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!
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Good morning, meese! Friday …
It is 9 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 9. Mostly cloudy with some flurries this morning. The overnight low will be -6 with dangerous windchills tomorrow.
Of course, the dotard sitting in the Oval Office echoes the Republican Party line and says cold weather is proof that there is no global warming. Keep yammering, yam! Every time you say something stupid about the climate, more young people and college eductaed people say “I will never vote for a Republican.” In Alabama, a state that is sending their first post-Southern Strategy Democrat to the Senate, voters 18-44 voted 60% for Doug Jones and college educated voters clocked in at 54%. The future is not going to be kind to parties that deny science and who basically tell young people “we don’t care if we destroy your planet.”
Today I am staying away from the “JHC, the Orange Orshole is totally demented!” articles which will cut my reading by about 80%.
See all y’all later!
Good Friday Meese. 4 degrees here in Saugerties NY – wind chill wayyyy below zero
I was finally able to catch our outdoor cat and bring him inside. Was worried he would freeze to death. He was unhappy about the whole deal – but is now ensconced on my office futon and purring.
Just finished reading the entire RI report on PR and am writing it up
Reminder
Diary up
Retweeted!
Went and found it on twitter so I could comment when I RT’d it. (Also read your diary, of course.)
It is interesting that the Democratic Party is using Kamala Harris in fund raising emails. I wonder if they have the mailing list sorted in some way to weed out the people who will be offended because she is both a woman of color and a proud Democrat? Here is what she said, btw:
Excellent call to arms! I won’t give to the DNC, though, unless they reject the politics of bernerism. That means putting people on the Unity Commission who are committed to building up the Democratic Party not to berning it down and hoping something perfect and beautiful rises from the ashes. The face of the Democratic Party is Kamala Harris’ face – not a 75 year old man who hates women and finds people of color annoying because of their “obsession” with justice.
Well said, Jan!
Glad to see it. I’m going to give to specific candidates. Won’t support the Burned group.
I have been doing that since 2002 when the party groups were sending money to people like Ben Nelson of Nebraska. I am not against having Blue Dog Democrats in Congress but my money was too precious to be sent to a multi-millionaire who voted too often against my values. There will be others to take up the cause for the Testers and Heitkamps and McCaskills and Manchins. I have a Democratic Senator to get re-elected in 2018 and she is going to need all the help she can get.
I agree – at least one of the faces of the party is Kamala Harris – and none of the faces of the party is an old white guy who doesn’t even belong to the party and spends all his time trashing it. I used to give to the DNC. I stopped – and told them why. I now mark as spam anything that hits my email box with any variation of “stand with bernie” – I don’t know who I will even be able to support monetarily going forward, but it won’t be the DNC until they shut down that “unity” crap.
Good morning, Moosekind! Still pitch-dark at 6:45 a.m., with a temperature of 17 degrees F. High today in NoVa will be 32 F.
After a long day of child-tending yesterday, this weekend should be easy. Not going to wear myself out by taking on too much.
Hope everyone will have a nice, restful day.
Today & tomorrow are warming up a bit before the big, arctic front gets here. The weather guy said something about the air being compressed by the front moving down… Anyway, we’re having way better weather than any of y’all. But possible frozen precip on NYD. Yesterday was quiet at work — we joked that that was because literally everyone who uses our service called on Wednesday. Wonder how today will be? Brain is playing Little Things to me.
Good morning, 36 and cloudy in Bellingham. The sneezy feeling I had yesterday has become a very real flue/cold…..achoo! I did go to the new star wars movie with the family yesterday but I’m going to see how I feel re our New Year plans. We have a long standing dinner, sharing books, and great conversations evening with old friends and this year we share responsibility for the soup and salad course. But I don’t want to share germs so Ron may have to go without me.
Best wishes to all for a healthy and happy day.
{{{princesspat}}} – Healing Energy – and 500 mg vitamin C and garlic soup to help your immune system kick this. moar {{{HUGS}}}
20 just before dawn and 26 now. It was also clear at dawn but it’s seriously gotten over it. sigh. ‘spozed to go up to 41 today – I’m waiting for it to just crest 32 before going out to do the outdoor stuff. I will at least do some of it today simply because I’m not going to have another window of opportunity for at least 2 weeks. I won’t be doing it alone – since the wood I’m going after is a tree down in my friend’s backyard she and I will be working together on that part of it. But I’ll need to split it (borrowed the electric splitter – she brought it over this morning) and that’s a cold job. Not moving enough to keep warm when using the electric splitter. Got 4.4 KWHs yesterday and m-t-d is 155.8. Getting to 170 is still possible but getting less likely. sigh.
