Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Dec. 23rd through Dec. 29th

December 22, 2018 JanF Community 114

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 (dated 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?

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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.

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  • Page One of Comments is HERE!
     

  • Page Two of Comments is HERE!
     

41 Comments

  1. Here is a Christmas poem thread:

  2. Happy Christmas, Meese! At 8:20 a.m. a partly cloudy Christmas Day is dawning here in Northern Virginia. The leafless woods across the way are filled with misty golden light. Right now it’s 32 F., on its way up to 41 F.

    There will be cooking and cleaning today and more cleaning tomorrow. This is the first Christmas I can remember that Dearly and I haven’t been hosting Christmas dinner. Younger Son and DIL will host it in the new big house they moved into exactly two months ago today. He’s cooking roast beef and Yorkshire, we’re all bringing something. I’m bringing a sherry trifle and the yellow vegetable we always forget to eat.

    Dearly, whose COPD is much worse than usual, is having a sleep-in, but soon I’ll put the cinnamon rolls in the oven. The aroma should wake him up. :)

    Wishing everyone a happy day with family and friends!

  4. Merry Christmas! I slept in, watching the news — flipping over to the Dr Who marathon also. Enjoying a lemon poppy seed scone. I promise I’m going for a walk this afternoon, though there’s a 40% chance of rain.

    here’s a bit of my church’s Christmas Eve service last night

  6. Merry Christmas/Feliz Navidad/Happy Yuletide – and all the other Holy days we mortals have hung around the winter solstice. The house smells of the lemon almond butter muffins I just got out of the oven. My family has done our various gettogethers – today I’ll be having Korean food with a friend. Currently listening to the wonderful music Dee posted at DK as I do my morning twitterfest. I was planning to get offline once I finished but I’ll be online until I’ve played all those Aretha & Nancy clips. 🎶✨🎁🎄

    Damp and chilly but the sun is trying to slip through. Thankful for a warm snug house for myself and everyone who has one, Holding the Good Thought for everyone who doesn’t or is in danger of losing one. Healing Energy to everybody everywhere shaped to the need. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  7. Good morning, 36 and cloudy in Bellingham. Our family Christmas Eve was fun last night….thoughtful gifts, happy dogs and kids, good food, lots of laughter. So much to be grateful for, and so weary too! We’ll go to breakfast at #1 son’s house soon, come home for a nap, then dinner at #2 son’s house. Whew :)

    Best wishes to all on this Christmas Day.

  8. Wednesday Meese

    25 going up to 40 here in NYS.

    Overslept – must have eaten too much yesterday.

    Need coffee!

  9. Good morning, meese! Wednesday …

    It is 30 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 37. Wet snow, flurries then rain are in the forecast.

    We had our traditional 12/25 meal of Chinese food yesterday and it was a particularly good batch. One thing that Chinese restaurants have is a lot of variety which allows us to have a little bit of this and a little bit of that – and leftovers! The traffic was mostly non-existent on our way there but picked up on the way back (we must have hit a gramma shift change). All in all a pleasant – quiet – day at home.

    I have some projects that I did not get done over the long weekend that I am going to try to focus on for the next three days. I had planned to work yesterday on a project but ran out of brain and decided it was best not to try to do anything that required cleverness and creativity in a brainless state!

    The Senate will be returning today and plan to meet on Thursday to consider options for ending the government shutdown. In my mind, the people who should be meeting is the House – they need to meet and pass the CR that the Senate passed 100-0 and send it to the petulant pustule in the Oval Office to sign or veto. It does sound like tRump is shifting a bit – he is talking about “fences” now instead of “concrete walls”. Nancy Pelosi suggested Trump doesn’t even know what he wants:

    “First of all, the fact … that he says, ‘We’re going to build a wall with cement, and Mexico’s going to pay for it’ while he’s already backed off of the cement – now he’s down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something, I’m not sure where he is,” Pelosi said.

    Ha!

    I had to look at the status of a transaction in my bank accounts yesterday and caught a glimpse of my IRA balance. Holee Sheet! I hope that the stock market settles down into a more normal end of year and that some of the losses are recouped. Otherwise, I will be pricing cardboard boxes to live in for my old age.

    See all y’all later!

