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!
Light rain, no fog. The Trumpian shitstorm continues; but the kids from Stoneman Douglas are leading the revolution so maybe things will be ok. I saw where one of them re-tweeted a thing about how long Flint has been without safe water, thought that was great. Playing U2 in my head while I eat oatmeal & drink tea.
The Trumpian sh*tstorm right now requires a hazmat suit. Between his laughable claim that he would rush to the aid of the students – because he is a golfer which makes him an athlete, apparently – and his very disturbing talk of how to deal with mental illness, it was a particularly bad day. I keep trying to ignore the Trump Reality Show, the distractions that underscore that the most important thing to him is to stay in the news but some days it is more difficult.
52 heading for 60 and mostly sunny right now – ‘spozed to have rain moving in again, sigh, but I can enjoy the sunshine while it lasts. Got 14.5 KWHs yesterday, the m-t-d is 185 with this morning’s driblet. We won’t make 200 but we’ll get closer at least and maybe right under it depending on how much afternoon sunshine we get today and tomorrow.
The Parkland kids are as active now as my age (and slightly older – I was on the youngest edge) group was in the late 1960s and early 1970s and they have much better tools for their activism. Social media is a weapon and they know how to use it even better than the rose league and the Russian bots. So even while we are still in this really bad situation – government is in the hands of Deplorables and the president is a narcissist – I have more hope right now than I’ve had since 11/9/16.
Gonna do my tour of the internets – Villages to visit and tweets to read among other things – then see about some outside work before the rain moves back in. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 40 and cloudy in Bellingham today. We enjoyed our Seattle concert adventure, but rain, snow, sleet and hail made driving no fun so I’m still tired. I was at the dentist early yesterday, and then a nap happened.
I’ve got sewing room plans for today. Don’t know how much I’ll do but I’m grateful to feel some creativity and energy returning!
Best Tuesday wishes to all.
Good Wednesday Meese
37 here in NYS going up to 52
Am at the point of wanting to say fuck everyone in the US Government – the situation in Puerto Rico is unconscionable
I am having a difficult time finding anything nice to say about our government. I hope folks see that the people who encouraged them to “vote for the party of death and destruction so that it is so bad the people want a revolution” were wrong. But maybe they don’t see it since their view of the world is filtered through privilege and they are not harmed when people have no power – or immigrants are kept in detention for years without a court hearing – or people’s safety nets are shredded to line the pockets of the wealthy. I despise them for being so stupid that they believed it and for being so obtuse that they could not imagine how awful it would be – and how mindlessly simplistic “millions will protest and things will change” is. We change things by voting in the people who will vote for the things we want. We outnumber the bad guys!! It didn’t have to be this way. :(
Slashing the friggin’ loan – pulling out contractors – kicking evacuees out of hotels..Puerto Ricans are being treated as lower than shit.
I take this personally. Every damn day.
I was glad to see that the Florida kids haven’t forgotten PR.
Good morning, meeses! Wednesday that feels like Friday …
It is 34 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 48. Sunny skies this morning giving way to clouds. Tomorrow we are expecting snow and more typical early spring temperatures. The upper 50s this week were a nice break, though.
Americans are stupid. We have allowed about 3% of our citizens to bully us and turn our daily lives upside down. I opened my cyberpaper this morning and the over the fold headlines were “MADISON PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOLS | RESPONSE TO PARENT, COMMUNITY CONCERNS: Security upgrades pledged” and “DANE COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE | ACTIVE SHOOTER SITUATIONS: Training: Plan ahead to survive”. Plan ahead to survive. How about we ban assault rifles to survive? We have changed our way of life to protect the rights of people who want to own weapons of war and shoot us up if they decide they don’t like the cut of our jib. I hope we can run on this issue because it is the right thing to do.
Two more Red to Blue state legislature seats flipped, one in New Hampshire in a Trump+13 district and one in Connecticut that had been in Republican control for 44 years. The yam is really trashing his party. The third legislative race was in Kentucky and the Republican won by 31 points in a Trump+68 district so the shift is real, even in blood red Kentucky.