Partly due to the weather I’m spending more time on twitter than I meant to – or am happy about. Twitter is where I can at least see my online friends/family and trade a comment or two – but it’s also a time suck and even now I do have other things to do. (Not to mention that too much time on this laptop monitor is messing with my eyes.) Need to get some coffee – I’ll check the DK Village and do one last run over on twitter while I drink it. Then I need to layer up and get outside. I can only work outside in 10-minute stretches at these temps so I need to get started if I’m going to get anything accomplished at all today. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Twitter can be a time suck and, unlike writing a blog post, it has few lasting rewards. Zip, zap, your most brilliant thoughts scrolling off the screen, never to be seen again!
I watch my feed more for entertainment than enlightenment (some of the folks I follow are like characters in a novel). There is definitely no better place to get breaking news but the second wave of information is generally useless and the hot takes are infuriating. A few days later the tweets with think pieces come out and I usually save the interesting ones in Pocket to read later.
You will have to figure out how you want to use it and what feels comfortable – and adjust here and there along the way.
twitter is very new to me and so I’m still learning it. I’m a slow learner in these things. Of the 8 years I was on DK (including a couple of months lurking before I joined) I only became really active in writing diaries and doing community support in the last 18 months. Before that I was regular in the Pootie diaries and any fundraisers or disaster live-blogs but otherwise just sort of wandering aimlessly around. So. I will learn how to do twitter as best I can for my purpose and – as you say, adjust along the way. :)
Saturday Meese
6 degrees here in Saugerties NY – bone numbing windchill.
Up checking the sinks early – have to leave the tap dripping to prevent pipes from freezing.
Sitting here thinking about how often folks on the faux left attacked Eric Holder.
Kudos to Holder for the work he is doing on voting rights
I hope that there are enough career DOJ officials who feel the same way that Eric Holder does. A lot of people hired during the Bush II administration had less than stellar resumes and swore allegiance to the Republican Party and George W. Bush (who can forget Monica Goodling). I don’t doubt that the people Eric Holder hired made sure that openings were filled with qualified people not political hacks. The jury is still out on Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein. Former Deputy AG Sally Yates vouched for him so there is that.
A lot of attention is being paid to voting rights and I hope it bears fruit. The biggest impediment to voting right now is the need for a photo id. I’ve no doubt that it lost Wisconsin for Hillary Clinton last fall and it sounds like 200,000 people were barred from voting in Alabama’s Senate election because they had no id. Any change to how valid ids are gotten to the people who need them will have to come from the state level so we need to take back statehouses to achieve that. The handful of voter id cases that have been been brought seem to never get past the Republican controlled Circuit Courts, for example, the 5th Circuit has been slow walking, actually slow “standing still”, the challenge to Texas’ laws. So lawsuits don’t work – and the Supreme Court does not believe there is a right to vote – and we can’t vote in swamp drainers to take back statehouses because the voting laws are disenfranchising Democrats. In my mind, the push has to be to put resources in every state and county and municipality to get people valid ids this year. Load up buses if you have to and take folks to drivers license bureaus, put together an army of attorneys helping people document their existence. I will be watching Eric Holder’s initiative and some of the other voting rights initiatives closely.
Depending on which circuit gets voting rights cases — there have been some wins in our favor. Other victories have come with overturning disenfranchisement of felons – like what happened in VA.
Agree we need to mobilize ID Brigades.
Yes, at long last overturning felon disenfranchisement laws has been making some progress. Alabama just did theirs and I think there is a referendum in Florida. We would not be talking about the “Bush II Administration” if Florida had not purged their voter rolls ahead of the 2000 election of people whose names looked like the names of felons and certainly if felons were not permanently barred from voting in that state. It is unfair to not have your rights restored after you have served your time, especially since so many of the felons were “created” by the blatantly racist drug laws from the 1990s.
Definitely we need to work on getting folks the IDs they need, getting them registered (getting the re-registered after they’ve been purged), and to the polls.
Returning voting rights can reach even Rs – if you can put it in such a way that we’re not dealing with the racist dog whistle. One of the emails that was circulating about the ebil Hillary through the white Church Lady lists included that Hillary was going to give felons the right to vote. One of my R aunts sent it to me and asked me if it was true. I told her yes after they’d served their time and paid their debt to society. Her response? “Good idea.” (I truly think that if we’d found a way to insinuate our message into the white Church Lady email lists we’d have brought white women voting for Hillary above 50% – but most organizers don’t know about that group and the ones that do don’t think they’re important. But every “Hillary the murderer” accusation laid against her for the last 35 years was regularly circulating through that group with no rebuttal – at least not until my aunt started recirculating my emails to her, but that was in October. sigh)
Good morning, meeses! Saturday …
It is 0 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 1. The current windchill is -20 and will be below 0 all day. I do not have to go anywhere today, thank goddess.
