Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: November 6th

November 5, 2022 JanF Community 86

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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37 Comments

  1. Good morning, 33, cloudy and a cold wind is blowing. I’m going to try to stay focused on real life today and to not be overwhelmed with election news. Fortunately I’ve got lots of prep for tomorrow’s birthday celebrations to keep me busy. And if that doesn’t do it there’s always laundry to do! Best wishes to all.

  2. Good day after election day morning Meese. Been up since very early processing stuff – watching results roll in.
    Clearly no “red wave” happened.

    • From what I saw before I went to bed, there was no red wave. I just got up and have only checked Arizona so far. They have 91% counted but they have a lot of “late earlies” to count (early votes that came in right before or right on election day). They have to be processed – envelopes opened, signatures checked, votes tabulated – and the final results are not expected to be ready to report until Friday.

      The Democrats here are winning the key state wide races – US Senator, Governor, Secretary of State, Attorney General – but they tightened considerably; when I went to bed we were up by four to five points in most races, now only up by thousands of votes. My CD is a tight 1,500 vote margin! I am trying to figure out who the “late earlies” are and I hope they are mostly Democrats. All in all I would rather be ahead than behind especially since the screams of “rigged elections!” is certain to start immediately.

      My hope is that we hold the Senate because we really need another two years of stocking the federal courts with decent people – so much damage has already been done. Fetterman’s win will help ease the anxiety a bit.

    • Ha! I am laughing at the headlines about McCarthy’s big victory party having to be put on hold. There are a number of races to decide yet – in Arizona we appear to have lost a seat and picked up a seat so a net 0. Sharice Davids won despite the efforts of the Kansas legislature as she was gerrymandered out of her natural constituents and into the wheat fields of Kansas – the Kansas wheat farmers apparently were fine with her. The New York legislature shot themselves in the foot with their ham-fisted gerrymandering attempts that got tossed and the resultant CD map will probably leave them with fewer seats.

      If McCarthy has to govern a House majority with a razor thin margin, he is going to be in a world of hurt. About 20% of his caucus wants to blow up the government (literally!) and will not let him cut any deals that will keep the government open or avoid defaults on our debts. It will be a case of “be careful what you wish for” as the nation discovers just how useless McCarthy is.

      Georgia Senate to a runoff! I am sure that Senator Warnock is exhausted by having to run 4 statewide campaigns in 2 years – I hope he can get his 6 year seat and take it easy for a while.

      And the TFG! Ha! The recriminations and yelling has begun! The basketful of deplorables chosen by tRump only prevailed in the reddest of red states. Sad trombones.

      I am glad that Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has dispatched his unfit opponent and hope that he can retain his veto pen. If the Republicans get their super-majority and wield it in lockstep, they can essentially neuter him and run the executive branch by legislative fiat. :(

  3. Good morning, meeses! Wednesday …

    It is 55 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 68. Mainly sunny skies are in the forecast.

    Well, election season is done and vote counting season has begun. I am thrilled beyond belief that the election ads will no longer blare at me from my TV and my electronic devices. I have not had a chance to look at the election results this morning except for my own state but when I went to bed Fetterman had been declared the winner and Ryan had been declared the loser. So we picked up one open Senate seat. I was sad to see the North Carolina results, I thought Beasley had a chance. I was really sad to see Val Demings lose in what appears to be a Florida bloodbath for Democrats. Lots of self-loathing seniors there – maybe they expect the rest of the country to save their Social Security and Medicare and feel just fine voting for the worst people in the world. You know that DeSantis will now release his long awaited Florida abortion ban – I expect a ban at conception now that he is essentially King of Florida. It is difficult to believe that in 2008, Barack Obama won Florida – what an incredible turnaround.

    I need to get back to my projects. Yesterday, besides being election day and lunar eclipse day and the second day of the time change, was also Microsoft Patch Tuesday and that usually means more support calls. I need to try to get a few projects done before that starts.

    See all y’all later!

  4. So, Texas sucks. Even more than I thought. I thought Abbott would probably win, but I thought at least our spectacularly corrupt Lt Governor and Attorney General might go. Even Uvalde County voted for Abbott. What the h? When the 2 astronomy shows are over, I’m going to re-listen to the audiobook and revise my review. Please do come by Bookchat tonight, even if you’re not a fan. It’ll be a good distraction, and if the news in your area is good, you can tell people what you’re reading and/or cheer the rest of us up.