  10. Good Woden’s Day, Meese! It’s cold here in Ashburn, all white frost on the grass and gray mist among the trees. The sun is rising, though, turning some of the gray mist gold. This kind of morning makes me think of my favorite line from my favorite Christmas carol, “The Holly and the Ivy”:

    O, the rising of the sun, and the running of the deer

    The current temperature is 26 F., going up to 46 F.

    Had the night from hell owing to having partaken rather too largely of the rich food at Christmas dinner. Got up at 3:30 a.m. I know I’m going to crash later. Among the Christmas presents I received was arthritis in my left little finger. The pain also contributed to my waking up in the wee hours. Did some qi gong on it and already the pain and swelling seem better.

    Today the whole gang are coming over here for a dinner served in the private dining room of Cardinal Club House. Or they may put us in the corner of the public dining room as there will be 15 people, including four excitable children. Thank Goddess the Mont-Ster is staying at his favorite hotel. They asked if they could put him in with the bigger dogs because he’s mean to the little ones. Last time we picked him up from there the staff person said the puppies had worn him out.

    Wishing a safe, pleasant, quiet day to all at the Pond with NO NEWS.

  11. I was glued to the couch yesterday by the Dr Who Christmas specials marathon. Today it will be easier to get out, because they’re showing the Clara episodes & I really dislike that character. So, this afternoon, I will buy groceries & take a walk. One more nice, if cloudy day, severe weather tonight, and an arctic cold front this weekend. But for now, I’m wearing shorts. Yay Texas.

    More neat stuff from Neil Gaiman & the BBC — reading from his book on Norse mythology.

  12. It’s 52 at the moment and gonna stay around there all day and through the night. There’s a front moving in although it seems to be taking its time about it. The actual rain isn’t due until after dark and the temperature drops not until tomorrow after dark. But the barometric pressure is starting its drop right now and will keep dropping until it bottoms out tomorrow night (at which point the wind will shift from south to west and the cold will be blown in with it). At least that’s the projection. My hands confirm the barometric pressure shift. I can’t vouch for anything else. Yet. It’s partly cloudy at the moment. I don’t have a whole lot of hope of that clearing off. But there’s some. Yesterday we got 7.4 KWHs and the m-t-d is 138.8 – we should at least get enough to get over 140 today. I finally opened my SWEPCO statement (I wish they’d do calendar month instead of mid-month to mid-month) and my energy “balance” is in 2 digits. Apparently I’m using a lot more electricity being retired than I did working. And this has been a cloudy year. Hopefully now we’re on the sunward side of the solstice I’ll be able to catch up/keep up. Otherwise I’ll be paying SWEPCO more than just the monthly maintenance fee.

    Hope the nimrods in the R party decide opening the govt again is much better for their own stock – that or Putin telling them to are about the only hopes I’ve got on that. Even if they do there’s still a big mess for Pelosi and the Dems to clean up, but it will be a lot bigger mess if Pelosi has to be the one to get the govt open again. Meanwhile every single govt paycheck will be on hold unless Payroll ran it early for the holiday. And if it stays shut down much longer it will start hitting the Social Security and Disability checks since nobody’s at work to run them and release the funds to the banks. Mine doesn’t come until the 3rd Wednesday of the month and I’m sure we’ll be up and running by then but the folks who get theirs the 1st Wednesday of the month have to have chewed their nails to the quick by now. But on we go, step by step. We’ll get there. Healing Energy to everybody everywhere shaped to the need. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • I wonder how much of the additional electricity usage is because you had company over or were on the road?

      • More likely to be using the computer at home – even when I was using the laptop on battery, I was still recharging at least once and sometimes twice a day – combined with more lights/lights on longer in the morning during the darker part of the year and during storms during any time of year. Opening and closing the refrigerator more often, playing music CDs – just general living stuff one does during the day. When I worked full time my “extra” electricity use was at work and I didn’t realize how much I did because there’s no way to track my use at work. {{{HUGS}}}

        • Speaking of tracking, are you able to access your Excel sheets in the cloud (OneDrive)? Let me know if I should set up a Quick Assist session 😊

          (I doubt Cloud would be able to help, except by draping himself on the keyboard)

          • I haven’t tried. Or at least I didn’t know I’ve tried. I just opened OneDrive and looked at it – since my natural gas usage is in there, I guess I have. I just brought up Excel from the startup sidebar and updated what I got. LOL

  13. Good morning, Meesefolk; 30 now with a high of 37, but there’s enough damp in the air that it feels colder. It’s still warmer than I expect for December though, so no complaints here.

