Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Nov. 12th through Nov. 18th

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.


Page One of comments is at this link
 
Page Two of comments is at this link


 

43 Comments

  1. Good “morning”, Motley Meese! The week begins …

    Morning low of 30 degrees in Madison WI with an expected daytime high of 39. Light snow is in the forecast.

    Have a great day, all y’alls!!

  2. Good Sunday Morning Meese

    27 degrees here in Saugerties NY

    Was glad to see The View covering PR – since they have an audience that is different from “lefty blogs”

    Will be exploring Puerto Rican music/culture this morning over at DKos

    • I haven’t seen anything in the news about Puerto Rico except that their FEMA guy resigned, apparently from exhaustion, and that the Army is leaving. I did see that some power wires went down and then nothing about that since, which makes me wonder if it was an Internet hoax.

      I just checked status.pr and it looks like they are at 44.5% for power and 87.82% for water (much lower in the north and higher in the city). Cell phone coverage is still very low.

    • {{{Denise}}} – music is always what’s gotten folks through really bad times – times so bad if you didn’t have music you wouldn’t have hope and you’d just curl up into a ball and die. But we do have music – in the very rhythm of our heart beats, of breathing in and out if nothing else. And those who have voices lift them up to remind us all that Life is a Song for Singing.

  3. Got in my walk yesterday — 1.5 mi. Bought groceries, the berries are thawing, I’m going to break up the walnuts (why does no one sell roasted nuts for cooking?) so I can start cooking as soon as I’m home from church. It’s warm here again — sandals weather. When I set out next week’s clothes, it’s all gonna be capris.

  4. Good morning, Meese. Cloudy here but with weak sunlight casting shadows. It’s 35 F. here at the moment, going up to 47 F. later. Comfort food for dinner tonight—shepherd’s pie with peas, followed by stewed apples with custard.

    Spent yesterday gulping Advil a la Carly Simon (“I haven’t got time for the pain/I haven’t the room for the pain”), and trying to catch up on my lost sleep. Still had trouble getting off to sleep last night, but when I moved into the cooler bedroom I went out like a light.

    We’re about to watch the race so I can’t cruise any blogs until later. Coming down with a cold, so I feel kinda blah.

    The woman who interviewed me by telephone yesterday said her crew would be filming in the DC area in about a month and thinks she might interview me on film. (I lead a weird life.) We’ll see whether this comes to pass.

    Wishing everyone, especially Puerto Rico, a good day. Our local PBS station showed “West Side Story” last night, so we captured the recording. Man, that movie really seems quaint now.

    • Last night I made chicken soup with dumplings in the crockpot. Much needed comfort food. Hugs and healing energies!

  5. Good morning, 51 and raining in Bellingham. I turned the news off and the music on yesterday, but I need to hide my phone to have a break from addictive twitter!

    If I can stay focused I’ll finish sewing the blocks for my Dr Who quilt project today. Now that I’ve solved the math dilemma the process of cutting, sewing and keeping everything sized and square is quite relaxing.

    Time to find some coffee. Best Sunday wishes to all.

  6. Good afternoon! It’s 40 here now, so already warmer than yesterday; supposed to get up to 45. DC (kitty) is happy that the sun is out and there are sunbeams to lie in.

    I need to have more coffee and wake up a bit, and then start on laundry and housework.

  7. overcast but warm here… expect the marine layer will burn off by mid-day. gotta get back to the motley alces alces. cheers, everyone.

  8. It was 54 by the time I got online – we had about an hour of sunshine but about the time the laundry finished it clouded up again so I’ve hung it indoors. Cinnamon-vanilla muffins for the week. I really need to make soup for lunches – I’ve got 2 servings left of my last batch – but I don’t have any stock and don’t have time to make it until tonight as I’ve got my eldest grandson’s 20th birthday party to head out for shortly. (His birthday was actually Thursday but he had classes – sophomore in the Engineering College.)

