Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Jan. 17th through Jan. 23rd

January 17, 2016 JanF Community 134

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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29 Comments

  1. Good morning, meese! Friday …

    It is 21 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 26. Mostly cloudy skies are in the forecast.

    I have a few things to get done this morning before I can even read the news.

    See all y’alls later!

  2. Getting ready for school – so don’t have time to chat – have a good – safe day everyone

  3. Good morning! It’s still dark. Dearly Beloved has taken the dog out, retrieved the newspaper, and is making the tea. We’re waiting for The Big One to begin at 1 or 2 p.m. today. Most likely it will begin at noon. They never get it right.

    Have avoided reading the news just yet, so consequently feel quite calm.

    Back later!

    • It is actually a busy news day from the looks of all the stories I have saved off in tabs. But it is also a busy working day so I can’t read just yet.

      I hope your power and Internet stay up and that the storm is not as bad as they have predicted. Stay warm!!!

  4. So I got no exercise again yesterday. But I did get my car inspection taken care of and my 10% off shopping trip done (my co-op has a quarterly thing where you get 10% off one shop). Bought lots of tahini, ground flax seed and other stuff.

    I saw on the news this morning that a friend I had not seen in a while died of a stroke. He was a great guy — I met him because of the AIDS Ride: Mark’s obituary. He was indeed a “civil rights loving yellow dog Democrat”. His funeral is at 2:30 today…. I’m going to ask if I can leave early, but Fridays we are short staffed to begin with. I hate to make the day harder for my co-workers, but I want to go.

  5. 25 heading for 35 and still overcast this Friday in Fay., AR. Snow went south of us, as usual. (Most fronts coming from the NW generally follow the AR River Valley.) Which is actually OK by me as I can’t get up on the roof to clear the solar panels. Krugman’s column today was totally right on as far as anybody who’s tried to get stuff done in government is concerned. I like the “Obama’s true heir” comment – Sanders is the heir of candidate Obama, but Hillary is the candidate of President Obama. Anyway, I’m still be hung up on some HR/Payroll stuff – if it hasn’t resolved itself by 10, I’m heading up to the Dean’s office to talk to people face to face about getting those approvals. Don’t eff with people’s paychecks, dammit! Everybody in the path of nasty weather safe. Warm if possible, with electricity and internet if possible, but definitely safe. {{{HUGS}}}

  6. Just a quick hello this morning, I’ll check back later today. Everyone in the mid-Atlantic stay safe and warm! We may get tornadoes in Florida from this front – all things considered, I’d kinda rather have the snow.

  7. Good morning, 51, raining and windy in Bellingham today. I’m going to the pool soon and then I’ll see what the rest of the day brings my way. Yesterday’s surprise was finally finding the right person/firm to help with my MIL’s estate sale. It will be a big relief to have that over with, and by the end of March it should be.

    I never did make it to my sewing room yesterday, but oh well. Those projects can happen when they happen!

    • We shall see, 2020 is a long way out.

      The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Friday pledged to immediately diversify its leadership by adding three new seats to its board of governors, as well as doubling its number of female and minority members by 2020.

      Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs announced the changes following a weeklong storm of criticism and calls for an Oscar boycott after academy members nominated an all-white slate of actors for the second year in a row.

      If the academy nominated all-white actors, the solution is not to add more female and minority members but to fire the asses of the current ones. If there is racism, don’t dilute it … root it out.

      This may help:

      Other changes include limiting members’ voting status to a period of 10 years, to be extended only if the individual remains active in film during that decade. Lifetime voting rights will be granted only to Academy Award nominees and winners, and to members after three ten-year voting terms. Previously, all active members received lifetime voting rights.

      The old timers who don’t like that the blah people are making moving pictures (“what’s wrong with blackface???”) don’t deserve a vote.

  9. Good morning, meese! Saturday …

    It is 21 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 30. Partly cloudy skies are in the forecast.

    Snow and blizzards all over! Pete Souza Tweeted this photo of the office of a guy who works out of his home:

    ~

    I am having a difficult time getting my head around the enormity of the Flint water crisis. The governor was more worried about the political fallout and the PR than the lives of those families, some of whom may have children permanently damaged by what is essentially government malfeasance. I was not sure about the EPA person resigning until I read deeper. Yes, she was blocked every step of the way by state and local politicians but when she got the report from her own scientist, she should have raised the alarm. EPA director Gina McCarthy:

    The Flint crisis pushed EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy on Thursday to issue a new policy to elevate any issues that appear to be a substantial threat to public health, or that “other authorities appear to be unable to address.”

    “Our strength can become a weakness if we interpret our responsibility as ending with simple technical compliance,” McCarthy said in a memo to all EPA staff.

    Exactly. When there are health risks, you don’t delay remediation.

    I want the governor to own this both financially and morally. I am not holding my breath that either thing will happen. The teaparty governors elected in 2010 and re-elected in 2014 seem to be coated in Teflon. Nothing they do makes the voters care enough to change their government.

    In other news, Republicans in disarray!! Trump v Cruz, or as Lindsey Graham put it “gunshot to the head versus poison”. The white supremacist rag National Review got kicked out of the next GOP debate because they went full anti-Trump. That is the debate that NBC got kicked out of because CNBC asked tough questions.

    Busy morning as I try to clean up the mess that my desk became after two weeks of end of year projects took precedence.

    See all y’all later!

