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 to view previous pages, shown here with 3 pages of comments available and Page 2 circled.
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Found on the Internets …
Ha ha, love it!
Good morning, meeses! (checks calendar twice) Wednesday …
It is 70 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 90. Mainly sunny skies. We had a storm move through the area in the early morning hours but it is not cooling anything off. A front expected on Friday will (we hope) bring some relief.
The right wing attacks on Simone Biles are disgusting but not unexpected. A headline and lead in on a right-wing website (no, I did not click) claimed that the Olympics are not about individual athletes, that the purpose was to “utterly defeat other countries and prove our superiority.” That is whacked. Of course it is about individual athletes, it always has been, and “dominating other countries” is not the goal, it is the opportunity to compete against the best athletes in the world. The focus on Simone Biles, clearly the best gymnast America has ever had, was unrelenting. Being able to withstand the white-hot light of 24×7 social media and the cameras should not be a requirement to compete. The Olympics are a year late, training last year was spotty, the Tokyo games are not normal with no spectators and living in hotel rooms and dealing with the fear of infection – I don’t blame anyone has to back away from the pressure. The last thing anyone (who is not a sociopath) wants is for an athlete to push past warning signs and wind up injured.
I did not watch the January 6th Select Committee hearing but I read some accounts. It is too discouraging, knowing that the panel faces an uphill battle to counter the firehose of disinformation the Republicans and their captive media outlets (Fox and CNN and the bothsidesers on MSNBC like Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell). Republicans are pro-police unless the police are trying to stop white supremacists from overturning an election, then they use their thin-blue-line flags to beat them and maim them.
The CDC masking change is not surprising to me. I never believed that being vaccinated would stop you from spreading COVID – that made no sense to me. If you go to a restaurant and have COVIDs blown on you and breath them in, how can you not be carrying them around and passing them along to your unvaccinated children and immunocompromised friends and family? Air droplets are air droplets, they are not impacted by a vaccine and will be in you and on you. Anyway, I hope they extend the airport and airline mask mandates through the end of the year. If Republicans are intent on letting the pandemic run unchecked in their states, we can at least keep them from spreading it to other places. Dane County is 70% vaccinated and I don’t need to leave my little island of sanity until a short business trip in mid-October.
See all y’all later!
I watched. Was very moved by yesterday’s testimonies, especially these from Sgt. Aquilino Gonell and Officer Harry Dunn
Moving testimony. I have been viewing some clips this morning.
We saw some of the testimony on the news yesterday. It was wrenching.
Wednesday Meese. Looks like the heat wave predicted for us here in Kingston is not happening yet. It’s 63 going up to 79.
Puerto Rico
I won’t retweet this because I don’t want to give Charlie Kirk (whoever that is) any more attention. But this is a sample of the anti-Simone tweets and commentary. Adam Serwer nails it:
Good morning, all! The cycling and triathlon parts of the Olympics are over, nothing for me to watch until the marathon. I’m glad Simone Biles is doing what’s right for her. Working in the office today, I’ve got the yoga book to remind me to stretch and move.
Today’s supposed to be like yesterday only warmer. Since we got to 97 with a heat index of 112, that’s not comforting. But it’s 76 now and I’ve got the house open to air out. We generated 18 KWHs yesterday which is at least enough to cover A/C use. The m-t-d is 445.68 – it’s possible to reach 500. As long as we can get at least 15 a day for this last 4 production days of July.
Nothing seems to be getting better. For anybody. For some folks, like me, that’s OK. I’m not in a bad place even if I’m not always comfortable and staying steady is just that. Steady. For others that’s not. The situation is deteriorating around them and every day of not getting better means it’s getting worse. And the more work or money or help needed to get them out of the situation. If they can be gotten out of the situation. This is true for my friends. This is true for the country. And the planet. We keep on doing what we can do because that’s all we can do but. . .
I’m hearing a chainsaw down the street. I hope the widespread outage we had Monday evening/night has convinced SWEPCO it might best get caught up on tree trimming. Before we get another ice storm like in ’09 that shut down the region for weeks and got them a hefty fine from city and county. (I think having to hire every tree company in the 4-state area that Ozarks Electric didn’t get first may have had more force than the fine.)
