Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Jan. 8th through Jan. 14th

January 7, 2017 JanF Community 90

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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39 Comments

  1. Good “morning”, Motley Meese! The week begins …

    Morning low of 12 degrees in Madison WI with an expected daytime high of 14. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast.

    Have a great day, all y’alls!!

      • Thanks for this, Jan. My most treasured moment is the look on his face when he walked out onto the stage from the wings. It was a solemn look, as if he was just realizing what a historic moment it was—not only winning the race, but the fact that he would be the first black POTUS.

        • He looked very somber and serious, probably from the burden that had been put on his shoulders. He did not need to worry – he did well.

  3. Good Sunday morning Meese

    Cold here and the coffee maker broke – sigh
    Hubby is headed out early to buy a new one

    Looking forward to seeing this film- James Baldwin is one of my heroes

    • I will greatly miss this smart, beautiful woman and her passion for helping children to live a more healthful life, with fresh food and exercise!

      Probably Thing will have her garden paved over and plant taco bowls there.

      • What he does to her garden has been one of my biggest fears – not because anyone will die from it but because it will underscore the incredible loss. She specifically asked for her garden to be maintained and Hillary promised (of course!)

        Would it be worse to have it paved over or neglected so that it is nothing but weeds, a symbol of the terrible thing that has happened to our country? :::shudder:::

    • Stellar, as usual. I didn’t get into it until late so didn’t comment. If I had, I would have commented on the long slog and prep work done by people like Pauli Murray so that when “Rosa sat and Martin marched…” visible change actually started. {{{Denise}}}

  6. Cold again — in the 20s. But by Wednesday, it’ll be 80. Since I don’t have to cook for a work week, I hope I’ll get in a walk this afternoon. So yesterday was — not actually bad even with the dead battery & all. People were kind, and most important, it didn’t end up costing anything. I am still in dire economic straits so this could have been a disaster. Brain is playing drifty, dreamy Rise Up for me.

  7. Good morning, Meese! It’s a freezing 16 F. out there this morning, with howling winds. Not the greatest weather. I’m still not venturing out by myself as the roads froze over last night and I see no signs of road treatment on our street. The high today will be 23 F. There were 527 accidents in Virginia yesterday, owing to the snow.

    Wish I hadn’t missed the PBS special on Thing. Someone did a recap of it on dk. Caught a hilarious skit on FB, called “Anger Translator.”

    Going to Google the name “Sissy Farenthold,” because I think the David Farenthold who is investigating Thing must be her son or grandson. If memory serves, she was one of the lawyers in the Roe v. Wade landmark case.

    Lots to do today to get the Beach Room ready for the new occupant, which will involve clearing the closet and the chest of drawers. Miss Pink Cheeks has slept in that room when she’s stayed over, but now she’ll have to sleep in the spare bedroom upstairs. This will force me to clean up my office, because I’ll have to move her coloring books and colored pencils, etc. up here. Our tenant and his little girl will move in a week from today.

    Wishing all a good day!

  8. Single digits at dawn but low 20s now. Yesterday was sunny – sun did sublime the snow off the panels and I got over 6 KWHs – today is overcast again. Still, it’s light enough I’m generating something – almost half a KWH at 10:30 am central. It could be worse and will be again. Put a metal water dish out for the ferals and birds that I can bring in and thaw on the wood stove periodically. Got most of my Sunday chores done. (Note to self: peppermint candy canes do not have enough peppermint oil in them to flavor supposedly cocoa-peppermint muffins.) Still need to make soup and of course once the clothes dry put them away and put the racks up.

    The beautiful sunshine had a lot to make up for yesterday – apparently my car thermostat went out (not sure yet) and the car started overheating into the danger zone as I was going for pet supplies. Took me an hour and stopping to cool the engine every 3 blocks to get from where that happened to the auto shop (2 miles away – I could have walked it faster) just 15 minutes before they closed. That did include a stop at WalMart (because that was one of the 3-block slots) to get antifreeze that wasn’t the problem, but it had to cool down anyway – so just a waste of $8. spent at a place I try to boycott. Nothing obvious. Fortunately before I left the house I got a really strong feeling that I should take that cell phone with me – the one I got for emergencies and so I could connect with Denise at NN – really strong, like sitting in the car about to start the engine, go back in the house and get it type strong. I called my girlfriend-coworker-neighbor who came and got me (and took me to Tractor Supply to get the pet supplies). We’ll use her car tomorrow as her husband doesn’t need it. (Student and classes don’t start until the 17th.) If this is Mercury in retrograde, I hope it shifts forward soon.

    Heading over to DK to visit my community needs lists/diaries, the Village “British Breakfast” diary, and of course read Denise’s diary. Hope everybody is safe and warm. Don’t have to ask about folks here thinking up acts of Loving Kindness to overwhelm the Hate because we wouldn’t be here if that wasn’t a “default” position for us – unlike some others even in places we wouldn’t have expected. Good luck in thinking up more Resistance things to do. Bright the day and wind to thy wings, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • so, yesterday was “weird car thing” day, at least in our part of the world — hope yours turned out ok!

