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 48 degrees in the Desert Southwest with an expected daytime high of 54. Rain is in the forecast.
Have a great day, all y’alls!!
Sunday Meese. 29 here in Kingston NY going up to 37. Happy Hanukkah!
Puerto Rico
Interesting – going to go see if I can find the crosstabs
Casa Pueblo demonstrating that not everything in Puerto Rico is failure and dependency. That there are also people creating and building
Vieques
(now up to 442 – still piss poor)
Cold morning — was supposed to get near freezing. I didn’t cover the plants, did scooch them all close together in preparation for the truly cold weather at the end of the week. Today at church is Lessons & Carols, which is always fun. I’ve got tea steeping, when I get home I’ll cook the vegetables for my mushroom risotto.
Black Music Sunday – posted
It was 21 when I got up, 31 now, heading for 49. And sunny. We generated 6.7 KWHs yesterday bringing the m-t-d to 73.86 – we should at least best 2014’s 76 and might make it to 80. Maybe.
As the good people leave twitter, poor folks are getting fewer and fewer responses to their fundraisers. I don’t know what they’re going to do if/when twitter stops operating. I don’t know what I’ll do either, but I’ve got a (paper) list started of where folks have other accounts so I can find them again.
Meanwhile, I’ve done my Sunday chores (except putting on the clean sheets – that has to wait until my son gets here this afternoon to help me turn the mattress) and am heading off to twitter. And Dee’s diary on DK of course. Bright the Day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 28 and snowing outside my window today. It’s pretty now but I hope it doesn’t accumulate. I finishes sewing the duvet cover and shams, now just a pair of pillow cases and I’m done. This project has been a struggle as I’ve been absent minded and my skills are rusty but I can feel techniques returning to my fingers so I hope I can keep sewing after Christmas is over. It’s relaxing when I don’t have a deadline and it’s nice to feel creative again. I’ve got a long yule list for today so I’d best get busy. As always, my best wishes to all.
Good Sunday afternoon, Moose Peeps, and Happy Hanukkah! Little E. (I dare not say his name) will watch his mother light the first candle on the Menorah tonight.
Being the Laundress as well as the Cook, I’ve had a lot to do this morning. We’re also watching the World Cup and cheering for la belle France.
Lots to do as usual. I’ll miss Twitter ,but I’m going to be there until the bitter end. The others are just too complicated to bother with—semi-addled as I am anyway, I just don’t have the time.
Oh, the weather. It’s not terribly nice. Right now in Ashburn it’s 39 F. and we’re having a little sunshine, but it’s mostly cloudy. I dried some orange and lemon peel last night for Solstice potpourri, but I need to visit an Indian store to buy whole nutmegs and cinnamon sticks.
Wishing a good day to all at the Pond!
Ha! You can say Ethan now. You could even put him in a sentence with quotes! We turned off the setting that was creating false positives for dangerous code and replaced it with some additional other security. I have to admit I still hold my breath when I click “Post Comment” (and I still copy my comment text into memory before I post) but based on my chat with the tech, I think we are out of the woods.
Thank you, BlogGoddess! The business of no quotes was extremely tiresome and as for “Ethan,” it’s quite Elizabethan. Nothing wrong with that name at all.
Monday Meese. 30 degrees here in Kingston NY going up to 37.
Was pleased to see the Panther women book getting some attention
Puerto Rico
Following Shelly as you requested.
Good morning, meeses! Monday …
It is 37 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 57. Sunny skies are in the forecast.
Today the final report from the January 6th Committee is expected to be released along with criminal referrals. It is almost guaranteed that tRump will be referred but I am most interested in the referrals for the members of Congress who helped organize the insurrection and brought it within a hairsbreadth of destroying our country. In a perfect world, those who voted against certifying the election even after being attacked and nearly killed should be censured, but those who were on Mark Meadows text tree actively plotting should be charged with felonies and be imprisoned. It would be fitting justice if Trump’s Kevin become Speaker of the House only to have it taken away when 10 members of his Q Caucus are behind bars and unable to vote (I am pretty sure that being a convicted felon is no bar to federal office but if you can’t vote, you can’t be considered part of the majority). All hail Speaker Hakeem Jeffries! :)
Twitter is a train wreck but I am going to have to figure out how to mute the constant back and forth. It is triggering my PTSD from blogging under the bully at the orange place with his uneven moderation and narcissism. I guess it is the nature of the business, the guy who controls the social media portal holds complete power over who posts. The owner of Facebook is not a very nice person either but he is terrible only up to a point – he will take the money of right-wingers who want to use his site to foment an insurrection and destroy democracy but he is not willing to blow up the site to puff up his ego. Yikes, there is me calling Mark Zuckerberg “not so bad”!
I am starting to understand why people are deterred by the complexity of Mastodon. I just read a purportedly helpful guide about how to navigate and it spent a lot of time explaining how it works. Really, the only thing you need to know about how mastodon works is that no one person owns mastodon and there is no big datacenter running it so it is unlikely to go completely offline if the bills aren’t paid. After that, you sign up by finding a mastodon community that you trust (by seeing where other people are signed up) and creating an account. After that it is like any other social media site – you have to find people and subjects to follow. The biggest thing that has people wigged out is “how do I find my friends?” Hello? When Twitter was brand new, people did not cry about how they couldn’t find their friends – they looked at other social media and blogs and news articles and started building a Follows list. Then your Follows would retweet other people and if you liked them, you would follow them. It was built organically. There are tools to import your Follows (I would never use them, you have to turn over your codes and passwords) and ways to harvest mastodon or Post links from people’s tweets but the best way is to find someone likely to have a great Follows list, click on their Followings and start adding from their list. One thing – the web site is useless for harvesting follows and the Mastodon app is pretty bad. In my opinion, your best bet is to download a third party app – I use Tusky.
I finished the most important hot project for the weekend and I have to at least get the first part of the other two organized today. I need to clear the decks for an important project that I will be working on over Christmas weekend (no problem, it is not my holiday) that has a hard deadline of January 10th but which will be easier to implement over a long weekend when clients are unlikely to be on their computers.
See all y’all later!
What I dislike about Mastadon is the silos/islands/federations. On the bird app, if I search for “thing I’m interested in”, I find it. On Mastadon, I don’t. Then I guess which island people interested in that thing might be on and search there, and the other island with a similar name, and so on.
I’m abandoning that place as soon as the whale app is up.
There is a problem right now about consistency in finding people depending on which server community you are on and which one the person you are looking for is on. For example, if you search in People for @marcelias, you can find him – I think because he is on a server that allows People searches (I need to figure out what the criteria is). If I search for @deoliver47, it finds nothing even though I know she is on @newsie.social. I can find her if I enter the entire URL or her entire address @deoliver47@newsie.social but as you pointed out, it sucks to have to know the full address – right now everyone is on twitter.com so it is not a problem.
I hate to be a Debbie Downer but the whale app is going to be a niche social media site. Unless Chris is funded by George Soros, he will not have the resources to build a Twitter. Even if he can build a great website and someone builds a brilliant app, you need more than that. Twitter has three data centers to manage the billions of bytes of data that move on their platform in a minute. That kind of infrastructure is expensive. Even Post.News which has some funding is limiting signups and has a LOT of missing features.
I still hope someone – but not the Saudis! – buys Twitter from Elmo and restores it to its previous state.
Good morning. Chilly and raining – like thunder rumbling rain, wow. Big chill coming at the end of the week. Didn’t walk this morning, had really planned to walk inside the parking garage, but even though I set my alarm early early, I still didn’t leave in time for that to work. And my tea spilled in my bag. Happy Monday. Think I’ll listen to some U2. No one else will be here for 20 minutes or so, no one to bother.
Good Monday morning, Moosekind! It’s 33 F. miserable degrees, quite windy, and partly cloudy. Now that we’re dogless, I don’t get out to the courtyard any more in the mornings, so this weather report is mere hearsay.
Dearly, who did not get a wink of sleep all night, is now in the bedroom that has the bathroom that contains all my makeup and stuff. So I’ll just have to wrap presents while still in my dressing-gown until he wakes up. That’s OK, there are chores I can do that don’t involve my being washed and brushed to do them.
We’re not going to have a White Christmas. Jay’s Wintry Mix web page is wrong again.
Today I have a memorial dinner for a woman who came to my writing group a couple of times. She’d had a hard life, bravely bringing up two sons on a divorced schoolteacher mum’s salary. She wrote about going to Paris with a friend, years ago. I’m so glad she was able to go there! “See Paris and pop your clogs,” goes the popular saying. (With me it would be “See London,” but that’s me.)
I do hope Dearly wakes up in time so we can go to the shopping center, where he can get a haircut and I can get a mani. Badly need it.
We’ll be home, quivering, to watch the criminal referrals on C-SPAN at 1 p.m.!
Wishing a good day to all at the Pond.
It’s 42 going to 44 and pretty much staying there until just before dawn tomorrow when it will briefly drop down to 32. Yes, it’s overcast. Yesterday may have been the last sunny day for December. We generated 6.8 KWHs and reached 80 for the m-t-d.
Apparently the first folks to leave twitter were the ones who had both the inclination and the ability to help folks with fundraisers. I’m seeing people shifting from kind of desperate to very desperate. From asking for $2K-$5K to get them out of the hole they’re in to asking for $90 for a night in a motel and a hot meal – daily. And the big asks, the $25K and up asks, pick up a little from friends and family but are otherwise being ignored entirely. Aji said people are going to die for Musk’s ego and she’s right. But then, considering his history, a lot of people have already died for his ego. I’m like Jan, hoping somebody who sees the value of twitter as social media, buys and restores it. I’ll do twitter while twitter’s there to do. I have a paper list and I’m accumulating folks’ addresses on other sites. I don’t even know how to deal with this but I’m sure my son or grandsons can help me when I have to.
So. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
I will put something together on the other sites when it is more urgent. Right now, there is no need to jump and we can hope that the #twittermigration brings about some much needed changes with Mastodon’s interface so that it is more user friendly before people have to move. I think that Post is going to become a website with articles and short posts and less a message board, a cross between Facebook and Twitter. The jury is out on how well they will do moderation. Mastodon is definitely set up as a Twitter replacement and may turn out to be the Twitter replacement but certainly not yet. As Nurse Kelley Sez (Post and Mastodon), she needs Twitter to follow wildfires and until there are enough people, including law enforcement and local governments, on one of the other platforms, she has to follow Twitter. Elmo’s ego will kill.
Good day, 18, snowy and frosty outside my window today. I’ve watched the Jan 6th hearing and was surprised with tears as I heard the word “indicted”…..been a long time coming. Now it’s time to follow my yule list and see how much I can cross off today. Best wishes to all.
Good morning, meeses! Tuesday …
It is 39 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 61. The forecast calls for cloudy skies with sunny breaks and a very slight chance for rain in the afternoon. I can say emphatically that I am glad to not be in the Midwest this week where they are expecting below zero temperatures.
I watched the January 6th Committee’s final meeting and it was good to see the summary of their work. In my opinion, their work was pitch perfect – they clearly understand how to present material that is compelling. I thought Liz Cheney speaking about her great-great grandfather who fought in the Civil War to preserve the Union was powerful. That the Confederate flag is now one of the flags celebrated by the Republican Party must be extremely painful for her. Too bad she and others did not stop trumpism when they could have – instead they were willing to gobble up the tax cuts and regressive judges and deregulation and take their chances that a completely unfit man, a known grifter and sociopath, was put in charge of our democracy. Thank you for your service on the committee, Liz. Now go away.
I hope the federal government can figure out what to do about the migrant situation. It sounds like SCOTUS put the cancellation of Title 42 on hold again, delaying the inevitable. We have international compacts respecting the rights of migrants to seek asylum and we need to figure out how to accommodate them or discourage them from arriving. If the latter is going to take a while, then they need to beef up the accommodations so that it is not a humanitarian crisis. The MAGA yahoos in Arizona will try to take matters into their own hands and it will suck for anyone here who is not white when that starts.
I have many things to do today so that I can take tomorrow off to celebrate the Winter Solstice. I have not wrapped gifts yet and have to find the wrapping paper (I am sure it is “in a box”). I need to make a good project list so that I can concentrate on the things I need to get done. One of these days I will stop talking about my lists and start working on them.
See all y’all later!
Good morning. The news today was at least half stories about the coming cold. Three freezing nights in a row is rare here, so this is freaking people out. I’m getting ready for my 2 wfh days. Trying to get into Mastadon. I just really hate how complicated it is.
Tuesday Meese. 29 here, going up to 37 – and thankfully no snow in our forecast.
Puerto Rico
Good Tuesday morning, Meese! It’s a lovely frosty morning in Ashburn, 29 F. with glorious sunshine, and less wind than yesterday. Today’s high will be about 40 F.
Last night’s Memorial Dinner in honor of my friend was very nice. Her two sons are delightful and took great care of their guests. As S. had been a member of the Writers’ Group before her health declined, two members of the Writers’ Group wrote poems in her honor and shared them with the dinner guests.
Getting ready to have lunch today with a dear friend. Because Dearly needs to use our one vehicle this afternoon, he’ll drop me off at her house, she’ll drive us to the restaurant, and then we’ll return to her house afterwards. I hope he’ll pick me up at 3 p.m., so we can run to the Indian store for whole nutmegs, cinnamon sticks, and whatever else I can find for the Christmas potpourri tomorrow.
Dearly had his usual rotten night and so did I. I think our bedroom is too warm. Going to turn off the little radiator tonight and see whether that helps. Dearly is ALWAYS cold.
Worked on the Winter Solstice ritual last night and think I’ve got it down. The words I’ll speak are not original with me but I was careful to attribute the sources in footnotes. I’m keeping in mind the fact that it will be cold and dark and people will be standing around in that cold darkness around the firepit. Part of the ritual will be conducted in the screened porch that leads into the courtyard, so that’s a bit better. Then we’ll enjoy hot, spiced cider and gingersnaps. I do love Yule!
I’d better begin getting ready. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond!
We’ve got highs in the mid 40s today & tomorrow, low 30s Thursday, and Friday at dawn is forecast to be -4 actual air temp with windchills in the -20s. And cloudy. There’s not a fully sunny day until next Tuesday and it’s the only one for what’s left of December. sigh. Yesterday we generated 4 KWHs and we’re at 84.59 for the m-t-d.
The clouds are depressing. The twitter situation is depressing, extra depressing as I watch desperate folks get more so as all the folks who have the money as well as the inclination to help bail. Folks I know with cancer or in danger of being homeless who aren’t putting that out on twitter, that’s also depressing. The bloody world situation is depressing. Going into the Dark. Well, tomorrow we start back into the Light. And I am always blessed with the Light of friends – online and off.
Bright the Day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 17band snowing outside my window today. The temps were in the 20’s when I first woke up but now it’s getting colder. Our house is warm but the exterior walls are cold so that makes the pipes vulnerable. We leave some dripping overnight and have a heater in the basement where the water pipes go up the wall so that helps too. It’s always a relief to find the water still dripping come morning!
We hurried around yesterday doing as many errands as we could knowing we’ll be snowed in here until the rain comes at the end of the week. If it’s freezing rain that will impact our Christmas plans so we’ll just have to wait and see.
I’ll be sewing and wrapping today, and I may venture outdoors to sort out the pile of branches and holly that are now covered in snow. I’m not doing as much with flowers as I usually do so I just need a few greens. The flowers are safely in a cool spot in the basement and I wish I would have done the same with the greens but I was to tired yesterday so I just stopped and rested. Best wishes to all.