Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Jan. 28th through Feb. 3rd

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 HERE!
 
Page Two of Comments is HERE!


 

19 Comments

  1. Back to cold — well, cold enough for a jacket, anyway. I should try to leave early & visit my friend. Getting up early for training ride in the morning. It’s the first one, so it’s a big deal. I can miss one week of Joy Reid’s show. Anyway, at the office, eating oatmeal & drinking tea. Glad things are going well for Ono, sending her good health thoughts.

    • {{{anotherdemocrat}}} – Healing Energy to your friend – and you. moar {{{HUGS}}}

  2. 19 with a wind chill of 8 but sunny and clear. Hope that holds. The house will warm up better when the south-facing enclosed front porch gets some solar gain. It did clear off yesterday after lunch time – and the 9.4 KWHs generated shows just how much more light we have than we did a month ago. Yesterday being the 1st, that’s the m-t-d as well – but it won’t be for long. :)

    Evil Ones being evil – no surprise there – but the news from FL is good. It’s not the best which isn’t even possible as long as racism has its filaments threaded through our society like mold in blue cheese, but it’s good. We can build on that. Meanwhile we do what we find at hand to do, whatever that may be. And hope that while it may not make THE difference it will make A difference.

    Yasu DM’d me last night just before I went to bed that Ono’s home and hoping to do a post in a day or two. So that’s a serious W00T!!! I’m RTing Aji’s stuff and Bobby’s stuff and Denise’s stuff and… hoping that somewhere along the line the tweets reach folks who can and will help. I need to quit procrastinating and get my tax stuff together. The fed is easy – I had one source of income and I take the standard deduction because my itemized stuff doesn’t reach the standard. The state is more convoluted and I have to itemize or I owe them money because AR’s standard deduction is so low. Now if I could just warm up. :) Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

      • {{{basket}}} – good news is always cheering – gives us strength to go forward. Taxes are how we pay for civilization. (Voting is how we keep civilization.) But yeah, they’re a pain to do. :) and moar {{{HUGS}}}

  3. Here is the article I had read about the federal ruling in Florida and the awful way Jeb! treated it like he was King Solomon or something. It is from Mother Jones:

    Mother Jones obtained more than 1,000 pages of transcripts of clemency hearings held during Bush’s tenure. Together, they provide a glimpse into his moral reasoning as he weighed the worthiness of the appeals by thousands of ex-felons hoping to regain their rights. The transcripts, covering two years of hearings, show that Bush seems to have relied on an entrenched set of personal values in his rulings. If a crime involved alcohol abuse—such as DUI manslaughter cases, which were relatively common—he liked to see several years of complete sobriety before he would restore the person’s rights. He was loath to approve the applications of petitioners he felt were not sufficiently remorseful or did not take full responsibility for their crimes. He sometimes asked wives in attendance to keep their husbands in check. Ex-felons needed to prove, over years of good behavior, that they had reformed. Bush often denied clemency simply because he believed not enough time had elapsed since the completion of the petitioner’s sentence. He did not appear to question the basic premise of his judgments: that the right to vote should be contingent on a citizen’s moral rectitude.

    • Not surprised. Appalled but not surprised. Thank goddess the Court ruled that particular method to be unconstitutional.

  4. Good morning, 51 and raining in Bellingham. My thoughts are with Ron’s mom, as today would have been her 100th birthday. We’ve sent photo’s of her to the family so we’ll have an online birthday remembrance for her today.

    I finally feel well enough to do something in my sewing room so Heide’s new dog bed cover may be finished today. It’s a cozy room to be in on such a rainy day, especially when I turn the music on and the news off.

    Take care everyone.

    • {{{princesspat}}} – always Healing Energy, shaped to your need. Love is Love and obviously still strong no matter which side of the Rainbow Bridge family members are on. Enjoy your music and your cosy sewing room. moar {{{HUGS}}}

    • We want those who helped form our lives to live forever. The good news is that their works live on even when they pass away.

      How is your husband? Obviously you survived the trip to the UrgiMed. :)

  5. Good morning, meese! Saturday …

    It is 19 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 32. Light snow and snow flurries expected all day with the forecast calling for 1 to 4 inches. Seems like a rather useless forecast – 1 inch is nothing but 4 inches can get you stuck.

    There were three news stories yesterday: the Nunes memo, the stock market retreat, and the release of Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review. Which one of those should we keep our eyes on? The Nunes memo was the distraction (complete with references to “salacious events”), the stock market losses are, at this point, simply a correction – the reset was all the way back to 1/10, and the Nuclear Posture Review included Trump asking for “tiny nukes” so that he could nuke countries “just a little” if he wanted to. That, coupled with the fact that he wants to “bloody the nose” of North Korea to show them who’s boss (using the language of a bully) is where I hope our elected representatives are focusing their attention even if the press is distracted.

    The Democratic Weekly Address is by Tina Smith, the new Senator from Minnesota, speaking about making common cause with the Trump administration when it helps Minnesotans. This is pretty safe talk – there will be nothing because Republicans will load every bill with poison pills. There is no transcript yet so I will wait for a while to see if one shows up before I post.