Anyway, I need to close up the house, get more coffee, and on to my online chores. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good Wednesday morning, Moosekind! It’s a sunny day here in Ashburn, pale blue sky, pale sunlight, and all. At 10 a.m. it’s already 81 perfectly bloody degrees F., on its way to 90 F. Dare we hope we’re on a downward slope as far as daily temperatures are concerned? I always think I’m going to like summer, and I actually do, but one grows tired of the heat. That’s why we use our screened porch as a junk room. It’s always either too cold, too hot, or too windy to sit out there.
Breakfast was late this morning, that’s why we just finished a little while ago. That’s because I went down to the garden patch, picked what was ready, and watered thoroughly. One of my friends is on the same early morning watering schedule as I. I never hail him because I don’t like to talk Before Coffee. I imagine he feels the same way.
Anyway, Wednesdays are my day to give Dearly a treat, which is Soft-Boiled Egg and Soldiers. He loves it. It’s time-consuming to prepare, however.
Nothing much on this morning except laundry and attending a presentation next door. It’s about a Loudoun County-run series of excursions for seniors. I’d like to know the destinations of these excursions if they don’t involve a great deal of walking. There was a time when I wouldn’t have minded walking at all, but now that I have The Foot, the amount of walking required is a consideration. The Foot didn’t bother me all day Sunday or all day Monday, but yesterday, while I was cooking dinner, it started making itself felt. Soaked it after dinner, after which it was all right.
Well, now that I’ve bored you to bits, I’m going to get on with my day. Wishing peace, good weather, and all things desirable to everyone at the Pond.
{{{Diana}}} Healing Energy. & moar {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 64 and sunny in Bellingham. I should be outside watering the patio plants but I’m lingering indoors with a cup of tea. My day will get busy soon enough.
I was going to take a break from reading easy fantasy but the lure of what happens next is strong, so now the characters are floating in hot air balloons following the Nile River to the source and being chased by bad guys in various floating devices. Who can resist The Custard Protocol Series :)
Best wishes to all.
Those books are so much fun! I love all her series – the Finishing School, Parasol Protocol, and she has some in America as well.
Oh, hey – in case anyone knows people in/near Austin looking for work. There are 3 librarian positions available at the State Library. And 2 non-librarian ones, one is for a bilingual person. If you know any talkative bookworms, tell them about the openings in the Talking Book Program.
Good morning, meeses! Thursday …
It is 72 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 84. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast. We had a line of storms move through the area between 12:45 and 1:30 and it elicited a Tornado Warning that set off the phones at about 12:30. After a quick look at the radar, we packed up the dog and moved to the basement to watch the local weather station. The storm had a pretty nasty bow to it and, from the sounds of it, spawned a little tornado about 40 miles east of us. All it did here is mess up our sleep, having it come 3 hours into the sleep cycle with us left to piece together that and another 3 hours when things settled down.
The Senate passed the infrastructure bill framework which I think means that it just needs an up or down majority vote once the text is firmed up. I have yet to read about it and I hope that it includes pay-fors that won’t make it dead on arrival in the House. I wonder if any House Republicans will vote for it? They seem pretty bent on obstructing everything and our majority is very slim – once the new Republican Congressman from Texas is sworn in, it will be three. I hope that berner Nina Turner doesn’t win the Ohio special election for Marcia Fudge’s seat; if she does, our pro-Biden majority will shrink to 2. Too close!!
I best get back to it. Two work days left in July and I don’t have a good “to-finish” list.
See all y’all later!
Thursday Meese. 59 going up to 75 with rain here in Kingston. I’m disgusted with a big chunk of “haumanity” that wants to kill us all with their stupid.
Just saw this tweet
Jeez! That’s assault!
Puerto Rico
Good morning. Eating breakfast, watching the news. The local news does a lot of weather, including climate-change stories and general environmental stuff. Just had a story about purple martins.
Good Thursday morning, Meese! It’s kind of a blah day here in Ashburn, 73 F. right now, going up to 88 F.
