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!
No walking this morning, I got all the way into downtown & realized I left my phone & my hair thingies at home. Now, I can go a day without my phone, but with my thin, fine, waist-long hair, have to have multiple restraints for a 30 minute walk. Reading Ari Melber’s live tweet of Rachel Maddow’s brilliant Comey interview last night. Wow. And then there’s this sub thread, that evolved into a discussion about Comey’s misogyny & hubris, really interesting. Today, my team is having a happy hour fundraiser after work, but I want to go home & read over my eulogy for tomorrow, and make sure what I’m planning on wearing works (no runs in the tights, etc).
I’m not done with the eulogy – need an ending, but here’s what I’ve got so far. There are so many speakers we’re limited to 2 minutes, and I was assigned the high school years, so here goes:
I think Minerva and I were destined to meet. In 7th grade, my first day at Pearce, I walked through a hallway intersection and there was a knife fight behind me. Min was on the other side of it. But we managed not to meet at Pearce. I moved twice after that and one of the places I lived was Salzburg for a year, then came back to Austin and went to Reagan for 10th grade. Where I met Min – who, as it turned out had lived in Munich right before I lived in Salzburg. So I’m in Austin, going to 10th grade, and in French class is this girl who also speaks German – Min. We bonded over being not the cool girls, who knew French & German and had a fondness for German junk food. I’ve never understood why Erdnusslochen never got popular over here, you’d think Americans would love peanut flavored cheetoes. I was only here for that one year, but we kept in touch, she had to put my address in pencil because I moved two more times. But we wrote letters back & forth (kids, ask your parents about the days before cell phones, texting, e-mail – we had to write paper letters & pay extra for air mail, or use aerogrammes). She was always there for me, the constant moving meant I was never the cool girl anywhere, but Min always understood, even though our conversations took weeks to complete. When I didn’t understand someone, she’d tell me what was going on. That was one of her special gifts, she could understand just about anybody, and explain them to you. But she also supported me, even as a high school kid she was not just book smart but knew how to really be there for you. Moving and being the fat, glasses-wearing new girl every year wasn’t a lot of fun. Having a friend like Min helped a lot, kept me relatively sane through those years.
{{{ad}}} – It sounds pretty good as it stands. I not sure you need a ending other than what you’ve got. Maybe “But that was just Min” – if you really want to add something. But it’s solid. Healing Energy and moar {{{HUGS}}}
Would love to read the subthread about Comey’s misogyny, which I tweeted about this morning, but could not find it in the link.
there’s a reply from Julie Z something, click on it & there’s discussion, then further down in the linked thread, there’s more misogyny discussion
43 windchill 36 and sunny at the moment. There’s a front moving in but from the looks of the widget it may not get here until tonight. That would be good. Since I’m definitely gonna have a couple of days of low production, getting in one more good one first will keep me heading for 400. We got 23.3 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 287.6 – as long as the sun holds out we should reach 300 by mid-afternoon.
twitter is twittering – I’m spending less and less time on my TL and more and more time just keeping track of my notifications & replying to replies. Still manage to RT a boatload of stuff during the few stretches that I am on my TL. LOL. Still doing my same protocol otherwise – signal boost to Denise’s Puerto Rico tweets & diaries plus Black Kos twitter roundups, signal boost to Aji’s various mostly writing & some sales stuff, signal boost to anything the Parkland kids put out that I catch & Village folks I catch. That’s my “Resistance” for the time being. I did double-check my voter registration yesterday – there shouldn’t have been a problem and there wasn’t – to make sure I can vote in the May 22 primary. I’ve got a solid “Moms Demand” candidate running for state rep – the other Dem is a nice white male who “doesn’t get it” on much of anything to do with anything other than white male issues. He votes the way I want him to most of the time in City Council but he doesn’t understand why some of those votes are important. sigh. He’s safe on the City Council where we’ve got a slight progressive majority (supposedly non-partisan situation) and a progressive/liberal/union mayor – in Little Rock where we’re trying to break the R strangle-hold? No.
Need to visit Villages, read Denise’s diary, and tour the internets. And get coffee. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, Meesefolk. It was 34 when I got up this morning, with an expected high of 52, but it’s a bright, sunny day so I’ll take it. We may finally be turning the corner and experiencing spring; going by my gardens, I’d say we’re about 2 weeks behind…my hellebores usually bloom in late March and are just starting now. We also had an earthquake last night, so the weirdness continues.
I’m supposed to go to a volunteer mobilization event for our MI-10 candidate tomorrow, but I’m struggling with the idea of going. Some of it is because, although I feel much, much better, I still don’t feel like I’m operating at 100%. But I’ve also had my enthusiasm dampened greatly for this candidate. She attended the PCCC/Bold Progressive candidate training in DC last week, which by all reports I’ve ever heard is top-notch training. But she then proceeded to post video on Twitter, featuring Nina Turner’s keynote speech. I was willing to give her a pass on that, since it’s not as if the candidate selected the speakers. However, the next day, she posted an article about the training and used Turner’s words, “Any old blue won’t do.” Ugh. My district has a Cook PVI rating of R+13; in 2012, it went for Romney 55-44, and in ’16 to T***p 64-32. In other words, there is lots of “economic anxiety” in my area, and the not-so-surprising corollary is that there is also a lot of Bernie support. But I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be part of that; I’ll vote for the candidate, but I don’t think that I can, in good conscience, volunteer for her campaign.
That is really sad. Tina Turner and her revolution are doing so much damage. I cannot for the life of me understand how a woman – and a woman of color! – became a purista, willing to forego any progress if it is not fast enough. In Dane County, our candidates are librul and libruler so we can be finicky about which Democrat we want to vote for – a D will get elected and there are often no Republican challengers. In other parts of the country, you have to be willing to accept “any old blue” because the D means Nancy Pelosi is Speaker and the alternative means Steve Scalise is!
