Welcome to The Moose Pond! The Welcomings posts give the Moose, old and new, a place to visit and share words about the weather, life, the world at large and the small parts of Moosylvania that we each inhabit.
Welcomings will be posted at the start of each week (every Sunday morning). To find the posts, just bookmark this link and Voila! (which is Moose for “I found everyone!!”).
The format is simple: each day, the first moose to arrive on-line will post a comment welcoming the new day and complaining (or bragging!) about their weather. Or mentioning an interesting or thought provoking news item. Or simply checking in.
So … what’s going on in your part of Moosylvania?
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NOTE: The comments page will now split off after 20 or so left margin comments with the most recent comments on the current page. To see the older comments, scroll to the bottom of the page and use the link.
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What can one say? I mean really, what is there left to say? That we have rights too—the right not to be murdered as we go about our daily round?
Good morning, Meese! Up too early again. It’s dark and still raining. We’re supposed to get a lot of rain today, tapering off tomorrow, and then more Sunday and Monday from Joaquin. Or such was the word when we went to bed last night.
Feeling very discouraged about the latest shooting and also about the awfulness of downsizing. Had I known that it was going to be so exhausting and expensive I would never have undertaken it. Wish I’d never started it, actually. The only thing that keeps me going is the idea that when Dearly and I go to that great tea room in the sky, Elder Son won’t have to take a couple of months off work to go through all our stuff.
Hope everyone will have as good a day as possible.
I would respectfully request that you delay for quite a while your toddling off to the great tea room in the sky. :)
You are a good parent for not wishing the sorting-through onto your children. I have seen people having to do it and it is enormously time consuming and can lead to a lot of conflict. It is never easy to sort and divide up the belongings and regardless of how well people think they get along with their siblings, there will be disagreements. Better for you and Dearly to do it now. Nothing to fight over means fewer fights!
Watch out for flooding! weatherdude was worrying that people would see that Joaquin is heading out to see and miss that there could be a foot of rain from this storm: More Than a Foot of Rain Is Possible on the East Coast With or Without Hurricane Joaquin:
Stay safe!!
Diana I hope your new apartment will have a tea room so you can rest and recover there as well!
Good morning, meese! Friday …
It is 45 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 62. Mostly sunny skies in the forecast.
I got distracted and Diana beat me to the check-in!! I did post this:
The president was angry … we should all be angry! I remember when sending my child off to school felt safe. But instead, after Newtown, our “NEVER AGAIN!” moment, there have been another 296 mass shootings. We suck, really.
In other news, all Oklahoma executions have been put on hold because the drugs aren’t the right ones. Good. I hope they can never get the “right” ones again.
The incoming House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, speaking honestly about the Trey Gowdy Benghazi panel, has unleashed a firestorm over his admission that it was politically motivated. Nancy Pelosi is considering withdrawing the Democratic members from the panel. She should. We should not be providing easy cover for the GOP’s politicization of the embassy killings.
See all y’alls later!
Good morning, Meese. This is a fast wave of a hello along with good wishes for downsizing, computers, implants, painful backs and dear little Finn and everything else..
Have a dreadful head cold, not sure about what the hurricane will do. And am sick about the shooting in Oregon and the whole barbaric death penalty. And then there is Syria. If I didn’t have so much to do. I would crawl back to bed.
Hope the world is a better place when next we all meet.
I have been avoiding looking at Syria news. A scan of the headlines was even too much: Russia has been given carte blanche to do what they want there and The Donald said that Syrian refugees better not come here because when he is president, he will send them all back.
I hope your cold clears up, Portlaw! There is nothing worse than having a lot to do and not feeling well.
((((((Portlaw))))))
So sorry you are feeling so under the weather.
Hope you feel better soon!
Thanks to you and Jan for your best wishes.. I keep telling myself that I am keeping the Kleenex industry alive all by myself.
Hope you feel better soon, Portlaw! Have you tried getting a cup of hot water, adding 1 tablesp. each of lemon juice, whisky, and honey to it, drinking it, and then falling into bed?
