Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Oct. 23rd through Oct. 29th

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.

16 Comments

  1. Happy Freya’s Day, Meese! The sky is full of angry-looking steel-gray clouds which will, of course, dissipate rather than give us any rain. (We did get a little yesterday, though.) Currently we’re at 50 F., going up to 61 F.

    Not much to say except that I want to go on a news diet. I’m just too stressed out listening to the TV and reading the Rethug WaPo. My stomach roils from it.

    Haven’t been to the gym in two weeks, which is also stressing me out. I spend too much time on line, lots of time running errands, and not enough time doing the things I really need to do. (Complain, complain.) Anyway, it’ll all be over quite soon and then I can start stressing about the Rethug plot to take down HRC.

    Wishing all a good day!

    • I was hoping for clear skies this morning because the east sky had a treat for us but, alas, it was not to be.

      The election will be over soon and then we will be back to normal ugly news and Democrats fighting about Hillary’s cabinet choices. :( I wish they would wait until we get her safely elected.

  2. Hillary’s rally in Cedar Rapids IA will include Cecile Richards!! 2:15pm Eastern:

    Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton holds a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, along with Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Cecile Richards, EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock, and NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue.

    Airing LIVE Friday, Oct 28 1:15pm CDT on C-SPAN.org

  3. 39 here – going up to 47 – there is still snow on the ground but roads are clear.
    Heading off to school.

    Really want to be a bear and hibernate.

    Have a good day folks.

  4. Upper 50s heading for 80 today. Sunny again which is relatively good for electricity generation. Reached 234 KWHs for the month last night so should get over 250 but nowhere near the 308 I got in October 2015. Cloudy year (and bigger oak tree). sigh

    Having already voted, I’m starting to hang up on computer-generated polls (although I’m happy to talk to a real human being). Still smiling about the Michelle and Hillary event yesterday. Purposing my candles for “Highest Good, Blue Wave if that falls within Highest Good” – do not want to tell The Universe what to do, definitely want the Universe to know what I want. :)

    Meanwhile, I have work to do so I’d best get to it. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  5. Good morning, 51 and partly cloudy in Bellingham. It’s a pool morning for me, then some errands with my sister this afternoon. We took the easy way for a family dinner last night and met at a local taco restaurant. It was fun to be with the grand girls and not have to do anything!

    I’ll go to the pool this morning, then do some errands with my sister this afternoon. Yesterday I updated and cleaned my older Dell computer for her to use while she is here, and with all the W10 components working as they should it’s zipping along. The keyboard has a satisfying “click” and I like the screen so I may keep this one for me and give her a newer one to use!

    Interesting article by Nancy LeTourneau re Texas…….

    Turning Texas Into a Battleground State

    You might not be familiar with the name Jeremy Bird because he’s not someone that seeks out opportunities to be in the spotlight. But he played a critical role in both of Obama’s presidential campaigns, staring off as a field director in South Carolina during the 2008 primary and winding up as the National Field Director in 2012. When people talk about the community organizing that infused Obama’s win in 2008, that was the work of Bird – who based a lot of it on what he learned from Marshall Ganz while taking his classes at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

    After the 2012 campaign Bird founded an organization called Battleground Texas where he has taken that same community organizing approach to accomplish this goal:

    Battleground Texas is focused on expanding the electorate by registering more voters – and, as importantly, mobilizing those Texans who are already registered but who have not been engaged in the democratic process. And we’re using the data-driven, people-focused approach that has helped win grassroots campaigns around the country.

    • When (not if) we get Texas it will be game over for national elections.

      If it happens this year, it would be awesome. But either way, I just hope that when it goes blue, they can do what we can’t seem to do here – win during the midterms when the state government is chosen. I was sure that 2014 would see a wholesale rejection of the awfulness they visited on us in 2010 but I was wrong – only about 48% of us considered it awful enough to vote against Walker.

  6. Morning all! Dee be careful out there on slick roads – I so much wish you could retire and just stay home in weather like this, but then, your students would miss out on so much!

    I’m so upset about the Bundy verdict – it just looks like straight up jury nullification to me, with the jury simply ignoring evidence and law to acquit. I need to read up on the trial though to see if there’s more to it than that. So ill-timed as well – telling crazy Trumpists that it’s ok to disrupt public institutions if you’re white and carrying a gun. ach. The contrast with the brutal treatment of the Native American tribes protesting the pipeline could not be more stark. And awful.

    Hillary and Michelle were so great yesterday! I will tune in to the President today in Orlando – hopefully he’ll have more kind words for Patrick Murphy, who in the latest poll is tied with Rubio. Things are going well, if not overwhelmingly, for Dems in early voting so far – here’s a link to Steve Schale’s daily analysis for anyone who’s interested in the voting statistics. One note of concern is that the African-American vote is running behind Obama’s numbers – hope the President can push that a bit. Also, not in Schale’s analysis but read elsewhere, the voters under 30 so far only comprise about 5% of the vote – dammit, this is their future we’re voting on, why can’t they see that!!

    http://steveschale.squarespace.com/blog/2016/10/28/florida-day-11-florida-votes-and-the-jaguars-suck.html

    Ok, everyone have a great day!

