Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: March 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 HERE!
 

  • Page Two of Comments is HERE!
     


 

26 Comments

  1. Good morning, 49 and partly sunny in Bellingham. The big world seems to be spinning out of control today so I’m going to try to focus on my small world. I’ll be in the garden!

    Take care everyone.

  2. Good Wednesday Meese. Heading back to wintry New York from balmy Miami. Things went very well here. Ceremonies were awesome and met some interesting people. My laptop conked out so have been restricted to phone and much of the time we were so immersed in ritual I didn’t have it turned on.
    Hope the snowstorm doesn’t delay my flights

    • Good luck getting home! It looks like NYC and DC are going to be slammed (schools were already pre-closed).

    • {{{Denise}}} – safe travels. Glad you were so immersed in ritual – important stuff – you didn’t have time for the insanity. moar {{{HUGS}}}

  3. Good Wednesday morning meese. It’s 3:39 am Pacific and I am unable to fall asleep or stay asleep. There is rain falling gently outside and I hope the morning is better.

    • {{{basket}}} – I hope the gently-falling rain helped you to get a bit more sleep. Healing Energy and holding the Good Thought for the rest of the day. moar {{{HUGS}}}

  4. Good morning, meeses! Wednesday …

    It is 23 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 39. A few clouds this morning then sunny skies for the remainder of the day. They keep moving snow in and out of the forecast for Saturday. We are hoping it stays out because we plan to go down to Library Mall for the #MarchForOurLives event on Saturday.

    Austin police think that the suspect they were surrounding, who blew himself up, is the package bomber. I hope so – that was terrifying.

    The Illinois primary was disappointing – the anti-choice, anti-LGBT Democrat in CD-03 beat the candidate that NARAL and others had been supporting. I hope we don’t need his vote to form a majority next year because he could very well decide to caucus with the Republicans – he is a 57% Trump voter in the House anyway. I am sure that the Republican running in that district is worse but it is a pretty low bar. Apparently that district was gerrymandered BY THE DEMOCRATS to make sure that a progressive candidate could not win. Thanks for nothing, Illinois Democrats. The governor’s race will pit one billionaire against another one which is sad. But maybe in Illinois it is the only way to guarantee that the governor won’t sell a Senate seat or political favors and end up in prison.

    The ACLU v KKKobach trial finished up and the judge held the hearing on the Kris Kobach contempt of court charges yesterday. She will make a decision on that – I hope it involves jail time. Fines don’t deter people like Kobach, there is always some big bucks sponsor waiting to pay the bills for Republicans who break the rules.

    I am going to ignore the rest of the news because I have some projects that need my attention.

    See all y’all later!

  5. So, a suspect in the bombings is dead, good. I hoped this would be the outcome, I didn’t want him to have his day in court & get to tell his tale of woe, or his manifesto or whatever. But I worry that he wasn’t working alone. He was at a hotel in Round Rock, a way north Austin suburb, the package was mailed from a store on Brodie Lane which is way, way south. Driving for an hour in Austin traffic with a bomb in your car? Seems unlikely — sure he wanted to throw the authorities off his trail but he could have gone north to Georgetown or Waco, or east to Bastrop and spent less time driving with a bomb in his car.

    Anyway, it’s cool again — 50 or so, I had to wear actual shoes & a sweater. I didn’t walk before work, will get it done after. I had put in for tomorrow & Friday off, was thinking of not taking them but wanting to get in some exercise and realizing that Saturday will be completely taken by the March for Our Lives and that I need to cook….. I may take them anyway.

    Brain is playing Discotheque, which is a deceptive song. It looks & sounds like a poppy dance tune, but it’s actually deep & philosophical: It’s not a trick, you can’t learn it It’s the way that you don’t pay that’s okay ‘Cause you can’t earn it – love

  6. Good morning, Moosekind! 28 when I woke up this morning with an expected high of 36; just another dreary March day in MI. The Saturday forecast keeps improving; there is now zero precipitation in the forecast, with a high of 37. I can do the temperature with my [mittened] hands tied behind my back, so I’m hoping the forecast is accurate.

    Now I just have to hope my car is out of the shop in time. I took it in yesterday for some little niggling repairs and asked them to check out why my car was pulling so hard to the left (so much better than pulling hard to the right!) As I suspected, it needs an alignment and new tires but also needs repairs to one of the ball joints. I really hate getting an alignment before the potholes are fixed, but with the state of state finances in MI, I could be waiting a long time before that happens. (If we could just start calling potholes “tax breaks for businesses and the wealthy,” they’d be fixed and paid for overnight.) And new tires without fixing the alignment would just be stupid, so I’m all in. The cost of the repairs did prompt a dinnertime discussion about when I should be getting a new car; The Hubby was pushing for sooner-than-soon, but I’m holding out for early 2019, with the hopes I can get a deal on a 2018. We’ll see…

    Back to work…this is supposed to be my slow time of the year, but somehow that’s not happening.