    I got so caught up in meal prep yesterday that I never stopped by here. While I’m in the midst of it, I can’t help but think that it seems ridiculous to go to so much trouble for just the two of us, but then I watch Hubby’s face as he eats turkey and all the rest. Yeah, it’s worth it, particularly since it’s only twice a year that I do the full spread. And now we have leftovers for almost a week, so if I extrapolate the time in the kitchen, it definitely doesn’t seem like too much!

    I haven’t a clue what’s been happening in the wider world, so it’s time to hit the intertubz and see what I missed. Good day to and for all!

  14. Good morning, 38 and raining in Bellingham. Post Christmas exhaustion has hit hard this morning so resting will be the focus of my day. I’ve got music playing, solitaire games to play, and a messy word to try to ignore.

    Best wishes to all for a restful day.

    • Except that I just got finished replenishing the cookie tin, your day sounds like what the rest of my day will be. Rest is good. {{{HUGS}}}

  15. 41 with a high of 55, and about to leave for work. Did not get any moving prep done during the long weekend as I was basically too tired to even think about it, so need to scramble now.

  16. Good morning, meeses! Thursday …

    It is 37 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 46. There is a lashing rain now and it is expected to rain all day. North of us the precipitation is snow so it could be much worse.

    It is good news that the markets recovered – people who were doing happy dances that the stock market was tanking because “rich people are hurt” don’t understand how much of ordinary people’s retirement money is in the stock market. The death of private pensions – are there any left? – means most of our money is in the stock market and quite a bit of our money can be lost when Wall Street gambles with it. This is NOT a good time to have crippled consumer protections and weakened oversight of banks and Wall Street. I keep saying “maybe now people will realize how bad Republican policies are for ordinary people” but if they did not learn the lesson from the global financial meltdown in 2008, maybe they are too dense to get it. Third party candidates gave George W. Bush and his party permission to hand out huge tax cuts, cut regulation and destroy working people’s wealth in 2000 and third party candidates gave Donald J. Trump and his party permission to use the same recipe and hand us the same sh*t sandwich. Maybe we will never learn – I wish there was a way to break this cycle of stupid.

    I found that if I ignore the “Trump being unpresidential” stories, there is very little new news. My news aggregator helpfully organizes the news stories into topic outlines so I can skip over the repeats. The shutdown will start to pinch as today is the day that federal workers paycheck’s would have arrived in their bank accounts – I imagine a mad scramble to turn off automatic payments will ensue, one reason I never use automatic bank account payments for anything. Yes, it is sometimes tedious to have to release my payments periodically throughout the month but being able to control the cash flow if the inflow were to stop is too important. The news reports suggest that if we can find a definition of “wall” that gives tRump cover, Congress might be able to pass a CR. Nancy Pelosi suggested a “beaded curtain” – maybe “Trump’s Fig Leaf”, size extra small?

    See all y’all later!

  17. Thursday Meese

    29 here in NYS going up to 38 and we have a messy snow storm on the way.
    Two interesting reads

    Puerto Rico

    • Thanks, Dee. Dear Goddess, how sick I am of people like jboule who say things like this:

      … Clinton made plenty of tactical and strategic missteps in her bid for the White House.

      Eff that. I thought she ran an extremely good campaign. She laid out her policy positions clearly for those who weren’t too bone-ass lazy to go to her website or listen to her speeches. She also won the popular vote by 3 million votes and should be president now.

      That said, I’ve had enough of white men screwing and screwing up this country. I want a qualified candidate of color who lives in the real world and knows what’s what. Most of the world’s population is not white. I realized this 50 years ago when I complained to an optometrist that blue contact lenses took a long time to obtain. He said, “That’s because they have to be specially manufactured. Thirty-nine out of every 40 people have brown eyes.”

      Just think about that. I often have.

      • I totally agree with you about jboule’s comments on Hillary’s campaign. Same crap in the comments as well. “If she’d had a plan and not just pandered to POC…” I block for that one.

        • Lotsa people are in big denial about the amazing support Hillary had in the black community

          • They’re also in big denial (actually more like violent rejection) about the work Hillary has done most of her adult life for the Black community. Not saying she didn’t slip into caucasity periodically – she’s white and she did – but she didn’t stay there long. Hard to call over 4 decades of allyship to the best she could figure out how to do “pandering” rather than saying she used/is using her white privilege to help BIPOC – but they call it that anyway. (yadda yadda “hot sauce”) sigh.