    • Oh and in Steve’s analysis – Duval County is north Florida, Jacksonville mainly, very Republican territory. And the Jacksonville Jaguars pro football team is just terrible this year. Also, Alachua County is MY county, yay – that home of “East Florida Seminary” stuff in Steve’s memo is a little dig at the University of Florida here – I imagine he went to Florida State lol.

    • I was trying to figure out what happened in Oregon. One of the things I saw briefly last night was that the judge told the jury that if there were no conspiracy, there could be no gun charges. I didn’t see anything on that this morning so maybe it was some early speculation. Do you think they could have been scared of retaliation? The good news is that the Bundy boys will be kept in prison and shipped to Nevada for a trial on the 2014 charges. I hope that the prosecutors there do a better job of building that case.

  7. Good morning, meese! Saturday …

    It is 63 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 64. The forecast calls for variable cloudiness.

    When I saw the email “story” hit yesterday afternoon, my first thought was “just shut up”. People who were not voting for Hillary Clinton over her personal email server will never vote for her and the rest of us are sick and tired of hearing about it. In my mind, it is now code for “Hillary is Dishonest” and a dog whistle meant to perk up the ears of those who believe that Hillary Clinton should be in jail (we see you out there, Paul Ryan!!). The only meaningful fallout might be that it gins up the Republican Party base and stems the down-ticket bloodbath. I guess we will see how long the story runs. When I saw that even Sen. Diane Feinstein was castigating Director Comey, I knew that he had really stepped in it. Another example that you can’t clean the stench from wallowing in partisan Republican witchhunts (he was a Whitewater investigator) off a person – they revert to form. Next time the FBI position is due to be filled, how about we find someone with an impeccable resume, not one that people thought was smudged by one act of integrity, the Ashcroft hospital visit during the Bush administration.

    I found Hillary’s presser on the email nothingburger. I am glad she did it but sad that she had to:

    Strong, clear. “People are choosing a president”. Yes, we are.

    Today Hillary will be in Daytona Beach FL at 4pm, Joe will be in Nevada, Bill in Ohio, Chelsea in Michigan. Hillary added a Phoenix AZ rally to her schedule – for next Wednesday, Nov. 1. Ha!! I want her to add a Texas rally just to freak out the RNC. I bet Austin would welcome her.

    The president’s weekly address is an address by Vice President Biden regarding his Cancer Moonshot. I will post it after I get a few things done this morning.

    See all y’all later!

  8. Up for ungodly hour workout. Rude student neighbors woke me up at 2something. Gonna hate this workout. But if I start skipping, it’ll be too easy to keep skipping. Otoh, if all my training is on the trail & the race is on the street…. if I’m disciplined enough to walk after I watch AM Joy…. Ok, back later.

  9. Another sleepless night chiming in – I couldn’t go to sleep for reasons unknown. So got back on the computer at 3:30 Am or something, playing WOW – Dee was there too, up letting her dogs out, so we had a companionable few hours in our voice chat, just hanging out talking and playing.

    I’m so outraged at the FBI Director – this is a nothingburger of the first order and he knows it. The LA Times reported sources told them none of the e-mails in question are from Hillary, and most likely are duplicates of ones the FBI has already looked at. Comey’s own agency is furious with him for releasing this info that is so misleading, so close to the election. Some say it’s incompetence – I’m not buying it. I think he wants to ingratiate himself with House Republicans, and wants also to make it difficult for Hillary to get rid of him when she takes office, as those Republicans would be right on her shouting obstruction and saying she was going after political enemies. That way he can be the Republican House’s man on the inside, helping them push more conspiracy theories and keep their own obstruction churning. It makes me sick, the whole thing.

    And the way the press bought the Chafetz version of this uncritically in the first wave of coverage is simply unconscionable – are they journalists or stenographers? Wait, don’t tell me. I can only hope there are no true undecided voters left who might be swayed by this nonsense.

    Opera this afternoon – Bellini’s I Puritani, a nonsensical but beautiful opera with the great Deana Damrau in the cast, so hopefully I can stay awake long enough to listen!

    Everyone have a great day!

  10. Dropping by for a minute to check in – mid 60s this morning going to 80 and sunny again. I’ll take it. Especially since the gain on a sunny day right now is still under 9 KWHs for the day. Friend’s car is unavailable so I may have to be her taxi before heading over to Dem HQ. I’ll check back when/if I can.

    Comey will be lucky if he’s not removed from office via breaking Hatch act restrictions. And we’ll be lucky if he is. But somebody besides President Obama or Hillary will have to file the suit.

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

  11. Good morning, 51 and partly sunny in Bellingham. I was awake in the night too, then up early to take my sister to the train so I’m already wishing for a nap. She will visit our Seattle daughter this weekend and return on Sunday.

    Needless to say I want this endless election to be over!

Comments are closed.