    • {{{DoReMI}}} – holding the Good Thought for car stuff and weather stuff. Best I can figure out, there are no slow times of the year any more. moar {{{HUGS}}}

  7. Good morning, 42 and mostly cloudy in Bellingham. I was awake in the night so I finally got up and just did things for several hours. I went back to bed about 5:00 (PST) so my night’s sleep was a long nap! Oh well, at least something got done.

    Something has triggered another round of dizziness too. It’s easing but not gone so I’ll pass on the pool today, do a few more things, take a nap, do a bit more, and then the day will be done.

    Take care everyone.

  8. Late online this morning – not only needed to grill my breakfast sausages (for the next 4 weeks) before I could actually have breakfast but for some reason my phone & internet were down (AT&T package) – finally had to do a hard reset of the router to get it back. At the moment 39 windchill 32 and sunny. There was frost all over everything when I got up this morning but it’s been burned off nicely. Only got 10.8 KWHs yesterday but we’re producing nicely at 1.9/hour at the moment and the m-t-d is 276.9 – if the clouds wait until after 5 to move in, this should be a very productive day. (Big IF though.)

    Wish the IL primary had come out better/differently – maybe it was close enough to scare the DINO into voting with us over 50% of the time. (Anybody who gets the neverlution nod needs to say “no thanks, I’m interested in getting things done, not yelling about how bad they are” – otherwise they gonna lose every time.) I wish folks would step back and think before they go all OMGHOF this is the one, this will bring them down. Nothing will bring the Rs down except defeating them in November and taking back the House at least, Congress and a boatload of state houses at best. The entire R party is complicit. The R party controls both executive and legislative branches and is right on the line for the judicial. They are not going to indict, convict, and imprison themselves. Precinct-level organizing, registration, and GOTV is not just the best but the only way out of this mess.

    Got a mess of family birthdays this month – Daddy would have been 96 last Saturday, 2nd to youngest grandson was 9 yesterday, youngest sisters are 59 today, elder son will be 47 Monday, and a middlin’ grandson will be 14 on the 30th. Also a few losses – Life is what it is. Holding everybody in my heart. Golden Energy covering the Earth and all who live therein/thereon – shape it to your need.

    OK – need to tour the internets then get back offline until probably late this afternoon. Seriously, seriously, seriously holding the Good Thought that MBNYC will respond to one or more of the folks who’ve reached out to him. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  9. Thursday Meese
    Happy to be home and trying to play catch up on chores and writing and other stuff – going away is great – coming home is better :)

    Reminder

  10. Good morning, meeses! Thursday …

    It is 36 degrees – wait, that’s can’t be right, my feet are cold. :::restart crashed WeatherEye widget::: It is 19 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 45. Sunny skies most of the day then clouding up this afternoon as the front starts moving in. The huge storm coming in from the west is expected to just barely miss us but people are planning for the worst.

    Holy snowly, Nor’east! People on the east coast unburying again.

    So the Austin bomber had a “challenging life”. JHC on a cracker, lots of people have challenging lives and they don’t blow people up! The press is willing to give a basketful of mulligans to white males. I was reading some stories that suggest the crimes – because they were against black people – were underinvestigated by the Austin Police Department. It wasn’t until they realized it was a serial bomber – and that white people could die too!!! – that they started caring. What the fk is wrong with our law enforcement?

    Congress is poised to vote on the Omnibus to keep the government open and fund it through the end of the fiscal year (and beyond?). I was mostly offline yesterday but it sounds like there are a lot of domestic programs being funded and that Democratic Party leadership is on board. The Senate is trying to include a health care “reform” that has some fixes that counteract the mandate repeal but also have a ginormous poison pill related to birth control and abortion that Nancy Pelosi is digging in her heals on. Susan “Plays a Moderate on TV” Collins appears willing to allow the law to ban health insurance policies that cover abortion from the exchanges – regardless of who is paying the premium for them. This is being characterized as an expansion of the Hyde Act and therefore “no big deal” but it is a big deal and curse them for trying! Stay strong, Nancy!