The West Virginia teachers won! The state blinked and the teachers will go back to school tomorrow with a 5% raise. Maybe legislators heard from their constituents how embarrassing it is to find out that the teachers have to work two jobs to make ends meet. What a terrible thing Republicans have done – vilifying and impoverishing teachers to score political points and risking that the next generation of Americans are unequipped for the challenges of the future.
I hesitate to open Twitter to find out what the vulgar talking yam has shat out – yesterday was NOT a good day for him. I think instead I will do accounting work and get ahead of the 3/15 deadline.
See all y’all later!
52 & drizzly, heading for 65 – hope it will clear off but not holding my breath. Power outage this morning – fewer minutes than Puerto Rico has been for days – so late start. Inverter did the same thing – arc fault – I did the manual reset and have reported it to my installer who probably won’t pay any more attention than he has the last 5 or 6 times. Once I was taught how to manually reset it myself so I wasn’t down until they got out there he stopping paying any attention. Now I’m afraid to go directly to SolarEdge just in case me doing the reset has invalidated my warranty. sigh. We got 4 KWHs yesterday bringing the m-t-d to 189. If it doesn’t clear off we will be lucky to get the same today. oh well. We start over tomorrow.
Evil Ones being evil. No matter what issue, no matter which direction you look, they are acting in ways to kill people. Some slowly by taking food and healthcare, some quickly by supporting assault rifles in the hands of white supremacists, some in between. But killing people. The kids give me hope. How long it is until the elections – and even then supposing we do take back Congress, the new one won’t be in secession until January – depresses me greatly. But we will keep on keepin’ on – one step at a time and while it’s not possible to carry all the fallen with us, we’ll carry as many as we can – and won’t forget the ones we can’t.
Need to do some stuff on the internet and then get off again. Still having problems with my eyes so need to limit the time staring at a computer screen. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Warm & dry day, for now. Thunderstorms supposed to come tonight. Got to do bills today, and then leave early for the eye doc. Turns out he’s not on my medical plan any more, but since he’s been my eye doc since I was 12 (when we lived overseas, we just scheduled my eye appointments during the summer when we were back here visiting), he’s going to give me a “cash” discount. Didn’t play any music in the car on the way in, so my brain started playing Lights of Home for me — this is as much a Bono’s going to talk about his near-death experience. “Hey, I’ve been waiting to get home a long time.”
Good morning, Meese, and welcome to another cloudy Woden’s Day. What a downer, after yesterday’s bright blue skies and sunshine! Current temp. is 41 F., going up to 59 F., with rain in time to ruin rush hour. One of the things I love most about being retired is drinking coffee while listening to reports about awful morning rush hours.
Because of my sleepless night on Monday I did not do well in my training at the gym yesterday, nor did I get anything at all done toward packing. However, Darling Niece is coming this morning to help with that. Last year she was a huge inspiration in helping me downsize my clothes closet. I have a hard time letting go of things but she talked me out of my emotional connection to certain items.
You know what? I find the news that the Russians interfered with the election results in seven states in November 2016 so staggering I cannot think of anything else! How can this NOT be dominating the news? How? It just shows you we are no longer a democracy but a kakistocracy. (Hope that’s spelled correctly.)
Wishing all a good day. Stay warm!
Good morning, 38 and cloudy in Bellingham. I’m going to the pool this morning, and I hope I’ll do more than nap this afternoon. My energy is returning but my lists are long!
Paul Krugman at the Seattle Times, Power to the forces of decency
Thanks for sharing that free-click Krugman column. I am getting more hopeful about us overcoming the 7 percentage points as I watch the special elections. A lot depends on how motivated Republicans are in the fall. If they have even a shred of remorse for the mess they created for voting reflexively R, they will help us elect Democrats to Congress and put up a firewall. We can’t stop the Pruitts, or the Zinkes or the Sessionses except in the courts but if we can take the Senate back, we can at least stop any more deplorables from gaining executive branch – and judicial branch – power.
Good morning, meeses! Thursday …
It is 34 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 41. The snow will stay east of us so our March will come in like a large housecat.
You know, people say we are being hyperbolic when we say that the White House is a veritable sh*tshow, but after a day like yesterday, is there any doubt? Between open grifting, white (!) lying, the rats abandoning the sinking ship – and the shitgibbon doing his reality TV host schtick to rile people up – it is unwatchable.
