Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Aug. 18th through Aug. 24th

August 17, 2019 JanF Community 90

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 (usually Saturday night with a Sunday date). 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!
 

 

36 Comments

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

    Morning low of 66 degrees in Madison WI with an expected daytime high of 81. Rain is in the forecast.

    Have a great day, all y’alls!!

  2. Sunday Meese. 73 going up to 90 here in Saugerties.

    Excited about the launch of the 1619 project.

    Is my Sunday topic

    Puerto Rico

    • I’ll be excited to read your post, Dee! I think about slavery more and more, living as I do in the state where it began. I am so glad we in this country are at last beginning to discuss the monstrous injustice we white people have inflicted on our fellow citizens.

      The Occupant hates brown-skinned people. How did a creature so vile get to be president? I just can’t believe how he’s destroyed all the norms and eviscerated moral responsibility! 2020 is too far off, IMHO.

      • {{{Diana}}} such a vile creature got to be president because 55+% of the white population agrees with him even if many of them would prefer a more “polite” way of phrasing it. And because that 55+% white people includes the cabal that owns 90% of MSM and uses what should be news (& entertainment for that matter) as a propaganda machine to keep it that way. Most of the “norms” and even the “moral responsibility” were only for white people anyway. Thanks to social media – and folks like Dee – we are now seeing what’s been going on for half a millennium (counting from when genocide of Natives started).

  3. Up & watching the news, tea is steeping & I don’t have to make lunch this weekend, yay. Today: church & the gym. My stomach is somewhat unhappy, but I still think I can do 30 minutes on the elliptical.

    • They had a good discussion on Up (the MSNBC weekend morning show) with the woman who wrote the essay about how the U.S. wasn’t a democracy until black people made it one.

  5. Good morning, Moosekind! Never made it here yesterday, what with finally paying some overdue bills and getting ready to attend the Democrats’ luncheon. (Re this: I won a cookie shaped and decorated like the Democratic donkey for correctly answering a question about state politics.)

    This morning it’s hot, sunny, and humid in Ashburn. At this writing it’s 80 F., going up to the mid-90s or higher. The whole week is going to be like this. I’m ready for August to take its leave.

    Politics is just as depressing as ever. On the home front, I have four articles to finalize for the next issue of the quarterly paper here. After that I have only one article to research and write, thank Goddess!

    Wishing a good day to all at the Pond.

  6. The overnight low was 74 and it’s already 80. I did manage to open up for a couple of hours this morning while I was doing the Sunday chores but close up as soon as I was finished although the A/C hasn’t actually kicked on yet. It didn’t until 5:45 yesterday evening – but it was also still kicking on periodically at 4 am. sigh. Yesterday we got 17.5 KWHs so I’m pretty sure we covered yesterday’s A/C use. We shall see about how today goes. The m-t-d is 233 so on track for at least 400 for the month.

    Good news on Bobby – a blessed pootie peep sent him just over half the total giving him what he needed by tomorrow. I don’t know. Maybe if he can think of somebody in a state that has Medicaid (his closest stateside relatives don’t) he should move to the mainland. Nobody can promise anybody anything these days but I think it would be possible if not easy for him to find a job and it doesn’t seem to be in San Juan.

    And I think good news on my Kamala search – I thought to look up the number of applications for land-to-trust in CA while she was AG. I could only find numbers for 2010 and 2015 but there were 137 applications in 2010 and 102 in 2015 which makes the 15 letters requesting denial she wrote on behalf of some state agency or other not look quite as anti-Native as that oft-repeated single report indicates. Essentially the same “Hillary rules” for when HRC was running for Senate the first time were being used against Kamala for her Senate run – factoid taken out of context. Not that I think Aji would accept that even if I were going to tell which I’m not – & definitely the DK folks writing anti-Kamala diaries and comments will start a pie fight if anyone puts that sort of thing in a diary. So I guess it’s just as well I can’t. So much of Kamala’s support of Natives, sovereignty and other issues, is wrapped up in speeches, programs, and plans that address a whole lot more groups so it’s very difficult to pull out something on a tweet. (Sure is easy to make negative accusations on tweets – but we knew that already from “Hillary rules”.) And of course she doesn’t have a Senate voting record because Moscow Mitch hasn’t let anything come to the Senate floor to be voted on. I’m still looking though.