    Evil Ones still doing Evil. Unfortunately no changes needed on my “action items” my friends are carrying forward over at DK. Equally unfortunately no changes on my status at DK. So just as well I won’t be online at 2 when a diary may or may not publish that I would have covered for if it didn’t and I can’t now. sigh. But the community needs lists are being carried forward and the folks in need are being helped for which I am very grateful. And for all the folks who’ve contacted me by various means I am even more grateful.

    My hands are bothering me so it takes a while to actually answer emails but I’m doing it. And need to get back to doing it so I have everybody done (or try to anyway) before I leave for the party. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • Happy birthday to your grandson; enjoy the party. Cinnamon Vanilla muffins sound delicious; do you mind sharing the recipe (or the source if it’s too much on your hands for typing). Love & lots of hugs, bfitz.

      • {{{Avilyn}}} – I did – also the Italian cream cake drizzled with toffee he had for a birthday cake. :)

        These are made with a bean-based gluten-free flour mix so you have to sift once before measuring.
        preheat oven to 350 and prepare muffin tins
        sift together 2 c gf flour, 1/4 tsp soda, 1 tsp cinnamon – set aside
        cream together 1 TBSP butter, 3 TBSP almond butter, 2 TBSP brown sugar.
        beat in 2 eggs, stir in either 1 tsp regular vanilla or 1/4 tsp Mexican vanilla, stir in 6 oz plain 2% yogurt, stir in 6 oz seltzer water.
        Add flour mixture and stir until all the flour is damp. Pour into muffin tins and bake about 30 minutes or until done
        Cool on a wire rack before removing from muffin tins. Enjoy.

        moar {{{HUGS}}} and always Healing Energy

    • There’s a Sunday diary up at the dk Village. Your name is coming up in the comments, all good of course. Birthday party sounds nice! :)

      • {{{MomentaryGrace}}} – I’m so glad someone covered for Michael. I was worrying about that last night. If they manage to get me reinstated I hope I can be even more of the person I’ve been to them already. I don’t want to let them down. They’re family. moar {{{HUGS}}}

  9. Good morning, meeses! Monday …

    It is 21 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 43. Right now we have freezing fog (yikes!) but the forecast calls for sunny skies later this morning and through the rest of the day.

    We made it through an entire weekend without a mass shooting. Hurray for us. /snark

    Busy week here getting ahead of projects with next week being the short Thanksgiving week. This morning I have to run maintenance on my managed servers – work I should have done yesterday but I ended up getting caught up in one final update needed for my new computer. I don’t know how people without built-in tech support get through these things. I guess they hire people like me!

    See all y’all later!

  10. Good Monday Morning Meese. 36 with rain here in Saugerties.

    Am going to try to help get the word out about this Sunday’s March

    I am not getting the feeling that much of “the left” is helping out with this and it is making me pissed off.

    Though Mayor Cruz and Lin-Manuel are featured speakers – and grassroots PR organizations have been posting online and spreading the word – I see nothing in the news.

  11. Walked again — 1.21 mi. It’s warm, walked in just tech shirt & tights — and will be warm all week. I took tomorrow off work, because it’s the day I’ll be waiting for my code to buy concert tickets. Our computers were upgraded over the weekend, but everything seems to be working, so yay. Oatmeal & tea and catching up on what’s going on. Really love American Soul by my boys.

  12. Good morning, Moosekind! We had a little predawn shower here in NoVa, so the streets are still wet. The sky is cloudy. As we no longer turn on the TV in the mornings, I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen today with regard to weather. Current temp. is 38 F., going up to 49 F. today.

    Didn’t have to take a pain pill at all for the aching jaw yesterday, although it’s still very tender and I can’t chew on that side. I’m now dosing myself with cold medication as the changing temps. have started something again.

    We’re planning a trip to Costco today to get Christmas crackers. Costco has the biggest and best Christmas crackers, so I want to get them early. Dearly Beloved bought two little evergreen trees for the front porch yesterday, and very handsome they are.