  5. Well, it was a blood bath in AR. But that’s nothing new. It has been since the Roberts Court gutted VRA. The christofascists know very well that Sanders is a good little obedient submissive stepford female whose mouth/speaker broadcasts either twitler or her daddy so they didn’t have a problem putting her in the governor’s office. At least my local reps, including state legislature, all stayed blue. And we did, barely, defeat Issue 3 – the religious “freedom” amendment to the state constitution.

    It’s 65 heading for 80 and sunny at the moment. Yesterday we did manage to make it to 6 KWHs and the m-t-d at 49 is still on track for 180. With one completely dead panel, too.

    Holding the Good Thoughts we hang onto Congress. Off to twitter. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  6. Good Wednesday morning, Moosekind. It’s 48 F. now in sunny Ashburn, going up to 60 F. later.

    I’m tired and disheartened because the people I hoped would win did not win. Thought there was going to be a blue wave because of women. Gods, was I wrong. Can’t believe my 13-year-old granddaughter Nora is going to have fewer rights than I had.

    Was awakened at 4 this morning by a horrible smell, which turned out to be Mandy’s poop. Luckily, most of it was on the acrylic chair mat or the pee pad, but it was the most horrible odor! Not a pleasant thing to deal with at that hour. Since then she has peed twice more on the carpet, even though I have had her out of doors several times. I washed the pee pads and put them on the porch to dry. I’m upset anyway because of the election (thought Tim Ryan would win over that awful Vance), and now this.

    The GOOD news is that at 8:30 this morning I received a call from Chad at Vanguard, who brought in Louis from somewhere, with the result is that my access is now restored! I was so pissed I put in for a huge withdrawal of my Roth IRA, which should keep me out of debtor’s prison for a while. A tip from someone on another blog led to this happy result.

    Feeling very tired, discouraged by Mandy’s behavior, my personal problems, etc. Wishing all at the Pond a good day.

    • {{{Diana}}} maybe check with the folks you got Mandy from to ask for advice. Either directly or the name of a dog trainer/behavior person. There’s got to be a way to get Mandy to stop doing this but I know getting mad and then cleaning it up isn’t it. Holding the Good Thoughts & sending Healing Energy. moar {{{HUGS}}}

    • Yay, Chad from Vanguard! You are right to move your money out of there as soon as is feasible. First, they don’t deserve your business and, second, if they can screw you up once, they can surely do it again. Security is important but there are ways to do it without totally shutting you out of your accounts for months. I often wonder, after I finish a complicated transaction related to personal finances or insurance or health care, how people manage these things as they get older – or are people who never worked outside the home and have no familiarity with how business works. If they don’t have children and grandchildren to help them, it would be daunting.

  7. Good morning, 31 and sunny outside my window today. Just waking up, still to sleepy to read election analysis but feeling great relief re the results. Maybe the tRump fever that has been raging is finally breaking :::sigh::: Busy day ahead, working with Sue to clean this old house and getting ready for birthday dinner tonight.

    Best wishes to all.

    • Washington state got bluer, I saw. Some of your holds and pickups will make the Republican House majority even thinner. I saw that there are 12 seats that might hold or flip what would let us keep the majority – fingers crossed! It makes the dunderheadedness of the New York Democratic Party look even worse. We lost 4 winnable seats there.

  9. Thursday Meese. 38 here in Kingston going up to 66. Still processing midterm results in my head. Looked for good stuff – like this:

    Meet PA Majority Leader Joanna McClinton

    Other news was very distressing – though not surprisng to me.

    • I am not sure what to think about Texas. It seems like every hope about electoral success there has been dashed. We hoped that Hispanic voters would put us over the top electorally but it turns out that Hispanic men are mostly Republicans because they have bought the "it’s not YOU we think are rapists and drug dealers and criminals, it is all those other people who look like you and share a common heritage with you." – like the Log Cabin Republicans, people of color who vote to enable the very people who despise them are perplexing. Maybe by voting with the majority they think it makes them part of the majority? Anyway, time to think a little smaller in Texas and put our Big Change electoral energy elsewhere.

