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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Good “morning”, Motley Meese! The week begins …
Morning low of 25 degrees in Madison WI with an expected daytime high of 48. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast.
Have a great day, all y’alls!!
Sunday Meese. 14 degrees here in Kingston NY going up to 38. Will be celebrating Nancy Wilson’s birthday today in Black Music Sunday
Puerto Rico
Good morning. The Austin Marathon is this morning, they’re actually having it this year — proof of vax required & masks where crowded. At 46, it’s a little warmer than most runners like it — and it will get up to the mid-60s by noon, when even the walkers should be done. The course runs right by my church, making getting there interesting, but once I get there, I’ll hang around outside & cheer people on for a while. Need to do some cooking today, but I’m off work tomorrow so I’ll also take some time to go for a walk.
Hey, another, i saw your tweet of Markos’ article about Russia. Read it. It laid out the situation very neatly, I thought.
Black Music Sunday
It’s 45 going up to 65 and sunny so far. Clouds are supposed to move in later today. I hope it’s much later today. Yesterday we generated 11.58 KWHs and brought the m-t-d to 121.7 – almost to what we generated last February.
Yesterday I got a letter from a very dear friend I haven’t heard from since before the pandemic. I’ve been very worried about her. The last I’d heard she’s lost her job at the library because her boss hated her and made up crap about her (Trump country & she’s not only a Dem, she’s a witch), Unemployment Insurance believed my friend and got her the benefits as long as they could but she’d just run out and was going to have to move back in with her estranged husband. Not move in as in go back to him, move in as in renting his back bedroom. But still not good. And she forgot to give me his address. She’s had little to no access to computers since she lost her job. Apparently both her computer access and her email were through her job so not only could she not get to her email often, she no longer had an email (or at least one I knew of) to get to. And the job was at the library. A place that had been a joy and refuge since she was a kid, no matter what city or how her family situation was going, now turned into a place that makes her sick just thinking of. She’s had a lot of Depression. She already had heart issues. She may or may not have had back then but she certainly does now diabetes, chronic kidney disease, insomnia, and dental issues that need to be dealt with ASAP. (And may have been. I hope. The letter’s dated the 8th and she had a dentist appointment the 9th.) She mentioned her sons (neither in NM but at least in adjoining states) and her granddaughters. She didn’t mention her daughter which I hope means everything’s (relatively) OK with her and not that she’s dead & my friend can’t talk about that yet. (Daughter was born with severe health issues. It was a miracle she made it, another that she reached “normal” (except for the shunt) by 2nd grade, a miracle she survived her teens, nobody expected her to reach 30 – and if she’s alive she’ll be 35 next month.) So. She’s alive, if not well. And I now have her address. I wrote my letter last night even though I can’t mail it until Tuesday.
Everything and everybody else seems to be trucking along. Not worse, not better, and still moving and breathing. My energy went to cat barf this morning. LOL. But I’ll do what bits of housework I can manage as I can manage it.
Off to twitter and Dee’s diary. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}
Good Sunday morning, Moose Peeps! Our current temperature in Ashburn is 29 F. freezing degrees, and our high today will be 46 F. Yesterday the wind gusted up to 50 miles per hour. I could hear it even through our thick, sound-deadening windows.
Lawks, Meese, I have been out of action since Friday night. On Friday morning I buzzed off to the gang of rheumatologists down the road. They have a super-dark, gloomy office. It’s like entering an ancient Egyptian tomb, only better ventilated. They encouraged me to go down the hall with the nurse, who settled me into a big, comfy recliner. She couldn’t find any veins in my arms, so settled for one in my hand. I told her the last vampire to draw blood left a bruise that lasted a week. She said she would use the smallest possible needle.
It’s never pleasant being jabbed but I’ve made it a rule not to flinch. So once she got the thing in and started the infusion, I was as happy as a pygmy rattler warming itself on a rock in the spring. I had a Kindle with an interesting book on it, so I was so engrossed in the story that the beep from the machine containing the bottle quite startled me. After I escaped, I felt quite all right, to the point where I even went shopping.
Fast-forward to Friday night. All of a sudden I was seized with a violent fit of shivering and chills. Couldn’t get warm to save my life and couldn’t stop shivering. It was like having malaria. When I lurched out of bed Saturday morning I was so nauseated that I threw up four times. It was awful. Then I had aches EVERYWHERE in the body–the back, the head, the neck, and so on. I felt so ill that the only things that would go down were gingerale and tea. In the evening I ate a little ice cream with some strawberries, and it stayed down. It was an absolutely awful day. I squeaked and moaned to the point where I’m sure poor old Dearly’s patience was more than tried.
Today I feel much, much better! There’s a little bit of back pain but not more than usual. I even ate breakfast, although I had to be a little careful. All that agony from ONE Reclast infusion! To borrow a phrase from Richard Milhous Nixon, “Let me say this about that. I am NEVER having Reclast again!” My bones may turn to macaroni, but I’m not having it again. I rang up my friend because I couldn’t sit at the computer yesterday and told her about my reaction. She had Reclast about four times and experienced nothing at all. I must have a peculiar body chemistry.
That’s enough about me. We have been invited to tea this afternoon so we’ll hobble over there, two elderly people on their last legs. Dearly looks a lot better now that the awful bruises are fading and he has that terrible bandage off, and I feel better too, but mah Goddess, it’s no picnic.
I’m going to try one more time to repro the Washington Post article to which I contributed. My friends were all quite excited about it.
{{{Diana}}} Healing Energy & moar {{{HUGS}}}
Here’s part of the article from the post. John Kelly, the columnist, asked what time period we’d like to travel to if we could.
“Diana Read of Ashburn, Va., would go back to Minoan Crete, “say the year 1850 BCE to be on the safe side — and I’d very likely stay there.”
That ancient place, she wrote, is the “only known civilization not founded on warfare.” The men of Crete sailed the Aegean, trading the olive oil produced on the island.
“With the men away, it was women who ran things,” Diana wrote. “The great temple complex at Knossos was where the grain, wine, olive oil and other comestibles were stored. In hard times, the priestesses dispensed enough food that no one had to go hungry.
“In those pre-patriarchal times, women were valued as the givers and nurturers of life.”
The hot climate meant children went clothing-free until adolescence. Men wore a garment that resembled a kilt. Women wore long, tight skirts and bodices that left their breasts exposed.
Wrote Diana: “Imagine never having to wear a brassiere, a garment designed to confine, control and hide the human breast! To live in a society in which the Great Mother Goddess Rhea was worshiped, in which women were revered rather than subjugated, abused and despised would be paradise.”
Lucy Johnson of LaGrangeville, N.Y., said she’d like to live during the Upper Paleolithic, which lasted from 40,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago.
“I would live in a small community, but we would get together once or twice a year with other communities and exchange news and goods and spouses,” Lucy wrote. “That is to say that these get-togethers were times when the young folks could get to know one another and pair up — and if it didn’t work out, they could try again at the next fair.
“Back at home we each had our roles, but each role was recognized as essential to the survival of the group and no role was held above another.”
One man might be skilled at hunting, another at chipping spear points. Women who knew the medicinal qualities of plants were as valued as ones who could sew.
Wrote Lucy: “Life was hard, but equal. Each person was respected for what they could do.”
Interesting, isn’t it? Most contributors wanted to go back to quite a recent time, including a 26-year-old who wanted to live in the 1960s and 1970s, “before social media.”
Outside of the Indigenous cultures our society has made sure we get distorted views of, we really have to go a long way back to get any kind of peaceful and egalitarian society. sigh. (You did good. He missed the very clear point.)
Good morning, 43 and mostly cloudy outside my window today. Yesterday was very fun with family, cooking and visiting together. Nice to have the house full of laughter and conversation. Today will be an elevate my legs and rest day but that’s to be expected. Best wishes to all.
Good morning, meeses! Monday …
It is 32 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 36. Brisk winds precede a front moving in that “they say” will bring a winter storm – not a lot of snow but ice tonight and tomorrow. Lovely. I have to travel this week but I think I can wait until after the storm passes and is cleaned up.
Cancun Ted Cruz, unable to continue to interfere in Canadian politics after the Christian White Nationalist funding was shut down and the government swept up his literal Confederates, has turned his sights to criticizing Mexico. Mexico will have none of it and took a shot at Cruz and the Republican Party’s attack on elections and democracy itself:
Zing!!
I find it difficult to believe that Russia wants a full-scale ground war in Europe. Maybe the war talk is to take the attention off Russia’s terrible exploitation of their Olympic athletes and the continued embarrassment of having to compete under the name ROC without flags and anthems. I really don’t care if the Olympics are permanently cancelled – there have to be plenty of venues for athletes to compete in their sports. The games have become political footballs and often a way to allow dictators to gloss over their human rights violations and solidify their power over their own people.