  18. Ugh, up & dressed & at my desk. I really shouldn’t complain about a 2 day work week. I got in a little over a mile walking yesterday, yay me. And I’ll walk after work today — I have a bright, reflective shirt to wear, so I’ll be seen. Crazy loud thunderstorms last night. Two water rescues, and as I left the house, the news was saying there were 2 more underway. We got more rain last night than we normally do for the month. Glad it isn’t cold, that would have been bad.

    I have my Christmas playlist queued up for my boys doing Christmas Baby Please Come Home when I leave work. (they are so young in this video, it’s practically baby pictures)

  19. Good Thor’s Day morning, Moosekind! It’s another bright, beautiful day here in NoVa, with a current temp. of 28 F. going up to 47 F.

    Going to write postcards today for Jennifer B.’s upcoming special election on January 8th. Miss Pink Cheeks is with us, and I am pleased to report that at the moment she is reading a book. She received a box set of four Dragon tales for Christmas. I love the fact that she reads!

    Last night we hosted a dinner for 15 in the private dining room of the main clubhouse. I called it our Boxing Day dinner, but of course as the majority of Americans have no idea that Boxing Day is a holiday, we were charged only for the regular price of the dinners, not the holiday price. LOL! We had a darling young waiter named Matthew, who did a superlative job and was very patient with the four children. He said it was really nice to see children in a home for dinosaurs. Well, he didn’t put it quite like that, but I knew what he meant. Anyway, afterwards we came back here for drinks and chocolates. The four children fell on the piñatas with shrieks of joy and were soon bashing them to pieces with my only rolling pin. My sweet cousin in Corpus Christi sent me the piñatas last summer after she visited the shop and bought the last four they had.

    Sorry to report that all is not well home on the range. Dearly Beloved’s COPD is worse, far worse than I’ve ever seen it. He is now on the way to his third doctor visit since we returned to these shores early in December. And yesterday, while I was frantically painting my face for the upcoming dinner party, we received a call from Healthy Hound, who gave Monty a very bad report card. He’s been trying to “dominate,” whatever that means, so they’ve had to isolate him. He can still board there, but he’ll have to be solitary. This news puts paid to any future travel plans.

    So I’m worried about things here at home and worried about the nation, but I can cope emotionally with only one thing at a time.

    Hope everyone at the Pond will have a nice, restful day.

    • Holding your husband in the Light. And Monty sounds like he could benefit from some gentle obedience training, if you have the time to invest in that.

    • {{{Diana}}} – Healing Energy to your household. COPD is so very weather sensitive and this is not a good time of year for it. Moar Healing Energy.

      (My bet is Monty was mounting the other dogs. Some folks get upset by that. Yes, it’s a dominance thing. But it’s not growling or fighting, just making it clear he’s the Alpha around these parts. And if there wasn’t any growling or fighting, he actually is the Alpha around these parts.)

  20. 55 and overcast – supposed to clear off and get up to 60 along about noon at which time the barometric pressure will start going up again, the wind will shift to westerly, and the temps will start dropping like rocks. Gonna do my shopping and other running around today and only leave the house tomorrow for afternoon coffee with a friend. Yesterday we generated 3.4 KWHs (definitely less than I use in a day) and the m-t-d is 142 – since we’ve got 5 production days left I’m sure we’ll reach 150 and it’s even technically possible to reach 175 which would be nice.

    Jan’s right – if you ignore the #45 is unpresidential/unpresidented stuff, there’s not much in the news. Not that there shouldn’t be but since I know who (in general, not specifically) owns the media I’m not surprised. Meanwhile millions of people need help of one kind or another (including their pay, Disability, or retirement checks) including some very dear friends of mine. Healing Energy to everybody everywhere shaped to the need. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • The little glimmer of light is that Social Security checks (including disability), Medicare and Medicaid, military retirement checks, and government worker retirement checks will not be delayed by the shutdown. That’s little solace to the furloughed workers, but at least some of the least able to bear a disruption will be covered.

      • Then that means a large number of somebodies are working without pay to “run” payroll for those checks. While the direct deposit is automatic, preparing the everything to permit that automatic direct deposit is not. But I am thankful for that. By shutting down ALL of my giving I could live for several months on what I have in the bank – a few extra because of the part-time work I’ve been doing – most of my/our friends on Disability could not. {{{HUGS}}}

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