    Next week Thursday the government funding runs out again! House Republicans want a Continuing Resolution through March 31st now which is well past the time when DREAMers will start to get deported. I hope Senate Democrats are not counting on the court order from California blocking the end of DACA because that is a pretty slender thread to hang the lives of hundreds of thousands of people from. All it takes is an appeal to the Supreme Court where the sociopaths there will do what sociopaths do – let people metaphorically freeze to death in a truck to uphold their interpretation of the letter of the law.

    I have a busy day today with project work stacked up from a too-busy work week – need to get to it!

    See all y’all later!

  6. Good morning, Moosekind! Still pitch dark here at 6:00 a.m., and the fading Supermoon seems to be traveling from the back of the house to the front. Current temp. is 11 F., going up to 35 F. later today.

    Taxes and laundry are planned for today’s agenda, with chicken pot pie followed by baked apples for dinner tonight. Still taking penicillin and Motrin for the dental thing; still have the bandage from the skin biopsy yesterday on my arm. This was a horrible week on the home front.

    Has anyone heard the rumor that Lyin’ Ryan will not run for reelection? What a gift that would be. And Thing wants to give North Korea a bloody nose? There are so many things to worry about, one doesn’t know where to start!

    Denise, how is your husband? Did he get treatment for the ‘flu? Princesspat, so glad you are feeling better and can get to your sewing room again!

    Wishing a peaceful Saturday to all Pond dwellers.

    • Ryan started dropping hints about a month ago, after he got his payoff from Republican donors for passing their tax cut. It is possible that he does not want to be in the minority, it is possible that he is hoping that if he leaves there is still time to save his immortal soul after enabling the worst people in America to damage people’s lives (there isn’t). He said he wants to spend time with his children which may be true. They are now getting to the age where they probably realize that their father is a granny killer and that he is now permanently linked to the personally gross Donald Trump – and that their future will always be “children of craven asshole granny-killer and Trump boot-licker Paul Ryan.” Or maybe he is ready to cash in so he has time to build a bunker before the whole damn world falls into chaos?

      One thing I am pretty certain of is that he is not quaking in his boots about his potential Democratic challengers. The Republican legislature in Wisconsin, sensing that some day the people of Janesville, Kenosha, and Racine might stop voting against their economic well-being, crafted a district for him in 2011 that pulled in a bunch of towns that had been part of Rep. James Sensenbrenner’s bloodiest red congressional district.

      I hope he retires, he is a loathsome man.

  7. Up early for training ride. 45 degrees & intermittent rain. I don’t know if it’ll be raining enough at 9:30 that they’ll call it off. But I have my thermals on just in case (45 is cold to me — and riding a bike creates a wind chill). Will go visit my friend today.

  8. 34 windchill 29 and I’ve been standing out in it resetting my inverter – apparently we had a minor outage overnight and the system even in sleep mode read it as an arc fault – it is working now and I’ve emailed my installer about replacing that inverter while it’s still under warranty. That said, we got 10.4 KWHs yesterday, 1st over 10 for the year, and the m-t-d is 19.9 so off to a good start.

    Of course the nothing-burger memo took up all the oxygen yesterday. MSM’s owners trying to make sure nobody n-o-t-i-c-e-s the really serious stuff staring us in the face like no budget, debt ceiling hit sooner due to tax scam, DACA, and stuff like, oh yeah, Puerto Rico and the proposed 80% cut in CDC global disease outbreak prevention. Evil Ones being evil. GOP = Give Out Poison

    Just about wrapped up taxes. The fed was easy – used TurboTax (although one of these days I’d like to find a free site my CPA kid thinks is OK), e-filed, and I should be getting my refund deposited in the next 3 weeks depending on shutdowns and debt ceilings. This will be the last of my 4-digit refunds but I won’t have any more 4-digit withholding either. The state is harder. The deductible is so low it’s only that I’ve been donating money as fast as it comes in – and some of it even to organizations legally considered charitable and thus tax deductible – that I manage to not have to pay extra. So before I do the AR return I have to scurry around and find all my legal donations. :) But I should have that wrapped up and in today’s mail. (Even if I let TurboTax do my state for me, they can’t e-file it – AR doesn’t accept from them – so I’d have to print out the forms which I can’t do since I don’t have a printer or hand copy from the screen onto the forms and mail them in anyway. Not worth the extra $40.) So. Tour about the internets then to work on that. And coffee of course. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  9. Good morning, 49 and cloudy in Bellingham. I seem to need a lot of sleep now, but frequent naps are becoming a round the clock pattern. It all adds up to plenty of sleep but being awake in the middle of the night is tiresome. It’s prime worry time!

    Between reminiscing and remembering Emma’s long life and the memo news yesterday was a long day. I did get some sewing done so Heide’s new dog bed cover should be finished today. I’ve created a long to do list in my mind so it’s time to actually finish something.

    Take care everyone, and as always, thank you for your healing thoughts.

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