Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Nov. 22nd through Nov. 28th

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?

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.

34 Comments

  1. Phew – belated holiday greetings to everyone

    (am up letting the dogs out)

    Was in the kitchen – starting Wednesday – cooking. Had a family traditional meal Thursday – turkey stuffed with oyster cornbread stuffing, giblet gravy, smithfield ham – glazed with honey and pineapple, collard greens with ham hocks, candied yams, mashed potatoes with garlic, cheddar cheese biscuits, macaroni and cheese casserole, deviled eggs.

    Goddaughter brought the apple pie and I didn’t bake a pecan or pumpkin this year. Getting old :)

    Was thankful that hubby and god-daughter did the clean-up and packaging of left overs. The cats and dogs were ecstatic to get some turkey scraps and I was just tired – and glad that I only do this once a year.

    Today will make my turkey soup.
    Tomorrow will have turkey sandwiches
    The day after will have turkey salad …..

    • Sounds like you had an excellent day! I never developed any enthusiasm for cooking so I can only look on in awe at those who spend days creating a holiday meal. It is good to have leftovers, though, and I often regret that the meals I pull together don’t have them.

      • I don’t cook a lot these days – too much work – though I have to admit I prefer my cooking to quickie micro-wave stuff.

        Leftovers save money – and we have a big freezer.

    • Denise, no wonder you’re tired—that was a perfect storm of cooking! It sounds delicious.

      Love cheddar cheese biscuits. Think I’ll make cheese and celery bread this baking season. A little garlic goes into it too.

  2. Good morning, meeses! Friday …

    It is 33 degrees in Madison on its way up to 34. A wintry mix is expected this morning so I hope people hereabouts are doing their shopping cyberly. I have never been tempted to venture out into the post-Thanksgiving crowds. My daughter thinks I am boring … I am!!

    Another person breached “security” at the White House, this time jumping the newly “fortified” fence:

    I saw a video showing how they “enhanced” the fence. Sheesh! Put razor wire up there for crying out loud!! A couple extra spikes is not going to deter a nutjob. It troubles me that the First Family is in there enjoying a family Thanksgiving while the Secret Service is falling down on the job … again. Our country is full of nutjobs and the president’s security is being handled by the Keystone Kops.

    Tuesday is December!!! How the heck did that happen??!? I need to get organized for end of year and get some delayed projects completed.

    See all y’all later!

    • Yes – this happens too frequently. I don’t understand how they let this happen over and over.

      • I watched the turkey pardoning video and thought about how much that family has given up – as a family – for Barack Obama to be president. The least we can do is give them a space where they can enjoy Thanksgiving together unmolested. You know damn well that if the First Family were Republicans, the Republican Congress would pass the Keep The First Family Safe Act and fund better security and higher pay to attract better quality agents … and razor wire for the freaking fences!!!

  3. Good morning, Meese, and happy black Friday! Cloudy here in NoVa, 37 F. now, going up to 66 F. today. I won’t be part of the shopping crowd; I despise the rank commercialism of the season and the fact that it now starts in September.

    Elder son and DIL did a great job with Thanksgiving dinner—so nice to have the younger generation take over. Jan, I haven’t heard as much silly criticism of the First Family and the turkey pardoning video as there was last year. That’s a relief. Does the Secret Service hire nothing but incompetents now? There was a time when half the neighbors on my street worked for that organization. We got used to seeing them on TV near the POTUS.

    Denise, I’ll be sending the story to your email address shortly. Having an awful time with the illustration, which I bought from Canstock. No matter how I fiddle with it, it doesn’t seem to fit Facebook’s parameters. Oh, well, I’ll keep struggling.

    Wishing a good day to all!

  4. Slept in again — again interrupted 5 or so times, but it was lovely turn over & doze. Cold, rainy front coming through — 70s this morning, 50s at 5. But I’ll get in at least 1 mile, I swear. Tomorrow morning’s ungodly hour walk will be interesting — 40 & raining. I suppose that’s not cold enough for my facemask, but definitely a hat & several layers.

    Did wake up with music playing in my head — don’t know why, but With or Without You. I like it, but it’s not one of my favorites, it isn’t in my marathon mix.