    Sunday chores done. Checked email (how I know about Bobby – he DM’s me & it was in my email box) and now need coffee and to get to Dee’s Sunday Sermon. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  7. Good morning, 63 and cloudy in Bellingham. Yesterday was a fun but very busy day with my grand kids. When I started taking them shopping for school clothes we were in the little kids departments. Now they are all taller than I am and old enough to shop on their own, but thankfully still enjoy going with me. “It’s our tradition Grammie.” They all have different styles and sizes, but know how to shop for bargains and most importantly to ignore sizes and look for the right cut and fit for their individual bodies. I loved seeing them help each other find the right choices. Made me weary, but very grateful.

    Time for coffee and to see if we have breakfast food for everyone. We’ll be at Ava’s 12th birthday barbecue later today so I’ve got a birthday bouquet to arrange, and green chili con queso to make. Another family tradition :) Best wishes to all.

  8. Monday Meese.

    72 going up to 91 here in Saugerties NYand more thunderstorms with hail on the way.
    Got back from my trip into NYC yesterday safely. We drove into a massive thunderstorm coming back – by the time we got to my neck of the woods – we saw trees downed and messes everywhere.

    I’ve lived up here 20 years – this is the first summer we have ever had these deadly storms with hail and high winds in August, almost daily.

    Am elated to see the response to the #1619Project online – kudos abound. Of course racists be talkin’ trash – that was to be expected.

    • I haven’t had time to read the 1619 project but I saw summaries and saw the intense pushback from conservatives on Twitter. JHC on a popsicle stick!! The delicate conservative mind that it is unable to take in history without seeing insult instead of enlightenment!! Slavery was terrible. It was terrible in 1619 when the founding fathers invited it to our shores, it was terrible in 1865 when the Confederacy rose up to protect the right of rich men to own people. It is terrible in 2019 because the descendants of those rich men refuse to accept the terrible thing they did as terrible and continue to oppress the descendants of the men and women they enslaved. Sherrilyn Ifill did (and always does!) a great job.

      • I was glad to see that print copies sold out. I couldn’t pick up one in NYC yesterday.

        • The link to the PDF on the tweet is wrong, here is one that works: Full Issue of 1619 Project. It would be easier (for me) to read on paper but it appears to be 100 pages so I will probably struggle through the electronic version rather than kill a tree.

  9. Puerto Rico

    They do not feel represented by the political class, they don´t know about the economic bonanza and for years, they have seen how their predecessors leave the island in search of better opportunities.
    At the same time, they are engaged in social causes – such as environmental protection and gender equity – they are digital natives they simply didn´t know the world without the Internet and are better prepared to understand and take advantage of future innovations.
    They are known as Generation Z or “Centennials.” According to the Pew Research Center, they were born between 1997 and 2012, so they are not older than 22. And in the recent demonstrations against Ricardo Rosselló for moral and administrative corruption scandals surrounding his administration, they had an active and outstanding participation.

  10. Good morning, meeses! Monday …

    It is 61 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 79. The forecast calls for mostly sunny skies – for the first time in about a week it does not say “chance of rain”!

    I woke up to a crashed server (my own!) and spent the first two hours of my morning dealing with it. That is NOT how I wanted to start my week! I think it is a bad external device but it is difficult to know because it was a busy Microsoft Update weekend. Microsoft issued a hair-on-fire patch on Microsoft Patch Tuesday that rippled across the Internet and made everyone rush to update their servers and workstations. Generally I let the MPT updates “age” for about a week to let everyone else find the bugs in the patches but this one was being reported as must-patch-now and did impact a feature that is in place on all my servers. So I patched it and – as expected – it broke something else so Microsoft had to release an emergency patch to the patch. So the 4 hours I had spent on Saturday were followed by another 2 hours on Sunday and then followup this morning. Thanks, Microsoft! I will have to think long and hard next time about rushing a patch into place – I should probably trust my instincts, which have helped me survive 38 years of Microsoft technology choices; the problem with this one is that it was so widely reported that my clients were filling my Inbox with concerns about it. I hope that the last of the patches are done – I really have a lot of things to do today and don’t want to spend it handling problems.

    I am beyond disgusted with the Democratic strategists helping serial sex abuser Mark Halperin rehabilitate himself. I expect it from misogynist David Axelrod but Jennifer Granholm? Why??? We are powerless except for our ability to shun these terrible men so to have people associated with our party embrace and help enrich a man who abused his power to harm women and their careers is deplorable. It is not like this was ancient history and it is time for forgiveness, his abuse was exposed less than 2 years ago! Grrr.

    See all y’all later!

  11. Today will be the 15th in a row of 100+ temperatures, 20something all together. There was a tweet from one of the local weather guys about how we had a cool, wet spring so there was enough soil moisture that the summer really shouldn’t be this bad. Anyway….. I brought my gym stuff, will change on my afternoon break & hope I don’t talk myself out of going this evening.

