Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Nov. 25th through Dec. 1st

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!
     

36 Comments

  1. Nice weather, barely needed a sweater & definitely won’t this afternoon. The roller coaster that is Austin’s winter. I need to start walking more. My old workout group is starting back up on Sunday — it was/is a group for those of us with a lot of weight to lose. A comfortable place for us, and Paul is a really good coach. I should walk before work again, that would help. This was playing in my head, so I’ll share it: Armor by Sara Barielles.
    Step three: I see
    The unforgettable, incredible ones who came before me
    Brought poetry, brought science
    Sowed quiet seeds of self-reliance
    Bloomed in me, so here I am
    You think I am high and mighty, mister?
    Wait ’til you meet my little sister

  2. Good morning, 45 and cloudy in Bellingham. Looks like an important news day is underway, but I’m to sleepy to sort it all out yet. Lots of Mueller activity and all of it is bad for tRump!

    Meanwhile life goes on. It’s our anniversary today (51! yrs) so we’ll have lunch at a waterfront restaurant we enjoy and my sister will join us. Then tonight we’ll go to Ava’s orchestra concert. Thankfully her school has chairs so we won’t be uncomfortably seated on the bleacher seats :)

    Best wishes to all on this wintery looking day.

    • This is good. Every Court seat we can hang onto, even for a little longer, is one more that can’t turn against us just yet.

      • The court seat is vacant so it is not a matter of “hanging onto it” – we just keep it empty for now. However, this is important because unless the Republicans want to tick off their only black member of Congress, they will stop trying to put racists into these seats. This is the second nominee that Tim Scott has blocked, the first one was Ryan Bounds in the 9th Circuit. The Republicans could, in theory, resubmit Farr’s name in the 116th Congress when their Senate margin goes up two seats plus they have the Pence tie-breaker. But I doubt that they want to bypass Tim Scott to put this guy on the bench – if they do, it means that Farr has compromising photos of Mitch McConnell because it would be extraordinarily disrespectful to one of their own Senators.

        President Obama nominated two black women for this seat but they were blocked by Tillis and Burr. We will go after Thom Tillis for his support of Thomas Farr in 2020 so the fallout from this nomination will have consequences.

        • Keeping it empty as long as we can is good. I doubt we’ll keep it empty until we get the Senate back – especially with the Rs 2-seat gain – but the longer the better.

  3. Friday Meese

    30 degrees here in the Catskills with some snow in the forecast – going up to 38.

    I’m heading into NYC this afternoon to attend a ceremony and won’t be back till sometime tomorrow.

    Elated to see the beginning of hearings on Puerto Rico.

    • Good for Mayor Cruz! Don’t allow people to whitewash this, FEMA neglect led to preventable deaths.

  4. Warm today, like — I wore short sleeves & sandals. Tried to get out of the house early enough to walk before work, but didn’t really make it. I’ll try again next week. Need something happy & energetic, so: Head Full of Dreams.

  5. Good morning, meeses! Friday …

    It is 30 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 39. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    Can’t stay – client projects beckon.

    See all y’all later!

  6. Good morning, Moosekind, and a blessed St. Andrew’s Day to you all! Learned yesterday that traditionally, this day is the beginning of Advent. When I was Episcopalian I adored Advent more than any other time of the year, even Easter. However, that’s neither here nor there.

    Mostly overcast here in Ashburn this morning, but occasionally the sun peeps through. At the moment it’s 33 F., going up to 43 F. Yesterday was the day from HELL, but I won’t bore you all with a description. Suffice it to say that Mr. Paw Patrol (I might change his name to Mr. Minecraft) is better: his temperature has stabilized after yesterday morning’s high of 99.9, and he doesn’t have strep throat. He has a virus.

    I’m giving myself a writing day today, the last day of NaNoWriMo. The mss. is up to 19,904 words! Just need to finish Chapter 12 and get to Chapter 13, where we will see a first glimpse of the ball gown and its effect on the people who are creating it. (Many thanks to DoReMI and princesspat for their stellar guidance.)

    The Hatchet Man is bringing down the hatchet! It’s so thrilling, if exhausting, that I’m contemplating taking the evening off to eat popcorn and watch my screen, goggle-eyed (Google-eyed?). I bet the reason Thing panicked at the Christmas tree lighting and left so precipitately was that Whitaker called and told him the following morning Cohen would plead guilty in court to lying, which Cohen did. The latest I saw on Twitter was that Thing is canceling meetings right and left while he’s at G-20 in Argentina.

    Perhaps Santa will bring Thing an orange jumpsuit to match his hair. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond!

    • It is difficult to see a way out of this for at least some members of the Trump Crime Family. I personally think it won’t touch Trump himself because the worst thing they have on him is “lying” which Lindsey Graham says is just a “process crime”, apparently not a “real crime” that one should be punished for. Methinks that if someone had lied to Graham when he was a JAG prosecutor he would have a different opinion but, hey, things are different – he has a president to protect!

