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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Morning all – pleasant and warm here this morning, a cool breeze when I took Jasper out, but it’s supposed to get near 90 today. I gave up on widgets on my desktop a while ago, but I have the NOAA page bookmarked so I pull it up when I need to know if we’re going to get pounded with anything lol.
It was so great listening to the WBAI program last night with Denise – she was, as always, informative, comprehensive, and not backing down to anybody! Loved it, especially Dee’s dogs deciding to bark right in the middle of things lol.
Lots of good reading here today – Diana, I’m going to read your post next – I’m 65, and since I have no family to speak of, I think a lot about how to put myself in a position where I’ll be taken care of if I need it when I hit my 80’s. Glad you wrote it. And then I’ll check out Sady Doyle’s piece. I’ve only been back to DKos to check in on Moody’s WOW diary – going to give the rest of the site a wide berth for a while – I’m still not happy with the management so I will avoid giving them site traffic as much as I can.
OK, another day of grading to look forward to [not] – have a great day everyone!
I have discovered that there are no weather widgets for Windows 7 any longer except ones that are attached to malware sites. I will miss being able to glance in the corner of my monitor for the current temperature and to see if it is flashing angry red, telling me about a storm. Sigh. I am not ready to upgrade any of my development computers to Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 so I will have to find some sort of workaround. Things should keep working forever!!
I left you a reply about DK messages to your comment from yesterday. I think the feature led to a more toxic environment and just another place to worry about abusive attacks coming from. I hope you can put it out of your mind. Life it too short to spend time worrying about someone being wrong on the Internet!! :)
thanks for the reply Jan – it’s true, I’m reluctant to open that mail because I just don’t want to read unpleasant crap. So I won’t. And thank you so much for providing an alternate space on the internet!
48 at dawn heading for 80 this bright and sunny Friday the 13th. Reached 224 KWHs at the end of yesterday. Last year’s full month was 474.788, so that’s more or less what I expect this year, although I could reach 500 if we have enough sunny days in the rest of the month.
Over at GOS as best I can tell Kos and the moderators are having an emotional meltdown because the hated Hillary of 2008 is the winner in 2016 – and they’re getting more than a little aggressively defensive about having any hint of that pointed out to them. It’s disappointing as I’d thought better of them. But I stay firmly in the Hillary-positive and Pootie diaries and thus far have only had 2 warnings (for rec’ing something that was flagged) and a couple of aggressively defensive replies to my comments from moderators. I will be so glad when this is over. GOS will do most of it’s good work in attacking Rs rather than supporting Hillary this time around, but it still helps.
Unless the computers go down I must get summer payroll in today. (At least through 6/30/16 – some things have to be done in multi-approval steps.) Even though I don’t know if all the classes I’m setting up summer salary for will actually be taught. sigh. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 56 and mostly sunny in Bellingham. I’ve got a busy day of errands, packing, and getting the house and garden ready so we can leave in good time tomorrow. My hope is that we will arrive rested so we can focus on the estate sale but still have some energy for family fun. We’ll be staying at a hotel with a pool and walking trails by the Columbia River so we can have some time away from all the work. Our sons are good company so while they are with us having fun will happen if we can just keep up!
The president sat down with a student reporter from The Daily Targum, the Rutgers student newspaper. They had a nice conversation and this, I think, is an important takeaway:
The chance to be part of a revolution!!
I think that there are a lot of Republicans who don’t realize what their party has bought into. For years, they just assumed that the party would always give them someone who they could vote for that supported a core set of principles. I think when those folks look around in August and say “Are you kidding me? Donald Freaking TRUMP??!!?”, they will start questioning the values of the party they have blindly followed and choose something else. I hope they choose to ally with us – to not just reject the GOP nominee but reject the party that insulted their intelligence by offering him as a legitimate presidential option.
After Paul Ryan’s meeting with Trump yesterday, it is only a matter of time before he endorses him. This is the big question for Ryan:
He will lose it all. The remnants will be two parties: one, the false notion that Ryan carries in his Ayn Rand addled brain about a glorious party 162 years old founded on the principles of Abraham Lincoln; the other a party of know-nothings, the Trump Party, build on the Southern Strategy, lured by the dog whistles of Ronald Reagan speaking from Philadelphia MS, fueled by teaparty anger and the unwilling-to-accept-change white vote. Who will own the infrastructure, the ballot access, the name and the email list? It is anyone’s guess.
Good morning, meese! Saturday …
It is 39 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 50. Partly cloudy skies are in the forecast. I found a new desktop weather tool, quite by accident. I had spent a couple of hours searching and testing the few offerings out there. Many either didn’t work or were malicious programs. I kept thinking that Windows 7 had something built in at one time but I had never used it and couldn’t remember the feature’s name. Later in the day, I had occasion to check the screen resolution on one of my development computers and, lo and behold, on the list of desktop options was “Gadgets”. Sure enough “Weather” was one of them. When I tested it, though, it didn’t work – it failed to find the server that delivered the forecasts. So armed with that information, I hit the googles again searching for “windows 7 weather gadget”. There I discovered that Microsoft had discontinued the service but found several links from helpful people who had found replacements. Voila! I found one that did exactly what I wanted, verified that it was not a malware delivery system, and installed it.
