Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Jan. 21st through Jan. 27th

January 20, 2018 JanF Community 87

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 is HERE!
 
– Page Two of Comments is HERE!
 

 

31 Comments

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

    Morning low of 29 degrees in Madison WI with an expected daytime high of 37. Chance of afternoon showers.

    Have a great day, all y’alls!!

  2. Good Sunday Morn Meese

    27 here in Saugerties NY going up to 31

    I really enjoyed watching all the marches yesterday !

    Now to go check my news feeds

  3. There were a lot of great photos and video from the Womens March to the Polls rallies yesterday. We did not have one here in Madison (I am not sure why) but there was a big one in Milwaukee and a huge one in Chicago. According to reports, the rallies this year were bigger than last year – the one in Chicago was over 300,000. My favorite sign: “Grab ’em by the mid-terms”.

    Here is your must-read from Rebecca Traister: The Other Women’s March on Washington

    What’s the fastest way to fix a broken system? Take it over, say the record number of female candidates running for office in 2018 for the first time.

    Excellent framing.

    We won the hashtag battle: #TrumpShutdown was twice as “popular” as the ill-conceived and forced #SchumerShutdown. #SchumerShutdown is what happens when your social media is devised by Fox News viewers who live in a right-wing bubble.

    As Nancy Pelosi said, there are no “winners” in a government shutdown – we all lose. I hope it ends quickly. This is the tweet that sums up where we are and why the Republicans will have such a difficult time flipping the narrative to “this is just like 2013 when those terrible Democrats shut down the government!”

    And the stain from this will not be easily washed away:

    • He would know. Does know. As all us pragmatic progressives know and heed him as best we can.

  6. Major props to Tammy Duckworth

    • I noticed that we got #CadetBoneSpurs trending last night! Senate Democrats have no more fks to give.

      • Yeah – it was trending still this morning when I logged in.
        Now if we can just get more of our folks out to vote!

        • Do you know why Tammy Duckworth is not mentioned more often in the 2020 talk? Blue state Democrat, woman, veteran, doesn’t back down from a fight.

  8. Getting ready for church, then for a full work week. Ugh, that’s going to be so loud after being by myself so long. The March here was huge — of course the news has to give the 5 counter protestors equal time….. Warm today, I’m wearing sandals to church. Gee, I wonder what Joy Reid will talk about this morning.

  9. I spent a paywall click to read an Op-Ed from Gail Collins because she promised to be optimistic. She was!

    [Hillary]’s campaign was probably doomed from the start and utterly transformative.

    Doomed because when a president has served for two terms, Americans are inclined to go for change and pick the other party next time — even if things have been going along rather swimmingly. That’s generally been the modern pattern and it’s probably going to become even more true now that what’s left of our attention span is being pulverized by cellphones. And in 2016 if you were going to find a candidate who seemed to promise more of the same, it would have to be the woman who had been secretary of state for the departing two-term Democratic president, and was married to the two-term Democratic president before that. […]

    Of course, comes the question of whether Clinton lost because she was a woman. The answer is: sort of. Her gender was both a handicap and an enormous selling point.

    Even if her sex was a problem, it allowed her to transform the country more than many men who won the job. While losing, she made it normal for women to run for the most powerful office on the planet.

    This is critical. Look at all the breakthroughs women have made in the last century, and you’ll notice how many of them involved just making their presence in some new place seem matter of fact. All that pain and struggle to win the right to vote, and what did it get us short term? Warren Harding. But long term, it created a world where the big gubernatorial election in Virginia was analyzed in terms of women in the suburbs and that knockout Senate race in Alabama was pretty much all about black women streaming to the polls. […]

    It’s 2018, a big election year, and women are going to be running everywhere. We’re sort of astonished by the numbers, but not by their ambition. They’ll be elected to city councils, state legislatures and Congress and hardly anyone will give their gender a second thought. That’s Hillary’s gift.

    Of course, we all wanted more and we will never forget that her election chances were damaged by James Comey and sexist media-bros and Russian bots and voter disenfranchisement and history-challenged berners – probably enough to make up the 70,000 vote margin in three states. But we will take what we have been given and build on that.