Don’t have lemon but have everything else. May try it! Thanks!
Try 500mg vitamin C every 2 waking hours for at least a day. And garlic soup (fist, yes I said fist, of garlic simmered gently in a quart of chicken broth) about a cup every couple of hours.
Have been stuffing myself with Vit C and hoping it will work. Don’t have the fixings for garlic soup on hand but tomorrow is another day. Thanks. As you know, colds aren’t serious. They are just miserable!
Slept in — and really slept. Well, fitfully, but I feel rested. Looking forward to the movie.
Have the news on, on mute because I can’t take hearing more about the shooting. And ACL fest starts today — just saw a headline about increased security. I want to move to a sane country.
Oooh – it’s going to be cool in the morning — 59 when my workout group meets. Wow, I might wear long sleeves.
Happy First Friday of October – although good luck finding something to be happy about (other than having this quiet respite to duck into, I’m very happy and thankful about that) considering what’s going on, from the latest shootings, Syria, politics, computer crud, down-sizing, puppy trauma, and/or head colds. Well, actually my back is better and I’m quite happy about that :) It’s still in the mid-40s heading for the upper 60s in Fay., AR and mostly sunny. I am seriously thinking about starting the first fire of the fall season tonight. The house was almost chilly enough for the furnace to come on this morning. The furnace is set at 60.
I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to get cleared off my desk today as I’m expecting to be more-or-less slammed next week. Since one of our instructors quit as of the end of this semester, we’re having to do a grand-swaparound of classes for Spring. The deadline for finalizing Spring classes was August 17th so the Powers That Be are not going to be happy. And my deadline for getting Spring textbook requests to the bookstores is next Friday, so we’ve got to finish the grand-swaparound by Wednesday at the latest. So basically I need to grab some more java and get to work – but I’ll check back as I can. {{{HUGS}}}
Morning all. I’m listening to the clip of the President’s remarks as I type, and I am just in despair about this country. It sometimes seems 70% of us are held hostage to the insane bigotry, paranoia and violence of the other 30%, and I can’t see how it will end. I’ll tell you, one of the great things about retirement so far is that I just get to stay in my home, which I love, as much as I want without venturing out into the insanity that is Florida, in particular, and the US in general. I have a Canadian friend who says he just never wants to come south of the border again, he could not feel safe down here, and I can’t say much in argument against that view.
Denise, so far the implant feels fine – I have to wait 4 months to get the permanent cap or whatever it is, I guess to allow time for bone to grow around the implant base. Diana, I can well imagine how overwhelming the downsizing is – my mother spent 2 years clearing out her house and basement in Nashville after my father died, so that she could sell the house and move down here near me. And I still have a lot of her stuff in boxes in the garage from when she moved up to Indiana to assisted living near my brother. You will feel so much better when its done, though.
Have a good and safe day, everyone.
Geordie, my MIL decided she would just enjoy living with all her belongings and firmly told the family I would be responsible for taking care of everything when she passed. So now we have two large storage lockers of appraised antiques and several rooms in her house full of less expensive items to dispose of. I’m working on a plan to move everything to Bellingham where two antique dealers I know and trust can help me have an auction. She was an enthusiastic collector so it’s an overwhelming amount of collectibles.
I’m working with the family to make sure they understand the process and have the opportunity to select the items that are meaningful to them. Makes me weary to even think about all I’ve yet to do.
Believe me, princesspat, you have my sympathy!
oh man, I cannot imagine having to deal with that much stuff. My parents didn’t really have anything valuable like antiques, although my mom did leave me with a trunk that looks latter half ot the 19th century vintage. She mostly spent a lot of time getting rid of my dad’s accumulated junk in his basement/garage/workshop – they were beekeepers in retirement, and she had to dispose of a lot of that stuff. Plus many, many coffee cans filled with rusting nails and bolts and such. She tried to give those to my cousin’s husband, who gently told her no, he’d prefer to get that stuff rust free from Sears, thanks all the same lol. That Depression era generation just could not bear to throw out anything that might be useful – I’m not sure what my excuse is, but I have some of the same problem, which I need to overcome to get my own house in order!
