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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I think I feel well enough to try for breakfast. No coughing fits yet — though I’m moving & breathing slow & steady. I’ve got to uncover the plants today, since it isn’t going to freeze again any time soon. It’s even supposed to be in the 70s tomorrow. There’s a Women’s March here, but I think going to that would be pushing things too much for me. Going to take everything slow & steady till I’m sure I’m well.
More Healing Energy and I’m glad you’re feeling well enough to try for breakfast. Slow and easy is a very good idea. Naps if you can take them (I can’t – sleeping in the day time gives me massive headaches) would be good. And yeah, give the March a miss. You’re working and resisting in other ways and this is for the long haul. You know about pacing yourself for the long haul. moar {{{HUGS}}}
31 (windchill 22) this morning heading for 50 and sunny so far. Yesterday I got 8.7 KWHs and the m-t-d is 120.6 – if we keep this up (unlikely) we’ll definitely get over 200 by the end of the month. And if the weather is this warm tomorrow I’ll try to make Fayetteville’s itty-bitty token March (from the Square to the Courthouse is 6 blocks) since it starts at noon, IF it’s not raining – we’ve got rain chance which I’ll believe when I see it but it would be ironic if it did just when I really don’t want it to.
Considering who owns the media odds are good we will be blamed for the shut down – media’s already framing it that way – but if we can get SCHIP and protect the Dreamers and get aid to Puerto Rico, I think it’s worth it. I hope. Easy for me to say of course. I’ve got money in the bank – thanks to the university paying out my unused vacation and my Social Security check already in for the month – and I could live for at least 2 months on what’s in there. Folks living off generic-ramen and dumpster diving for food until their SNAP comes in cannot. Only thing that concerns me politically is what it might do to our chance to take back Congress, especially the Senate (although that’s a long shot anyway). Meanwhile Evil Ones being evil. I’ll make calls again today, as useless as that is considering my senators, then try to figure out something else good to do.
Need to haul in some firewood and get some coffee. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 43 and cloudy in Bellingham. The nasty flue kept me awake coughing again last night, but getting rid of the nasty congestion should mean I’m getting better. We did go out for lunch yesterday and the taco was tasty but I needed a long nap to recover from the activity.
Thanks to all for your healing words. I appreciate your support :)
{{{princesspat}}} – glad you are doing better & moar Healing Energy.
Good Saturday Meese
27 here in Saugerties going up to 47 – we have a heat wave!
Dopper posted this story to BKos -useful to bring up when discussing immigration
I’m not a big poll person – however these data are important to emphasize when dealing with the Republican/Trump shutdown
The Republican Party is not a majority party; they have simply gained a majority in the House and the Senate – and the presidency – by gaming our ridiculous election system, a system where fair elections rest in the hands of the states to choose who will vote. The majority of people don’t support Republican policies and in many cases want just the opposite.
I hope I live to see voter suppression done away with. That includes gerrymandering
Good morning, meeses! Saturday …
It is 30 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 40. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast.
So the government is shut down. I wonder how the Republicans are going to spin a 50 to 48 vote to proceed as “Democrats shutting down the government”? Their bill had underwhelming support in their own caucus. I went to bed right after Lindsey Graham caved, thinking that Chuck Schumer may have cobbled together a compromise to make the Continuing Resolution shorter to give more time for the DACA fix, I think a February 8th date was floated so that Republicans would have a teeny tiny fig leaf for their president at his State of the Union. I was okay with that because it funded CHIP and would have taken that threat off the table for the next round. I will have to read the news to find out what happened and where we are.
I have not scanned any of the headlines yet except my own paper’s. At least it did not say “Democrats shut down the government” although the subhead said “Trump’s late appeals fail to sway Democrats”. Ha! Nothing Trump can say will sway Democrats! I did laugh out loud at a line in the first paragraph that the shutdown is “marring the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump’s inauguration.” Good lord! We have had a continuous marring of our democratic institutions since noon on January 20, 2017. That we survived a year is a testament to those who refuse to give up on the notion that a government requires the consent of the governed. We Do Not Give Our Consent to be governed by Republican destroyers.
I am still trying to sort out the to-do bomb that hit my desk in mid-December and which I am not even close to getting a handle on. An old brain is not a very good place to store a to-do list and when it fires off nagging alarms about missing deadlines it gets noisy in there! I need to get it all on a list organized by priority so that I can get it out of my brain.
See all y’all later!
Well at least #TrumpShutdown is trending – in spite of all the bots trying to push the narrative that it is the Democrat’s fault
Someone was screen capping the Twitter accounts of some of the “people” retweeting the “#SchumerShutdown hashtag. It was pretty blatant trolling. I am not sure that making the minority leader of the Senate the face of this shutdown is going to resonate with the American people. They see Trump on TV, they see Ryan on TV, they see McConnell or the moronic John Cornyn on TV. My guess is that 90% don’t even know who Chuck Schumer is.