      • Don’t know yet. I had to leave it at the shop and they haven’t called. Really hoping it’s not too expensive, whatever it is. Glad yours wasn’t. {{{anotherdemocrat}}}

  9. Good morning, 39 and cloudy in Bellingham. I finally resorted to the “3 totes” rule……sort and or pack 3 totes, then wander off and rest. It’s all my attention span can handle! My new found tolerance for stacks of stuff is a bit alarming.

    My best wishes to all for a restful and peaceful day.

    • That sounds like a good plan.

      Right now I have stacks that need to be sorted. Most of my stacks contain things that I have already done (the piece of paper was a reminder so I wouldn’t forget) but I some I need to put on to-do lists and/or prioritize. I have five stacks for different things – one of them is very short and is used for things that need to be done right away. One is for things that are done but need to be documented, notes on how I did something or codes and settings for a specific client. Another is for personal accounting and one for coding projects. The ugliest one is about 4 inches tall and is where I toss pieces of paper with notes, projects, ideas. One year I undid that stack and found things that were 4 years old! I think after the January accounting crunch, I will sit down with it and go through it.

    • Thanks! I was trying to find just her speech and – voila! – it shows up in the Moose morning greetings!!

      I never watch award shows because they are just a jumble of names and faces that I don’t recognize. I had to shut down Twitter last night because everyone in my feed assumed that everyone was watching it live! I did see that Jimmy Fallon, tRump humanizer, got bad reviews. Good – may he forever scar anyone who embraces him and normalizes his hate.

    • Text of speech:

      Please sit down. Thank you. I love you all. You’ll have to forgive me. I’ve lost my voice in screaming and lamentation this weekend. And I have lost my mind sometime earlier this year, so I have to read.

      Thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press. Just to pick up on what Hugh Laurie said: You and all of us in this room really belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.

      But who are we, and what is Hollywood anyway? It’s just a bunch of people from other places. I was born and raised and educated in the public schools of New Jersey. Viola was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in South Carolina, came up in Central Falls, Rhode Island; Sarah Paulson was born in Florida, raised by a single mom in Brooklyn. Sarah Jessica Parker was one of seven or eight kids in Ohio. Amy Adams was born in Vicenza, Italy. And Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem. Where are their birth certificates? And the beautiful Ruth Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in London — no, in Ireland I do believe, and she’s here nominated for playing a girl in small-town Virginia.

      Ryan Gosling, like all of the nicest people, is Canadian, and Dev Patel was born in Kenya, raised in London, and is here playing an Indian raised in Tasmania. So Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick them all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.

      They gave me three seconds to say this, so: An actor’s only job is to enter the lives of people who are different from us, and let you feel what that feels like. And there were many, many, many powerful performances this year that did exactly that. Breathtaking, compassionate work.

      But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hooks in my heart. Not because it was good; there was nothing good about it. But it was effective and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh, and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter. Someone he outranked in privilege, power and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke my heart when I saw it, and I still can’t get it out of my head, because it wasn’t in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose. O.K., go on with it.

      O.K., this brings me to the press. We need the principled press to hold power to account, to call him on the carpet for every outrage. That’s why our founders enshrined the press and its freedoms in the Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to Protect Journalists, because we’re gonna need them going forward, and they’ll need us to safeguard the truth.

      One more thing: Once, when I was standing around on the set one day, whining about something — you know we were gonna work through supper or the long hours or whatever, Tommy Lee Jones said to me, “Isn’t it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an actor?” Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and the responsibility of the act of empathy. We should all be proud of the work Hollywood honors here tonight.

      As my friend, the dear departed Princess Leia, said to me once, take your broken heart, make it into art.

      • Good for her. I saw some headlines at DK about traitor trump twitting out a response but didn’t know to what. Not that it matters. She didn’t fawn on him and that was enough. sigh.

  11. Good morning, meese! Monday …

    It is 19 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 27. Cloudy this morning and then a mix of snow and rain and freezing rain in the forecast for the afternoon into the evening and overnight.

    The Senate will begin hearings on tRump’s choices for the Cabinetful of Deplorables tomorrow and then vote on the ACA repeal at the end of the week. President Obama will give his Farewell Address Tuesday night, and Vlad’s Poodle has said he will hold a press conference on Wednesday morning. My guess is that he “reserved” the press attention so that he can push back at whatever the president will say because he assumes that he will be the focus of the speech. He won’t be mentioned (which will probably tick him off more). The president will talk about us.

    See all y’all later!

  12. Good morning, Meese! Cold and gray in Northern Virginia this morning, with a current temp. of 13 F. It’s going up to a whopping 28 F. today.

    Not much to say. Made very little progress cleaning up yesterday. I need to focus more on the important things.

    Starting my weight training this morning. Hubby will drive me as I still don’t trust the roads. He’s going to Costco to look at space heaters and a humidifier.

    Wishing all a good day!

