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 (usually Saturday night with a Sunday date). 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!
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Wednesday Meese. 35 degrees here in Saugerties NY with snow showers. Going up to 47.
Puerto Rico
Got in another early morning walk, to be sure I got it in at all. Just over 2 miles. Going to try to walk again this afternoon. Got to make up for barely stirring from the couch yesterday. Anyway, happy Earth Day!
It’s 61 heading for 67 and the rain that was forecast for last night has been pushed out to this morning. Except it isn’t raining and while it’s overcast, it isn’t dark overcast, we’ve got some sunny patches and I can actually see some blue sky along the western horizon. So heaven only knows what the weather’s doing. The widget certainly doesn’t. I just hope the rain and dark doesn’t push itself out until tomorrow when I’ll be out running lots of errands. Well, it’s lots of errands for me – Aldi’s, Tractor Supply, probably Lowes, maybe WalMart, bank, home (all along MLK Blvd), Blood Bank, maybe PetSmart, Co-op, Harps, home (loop Weddington to College, then north on College, and return) . Then after everything’s unloaded take the car back to my son. It’s a good thing I now have 4 bandanas, right? Although actually it’s about 4 hours of running around in two 2-hour lots. Including one hour at the Blood Bank. Anyway, we generated another 19.7 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 267 with 9 production days left in April. Seriously hoping we at least generate more than the 2.5K system did.
I need to bake another lot of breakfast sausages this morning. Which is messy. And this lot won’t have any red pepper in it because I’m out and didn’t realize it. sigh. But it’s got lots of sage so that part’s good. Gives me something real and worthwhile to do instead of worry about friends, family, and the fate of the nation. I’ll check back in a bit. Healing/Helping Energy to everybody to your shaping. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good Wednesday morning, Moosekind! It’s sunny here in Ashburn but windy and cold. Currently it’s 44 F., going up to 58 F., and the winds will gust up to 30 miles an hour. This has been the windiest, coldest, ugliest April I’ve ever seen in the 54 springs I’ve passed in this area.
To sleep at 11 p.m., woke up at 4:30, up at 5:30 a.m. When Googling the side effects of Tylenol PM yesterday I learned, to my bone-dissolving horror, that taking it even once every few months can lead to Alzheimer’s! Apparently taking most sleeping pill drugs leads to Alzheimer’s. Between the two I’d rather experience the lack of sleep than Alzheimer’s.
So, Meese, from now on, “What can’t be cured must be endured” will be my motto. I’ll give y’all a break and shut up about it, too.
I miss hugging and kissing the grandchildren so much I could scream. Patting the dog on the head does not make up for it, and even after his weight loss he’s impossible to lift.
Fairfax County Public Schools’ system has failed abysmally with its online learning initiative, because Blackboard is an old, creaky platform. I bet it’s written in COBOL! The teachers are going back to Google classrooms, which they know and like, and where the kids find it easy to log on.
Am now reading Dani Shapiro’s book, Inheritance, about how she was brought up Jewish but went to pieces when Ancestry.com informed her that her “father” was not related to her at all genetically. Dear Goddess, this woman is self-absorbed! How did she get any work done if all she thought about all day long was herself? Just hope I can get through the rest of it. It’s not my book so I can’t hide it in my underwear drawer and forget it exists. All my brassieres are in there, pretending they don’t exist too.
Wishing a good day to all at the Pond and hoping the Moose herd won’t look at the news longer than 20 minutes today.
HAHAHA!! “Blackboard is an old, creaky platform. I bet it’s written in COBOL!”
Don’t disparage COBOL – I used it for many years and created software that helped run the engine of the economy! I remember the old Dilbert comic strips (back when they were funny and their author’s deplorableness was not as obvious), had a COBOL programmer who looked like a dinosaur and was named Bob. I am that dinosaur! It was certainly a wordy language but it was self-documenting – if you took the time to name your fields well – and it was invented by a woman, Admiral Grace Hopper. There are probably still some legacy systems out there written in COBOL but I would feel safe to say that none of them are online web-based products. Most are probably government systems and possibly an old insurance or banking application.