That was my grandmother! Think because of that my mother kept throwing stuff out!
You have my sympathy but truth to tell I have no clue as to what that would be like. Everything my mother owned – everything I own – could have been packed in the back of a station wagon and leave room for passengers, barring the furniture (bed, kitchen table, side table, and four chairs). Good luck.
The other reason to wait for the implant to settle in is that there is a very slight chance of rejection. They want to make sure that is not going to happen before they put an expensive crown on it. The whole process from start to finish (extraction to crown) was about 9 months for me.
This!
I saw a Tweet that echoed that same thing last night. The problem is that the right-wing has demonized the Democratic Party so much that people vote reflexively for Republicans even when the people they elect will vote against the things the, the voters, believe in. It is distressing that out of the 70%, only about 50% are paying attention so we have terrible laws like Stand Your Ground in Florida and NRA sponsored laws all over the country. It is sickening and, like you, I don’t see how it gets better. I hope that my daughter’s generation can fix it because mine has not had any success.
Good morning, 53 and cloudy in Bellingham today. It will be a beautiful day in my garden, but the reality of our gun crazy country intrudes even there. I had to turn off the news and turn on the music yesterday but there is really no escaping the feelings of sorrow, anger and frustration we all share.
However in my small world all is well…..Finn is healing and his family is recovering from the trauma, our son went hiking yesterday and sounded very happy last night, I finally found a solution for my carpet dilemma, the insulation bid is lower than I expected. and I have another car load of fabric, trim and patterns to donate to Ragfinery today……progress!
Good morning, meese! Very early Saturday …
It is 47 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 59. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast.
These are the sorts of things that make fixing gun violence impossible in our divided nation where half the populace has been ginned up with hatred over The Other:
Gak!
Sea-level rise deniers will have a rude awakening when the sea goes right up their noses:
South Carolina legislated that Sea Levels Shall Not Rise a few years ago. They are expected to get a foot, as in 12 inches, of rain.
The president held a press conference yesterday and one of the things he said was that he won’t sign any more short term spending bills. He had already said he would not sign any more budgets that kept sequester cuts. Good. That blemish on his skills at negotiation (caused assuming that the people he was dealing with were sane and would not self-immolate) needs to be rectified so that the next Democratic president does not have to deal with it. He has 15 months in office and a few things to clean up – that is one of them.
It is beginning to look like Marco Rubio is the consensus establishment pick for GOP nominee (“stuff happens“!). The only question left is whether “establishment” gets the nod in 2016 or if the nihilistic wing of the party can achieve mass. My money is still on “establishment” because I think when push comes to shove, old money finds a way to come out ahead. It will be easier in some ways to beat the establishment Republican because they are the enemy we know. I was reading an article yesterday about a group called MARs (Middle American Radicals) pretty much the Trump base (from the old George Wallace/Pat Buchanan/Ross Perot voters). The suggestion was that this group is about 20% of Americans and about 30-35% of Republican voters. The 30-35% lines up with Trump support and the 20% is the percentage of Americans that I have always suspected is completely untouched by rational thought. Even though the numbers suggest that there is no winning path for a candidate that appeals to them, they are volatile and I worry that a crisis of some sort could swell their numbers. While I don’t like establishment Republicans, they are a known entity. The MARs voters are scary.
Ha! This turned into a blog post!! Maybe I should consider moving my news musings to a separate post. Except I am too lazy!
Today is another travel day for youth sports so the President’s Weekly Address will be posted later today or tomorrow morning. I suspect it will be about the budget.
See all y’alls later!!
up for ungodly hour workout – someone remind me next August not to sign up for this again
Can the news get any worse? And what exactly is our involvement?
