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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– Page 1 of this week’s Comments can be found here
– Page 2 of this week’s Comments can be found here
I lost. They do the assessments on the value in January, we weren’t told about the issue till May — and it matters when we were notified, not when the damage happened. Sigh.
That’s bloody hard luck, another! Dear Goddess, how on earth do they expect you to pay such a large sum all at once?
This was for my taxes, I tried to get my valuation lowered because of the falling off siding & rotting wood. I mean, who would buy this place? But it didn’t work.
{{{another}}} – do they at least allow you to pay in installments? I haven’t lived in TX in over 30 years and don’t remember the drill.
Well, my comment – that I wrote about an hour ago – seems to have disappeared. I guess I’ll just say – bright the day, meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, meeses! Wednesday …
It is 61 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 73. Looks like a front might be moving through as there is a chance of rain and thunderstorms all day.
I am going to have to get off the news cycle for a while. I found myself getting physically sick by what has happened to our country – the healthcare repeal, Neal Gorsucks, the federal courts being filled with Federalist Society anti-government anti-people jurists, oil industry lobbyists regulating our environment, hedge fund managers regulating our financial industry, an unabashed racist running our Justice Department, Koch brothers planning a $400 million buyout of Congress, new laws restricting voting – it is a firehose of awful things coming at us. Then I saw this last night, an image tweeted by a reporter I follow, and I wanted to cry.
It is not a nice evening. The People’s House has someone living in it who has no interest in the lives of any people not named Trump. His presence in the house that gave me such personal happiness for 8 years – and was home to an administration that saved us from financial catastrophe, restored the rule of law, made America a worthy world partner, and set us on a course to save our planet – is overwhelmingly sad. His political party running all three branches of government is terrifying. And I need a rest.
See all y’all later!
Hugs Jan……I keep looking for good news to share, but it’s hard to find. I’ve muted my twitter stream and that helps but the relentless awfulness of tRump America is overwhelming.
I found good news!
I was glad to see that the awful Ten Commandments monument on the statehouse lawn in Arkansas was knocked over by a pickup truck. I am generally against violence and crimes but I am only human! The reasons given for installing it were hideous to me and the fact that the bill appropriated taxpayer money to defend the legality of the monument, in this time of budget cuts and needs going unmet, made me want to scream. I wonder if the bill covered replacing it?
Well, I truly hope that’s the end of that monstrosity on the statehouse lawn but I wouldn’t be on it. Yeah, my tax dollars to put it there over my protest. Still, that it was knocked over by a pickup truck brings a certain satisfaction. :)
Apparently the perpetrator has been knocking over god rocks all across the country! He did one in Oklahoma – which got put back up and then taken down by the Constitution.
A little hard on his truck, but good for him. :)
Good Wednesday morning Meese
I hope we stop getting weird storms here – last night one blew in – knocked me off line – took down trees – and then headed off East – lasted about a half hour – it was weird.
51 here going up to 79.
We have to maximize going after Rs over the holiday weekend – many have plans to attend 4th of July events.
Good tweet here on Crap-care
Andy Slavitt (and Topher Spiro from CAP) have been all over this issue. I called my Senator on Monday and asked him to delay the bill until everyone affected could weigh in. I am in a bit of a quandary because he is one of the holdouts that wants to make the bill meaner and I certainly don’t want to encourage that! I do believe that calls for decency are misplaced – a party that can look at 20 first graders getting shot in the face and says “this is fine” is not going to care if 15 million people have no insurance next year and many die needlessly. They will march off this cliff in lockstep with their ideology and, unfortunately, drag many people with them.
I was relieved to see the bill stopped but I would have been happier to see it voted on and killed. Mitch McConnell never loses and unless he secretly wants the bill to fail, it will get passed.
Good morning, Meese! Sorry you’re having horrible weather in New York State and Wisconsin. Climate change again. Have you noticed how, over the last five years, the weather has become worse and worse, especially in the South and the Plains states? Even here in the mid-Atlantic we’ve had a couple of tornadoes.
It’s a beautiful morning in NoVa right now, though, cloudless blue skies and 63 F., going up to 79 F. This is the last day we can have the a.c. off. Tomorrow we’re going back to ‘ot, ‘umid, and ‘orrible.
Very glad to have a child-free day today. I might actually get some work done around the house and on the book.
Glad about the delay of the Death Care bill, but apprehensive about eventual passage. I wish this whole administration would implode. My prediction, and you can say you heard it here first: if it does and Orrin Hatch is left as a “caretaker POTUS,” he will die after a month in office from the unbelievable stress.
And with that cheerful thought, I’ll wish everyone as good a day as possible.
Went to the gym last night, yay me. And gym bag is here today, iPod is charged & I’m going to make a new playlist at lunch. Yes, with that band I never talk about. The Deathcare bill is not dead, it’s a zombie & will come back & bite us unless we keep calling.