Today I will ignore it, finish my business accounting and get my March to-do list in order.
See all y’all later!
Thursday Meese
38 going up to 55 here in NY
Puerto Rico update
Shameful! Outrageous! The Treasury Department deserves to be slapped with a criminal charge.
Erik Prince is EVIL INCARNATE. If Blackwater (a.k.a. “Xie”) moves in, PR will be a police state.
Yup – appalling news – haven’t seen it in any paper but the NY Post – which I don’t usually pay attention to
{{{Denise}}} – where is there power and were not for Puerto Rico. I’ve been RTing the “xxx days without power” tweet – but I’ve also been RTing the “spring break in Puerto Rico” tweets. Some cognitive dissonance here. Thanks, moar {{{HUGS}}}
I wish someone would explain what the heck is going on in CA – from my perspective now is not the time to dump a Senator with seniority – meaning Dianne Feinstein.
Berniebros hating women, Dee. It’s OK to be an old white doddering male, but it’s not okay to be a savvy female politician if she’s old.
What is really stupid is not understanding the role of seniority in the Senate – committee chairs – will be very important if we flip it
the berniebros don’t understand anything about the way the system actually works. they just act like it works the way they want it to work – which may or may not be democratic depending on whether or not the process lets them win – and throw a whiny “they’re cheating” temper tantrum when things don’t work the way they want them to. they’re pretty much the mirror image of the Extreme Right – the main difference being which old white male they want in an authoritarian position over us.
BernieBros hate women and people of color and how reproductive rights and civil rights “distract” from their agenda. They are animated by the same thing TrumpBros are, drawn to the politics of white male privilege but from the left instead of the right.
In California, they can get away with it becasue there are enough sensible Democrats there to drown them out. I worry about the damage they will do in Wisconsin and Virginia and North Carolina and Arizona and Nevada and Texas and Florida – states that aren’t going to rally around the Their Revolution but that will suffer if the puristas peevishly stay home in November.
Nice weather — sunny & maybe 70 this afternoon. Eye doc yesterday was…. expensive. He really, really wants me in dailies even though they are, as I said expensive. He says my corneas swell with monthly lenses. And I have a retina that is trying to detatch, he says it’s about a millimeter off. So, yay for that. It took my whole medical spending account for that visit. And yesterday was bill day. I gave everybody something. Most got less than what they wanted, too bad. Glad I have beans & know how to cook them; can afford frozen collard greens & rotel tomatoes to add. I’m posting this video of Little Things because Adam is so handsome in it & I need to look at something pretty after yesterday.
Yikes – I feel you about the eye doc.
{{{anotherdemocrat}}} – Holding the Good Thought – got a candle going – sending Healing Energy to be shaped to your need. moar {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning Meese, it’s a gray Thor’s Day here in NoVa, but two red cardinals are sitting in the bare branches of the Fuji apple tree in the front yard. We’ll get rain later today. Current temp. here is 45 F., going up to 54 F.
Darling Niece came over and helped pack some of the front room yesterday. That was a blessing—there’s something about having another person to help that really eases the boredom. She plans to come over again tomorrow.
The news is so overwhelming I just can’t cope. Now Putie claims to have a missile that can overcome the USA missile shield system. Clearly, he’s after world domination.
Time for breakfast, then more packing. Hope I can find some personal time today. Wishing all a peaceful day without too much angst.
:( Did not see the Putin news – ugh.
Will look later.
Going to go listen to some relaxing music.
52 heading for 55 and overcast again. Not a great way to start a new month. Finished off February with just under 192 KWHs – not great by any means but at least more than I normally use in a no-A/C month. The overcast isn’t helping my mood any.
Little good news in the political arena – actually other than flipping some seats (yay!) there’s none. But there’s a whole lot of hope. Thanks princesspat for the Krugman article – he put it quite well. There is a movement, a surge, of decency going on right now. Both the Extremes, Left as well as Right, are trying to block it but so far it just keeps surging. Each issue has members who overlap with others. As one gets going the surge spreads to the next by way of those overlapping members. And the surge gets bigger and stronger. We won’t know if it’s going to get big enough or strong enough until the elections in November – and the following years. But it’s growing and my/our hope grows with it.