We finally had some rain last night! I was in the green recliner, groggily reading a Regency, when I saw lightning. At first I thought it was an airplane, but when the flash was followed by a peal of thunder I thought, “We’re gonna git it.” Sure enough we did, at 11 p.m. It was too dark to gaze out rapturously at the rain, but I did hear it falling before I took out my hearing aids. Just hope it made inroads on the 5 and 1/2 inches we’re under normal for the year so far.
We’re planning to stick Field Marshal Montgomery’s namesake in doggy play care while we run a few errands. It will be good to get them accomplished as we’re expecting another round of thunderstorms between 5 and 11 p.m.
OMG…Miss Pink Cheeks now has her own phone! She has a Washington, DC area code, though. I suppose they ran out of Virginia numbers. We’ve been texting since an hour ago. She’s still getting used to it.
Good news from Texas—M’Daughter’s second Covid test came back negative! She thinks the first test was a false positive. She certainly had the classic Covid symptoms, including the cough, when she took the first test. In fact, the cough was what alerted her in the first place. Needless to say, we are deeply thankful, both for the negative test and for the fact that she’s been fully vaxxed since April.
Time to get started on my day. Wishing all at the Pond a good day!
{{{Diana}}} Yay! for the rain & YAY!!!!! for the good news from TX. Healing Energy & more {{{HUGS}}}
Thanks, m’dear!
It’s 75 and today is predicted to be like yesterday only slightly hotter. Which definitely means heat index in the triple-digit teens. You’d think with all this heat we’d be getting record amounts of sunshine/electricity generation but nope. Yesterday we generated 16.8 KWHs – half again that is possible & a third again that is normal. But the 462.5 m-t-d is still close enough we could reach 500 by end of Saturday. But I certainly wish that since it’s hot enough I’m having to use the A/C I was generating enough electricity to cover it. It’s close but mostly not.
Holding the Good Thought on the infrastructure/jobs bill. Which of course should have passed with everything Biden asked for in the first 100 days and people be getting paychecks from doing the work by now. And would have if Biden had the same kind of scared Congress FDR did. But FDR’s Congress was afraid of an overthrow. Too-close to half of Biden’s courts one.
Nothing of substance has changed with anybody. I don’t know how Aji manages to string two sentences together with the pain she’s in but she’s still managing to write those beautiful descriptions of Wings’s new works. (He’s got several that she was going to post last night but I got offline before she did.) Jill is facing the fact that she may have to give up the dream of off-grid in NM. The plans depended on support she’s not getting. That’s as hard as all the rest of the stuff she’s going through. Amelia & Fineena & my friend are all hanging on as the road keeps getting harder. Somebody asked what we’d do if we woke up to Bezos’ fortune and that’s a fun game – but it would not take even .0001% of that to take care of the health & housing issues of these 5 people. And they wouldn’t have housing issues if we had a decent healthcare system to take care of the health issues. But we don’t.
I need to close up the house and get my 2nd mug of coffee. Then over to twitter and a couple of Patreon sites for my daily stuff. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 67 and sunny with a high of 80 this afternoon. Thanks to Sue’s help the house is as ready for company as it needs to be so I can be in the garden today. I need a few replacement plants, and have some plants needing repotting. I’ll do that this morning and water the garden this afternoon.
Best wishes to all.
Good morning, meeses! Friday …
It is 64 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 75. The forecast calls for “smoke” which I suspect means that clouds and sun are secondary to the haze from the smoke.
JHC on a popsicle stick!!! Republicans move to block UW system virus testing and vaccination rules
Well duh! The University System just rolled out plans for weekly testing (similar to what they did in Spring 2021) for unvaccinated students and faculty: you show the card and you can get off the test schedule. That apparently means “tyranny” to Republicans who are bent on killing as many people as possible. Nass has a long history of despising the UW schools so maybe this latest scheme is intended to kill all the students and faculty so that the universities are small enough to drown in a bathtub. I hope there are some legal remedies and that the split Supreme Court (3 die-hard ahole Republicans, 3 Democrats and one Republican who has actually read the state constitution and seems to have a brain) can inject some common sense into this. No one – NO ONE – will benefit from the universities having to shut down in-person classes because of uncontrollable outbreaks. My daughter was looking forward to in-person classes for the first time in over a year – this would suck big time.