  5. Happy Post-Turkey Day everyone! Dee, I am exhausted just reading about all that you cooked Wed and Thursday! My dinner out with friends at Francesca’s was delightful – the restaurant wisely judged that Gainesville Florida residents would not really go for an upscale northern Italian cuisine Thanksgiving Dinner, and gave us a very traditional and tasty meal – butternut squash soup, turkey, sweet and mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, squash/onion medley, and dressing, along with homemade rolls, and either carrot cake or pumpkin cheesecake for dessert. It was perfect, and the three of us had a great time.

    My friend Amy brought along my birthday card (a bit early, it’s next Friday but it was fine to celebrate it yesterday) which she found at a local shop – it was handmade with a crafting technique called quilling, which is rolling up small strips of paper into tight coils to glue to background paper to make a pattern or picture. This one is of a peacock, and it is gorgeous. Now I want to try doing this!

    I’m so sick of the Secret Service screwing up – one friend told me that he thought the problem was that after 9/11, Homeland Security took a lot of the best people out of the Secret Service to do their security work, so that the President and VP are left with the dregs. Something wrong with those priorities, imo, and I would not put it past the SS to have let racism and politics play a role here.

    Ok, have to put my turkey breast in a brine, so I can roast it tomorrow – turkey sandwiches, yum! Have a great day everyone.

  6. Good morning, 21 and clear in Bellingham. I view from my window is lovely this morning with a nearly full moon floating in the pinky blue sky, behind the tall bare branches of my old maple trees. And I’ve shared the view with my grand girl, my daughter and small dog Penelope so I’d best get on with another busy day. Our decision to have our T Day dinner together on Saturday was good, but it’s made for a long holiday. We’re baking pies this morning…. pumpkin with a gluten free ginger cookie crust for me, and Erica’s wonderful apple pie for everyone. I’ll share the pumpkin pie :)

    This article captures much of what I love about living in the PNW, but it also shares an evolving history of complicated tribal fishing rights and ongoing conservation management.


    Sacred Catch: Before Salmon Was King, Before Salmon Was Greed

    The waters around Bellingham are so quiet they seem to be hiding secrets.
    They’re tranquil, topped by a thin layer of mist that in winter is so gray, it’s hard to see the line between sea and sky. On summer evenings, the waters turn rosy pink from the setting sun.
    They’re so still there is little sign of the contentious history that once arose from them — days when coastal tribes of the Salish Sea risked arrest to retain their fishing rights.

  7. Belated Happy Thanksgiving everybody – I was only online yesterday to check email after I got back from my son’s house and didn’t drop by the Pond. Our high of 63 was at 3 a.m. CST – we’re predicted to hit our low of 35 at 3 p.m. Raining since dark last night. So. Yesterday I baked the turkey and took it to my son’s house – then, after a lovely meal mostly prepared by my DIL, brought the carcass and leftover (2-1/2 lbs) meat home. Today I made stock. Then hauled porch firewood to the house rack and split carport firewood to fill the porch rack. Thank goddess for my friend/neighbor who loans me her electric torque splitter! Splitting wood relatively comfortably on the carport certainly beats swinging a maul in the rain. Tomorrow I’ll use some of the stock and a lb of meat to make lunch soup for the next couple of weeks. It will have to be with rice as I’ve just discovered I’m out of GF pasta and I am most certainly not leaving the house any time soon. :) Won’t be online long as the living room is already getting chilly but if I don’t have time to see the President’s stuff (thank you Jan) today, I’ll get to it sooner or later. Have a wonderful, pleasant, calm, dry, and warm Friday. {{{HUGS}}}

    • One thing nice about Moose posts is that they don’t roll off the recent list so fast that you miss them. :) You might consider subscribing to the blog posts (see the widget near the top of the right sidebar). Then you have a reminder in your Inbox until you delete it.

      Sounds like you had a (good) busy Thanksgiving!

  8. interesting day: was warm, mid-70s up till lunch then I left home to take my car to get the oil changed — I was going to walk in the nearby neighborhood while they did, it was going to take an hour because they were going to rotate the tires. In the time it took to drive about 30 blocks, it went from comfortable in my shorts & tech t-shirt to “I’m staying inside my car” cold.