      • The “Hispanic/Latino” demographic (which is useless) is often lumped into the “poc” box. Problem with that is “poc” doesn’t work with people who list themselves as white and are offended by being thrown into a category with Black people and others that they look down on.
        The levels of anti-Black racism in the Hispanic/Latino grab-bag is an issue that a whole lot of people don’t want discussed. However, it’s real – mostly talked about and written about academically by Black Puerto Ricans, some Afro-Cubans and a few Afro-Dominicans

        • Thank you for that insight. I knew that many Latinx identify as white not Hispanic. The demographics now break out that category so that Republican Mexican Americans (many second generation) can look down on new migrants from Mexico and scream about border security. Unless there is a miracle, the gerrymandered CD 6 – a proud Tucson Congressional District once served by Gabby Giffords – will have one of them. You know from his strut and how he displays his 6 children that he does not consider himself anything but an entitled white male.

          I was dissuaded after 2020 from thinking about Hispanic/Latinx as a monolithic voting bloc – certainly Florida and south Texas put a lie to that. One of the post-election talking heads yesterday said that we need to stop thinking about the Hispanic vote and concentrate on the Hispanic voter each one with their own unique history that drives their vote. It is interesting because Black women and the large number of single white women see the bigotry and misogyny directed at them and are willing to band together to put the right people in office. I am pretty sure I could never vote for a politician who trashed my people, took away my rights and called me an animal. We can call them Broken Mirror Republicans – like Black, Jewish, married white women, and LGBTQ Republicans, willing to vote to enable those who despise, and often oppress, them.

  10. It’s trying to rain, but not really. Cold front tonight — and it might actually be cold this weekend. I brought a U2 t-shirt to change into just in case. Working in the office today, but tomorrow we’re closed. Bookchat went ok last night, not huge but not silent either. At least it was distraction from the damned election. I know things went well a lot of places, just here things went breathtakingly badly. Austin did our usual thing, and the counties north & south of us are blue, but most of the rest of the state is disgusting. Uvalde county went overwhelmingly, deep crimson red. Uvalde.

    • I will not scream out loud. I will not scream out loud. I will not scream out loud. I will not scream out loud. I will not scream out loud. I will not scream out loud.

      • Did the young people stay home? The high youth turnout (especially young women) appears to be what changed in a lot of the states where the blue sandbags held up against the red wave. I wonder if the sheer size of Texas is what makes it so daunting and feeds a "my one vote won’t matter" sense of despair?

  12. Good morning, meeses! Thursday …

    It is 48 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 61. Sunny skies are in the forecast. Slightly cooler than normal but pleasant – the sun makes a big difference. My morning walk includes large stretches where the sun is baking me and it feels great this time of year.

    There are still about a half a million votes left to count in Arizona, about 300,000 in Maricopa County (Phoenix) and about 100,000 in Pima County (Tucson). A large batch that hit last night padded Katie Hobbs’ and Mark Kelly’s leads and the counted vote now shows 70 percent. Mark Kelly is starting to pull away from Masters and I think when the vote gets to about 80% they will be able to call it for him. The Pima County vote is 3 to 1 for Democrats and the Maricopa County vote, which has a fair number of Republicans, appears to be repudiating the primary election winners. All of the Republican primary winners won with less than 35% of the vote (just like tRump did in 2016) – they are not popular figures especially among McCain Republicans who Kari Lake trashed the day before the election. In any event, the lawsuits have started so the election probably won’t be certified for a while – that’s fine, no one takes office until January anyway, there is time to sort out the winners and losers. A judge blocked the polls from staying open later than usual because of some machine glitches but no one who stayed in line was turned away – the Republicans simply wanted their people to be able to go home and have supper then come back! Irony of irony: their voters were upset by lines that they thought were too long! Ha!! The wait until election day to vote MAGAt crowd ran up against the reality of long lines on election day that were uncomfortable to stand in. I wonder if anyone gave them water? :)

    The House of Representatives is a bit more grim for Arizona. We lost two seats to gerrymandering – making a Tucson CD more red by adding some chunks of rural batguano insane Arizona and removing the Tribal areas from Tom O’Halleran’s district. We appear to be poised to pick up a surprise CD in the Phoenix area – a young Black man challenging a long-time incumbent. So our net loss may only be one, it could have been much worse.