Reprogramming/updating COBOL to take an 8-digit date both prevented the Y2K catastrophe and drove the engine of economic well being in the 1990s. You COBOL programmers did good. (But Blackboard does suck – according to both professors and students at U of A.)
Apparently a lot of the systems the IRS uses are written in COBOL, and all the COBOL programmers are hiding in the woods to avoid being found.
In one of my many unsuccessful attempts to improve my career, I took a COBOL class at Northern Virginia Community College. The program I wrote was so awful that it tied up some of the computers (servers?) all night long. It was embarrassing as hell. After that I stuck to what I was good at, which was editing. Editors don’t make much money nor do they enjoy much prestige, but being an editor was a hell of a lot better than being a secretary.
While I was going to college at night and working full time during the day, I needed to create a program that did a simulation for one of my business classes. Because I had access to a huge mainframe where I worked, and it was easier than fighting to get a spot in the computer lab at school, I decided to write it and run it at work. Bad idea! It had a very tight loop that did millions of iterations and literally took a megajillion dollar mainframe to its knees. Needless to say, I did not do that again! Fortunately, I was well-loved (or at least irreplaceable) at my daytime job and did not get fired. :)
Thank Goddess you survived the catastrophe! I admire programmers and constantly wonder at their abilities. My brain simply does not work like that.
But after all this time I’m reasonably happy with my brain. Once at Witch Camp we entered a trance in a class. I looked inside my brain and it was all ratty-looking, bursting cardboard boxes piled on top of each other like a pyramid. A stack of judgments, which looked like trestle tables, was piled up in a corner, and a few doctrines—huge, immovable, tall boulders—loomed darkly in another corner.
It was unnerving but interesting.
Good morning, 52 and raining in Bellingham. RonK plans to honor Earth Day by picking up plastic on a beach, and I’ll plant a few more pansies in the garden. It would be nice if the rain could wash the virus away…seems like the world needs a good scrubbing!
Best wishes to all.
I went looking for an Earth Day post that I knew I had written back in my blogging days and found one from 4/22/2013. Heh, I was a crabby old thing, even then! Here is the link: Earth Day? How About Earth Millennium?:
It was sad to see the links to the Environmental Protection Agency, now effectively the Extraction Industry Protection Agency. Goddess, I hope we can reclaim good government in 2021 – I don’t think there will be anything left if the Republicans are in charge for another 4 years.
Read your post and liked it. Facebook wouldn’t share it but Twitter did. Do you still have that blog?
I do! I sometimes recycle my old posts – I was a very prolific blogger between 2010 and 2013 and saved all my favorites from DK and another place I used to blog. Some I reposted, some are still in drafts.
I find politics uninspiring right now – it is just pulling the lever for Democrats in the hope that we can take back our country. Maybe someday I will write again.
Good morning, meeses! Thursday …
It is 39 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 52. Scattered showers and thunderstorms are in the forecast.
I just did a quick scan of the news because yesterday’s “news light” day worked pretty well for me. When I begin my day immersed in the news, as I normally do, it puts me in a bad mood! I scanned the headlines on my aggregation site – just to make sure I know what is generally going on – and put a couple of promising articles up in tabs. If I get my critical must-be-done-before-people-start-work projects done, I will reward myself and return online to read.
I was thinking about the scientist who got fired for speaking out about the quack remedy pushed by the Republicans’ president*. I understand the theory that “keeping the adults in the room” is important but where did that plan get us when Mattis was put in charge of Defense and Kelly was made Chief of Staff? It just gave cover to the most corrupt, worse run administration in modern history – a government that is now allowing people to die in order to cover up their incompetence. It would probably have been better to expose the ignorance and self-dealing sooner and then maybe we could have gotten the mess cleaned up before it started killing us. So if Fauci and Birx cover for tRump’s incompetence by lying for him and fluffing him up, what good are they doing us?
See all y’all later!
Thursday Meese. 33 going up to 53 here in the NY Catskills.
