January 15, 2023 a thought for today, Do not measure others by your own yardstick. Russian Proverb

The first upload for yesterday was “inside my home”. This is a part of my kitchen. It was the chosen part for this title today.

I do believe we had a couple of new people at church today. That was nice. Hope they come back. It was refreshing. The choir sang again this morning. Once again, as with last week, we sounded so much richer with our new member. 

It’s still cold outside. I don’t know why I mentioned the cold temperatures, it’s going to be this way for a couple more months. 

The second upload for yesterday was “tools”. These are a collection of just a few of the “tools” I have used in hobbies/crafts over the years. As the years passed and I learned more and more ways of doing things I have come across some interesting kinds of tools and gadgets. It was fun learning about their origins and uses. 

I have to get some dishes out of the sink but I think that will be the extent of my “chores” for this Sunday afternoon. 

One of the uploads for today was “outside my home”. It was too cold to stay outside without a coat on so this is a quick shot of some of what we see outside of my home.....the porch swing, the wind chime, the bare tree branches and some of my neighbors home. 

The word for today is action. Action is eloquence... William Shakespeare.  And is then example nothing? It is everything. Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other. Edmund Burke. Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you. Thomas Jefferson. To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. Isaac Newton. Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action. Honore de Balzac.  Never confuse motion with action. Benjamin Franklin.  All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action. James Russell Lowell.  The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth and have it found out by accident. Charles Lamb. Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in. Andrew Jackson.  The only cure for grief is action. George Henry Lewes.  All speech is vain and empty unless it be accompanied by action. Demosthenes. Speech is the mirror of action. Solon. 

The second upload is “umbrella”. I didn’t want to open this huge umbrella so I chose to stick it in a corner and take a photo and part of its shadow. 

I am sharing an article for a bit of enjoyment/education aside from renovations and historic information about the city. This one is about how a bird leaned to get to a food that takes human hands to do. The bird is a “common herring gull”. I found in this article that only one state has more gull species than Ohio and that is California. According to the article California has 27 species of gulls, Ohio has 21 recorded species. Apparently two more have come to Ohio recently, the common gull and the “glaucous-winged gull” who were recorded in Cleveland in late December and early January. The most common gull in Ohio to this point has been the ring billed bull. This one “roosts” in parking lots and on the Scioto River. It looks for scraps in restaurant parking lots. They sometimes share their space with the Herring gulls. The article says they are intelligent, live along life and are adaptable. The herring gull lives around water and likes to eat mussels or clams. Clams are famously difficult to open. Here’s the interesting part of the story, herring gull has somewhere along the line learned about the meal inside the clam and “devised a clever trick to open clams”. These birds spot a mussel bed and dive down to “pluck a clam”, fly back to a spot of hard-packed gravel. From “a height of several stories, the gull would drop the mussel like a feathered B-24 delivering a bivalve bomb” with the gull close behind to gather the “meat morsel”. The article went on to say that other gull species can preform this trick also. 

 I haven’t decided which take out we will be ordering for dinner, taco bell, KFC, Ding Ho, or subway. 

Joy                                Is it a message or is it art