    I got home & changed into long pants & a long-sleeved shirt & then went for my walk, I managed 30 minutes — 1.5 miles, before it was too rainy & cold. I’m going to hate tomorrow morning. The forecast is for 40 & rain. I put out my longjohns. Don’t laugh. It was 75 this freaking morning.

  9. Good morning, meese. Saturday …

    It is 24 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 37. Partly cloudy skies are in the forecast.

    Yesterday afternoon I watched in horror as the incident of domestic terrorism at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs unfolded. I followed it on my Twitter feed and on trusted news outlets. By the way, that would NOT include CNN which felt the need to put a GOP Congressman on LIVE while the terrorist was still active. WTF!! (yes, that is an F). Here is what he had to say while one of the people inspired by his lies was shooting 9 people and killing 3 of them, including one police officer:

    While the shooter was active inside the Planned Parenthood clinic, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) went on live TV and blasted the organization. “We saw these barbaric videos, and that was something that many of us have a legitimate concern about,” Kinzinger said.

    He went on to say that the shooter obviously had a “mental health issue”. What??!? No. He has been fed a steady diet of right wing lies and it has poisoned him. Own this, Congressman. You and your party have blood on your hands.

    I am going to put up a post of some of the Tweets I saw to preserve them in amber. One of the themes was the outrage many felt that a white man who just killed a cop can walk out of a building with his hands up and be taken into custody instead of shot a dozen or more times (I wonder if the cops took him to Burger King on the way to the jail?) . The outrage was not that the killer had not been himself killed but the fact that in American there are two types of justice: one for people who look like your hunting buddy and one for The Other.

    See all y’alls later!

  10. Robert Lewis Dear , – what is known so far. Hard to even find news stories that describe him as a white male. Few use the term “terrorist”

    Don’t look at comments on FOX news sites – they are mostly applause for the shooter they see as a hero – and regrets he didn’t kill everyone at PP.

    • I am wondering how the right-wing will manage to lionize the killer when he also killed a policeman. The cognitive dissonance that they feel must be crushing: “pro-life” = “kill people providing women’s health care”. KABLOOM … heads asplodin’!!

      My Twitter feed calls it terrorism but then I don’t follow (too many) idiots. One of my Tweeps helpfully fixed this Reuter’s headline:

  11. Up for ungodly hour workout. Just like the prediction, it is cold & rainy. Sigh. Schedule calls for 6 miles today. Sigh again.

  12. Good morning —I suppose. Cloudy here in NoVa, going up to 66 F. today, rain late tonight.

    In no other country would such terrorism be tolerated. We’re so used to gun violence that we simply shrug and say, “Who got it this time?” Dear Goddess, I could write a sci-fi story about random murders like this. Whose turn is it to die today? That’s what we’ve come to. I’m far more afraid of white males in this country than I am of any Syrian refugees or men of color. Rinse, repeat.

    Turning to a more pleasant subject, the cider is mulling in the crockpot, enlivened with cinnamon sticks, whole nutmegs, and orange slices. This morning the next-door neighbor and her daughter are coming over to make Christmas potpourri. The music is ready to pop into the player (Mothertongue’s “This Winter’s Night” solstice music); the sheet is ready to spread on the floor; and some of the potpourri ingredients are already sitting on the kitchen counter. Going to run up to the Christmas tree place and ask for trimmings (they usually let me have them free). Those will be the basis for our potpourri but I’ll add lavender and rosemary from the garden. I do love holiday seasons!

    My Facebook ad finally “took” and FB approved it, good. On Monday I’ll see about pasting the story into a post here and adding the illo. Jan, should it be a .pdf file? I have the file in Apple Pages and .pdf, which is how my Web guy likes it.

    • A PDF file has to be unpacked to turn into a blog post. Do you have it on your blog right now? I can scrape it off the page (which is HTML) and put it in a post for you.

      • No, actually. I don’t post it on GOS as a rule. I could perhaps just export it to a Word file and copy and paste that into a post. Would that work?

        • No, I meant your blog, not kos’ blog.