Too Much Information? Why, yes, yes it was! But an interesting glimpse into tech troubleshooting: 20% research, 80% dumb luck!!
Big big news for those who oppose the death penalty: Pfizer has announced that it will no longer sell its drugs for killing:
That, along with Killin’ Antonin no longer being the tie breaker deciding that all capital punishment is good, may be the final blow to the barbaric practice of state-ordered murder.
Today’s Trump: “a man who acts (literally!) as his own PR flack has a fool for a client”. Corollary: “if you live your entire life in the media glare, craving more and more attention, there will probably be a video of you doing something stupid/dishonest/ugly/ridiculous; sadly, for today’s desperate GOP, that is never disqualifying.
The president will be speaking about addiction in the Weekly Address and I will get that posted later this morning. Diana, I have not forgotten about your post and will read and comment later this morning. Yesterday was one of those days. I am hoping today is calmer.
See all y’all later!!
Glad you got your weather gadget, Jan, and very glad to hear the news about Pfizer! Somewhere in New York Portlaw must be glad to hear about it too. She is very much against the death penalty.
The weather gadget in Safari acts up occasionally. I’m still mad at Google for discontinuing the gadget I really loved, which gave me the Dow Jones, the weather, a little bit of news, and displayed every photo on my hard drive, one after the other. Why don’t they consult people before they take away the things we love? Weirdos.
Dee, here is a comprehensive article about Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (from ThinkProgress). Shocking to see that sexism may have played a part in her suspension! The new acting president appointed a new cabinet made up of white men … in a country where white men are 25% of the population.
Thanks for that – I remember my friend in Brazil recounting all the attacks on Dilma because of her looks her hair, her clothing ,,, sound familiar?
Yup! Sure does sound familiar!! I had only been following headlines on the story and felt no sympathy for someone who was being investigated for corruption. But corruption is apparently rife in Brazil and is it okay to be corrupt if you are a white male. Sigh.
And unfortunately “corruption” for a woman may just be “didn’t give the right guy what he wanted whether he was entitled/qualified to have it or not.”
Unfortunately, yes.
okay – I’m feeling really silly this morning after a half hour on twitter :)
Hope this guy gets jail time
I saw that last night! Our country on Trumpism is ugly and very disturbing. I shudder to think about what will happen on November 9th, the day after their disgusting candidate, and the party he rode in on, are humiliated at the polls.
The thing about Trump is that he is coated in Toxic Teflon. His supporters love him the way he is and the more revolting, the better. Even if his tax returns were released and it showed him as a liar and a hypocrite, they would not care! The only way we beat him is to win on our positives because there are, literally, no negatives that will ding him.
We just have to get out the vote. And I’m gonna go off on anyone calling themselves “progressive” who tells me they are going to sit out the election or write in Bernie
53 going up to 74 here in the Catskills – and more rain. Going to grade some papers and then relax a bit.
WaPo has a piece up on one of my all time favorite group of singers – Sweet Honey in the Rock
That makes me feel old! I saw them in concert in the mid-80s. It is good to see them still going strong.
Michelle Obama likes them, too!
Good beautiful morning in Old DC, Meese! The sky is blue, we have actual sunlight, the birds are out there celebrating in the apple trees (“A nature party,” as my Precious Pink Cheeks describes it), and it’s 50 F., going up to 69 F. today. I feel like dancing!
However, I’m coming down with a cold, as is everyone else I know. My trainer canceled our Thursday session, Dearly’s coming down with it—the list goes on and on.
Can’t seem to stop blogging. Just posted one on GOS called “How I Got Off My Big Fat Bohunkus and Began Exercising Again.” If anyone is interested, I can post it here too.
Plans today call for gym, laundry, and letter-writing. We’re getting rain this afternoon so I want to get the heavy stuff washed and spread in the sun to dry before noon.
Hope everyone will enjoy a relaxing Saturday!
Wow, rec list!
To short circuit a cold (shorten duration, lessen impact) – 1/2 c. garlic soup (fist of garlic simmered in a quart of stock) every couple of hours and 500 mg vitamin C in the hours in between. Healing Energy. (And heading over to GOS – I’ll check out your diary.)
Good morning, 58 and mostly sunny in Bellingham. And I’m mostly packed, and Ron is already asking me when I’ll be ready to leave, and I’m already hearing the words in my head,…..”how much longer before we get there”…so predictable!
So a 5 hr drive today, then tomorrow we’ll dig into the work of wrapping up his parents’ lives. Lots of memories…..
