Streams of Consciousness & Thoughts~~~

Says they have good taste in music. 😄

Wow, long time no see. How are you and how is life? And welcome back.

The more you know right? Readers are leaders, so they say. With that said......

If you define fart as the Merriam-Webster dictionary does—to expel intestinal gas from the anus—then no, plants don’t fart, because they don’t have anuses. However, they do expel gas (including methane, a greenhouse gas found in human and animal farts), so they basically fart in their own plantlike way. According to Popular Science, microbes in trees produce gas in much the same way that microbes in the human body break down food and create gas. Methane then seeps out of a tree’s bark or stems.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/568728/do-plants-fart

Everything breaks wind, then😁.

Why do people repeat the same mistakes?

In the words of a famous man, "Some mistakes are too much fun to only do once."

There is also the "Okay, I got it, NOW I understand how I can do it without suffering consequences" effect. This one gets people over and over.

I agree. It is a maddening workload. I keep having people tell me to slow down. I am taking a break next year from college, so there is that.

Church hunting again, or at least making steps in that direction even if it ends up as the church I've been going to but don't like all that much really is the best option. Too often I feel like what I have to offer isn't anything the church is interested in and / or I'm not normal enough for their "relevance" to be relevant to me. But if I'm really honest, I'm not entirely clear on what I want or expect out of church these days either.

Yep you guessed it, church I visited today was quite disappointing and not somewhere I'm going to visit a second time. Now I'm thinking I could have made this a separate thread and called it church dating because sometimes it seems like visiting new churches could easily be compared to dating, except the churches don't even know that they're being evaluated.

If you find a church where you feel comfortable... that's probably the wrong church.

I am SO ready for October to be over! This whole trip has been major stress and a significant excursion outside my comfort zone. And I wouldn't have missed it for worlds.

It started the week before I picked up seoulsearch. I found out my car's tailpipe fell off. NOOO! This is the vehicle I need to make it all the way to Nashville three times in a week! I called somebody and got a new one put on fast.

Next week my friend came in. I picked her up at the airport Tuesday and went to the Cheesecake Factory.

Wednesday we went to the Olde Towne Spaghetti Store and church.

Thursday we went to Nashville and toured a cat cafe, McKay's bookstore, Opryland Hotel and Opry Mills mall. Then we went home and fell over.

Friday I taught her how to use a screencast dongle and edit pictures.

Saturday we went to a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that has good burgers, and my town got blasted by a storm. Saturday night we retreated to a McDonald's that had power and internet and quickly researched the cost of picking up the rental car a day early. Then we drove east, crashing in Nashville... at about the eighth hotel, as all previous ones we checked were booked solid. Many events in Nashville that day, they said.

Sunday we tried to pick up the rental car. They said since we used a debit card when we made the reservation, we had to wait 24 hours to pick up the car. My friend quickly ascertained what would be necessary to get the car NOW and paid for it with her credit card. Grrrr... I was driving the car so I wanted the deposit to be on me. Now if I mess the car up SHE will have to pay for it. Not happy. But we were on the road and reached my mother's home in east TN safely (after a quick stop at the Knoxville McKay's. My friend was impressed by the McKay's both in Nashville and Knoxville.)

Monday was downtime for recuperation.

Tuesday (yesterday) I drove my friend on to Virginia, then drove myself and the rental car back. That was a lot of driving.

Today I am returning the rental car in Nashville, then going home to a house that now has water but still no power.

Tomorrow is my first day back at w*rk, and it's gonna be a hectic one. All the loonies come out and get real drunk on Halloween. The longer you are there the weirder the day becomes.

Can we fast forward to November? October is wearing and stressing me out. I just wanna crawl back into my hole and hibernate for half a month or so.

Wow... you earned some down time - but sounds like you guys had an adventure and lots of fun... OMG you guys were in VIRGINIA? That's my neck of the woods... Would have been awesome to link up and met you guys in person and tour you guys around my stomping grounds...
There is always next time... Things are looking up ... November is right around the corner...

I haven't been on an enjoyable road trip or vacation in decades. Maybe soon though. I'm glad you made it safe and sound.

The following is a list of the more alarming mistakes I made last week while seoulsearch was visiting.

TUESDAY: It was dark when I started driving and light when I reached my destination, so I forgot to turn the car lights off. Had to get a jump off.
We stopped by Aldi and I got more in my cart than I had money to cover in my wallet. I was in the middle of triage, determining what I could return, but seoulsearch covered it and I reimbursed her when I got home. That was more embarrassing than a dead car battery.

SATURDAY: I went the wrong way up an exit ramp... well the road sign SAID go that way...
Just an hour later I went through a four-way-stop without realizing it was a stop. Almost got hit by a truck.

NEXT TUESDAY: We stopped by a Walmart to cash my paycheck. I suddenly realized I had left the paycheck in my book bag... in my minivan... that we left in Nashville when we picked up the rental car. Um... oops. No worries, I had enough money to make it.

That was only the alarming ones. There were other, more minor mistakes.

And all I have on seoulsearch is sometimes she gets upset under stress - well I do too, I just hide it better - and when I dropped her off with the friends she was going to visit next, she would have left her phone and purse in the car if I hadn't reminded her to get them.

Yeah, she wins the reliability comparison. No wonder she was nervous about me making it home safely by myself.

In my defense, last week was a very stressful week. But I still can't justify all the mistakes I made.

Traveling is always one of the more stressful activities... Have had lots of snafoos when it comes to forgetting the little ankle biters, or getting anxious when missing a turn - especially in big cities or unfamiliar areas, or running late as a result; or accidentally forgetting to pull the gas hose out of the tank... talk about oops...
I hate when I'm traveling and have to shift weight from one bag to another at the last minute in a long line of impatient travelers...
Don't feel bad brother - happens to the best of us...

We live in a world where young people are able to multi task at incredible efficiency, it's underappreciated how much we are able to accomplish.

So much to say and no energy to say it.

Part of me wonders if that’s the Lord’s way of holding one off. Something to be learned still.

I've been thinking about the spirit of the antichrist...

No no no, put your crystal ball down. Everybody tries to predict who the "Antichrist" will be. The most popular choices always seem to be the current pope or the current USA president. The only thing the Bible talks about though, is the spirit of the antichrist, which was already at work in the new testament church days.

The spirit of the antichrist... a spirit that is anti-Christ, directly opposite everything that Christ is. What kind of spirit would that be? Pride? That is the Original Sin after all, the starting point of satan's fall. Greed? Greed precludes a lot of what Christ is. Hatred? That's about the worst thing we can think of, hating everybody. Hatred seems to be the opposite of love, and everybody knows God is love.

Personally I think it is spite. Spite is the best... or rather, worst... opposition I can think of to everything God is. Spite requires a person to destroy, not for any gain to oneself, but just because a spiteful person can't stand to let other people have it if he can't have it.

If a spiteful person doesn't get his way, he can't bear to just sit down and sulk. He has to cause a problem to ruin everybody else's good time. A spiteful person can't just accept that he didn't get the promotion and go back to his job, he has to find some way to tear down the person who did get the promotion. If a spiteful person does get something, it's not enough to have it - he has to make you feel bad because he has it and you don't. Spite is as destructive as love is constructive. That is what I think the antichrist spirit is.

I've heard a lot of people say the devil is stupid. He fights a war he knows he can't win, and I hear a lot of Christians, ministers even, talk about how dumb he is to think he might win anyway. I don't think he's stupid at all, and I don't think he actually believes he will win. I believe he's just destroying all he can, because all he has left is one last act of spite.

It's the only way I can make sense of everything the devil does. Logically he should just sit in the corner and try to not mess anything else up. He made a big play for control of everything, he lost, there is no possible way to win, so he should just sit down and shut up. But he can't do that. If he can't have it all, he is compelled to do everything he can to ruin it for God and for the humans God made.

Mind you, this is just what I've been thinking about. I don't have chapter and verse on it, and I'm certainly not going to preach it from the pulpit. But thinking back on all the really spiteful people I have known... and all the times I myself have been spiteful, and there have been a few... it sure makes sense to me.