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

October 8, 2017 JanF Community 110

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 One of Comments are HERE

  • Page Two of Comments are HERE

49 Comments

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

    Morning low of 57 degrees in Madison WI with an expected daytime high of 73. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    Have a great day, all y’alls!!

    • The nightmare in all of this is people are being told to boil their water before using it
      EPA – PR
      Water Safety

      EPA Hurricane Maria Update for Saturday, October 7th
      Raw sewage continues to be released into waterways and is expected to continue until repairs can be made and power is restored. Water contaminated with livestock waste, human sewage, chemicals, and other contaminants can lead to illness when used for drinking, bathing, and other hygiene activities. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), people should not use the water from rivers, streams and coastal water to drink, bathe, wash, or to cook with unless first boiling this water for a minimum of one minute. If boiling the water is not possible, water may be disinfected with bleach. To learn more about making water safe in an emergency, go to CDC’s Making Water Safe in an Emergency web page.

      So how do you boil this water if you have no power and no stove?

      • Don’t they have any sentient beings writing those advisories??? Yes, let’s boil that water – in the hot sun, I guess – or get bleach: from the closed grocery stores!

        There is apparently no one at the EPA who has the capacity to understand the situation on the ground. It is almost as if they are dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s so they can later say “we told you to purify that water!” JHC on a pogostick.

        • I took a look at that advisory and shook my head. I saw this in a Spanish language paper

          El exdirector de la EPA y el director de la división de agua potable del Departamento de Salud, Javier Torres, recomendaron también usar algún pedazo de tela o papel toalla para filtrar botellas o galones de agua.

          translation

          The former EPA director and the director of the Department of Health’s drinking water division, Javier Torres, also recommended using a piece of cloth or paper towel to filter bottles or gallons of water.

          no. no. no. no.

          • I’m going to write a diary tomorrow about the water situation
            Sheesh – think of all the reasons we need water

          • It’s step 1 – to get as much of the solid matter out of it as possible. The next step, which apparently they aren’t bothering to tell anybody, is the purifying part. Boiling is good as long as what’s in it is bacteria, parasites, etc and volatile chemicals. Boiling is not good if what’s in it is heavy metals (like lead) as it concentrates those. Bleach if you have it is great – only 1/8 of a tsp per gallon of water so a gallon of bleach will purify over 6000 gallons of water. If boiling is not possible and bleach is not available the 3rd way isn’t as dependable but it works. Put the strained water into a clear glass or plastic container, preferably capped, and set it in direct sunlight for 6 hours. So all those plastic water bottles that would otherwise be trash can be used to purify more strained water.

          • Yes, bfitz, I recall the third method from research I did for a story I wrote a few years ago. The setting was Mali. They did exactly what you said, putting the bottle of water on a black roof for 8 hours.

          • WHO has been using that in 3rd world countries to provide potable water for decades now. It’s not fast – boil for a few minutes or add 1/8 tsp bleach per gallon of water and shake or stir – that’s fast. The solar method takes most of the day. But it works. {{{HUGS}}}

          • Sigh – I doubt seriously that most people will do this – even if they knew – they’ll just drink water collected from streams that “looks clean” and drink it :(

    • I managed to get it to copy over to The Village diaries in DK yesterday. Give it a little more coverage. Thanks for posting it.

  4. Good Sunday morning Meese

    I’m staying focused on Puerto Rico as it slips from the headlines.
    This morning’s piece at Dkos is going to examine two parts of Puerto Rico – the history of the most awful slum in the U.S. – El Fanguito – which thankfully is no longer in existence and La Perla – a very poor barrio of San Juan which developers would lovet o snatch -because it is prime real estate

    • I went to the Puerto Rico page on AP and only found one new article, a story about how high tech firms are helping out. Apparently the Google balloon thing was just a PR trick and I am not going to promote anything that Facebook, destroyers of democracy and decency, do. The Tesla guy is promising some batteries but nothing concrete. More hopeful are the little companies like Vanu highlighted in the article.