60 something at dawn of another bright, clear, sunny day I’m not getting any electricity from. Today is the 5th day in a row and the 7th of the last 10 that my inverter is down. The only response I’ve gotten from my installer is an email about how he doesn’t appreciate getting snarky emails about “roof art” (I’d said in my email telling him it was down again – after he’d “fixed” it Tuesday – that I wasn’t happy about it and I couldn’t afford expensive roof art). I gave it a day to try an let my temper cool. Didn’t work – the situation is bad enough, being reprimanded by the person I hired and paid to install the system 3 years ago for being angry about it is insult to injury. I emailed yesterday morning saying it wasn’t intended as snark, that a non-functioning PV system like a non-functioning car is expensive junk. Then gave him more information I’d found about when and why the system went down. i haven’t heard back. Next step if I don’t hear back today is to see if there’s anybody else in the area who can do the work needed (and if it will invalid my warranty if they do so). So. I am stuck, have been stuck since 2 pm Friday, at 329 KWHs. For June. The month that is supposed to be the highest generation of the year. (Yes, I’m pissed and getting angrier by the minute. Just finding alternatives is not easy in this area.) At least the used to be but not new normal cooler and drier weather this June means I’ve only had the A/C on two nights.
Every bit of what the Evil Ones are doing and contemplating is eroding progress we’ve made. It is maddening. It is of course Evil. And yes, people are going to be hurt and die. But we’ve been here before. We carved the path forward an inch at a time over the centuries since this country was founded, since this continent was invaded. They cannot erase the path, just our progress on it. So when this Evil time is over, when we have managed to get them out of power and get the reins of government back into our hands, the road is there to travel much more quickly than when we carved it out the first time. It has been done so it can be done. And it will be done.
Gotta get to work. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 62 and cloudy in Bellingham. When I called the grand girls yesterday, feeling apologetic because I hadn’t made plans for our day, they said……”don’t worry Grammie, we just want to be with you.” So we went to lunch at the bookstore cafe, and came back here to change beds, do laundry and visit. It was a lovely relaxed time with them.
I’ve got a busy day ahead with the pool, my new tooth (finally!), and then Justin (my computer guy) will be here. Now that his business is mobile I can’t just go see him so he comes here and I have everything set up on the dining room table. Today he will fix some errant settings on my son’s laptop, extract the data from his old desk top so it can be recycled, make my old Dell laptop be a cleaned up guest computer, and install the data from my old Samsung into the new Lenovo Idea Pad I finally bought to replace it. I know more about maintaining computers now, but knowing when to call him is at the top of the list!
That sounds like a busy day! I am glad you have a computer guy – so many people try to go it alone and make a hash of things. Did he decide that it was less expensive to go on-site when needed rather than have a storefront? I have never had a storefront and did 98% of my work on-site until dial-up (via modems) and then Internet access became commonplace. Now I only have to show up for hardware issues and, since I have been trimming that part of my business and making sure that hardware warranties cover servers, it has literally meant two or three times a year. Less wear and tear on me that way.
Justin has made my computer life much easier to manage. I think he was doing ok with the storefront, but his wife found a better job in Seattle so it was best for them to move. He has family here so between working remotely on line and booking in house appointments for Tue and Wed he is busy. He took my Dell with him so he could do better diagnostics and will return it next week.
The day ended with an online tech support issue with Comcast. We have 4 tv’s in this old house so the cable boxes all need to sync with the main box and they were not doing so. I did as much as I could to reboot everything, but wasn’t successful so I walked from tv to tv, holding my laptop so I could follow online, found all the right numbers (tiny print, couldn’t see the numbers with my computer glasses on, grrrr), but magically everything got inspected and reset. I find all this new tech stuff fascinating, but alarming and confusing at times as well.
Here’s some personal good news – the PV system guys have been here working on my system since 5 pm. If they fix it, that will be great news. We shall see what we shall see.
Glad to hear it, bfitz! Hope everything’s working now.
Good Thursday morning Meese
61 here in the Hudson Valley going up to 84.
Saw this re-tweet by our Peter Jukes
Was saddened to read of the death of Geri Allen – a jazz pianist I’ve seen live many times
She was only 60.
I read of her passing yesterday. Thank you for sharing her music here.
{{{Denise}}} – looks like British cops are a lot braver than American cops, doesn’t it? sigh. Music is the sound of Love – what keeps us going no matter what. Sorry to lose a musician – especially that young. (Anybody younger than I am is young. heh)
Good morning, meese! Thursday …
It is 66 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 82. The forecast calls for mainly sunny skies with a chance for thunderstorms this evening. Last night we had a few tornadic fronts move through Wisconsin that brought us high winds and lashing rains but tornados to the west and south of us. One front came through about 1am and for the second night in a row, my sleep was interrupted.