Unfortunately, it seems impossible to retrain people who have been indoctrinated by the berners – it is like a cult. :(
Good morning, 51 and cloudy in Bellingham. Looks like the next few days will be even warmer so that means the soil will be ready for plants soon. The neighborhood deer have made a trail through our garden so like it or not I need to find as many deer resistant plants as I can and just make my peace with them. The new fence will keep the veggie garden plants safe, but my flowers are fair game.
Nice to see my part of town featured in the Seattle Times today. I can’t walk the trails anymore, but my bookstore is in Fairhaven so it feels like my local village.
Take a spring hike and explore a favorite Bellingham neighborhood
It sounds delightful, princesspat!
Good morning, meeses! Saturday …
It is 34 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 55. Mostly cloudy skies are in the forecast.
The Pompeo nomination will not pass favorably out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee but in Mitch McConnell’s Senate, hearings and committee votes are simply window dressing. If the committee charged with vetting a nominee declines to approve and the Republican’s president wants a vote anyway, he shall get his up or down vote!! That the Republicans in the Senate have allowed themselves to become puppets of the Trump “Administration” should be embarrassing as hell. I hope Maile Pearl spits up on them!!
In other news: Michael Cohen soap opera, more 2016 retro, DNC lawsuit to preserve rights, Nikki Haley appears to be planning a primary challenge to Trump in 2020, Sessions would quit if Rosenstein fired.
And the conservative 7th Circuit struck down an anti-abortion law signed by Mike Pence in 2016 as “unconstitutional”. The courts are the last bulwark against a rogue administration and we need to focus on getting back the Senate to make sure that generation of judges Trump is installing meet at least the minimum level of quality. I took some comfort from reading that the Angry Apricot is peeved that “his Justice” Gorsucks is “turning liberal.” He isn’t, of course, but the thought of him stewing over that insult made my day.
See all y’all later!
Good Saturday Meese
30 degrees here in NY going up to 50 and sunny (no snow – yay!)
Puerto Rico
This really sucks
Lin Manuel
Though the Berners in NY have jumped on the Cynthia Nixon bandwagon – Cuomo has solid backing from Puerto Rican voters – who are not going to forget what he did for PR and USVI from the beginning – not just words – but actions
Austerity measures for a territory on life support? What kind of idiots are on that board??!!? Gawd, we have to put “Fix the Mess in Puerto Rico” high on our to-do list for when we regain power. There needs to be some long-term fixes that give the people of the island control over their own economy and future. It should be embarrassing to everyone in our country that we effectively have a colony – and one we treat so horribly.
Sadly – the PROMESA Board was pushed through under Obama and he signed it into law – and made the appointments. He had very little wiggle room – PR was denied the right to declare bankruptcy (dates back to Strom Thurmond)
Not raining yet, but it’s supposed to so I’ll move my plants out to get some free water. Getting ready for the internment. Got to figure out next week’s breakfast, since there will be no time to cook this weekend.
52 might make it to 65 maybe, cloudy, chilly, and may or may not rain. I just got back from grocery shopping (did visit the Market but didn’t buy anything – mostly looking to see where “my” vendors are placed this year. I’m on my last gallon of frozen blueberries from last year. Hopefully they’ll last until the strawberries come in. Even more hopefully even though I’m now on Social Security I’ll be able to keep my goal of “eat local and/or in season” for fruit and tomatoes. Fruit and fresh green beans in season are mostly what I get at the Market. You know there’s something really wrong with the American system when “local and in season” is more expensive than “grocery store food” – but it is. So when I was trying to figure out how best to use my food dollars for environmental as well as health I chose fruit as my category to get at the Market.
When my friends talk about how upset the news is making them, I tell them to turn it off. Pick a news roundup they trust more than less, watch/listen once a day, and let it go at that. The frenzies the 24/7 news cycles are generating are bad across the board. Lousy for everyone’s physical as well as mental/emotional health. Everybody is running on adrenaline leading to adrenal exhaustion. And it makes people so incredibly manipulable and that’s always bad because the folks out there taking advantage of the manipulability are never acting in our best interests. Meanwhile the fundraisers get ignored and small businesses lose sales as everyone hangs on to their money with a panicky feeling of maybe needing to bug out. They don’t have a clue where, how, or why but they’re edgy and that’s bad for business as well as bad for the country and everybody’s personal health.
I need to RT Denise’s Puerto Rico stuff, Aji’s sales & patreon stuff, & whatever else I find (DK Village frequently has a few good tweets to RT) – including the Fighting Back when it posts. I also need coffee. And probably a fire as this damp chill is getting into my back muscles. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 47 and cloudy in Bellingham. RonK is going to an Earth Day event organized by Whatcom Land Trust, and I’m going start getting the patios ready for outdoor living. We used to put the furniture in the garage for winter but now we just leave it in place so the winter grime and spring pollen needs to be washed away. I also want to clean up the planting beds and start the process of moving a yew tree that’s out grown it’s pot. I can carefully losen the roots and soil from the sides of the pot, but some one else will have to wrestle it out. Per usual I’ve planned more than I can finish today, but it’s good to do as much as I can.
Take care everyone.
We cover our deck furniture with chair covers and remove them in the spring. This year I removed them on the first nice day, rushing the season a bit, and they have been under snow and ice more than usual. The snow melted yesterday and I pushed the ice off the seats and a few days of sunshine will dry them out.
The Democratic Party Weekly Address was about the Tax Scam and, while that is important, I could not let Earth Day go by without reminding people of the Democratic Party’s commitment to our planet: