"Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it." - Thomas Jefferson

I slept until almost 5:00 this morning. Woot!

I had an "aha" moment this morning. I'm not proud of it; I shouldn't have reached 67 before figuring it out, but it's a case of better late than never.
I've always been a bit puzzled by Romans 7:7: "I would not have known what it is to covet if the Law had not said, 'You shall not covet.'" His point in the context is that the prohibitions of the Law awoke within him the desire to do the very things it prohibits.
Huh?? I don't see that in myself. I don't need the Law to sin or to be drawn to sin. I can do it quite well all on my own.
Never mind how I got there, but I pictured a group of preschoolers playing together. Johnny didn't know how much he wanted to play with the red truck until he saw Sally playing with it. That awoke within him the great desire to play with the red truck himself, and that in turn led him to snatch the truck away from Sally. Of course this caused Ms. Mary, the preschool teacher to kneel down and talk sweetly with Johnny about sharing, letting others have their fun, and getting strapped to the swing set with duct tape if he ever did anything like that again.
Alas, that afternoon Johnny, being the inveterate sinner that he is, espied Julio beating on a toy xylophone with its mallet and gave him the same treatment Sally got. Which explains why Johnny is now outside screaming his head off whilst strapped to the swing set.
"I would not have known what it is to covet if Sally hadn't been playing with the red truck." (Romans 7:7 - CMSV)

What do you see in this pic? The person who posted it on Facebook put it up because some young girl she knows is crazy about unicorns.
WHAT????
And several people who posted comments thought the same thing. Really? A unicorn?
Doesn't the word "pollo" in the pic give you a hint that this might be a chicken, not a unicorn? OK, it's standing on its head and has flames coming out its butt, but really.....!
And the original poster knows Spanish!
(Yes, I realize that's probably supposed to be the rooster's tail but I have to squint real hard to make the rest of it look anything like even a dead rooster.)

One of the redeeming features of a gray drizzly day is looking out the window from the coziness of the inside and seeing the smoke from our wood stove slowly rolling over the roof and out toward the creek.

I stopped in to the Ace Hardware in Veneta to get some mineral oil for finishing the butcher block. The old guy who came over to help me asked what I was looking for, I told him, and he said, "Here you go" and handed me mineral spirits. Uhm....

Pam's flight from Denver to Eugene is delayed. They're now saying it will arrive at 9:30 instead of 9:00. That is NOT acceptable.