Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Mar. 19th through Mar. 25th

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.

Quick Links to Past Comments
– Comments Page 1 is here.
– Comments Page 2 is here.
– Comments Page 3 is here.

44 Comments

  1. My eye is officially 95% better, doc said to just be careful about putting my contacts in. I still argue for a bad batch of contacts, because it was only on one side. Anyway, better.

    So, yesterday’s hearings. Wow. And last night our amazing diplomat the Secretary of State said he’s going to skip the April NATO meeting so he can go to Russia instead. Can the selling out of our country to Russia be any more blatant? And yet people still say “give him a chance”???? What? Give him a chance to annex us into Russia? Ugh.

    Turning up the music in my head. It’s the dance-y version of Just Say Yes. But this is an acoustic version which is much, much better.

  2. Good morning, Moosekind! A somber grey beginning to the day: it rained early this morning, although it’s drying out now. Current temp. in NoVa is 45 F., going up to 62 F. later.

    Managed to keep in touch with the news by Twitter and other social media yesterday—mercifully, Mr. Toddler took a 3-hour nap. That made the time pass very pleasantly. I can watch him sleeping on a baby monitor smaller than a cell phone. When he woke up he was in a jolly mood so after his snack, his father told Alexa to play Beatles music and we all rocked and rolled in the tiny kitchen.

    Going to call my senators this morning and tell them a vote to confirm Gorsucks is a vote against women’s rights, and we’ll remember each November.

    Feel very down today. One of the friends I visited last Friday seems to have deteriorated into full-blown dementia or Alzheimer’s or something. She was a little more forgetful than usual last Friday but on the whole quite sane and rational. She did say that something of her would survive after she’s gone—her thesis. It’s her bachelor’s degree thesis in the archives at Georgetown University. I feel very sad for her and the friend she shares an apartment with. I’ve known both of them since the early 1990s. They were part of my Circle when I had one.

    Darling Niece may be over for coffee this morning and this afternoon I have child-minding again, so will be busy. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond.

    • {{{Diana}}} so sorry about your friend. I talk to family of people with dementia a lot, it is so hard. Sending healing energy your way.

  3. 63 at dawn, heading for the 80s again and sunny at the moment. Front’s gonna move in this afternoon – I’m hoping late this afternoon so I can get some decent generation – but if not, give us some actual rain please. When i got home yesterday the sky was very hazy and full of tiny cinders. I checked the Forestry website there was nothing listed for my county – no wildfire or planned burn – so it was probably some developer burning the bulldozed piles of trees before they start building. Messed with my eyes – also my sinuses – didn’t get much sleep last night. What good does it do to have nice weather you can open your windows for when some schmuck decides to burn bulldozed forest tracts? Sigh.

    I’ve still got some stuff to track down to finish clearing my desk – got most of it yesterday along with stuff that came up as the day went on. I might even be able to find Womack’s phone number under the pile. If not i’ll look it up again. I don’t like talking even to the staff of evil people, but I will. need to check in on the Village diaries and get my community needs stuff up. Bright the day and wind to thy wings, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • {{{basket}}} – Healing Energy and hope you get some rest/feeling better.

  4. Good morning, 44 and raining in Bellingham. Yesterday was a full day with the pool, then the hearings, then some sewing, and best of all some time in the garden pruning the salal and the laurel hedge with RonK and our son.

    I’m going to find time today for some therapeutic ivy clipping….restoring order to the garden is an antidote to our toxic political reality!

  5. Cloudy right now. It’s 65 degrees and according to 3 different weather apps it’s going to start raining at 12:45, or at 6:00 or not today but tomorrow. I guess I’ll flip a coin to see which I’m going with.

  6. Hello, Meese. Here it is 4:25 a.m. on Wednesday and I can’t sleep. Think I’ll get a cup of tea and come back later. (Yawn) Why can’t a person sleep?

    • Because there is a disturbance in the force, an ill wind blowing in untold death and destruction, an orange shitgibbon – and his party of shitgibbonry, poised to destroy the lives of millions.

      • Hi, Jan! Well, that’s telling ’em! I’m definitely going to make that cup of tea and then perhaps nap downstairs. I hate this. It throws my whole day off, and I have a child-minding job again this afternoon.

        See you later!

        • Two days last week I actually slept until my alarm got me up. I thought that meant that I was finally getting into regular sleep patterns again! But it was a fleeting moment, I am back to waking up at 1am or 2am or 3am. Sigh.

          We need a win on Thursday. If the AHCA is not passed on Thursday, if the vote is pushed to Friday or next week, that likely means it will never pass. House Republicans have to decide if they are willing to grab the third rail that their leadership is presenting to them. Die by primary or general election loss? It is too bad that making a moral choice does not enter into the equation.