    I’d better spend the rest of the day choosing the 500 photos we’re planning to have digitized onto a CD-ROM or a thumb drive, probably the latter. My Mac doesn’t even have a CD drive. We need to get those huge bins of photo albums out of the garage. The contractor told us he’d give us an estimate for the garage before Thanksgiving and will do the work after Thanksgiving.

    Bfitz, you are still missed terribly at the other site. Everyone is so upset! Dee, I shared your PR post on Facebook, thanks for writing it.

    Wishing a good day to all at the Pond and Beyond.

  13. 45 when I got to work and not much higher now – still overcast but not as overcast as yesterday, forecast is to get us all the way to 60. :) I got 4.5 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 67 so falling further behind. But I have generated more for the year than I use in a year so that’s good.

    Rs are still Evil and I am still banned from my work at DK to fight them. Holding pattern for a while. I won’t give up while my friends are still working to get me back. I’ll have to think of an interim plan – since I still have my “day job” it’s harder to do. But the rest of the office had stepped out I just managed to call my bloody Rep on the toll-free number. I’ve got to come up with an alternative to the post cards though. I’m mostly OK keyboarding mostly, but holding a pen long enough and strong enough to write a legible message is getting harder and harder to do. But I’ll keep on keepin’ on as long as I can.

    Gotta get back to work. Just taking a break from the Monday Emails. But I’ve got some answers to the issues that had been keeping some of these piles of papers on my desk. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  14. Good morning, 50 and raining in Bellingham. The wind blew all night so the branches of my old maple trees are bare this morning. The silhouette of branches against the sky means winter is here regardless of what the calendar says.

    I’m going to the pool soon and I hope to sew a birthday gift for my DIL this afternoon. I don’t have time to finish the new pillows for her living room, but my newly organized sewing room is full of simple possibilities so I’ll see what happens!

    Take care everyone.

  15. Good morning, meeses! Tuesday …

    It is 32 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 43. Rain and snow this morning, showers this afternoon.

    Good lord, the shoes keep dropping on the Roy Moore story! When the news broke yesterday that Mitch McChinless had bailed on him, I wondered what his end game was. Twitter suggested that it was a Koch v Mercer thing and McConnell is a Koch guy and Mercer is Bannon, his nemesis. So he is willing to give up this seat for the long game (he has 2 to give). If they do a Luther Strange write-in, Doug Jones will win because of the split vote. Sadly, Jones cannot win outright in a state where 50 pastors come out in support of a pedophile over a Democrat. The last time Alabama elected a Democratic anything was when Democrats were the KKK and Republicans were the Party of Lincoln.

    Shoes also keep dropping on the head of doodiebrained Donald J. Trump, Jr. There is actually no love lost between Senior and Junior and you wonder if the shitgibbon will let his own flesh and blood go to prison – or if Junior will turn state’s evidence on Senior. Grab popcorn!

    The House will vote on the tax cut bill on Thursday before there is a CBO score. It will not include eliminating the deduction on property tax because that will lose them 20 votes. But the Senate bill that it must reconcile with does eliminate the property tax deduction and that will be a third rail for blue state Republicans – it will harm their constituents, not just the hated city folk. So they will have to decide if that will be the last vote of their career; there are only so many Fox News and think tank jobs, so they will have to choose carefully. Grab popcorn!

    In Wisconsin, we have entrant number eighty gazillion in the governors race but this is a guy I can vote for without hesitation: Mahlon Mitchell. He ran in the recall for Lt. Governor back in 2012 and has union roots and no baggage. Middle of the thread:

    See all y’all later!

    • Here is an article “Four Ways Walker Could Lose”.

      1. Could the Foxconn deal backfire?
      2. How close is too close to Trump?
      3. It depends on the Democratic opponent
      4. Walker fatigue

      The Foxconn deal isn’t expected to produce jobs until the buildings are built and that won’t happen until after the election. But it could backfire in that it is targeted for one small part of the state by taking money from the rest of the state. So people in Green Bay will pay for the minimum wage jobs being created for the Racine/Kenosha area. THAT could be a big deal and it can be tied around Walker’s neck.

