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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Yesterday I had to wear shoes & a sweater, today back to sandals. Though by the end of the week, it’ll definitely be shoes. And sweaters. I’m already thinking of layers for Saturday morning, it’ll be 49 when my group meets for workout.
Got People Have the Power in my head this morning. And yesterday, someone quoted Seamus Heaney’s translation of The Cure at Troy. Hoping that good things will happen.
ok, the link made the text after it the text for the link….. I don’t know how I did that….damn insomnia. The link is supposed to say Cure at Troy. Which has a similar message as Ms Smith’s song. Ok, I’m gonna have more caffeine
37 at dawn, 50 now, and heading for 70 this sunny Tuesday in Fay., AR. Got a meeting in 45 minutes and gotta get a bunch of stuff done before I go. Will check back later. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 35 and partly cloudy in Bellingham this morning. The house is toasty warm because I turned up the furnace so the carpets will dry faster. I hope we can put the rooms back together today, and I hope I can remember where everything went…seems like a lot of china and glassware when it’s all moved about!
Morning all (just barely) – been straightening up for the cleaners, etc this morning. I am really at the point of not being able to bear reading or watching the news – that attack in the Applebys’ on a woman just because she was speaking a foreign language may be the last straw today. And you cannot tell me those despicable people would have attacked a white woman speaking French. I agree, the tide of hatred encouraged by Fox News and the Republican party since President Obama was elected has brought out the “freak flag” in racists and xenophobes – it’s hard to take, after our optimism in 2008.
Everyone try to have a good day despite the news – I will disappear into my game, I guess, my number one escape from bad court decisions and crazy racists attacking people.
President Obama spoke to the OFA last night and he is in this for the long haul. He is already making plans for after he “retires” and is ginning up grassroots excitement:
Good morning, meese! Wednesday …
It is 41 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 59. Wind advisory this morning with winds around 30 mph gusting to 45 mph. It is part of a front bringing in a few days of rain beginning with light showers this afternoon.
I watched Twitter for a while during the undercard GOP debate but shut it down for the “main” debate. Really, there is no difference. Obama and Clinton are evil, all regulation is bad, cut taxes on the wealthy and the magic unicorn will grow the economy, bomb more things. Scanning the headlines, the biggest takeaway was that it was boring. The Fox moderators seemed scared that they would upset the RNC and lose broadcast rights to future debates. Sad for them is that debates without fact checking and tough questions (“Do you hate Hillary Clinton or despise her??”) are not entertaining and people will tune out. Good. It really serves no purpose at this point. Make the candidates spend down their SuperPACs so that that money does not reenter the political arena when they drop out.
In other news, Hillary Clinton unveiled her plan to fix the VA healthcare system rather than privatize it as the Republicans want to do:
To honor veterans on Veterans Day, respect the wishes of 2/3rds of veterans: don’t mess with their government healthcare.
See all y’alls later!!
47 here in Saugerties and it’s raining. Hubby is home from work today because of Veteran’s Day. I’m headed to find out what the pundits have to say about the clown car debate last night – i didn’t watch.
I would never watch and I avoid all videos that show the GOP presidential field. Their words on the screen are bad enough … hearing them would give me nightmares!
Off topic: I wandered over to DK this morning to see what everyone was complaining about with the new format. I opened the BKos diary and it took a really long time to load. Yikes! I can’t imagine running that on a slow-speed connection!! The commenting system is interesting. They are struggling with what I found moving from the Old Moose to the New Moose: the new platform just doesn’t do simple commenting unless you tune out some of the noise. For example, here we could have included avatars and I chose not to nor did I add the “things that pop up a big box when you move your mouse over them”. It is distracting. Yes, “just” words might be boring but words are why I am here! I hope they address some of the concerns so that people with vision problems can comment again.
Speaking of which, are we okay with the fonts and backgrounds here? When we first set this site up, we were using the free Magazine theme and didn’t have a lot of font options. We can do more now. I will open it up to suggestions if people think that readability is an issue. There are enough of us old-eyed folks here that we can do whatever we want to the font size and color and tell the youngins to “get off our lawn!” if they complain. :)
Sizes …
x-Small Small Medium Large x-Large
I’m not sure – have to look at page when I don’t have it zoomed – which is what I do almost automatically everywhere. x-small is not readable even zoomed (I love the Medium one – but have eye problems)
I might fool around with it after everyone checks in (so that they don’t get jostled too much!).