  7. Good morning, meese! Wednesday …

    It is 25 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 37. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    I was busy yesterday and did not follow any of the Gorsucks hearings live. By the time I got a chance to look at Twitter, my brain was past the point of being able to read any of the accounts. From what I understand, he was quite rude to the women on the panel – SURPRISE, man from misogyny party who thinks that women game the maternity leave system turns out to be a sexist pig!! I have a few stories queued up that I will read when I get overnight projects cleared.

    One thing that fries my butt is that people are saying “well, he is no worse than Scalia”. IT ISN’T SCALIA’S SEAT!!! It is Merrick Garland’s seat and that is who you need to compare him to. Here we are poised to take healthcare away from millions of people – many of them children – and ask yourself how much more difficult it would be if every state had expanded Medicaid. Chief Justice John Roberts set the stage by striking the Medicaid expansion from the ACA. Elections only have consequences when Republicans win – when Democrats win, Republicans ignore the constitution and chip away at the foundations of our democracy. No one – no one – should be surprised that the party who won on the Southern Strategy and Willie Horton and birtherism, and an electoral college set up to preserve the rights of slaveholding states, would be, once they gained complete power, at the point where they would not care that a Russian asset is in the White House, that their votes will allow 36,000 people a year to die from treatable illnesses, and that they are fine with the mantle of Leader of the Free World being passed to the German Chancellor.

    Follow this thread from former Michigan Rep. John Dingell about the long road to the ACA:


    THAT is why I am proud to be a Democrat and why the loss of our democratic institutions is so painful. The repeal of the ACA is more than just the repeal of one health care bill – it is the undoing of the hard work of generations of Democrats determined to make health care a right. :(

    See all y’all later!

  8. Good morning Meese

    Sitting here waiting for the car service from Lehigh to pick me up and whisk me away to Bethlehem PA.

    Will be back home tomorrow bt mid-afternoon.

    Couldn’t watch/listen to the SCOTUS nom hearings – made me nauseous

    I will curse the people who put us in this bind till the day I die

    • Safe travels, Dee! I am having a difficult time not wishing harm upon those who led us to this point. Neil Gorsuch is 49 years old – and admitted under oath that he has no empathy, no ability to put himself in the shoes of the truck driver who was going to freeze to death if he stayed in his truck. THAT is who we will have deciding our laws for the next 40 years: a sociopath nominated by a sociopath put into a Supreme Court seat held open by a sociopath who is beholden to sociopaths for whom the preservation of every penny of their wealth is more important than the lives of millions of people.

    • {{{Denise}}} – safe travels and have fun at your venue. I don’t know of anything about the Rs that doesn’t make me nauseous. sigh. I’m not generally into curses, but the “will” I have for them they’d probably consider to be one – that they be rendered powerless and therefore harmless.

  9. Every evening I watch the news & I’m amazed #45 isn’t being impeached. I start the day, he hasn’t been, and I turn up the music in my head. Love this song from Tired Pony. The chorus: “Do you know what I’m looking for now? ‘Cause I sure don’t” , works on so many levels. I picked a live version to share because Garry is good at the banter thing. But this one doesn’t have Minnie Driver singing with him, and she’s better.

    • Good morning, ink! It’s a beautiful day in NoVa with white clouds sailing across the blue, but very windy. Current temp. is 38 F., going up to 45 F., so there’ll be a fire in the old woodstove tonight.

      Not much to say except that my friend is still in the hospital and not very responsive. I fear the worst. My other Circle Sister, who lives with her, is consumed with worry, of course. At least, there in the retirement community, she has friends to help her through this. After work her son comes to take her to the hospital so they can visit.

      Ugh, Dana Pill Bank thinks Gorsucks is going to be confirmed. Wish they could delay, delay, delay. If the intelligence community has something on Thing and his cohorts, why don’t they DO something?

      Got to get ready to go to the gym. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond!

  10. 45 this morning heading for 58 and cloudy. Heater kicked on for the first time in almost a week. Not going to get much in the way of solar generation today, got over 14 KWHs yesterday bringing us to 260 for the month to date. No hopes of 400 KWHs for the month as in March 2016, but do hope to get well into the 300s,

    I don’t know exactly how I managed to make DK a full-time job, but it seems I have. wrote and published a fundraiser for BFSkinner last night, wrote and scheduled a pootie diary for today also last night, and working on my Street Prophets for this afternoon. Going to have to re-write part of it because as best we can figure out some self-righteous, sanctimonious, elitist, privileged a**hole filed a report with YouCaring saying Aji and Wings were running a scam and the newest and final fundraising widget is now shut down. (All donations refunded.) Mean people suck. And they certainly believe the Rs’ contention that anybody needing help is really a “welfare queen” scam artist stealing your money. One more time Hate (temporarily) wins.

    OK, rant over. I’ve got paid for work to do and DK work to do – but I’m going to go visit the Village by the Moose Pond diary first! Bright the day and wind to thy wings, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • OMG! You have been doing stellar work, bfitz!

      What a crummy thing to do to Aji and Wings. I hope the testicles of the person who did that will fall off.

