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 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 (right before “Leave A Reply”) and use the Pages Tool, shown here with 3 pages of comments available.
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COUNTING DOWN THE TIME UNTIL DECENCY RETURNS …
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Good morning, meeses! Saturday …
It is 19 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 37. Sunny this morning and clouding up a bit later in the day. This weather pattern appears to be locked in for the next week. Weather is not much of an issue – we are here with no travel plans until after the new year when campuses reopen.
I was glad to see President-Elect Biden using the bully pulpit to shame the Republican Senate into doing something. It looks like the No Labels bill, with a few tweaks, will be what eventually passes. I hope they put enough poison pills into the liability protections that any business planning to take advantage of the pandemic to harm their workers and customers with impunity stop and think. I believe that the No Labels bill has “temporary” liability, whatever the hell that is – can you temporarily die from the negligence of your employer, can you temporarily get a devastating illness that drives your family into bankruptcy? Whatever. We will have to hope that we can repair the bad parts – we desperately need the good parts.
I am trying to not watch the minutiae of the wind down of the worst presidency in history. I hope that Joe Biden can simply disband the advisory committees that are being filled with tRump pals, I hope that justice will eventually catch up to those who give and accept self-dealing pardons, I hope that we can limit the damage the unfireable Postmaster Louis DeJoy will be able to do. But none of these things are in my power to control. I am very glad that Joe and Kamala are surrounding themselves with professionals – smart, competent women and men who know how government is supposed to work and who will do the massive job of cleaning the mess made by putting a truly terrible person in the White House.
I have a bunch of articles up in tabs to read later, mostly so I can chortle over the failure of the tRump “legal” team. I laughed out loud at Rush Limpbough bemoaning that MAGAts are coming across as “kooks.” Well, yes, because they are, doodiehead!! I thought it was funny that the “Stop the Steal” griftery fund raising does not include Pence’s name – apparently he does not want anything to do with it. He will be the least employable of the deplorables who worked in the tRump malAdministration. He has no discernable skills and he will never get the butt stains off his nose.
I will put the Biden speech up in a post later this morning. Obviously Fighting Back will retire – we fought and won – and I am trying to think about what I want to call the president’s weekly addresses other than Weekly Address. I want to showcase more than the president’s addresses so I may go with something more generic. We shall see! I have (:::checks widget:::) 46 days + 3 to the weekend after the inauguration, to decide.
See all y’all later!
Good Saturday Meese. Weather here in Kingston NY is nasty – cold, rain, however we aren’t getting hit by the big storm sending lots of snow to places like New Hampshire.
Puerto Rico
Good morning, everyone. I hate cedar trees — we call them “cedar” but they’re really a type of mountain juniper. I barely slept last night because of my allergies, and this was after taking zyrtec yesterday morning, benadryl with dinner, and more benadryl around 1 am. My watch says I got 4 hours of sleep. Ugh. I did have a good walk/run yesterday: 6 running segments, all at 90 seconds. Going to do some cooking today so I’ll be able to walk/run tomorrow afternoon, maybe do 7 or even 8 running segments. It’s cold here, so I’d really rather go out in the afternoon if possible.
{{{anotherdemocrat}}} – I hope the pollen stops or gets washed away soon or something. Trouble breathing sux and that’s all there is to it. Healing Energy & moar {{{HUGS}}}
Apparently we dipped below 30 about dawn. It’s 36 now heading for 60. Sunny at the moment which I hope holds. We got 7.5 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 17 – not on track. sigh. at least it is producing.
Cats are weird. The boys have decided they don’t like their food. Three days into a 22-lb bag. I told them “tough nooggies, guys”. So they seem to have decided that the new drill is “eat 2 bites from their own dish, pause to give me a dirty look, then go eat the rest from somebody else’s dish.” Stealing it adds flavor or something. Goofy cats.
I experimented with a supposed no-yeast sandwich bread recipe last night. It wasn’t cool enough to slice until this morning. It’s not bad. Definitely not a sandwich bread – there’s no way it would hold together with any kind of “filling” – but it’s OK as plain bread and I expect it will make fine toast. A savory toast as I grabbed the wrong bottle of olive oil and made it with rosemary-infused oil. LOL. I sliced it all and put most of it in the freezer. If I decide to do it again I think I’ll get a smaller bread pan so I can do a half recipe. That is one of the blessings of a quick bread over a yeast bread – you can reduce the recipe without causing problems.
Off to read and do twitter stuff. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
: ) about the flavored olive oil. I’m getting my groceries through curbside this week – it’s only $5, and I’m exhausted so it is worth it. Anyway, the dinner recipe I’m making: Crisp Gnocchi With Brussels Sprouts and Brown Butter calls for 4 tablespoons of butter & the HEB website has an herb butter that sounded like it would go well in this. I checked “no substitutions”, so I hope I get what I ordered.
Holding the Good Thought for your dinner recipe. (I’m glad you’re getting curbside – it’s so much safer as well as easier on you so you can rest a little.) moar {{{HUGS}}}
Good Saturday morning, Moosekind. Never made it to check-in yesterday because of sleeping until 7 and then letting the day get away from me. I wore two masks to get my gel mani. The technician was wearing a mask, of course, and there is a plexiglass partition between her and me so I just shove my hands through the little window at the bottom. Then I went to spend wildly at the grocery store. I want to start limiting my excursions there, even though I go double-masked with disposable gloves on.
Enough about that. I’m still wrestling with Chapter 9, I asked myself whyinell I decided to send my characters on a boar hunt. Answers: (1) To avoid the middle-of-the-book blues, which every novelist experiences, and (2) Guys like to hunt. Also, the boar has been very destructive to livestock and crops for the past several years.
Last night I gazed dolefully at my chapter and realized that I’m going to have to rewrite it completely. For one thing, Chapter 9 introduces a new character and he’ll be very important later on. This chapter is important in several ways, as it provides motivation for several different developments. I can probably salvage bits of 9, but certain events will have to be rearranged.
Oh, I forgot the weather! The sky is trying to clear itself. Right now we h ave cold blue covered with white veils of cloud. It’s very nasty outside, with a current temp. of 44 F. and winds gusting up to 40 mph. It is not a very nice day for a walk!
Found out yesterday that my friend at Greenspring is in the skilled nursing part because of a leg infection. As she is extremely tech-averse—she can deal with email on a desktop but nothing else—I can’t text her, even though she has a smartphone. I called her son last night to ask about her and he says she hasn’t even plugged her phone in! What a mess. Thank Goddess my 90-year-old Dearly Beloved can text and do FaceTime and other things.
Hope everyone at the Pond will have a good day. As someone said on Twitter—46 in 46!
{{{Diana}}} Good luck with chapter 9. You are the author & I am not but one my writing (& acting) friends told me that for it to feel right, what a character does has to make sense from the character’s point of view, not the author’s or the actor’s. So that boar hunt, for whatever reason you the author want it there, needs to make sense to the guys doing it. So I think your last reason – the boar is dangerous and has been doing a lot of damage to livestock & crops & just lucky it hasn’t killed a child yet – is the one to solidly keep in mind as you rewrite the chapter. Have fun. moar {{{HUGS}}}
Thanks, bfitz! Some people hunt to show how rich they are (equipment, horses, clothing, all very expensive), but yes, this boar just gored two of the exploratores’ horses. One had to be put down. A military installation can’t put up with such losses, so they’re riding out to get that creature. :)