July 7, 2022 a thought for today, Man has a thousand plans, heaven but one. Chinese Proverb

Here’s another printing event in the box. The special patriotic bulletin and companion historic booklet are done. The patriotic thought is a little late but still meaningful. 

The photo a day upload for July 6 was “bright colours”. I was waiting in the car for my sister, realized I had to have a photo with some bright colors. As I glanced around and spotted this sign across the street. The colors are bright to me so that is the image I snapped. 

It feels so good to be able to take a few minutes after my work at the church to go on a quick lookout for my photos of the day. When I didn’t have a car that had to be put on hold but it’s back now.

My second image selection for yesterday is this one of a fence behind my church. Nature is beginning to supply ornaments. 

The insurance company I have been “fighting” with has given the last word.....still, they are backing the lie my “opponent” spouted. So I took the next step on my way from the church this morning....I mailed a package of all the written correspondence that has taken placed in the last three months to an insurance group here in Columbus that is noted for settling disputes. We’ll see where that goes and if they believe the truth over a lie. Oh, the last contact with the company I have been dealing with came yesterday. The lady on the phone, a manager of some sort, said she had read all the documents and viewed the body cam and still backs the other guy. However, she was surprised when I told her we had exchanged insurance information (and yet she said she had read all the information). That doesn’t sound like she read all the information when I repeated that particular information over and over again throughout the correspondence. 

Once I got home and as usual for Wednesday I started the laundry. That is when I noticed that all of that rain in the last two days has left its mark there. 

The photo a day upload for today is “a fave place”. I was distributing the weekly bulletins in their appropriate boxes/tables. As I walked through the sanctuary I took a break and enjoyed the peace and the sight. 

The word is balance.  The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man, Euripides.  The balance of power is the scale of peace, Thomas Paine. So divinely is the world organized that every one of us, in our place and time, is in balance with everything else, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings, Rumi. Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery, Horace Mann.   To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artis en life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor, Robert Louis Stevenson. 

The upload today to my Canadian photo group was shot this morning at the park down the street from my home. The background was less than pleasing to me but instead of reject the image of the flower I did an textured overlay and brushed the flower back in. I need to get a bigger supply of textures. 

The article today brings another bit of some history of the past now becoming more visible in one of our communities. The title of the article makes my point and describes it well: “Once in the millions and reduced to hundreds, bison are back”. Moving in Ohio from Delaware to points east we notice “rich open farmland”. The top soil is “4 to 6 feet deep”. It provided grass for both wild and “domesticated” livestock. Ths article goes on to mentions that now as we approach Urbana we will see “a field of grazing bison”.  It goes on to report that once when the French, Spanish and English “colonists in the 1700s” came to the Ohio Country there were “large herds of bison....present in Ohio”. The bison shared these “deep forests, plains ....clear streams and rivers” with herds of elk and deer along with pigeons that “blackened the sky for hours”. The bisons in Ohio were “wood” bison, they are not as large as the plains bison but still “one of the largest animals in America”. They can weigh as much as 2,000 pounds and can run 35 mph or faster. In the time of the Native Americans in this area the bison “cut trails” through the woods allowing the people and other animals to follow these “roads”. The trails “followed high ground” making it easier to cross streams while staying clear of swamps and quicksand. Eventually these trail became actual roads. Then the bison were gone. Facts in the article indicate that in the 1600s and 1700s there were up to 50 million and 70 million plains and wood bison in North America. Native Americans hunted them and used “every bit of the beast”. The bisons supplied meat, clothing, even housing along with weapons and tools from their bones. Before guns and other weapons it was difficult to catch them, they were “ferocious when cornered”. The Native Americans hunted carefully not so with the French. The English called the bisons buffalo from the French version word “le boeuf”.  The “extermination of elk and buffalo in Ohio dates from about the year 1800". Since then herds of bison have been rebuilt slowly. In our area they can be seen at the Zoo, the Wilds, Darby Dan Farm and Battelle Darby Creek Metro Park. In 2016 they were recognized as America’s national mammal. 

I am putting the left over meat loaf in gravy over mashed potatoes for dinner tonight. 

Joy

                                      this poor old tree stump is being used as a show case