Straight From The Hart

One of the greatest mysteries of life to me is how there can be so many different tastes in music.  Leaving secular music out entirely, and just concentrating on religious/sacred/gospel music, I am constantly amazed at the difference in preferences . Our youth director at church and I go "round and round" about this all the time, in a friendly teasing way. I can appreciate that the difference can be accounted for probably 50% generationally, maybe 40% by what we listened to in our growing up years, which are highly influenced by the music we listen to, and that leaves 10% to be put in the category of just "taste" or "preference". I understand all this, I can even wrap my mind around it, but just for listening pleasure, for the life of me I can't imagine anyone taking pleasure from anything except what we call southern gospel.  The instrumentation, the lyrics, the harmony - it just doesn't get any better than southern gospel. I find contempor...

Straight From The Hart By Joan Rowden Hart A Short Life Well Lived Life started out hard for Mr. Grayson.  Born in the fall of 2006 to a feral momma cat who had hung around our yard for several years, he was the the only one of her many litters ever to survive the dangers of kitten-hood and become an adult cat.  She was killed on the street after he was  weaned that year. But Mr. Grayson was a survivor, and he continued to roam around the outskirts of our yard on the corner, scrapping for every morsel of food he could find. Milan would see him run to hide every time he went out to get the mail because the timid skinny cat  was afraid of everything and everybody. We can only imagine how many rocks or sticks had been thrown at him to chase him away from other houses.  He was mauled by the larger feral tomcats in the neighborhood, but he always survived to forage another day. Milan has a soft heart for any living creature  who is wounded a...

Building The Transcontinental Railroad The year was 1874. The Panic of 1873 had begun in September of the previous year. The nation’s first transcontinental railroad had been completed in 1869, and 35,000 miles of new track had been laid across the country. Banks and other industries were putting their money into railroads, and the banking firm of Jay Cooke & Co had overextended itself and declared bankruptcy. Other financial institutions followed suit, and within a few months 89 of the country’s 364 railroads had gone bankrupt. President Ulysses S. Grant was in his second term. And Jacob Blickensderfer, a civil engineer and railroad surveyor, had been assigned by the President to examine and re-measure the streets around the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Jacob had come to Washington in March and had spent three weeks taking calculations on different streets in the city and had also uncovered major overpayments to the contractors which he needed to include in his report to Presi...