I listened in on a telephone townhall with the Republican Senator from Wisconsin. It was very instructive to hear his rote answers to the questions and concerns of my fellow Wisconsinites including a woman with a two-year old child who is on extraordinarily expensive medication and faces multiple surgeries. It did not deter him from reciting the mantra of High Risk Pools as cover for what is essentially culling the herd – sending the sick to fight over the limited money in the unsustainable high-risk pools, mouthing platitudes about “we are a compassionate nation” and citing the example of one woman in Wisconsin whose premiums doubled (missing that most people, like me, had our premiums drop). At the end of the call he got on his deficit rant and accidentally mentioned that Medicare is unsustainable, too. Oops! I went looking on his web page for his position on Medicare – none – and his budget page is mysteriously “undergoing maintenance”. But here is a glimpse of his priorities from his campaign site:
Make no mistake about it, if the ACA repeal is passed, the next thing in their sights is Medicare and Social Security.
This writer from Forbes says that most of the rich that she knows, the 5% not the 1%, have no problem with the ACA tax and are against the BCRAp bill.
It appears that the people clamoring for the tax cuts are the Republican donor class – either from ideology or pure greed they cannot stand the idea that “their money” goes to pay to support the notion that we are a society that cares about those in need.
See all y’all later!
Went to the gym again yesterday, yay me. Still waiting for the “exercise will help your insomnia” to kick in. Getting ready to call Cruz & Cornyn again. I know they’ll vote wrong, I just want them to know I’m here.
Good morning, Moosekind. The blue sky is covered with a veil of white cloud this morning, so the sunlight looks rather namby-pamby. Current temp. in NoVa is 62 F., going up to 87 F. later. Worse is expected for the next several days. Don’t mind if the result is thunderstorms, the tomatoes will love it.
Had a productive, largely child-free day yesterday. Pruned the lilacs as far as I was able, cut out all the fire blight I could reach from the Golden Delicious apple tree, watered the front and back gardens, and weeded the herb and flower beds. In the afternoon I baked chocolate chip cookies for the neighbors who gave us home-grown blueberries, made a peach-blueberry crisp (it looked so pretty, going into the oven) using the peaches and blueberries our son gave us on Sunday, and baked a loaf of bread. After that I collapsed into a chair to read The Hamilton Affair, a work of fiction about, guess whom, Alexander Hamilton.
Looking forward to the weekend and next week. Mr. Preschooler will be in day care or at home, so I’ll like only have Miss Pink Cheeks over here. We are going to finish Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She can harvest whatever’s ready in the garden and help me make cake or cookies.
I’m very nearly finished writing Chapter 11, thank goodness. The novella is up to 16,000 words out of a projected 20,000. Now I have to work out the plot complications for Chapter 12. This book is so much fun to write! Hope I won’t get sued within an inch of my life, but of course it’s all completely fictional. There’s no country called the “Deeply Divided States of Reagania.”
Wishing a good Thor’s Day to all at the Pond and beyond!
70 at dawn heading for 90 – if it can stay relatively dry I can keep the A/C off for another day. PV system is up and running. No communication – about when they were showing up or anything and the crew didn’t check out with me when they left – so I have no idea what was wrong or whether it’s totally fixed or this is just a temporary patch and they’ll be back. I’ve emailed to ask for that. Meanwhile I will enjoy the fact that I’m generating again. Online early to post the DK Village diary and looking for an email from someone on my community needs list – update on her sticky situation – but the email just said she hadn’t heard back yet.
The Rs aren’t interested in tax cuts as tax cuts, they are interested in shutting down government. And part of that is their One True Goal of hacking off Libruls. We keep expecting them to make sense from our point of view – what’s good for America and Americans – but they never will. We have to look at their goals and from their point of view they’re doing just fine and being quite logical about it. They are Evil – but logically Evil.
Need to got – heading out the door for work. I’ll check back when I can. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Brilliant!
Just popped up a quickie at Orange
I’m really tired of all the anti immigrant crap I not only hear from the right – but from certain elements who claim to be left
This is scary shit:
Good morning, 61 and partly sunny in Bellingham. Small pleasures this morning……my new tooth finally feels right in my mouth, and my new computer has a back lit keypad and a larger font so I can see what I’m doing. Makes me feel less infirm!
I have a follow up appointment with the hematologist today. The grand girls are going with us, so we’ll have lunch and explore a new river walk park in Mt. Vernon this afternoon. They are being good sports so we’ll try to make sure they have fun.
Yesssss!!!!
and it gets better
I love Ari, his Sunday show has been messing up my weekend schedule (I have to be home Sundays at 4 to see it)
How come they didn’t give it to Joy Ann Reid?
Her weekend morning show is doing really well…. I like that she has 2 hours, time to really dig in to stuff. I know weekdays at 5 would be a bigger audience, but just 1 hour…. I feel like Chris Hayes’ weekend morning show was a lot better than All In, because 1 hour is just so rushed.
Good morning, meese! Friday …
It is 64 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 73. Chance of rain and thunderstorms all day. Maybe that means they won’t come through at 1:30am again!
A quick pass through Twitter shows that no nukes were launched overnight.
Never give up. Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the AMUF in 2001 and her amendment to sunset it was passed out of committee. BHD:
Trending on Twitter:
Our country on Republicanism.
See all y’all later!
Good Friday Meese
Rain today and tomorrow here in the Hudson Valley of NY – which will put a damper on travel plans and local events tomorrow
Celebrating the birthday of Lena Horne today