    • I heard that some folks took offense at the title – enthusiasm for a particular candidate was seen as disrespectful to the other candidates. Quelle Surprise!

  13. Well, yesterday and today had the same 74 at dawn but oh, what a difference. Yesterday was oppressively muggy and uncomfortable. This morning feels crisp and almost cool. We shall see how long that lasts. Yesterday we got rain and it was dark enough for a couple of hours to put the PV system back into night mode. Generation was only 9.8 KWHs and the m-t-d is 242 – not helpful (although the .2″ rain was). It’s supposed to be sunny today so maybe we’ll do a little catch up. Not gonna do a lot though – angle of the sun is now such that there’s never a time when the entire system is operating at full power. There’s always shade, whether dense from the oak tree until early afternoon or light from the wild cherry from early afternoon until dark, on at least one of the panels. This will do nothing but get worse until we get a heavy frost and the oak tree drops its leaves. (& I’m still pissed at myself for letting myself be “mansplained” away from the configuration I originally asked for.)

    Looks like Kamala’s team has realized she’s got to address Natives separately and not just included in with all the plans and programs she has for Black folks & other POC. There were political attacks on her when she was running for Senator that have been picked up and carried into the presidential race. And amplified by berners and other bot-like people. But mostly with EW in the race, Natives got the opportunity to stand up, speak up, and actually be heard – and while I don’t like EW (except as a Senator) and I’m pretty damn sure the term “pandering” could actually and truthfully be used regarding her current appeals to Natives, I am totally delighted that Natives now have their microphone turned on. And Kamala will have to show them she actually is the one with the best all-around plans for them too. Castro’s Native outreach is truly good and if that were my only criteria he’d be my number one. As it is he’s my number two – and the rest are in a lump with several white women and a Black man on the “they’ll do” side and the rest on the “if I gotta, I gotta” side. Although I’ll admit one white male, Beto, is inching towards the “they’ll do” side.

    Anyway, I need some coffee and I think I’ll go watch the birds at the feeder while I drink it. The fledgling hummer just discovered the feeding ports on the hummingbird feeder last night – she’d been poking at the edges and under the fake flowers that are supposed to attract them to the ports. She figured out what the perches are for very shortly after she discovered the ports, relaxed (as much as a hummingbird does) and had a good long slurp. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  14. Good Moon Day morning, Moosekind! At 10:30 a.m. it’s 83 F. in Ashburn, with a promise of going up to 95 F. or worse. The whole week is going to be like this, until Friday.

    Got up horribly early, made a batch of Peach Bran Muffins (delicious), then hotfooted it with Dearly and the dog to Fairfax, where we picked up The Littles and their clothes for the next two days. They’ll have an overnight tonight. Just found out my child-tending services will be required three afternoons a week until October. Younger Son’s job looks like flaking out—it hasn’t even been a year yet—so he has three job interviews during the next two weeks. We would love for him to get on with the federal government but if that doesn’t happen, either the Alexandria or Arlington city governments might do. Younger Son changes jobs just about every year, usually not by choice. That’s private industry for you.

    Started working on the D-Day article last night—Great Goddess, my notes were a mess! If I’d type them up immediately, it would be OK, but I’ve been so lazy this summer. It’s taken me ages to do anything.

    Daughter-in-Austin wants me to do a yoga retreat with her and her hubby on a Greek island next April. At first I was very excited, but then I started thinking: the cost. Having to pay the single supplement. The trip insurance. Having to leave Dearly and the dog for 9 days. Wouldn’t mind not seeing the dog, but Dearly was 89 years old last Tuesday and I’m not sure I want to leave him for more than a week. I would love to go back to Greece, but only for an Aegean cruise, whereby we would sleep and shower on board and disembark to visit islands during the day. So I’ll give this one a pass.

    Meantime, I’ve been urging The Littles to study this morning, or color, or read books or something. We can’t go swimming until the afternoon because of all the classes in the pool in the mornings.

    Sorry about the server troubles, Jan, and I hope you get your sunlight, bfitz! Princesspat, hope you can rest, and anotherdemocrat, hope you can get to the gym. Daughter said it was 104 F. in Austin yesterday.

    Wishing a good day to all at the Pond!

    • This is me! “Great Goddess, my notes were a mess! If I’d type them up immediately, it would be OK.” When I speak with someone on the phone regarding a project, I make pretty good handwritten notes (usually on a screen shot of the reported issue/change) and if I were 25 years younger they would be just fine because they would be supplemented by my young brain to fill in the gaps. Now the gaps are permanent! I have started getting better at it, recognizing the limitations of my memory, but every once in a while I simply can’t pull the notes together and have to go back to the client to fill in some of the details.

      Sorry you will not have your trip! Maybe you can do something together closer to home that would not require delay in getting home if you needed to. Personally I despise traveling, I am old and set in my ways and it is an enormous inconvenience. If I could be beamed to my destination, ala Star Trek, I would consider it but travel nowadays is such a pain.

  15. Good morning, Meesefolk; 66 when I got up and going up to 82 or so today. We have finally been getting some much-needed rain over the past few days, and it’s been arriving late at night and ending early in the morning. That’s mighty considerate, although it’s been torrential and with a sound and light show, which has caused the pups some concerns. When it started Friday night, I thought it might ruin the outside time we had planned with The Kiddo and SIL, but it’s been so dry that the ground swallowed all the rain. By the time they arrived Saturday morning, the “grass” (AKA weeds and burnt out lawn) wasn’t even noticeably wet anymore.

    We had a wonderful, if brief, visit on Saturday. First thing we went to the local diner for breakfast, and then opened birthday presents at home. Later in the day, we went to a local antique/upcycling store to browse and then to the local apple orchard/hard cider brewery. I hadn’t realized that SIL is a big fan of hard cider, so he was very happy to try a flight and take advantage of their build-your-own-six-pack offer. When I go down in two weeks to pick them up on our way to a family wedding in NC, I may have to take a growler of cider to SIL. When we got home, we played a round of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, and then we had steak, asparagus, and baked potatoes for dinner with local pie for dessert. They were on the road home by 7pm, but it was a lovely, full day.

    Despite all of our efforts to deep clean and de-fur the house, SIL was still an allergic mess. One of our cats decided he was the best thing since a bowl of cream, and by the time she was done greeting him (he didn’t discourage her), he was carrying around a box of tissue for the rest of the day. It probably didn’t help matters that when we went to the antique store, he attracted the attention of the store goat (don’t ask…some stores have cats, some have dogs, and yes, some have a goat), which just made matters worse. The good news is that he never had to resort to his emergency inhaler. The bad news is that this probably ensured that it will be another two years before they come home, rather than having me make the drive to them.

    Good day to and for all!

  16. Good morning, 64 and partly cloudy in Bellingham. Another busy family day is underway. Ron has a walk in the woods planned so Ava will be here soon, the grand girls want to visit the pottery painting shop in Fairhaven, my sister moves from her rental to here, a patio dinner tonight for 10, and so it goes!

    I so appreciate reading the Moose every morning. My best wishes to all.

  17. Good morning meese, it’s 60 going up to 85 today. A brief respite from the triple digit heat is welcome. I’m still a bit groggy and sleepy but I need to start getting ready for work. This week is going to be rather long.

  18. Tuesday Meese. 70 going up to 89 and fingers crossed we won’t have another thunder-hail event today. The tree damage around here – plus flooding has been horrid.

    Today is the anniversary of the landing of enslaved people in Jamestown.

    As the right wing “pundits” freak out about the #1619Project, some words from MLK to remember

  19. Puerto Rico

  20. Good morning, meeses! Tuesday …

    It is 59 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 81. Chance of thunderstorms all day.

    Is anyone else nervous that a group of Fox News hosts and purveyors of junk economics will be in charge of trying to avert and then mitigate the effects of a recession? I hope our candidates are smart enough to warn folks that any recession in 2021, the first year of the new Democratic president’s administration, will be the Trump Tax Cut and Tariff Recession. Set the narrative now.

    Planned Parenthood has refused to require that the providers who work for them give incomplete and erroneous information to their patients and will no longer accept Title X funds. Their clinics will stay open and they will use reserves and donations to help the people who rely on them (as much as they can) but they will have a $60 million hole. I was laughing – bitterly – at the headlines from the right-wing god rags claiming that the Trump Administration “defunded” Planned Parenthood. No, Planned Parenthood chose to not sell their integrity, a concept foreign to the religious right who literally embraced a serial adulterer and payer of hush money to porn stars in order to get “their guy.” There is a lawsuit wending its way through the courts over the rule change but the court hearing it refused to delay the implementation so there is still hope that the money will be restored. It will just be difficult for women – and men – who need reproductive health care.

    I put the 1619 PDF on my Kindle and will take it with me when I run errands today, one of which includes sitting in a waiting room for an hour. I hope to have time to start reading it.

    See all y’all later!

    • I will add PP to my very small donations list – and will spend time retweeting them.
      Thanks for that Jan.

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