O-Dark-Thirty

Home-made Pickles I like pickles. Dill pickles mostly, but for some reason I’ve craved pickles this last year. Sometimes I can substitute green olives, and sometimes I’d rather have olives than pickles, but if I go too long without eating a pickle, I get really hungry for them. I’ve liked pickles my entire life, it seems. I also like hot peppers, often at the same time as the pickles. The mixture is a great flavor. Okay, this isn't about hot peppers, but it's a cool picture My Mom used to can pickles. She made all sorts. She made dill, of course, but she sliced some, turned some into spears, did some of them whole. She also tried sweet pickles, but she wasn’t much of a fan of her own sweet pickles. I think Mom’s favorite pickles were bread and butter pickles. She made some of those also, in a large, clay pot with a lid. This crock was designed specifically for letting bread and butter pickles ferment, or whatever they do while they sit in the co...

Ralph Waldo Emerson said "Shallow men believe in luck...strong men believe in cause and effect." The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. What are you doing now? What results do you want? Make a plan from that. Work backwards and figure out what you need to do to get the results you want. God answers prayer, but He also imbued in each person strength and skill and will and spirit to accomplish things FOR God's people. There is an old saying that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. That's good, short-term planning. Plant the seeds so you can have lemon trees in the future. That's long-term planning. It isn't a Prime Day, it's a Square Day. B onus Post!

There is a new movie of the Three Musketeers, and this one has a little of everything, including a bit of steam-punk, by way of Leonardo da Vinci. October, 2011 The book was good, but I didn't think it was  excellent . For one thing, it portrayed French society the way it probably was: Musketeers were often kept solvent by wealthy women who slept with them, and Constance, though familiar with the queen, was a wealthy man's wife who took a shine to D'Artagnan. However, it has been the topic of a  lot  of action movies. The first one I can find ( IMDB ) was made in Italy in 1909. In 1914 we see one made in the USA. There are over forty listings in IMDB, made in a half dozen countries, including Japan. My favorite of all the versions that I've seen is probably the one from 1939, with Don Ameche as D'Artagnan. It's colorized now, of course, but it was the classic version when I was growing up. I didn't realize that it was considered a parody of the book. I ...

Who am I? That's the biggest question anyone ever asks. It's a tough one. I ponder it a lot, and I am now over a half century old and counting (with my most recent birthday just days past). Moses: First he was a Prince... Moses asked that question. “And Moses said unto God, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?” (Exodus 3:11, KJV) God knows who He is, of course, and simply tells Moses “I AM.” It doesn't get simpler (or more profound) than that. Moses started as a Prince of Egypt, then saw himself as a deliverer of the Hebrew people. He took it upon himself to kill an Egyptian, then hid the body, thinking it was a secret. He had an image of who he was right then, and maybe it was a clear image. But it was a wrong image. Because of his actions he had to flee Egypt, flee position and authority and power. He had to abandon everything he knew to that point, including his own concept of who he was. ...