  13. Slept in, sort of — my regular alarm (which I swear I clicked off) went off anyway. Warming up here — weather guy says no one will need their heater all week. Today, I swear I’m getting in a walk. And laundry. But really, I swear I’m walking this afternoon.

    • Thanks for the twitter links anotherd…….his 3:00 am thoughts are similar to what’s been keeping me awake.

  15. 20 at dawn so the temps started moving up about the time I went to bed as it was 10 then – already 40 heading for 45 and more or less sunny. Not supposed to get below freezing for the rest of the week and just barely chilly enough to need a fire in the evening – maybe.

    The Resistance has started. Millions of people coming up with different ideas and trying them. Some will work and we’ll keep doing them. Some won’t and we’ll try something else. We will survive the immediate future. The distant future I actually have hopes for, but partly that depends on what we do in the immediate future. We shall see what we shall see.

    Need to get back to work. Bright the day and wind to thy wings, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  16. Good morning, 40 and cloudy in Bellingham. I didn’t do much of anything yesterday, but there’s hope for today. The sound of the rain in the night and warmer temps makes my world seem more normal again. Between the cold making my joints ache and tRump making my head and heart hurt I’ve been depressed long enough.

    So I’m calling my senators today re holding hearings for the new cabinet without the ethical review process being completed. I know Senators Murray and Cantwell are doing the best they can, so my calls will just be to thank them and to add to the number count.

    • That is fairly unprecedented, to have a Senator testify against another Senator in a confirmation hearing; Rep. John Lewis will also testify against him. If I could only choose one position that we could block, it would be this Attorney General pick. But tRump’s team knew what they were doing – by making it all about how “nice” Jeff Sessions is, how Chuck Schumer and he share side-by-side treadmills – they have made it nearly impossible to reject him. Susan Collins, one of the moderate Republicans, is shepherding him through the process. Our only hope is that he disqualifies himself by letting what is in his thought bubble escape from his lips.

  18. Good morning, meeses! Tuesday …

    It is 34 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 39. Rain then snow are in the forecast. We got a dusting yesterday during the afternoon drive time.

    The wheels are coming off the “Repeal and Delay” bus as more and more people realize that Obamacare is actually the Affordable Care Act and are calling their representatives! Repealing Obamacare sounded great to the Trumpkins until they realized that it was their own insurance. Sheesh, what idiocy. A group of five Senators asked for a delay on the consideration until March and the first test votes had Susan Collins and Dean Heller defecting. That test vote, by the way, was an attempt to protect Medicare and Medicaid from the budget bill. Forty-seven Republican Senators voted to put Medicare on the chopping block – here are their names. The protection failed to win 60 votes, by the way, which means that Medicare is included in what Paul Ryan can kill. I am going to call my Senator and ask him why he hates me!!

    Today starts the Senate confirmation hearings with Attorney General nominee Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III leading off at 9:30am Eastern. He is being handled daintily because of Senate Comity, the terrible concept that anyone who has been a Senator can’t possibly be unfit for an important position like Attorney General. We need to change Attorney General to be one of the 60 vote threshold positions because this choice is not “deferring to the executive to assemble his own team” but is putting the cause of justice in America at risk. All you have to do is look at the Bush “Justice” Department to see what can go wrong.

    Tonight the president gives his farewell speech at 9pm Eastern. It will be on past my bedtime so I will watch it in the morning.

    See all y’all later!

    • Need to call my Senators, too. Both voted Nay. I expected it of Cotton. Looks like Boozman has enough cover this time around to show his true colors of being a granny-killing jerk (during W’s attempt at this he was in the House and voted to protect). Sigh. I called both Senators yesterday and just said “NO! until they get a clean bill from Ethics. Worry about their political philosophy after that.” Not that they care, but it’s a non-partisan approach.

  19. Good morning, Moosekind! It’s a gray day here, currently 20 F., with an expected high of 38 F. It’s supposed to rain tonight.

    Not much to say except that I need to get busier and stop treating myself so delicately. Realized that yesterday, the 9th, marked two months of depression. Also beginning to realize that what my friends told me is true: that after age 70, one really slows down. When I think of what I used to accomplish in a single day versus what I accomplish now, it’s staggering.

    Still, we can but do our little bit. Off to eat oatmeal and drink coffee now. Hope everyone will have a good, productive day!

  20. Even with yesterday’s non-action, I mostly slept the night through. But I will walk today. And take out trash & recycling. I have an e-mail in to the Ride people about a glitch on my page. Eating breakfast & watching the news. Brain is playing Ordinary Love, a sweet, pretty song from my boys. It was playing when I woke up overnight — I don’t know why my brain plays music while I’m sleeping.

    We can’t fall any further if, we can’t feel ordinary love.
    And we cannot reach any higher, if we can’t deal with ordinary love.

    • Glad you got good sleep. And music can help you do it – always does me anyway – whether from a recording or in my head. :)

      • I really have no idea why my brain picks the music it does, or why it’s always there. Weird that it’s apparently there even in my sleep.

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