      The question is: when DonJr and Eric and Ivanka are charged will Donald Trump pardon them if he thinks it will cause problems politically? Or will he let them rot? And if he does pardon them, will anyone in the Republican Party care? Yesterday morning, he was wishing he were back in New York doing “business deals.” Will we see a resignation? I doubt it unless someone can give him a convincing reason to believe it is his own idea – otherwise he digs in. What a drama!

      My hope is that nothing resolves until after the new Congress is seated. I really really want us to have some power over the line of succession.

  7. Welp, it’s 55 and more or less sunny in Fayetteville, AR at the moment. We’re spozed to get close to 70 today before we start slowly sliding back into winter by Monday. We generated 6.99 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 177.78 so all we need is 2.22 to reach the 180 November goal. Unless we seriously cloud up before noon, we’ll definitely meet that – might even beat 2016’s 183 which would be nice.

    Evils ones still being evil. We’re doing our best to slow them down now, block them soon, and get them out of power by any legal means. (That’s why sometimes it takes us a while – we only use legal means. They don’t.) That’s our job. Because politics is about who is in power, who has the authority to strengthen or shred the safety net, to mitigate or exacerbate climate change, to prevent or enhance election fraud, to protect or poison the very air/water/food our lives depend on, politics is about “a life well lived” – or not. And so we go, step by step, knowing the Law of Return by whatever name, using means we want used with us, to make things better. How long it will take, I do not know. Whether we will manage it in time (& even what “in time” means), I do not know. But I will try. We will try. And support each other in the trying. Healing Energy to everybody everywhere shaped to the need. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  8. Good morning meese, 43 with high of 55 today. Cloudy, but not much likelihood of rain today from what I can tell. My team at work typically has lunch on the last Friday of each month. Today’s lunch is at Lazy Dog, which has nice dishes.

    A good day to one and all!

  9. Good morning, Meesefolk; 28 this morning with a high of 36 expected; that’s not quite a heatwave, but I’ll take it.

    Had a klutz moment Wednesday night and took a tumble, so I wasn’t typing much at all yesterday, because I managed to jam fingers on both hands. I’m doing much better today…I tripped and fell over piles of dirty laundry on the bathroom floor that I had just finished sorting; I suppose if one is destined to be a klutz, falling on piles of laundry is a good way to save oneself from significant injury. I had been stressing about the backlog of dirty laundry, but I think the Universe found a way to remind me to be grateful rather than stressed!

    I won’t be watching the G20 gathering too closely, but it will be interesting to see if Donnie sticks with his announcement of no meeting with Putin, or if his boss’s demand for a meeting takes precedence. It’s hard for me to believe that 45* could actually stand up to Daddy Putin and deny him the meeting; I suspect if the meeting really is cancelled, we can expect some very creative spin-making from advisors to provide cover for the Pouter-in-Chief.

    Here in Michigan, our Lame F*ks are planning more damage during the lame duck session, a la WI and/or NC. They’re planning to strip existing powers and responsibilities from the SoS and AG, and it would be surprising if they don’t have something in store for Whitmer too. Snyder could, of course, veto anything they come up with, but his record of standing up to our legislature is almost non-existent. But that’s the only place where any pressure might make a difference, so I’ll be watching closely with the phone number to the governor’s office on speed dial.

    • It is too bad that the outgoing governors of both of our states – or the legislatures – don’t have the decency to respect the will of the voters. Our Assembly Speaker is saying that the voters be damned, it is only the urban areas of Milwaukee and Madison who voted to oust Walker and Schimel and HIS voters want him to strip the governor and attorney general of all power. I so hope that the federal courts hand him his ass and invalidate the gerrymanders that keep the minority in power in our state. Or that the young people in his district remember how he disrespected them and send him packing in the next election.

      • I think the only way to end these shenanigans is to end lame-duck sessions, and that’s never going to gain the approval of legislators. I think what makes it even harder to swallow is the sheer gleefulness that these jerks express when they’re concocting their latest screw-the-Dems schemes. They’re truly awful human beings.

        • We will have a chance to share our anger with them early in 2020. They are planning on moving the presidential primary to a different date rather than the Spring “non-partisan” election date to try to lower turnout so that their preferred Supreme Court candidate – appointed by Walker – can get elected to a 10 year term. They know that a lot of Democrats will be there for the presidential preference primary. I hope the Democratic Party of Wisconsin does a massive GOTV reminding people of what the legislature did and that we crush their candidate.

  10. Good morning, 47 and partly sunny in Bellingham. Yesterday was a long, but fun day, ending with Ava’s winter orchestra concert. The kids are squeaky but endearing, and Ava’s quick hug and whispered “thanks for being here” was our reward.

    If I can get (and keep) my act together our family wants to be our Christmas elves on Saturday. They will make short work of lights. trees, etc so I’m going to try to be ready for a few hours of Christmas chaos. If we can get the live tree this afternoon and the fake tree in place it can all happen. I like to leave the live tree in the garage overnight so it can come into the house drier and hopefully spider free.

    Best wishes to all.

  11. Good morning, meeses! Saturday …

    It is 32 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 37. Rain expected all day.

