Prayers Gone Wrong

You know the saying, "Be careful what you wish for?"  Well, the same can be said for prayers.  God knows our heart when we pray.  He will always answer prayers, it just may not be in the way we would like.  The classic example is when you pray for a person to be healed of a terminal illness.  God may answer that by quietly ending their suffering.  We get all ticked off because we meant for them to jump out of bed and start high-five'ing everyone in the room.  But, if we'll step back and reassess the situation, that person is likely* more healed than they could have ever been in human form.

Here are some other examples of prayers that can get an unexpected answer.**

• pray to get a raise at work - the next week get moved from the 1st floor to the 3rd floor
• pray for help in losing weight - get food poisoning, then contract swine flu
• pray to not covet neighbor's wife - they get divorced  (...pssst. She's not his wife...)***
• pray to find the time to get more exercise - car breaks down five miles from the nearest cell phone tower  (Think it can't happen? You've never been in western Oklahoma.)
• pray for more communication with the kids - more arguments ensue****  (Arguing with kids? Hard to believe, but I hear some parents do it.)

So, the next time you pray for something, and it seems that you got the opposite result, step back and see if the problem was you.*****

(******)

________________________________
*Not going to get into a theological discussion of saved/unsaved, Heaven/Hell.  That's for a different post.

**These are fantastical illustrations solely for humorous purposes. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, real or imagined, is purely coincidence.

***Would this happen? Not as an answer to prayer. Please refer to the previous footnote.

****Come on people! Lighten up! This is supposed to be funny!

*****Actually, the problem was you - you're not God.  "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9 (ESV)

******Just my way of helping you exercise your eyes - up, now down. Up, and... down. You're welcome.

The Return (Even Though I Never Knew He Left)

This settles it.  We - as in the U. S. of A. - need to take our tea drinking more seriously.  Then we can have spokesmen -animals -stuffed animals like the PG Tips Monkey. 

As best I can tell, PG Tips (which I still find to be a funny name for a tea company) first used chimpanzees, ala  Lancelot Link, in commercials back in the 70's.  Later, they developed a sock monkey to be their mascot.

Search YouTube for "PG Tips Monkey", and you'll find some of his commercials.  Thanks in part to a legal dispute, he apparently went on hiatus.  This clip, is appropriately named, "The Return".

In typical British fashion (no pun intended), he's even been known to don a dress and wig. 



Well, Poo!

"I'm just a little black rain cloud
Hovering under the honey tree"

Ok, that's not the poo I'm referring to.  Pooh is Number One.  This poo is Number Two.

What did he say?  I'm going to have to think about that.

As you probably know by now, I'm not a coffee drinker.  A few years ago I heard about a new coffee from Thailand called Civet Cat Coffee.  If you've never heard of this coffee, what I'm about to tell you probably won't encourage you to run out and buy some.  First off, it's expensive.  The online retailer Dean & Deluca sells Civet Cat Coffee through the Kopi Luwak brand. One 50 gram bag is $55.  Using the magical Google calculator to convert it to something I understand, it comes out to just under $500 per pound.  Yes.  $500.  Per pound.

Next, what makes this coffee so special?  According to Dean & Deluca, the beans (or cherries) are "digested and fermented by wild civets".  Now, to my internal thesaurus, "digested" is another term for "eaten" and "fermented" means "sits in the intestines until pushed out".  So, the civet cats do all the hard work, climbing the trees, then picking, eating, and - ahem - cleaning the beans.  The farmers just shovel up the forest floor, wash them off, and package them in little bags for gullible foreigners to buy.

Thailand's answer to Juan Valdez

Seems to me the cats do all the hard work.  I guess it's so expensive because there's not that many cats that prefer coffee.  If they'd hire more cats, maybe it wouldn't cost so much.
 
Well, if that wasn't bad enough, now a Chinese entrepreneur has ventured into my purview with a new product called "Panda Poo Tea".  When I first heard about it, I imagined Kung Fu Panda giving tea plants the civet cat experience before they're dried and packaged for sale.  Fortunately, that is as wrong as it is stomach-turning. 
 
Panda Poo Tea comes from tea plants grown in a compost bed of panda droppings.  Now, it takes a lot of tea plants to make a pound of tea.  That's a lot of acreage.  A lot of acreage would require a lot of panda scat.  Apparently, that's not a problem.  The average panda creates some 44 pounds of panda poo per day.  44 pounds.  A day.  Every day.  That's enough to make a LEET-speak geek exclaim, "0# $#17!," and rightly so.
 
He hopes to sell the first harvest of this new tea variety for 22,000 pounds per pound.  For us colonial revolutionaries, that would be a mere $44,000 per pound.  16 ounces.  $44,000.  Now that cat-excreted java seems like a bargain, doesn't it?
 
I'll stick with a nice Assam, or Lapsang Souchong, or a good English Breakfast.

Random Thoughts for a Friday

Here's just a few things that have been on my mind, but none of them warrant an entire post on their own.

I saw another car that fits into the same category that I wrote about here.

I followed an Angry Bird home.

Things have been a little weird in Oklahoma this year.  I was there to experience the 5.6 earthquake on Nov. 5.  Since then they've had aftershocks on the same day as tornadoes, flash flooding in places strangled by a drought, and earlier in the year they experienced new state records for snowfalls, hail stones, low temperatures, and wind!  You can read more about it here (unless you've lived it, then you may not want to).

Speaking of weird, Earl Grey tea.  Bergamot oil - 'nuff said.

I've thought about this a long time, but have never had a platform to express it until now.  Isn't it ironic that the bread manufacturers spend all that time and energy to get the bread to the grocery store so it's as fresh and soft and moist as possible, for us to bring it home and dry it out in the toaster.

A tea blog I follow, The Devotea, recently had an entry about Politically Correct tea.  It humbled me to be reminded that the (often) amber liquid I love (not Dr. Pepper, it's caramel colored) is picked and produced by people who most likely make less in a day than what I spend per ounce on some tea varieties.

Speaking of tea, if you're ever in middle Tennessee, and you like tea, be sure to stop in at Franklin Tea in downtown Franklin.  Jan is the owner, and she is the nicest person you'd want selling you tea leaves.  (Which reminds me, I still have a post in progress about a tea tasting My Sweetie and I attended.  It's taking awhile because I don't want it to be boring. No comments about that never stopping me before, thank you.)

I've mentioned that most of the time there's just two of us in the house now, right?  I called home to let Sweetie know I was on my from work, and a deep voice answered.  It caught me off-guard - did I dial the right number?  Who's home with My Sweetie?  Then I realized it was our son.  His university is close to a military base, so they don't have classes on Veteran's Day.  He surprised us by coming home.

Another blog I follow is Stuff Christians Like.  It's author, Jon Acuff, is a humor-filled guy who works in Dave Ramsey's office.  He's written a book called Quitters, that's next on my want list.  It's about quitting your job to do something you dream about.  The first step is Don't!  As in, don't quit your day job without preparation for the next step.

I've been slightly obsessed recently with a term that I'd heard before, but never really thought much of until Jon wrote about it -- the Jesus Juke.  If you've never heard of a Jesus Juke, it goes something like this.  One person will quip, "Don't you hate how expensive Starbucks is?"  and another will respond with something like, "Yeah, think how much good we could do all that money went towards overseas missions."  Usually it stops all conversation and leaves most parties feeling guilty - when the person doing the juking was probably either trying to be profound or funny, and no one is sure which it is.  Anyway, on Facebook I saw a status that said something like, "I sure miss my husband when he's traveling."  One of their (obviously single) friends said, "Be thankful you have a husband to miss."  Would that be a Spouse Juke?  A Secular Juke?

Why do we enslave ourselves to these creatures who seem most concerned that their food bowls are empty?

Cat wanting to be fed - at least she was until she ran off while I got the camera

Well, I better feed the cats instead of blogging about feeding the cats.  They'll love me more for it.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, we don't typically store our cereal in the middle of the kitchen floor.  Well, it is cereal, and it is on the kitchen floor, but it's there to keep the dog from opening the pantry and getting to the cats' food dishes.  He's trained like elephants, who don't escape when held by loose ropes.  We had something heavier there, and now he doesn't go in with something light blocking it.