    Being mainly offline allowed me to avoid news about the personal grossness of the Republican’s president and his epic ignorance. I did catch the news that the $30 billion in tariffs being levied on China will have serious repercussions in agricultural states, including Wisconsin. Farmers here will find out how gods/guns/gays/gonads overriding “it’s the economy, stupid” will work out for them. If you elect someone stupid because of their cultural identity – SURPRISE! – they are still stupid. And so are you.

    See all y’all later!

  11. I took the next couple of days off, I need to run the errands I won’t this weekend, and cook. Right now, I’m watching Stephanie Ruhle go off on Facebook & Zuckerberg. We’re having gorgeous weather — highs around 80. So I definitely need to get some exercise done, too. Will play some U2 in my head to get me moving: You’re the Best Thing About Me

  12. 43 windchill 38 and at least no frost on anything this morning. Yesterday was glorious as far as sun went even though the wind was a bit chilly – got 20.1 KWHs, the latest high for day/month/year, and the m-t-d is 294.7 – with 10 days of generation left in the month 400 is very possible. But iffy considering the weather predicted for next week. Still, we can do it with an average of 10.5/day. Today started overcast but the clouds seem to be burning off as the sun comes up over the hills.

    Everywhere in this country right now in just about everything we’re not just fighting for the soul of our nation, we’re fighting for our nation to have a soul at all. Whether it’s Nancy Pelosi keeping the Dems together in the House to block expansion of the Hyde Act or NGOs on Puerto Rico trying to bring microgrid PV systems (over an increased tariff on PV equipment) to the more rural & cut off areas, whether it’s setting up sanctuaries for brown people ICE is targeting or fighting to get military weaponry out of civilian hands – does America have a soul to be saved? I know folks who’d say no. But if I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t still be here.

    I need to tour the internets (hope to goddess somebody’s heard from MBNYC) then go do some offline stuff. Hope it warms up enough I can walk outside again. More things bloom every single day this time of year. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  13. Good morning, 47 and raining in Bellingham. We’re going to visit the daffodil fields in Skagit County today. It’s to rainy for photos, but seeing fields of flowers will be welcome regardless.

      • {{{anotherdemocrat}}} – please do. Other than people, what I miss most about TX is the fields of bluebonnets in the spring. moar {{{HUGS}}}

  14. Good morning, meeses! Friday …

    It is 21 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 43. Sunny skies this morning with clouds moving in this afternoon. The weekend winter storm is expected to miss us with only a 30% chance of precipitation now.

    I am going to ignore the John Bolton news because, really, he fits right in with this deplorable “administration” and, really really, there is absolutely nothing we can do. The position is not subject to Senate confirmation and even if there were anything resembling Congressional oversight, they would be powerless to change anything. I find it unlikely that he will get a security clearance given his Russian and Cambridge Analytica connections – and his PAC – and there may be some legal remedies if tRump suspends security clearance requirements for NSC director.

    Anyway, good news out of Wisconsin as a Dane County Circuit Court judge ordered Scott Walker to set a date for special elections. It will likely be appealed but the process to force Walker to adhere to the rule of law has begun. The Republican speaker of the state assembly declared the judge an “activist liberal judge from Dane County” before he was told that she was appointed by Walker. Oops! Right-wing talking point fail! The best part of this is that it allows us to get another news cycle or two out of “Scott Walker is afraid to call special elections because he is worried about losing.” Whether we could win either of the seats is debatable – maybe the Assembly seat – but any day you can call Scott Walker cowardly is a good day.

    See all y’all later!

  15. Friday Meese
    31 here in NY – going up to 47

    Still tired from my trip. Trying to get back on schedules.

    Lots of Puerto Rico articles today – which is both good (coverage) and bad – situation still fucked up.

    Puerto Rico

    FEMA fuck-up

  16. Slept in, going to start cooking oatmeal soon. Lunch — quinoa with vegetables — this afternoon. Looks like nice weather for the march tomorrow. Will need sunscreen & a hat. Between the Bolton news & now Trump is threatening to veto the omnibus bill & shut the government down, I’m going to play calm, soothing Rise Up.

  17. 56 and the sun keeps coming and going – not sure what we’re gonna get today. Yesterday got 16.78 KWHs and the m-t-d is 311.8 – so still heading for 400. Depending on what the need is, my system (w/ Powerwall type household batteries) might or might not run a household in Puerto Rico – even here in NW AR it generates about 4 MWHs per year, would probably manage 5 in Puerto Rico – I’ve got gas furnace, hot water, cook stove which reduces my draw. But I think about Puerto Rico – and other places hit by storms and long (although usually not PR/USVI long) power outages following them. Every time I check my generation data I think about them.