  10. 65 and gonna stay that way until late afternoon – hopefully my clothes will be dry by then. Even more hopefully my Cloud kitteh will have come home by then. It’s the first day in over a month the weather has been decent enough to hang clothes outside and I only let the boys out in the backyard while I’m doing it. Cloud got out and he’s been gone for over half an hour. He’s never been a wild kitteh like Charlie and isn’t likely to know what’s dangerous and what isn’t in that riparian buffer area between my back fence and the creek. I’d be worried if it were Charlie but I’d be pissed at him too which would take the edge off the worry. With Cloud I’m just worried.

    I didn’t attend yesterday’s march here – weird weather – on my side of the divide heavy clouds until the march was over, on the east side of the divide (which I didn’t know until somebody posted a picture last night) sunshine. Oh well. Women marched – and while the national media apparently didn’t notice local media certainly did. As did the twitterverse. We’ve marched. A bunch of us are running. All of us need to get to the polls in Nov (or sooner for Special Elections). That’s how we turn this around and stop the Evil Ones from doing more evil. (OK be realistic – slow them down a lot.)

    Got 8.4 KWHs yesterday (most of my production is in the afternoons) and the m-t-d is 138 – so more than the 2.5K system I had in January 2015 – still hoping for 200+ for the month. As pointless as it is – he’s a cat after all – gonna go outside and look for Cloud again. Will do other online stuff when I get back. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • Update – Cloud just showed up at the back door. sigh. Cats. Gotta love ’em, right? :)

  11. Good afternoon, Moosekind! After a surprise pre-dawn sprinkle, the weather has now turned sunny, with the blue only lightly veiled by white. We took Miss Pink Cheeks and Mr. Preschooler out to breakfast, and they both got well stuck into the whipped cream. Felt gratified that they did eat most of their breakfasts, though.

    Lovely feeling of freedom with the tenant out! Have not been able to check the news yet, going to go downstairs and do that. Felt very proud of all the women’s marches yesterday. Having seen for myself some favorable reactions from people when my fellow Clinton supporter and I canvassed them in October 2016, I will canvass again in the fall if I can find someone to accompany me.

    Other than that, hoping for a peaceful Sunday, at least in the USA. I know it’s anything but that in doomed Afghanistan. Contemplating Thing’s upset weekend with satisfaction. He didn’t get to go to his party at Mar-a-Lago—boo hoo!

  12. Good morning, 48, cloudy and very windy in Bellingham. The wind, coughing and tRump angst kept me awake for hours last night. I finally went back to sleep when all of you were prolly waking up so I’m even more out of sync than I usually am!

    Needless to say I didn’t march yesterday, but seeing the headlines and photos and reading the articles in my local papers gives me hope…….

    Renewal and resistance in Seattle — thousands take to streets for Women’s March

    They marched. Now, they act

  14. Monday Meese

    34 here in Saugerties NY going up to a hot 41

    Sitting here revamping my course outlines for first day of school tomorrow – want to work Maria Irma impact on the Caribbean into my women in the Caribbean class – and for my cultural anthro class will add Women’s march to the gender section

  15. Good morning, meeses! Monday …

    It is 36 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 43. It is raining now and will be raining off and on most of the day. Tonight it will get colder and the forecast suggests that the precipitation will turn to ice or snow … or both!

    I watched the shutdown negotiations on Twitter for as long as I could stand it then shut it off in disgust. The rhetoric from the right is awful! Lies, distortions (aka, Cornynisms), the terrible ways they refer to the people who were brought to the United States as babies/children. And, yes, I understand that most DACA “kids” aren’t kids anymore – JHC on a popscicle stick, what a dumb argument (that they should not be referred to as “kids”) – they were kids when they came here and that is the whole point of it. They did not sneak over the border with drugs in their diapers planning rapes when they reached puberty. A WaPo article explained how the language is being weaponized and how that makes agreement difficult:

    Their disagreement over how to describe an estimated population of 11 million people might seem like minor semantics in the tempestuous, decades-long debate over how to overhaul the nation’s immigration system. But people on both sides say the yawning gap in language has come to symbolize — and directly contribute to — the inability of Congress and the general public to forge consensus.

