The Final Touch

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The Minneapolis-St. Paul (Minn.) Star­Tri­bune news­pa­per, in its blog enti­tled “On Weather,” stated today that Moor­head, Minn. — only 30 miles south of Hen­drum, where I live — was the “hottest, most humid  spot on earth Tues­day evening”:

“The coolwx​.com site shows global extremes from hour to hour. Tues­day evening, around the din­ner hour, the dew point at Moor­head reached 87.8 F, mak­ing this the most humid report­ing sta­tion on the planet. The heat index peaked at an almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble 134 F. at Moorhead.”

Hearty — or fool­ish! — peo­ple that we are, my fam­ily and I were OUTSIDE at my youngest’s tee­ball game, and there was NO shade at the ball field! For­tu­nately, it only lasted an hour. I wouldn’t have even taken him if it hadn’t been the last game of the sea­son. He would have been awfully sad to have had to miss out.

(By the way, the pic­ture below is not of our ball dia­mond — WAY too much shel­ter from the sun to be ours!!)

I hope the rest of you are sur­viv­ing sum­mer quite nicely — spoiled, per­haps, as we are by our air-conditioning and fans, and for­tu­nate to not be home­less on days like these. Sum­mer bless­ings to you all!

If you are tired of the cold and snow, raise your hand!

Got this from a friend/colleague and just had to share it! It has snowed here, I believe, every day since New Year’s Day — and quite a few days in Decem­ber as well. The white stuff is piled high around our house and community.

Oh, and yeah — it’s COOOLLLD: –20s air tem­per­a­ture much of this week, and that doesn’t even count the windchill!!

Any­one in a warmer clime care to do a house-swap for, say, three months or so? Liv­ing here builds char­ac­ter — but I think I’ve got enough char­ac­ter for the time being. Hey, and you could get in on the result­ing sand­bag­ging in March and April, too! You’d like that, wouldn’t you?

Suu­ur­rrre, you would!!!

Isa­iah 43:19 and many other Bible verses tell us that God is always doing some­thing new. From the very first words of Scrip­ture, we know God as cre­ative. Some­times, cre­ativ­ity means tak­ing some­thing old and shar­ing it in a new way. The mes­sage of Christ­mas — the Good News of Great Joy that Jesus has been born to save all peo­ple! — is not new, but it must be told in new ways in order to be received and embraced by each new gen­er­a­tion. The video at the link below is truly clever! (The only thing I would change is the sound­track, per­haps to a lively ver­sion of “Joy to the World.”)

Enjoy! And remem­ber — it’s still Christ­mas, accord­ing to the Church-Year cal­en­dar!
MERRY CHRISTMAS! AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

First of all, “Happy Mon­day morn­ing” to you all! My dar­ling cat Pump­kin and I have a video mes­sage to share with you:

I had so much fun mak­ing this video! For starters, it’s the first one I’ve ever made online, and I think it’s so fun to learn new skills!

Sec­ond, I made it using an awe­some web­site called Ani­moto*, which is so easy and slick that I was absolutely amazed! Not only can Ani­moto cre­ate videos out of var­i­ous video clips you upload, but — as you can see in this video — it can make a video out of your still pho­tos. You can do short (30-second) videos for free, or you can pay $30 a year to make as many unlimited-time videos as you wish. Seems like a great deal to me — and so much fun!

Third, this one-year-old kit­ten (he still acts young even though he’s offi­cially full-grown now, and we still refer to him and the other kit­ten we got at the same time as “the babies,” as com­pared to our two older cats) is such a cutie — don’t you agree?! — that I just laugh out loud each time I see these pics, espe­cially the “pull-up” ones, and I just had to share him with all of you!

Hope you enjoyed the video — and my goofy cat! Would you please let me know what you think by post­ing a com­ment? Thanks!

Have a PURR-fect day!

* http://​cmp​.ly/5

Well, it’s not for lack of try­ing, but I have not yet been able to locate a link to an archived record­ing of the Christo­pher Gabriel Pro­gram from yes­ter­day morn­ing when Gram­mar Girl Mignon Fog­a­rty was a guest on his show (970 WDAY Radio out of Fargo, N.D.). I will keep an eye out because yes­ter­day morn­ing, there was a link for his March 3 show.

In the mean­time, the National Gram­mar Day web­site is still live. I invite you to visit and poke around. Among the top “fun finds” is this music video, also acces­si­ble on YouTube, in cel­e­bra­tion of National Gram­mar Day; turns out the Gram­mar Girl has a bit of singing and song-writing tal­ent as well! It’s worth a listen!

I hope you’ll click on the “Play” icon in the video below to hear the whole song. Just one great line to which I can per­son­ally attest: “If you love good gram­mar, you’ll never be bored!”