I don’t think that shutdowns mean much anymore as in “we will punish you for shutting down the government!” The 2013 shutdown cost billions of dollars in unnecessary costs and the party that caused it was rewarded with a wave in 2014 that gave them the Senate and allowed them to steal a Supreme Court seat. People will not campaign in the fall on a government shutdown in January – they will campaign on the things that they campaigned on last fall in Virginia.
Well said, Jan!
And good luck with the project.
I hope your family members who work for the government have savings to see them through. I always wondered how many people’s credit would be irreparably harmed by weeks-long shutdowns that made you miss a mortgage payment or car payment – or student loan payment. Can you repair your credit by claiming it was caused by “Republican Incompetence”?
Erik Loomis thinks this shutdown could last months because there is no upside for the Republican Party to reject racism:
Shame I can’t go to the March today, we have lovely weather — highs in the 70s & I have a HerStory t-shirt I was looking forward to showing off. I’ll post a picture later. Right now I’m watching the local news & waiting for Joy Reid’s show. Got to take stuff out of the freezer later, get ready for a full 5 day week next week.
My t-shirt comes from the research done for the background when U2 performed Ultraviolet. They had screens with all kinds of amazing women from history. And Bono introduced the song saying it’s dedicated to women who stood up, sat down for their rights, who resisted & insisted & persisted…. Even if you’re not a fan, click on the link, listen to the intro, hit mute when they start playing & look at the screen behind them. I used one of the Texas shows because they included local women at each stop. It really was quite a research project.
Good morning, Meese! So—I’m not the only one late to the Pond today! Had to run out to Navy Federal Credit Union to deposit my child-tending paychecks and for a few awful moments I thought it was shut down as well. I tried the front door of the building and it was locked. Luckily, the Goddess Fortuna had seen to it that I still had my Navy Fed debit card in my wallet. (I tend to use it once a year, at Christmas.) By the time I had deposited them, the building was open. Can only suppose I mistook the time and that Saturday hours are 9-12 rather than 8-4, as on weekdays.
Of course, I could have used the mobile banking app on my phone to deposit them but I tried that once. It took longer than driving the two miles to the NFCU. It’s just such a fidgety app that I have no patience with it. Besides, I really don’t want financial access on my phone—it’s too easy to lose such devices.
I’m expecting our jobbing gardener to turn up. We have some winter things that need to be done. Our Australian house guest cut down the raspberry canes, so there will be raspberries next summer. They grow only on new wood.
Also, Elder Son and family are coming around to help organize the garage, now that it’s all lovely and dry-walled. So it’ll be a busy Saturday.
It may sound odd, coming from me, but I hated Season 2, Episode 7 of “The Crown,” which we watched last night. Too much S-*-X! Goddess knows I don’t like watching that stuff on screen and I’m especially uninterested in Princess Margaret, who seems to me to have been a complete waste of space. Oh, well, that’s just my opinion.
Wishing all a good day. Here in NoVa it’s sunny, blue-skied, and 23 F., going up to 56 F.! Summer food for dinner tonight, folks.
I am with you on this: “I really don’t want financial access on my phone—it’s too easy to lose such devices.” Too easy to hack, also. The least protected devices in your household are your phones.
That IS odd, coming from you Diana! ????
I hope the Tenant of Doooom can be dealt with (or shut down, if need be).
50 at the moment and supposed to pretty much stay that way all day. It’s also cloudy enough I’m waiting a bit before driving to the grocery store and if it doesn’t lighten up I’m skipping both the grocery store this morning and the March at noon. Basically I am not safe driving in uncertain light. Got 8.7 KWHs yesterday which brought the m-t-d to 129.4 but if the clouds don’t thin out a bit I’ll be surprised if we get even half that today, maybe a quarter if we’re lucky.
So. We have a government shutdown that the Rs will not have to pay for at the polls in Nov. We shall see who blinks first. Our team is standing strong and even the weakest of our links are being pretty firm at the moment. I think we’ll stay firm. One thing about having pros in Congress instead of noobs is our pros know when to “hold ’em” – know when folding is gonna cost us so much more down the pike to just not do it. Right now we are seriously at a point that if we fold we will get nothing but a horse laugh for anything we try to do until this R Congress is gone. The stakes are just too high for over 10 million people – 9 million kids for CHIP alone. My senators of course not only have blood on their hands, they want more. I called Boozman’s DC office yesterday – his local office is swamped, calls go to voicemail and the mailbox is full. Cotton’s local and DC phones go straight to voicemail and the mailboxes are full. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cotton told his staffers to shut down and not take any more calls.
Gonna go check my twitter feed & the DK Village diary. And hope it will get light enough soon so I can do my shopping. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 41 and raining in Bellingham. My corner of the PNW is quiet and peaceful, which seems at odds with the mess our country is in today. I watched the vote last night with very mixed feelings……relief the Dem’s stayed strong, grateful a few R’s voted for what I value, furious anger with tRump, McConnell and Ryan, and increased angst re what comes next.
Take care everyone.
Best. Sign. Ever.