Thanks Jan. I can read the Moose just fine. I’ve found I have to set the zoom higher depending on the computer I’m using…..110 for the Lenovo, 125 for the Samsung, 100 for the Dell. And I have to adjust screen brightness individually as well. But those are my individual preferences and needs so I certainly don’t expect a website design to meet them.
Dkos will have to address the readability issues though. The over all hue and cry can be chocked up to “no change is acceptable” but when Dee has difficulty reading Kos had best pay attention!
Ha!!
I think that what will happen is that people may not be able to sit and tend diaries for as long as they used to which would be sad because that is a big part of many diaries … the conversation. I came across a heartfelt plea from our friend Yas asking for some improvements in the way commenting works. I was surprised at how long the new formatted posts took to load (molasses!) and that all the comments have to be loaded in order to read a single one that you might have been interested in replying to. Can you imagine looking at a link to a comment in a diary that has 1,000 comments? Ha!! Maybe that was to discourage linking to Certain Comments … doing that got us and our peeps in trouble more than once, didn’t it? ;)
I hope they figure out something for those who simply can’t read the site. I know they made adjustments when they went from DK3 to DK4 – Nurse Kelley set up Cranky Users to help direct those efforts; I hope some advocates emerge to help with this transition.
One of the news aggregation emails I review focuses on journalism, news web sites, and social media. There was an article not too long ago talking about local news sites who are in a Catch-22: they need ads for revenue but the ads are driving people away because it slows the site down. The analytics showed that people literally click away rather than waiting for a page to load and go looking elsewhere for news. So the local sites then add more ads to make up for the loss in revenue (and more intrusive ads) and lose more readers. At the new DK5, the goal of getting more readers and newer readers will not bear fruit if the site loads too slowly or is cacophonous (my major complaint about sites).
I like this font much better than the GOS one. And the size is fine — maybe because the font is more legible.
DK5 is going to take some getting used to – and I do hope they do some updates to deal with the visual stuff. The white background here is muted (I guess that’s the way to describe it) rather than glaring. It’s the glaring that’s the problem over there. The Moose font either is or is close enough to Times New Roman to be very readable, unlike that san-serif font DK5 is using. Medium or Large either one is better for me, but I don’t need X-Large. Over there I’ve found that if I bold my entire comment, it’s more readable to me but that only works for my comment. The intensity of the print/font here could stand to be a little darker for me, but this works fine.
And I totally appreciate that you considered readability when setting up the Moose Pond!
All screens here went through the Dee Readability Test. :) The default was a sans serif on glaring white and that hit the cutting room floor pretty quickly.
The font darkness is something I tried to address at one time and set aside. If you notice, when you are composing it is much lighter … it is possible that is it purple (our heading font color), not black! It gets black when we post but not as dark as I would like. Now that the theme is locked in, I can go into the code to customize the comments and fonts. Maybe after the end of the year when things slow down.
That’s what the folks at GOS should have done! I can live with the font darkness if you can’t get to it /can’t do anything about it. That’s just one of those “it would be nice” things.
Jan and Denise—you were better off not watching. It was awful. We went to bed before it was over.
Weather News from weatherdude: A Blizzard and Tornadoes Are Possible Tomorrow Thanks to a Big, Classic November Storm
Graphs and projections at the link.
Good morning, Moosekind! Gorgeous, sunny morning after yesterday’s day-long rain. Here in NoVa it’s 51 F., going up to 63 F. today.
The debate last night was boring and so filled with lies my ears are still hurting. As Al Franken would put it, nothing but “lies and the lying liars who told them.” Ugh. They all seemed completely irrational except for a moment by Jebby, who pointed out the utter chaos that would ensue from deporting 11 million people all at once. Rubio seemed to have memorized his answers in advance, and Kasich kept interrupting everyone to describe his own achievements so we’d all know what a superguv he is. All told, the “debate” produced enough “ughs” to keep a million feet warm throughout the winter.