Drinking tea & watching Joy Reid on MSNBC. Bought my Scottish friends album December – I Will Let You Have Your Say. Beautiful music – and they have a song dedicated to Aaron Sorkin, it’s about their favorite West Wing episode, 20 Hours In America. They are cool, sweet people. Here’s a video of theirs, it’s a song about Alison Stewart, her husband is kinda famous (hint – the video was shot in Dublin)
No idea what I’m going to do today. Maybe I should have more tea…
Morning all! Finally got some rain here yesterday so I don’t have to run my sprinklers for the first time in 10 months just yet, yay! Warm and sunny now, but I have to buckle down get a bunch of exams graded today so doesn’t much matter to me I guess.
I saw that “feel the Bern” clip just now on Twitter too, Dee, and OMG – seriously, that looks like it’s a clip from Portlandia, doesn’t it? I expected to see Fred Arnesen (sp?) show up in there.
I’ve got Joy Reed’s show on too – I really like her so much, she’s about the only MSNBC talking head I can deal with now. I saw her on Chris Matthews last night just GOING OFF in a righteous rant about how unfit for the Presidency Donald Trump is – we need many more in the press to speak the truth about this lunatic. It was entertaining yesterday, to be sure, keeping up the Trump antics, but he is a serious candidate for President of the United States! This man is going to getting security briefings soon! He simply cannot be allowed near the White House, period.
I watched “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” last night finally – it may have been available on Netflix for a while, but yesterday was the first time I saw it there – and I had completely forgotten Dee was in it!!! It was great to watch, brought back a lot of memories of the Women’s Liberation movement of that time in the 60’s and 70’s – I was in college, not really an activist, but swept along with the wave as many young women were. And Dee, your part was so great, such a pleasure to see you on film!
I am thinking about writing a piece asking whether Elizabeth Warren is really the right person for Hillary to name as her VP running mate, I hope it would be ok to post it here, Jan? I’m skeptical that Warren would even want to do it, but more than that, I’m not at all convinced she’d be the right one for a lot of reasons. At the heart of it is my concern about the nature of her “Democratic” bona fides – she’s like Sanders, apparently the only reason she left the Republican party in 1996 was economics and the Republican attitude toward the banking system. I don’t really know how anyone could claim to be a Democrat now and still have voted Republican prior to ’96, given the racism evident in Republican stands throughout her adult life (she’s just a year older than me, so I can look at my adult years and think about whether I would EVER have voted Republican from 1968 to 1996 and the answer is a resounding NO!) and all the vile legislation Republicans put through during the Reagan years in particular. So I’m investigating it, and I hope you’ll let me post it here when I get it done. I’ve got to finish grading this weekend, so it won’t be for a few days though.
Ok, back to grading – everyone have a great day!
You, and anyone who is a regular here, is welcome to post anything, any time. Sometimes we feel like a coffee klatsch but we are a bunch of bloggers.
Once the primaries are over, I will be writing more. Primary battles seem so non-productive; they are fine to jabber about but the serious work will be GOTV and pointing out our candidate’s strong points and worrying about the polls. :)
I know that Elizabeth Warren was a Republican but I don’t know much about why she changed parties. I was a Republican by birth and did not bother thinking about politics until I saw what the GOP had in mind for women during the battles over abortion access in the 90s. I had found no glass ceilings in my chosen field that would have awoken the dormant feminist in me – data processing was still considered backoffice women’s work until we started making pretty good money and then, lo and behold, men started entering the field and being put in charge. By then I was out of corporateville, on my own and not under the thumb of The Man.
Yes, it does sometimes feel like a coffee klatch, but I love hearing about everyone’s daily life. And some of us—you, Jan, and Dee—write about political issues too.
Here at the Moose I feel I can relax and let my hair down instead of constantly walking on eggs or tiptoeing around people’s resentments.
Long live The Moose!
Part of that (not having to tiptoe around resentments) is because we are generally in agreement on the big issues. And where we may disagree, we do it politely because the moose way values respectful discourse. I laugh when I see the “Community” on the top of the DK site. It has never been “A” community but rather lots of communities, some of them more like gangs, ready to rip people apart if they see anyone straying from their dogma. It is, quite literally, not worth wading through the dreck to find a nugget or sharing my words in a space where they are openly mocked. For blogging, I just need a publishing platform, a link I can Tweet. For personal enjoyment, meeting with the meeses every morning is my favorite part of the day.
Hi Meeses – the sun is shining although the temps are a good 15 degrees lower than yesterday. Got my shopping done and a little bit of gardening (well, weeding around the edges of one of my flower gardens and planting a couple of marigolds I got at Lowe’s). Then had to go to a memorial service. Actually didn’t stay for the service but greeted everybody I knew and a bunch I didn’t know but who knew me, apologized to my friend and took off. I’d accidentally “double booked” an appointment – probably Freudian or something because really I don’t do religious services, especially memorial services, very well – even when by very liberal Episcopalians. Rain moving in tomorrow and especially Monday so I’ll enjoy the sunshine while I’ve got it – 19 KWHs for the day and 267 for the month so far today. Bright the day. {{{HUGS}}}