    I have started my Saturday mornings every week for the past 5 years by reprising, for the Moose, the Presidential Weekly Address, during Barack Obama’s presidency, and then our Democratic Party Weekly Address and news from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; she was the only Democrat interested in communicating about Democratic Party values and goals on a regular basis. This morning, her press releases started out with “Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi” :::pinches self::: It will be nice to report on Democratic Party values and goals that are closer to reality now that we have won back the House. :::pinches self again!::: We will keep Fighting Back until we take back the Senate and the presidency and restore small d democratic values and small d decency in America. The Weekly Address is by Representative-elect Katie Hill from CA-25 speaking about H.R. 1, the first bill to be introduced in the 116th Congress – a package of reforms to strengthen our democracy and make our elections more fair.

    George H.W. Bush passed away yesterday. I try not to say anything ill of the dead (for at least 24 hours) but it is interesting to note that he is mostly being celebrated for being the last Republican who did not totally destroy the underpinnings of our democracy during his time in office. Those were the days, I guess, but the primordial ooze that burbled up from his embrace of the politics of racial animus and fear mongering ultimately gave us Donald J. Trump. We can say that Russian meddling tilted the election to Trump, but the bottom line is that it would never have been close enough to tilt without the foundation built by Lee Atwater and the politics of Willie Horton that created the fertile ground that let white butthurtbros find and elevate their leader. May those whose actions led to this place of hate and bitterness NEVER rest in peace.

    See all y’all later!

  12. Good morning, Moosekind! It’s gray here this first day of December, with rain expected some time this morning. Currently it’s 35 F. in Ashburn, going up to 44 F.

    So H.W. has gone to his eternal rest. This is going to sound mean, but are we in for an entire week of canonization, per the late Ronnie Ray-Gun? I was never so revolted in my life as I was in 2006, with Saint Ronnie being credited with everything good that had ever happened. I will always maintain that it was Ronnie who started this country on the long road to perdition.

    Perhaps I simply won’t turn on the TV for a week.

    Meanwhile, here at the home front, today will be a day of catching up on all the chores I neglected while I was writing. I’m up to 20,818 words now with many more to go. Sometimes a quiet gray day of laundry and letter-writing is just what one needs.

    Wishing a restful Saturday to all at the Pond.

  13. It’s 56 and sunny at the moment – this is the high for the day but the descent will be slow until after dark tonight. I hope the sunny lasts to give us a good start on December. November ended above the 180 goal, which was nice at the 2nd highest ever (thus far) for November. The highest ever for December is actually slightly higher than the highest ever for November at 202 KWHs in 2015 so that’s the “primary” meet or beat goal. The secondary and more realistic goal is again 180. Right now we’re still counting in watts rather than kilowatts. Time it takes.

    Daddy Bush started out being a reasonably caring and patriotic person (especially for an R). I remember supporting him back in TX when he was a pro-choice candidate and the Dem was a pro-lifer – but we’re talking late 1960s, early 1970s here. He got over it. A friend of mine who knew him – not friends, just the families had interacted a bit when she & George were in their late teens/early 20s – said she thought being the head of the CIA changed him. That once he saw all us hippies were absolutely right about what America was/is/and will be without some significant change in direction it broke him and what remained was the power-hungry killer who didn’t care who went down as long as he had access to power. I don’t know. He “presented” better than either of the succeeding Rs but that’s not saying a whole lot. I know that people are dead because of him and his policies. I know that people are still dying because of him and his policies. I believe in the Law of Return and will let the gods take it from here.

    I’m not sure what my day will be like so doing my checking in early but will try to be back later to see how everybody’s doing. Healing Energy to everybody shaped to the need. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  14. Slept in, watching local news because I had to turn away from Up, couldn’t stand all the praise of George Bush. I’m sure he was a nice man on an individual level. But. Ronnie Raygun’s VP has plenty to answer for. And an actually good man doesn’t hire Lee Attwater. “Less evil than” is nothing to be praised for. So I won’t post Tramp The Dirt Down, because he actually was less evil. But I’m not sad.

    My finger is better. Can’t believe I had to leave work because of a hangnail. But you don’t know how much you use your middle finger till every time you do is excruciating. Infection seems to be gone, there’s a little redness but no more heat.

    Here, listen to Life On Earth.

    Shouldn’t need to be so f*cking hard This is life on earth It’s just life on earth It doesn’t need to be the end of you, or me This is life on earth It’s just life on earth

    • No, life shouldn’t need to be – shouldn’t be – so f*cking hard. Healing Energy. {{{HUGS}}}

  15. Good morning, 41 and cloudy in Bellingham. We got the trees in place so the family tree decc’ing can happen this afternoon. And the annual Christmas Spode migration is underway. Christmas traditions that were simple seem to become more complicated as the years go by!

    Best first day of December wishes to all.

  16. Good afternoon meese. It rained earlier this morning and there’s a winter storm warning for the Sierras with up to 18 inches of snow expected. Currently 51 with a high of 52.

    I need to get started soon on the things I wanted to do this weekend but the temptation to sleep in is strong.

    • {{{baskit}}} – rain is good (as long as it doesn’t cause flooding) and a good snow in the mountains is wonderful. But definitely this is sleeping in weather. Hope you can get your weekend goals accomplished AND have a nap. Healing Energy & moar {{{HUGS}}}

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