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/article/afghanistan-msf-staff-killed-hospital-partially-destroyed-kunduz
Horrible. They are the organization I admire the most in today’s world. :(
There is this
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kunduz-doctors-without-borders_560fc571e4b0768127023cde
Collateral damage????????????????? Where have I heard that before????
omg, what possible excuse can there be for a US airstrike hitting that hospital?
http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/10/03/afghanistan-hospital-bombing-kunduz-idINKCN0RX04A20151003
They have pin point targetting, I thought, how could our forces have done this? It’s totally outrageous, and I feel sick – I agree Denise, Doctors Without Borders is such a wonderful organization, and this is truly an outrage.
It’s cloudy and actually cool here – first time since probably March that it’s cooler outside than inside the house. And with all this awfulness happening, I feel like pulling into my shell and just not looking at the news. gah.
“pin point targeting”
This is the lie we choose to believe so that we can live with what is done in our name around the world. Then, when things go wrong, we (the collective we) can call it a “mistake” when really, it is because we (the global we) have accepted violence as a rational response to the violence of others.
There are no “good” wars, they all suck. But there are times when military intervention is good for a region or a people. In a perfect world, we would talk about our differences, come up with a sensible solution that both (all) sides agree to, and the conflict would be resolved. In the world we have, there are terrorist organizations (and individuals), rogue nations, and a few superpowers. We can talk and/or apply economic sanctions, like we did with Iran, when there is a country or identifiable leaders. When there is no one to talk to or the demands (“we want all of you dead”) are not really negotiable, we are stuck.
We have two alternatives in that case:
– walk away and let a region fall into (further) chaos harming innocent people and those who are trying to help them (like Doctors Without Borders)
– fight against the terrorists, where it is possible, choosing the least damaging military response and deal with the consequences of unleashing weapons that we really can’t control.
There is no third alternative: mankind sucks, conflict is inevitable.
What we as progressives can do is elect people who are wise enough to recognize when we can walk away and, when we can’t, the least damaging military response.
Exactly. And that is how I always choose.
Good morning, 49 and light clouds in Bellingham. Our grand girl has an afternoon soccer game today so we’ll be there. I pass on the early morning games, especially when it’s also raining.
Autumn’s bounty of color, food arrives
Ah, to be a grandparent and have the luxury of a choice between sitting in the rain or staying home in your warm, dry house! :)
The fall colors are starting to show here; I have not seen a map yet of the “foliage line” but I am sure that Up Nort’ they are already well along. Every year is different, the colors are a response to how damp/dry hot/cold the spring and summer have been. And of course fall winds and rain control how long we see the leaves “in place”. My daughter was noting on our walk last night how there are a lot of leaves on the ground already. It is the current cycle! On to winter …
Good afternoon on a gray, cold, drizzly October Saturday! Last evening we had to have a fire in the woodstove, as we will today and tomorrow. This morning we took Miss Pink Cheeks out for breakfast at the Virginia Kitchen, which we hadn’t done for a couple of months. During the meal she informed us that the dastardly kindergarteners had eaten all the ice cream in the school cafeteria yesterday, leaving none at all for the first graders. Those kindergarteners!
The downsizing lady was so good and so helpful. She worked for six hours, helping us sort, pack, and dispose of items. She took away a large number of items in her car for donation to Goodwill and so forth. It was an exhausting day, as today has been so far. We went to Lowe’s and Home Depot to buy new ceiling lights for the bedrooms (apparently ours are declasse) and new lights for the upstairs bathrooms. I’m in a really bad mood and that’s without even looking at the news!
Sick about the bombing of the MSF hospital. I donate money to them every month and only wish I could win the lottery so I could donate even more. I’m off for a nap before I polish the silver and wash innumerable tablecloths that will be given to daughter-in-law, who will hostess Thanksgiving from now on. Younger Son will be hosting Christmas, so he’ll get the Christmas tablecloths. Hope everyone will have a good Saturday and that Portlaw’s cold is better!