Gonna tour the internets then do some first of the month stuff. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 39 and cloudy in Bellingham. I went to bed feeling like the tRump mess might finally be ending, but woke up in the night with the fear it never will. Now I need to forget about all of it for a while.
I got a good start on my sewing project yesterday so I’m going to turn the music on and try to stay focused on sewing pillow covers today. I have seven to make, using 4 different fabrics and trims, so it’s a creative challenge but it’s manageable as all the pieces are small.
Take care everyone.
I am having sleep disturbances again, also. It goes in cycles – when I have things to worry about in the instant, my sleep is busy working on those things and ignores the tRumpering. But after a news day like yesterday (and I have not looked at today’s new news yet) it takes over. I wish Mueller would arrest someone in the Trump inner circles so that all the cards are laid on the table. Until we know what he will do when the rubber meets the road, we are all living in dread.
This is so freaking sad: Haunted: Students face fears on return to scene of shooting
This 15-year old girl should not have to carry this burden – we need to make this stop.
This is war trauma – sailors in torpedoed ships dogging down watertight doors and having to ignore the pounding & cries for help of those on the other side – PTSD. Kids in schools should never have this kind of trauma and stress. Kids outside of war zones should never be able to match events with combat veterans. The Rs are evil. Just evil.
Friday Meese
Just threw up a quick post at DKos
What has me freaked out this morning is this:
Retweeted them both. I was reading yesterday that the vultures are circling – trying to privatize the school system and – really – steal anything not nailed down.
When is the next election on the island? Do you know if they will be looking into statehood again?
Yup
That was my subject here
Elections are every four years so PR is stuck with Rossello till 2020
The status question is different – and don’t know when/if there will be another special vote
Snow blown Friday here in Saugerties
Just got a text message that my school is closed – I had already emailed students that I was cancelling class – at least this way I’ll get paid
Weather conditions weird – blowing heavy wet snow – very windy – don’t know how much we will get here
There is a dangerous storm in California right now bringing much needed moisture to the mountains but grinding everything to a halt. You guys have gotten a lot of snow this year!
Good morning, meeses! Friday …
It is 21 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 43. Sunny most of the day.
The West Virginia state senate adjourned without passing the teachers raise so the teachers wisely stayed on strike. No one should ever trust the word of a Republican legislator. They lie, their national leader lies. This story is not getting a lot of attention because the air is sucked out of the news cycle by those following the day to day chaos in the White House. There are more important stories than Jarrod Kushner’s security clearance, the stupid things the shitgibbon says every day, and – really – anything at all to do with Hope Hicks. Mitch McConnell has said that the gun debate is over and he will move on to repealing banking regulations because 2008 was sooooooo long ago, no one can remember the damage that the banks did to the global economy.
Some days, I am not sure how we survive until January 2019 when a new Congress is sworn in – or if that will be enough while we wait for Trump’s term to expire. A few days ago, Mike “QTip Head” Pence promised that legal abortion will be ended in our lifetime. JHC! There is really no way to fight it all issue by issue and we need to focus every bit of our attention on the ballot box. The Parkland students are finding out the limits of protest and death-shaming their existing elected officials (we found out with Manchin-Toomey in 2013) and are starting to focus on the midterms and elections. Protests are important to keep your cause in the public eye but the NRA and their employees – Republican electeds – count on people getting frustrated or bored and moving on. We need to do everything we can to make sure that does not happen.
California passed a law to pre-register 16 and 17 years olds when they get their drivers licenses. Someone has a bill to do that on the federal level which would be great. It turns out that the demographic tsunami we expected from Caucasians becoming a minority is going to be here sooner than expected and not based on race but on age. Pew just released a big survey that shows just how much young people despise Republicans and this! Look what happened to millennials on the way to this midterm:
See all y’all later!
These Parkland kids are very good at messaging. How can you read “locked in a classroom seeing your friends texting their parents goodbye messages” and not have tears well up in your eyes? Only a Republican could stand firm on the right of people to slaughter our children after reading that.
His tweet was in response to this: