Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Aug. 30th through Sept. 5th

August 30, 2015 JanF Community 143

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 (every Sunday morning). 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 now 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 and use the link.

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30 Comments

  1. Good morning, Meese! Another hot, humid, horrible day in Northern VA. Every afternoon we get a rumble of thunder but then the clouds dissipate. We’ve been without rain for five weeks now.

    After The Visit yesterday we now have lots of homework and a goal! We must downsize everything except the furniture by next March, so as to be ready to put the house on the market. Have my work cut out for me but on the other hand, doing less child care will definitely help.

    Awful night—lost three hours’ sleep due to waking up and being unable to go back to sleep—so expect this to be a very slow day. Hope it’s a good Friday for all!

      • The visit was from the downsizing expert at the retirement community that we want to move to, Portlaw. She left us a folder of brochures. There are experts on call who will do everything from helping us get rid of stuff or sell stuff, to packing our possessions for the move, to staging the house to go on the market.

        Dearly Beloved and I have been the busiest grandparents in Fairfax County but we are looking forward to not having so much work to do—house, garden, grandchildren.

        • The move sounds like an excellent idea as does the downsizing expert! And soon you will have more time for your writing!

  2. Forgot to mention that since “Mount McKinley” has been renamed “Denali,” a petition is now circulating to rename “Reagan National Airport” its original name of “Washington National Airport.” Washington, as even Rethugs should remember, was also a president. I despise uttering the name of the Second Stupidest President in American history and have always called it “Washington National Airport.”

    • Actually the airport is referred to as “Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport” so they can fix it like this: “Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport”. Too bad we can’t elide the damage done by Reaganomics as easily.

      Did you see this chart from a recent study showing how worker productivity is rewarding the CEO class instead of the workers?

      It started the separation in the Nixon years but was on steroids after Reagan and his tricklers got ahold of the economy. :(

  3. Didn’t walk this morning, figured I need a day of rest. Only woke up twice last night, yay. A friend shared this on FB & it’s my new earworm: Hozier covering Sam Smith’s Lay Me Down. I don’t know Sam Smith, but…. Hozier.

    I’ve got my early workouts Saturday & Sunday – then Monday is off. I may not set an alarm at all, just see how late I can sleep.

  4. Good morning, Meese, from a hot and humid part of the Pond.,

    The news fills me with sorrow and rage. Just thinking of Syria, just thinking of the migrants. Such grief. And then, I saw this

    BUDAPEST — With thousands of migrants pouring out of Afghanistan and the Middle East, the business of smuggling them across the Balkans into the European Union has grown even larger than the illicit trade in drugs and weapons, law enforcement officials said.

    In Greece alone, there are 200 such smuggling rings, said Col. Gerald Tatzgern, head of the Austrian police service fighting human trafficking.

    “It has developed into a business worth billions,” said Johanna Mikl-Leitner, the interior minister of Austria. Smugglers have spread out through the region, in Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, Romania and Serbia, she added.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/world/europe/migrants-smuggling-in-europe-is-now-worth-billions.html?&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

    I am not filled with admiration for our species, this morning.

    Hoping for better days for our world.

  6. A late g’morning Meese

    Am out of the loop – hubby is home sick with something he caught at work so I am doing nursing duty.
    Love that pic Jan – at least there is something to smile about in an avalanche of bad news

  7. Good morning, 45 and clear in Bellingham. A few hours of sunshine will be most welcome today. I’m feeling overwhelmed this morning…..planning a funeral, helping with travel arrangements, and preparing to be in Kennewick all next week kept me tossing and turning all night. I hope my time at the pool will help me clear my worried thoughts and find a clearer focus.

    • It’s a great deal of work for you to do. Hope being in the pool will help you find a way to make things easier for yourself.

  8. Was 70 when I walked in the door this Friday morning – 83/heat index 93 now – humid and danged uncomfortable and we’re not even expecting rain for another week, if then. Work met me at the door and I’ve just now gotten a chance to check in (well, managed one comment in another diary before I had to leave). STILL haven’t gotten to the President’s speech in AK. I’ll log in from home sometime this 3-day weekend and try. My home system is not as “big” or as updated as my work one so I usually don’t do much more than check email – but some times it’s important to try.

    Human beans are such a mixture – they can be so good-hearted, can step up to emergencies in ways you’d never expect. They can also be uncaring or even actively evil. As best I can figure out 20% are good (mostly), 2% are evil (mostly), and 78% are good-hearted but manipulable as hell. Unfortunately the 2% are a damnsight better at manipulation than the 20%. (And the reason we need laws and regulations is that 75% of the gullible 78% are very law-abiding, so they won’t necessarily do it because it’s right but they will do it if it’s law.)