My niece and great-nephew are coming for coffee hour this morning, after which Dearly and I must hurry out to buy an over-the-range microwave that has a timer. Younger son gave us the microwave he bought but never used and it looked better than our old one, so we had it installed. It doesn’t have a kitchen timer on it, though, and I rely heavily on that feature. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond and Beyond!
I am appalled after reading some pun-idiot-ry which seems to think Rubio “won the day”.
Sigh.
There was some talk that the corporate media set up the debate questions to highlight Rubio. Now that they can’t get voters to buy the Jeb! product they have been pushing, they are frantic to find another establishment Republican to pour their hopes and dreams into. Rubio would be perfect for them: without principle, definitely for sale … the empty head like George W. Bush that they can lead by the nose. I think they hoped that Walker would be that guy but his head turned out to be too empty.
It is interesting because a Rubio v Cruz “I am severely conservative” battle is starting to develop. The movement conservatives are determined to move to the right, convinced that Romney lost because he was too moderate. If Cruz can paint Rubio as Romney with fewer letters, he will win a lot of primaries with that base going to the polls. But the more they cater to that base the less likely they will be to win a general election contest with a Democratic candidate.
Slept in, more or less. It is really warm today — gonna get in a walk (no, really) and wear shorts & definitely carry water — our high will be in the mid 80s. But by Friday I’ll be wearing sweaters. Anyway, the plan for today is to get in some exercise & clear out my dvr. My head is still playing People Have the Power to me. Looking forward to listening to my mix on my walk. Guess that means walking on the trail since I never do music walking on the street.
Mid-60s in Fay., AR at sunrise and will be all day long. It’s cloudy and we’ve got about a 25% chance of rain after lunch but otherwise just clouds, darn it. The temps will start dropping after dark. I don’t see anything like a winter storm coming in until Sunday afternoon on the current forecast.
Things never do stop being crazy, but they’re going back to crazier as we have 3 search candidates coming in this month, I’m trying to get the Cat Leave Donations from the faculty, and – while we are doing priority registration for Spring 2016 – the call has gone out for the rest of 2016 classes. And I have so many emails for stuff I can’t do yet that I can’t find the stuff I can do. sigh.
Hope everyone has a lovely day, not matter what the weather is like in your part of the Moose Pond. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 43 and clear in Bellingham. We enjoyed a family birthday dinner at a local steak house last night…..a very fun evening! My “kids” are all well into their forties now. Hard to believe, but I’m very grateful we have shared so many birthdays together.
We’ve got the furniture back in place and after the china cabinet is anchored to the wall I can start putting the china and glassware away. I’ve been washing, polishing and sorting so I’ve got a plan but I’m a sentimental collector so editing is a challenge. I worked for a very astute antique dealer off and on for years and the china cabinet was her thank you when I helped her close her business. She knew how to display layers of collectibles and I seem to learned that lesson well!
I’ve read all the serious post debate analysis I can tolerate this morning. Martin Longman’s summary brings a sad chuckle…..
An Archie Bunker Debate
He ends with, “In this context, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about who won. Nobody won.
Our nation is a joke.”
I don’t agree re our nation being a joke. But what happens to all of us if one of the Archie Bunker candidates is actually successful……scary thought!
Morning all! Finally a cool morning down here – by which I mean in the low 70’s outside – perhaps fall is finally here.
I like the look of this site and the font seems fine, although I’d not want it any smaller. It’s very readable. I don’t know if my discomfort looking at GOS is from unfamiliarity or if it’s really going to stay harder for me to read, but the business of the site really puts me off. I haven’t even attempted a comment yet.
I refuse to watch the Republicans myself, and I can barely stand to read about it. Glad to read everyone’s analysis here – clown show is the only apt term, it appears.
Have a great day everyone!
Good morning, meese! Thursday …
It is 40 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 48. Morning rain and more winds. Last night we had a couple lines of storms come through, some fierce. I hate when the wind is so high you can hear the house groan like it is going to break up.
Trump wants to bring back “Operation Wetback”! Offensive as a name and another truly awful part of our history:
Now try to do that for 11 million people. I hope that the images from that era make it into campaign ads next year.
See all y’all later!!
They were talking about that on MSNBC last night — all that Trump would say is it would be done “humanely”, over & over. No details about how. And how do you “humanely” separate parents from children — and who is going to take in those children, the already overburdened foster system? Or does he want to deport American citizens who are minors? Trump makes me sick.
That is the thing that is so ghastly about the anti-Latino federal judge (and George W. Bush appointee) Andrew Hanen in Texas who stopped the president’s executive order on DAPA: the people that President Obama wants to shield from deportation are the parents of American citizens, children born in the United States. When you deport those parents you either split up families or you “deport” American citizens.
Had that kind of wind here last night. Agree with you on it – definitely didn’t help my sleep. And Trump would be an evil joke if he wasn’t getting so many virtual votes.
Good morning. I am trying to negotiate the moose on my mobile. This is not easy for me. One thing I have noticed is that the edit button is too close to the fierce. With my fumble fingers I wind up hitting edit more often than not.
Thankfully this will not be much of a problem. I hope to have my pc back soon, fingers crossed.
The “Edit … More Options” is part of the plugin we added to allow for a few minutes to edit a comment that we posted. I am pretty sure that I can’t move its location (it would actually be nice to have it disappear after the time has expired!) but I will check it.
Unfortunately, it is not easy to work with any website on mobile for anything other than reading. I find myself flipping my phone from portrait to landscape to scroll because portrait squishes the threaded comments so that sometimes they are just one letter per line. Very unuseful! The WordPress mobile, though, is definitely better than the old moose. I could never get a comment box to display properly to paste something … the paste made the screen redisplay and I lost many brilliant comments … some of which would surely have changed the world!!
Did your PC blow up?
Never mind! I see from a comment in the Mizzou post that your Internet is out. Bummer! I hope it comes back soon.
Internet is still out. Growl! I’m headed off to school. Hopefully will have access when I get home.
Good morning, Moosekind! It’s 46 F. on a cloudy Thor’s Day in NoVa, going up to 65 F. with possible rain today.
Denise, sorry to hear your Internet is out. What a bummer! Is there hope of getting it restored? Jan, I am sickened by Trump’s plan to deport 11 million people. Let’s see, would there be any hints in How to be a Nazi regarding the best way to accomplish this? Would Trump order lots of cattle cars and force the deportees to stand up in them all day and night, with no food or water or blankets or latrines?
He’s crazier than a goddam loon. As for Marco “Waterbaby” Rubio, it seems as if he’s going to be the default frontrunner for now (well, that’s according to this morning’s WaPo headline). He is dodging questions on immigration.
Never have I seen more blatant examples of “It’s Okay If You’re A Republican.” Grain stored in pyramids? Of course. China involved in Syria? Check. According to “Good Morning Merrycar,” Carson’s foreign policy adviser is a professor at Liberty University (!) who believes the USA should use military forces to spread Christianity here at home and abroad. Moosekind, say hello to World War III if this idea takes hold.
Yikes, too depressing, and I have a depressing morning ahead anyway. Have to have a couple of telephone conversations that are going to result in disappointment for certain people. At least I’ll have Daisies to look forward to after school today. Miss Pink Cheeks and I are presenting a session about the life cycle of butterflies and we’ll also create butterflies out of clothespins, googly eyes, and coffee filters.
It’s to be hoped today will be a good day for all at the Pond—can’t speak for Beyond.
Yes, LiberTEA University is like the Harvard of the right-wing mouthbreathers.
I careen wildly between “We are doomed!” and “It will all work out!” on a daily basis. I think a lot has to do with whether that day I think that the American people will recoil in horror from what is being proposed … I certainly do!
So yesterday, it got up to the mid 80s, this morning leaving the house, I kinda regretted wearing sandals. And tomorrow, it’s supposed to be in the 40s at this time of day. I didn’t get my walk in (try not to die of shock) but I did take the trash out, and the recycling. The only dumpster in my complex is way around the back of the complex, so that was at least some exercise. And the recycling.
My browser is doing some odd things. Might be in for a fun day.
Just as i’m getting ready to leave I hear on the TV local news (TV works-Internet still out) that SUNY New Paltz students are staging a walk-out today, to protest tuition hikes.
Glad to see them protesting
Some right-wing pundit yesterday said, in response to the Mizzou protests, that the voting age should be raised to 25 because clearly college students today are not mature enough to vote. They look plenty mature to me! The kids have the energy to protest what the rest of us would if we could find our teeth and walkers!!
LOL, Jan!
So I was seeing this hashtag in my twitter timeline: #WakingTheFeminists Looks like it’s at least starting as a theater thing:
Eleanor Tiernan @eleanortiernan 1h1 hour ago
This morning Irish women, having no other option, are taking over our national theatre. We may not give it back. #WakingTheFeminists
but I’d be surprised if it ends there. And it ain’t gonna stay in Ireland, either: https://twitter.com/oonaghmurphy/status/664763951742386176
that’s Meryl Streep, Christine Baransky, and I feel like I should know who the woman in front is…. anyway, very interesting.
38 at sunrise, 45 now, and heading for 60 this sunny day in Fay., AR. I woke up thinking it was Saturday so it was a real jolt to remember it’s Thursday. sigh.
The Chair wants me to take another shot at getting Cat Leave donations since I only got 6 including myself and the secretary. My work email is down so that will have to wait until it’s up again. Got a bunch of travel stuff I need to deal with – not only do we have a search candidate here today and two more coming by the end of the month, but the entire Criminal Justice side of the department is going to DC next week for a conference. And of course not all of them have given me their travel information – and of course the previous Chair has changed his twice since he first gave it to me. sigh.
Will read & fierce (over at the new GOS the rec is a star so I guess we’ll have to start doing “r,s,c” instead of “r,r,c” when we want to say “read, rec’d, commented”) and then get to work. Have a lovely day. {{{HUGS}}}
Do they still have a way to “Hide” a comment? What is the symbol for that? I am imagining something like this:
Ha! Aviator mischief could be interesting :)
Nope. No troll, hide rate, or anything like that. You can collapse the comment and all those following it, but I think that’s the extent of it. There is a “flag” you can click but I have no idea whether or not that’s a negative indicator. If it is a negative indicator it would be nice if it looked like that. :)
Ah, it very likely means “Flag for moderation”. Lots of sites have that feature and it simply means that someone in a position of power should look at the comment to deterimine if it should be removed. Did they ever add the “Ignore” option that they used to promise would some day be part of the mix? I thought a lot of fights could be avoided if one could automatically hide from one’s eyes all posts and comments by certain people. On Facebook one can do that … it is called Blocking.
That sounds logical. No “ignore” that I know of. (Except Kosmail seems to have one.) If I were silly enough to read the anti-Hillary diaries and comments I’d definitely want an ignore!
Jan, there are certain persons whose badly spelled, sloppy “diaries” always make the Rec list. I never go into those diaries even for a look, nor do I read the diaries of the pompous ones who think they’re deity (with no good reason from what I’ve observed). I wish we COULD block those.
On Twitter, I have a feature called “zip” which zips up people who I don’t want in my Tweetstream. I can choose permanently, one month, one week, one day, and one hour. That helps me keep my stream “tidy” during breaking news, for example, and also lets me temporarily block someone who is on a weird rant about something (or is retweeting someone obnoxious and I can hope it is only temporary). The missing Tweets show as a zipper with a number next to it so I know that something is there and I can always unzip if I want to see it. That would be a great feature for those who follow a big blog that has no real posting standards!
Good morning, 45 and partly cloudy in Bellingham. Well, emptying the rooms was a faster process than putting them back together is…….another day of cleaning and shuffling stuff is ahead. I’m a sentimental collector so every item I touch brings a memory of my mom, grandmother, great grandmother, my mil, old friends, family gifts…..and that means I stop to think and remember. It is nice to have everything clean again but I’m wishing for a magic wand!
How I sympathize, princesspat! I’m the same way. :)