      There is no “too close to Trump” in Wisconsin. 91% white, most of them butthurt because they had a black president who took all their guns! Wut, he didn’t? Well, he wanted to, that’s enough!

      I think it will be the combination of 3 and 4: the right candidate and Walker fatigue. You can see Mahlon going to the fatigue in his announcement tweet. The right candidate won’t run on Walker Sucks (even though he does), they will run on the issues that Walker failed us on – education, infrastructure (our roads are awful), protecting our environment.

  16. Good Tuesday Morning Meese.
    35 going up to 44 here in Saugerties NY.

    Today is school day – the course is for freshmen mostly and is about anthropology in today’s world – discussing anthropology, US politics and religion today -and will ask them to identify what issues in the news are about religion
    I plan to show this tweet

    We will also discuss these data:

    The second-largest religion in each state — WaPo

    Christianity is by far the largest religion in the United States; more than three-quarters of Americans identify as Christians. A little more than half of us identify as Protestants, about 23 percent as Catholic and about 2 percent as Mormon.

    But what about the rest of us? In the Western U.S., Buddhists represent the largest non-Christian religious bloc in most states. In 20 states, mostly in the Midwest and South, Islam is the largest non-Christian faith tradition. And in 15 states, mostly in the Northeast, Judaism has the most followers after Christianity. Hindus come in second place in Arizona and Delaware, and there are more practitioners of the Baha’i faith in South Carolina than anyone else.

    All these data come from the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, which conducts a U.S. Religion Census every 10 years.

    Pagans are not included – which I will point out :)

    • That was a fascinating map! I understand Judaism in the Northeast – Minnesota is a bit of a surprise – but to see Islam as religion number 2 in a large swath of the center of the country is interesting. It is too bad that they did not include Pagans – or unaligned. I think that “no religion” is making headway as younger people realize that organized religion is organized for the benefit of the churches more than the congregations and that the key tenet of any organized religion is obedience. That does not suit the Gen Z’ers which includes my daughter.

  17. Good morning, Moosekind. The sky was covered with low-hanging puffy gray clouds when I went out to get the newspaper, but now the clouds have flattened into a uniform gray. Don’t know what this portends. Current temp. in NoVa is 41 F., going up to 49 F.

    Going to the gym this morning even though the cold is taking hold and I don’t feel very well. Accomplished absolutely nothing of note yesterday, not even letter-writing.

    We’re going to have to mobilize against this tax bill. It will be an absolute disaster!

    Need to make two telephone calls today: one to my regular dentist to get an appointment for a permanent filling and the other to BookBaby, my publisher.

    Wishing a good, quiet day to all at the Pond and Beyond. The Moose is acting up again, had to log out and log back in. Otherwise they’d have called me “Anonymous.”

    • If you were “Anonymoose” that would be one thing but “Anonymous” will not do at all! I had terrible Moose sign-in problems late last week and had to clear logins and cookies in FireFox. I was shocked to find cookies saved up from sites I have not visited in years! Sheesh. Anyway, cleaning them out helped a lot although I had to dig through old notes to get logged back into other sites that I want to stay logged into. It was a good opportunity to tidy up.

      I just put up my 2018 Moon Calendar (I “store” it on the reverse side of my 2017 banner so that on January 1st, I can just flip it over) and I noticed that the year will start with a LOT of moonlight. I consider this a good omen. I am very anxious to flip the calendar to 2018 because “17” seems to have a lot of sharp edges and has no beauty or flow. Look at the 8! It is time to start putting witchy intentions towards next year’s goals.

  18. Warm again — high in the mid 70s today. Got my code, now to wait 2 ½ hours till I can buy my ticket. Right now, it’s breakfast & the local news. Definitely going to the gym this afternoon, and of course there’s U2 music playing in my head.

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