    I need to get my to-do list refreshed. I finished a couple of projects yesterday and earlier this morning and I need to make sure that I have a handle on what is left. Tomorrow is a federal holiday so there will be no mail or banking and some clients may be off so I need to contact them today if I need anything to work on their projects over the weekend.

    See all y’all later!

  13. It’s 65 heading for 76 and sunny at the moment. There’s a front moving in tonight. I’m hoping actually tonight, as in after dark, before it starts clouding up. Tomorrow’s high will be about 20 degrees lower than today’s low. Yesterday we generated 6.47 KWHs and the m-t-d at 55.8 is still on track for 180.

    I had a rough night. Sinusitis, backache, some other TMI stuff. I hope it’s just the front coming in and my body will settle down a bit once it’s actually here. I hope. Meanwhile I’m groggy and clumsy. Totally unhelpful and all that. At least my hands are mostly OK. For now.

    Folks are still rocking/reacting to the election – and hoping we can hang onto Congress. Even if it’s by the skin of our teeth. We can do harm reduction as long as we hold. Holding the Good Thoughts and sending Healing Energy to everybody.

    Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  14. Good morning, 34 and cloudy outside my window today. Birthday dinner was fun last night with tasty food and good company. My knees are throbbing this morning, but oh well. I’ll finish the cleanup this morning and then I need to remove the last of the frozen flowers. I’ll plant some winter pansies and hellebore when the temps are back in the 40’s.

    Best wishes to all.

  15. Friday Meese. 48 going up to 63 with rain here in Kingston, NY. Am trying to figure out how to download and save my Twitter archive – in case the whole thing goes “poof”
    Found a link explaining “how to” – now to actually do it :)
    https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive

    Meanwhile Florida Ricans – Ugh

    • Wow, just wow, on the Puerto Rican vote in Florida. Well, we knew that a lot of them are Republicans. We can add them to the list of Broken Mirror Republicans.

      Thanks for that link about Twitter. I don’t think it will go away but I would not be shocked if it started breaking down and maybe going dark for periods of time. Eventually someone else will buy it – I saw rumors about a group buying it and running it as a non-profit – but it may be a while before that happens. Musk is stubborn and he will not walk away from his $44 billion toy unless he starts bleeding cash. What I would like is to find a way to download my follows – I have a well curated list of news, sports and interesting people and would have to lose them if I have to start from scratch. I think with names and Twitter handles I should be able to find them again but I don’t have that list anywhere right now. I don’t think mastodon will be The Place – it is too complicated to set up and use – and the other sites being recommended are run by sketchy people (no, I don’t want to be the minion of the people who ran Occupy or some rando on the Dark Web). For now, I will do the archive and sit tight. One thing that I am not sure why people are complaining about are the parody accounts and the hate accounts. If you don’t follow them, you don’t see them. If one of them finds you, you block them. I used to look at the blue check as a flag that if they claim to be a reported with WaPo, that they are. But a lot of the people I follow don’t have blue checks so it is a big yawn that it is now being sold. In any event, nothing has changed enough right now to require me to change. Just keep the block/mute button handy. :)

    • It was a little tricky to find the archives request but it is there. Unfortunately it does not download the archive right then and there, it prepares a zip file of the archive and then tells you (somehow!) when it is ready. The process, it says, can take 24 hours. The big question is will it even work given that the platform is going to begin melting down. I suspect that 100 million users downloading their archives will put quite a strain on it.

  16. Good morning, meeses! Friday …

    It is 41 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 63. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    In Arizona, yesterday’s new numbers were good for Democrats in statewide races. Katie Hobbs added to her total and is up by a full percent not just fractions. Mark Kelly is up by over 100,000 votes and Adrian Fontes, the Secretary of State candidate, has a comfortable lead. Our Attorney General candidate, Kris Mayes, is ahead but it is a razor thin margin. Today what they are calling Box 3 is going to be counted in Maricopa County. Those will include a lot of the mail-in ballots dropped off on election day rather than mailed in because of the conspiracy theory promoted by election deniers that after early drop offs were counted, the information was passed along to Democrats so that they know how many phony ballots to create in order to win the election. So that count is expected to be Republican heavy. But like the “red wave” that may be more hope than reality. They could just as easily be ballots dropped off by people who thought they would vote in person but didn’t have time to wait or people who were motivated to vote by worries about Republicans winning or people who didn’t want to vote because they didn’t like the choices but were ticked off when Kari Lake trashed John McCain Republicans the day before the election. As they say – we shall see. There are still 100,000 votes left in Pima county which will break 67 to 33 Democratic.