    Bolton is one more thing to distract us. As long as we keep taking the bait twitler and the Rs keep throwing we aren’t using our time or energy on that precinct-level organizing we need to be doing to win back Congress in November – and keep it in 2020 while taking back the WH. It’s like starting a paper fire at one end of the leaky boat we’re in. Some potential danger although not much, but taking our attention away from bailing the rising water in the boat. We’re not going to make it to a place where we can repair the boat if we don’t keep bailing now.

    Need to visit Villages and tour the internets – so far nobody’s heard from MBNYC so the fundraiser diary seems to be on hold (and the $500 match we’ve cobbled together with it). In good news Franki’s gotten her car and can get Mikayla to her OT, PT, and drs’ appointments (as well as get back to work). If it warms up the way it’s ‘spozed to I’ve got some yard work I’d like to get done. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  18. Good morning, 42 and partly cloudy in Bellingham. The daffodil fields were rain drenched and muddy yesterday, but that’s life in the PNW. We enjoyed our afternoon away from home regardless.

    I’m trying to keep from getting to upset re the tRump tantrums…..helps to laugh when I can.

    @TeaPainUSA

    Rosenstein and Mueller are playin’ 3-dimensional chess, while Trump sticks to his strategy of eatin’ the chess pieces.

  19. Good morning, meeses! Saturday …

    It is 28 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 41. Mostly cloudy skies are in the forecast. Temperature at march time will be 34 so we will have to bundle up. I am not sure if I will march with the marchers – I may wait for them to arrive at the Capitol. It is about a mile from where I will park to Library Mall and then, of course, we would have to walk back. I may save my energy for cheering and chanting – “Hey Hey NRA, how many kids did you kill today?”

    The Omnibus was signed and apparently the reason the Poutus pouted and stomped his feet is because Democrats were more than fine with the tradeoff of more military spending for more domestic spending – he did not get his border wall and New York and New Jersey got their tunnel money. By the way, I am not sure who still believes that Democrats “hate the military” – probably the same people for whom ads demonizing Nancy Pelosi are effective. The script is old and tired just like their party. Paul Krugman had a tweet thread that pretty well summed it up:

    Simon argues that conservatives in both Britain and the US have an economic agenda that is objectively bad for the majority of voters, and would be unpopular if people understood it. So why are the even competitive electorally? 2/

    His answer is that (a) they cater to social illiberalism — which in the US largely, but not entirely, means racism (b) they have managed, with the help of the media, to mislead voters about just how regressive their economic agenda is 3/

    What Simon argues is that this con game is always fragile — the public might catch on (special indications indicate that GOP attempts to kill health care for millions are taking a big toll on the party). So the right has strong temptation to cheat 4/

    That is, to do away, de facto at least, with democracy. This could mean full-blown authoritarianism, but it could involve gerrymandering, disenfranchisement, etc.. A lot of this has already happened in the US, where Dems need a 7 or 8 point popular margin to take the House 5/

    But there are other implications of this kind of analysis. If a party’s political strategy rests fundamentally on a con game, there will be a selection bias among both politicians and voters — one that’s very visible here in America 6/

    First, the party’s politicians will disproportionately include people who are both willing to engage in con games and good at it — i.e., con artists. Not saying that there are no con men on the D side, but there’s hardly anything else on the R side 7/

    Second, the party’s base will disproportionately consist of the easily conned. And this explains why Trump, who looks to most people like a dangerous buffoon, dominates the GOP so easily: he’s a crude con man, and the party’s base loves him for it 8/

    As a result, whatever impulses toward decency may remain among, say, Republican senators are overshadowed by their fear of the Trump-loving base. Which is, in turn, why we are so vulnerable to a constitutional crisis 9/

    Shifting gears, I continue to be impressed by the Parkland movement. They are everything that the Occupy movement was not: they understand the optics, they refuse to be co-opted by nihilists and they completely understand that marching without voting is a waste of effort. Most of the marches will feature voter registration events and the theme is not #YellAtThem but #VoteThemOut. When my daughter went down to the Capitol for walkout day a couple weeks ago, organizers were handing out little bookmarks with the dates of all the 2018 elections on them. THAT is how you do change – by electing a government that reflects your values.

    Busy morning as I try to get a few things done before we pack up to head down to the Capitol. The Fighting Back post will likely be done tomorrow morning rather than today. Keyboard activism takes second place to in-person activism. :)

    See all y’all later!

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