      Much of the ground work is being spearheaded by nonprofit organizations and small firms with expertise in rural or emergency communications.

      Lexington, Massachusetts-based Vanu Inc., which sets up wireless communications networks in rural parts of the United States, Africa and India, is sending dozens of its small, solar-powered cellular base stations to volunteer crews on the ground in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Aid workers are pairing Vanu’s devices with other technology, such as inflatable satellite antennas.

      After setting up a network on the island of Vieques, off the main island of Puerto Rico, one team watched from a roof as local residents started getting text alerts from family members who had been trying to get in touch.

      “They noticed everyone in the plaza pulling their phones out,” said CEO Vanu Bose. “You don’t have to announce you’ve lit up coverage. People know right away.”

      They plan on sending 40 more of the units.

      Another group is called Net Hope described as “NetHope is a collaboration of leading international NGOs serving tens of millions each year in 180+ countries.” Their web site is here.

      • I want to see a huge group of Democrats hold a press conference to SCREAM about this – not just the Latino reps.

        • I hope they do and soon. The problem is that right now there are a half dozen crises and the focus is being pulled in many directions. The ACA sabotage needs to be addressed because the 2018 plan year starts on November 1st. The DACA kids need to be protected. The window may already be closing to pass some gun regulations.

          What we don’t need is Twitter filled with stories about Harvey Weinstein. A movie mogul is a pig – NOT BREAKING NEWS. Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama once spoke to him – who the hell cares!!? And the NFL is not popular any more because white identity politics trumps “enjoying a sporting event”? Fine, don’t watch. We are not going to back down from nazis and the KKK to soothe the butthurts of flag waving cretins. Last month they were waving Nazi and Confederate flags – NOW they decide that disrespecting the American flag is important. Meh.

          It does not take a genius to triage and see that the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico needs to be addressed first and foremost. I am heartened by stories of ordinary people raising money and getting goods and help to the island. But the federal government needs to get the big stuff done – restore power so that people have running water and can open grocery stores and banks and businesses.

  5. Eating breakfast, waiting for Joy Reid’s show. Today: church, get next week’s food together, maybe the gym. Watching the Chicago Marathon. Yes, I watch marathons.

  6. 49 at dawn which was an hour after I was standing outside in the moon light thanking Her for getting Aji & Wings in their house at least to sleep and Channeling more Good Health, Safe Home, Supportive Community to everyone I touch or have ever touched in any way at all. Fed the cats, put out bird seed, started a fire, checked Aji’s blog, started my Sunday stuff (vanilla-cinnamon muffins this week). Still need to make soup but that can wait until this evening when I plan to eat it. LOL. Got 11.3 KWHs yesterday and at the moment the m-t-d is 63. Progress is good.

    Passing on what information I get my hands on from whatever source (not that I have many) is pretty much my piece of the Resistance whether it’s the community needs list, links to helping organizations for Puerto Rico (and others), or what little election (11/7 and specials) information regarding who’s running for what I manage to hit on. I also make phone calls but my congresscritters are blood-on-their-hands red so it doesn’t do a lot of good. And when the 2018 election gets in gear and my local Dem party opens an office, I will be staffing it – more than I have in the past when I was restricted to weekends. We each do what we can and this is what I can so I am.

    Need to read the British Breakfast and get over to DK for Denise’s FP. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  7. Good morning, 47 and partly sunny in Bellingham. Another quiet day ahead for me, and all I’ve got is best wishes for all.

    Time for coffee, and hopefully a few brain cells will engage!

  8. Good Monday morning Meese

    Yesterday’s post went well – got a lot of people to sign up for the SOS Puerto Rico group on Kos


    am working on my Puerto Rico water post – should be finished in an hour or two – will let you know when posted
    Back to keyboard pounding…

    • I looked for your tweet yesterday and couldn’t find it! Thanks for embedding it here.

  9. Good morning, meese! Monday …

    It is 50 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 68. Variable cloudiness.