  9. Good morning, Meeses!! Saturday …

    It is 67 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 88. Partly cloudy skies are in the forecast. Good day to stay home in the air conditioning … but I have to be out in the heat!! Fall youth sports has begun and that means Saturdays, outside, rain or shine, cold or heat.

    I was pleased to see that Austria and Germany have agreed to take the refugees that Hungary was shipping to camps. Trains and camps and right-wing extremism … good lord, what is happening to Europe? Heck, with the rise of Trumpism, what is happening to us?

    The Rowan County clerk is still in jail (the judge will revisit her sentence next week) and the deputy clerks are issuing marriage licenses. There was some concern about the validity of the licenses which I hope was simply Internet rumor … probably started by the Liberty Counsel hate group who is providing (bad) legal advice to the jailed clerk. I can’t imagine that the lawyers for the plaintiffs would not have verified that the licenses would be valid.

    Senator Ben Cardin of MD joins with the war party, making the nonsensical claim (touted by noted foreign policy expert, Scott “3% and sinking” Walker) that the rest of the signatories of the deal will be willing to apply stronger sanctions on Iran. The Baltimore Sun wrote a scathing editorial:

    Rejecting an accord that has been embraced nearly universally not only by our negotiating partners but by the world community at large would isolate the United States and Israel and would weaken other nations’ resolve to continue sanctions. Mr. Cardin says he is certain that our negotiating partners would quickly reapply sanctions — or, if necessary, provide support for military action — if Iran races to build a bomb.

    We will not get Russia and China to agree to reimpose sanctions. It was difficult enough to get them to agree to the current sanctions … they are not going to do so now to give a fig leaf to Senators afraid to embrace peace. Meh.

    See all y’alls later!

  10. Good morning, Meese. It’s a very pretty day here. Hope it is throughout the Pond.

    As for Sen Cardin, the ambassadors from our negotiating partners have already met with some Congress people and have already made it clear that they are NOT going back to the negotiating table. I am getting so paranoid that I think some of these guys really want war.

    As for the rest of the news, hoping that those suffering refugees find safe refuge. Much of Europe, like much of here, is anti Muslim. Bigotry, alas, is international. The photos I see of those poor people are haunting. The NYTimes had one photo, full page, of a Syrian woman with her child. I will never forget it. Haunting. The photographer should get a Pulitzer.

    It;s Labor Day weekend so thanks to the unions who made us strong!

    Special wishes being sent to our princesspat for the week ahead. It’s been a hard year for her family and good thoughts for better days are heading across the continent.

    Hope it’s a good day for all on our Planet.

  11. Good morning, Moosekind! Guess what, yesterday we FINALLY had a thunderstorm with a decent downpour. It rained again during the night and will be overcast most of the day. This has improved my temper about 100 percent.

    Feeling a little better about the refugee crisis as Austria and Germany have offered to take people in; not feeling great about Senator Cardin, who is behaving irresponsibly, in my opinion.

    Hope princesspat’s pool therapy helped to calm her nerves. That’s a lot to have on one’s plate. anotherdemocrat, hope you got some sleep last night. My particular earworm is “Let’s Go to School” with Mei-Mei Hu. That’s a video about a kindergarten in China, which Babylicious wanted to watch every single morning, so the music from it keeps playing in my head.

    Dearly Beloved is recovering from what I believe to be the norovirus. It was much more severe than the average bout of 24-hour stomach ‘flu and he’s lost 10 pounds that he can ill afford to lose. I think he must have got it at the airport where he works on Mondays.

    Looking forward to a day of errands, one of which will be rejoining the gym whose doors I haven’t darkened for the last two child-care-filled years! Hope it’s a good day for the whole world, as Portlaw says.

  12. Good morning, 45 and mostly clear in Bellingham today. I’m trudging through my to do list, but I remain weary and my heart is heavy. I know grieving is a shared human experience, one we all find our way through, and I will. It’s just not an easy journey.

    Thanks again for your kind thoughts.

    • Horrible story. And here they have a beautiful healthy child. You would think they would be forever grateful. I feel very sorry for the child. She or any other child deserves much better

      • Not surprising in a society where people treat their offspring like badges to be worn to show others of their magnificence. As the parent of a teenager, I see it often in both youth sports and the educational system.

        They should indeed be happy that their child is healthy, not distressed that it is “flawed” by not meeting their definition of perfect: white. JHC!!

        … in Cramblett’s predominantly white community, she feared that her daughter, Payton, now 3, would grow up feeling like an ‘outcast.’

        Maybe this is the universe’s way of teaching a “predominantly white community” tolerance. I am embarrassed for the plaintiffs that they do not realize how awful they make themselves sound.

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