    I am hoping things are quiet enough to get my to-do list done. As often happens, I got sidetracked and by the time I got back to my desk, I had run out of steam.

    See all y’all later!

  17. Front coming through today, it’s 70 now but will drop to the 40s by evening. They say tomorrow, the wind chill will feel like freezing. Madness. Storms expected, they had to cancel the parade. Not sure what I’ll do with the day, maybe a walk after the storm passes. For now, I’m watching astronomy.

  18. It’s 41 and still dropping for a bit before the clouds clear off and it gets up to 48 today. We’ve gotten 1/3″ of rain and may get a bit more – enough to get us to 1/2″ maybe. We generated 5.4 KWHs but the m-t-d at 61 is still on track for 180. It probably won’t be by end of day but we shall see.

    Yesterday I mixed up and pan fried a small (1 lb – 2 weeks’ worth) of sausage yesterday and it came out really good. My son can get (relatively 80-20) lean ground pork at Sam’s Club for considerably less than the pre-cooked turkey sausage so I’m going back to making my own. In smaller batches so I can cook them in the skillet (which I can clean fairly easily) rather than the electric grill or oven broiler (which I can’t).

    Better sleep last night but later. Obviously. So I need to get over to twitter and start my boosting day. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  19. Good day, 43 and cloudy outside my window today. I’ve been trying to find replacement toilet seats for the Kohler toilets I bought when we remodeled the bathrooms. I chose ones that were in keeping with the age of the house and thought (silly me) they would be easy to maintain, but now both models have been discontinued and finding replacement seats has not been easy. I think I’ve ordered ones that will fit and could only find them at Home Depot, grrrrr! I avoid shopping there whenever possible but this time it’s the only choice. Next I need to clarify Thanksgiving plans with everyone, then ready or not start thinking about Christmas. Feeling grumpy, but oh well!

    Best wishes to all.

  20. Good morning, meeses! Saturday ….

    It is 45 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 68. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast.

    Arizona has re-elected Senator Mark Kelly! It was not a close race – there are pockets of crazy Arizonans but a guy running to cancel Social Security and Medicare in a state with a lot of retirees is not going to find enough people crazy enough to vote him in. The exit polls (which I do not understand in a place where 90% of the vote is mail-in) said that the main issue, by 77%, that led them to vote for Kelly was abortion rights. Samuel Alito helped up preserve our majority – I hope we can reward him by putting a liberal justice in his seat when he retires, as he seems overcome by sadness that no one except the Federalist Society loves him. Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada appears poised to be re-elected based on the votes left outstanding. It would be nice to have the Georgia seat as a cushion and not have to worry about the slimness of our 50 + Kamala majority for the next two years but thank goodness it will not be an existential crisis if Georgia elects the famous footballer with diminished mental faculties. I am guessing that a 51 vote margin means we do not have to dicker with Mitch McConnell over rules and we can put majorities on all the committees.

    In other Arizona election news, the hopes of Kari Flake that were pinned on Maricopa County Box 3, the first batch of “late earlies” from election day, appear to have been dashed. The expected 75 to 25 R to D did not materialize, Katie Hobbs won it 54 to 45. The extra votes allowed the AP to call the Secretary of State race for Adrian Fontes, giving us confidence that the 2024 election will be certified to reflect the will of the voters. Our candidates added to their totals in the Maricopa County, Pima County and Cococina County (Flagstaff) new voting numbers – most of the rural counties are in and new voting numbers will be almost exclusively the cities who still have about 300,000 ballots to count. The race for CD-6 tightened up; I don’t know if it is enough to overcome the R lead but it gives me some hope. In any event, Katie Hobbs and Kris Mayes (AG) are trending in the right direction. We are not out of the woods yet but we can see the edge.

    I stayed up too late waiting for the returns and am dragging a bit this morning. I will scan the overnight news and give my coffee a chance to wake me up and then carpe diem – and carpe my daunting stack of notes that need to be sorted.

    See all y’all later!

    • Whew! That’s a relief on AZ. ???????????? (I seriously understanding dragging a bit!) Good luck with your daunting stack of notes.

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