      • {{{Diana}}} – well, I certainly didn’t mean to be doing this. Of course once I started working with the fundraisers… Ojibwa invited me to do the expanded community needs lists as a full diary twice a week through Street Prophets. And now my name is known, people come to me – either themselves or someone alerts me to a problem. As to the pootie diaries, well, I promised Tricia – not a regular/weekly, but backups.

        The Evil ones damage their own souls and I ignore them when I can and work around them when i can’t. Meanwhile, Aji and Wings are finishing their 7th winter living in a leaky, toxic, uninsulated something that Wings – as short a man as he is, and he is – cannot stand upright most of the time. So the focus has to be on getting the house built and worry about the Evil ones later. moar {{{HUGS}}}

  11. Good morning, 52 and partly cloudy in Bellingham. Yesterday’s rain kept me indoors and with no garden therapy to counter tRump toxicity I was mad at the world all day. I hope my time at the pool this morning will help me recover!

    Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate……

    Neil Gorsuch Was Hatched in a Federalist Society Lab

    Senate Republicans and Gorsuch will continue to play the confirmation hearing as if the courts, the judicial branch, and Gorsuch himself were the Last Decent Thing in America. That movie has some real allure and salience, as every other norm of decency and deliberation is in flames in the dumpster out back. Nobody wants to protect the Last Decent Thing in America more than I do. But even if it’s still 1956 in Neil Gorsuch’s head, and the rugged open plains still stretch out as far as the mutton can see, here in reality the dumpster is on fire and everyone is getting singed. As we are learning sitting in this room on Capitol Hill, you can ask for gravitas and respect, but you cannot really growl or shout when it isn’t forthcoming. America broke it and America bought it. All of it. And no one person gets to pretend we aren’t all on fire.

    • It is distressing to read the “day after” stories and realize that he is mounting a charm offensive to cover his hideous visage and 19th century jurisprudence. I don’t expect the Democrats to filibuster but I wish more of them would expose that he is a soulless creature who can’t even drum up empathy for a man freezing to death. I am 100% certain that he penned that dissent with an eye on the Supreme Court so that he could show his bone fides (“there is NO context – only the letter of the law”) to the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation.

      He will “reluctantly” repeal Roe v Wade, “reluctantly” roll back marriage equality, and “reluctantly” destroy the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. Our only hope is that Chief Justice John Roberts feels the heat from the dumpster fire and decides that his children’s future is at stake. In a veritable basket full of awfulness of this election’s outcomes, it is difficult to pick the most awful but losing a Supreme Court seat is probably either number 1 or number 2 on my list.

  12. Good morning, meese! Thursday …

    It is 27 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 41. Mostly cloudy skies are in the forecast. Tomorrow it will get to 60 but then rainy weather will come in for the weekend.

    Busy news day yesterday! Today the House meets to repeal President Obama’s signature legislation. Our “allies” in the effort to Kill The Bill are the Koch brothers and the Freedumb Cacas. Their anger at Ryan’s bill is that it is not mean enough but, really, I don’t care what motivation people have to vote against the bill, I just want it stopped. The Republicans showed during the primaries that they are a party split into three factions, none large enough to pass legislation. Today we find out if they are willing to set aside their ideological differences long enough to unite on this bill. If it fails, there is hope.

    And JHC on a popsicle stick!! Senate Democrats are cutting a deal with Mitch McConnell to let Gorsuch in without a filibuster with the understanding that they will keep the filibuster in place for the next nominee??!!?? What part of Mitch McConnell cannot be trusted don’t they get? And what makes them think that Gorsuch isn’t the nominee that we can collectively agree is unfit? He is the polar opposite of Wise Latina, he is privileged white male without a single shred of decency or concern for his fellow man. He makes Clarence Thomas look like Rosa Parks!! Filibuster, have the filibuster killed now if that happens but don’t buy anything that Mitch McConnell is selling.

    See all y’all later!

    • JanF – has anybody “named names” on this? Without that, I’m going to give Dems the benefit of the doubt and say possible Russian trolling to divide us. With names, I’m gonna say “hit the phones, folks, and flood their inboxes – no way! on this crap” – I’ll put the Capitol Switchboard phone number in all my comments to that end. If we have some names and we’re not just being trolled again.

  13. Good Thursday morning Meese. Sitting in the hotel here in Bethlehem PA eating pancakes. Will be heading home at 9:30 AM.
    Will check back in later.

    • {{{Denise}}} – sounds good – wish I could eat pancakes. ;) – Safe travels, hope you had fun with your thing in Bethlehem and moar {{{HUGS}}}

  14. Good morning, Meeses!

    Weather: 37 now, high of 40.

    OK, so much going down right now, it’s hard to decide which drama to follow.

    • {{{inkaudlay}}} – that’s why all the Resistance things say to pick your issues to focus on. Trust your comrades and allies to cover the others. Nobody can do it all. We’ll burn out if we try – and everybody running to the latest OMG leaves all the other OMGs breaking through the walls while we’re elsewhere.

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