          Yes! WordPress likes Word formats. If you export it to Word, the text should paste nicely into the Visual tab view in the Editor. If you get stuck, let me know. You have my email address, right?

  13. Good morning, 27 and cloudy in Bellingham. I haven’t hosted a full family Thanksgiving for several years, and while I’m enjoying every moment of family time I’m reluctantly realizing that something has to change…..and that something is me! It’s hard to accept but the limitations of arthritis and the damage from BCH are very real so it’s time to build some new traditions.

    A nice moment from yesterday……the older “kids” were laughing and baking in the kitchen, the grand girls and I were watching Mary Poppins, singing along and doing some art projects in my sewing room, RonK was watching a football game, and small dog Penelope was keeping tabs on all of us. Much to be grateful for and our holiday time together will evolve.

    • Enjoy your day, princesspat! I think that Thanksgiving celebrated on the following Saturday makes perfect sense. But please take care of yourself!!

  14. Morning all – thanks for the great post on the Planned Parenthood terrorist attack, JanF. It’s so sickening, I’m having a hard time dealing with it. I will say first, I’m glad to have this place to come to for good discussion when horrific things like this happen, as they all too frequently do these days. Second, I’m thankful for the guild in World of Warcraft that Dee and I both belong to – founded by Daily Kos members, named Wreck List, we are proud leftists and that’s part of our membership criteria. I just put up a message in our chat about supporting PP, and it spurred a great conversation among all the guildies in game this morning. I don’t really have a lot of RL friends here in Florida, so I am so grateful for my online friends – thank you all!

    Still too warm here, back into the 80’s, but at least it’s cooling off to the 60’s at night, so it’s bearable. I finally got my turkey breast into the brine this morning – it’s pretty small, less than 3 lbs, so I can roast it this afternoon for dinner tonight, shouldn’t take more than 75-90 minutes I would think.

    Have a great and safe day everyone – I love hearing about everyone’s family Thanksgiving gatherings, sounds wonderful!

  15. Didn’t know about the PP terrorist attack until I logged on to check email – Alan Grayson, calling a spade a spade, sent out a PP-fundraiser response to that. I came more or less straight over here to get the news. The Rs of course will never call any terrorist activity perpetrated by a white man “terrorism” – in their tiny minds only POCs can be terrorists. And equally of course the RWNJ rhetoric is responsible for much of it. And their gun laws just help facilitate what their rhetoric demands. More than ever I wish there was some way to transport all of them the the Enterprise holodeck so they could live out their fantasies without hurting the rest of us.

    Still raining, still chilly (40 at the moment) – I need to do some end of month financial recording but then I’m getting back offline and heading for my rocking chair by the woodstove! Hope everyone has a pleasant – safe, warm, well-but-not-too-well fed, rest of Saturday. {{{HUGS}}}

  16. light rain, but cold!!! omg

    ok, I known 40s isn’t really all that cold but it was 75 yesterday — I warmed up during the 2 hours I was walking, but when we finished….. it was miserable. Went for breakfast tacos, never really got warm, came home turned up the heat & took a hot shower — now I’m warm. And the nap helped.

  17. Good Sunday morning all. My brined turkey breast roasted last night in about 80 minutes and is delicious! I will definitely do that again. My next culinary sights are set on an onion and wine stew from Ruth Reichl’s new combination cookbook and memoir, My Cooking Year (I think that’s the title).

    How on earth can the media and authorities keep saying the PP shooter’s motives were “unclear”. Really? Come on, guys, it’s crystal clear. And it’s domestic terrorism, just call it what it is people. Sheesh.

    Ok, listening to Adele’s “25” album and ready to surf the net before playing some WOW. Have a great day everyone!

    • Media and authorities have to keep saying the shooter’s motives are unclear or they’d have to admit that they are responsible. “No more baby parts” – where’d the psychotic bastard get the idea that there were baby parts at a PP clinic? And since they are constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility for anything…

  18. weird, I checked in this morning but I don’t see it

    Cold day (for here), church was nice – beginning of Advent, nice music, communion, and now I’m clearing out my dvr. It’ll be too cold in the morning to walk before work, so I’ll take stuff to change into to walk after work. And did I mention it’s cold?

Comments are closed.