    Anyway, the last I heard is that the House absolutely refuses to bring a DREAMer bill to a vote on the floor so I am not sure why we are even talking. And the people saying that they will vote on a bill based on a “promise” to do so are fools. I have no doubt that if they extend the CR to February 8th the Republicans’ president will go scorched earth at the State of the Union and use the podium to promote lies about DACA kids, Democrats and immigration as a whole. Don’t give him that – keep it shut down, force them to pass the military pay bill, give them a 5 day CR if you need to but do NOT give him the SOTU. I haz spoken!

    See all y’all later!

  16. Good morning, Moosekind. It’s still dark here, although the sky is beginning to lighten. Current temp. is 51 F. in NoVa, going up to 64 F. We’re having another mild spell, very convenient for most but disappointing for snow lovers.

    Have no words to say about the continuing intransigence of the Rethugs, may they be damned and doomed for their actions. Feel that we’re in a handbasket and hell is our destination.

    Child-tending this afternoon with Mr. Toddler in Arlington. He keeps me on my toes! On Saturday his parents came over to help organize our garage while he watched ‘toons on telly. Yesterday was spent with the other set of local grandchildren, breakfast in the morning and tea in the afternoon.

    Wishing a peaceful day to all at the Pond and beyond.

  17. Warm this morning — just needed a sweater & it’ll be in the 60s this afternoon. Weird being at my desk. Hoping I can deal with the chaos that is a normal Monday here after being off so long — my last workday was the 9th. Playing some U2 in my head to get me through.

  18. 36 at the moment (windchill 27) and heading for 46 – inching our way back to winter – very clear at the moment. Yesterday’s afternoon clouds meant I only got 6 KWHs – what would have been great in Dec is an “only” 3 weeks into January – with this morning’s driblet the m-t-d is 144 – so 200 for the month is still very possible. Just got finished grilling (electric grill – outside is not a good idea) 28 breakfast sausages so the house smells deliciously of pork and sage. Ate one for breakfast, put tomorrow’s in the fridge and the rest in the freezer. And 4 weeks from now I’ll do it again. :)

    I wish I knew how to “link” an email – I’m on the Children’s Defense Fund list and today’s is about the Merrill Scholarship and the difference it and Mr. Merrill’s mentorship made in Marian Wright Edelman’s life. It’s a wonderful counter to the evil being done by the Evil Ones in Congress and the white house. And it is evil. Those behind the Rs also own the media so they control the meme. And they not only do not care about the people they are hurting and the damage they are doing to our government that’s actually the point. They want to purge – one way or another – this country of all non-white people and break our democratic republican form of government. Their goals are the same as Adolph Hitler’s were. Exactly the same. So we will work and fight with what small tools and broken weapons we can find – and overcome them by sheer numbers. But small bits of light, like that email, help us to see our way.

    Gonna go tour my parts of the internets and only go out for firewood – it’s beautiful outside but the wind has a knife edge this day. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • There is no way to “link” an email. The way I share email contents is to copy and paste the text from the email into comment, usually with the “quote” tool so it shows:

      Like This

      • I was afraid of that. The email is rather long – pretty long for a comment and impossible for a tweet. Thanks & {{{HUGS}}}

  19. Good morning, 44 and raining in Bellingham. I went to the pool this morning, yay! My achy joints were happy to be in the warm water again. The pool director was kind to save my spot and agrees that I should just go 2 x’s a week for now so that’s my plan.

    Hope it’s a good day for all.

    • {{{princesspat}}} – glad you made it to the pool. Warm water is wonderful, isn’t it? :) Healing Energy and moar {{{HUGS}}}

  20. Tuesday Meese
    38 here going up to a rainy 48 and today is my first day back at school

    My heart sank when I saw this name trending on twitter

    RIP – to a wonderful brother

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