Now we find out that Delta is as contagious as chicken pox (and the common cold) and the virus lives in the airways of vaccinated people who can then spray it all over each other because we are unmasked. I wish the CDC had put more “based on current science” and “we can’t be certain” into their releases. I understand that the economy being open is important – especially with Republican governors cancelling extended unemployment benefits and with the money from the ARP running out – but can we really afford to fill up our hospitals again with people who can’t breathe? :(
Also, my reply to federal employees who don’t want to get vaccinated? Find another job – our health is more important than your #RepublicanDeathCult politics.
See all y’all later!
Well said, Jan!
Rethugs are murderous and insane.
Good morning & happy Friday! Today: work, pick up groceries…. and that’s it. There’s a couple of items that aren’t on the pick-up list for the grocery store (why not have the big container of mushrooms?) so I’ll have to go in. Definitely wearing a mask.
It’s 71 and sunny at the moment. Widget says high 97, heat index 100. Widget also says like yesterday which was high 99, heat index 116. But the hot weather breaks on Lammas and that’s a lovely gift. We generated 18.7 KWHs yesterday and the 481 m-t-d means we could, probably won’t but could, reach 500 today. Even if not, reaching 516 by end of tomorrow – very doable – gets July 2021 to 4th place. Which while not great, isn’t as bad as June 2021 so maybe we’re coming out of this cloudy year and into the sunshine again.
I was looking something up on DK and saw Ono’d posted a “help” diary for Frankie. (A/C broke & Franki wasn’t going to be able to replace it for a couple of months.) Most of the old-time Peeps are on FB so Frankie’s got a lot of “aunties” – and her kids have a lot of “grandmas” since Tricia died. But there are enough Peeps left on DK that the new A/C window unit was covered in about 6 hours flat. I’m so glad for Franki. And glad/sad/something about DK and FB and just stuff. At least there is some good news. Aji’s still waiting on test results before she can start treatment. Jill’s trapped – she doesn’t have the money or the physical help she needs to either make the NM dream work or the MO dream work. But she’s still applying everywhere she can think of. Amelia got up yesterday with plans to do stuff, then got derailed by her OS system needing updating on her phone. By the time she managed that, all her energy was gone. & the three stressful situations my friend is in, any one of which would be stressful enough, keep getting more stressful and like Jill she keeps running into dead ends on every path out she tries. Holding Good Thoughts for everybody. Hoping/praying Lammas will bring them the break they need to get through things.
Sinusitis flare last night. So sleep not good and brain currently fuzzy. But I’ll manage. 2nd mug of coffee (I only do 2 a day), then over to twitter. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good namby-pamby Friday morning, Moosekind. The “namby-pamby” refers to the pale sunlight and pale blue sky covered by cirrostratus clouds. Right now we’re at 82 F. in Ashburn, going up to 87 F. Yesterday afternoon the storm did rageth like the heathen all around us—golf ball-sized hail, downed trees, fierce rain, the lot. Not here in dry old Ashburn, though. Duh. We’re now 6 inches under for the year to date for rainfall.
Today is Lammas Eve, and today my youngest grandchild is six years old. His parents want to go to a concert next weekend, so he’s coming to spend Saturday night with us. His birthday party will take place tomorrow at a swimming pool with 10 friends.
Virginia is supposed to be full of peaches but I can never find any peach ice cream. Just roasted some peeled, diced peaches to make my own. Miss Pink Cheeks, who now has her own phone, texted that she wants some of it the next time she comes over.
I continue to mourn the deterioration of the English language. The menu in the Pub advertises “shepard’s pie.” Huh? The menu in another restaurant advertises “chicken picatta.” In the Deli a sign invites prospective diners to choose a “starter, an entrée, two sides, a drink, and a desert.” I almost said, “I’ll have the Gobi desert, please, and my husband will have the Sahara, considering that he spent four years in Africa.”
Why do I occupy my mind with such trivia? Because if I gave more than a nanosecond’s thought to the death and destruction being instituted by the Rethugs I’d want to launch myself out the window. It is said that the windows here in the Home open only three inches because it is feared that residents would jump out of them. I don’t know whether that’s true or not.
Got to mix my peach ice cream and put it in the freezer. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond!