repeatedly show me how the decisions of human beings in authority are made with and by things happening in their life and in the society around them at the time the decisions need to be made. Am I naïve?  This article is about the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, hopefully when I read it through there will be some salvage to the tatters being made of my humble belief in the history and greatness of the world’s United States. In Springfield, Illinois in the front of the museum is a sculpture of Lincoln “right down to Lincoln’s patent leather shoes”. The museum features many parts of Lincoln’s life “from childhood ....to that fatal night at Ford’s Theatre”.  The museum is sectioned into two parts, “the Journey” the early years and “the White House Years”, all from the one-room log cabin to the farewell speech. I’m sure those early years show a hardship that is not just the suffering of one part of society but of many if not all of us to one degree or another. The article went on to relate how there was impeccable attention to setting up the cabin right down to some trees. The article further mentioned that two 1800s tobacco barns were found in storage in Kentucky and Virginia and brought to the museum. There is a reproduction of the South Portico in the White House section. “There are 12 million books, documents and artefacts...the world’s largest collection.” It is “one of the most studied museums in the world”. I wonder if, because of a belief as earlier mentioned in the blog, very soon, this facility will be allowed, by some purported all knowing(?) authority, to be taken apart and destroyed as with the other historical artifacts that have recently been in this year of horror or deformed wonder. 

Wonderful pizza night tonight...

Joy