I guess the pandemic ends on February 28th! Some people are not happy that masking will be optional in colleges in the University of Wisconsin System beginning March 1st. I hope the hospitals are ready – universal masking in a lot of densely packed indoor spaces has helped slow the spread. I have an out-of-town trip to take in mid-March and the airport/airplane mask mandate will end the day after I return. I think I will be able to avoid air travel during the next surge.
I have to prep some computer hardware for recycling. The last bit of archived data from my server has been stored in the cloud and it is time to clear the disks and get the computer to the e-waste recyclers. I have a boxful of old disks that need to be cleared as well so I will do that today. I got my personal taxes ready to mail – when the post office is open – and my business taxes are ready to transmit. TurboTax said that they are not ready to take transmissions so I have to research what that is all about and when they expect to fix the problem.
See all y’all later!
How do you store things in the cloud?
You can purchase a Microsoft 365 license and it allows you to store up to 1.1 terabytes (1,000 gig) of data in the cloud. You access the storage using folders just like you are used to but instead of the data in them being on your computer they are on Microsoft servers in the cloud. They manage backups and security and you have your documents available from wherever you have Internet. It pretty much requires a high-speed Internet connection but it worked with my slow-speed Internet of 12mbps, just not as crisp as my newer 600mbps service). The cost is pretty reasonable, for a Family subscription it is $99 a year, for a Personal subscription, it is $69 a year. I have the business version which includes email services and advanced sharing (SharePoint instead of OneDrive) and costs $60 per year per user. You may need that because it works better with Apple products. There are other companies that offer cloud storage services such as DropBox which will want to take over your computer, there is something from Amazon that has terrible up-time and probably something from Google that they will cancel once you love it and rely on it (it is their nature). Anyway, I now have all my server folders in the cloud and can access them from my computers and my tablet when I am away from my desk.
Thank you! My Mac is driving me so crazy and adding to my stress that I’m contemplating saving up for a Lenova Thinkpad on Black Friday.
Problem is, whatinell do I do with all my docs that are in Apple’s abysmal word processing software?
I think that there is a way to convert them into Word. Let me see what path you have available.
Obviously, the Windows solution is much more compatible with Microsoft 365 and if you got it with your new computer, you might get a deal.
Monday Meese. 28 here in Kingston NY going up to 54.
Right there with you, Sis! I had a coupla things to say about that on Twitter.
Puerto Rico
Warm morning & going to get up to 80 this afternoon. Got a lot of cooking done yesterday, so I will get in a walk today. I swear. For now, I’m eating breakfast & watching Mythbusters.
Good Monday morning, Moosekind! It’s another very bright, sunny day in Ashburn. Too bad the temperatures aren’t keeping page. It’s 42 F., going up to 64 F. This projected high is better than what I saw on the TV last night.
We had a very low-key day yesterday, leavened only by an invitation to tea at Younger Son’s house. There, we enjoyed some of the birthday cake (horribly rich, from Baskin Robbins), and watched Nathan Chen ice skate. Miss Nora, all flowing hair, long legs, and coltish grace, deigned to join us for a few minutes. For once, she didn’t have her online Chinese class yesterday. Little Karl demonstrated some tai kwon do moves. He and Younger Son had just come from a swimming lesson.
Younger Son, by the way, has just been approved for full-time telework! That means he’ll hardly ever have to do the 80-mile round trip to the office except for occasional meetings. It won’t start yet, but eventually it’ll happen. Apparently it all depends on when the new printer arrives. One day both parents will be working at home full time. That’s so different from the way Dearly and I had to bring up the boys! We were always racing off to work, always scrambling for before- and after-school child care, always frantic to figure out how we were going to handle summer vacations, Christmas vacations, and the like. I realize that working at home means the parents actually have to work, but the point is, there will be two adults present at all times. DIL arranges her work so she can see her little son on and off the bus in the mornings. At 13, Nora is big enough to see herself on and off.
I am still feeling better, thank Goddess, although unable to eat much. That’s okay, my weight was down a pound this morning. Long may it last.
No other news. Wishing everyone at the Pond a good day!
It’s 56 heading for 70 and sunny at the moment. But the clouds are already moving in. Hopefully they will stay light or at least leave gaps for the sun. Yesterday we generated 11.69 KWHs and brought the m-t-d to 133 – still 14 short of the 2.5K system in Feb 2015 and 70 from the ‘be nice’ goal of over 200 for the month.
I forgot it was Presidents Day and put the mail out. Now that Dee’s reminded me I’ll bring it back in. I need to go to the grocery store today. Wish I could hold out until Thursday since I need to go to the Co-op for supplements. But I’m gonna run out of canned catfood before then. At least the likelihood of most of the store employees still being masked is good. This week.