      • Snyder fired a couple of people and gave more power to the mayor (probably to set her up for blame). But it is more telling is who he hired: two, count them, two PR firms.

        Because paying for lipstick for the pig of trickle-down destruction of our states and municipalities is the only real priority for Republican governors. I am sure that they will find a way to shift the blame to the EPA district director and off their negligence. I would hope that they would lose any lawsuits but sadly the poor people of Michigan would again be left holding the bag. They can’t raise taxes (thank you, Grover Freaking Norquist) so the only place the money can come from is further cuts in services. :(

      • I finally got a chance to read the article you linked. JHC! No wonder the EPA district manager felt she couldn’t push. That guy said basically that the EPA is not the boss of him and, besides, they are in full compliance. I hope the feds move in quickly to take over ALL aspects of water quality testing in Michigan.

  10. Heading out to ungodly hour workout. This should be fun, haven’t worked out in weeks, my allergies are killing me and my stomach isn’t happy. I don’t think I’ll do the scheduled 10 miles.

  11. Good blizzard morning, Meese! It’s 23 F. at 8 a.m. this Saturday, we have 16 inches of snow and counting, and it’s still coming down. The snowplow came twice yesterday evening but the road is covered up again. We’re going to be housebound for a long time, I think.

    Thankful that we still have electricity and that Mr. Newbaby got his first tooth yesterday. He’ll be six months old next Saturday.

    Bfitz, I made your cherry-almond muffins yesterday and they were tasty! I overmixed the batter, unfortunately, and it wasn’t until the muffins were cooling that I worked out what “GF” in your recipe meant. I used one cup of regular white flour and half a cup of whole-wheat flour. After I published a photo of them on Facebook, two people asked for the recipe.

    Saddened to hear about the shooting in Canada yesterday. I hope they don’t start imitating us! I still remember hearing about the appalling massacre of women engineering students at the University of Montreal in the 1990s by a guy who hated women. (My theory is that all these men who massacre people in public places were ugly guys who couldn’t get a date.)

    Seems like a good day to write and do income taxes, so will do that. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond and Beyond!

    • Glad you are okay LadyD- am praying for everyone in the Blizzard path. We got not one snowflake up here., though the two counties below us got slammed.

    • 16 inches!! I suspect that no one there knows what to do with that much snow. Stay safe and warm … and on the grid!

    • I just dropped in to see how you were doing – like were still on-grid and online :) Glad you enjoyed the muffins. The GF flour I use is Bob’s Red Mill All Purpose – it gives a baked product as close to whole wheat as you can get with gluten free and has a similar nutritional profile. Stay warm.

  13. Good morning, 40 and partly cloudy in Bellingham. I stayed up far to late last night because I had to finish my book, #6 in the Malazan series, The Bonehunters. As I’ve mentioned before the books are a complex reading experience and the combination of great writing, high fantasy, exciting and poignant characters, and an overall message of compassion regardless of the horrors of the world(s) is fascinating to me. I should take a break before I start the next one though……I’ve got real life tasks I’m not attending to!

    Steven Erickson answers readers questions…….

    One last comment on all this: I remember thinking, as I rolled into Chapter Seven, how delicious it was going to be writing it — in not letting go, not offering up any breaks, any breathers, not for the characters and not for the readers. I imagined, somewhat evilly, forcing readers to stay awake late into the night, exhausted in their crawl through that chapter, and how that exhaustion would perfectly reflect what the characters were going through. Does that make Chapter Seven metafictional? Post-structural? Postmodern? For you to decide, I suppose, but the whole point was … to make you feel what they felt, and that meant a hundred pages of unrelenting narrative, mostly inside a claustrophobic realm, with vast weight overhead…

    Well, I never said I was nice.

    And this was just chapter 7!

    http://www.tor.com/2012/06/27/ask-steven-erikson-your-bonehunters-questions/

    The family is coming for lunch today, so I’ve got to get busy. Our poor grandson is on crutches thanks to a wrestling injury, so he needs a bit of cheering up. A muscle in his hip is torn so he’s got a painful few months of recovery to get through. Hopefully he won’t need surgery, but he’ll know by mid February.

    • Yikes, these high school sports, princesspat! Hope the poor boy avoids surgery. My grandson in Austin did something to a…muscle, the name of which I cannot recall, twice, and now is forbidden to play most sports.

      I think kids are pushed too hard. School is for learning, not Olympic-style sports training.

  15. morning all – I stayed up half the night watching a new series on Amazon Prime, Fortitude, a mystery set in a town on an island in the Arctic circle. Michael Gambon and Stanley Tucci in the cast, it’s pretty grim, but couldn’t stop watching it till the wee hours. Will finish it today.

    Diana, glad you guys have power and can stay inside! I lived thru several big snowstorms in DC and Maryland, including the one in 1979 which was a real doozy. Stay cozy!

    It’s very chilly here today, only in the 40’s, so I am playing WOW and of course listening to the opera broadcast this afternoon, assuming the Met is able to pull off a live performance in all the snow in NYC.

    Have a great day everyone!

    • The opera was cancelled and Bill de Blasio was called a tyrant! Opera people take their music very seriously. :)

  16. I did 7.6 really cold (for Texas) miles. I took my face mask but didn’t wear it & I kind of regret it because I’m wheezing. My lungs really hate cold. I may take a nap just to get all the way warm. My brain is playing U2’s cover of Everlasting Love for me.

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