    People who thought we did not have to rush a DACA fix in were wrong. The White House has added a bunch of new “conditions” to any deal, conditions added by Sessions and other hardliners so now we will not have a legislative DACA fix. I hope that the courts have better success.

    The attempt to do a “kill enough of it so it dies on its own” repeal of the ACA will be unveiled this week via executive order. The people who have been analyzing the content of the draft believe that it may possibly encourage the private insurers to drop out of the exchanges immediately rather than wait and see how 2018 turns out. Essentially what it does is allow for associations to offer insurance for their “members” that does not have to adhere to the rules of the ACA. So an association could form that offers insurance to its “members” but does not cover annual exams or maternity, for example, and they could offer lower premiums and cherry-pick the healthiest. That will make the rest of the market sicker and older putting it into an actual death spiral. A lot depends on how the insurance industry responds. I will never understand a business model that rejects making 15% profit on a guaranteed market in order to make 30% profit on a much smaller group. That the insurance industry is complicit with the Republicans in shrinking their own market seems insane.

    So the new rule for disaster recovery is that if you don’t cater to Trump’s ego, you don’t get help. FEMA director Brock Long said that they are filtering out any requests by the San Juan major and are not responding to the new crisis where a power substation failed and two hospitals in San Juan no longer have power. The problem with requiring shitgibbon ass-kissing is that with the entire Republican Congress’ lips firmly attached, there is no room for anyone else’s!

    See all y’all later!

    • Brock is a schlock whose remarks are a crock. May karma deal with him as he deserves. This is white male privilege on steroids: he sits here in DC on his aging, overweight assets and pontificates while a woman of color who is THERE and seeing the conditions with her own eyes, is vilified and her messages dismissed out of hand.

      Women, especially women of color, are always ignored. Women of color reported to police the awful goings-on they heard and saw in Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment building and were ignored. If the police had listened to them, lives would have been saved.

      • It also didn’t help the situation that many of Dahmer’s victims were Asian and therefore not deserving of protections. I lived in the Milwaukee area during that mess and the cops who let him continue his murder spree were never fired. When the victims are not white, there are different rules for holding the police accountable for their safety.

  10. Good beautiful rainy Monday, Meese. Yesterday we received a sprinkle or two—an appetizer, as it were—but the rain predicted for today began falling last night. What a glorious sight—black streets gleaming with wet in the lamplight.

    Woke much too early, went out to get the paper at a quarter to six, and it was raining steadily. Heavy rain began when I was back in the house slurping a cup of tea. For the next two weeks it will be dismayingly and uncomfortably warm for this time of year. Right now it’s 73 F., going up to 85 F. Gad, I remember 1979, when we had wet, heavy snow on October 9! Of course it was gone by lunchtime but still, snow is snow.

    Today being Indigenous People’s Day (it ought to be named Indignant People’s Day, the indigenous people in question having been ignored for so long), we have no child care duties. We’re going to spend the day looking for that wedding photograph. The garage is looking emptier and emptier! At the end of the month Serious Steps will be taken to clean it and make it into a place where a car could fit.

    As Jan said earlier, there are so many issues requiring our attention that it’s impossible to focus on them all. There’s nothing one can do about Catalonia from this side of The Big Damp, so I just focus on this country. Still hoping that all power and clean water will be restored to Puerto Rico this week.

    Wishing all a good day!

  12. Monday morning. Oatmeal, tea. Looking at Friday’s tally sheet — I worked really hard. I wonder if our call volume will be low because people think this is a holiday. We are going to have a record high today of 95, heat index of 100. But a cold front is coming overnight & they promise highs in the 70s tomorrow. I might actually wear shoes. I might save that for Wednesday, when our low is supposed to be 58. Brrr!

    Yesterday was my church’s 130th birthday. It’s a great place, been in the justice business a long time. Back in the ’50s they were among the 1st Austin churches to integrate. Had women pastors when that was still a rarity. 2nd church in Austin to join the Reconciling movement (in the Methodist church, that’s where we say “hey, LGBTQ people, you’re welcome here”). So, pretty proud of that.

  13. 55 at dawn heading for 85 – a bright, clear, sunny day which is nice. Got 11.5 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 74 – got some catching up to do to get back to a 10/day average but working on it.

    Today being a federal holiday – no comment on this particular federal holiday although it fits right in with my bloody congresscritters – no phone calls. But will of course put out my various political action stuff under the community lynx in the Village diaries as usual. Trying to figure out where best to put links to Denise’s diaries in that lot. And of course my regular community needs stuff, which is not moving at all – but I’m still so happy about Aji being able to at least sleep in the house – it sort of helps mitigate the unhappiness about nothing else moving.

    Gotta get to work (and over to DK to at least check in). Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  14. Hola Meeses!

    I recently upgraded my FireFox browser because it was 6 versions out of date and that made it very crabby (I never use the auto-update feature but only update when it requires me to).

    The new version is showing that we are not a secure web site which is something I knew but did not care much about because we don’t do secure transactions or keep people’s personal information. However, it is now making my re-login process one step longer and is also, by default, pointing to another site’s SSL certificate which is creeping me out (it is a god-is-my-webmaster IT support site!).

    I got on a tech support chat with our host and they have a free SSL Certificate we can use (SSL is the protocol that is needed to make the moose secure). So if you have bookmarks saved as https://www.motleymoose.com you may want to change them to https://www.motleymoose.com. The SSL change may take 4 hours or more to be in effect so don’t assume that if everything works fine RIGHT NOW that everything is okay.

    I am not sure what this does to in-site links – I guess we will find out together!!

    Maybe – fingers crossed – this will help those of us who are occasionally logged off.

    • Mine’s a tab on my google “frequently visited” home page – is this going to make it go kerflooey or soemthing?

      • For me personally, it seems to have made the font do odd things and the menubar icons are rendering incorrectly. I am going to stay with the http and tell my FireFox to give the site a pass. At least if someone does use the https, it won’t send them to some crazy web site now!

  15. Good morning, 41 and partly sunny in Bellingham. I took a news break this weekend so I feel slightly less fraught this morning. I’ll go to the pool soon and hopefully I’ll have some energy left for the rest of the day.

    Best Monday wishes to all!

  16. Good morning, meeses! Tuesday …

    It is 52 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 57. Cloudy this morning then a chance of rain this afternoon.

    I only have time for a quick scan of Twitter and it appears that no one has nuked anyone. I saw last night that Nancy Pelosi is willing to shut down the government to save the DACA kids. If that is the only way to protect the 800,000, I have no problem with using that leverage. It is NOT okay to gather the information about people and grant them immunity from deportation then cancel the immunity and turn the data over to ICE. I don’t care who the president is or was, our country made a promise and we should abide by it. It is like this awful cancelling of negotiated and Senate approved treaties. The United States will never again have credibility on the world stage. Republicans are happy with this because they think they will get a tax cut out of it. That is a terrible trade-off and many of them are starting to realize it.

    I am watching the wildfires in California – I have friends in the area. I wish I could send some of my rain there.

    See all y’all later!

  17. Tuesday Morning Meese
    62 going up to 79 with rain here insaug erties ny
    I’m off from school for fall break. GLADB ecause it gives me more time to blog about Maria aftermath
    threw up a diary at Orange on the end of the Jones Act waiver – whichwas just a series of tweets

    In other post-Maria news
    Carmen Cruz tells it like it is

    Will be taking a look at US Virgin Islands aftermath in Black Kos today .

    more Maria tweets:

    Sigh – grrrrrrr

  19. This video is chock full of win: “If someone doesn’t understand privilege, show them this”

    “None of those things I mentioned have anything to do with you or are anything you can change.”

  20. It’s actually refreshing outside this morning. Still wore sandals, but it was almost too cool for them. I feel so bad for the people in the area with the fires. Know how that feels, we had it here a couple of years ago — heat, dust, smoke — and knowing that the smoke & ash is from somebody’s everything. So sad. And all the other disasters. Not to mention the disaster in the White House.

    Here is one good thing, though:

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