The rash is easing off – but not enough I can use any kind of topical salve or ointment for the muscle pain. Which is most certainly not easing off. And the pain meds, either the Rx or the Ibuprofen, aren’t working as well. sigh. Aashir’s nana suggested Ibuprofen followed 2 hours later by Tylenol – she says it’s almost as good as codeine. If I remember to get Tylenol I might try that.
Nothing new from yesterday – or last week – with anybody that I know of. Except – prayers up or something. Jill’s son is almost finished with Basic and heading for AIT next – but as soon as that’s done looks like he may be shipped to Germany. If we’re at war with Russia will be shipped to Germany and probably the front lines shortly thereafter.
Off to twitter then to the store. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Oh, Bfitz, I do hope you can get some relief soon!
Vibes of white healing light and rosy pink clouds of love to you.
{{{Diana}}} Thank you and I know I will. I just so very blessed that this is shingles – a temporary thing that I can get vaxxed for once this flare is over – and not something chronic. Healing Energy and {{{HUGS}}} back to you.
Good morning, meeses! Tuesday …
It is (hold on, my weather widget crashed) … 19 degrees in Madison, feels like 5. Freezing mist right now and we are expecting freezing rain by 8am (lasting all morning) – temperatures will stay under 30. It will be interesting if the forecast closes schools – does anyone want to send kids to school with the possibility that they will be stuck there? Some parents might!!
So Putin did the dirty deed – claimed that Ukrainian separatists in the eastern regions are being mass murdered by the Ukraine government, declared that he recognized two areas as independent countries and has moved his army into them to protect their sovereignty. By the time I went to bed, the world’s economic powers had started imposing sanctions. The pundits were either saying that Putin doesn’t care or that Putin has bit off more than he can chew. I suspect it is the former – he has the power to force the people of his country to accept whatever he does. There is no one there who can topple him or restrain him. We watch and wait.
I have a number of projects to work on today and the challenge will be to not start them all at once and feel overwhelmed. I need to set up my List of Three and do them one at a time.
See all y’all later!
Good Tuesday morning, Meese!
Monty got me out of bed at 4:45—I wasn’t asleep anyway—to take him out. I didn’t mind getting up as I’m convinced Putie is going to invade today. Just had a feeling.
So far he’s only ordered troops to those two provinces, so we’ll see.
Day is dawning. There are clouds scudding across the sky and a half-moon was visible at 5 a.m. The air smells of distant rain and we have 46 F.
Going to go back to bed for a bit. See y’all later!
Tuesday Meese. 29 here in Kingston going up to 51 and rain.
Puerto Rico
Power outage
DR
Good morning. I got in a walk yesterday, didn’t really push it, but at least it was something. Will log off work early today & get in another one, if it’s going to be in the 80’s, I’m going outside. Big cold front coming tomorrow — maybe a freeze tomorrow night. I’ll have to log off work to cover my plants. But today will be really nice.
Our high of 58 at dawn was followed by a sharp drop to 30. Which it is now. It might inch back up to 40 by midafternoon. However high it manages to get on this cloudy day, that will go into a long slope to 17 by dawn tomorrow. The lights are on. So is the PV system, surprisingly. Barely, but on. Yesterday we generated 9.1 KWHs and the m-t-d is 142 – if by some miracle we manage 6 today we’ll have edged out the 2.5K system’s February 2015 and still have 6 more days of generation in the month.
As with Hitler, we will have war if Putin decides to have war. And the only choices we have are how soon will we respond with anything that could stop him/push him back. Presupposing Dems stay in power to respond rather than betray all our allies and join him as the Rs would/will do.
I’m better. Not a lot better, but still. Day 6 on the anti-virals, the rash is starting to ease up. Even clear up in places. Alternating Ibuprofen and Tylenol has helped with the muscle ache. I could sleep on my right side part of the time last night – a first since the shingles started. I didn’t sleep much but that was sinusitis and not shingles. (The front bringing the rain that hurts Murf’s joints also triggered a sinusitis flare.)
Same ol’ same ol’ with everybody. So I guess we keep on truckin’ – until we run out of road or something. Off to twitter. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
{{{Thank Goddess you’re feeling a bit better, Bfitz!}}}
Good morning, 25 and cloudy outside my frosty window today. I got most of the party stuff put away yesterday, changed the beds, and laundry is underway, whew! And my legs are recovering, which is always a big relief. So what shall I do with my day? I’ve got an easy sewing project cut and ready to sew and a stack of books to read so I have choices. Best wishes to all.