Today is the penultimate day of 2017. We will be smudging ourselves and our house tomorrow to cleanse ourselves of the bad parts of 2017 so we only bring the good parts forward. It was not a complete waste of a year – what we have learned about the fragility of our democratic institutions will help us as we rebuild. More people have woken up to the racism and misogyny that permeates our society and, more importantly, more people are refusing to accept that it has to stay that way.
For myself, I don’t usually make New Years resolutions because it is not my new year, January 1st is simply the day the Catholic Church decided to start the world’s calendar on and that has several layers of ickiness to it. But it does mark a change in what we see plastered all over. I like the look of “2018” with the pokiness of the 7 giving way to the smoothness and peaceful look of the 8.
I have some projects that need to be delivered in 2017 so I will get to it. The Democratic Party’s Weekly address is a shout-out to veterans from Congressman Tim Walz of Minnesota and there is no Nancy Pelosi news conference from this past week so the Fighting Back post will be pretty easy. I will post it later this morning.
See all y’all later!
I don’t usually make resolutions either – for this year ahead I will resolve to continue to fight for PR and the USVI – even if people get tired of my rants.
Grrr – looked out the window – it is now snowing =- which usually does not happen when it is 9 degrees.
We won’t get tired of your rants! I am going to call my congresspeople again after the beginning of the year to make sure that they remember that PR and VI recovery is still an important issue to me. There are so many critical issues to deal with it would be easy for them to forget.
I hope that our Congress can do something about the DACA kids. I see too many people saying “we will never vote for a wall!” on Twitter but that is stupid, in my mind. Give the Orange Orshole a few million for his stupid wall. We can tear the damn thing down in 2021 but the 800,000 DREAMers will never be able to rebuild their lives if they are deported.
{{{Denise}}} – definitely keep ranting on Puerto Rico and USVI – that needs to stay on the radar however we can get it there and with you writing the posts the rest of us can tweet and retweet to get/keep it there. I hadn’t realized how that can keep going days after the original is sent out – but on last night’s notice of RTs of my RTs I saw a couple of folks had just RT’d my RT plus gofundme link of your RT of elfling’s diary about solar gardens. So definitely rant away. moar {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, Moosekind. It’s still dark, but the street light shows me we did get our little dusting of snow. I’m surprised, as the weather forecast is usually wrong. Currently it’s 19 F. in NoVa, going up to 34 F. later. No more snow is expected.
It’s time to go downstairs and make the early morning tea. Looking forward to a quiet day of catching up on correspondence and housework. Also need to update my website. Wishing a nice, quiet day to all.
Chilly, cloudy day — tomorrow the high will be in the morning with falling to the 20s with a wind chill in the teens. For us, that’s crazy cold. Going to be hard to make myself leave the house on Monday, but I like to do some exercise on New Years Day, to set a good intention for the year. Another good intention for the year, remember that Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way. Favorite line: write a world where we can belong to each other, and sing it like no other
Good morning, 42 and cloudy in Bellingham. Still coughing and aching so another quiet day ahead for me. I’m sick of 2017 so I might as well sneeze it away!
Take care everyone.
{{{princesspat}}} – more Healing Energy and quiet is good for Healing. And sleeping is better. Hope there are some naps in your near future. moar {{{HUGS}}}
Hope you’ll feel better soon, princesspat!
High of 37 for the day was at midnight and it’s been slowly dropping since. It’s 25 now with a windchill of 13 and will bottom out about dawn tomorrow at 13 before rising to 20 then starting the even further downward path. Seriously cloudy – PV system is awake but generating in driblets – got 3.3 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 159. We’ll definitely make 160 for the month but 170, while still possible, is very iffy. I’m totally surprised but we have actually hit 4 MWHs for the year – just barely, but we did it. 2017 has been a dark year in many ways – including sunshine. My 3rd and 4th quarter metrics for my 4K system are lower than the 3rd and 4th quarter metrics for my original 2.5K system. Holding the Good Thought that 2018 will be better in all respects.
Got some of the wood dealt with yesterday (and picked up a nasty splinter I still haven’t managed to get all of out of my thumb) – enough at least to not worry about the serious cold spell (for our region anyway – nothing above freezing, single digits at dawn, and wind chills in the negatives) we’re heading into. I’ve almost a day’s worth of wood in the house, 3 days’ worth on the porch, and about 2 weeks’ worth (I hope) on the carport and another rick outside. I will need to contact a supplier soon though so the next warm spate we get I can get more. My friend across the street took me to do some minor shopping this morning while she was doing her minor shopping for which I am very grateful. It’s really too overcast for me to safely drive. I could have done without stuff for a couple of days but that would have put us in the coldest part of this cold spate. Heading over to DK to check the Village and other families and to twitter to see what good stuff I can RT. :) Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}