Life Imitates Animation

I’ve hit a dry spell lately for blogging ideas. I guess that’s an indication of how uneventful life has been lately.

I’ve been enjoying reading the blogs I follow (I was going to include links, but I don’t want to leave anyone out, and that would mean a LOT of hyperlinks).

As I’ve been driving to and from work the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a trend in vehicle designs. Maybe it’s the new generation of automotive engineers, maybe they’re bored with the same ol’ – same ol’. Possibly, they’re trying to market to a younger generation, or even the nostalgia that Baby Boomers have for days gone by.

I posted this awhile back on Facebook.

Pikachu, I choose YOU!

Remember the Banana Splits?

Those Mazda 3s always remind me of the second character from the left.

 

And one more:

Looney Tunes?  I always liked Sam the Sheepdog.  Not enough that I'd want to drive a car that looks like him, though.

Isn't that odd, or is it just me?

Yeah, I think I know the answer to that question.

Thank-you-verra-much!

Today is the anniversary of Elvis' passing (alleged passing, that is).  This is one of those moments where "I remember I was ____ when ____."  I was traveling down I-35 in a two pickup caravan headed to Dallas, TX.  It was an FFA trip to Six Flags before my Freshman year started. 

The other vehicle called on the CB that they heard a news report that Elvis died.  We couldn't believe it.

I wasn't old enough to fully appreciate his contributions to music.  To me he was just an old singer that my sisters liked when they were growing up.  It wasn't until later that I came to understand how important he had been.

What better way to commemorate his death than with a pun.
I'll freely admit this isn't original - I'm lifting it from a friend's Wall on Facebook.

Six months after Elvis passed away, a fan, not believing Elvis was dead, broke into the grounds of Graceland and dug up the grave.  When he opened the casket, he found Elvis fastidiously erasing sheets of music.
He said, "Elvis, what are you doing?"
Elvis replied, "Decomposing."

Thank you! Thank-you-verra-much!

Are you old enough to remember what you were doing Aug. 16, 1977?

When the Chips Are Down

Our "baby" is going off to college in less than three weeks.  We threw a party for him and his friends that was a graduation/off-to-school soirée.  We told him to invite a "few friends".  We were thinking 30 max.  His invitation list through Facebook was 42.  That didn't include the spouses of some of the parents, either. 

Two years ago we did kind of the same thing for the first-born, but we sent out invitations with the graduation announcements, we had no control over the RSVPs, and it was billed as a come-and-go open house.  We planned for 75, and got a lot less. 

Plus, the first time around, we ordered all the food from a local Mexican restaurant, because 1) Mexican is cheap, 2) most everyone likes it, 3) we could lay it all out and people could assemble it in whatever combination they wanted (nachos, burritos, tacos, with or without beans, etc.), and 4) it was easy.

As I said, we planned for 75.  We ordered food for 75.  They delivered what seemed like enough for 150.  We fed everyone that day.  We sent some with a couple of friends.  We ate on it for a week.  We took the rest to a family gathering and fed 20 people two meals with it.  So, I'm not kidding when I said we had a lot of food.

So, you'd think we'd learned out lesson, right?  Originally, we ordered for 30 people.  Two days before, as we watched the Facebook replies surpass that mark, we decided to increase the order to 40.



Just a few chips

This is the left over chips.  in case you can't tell by the drawstring, that's a "tall kitchen bag" size trash bag that we're storing them in.  We also have a gallon-sized ice cream tub full of queso, and a 1 pound margarine tub of salsa to go with them.

Plus, with all the beef, chicken, beans, and rice, we haven't been lacking for meals this week.  We froze the remainder so we wouldn't have to throw it out.  I may trade in my normal caps for a sombrero before it's all gone.

If Looks Could Kill

The owner of this cat better be sleeping with one eye open...



I WILL kill you in your sleep.

 From the Random Cat Picture website.