June 2, 2024 a thought for today, If you walk on snow you cannot hide your footprints. Chinese Proverb

My first upload for yesterday was “I am....” I am a mother, grandmother, great grand mother, volunteer, church goer, reader, photographer. I’ll admit I touched up the wrinkles so I didn’t look like what the years have done. But that me just yesterday.

The second upload yesterday was “from a distance”. This is one of the streets in my neighborhood. It is clean and quiet all the way along its distance.  

The third upload for the first day of June 2024 was “photographers choice”. For the next five month we are on a work day hiatus of “assigned subjects”. We will have “assignments” on the weekends. The weekends will be up to each of us in the club.  This bench in the park looks inviting. I often see walker taking a break at the bench. 

Life today. Good morning...it has been. Church followers this morning at Hoge were few. We had easy one-on-one bonding with our peers. The message was energetic and interesting. We had a visitor who apparently had come frequently in the past. Hopefully he will return. The choir is in a summer hiatus. Today was our monthly communion day. 

I wanted to stop at the bank on my way home but the line was all the way down from the drive thru to the street so I changed my mind. Not that much of a problem right now. So I meandered for while looking for the photos for today.

The first upload for today is another of the “photographers choice”. I like the feel of these steps, the arrangement and the aged feel. The greenery softens the rough edges of blocks and cement. 

This will be a typical Sunday for me......refresh and renew for the week ahead. It looks like it will be a fairly uneventful week coming up. It could change.....who knows.  

The only thing on the agenda is uploading todays church service to our facebook page. That takes most of the afternoon. 

The weather is typical Ohio weather today, the second day of June. It is just barely comfortable enough to have the screens shut and the furnace off. It’s not quite summer time yet. 

The next upload is “empty”. This is one of my zip lock sandwich bags boxes. I searched around for something a little more interesting but this one won out. 

The word today is first.  The man who occupies the first place seldom plays the principal part. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  Mistrust first impulses; they are nearly always good. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome. Julius Caesar.  Illusion is the first of all pleasures. Voltaire.  How can we live in harmony? First we need to know we are all madly in love with the same God. Thomas Aquinas.  By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. Confucius.  Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom. Thomas Jefferson.  Be content with your lot; once cannot be first in everything. Aesop.  Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first, and then compels us to tower by reason of our blindness. Charles Caleb Colton.  Three silences there are: the first of speech, the second of desire, the third of thought. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase. Charles Caleb Colton.  To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life. Robert Louis Stevenson. The first-beginnings of things cannot be distinguished by the eye. Lucretius.  The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society's most basic values. Charles Caleb Colton.  God is the last link of the chain, but He is the first also. Joseph Barber Lightfoot.

The last upload for today is “I held this”. My cell phone is in my hands countless times a day. There are phone calls, text messages and photos to take and look at. 

Article: Bees, nature, and trash all working together. What a world we live in. The headline sounded a little unique....bees in a landfill.......where there is a pollinator garden. I have passed the landfill many times and never dreamed of pollinator garden or bee working there.  According to the article there are 12,000 honeybees there. Two beehives were put there in April to “support the site’s two acres of pollinator gardens......to increase biodiversity”. I presume that the gardens were already there. It goes on to mention that the garden is about 2,000 feet away from the waste in the landfill and that the bees are not interested in the trash. The bees also travel up to two to three miles away pollinating other gardens and farms. Placing the hives in that place was an idea of an employee who also owns 30 hives of his own in Zanesville. In the springtime the bees find their own food so he cares for the hives for invaders and checks to see that the bees are healthy. He said this takes about an hour every week. It is believed that the “bees fit the mission because they care for plants in the surrounding area and the landfill’s green space”. One of the area grade schools, Harmon Elementary School, had a tour to learn about the new hives. The people are the landfill have named the queen bee of each of the two hives, one name is Beetrix and the other Cardi Bee. During tours of the landfill some of the visitors get to see the bees. There are plans to “expand the pollinator gardens, but that process could take years”. The landfill pollinator garden has 27 flower species. In ending the article “When you see the flowers on the trees and the flowers growing ... and the fruits, the apples, that’s when you know there’s success”.

I think I will make Welsh rarebit for dinner. 

Joy

                                     mom and dad with their little ones