I’m really getting tired of this:
CNN:Erasing black women
It’s bloody MADDENING, that’s what it is! We need A-Klo in the Senate, Warren as head of Consumer Protection (she’s 70 anyway), and Whitmer to stay right where she is. If all people can think about is white women, I can provide a name: Hillary Clinton!
It must be Kamala! Incidentally, there are a couple of cute videos circulating in cyberspace wherein she teaches Mark Warner to make a tuna melt sandwich.
Puerto Rico
Unbelievable, Sis! May karma deal with her as she deserves.
Good Thursday morning, Moosekind, and happy Shakespeare’s birthday! He’d have been 456 today. I couldn’t order a grand birthday cake from the bakery, but I’ll make a small one of my own, a yellow cake with chocolate frosting. I’m terrible at cake decorating, however, so it will simply have to be a case of “it’s the thought that counts.”
They say it will rain today, but right now in NoVa a veil of white cloud is stretched over the blue like a pulled-down window shade. The temperature is 45 F., going up to 63 F.
Not much news of interest except that I am worried about Dearly Beloved, who is experiencing a great deal of pain from arthritis. Thank Goddess I’m here to make his life a little easier, which I am doing with gladness. As he’s a few months away from his 90th birthday I can see that I will have to take over more and more of the chores he’s been doing. If only the dawg weren’t so obstreperous. He wants to go out every 15 minutes, which is hell on humans trying to concentrate on a project.
Let’s hope the news won’t be too bad today. My heart continues to break at the sight of all those cars lining up to pick up groceries from the food bank and then—when it’s their turn—finding that the food has run out. That was on “World News Tonight.”
Peace to all at the Pond and may the plague be gone.
sending comforting thoughts to your Dearly Beloved
Thank you, dear friend!
It’s 54 heading for 73 overcast with a nippy wind. Not a great going out day but it is what it is. Yesterday we generated less than 2 KWHs and the m-t-d is 268.8 – not sure what today will bring but it is supposed to clear off later this morning. My son will be here shortly and I’ll start my day of running around and mostly being offline until mid afternoon. Hope things are available and I can do fewer stores. Really hope I can actually give blood today. Anyway I’m just checking in while I have the chance but will check back later. I need to grab a few things to be ready. Including my winter gloves instead of my gardening gloves for this morning. sigh. Channeling Healing/Helping Energy to everybody to your shaping. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good luck with the vampire business, bfitz!
Got in a not-quite-2 mile walk. My phone is on the charger, I don’t remember the exact distance. Now I’m “at work” & watching British mysteries. Answering e-mails & fixing things in people’s accounts. Hope I’ll get another walk in later.
Good morning, 49 and cloudy in Bellingham. Thanks to pouring rain I didn’t plant pansies yesterday, but RonK did clean up a beach. He came home very wet but he kept his Earth Day commitment.
Our 2 x’s a month housekeeper called and we decided it would be safe for her to be here again, so we cleaned house yesterday. I’ve done the basics but we need her help to do the rest. We’re going to be living with this virus threat until there’s a vaccine, so I hope we made the right decision.
Our grand son is 19 yrs old today so we’ll call him with our birthday wishes. Sure wish we could be together :::sigh:::
Best wishes to all on this rainy morning.
Happy birthday to your grandson! How lovely to be born on Shakespeare’s birthday.
{{{princesspat}}} Happy Birthday 🎶🎂🍨🎁🎉 to your grandson. moar {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, meeses! Friday …
It is 39 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 54. Rain ending this morning but then cloudy. I hope it rains on the Republican Death Cultists gathering at the Wisconsin State Capitol today to protest Tony Evers trying to keep them from dying. Even Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (our state’s CoC organization and the Republican Party’s overlord), is not in favor of re-opening the state tomorrow and definitely not in favor of a mass re-opening everywhere. Someone in the Republican Party leadership missed the talking points fax!
Now the drooling dotard in the White House is recommending that people use disinfectant to clean their lungs. Is there no one there to stop him from saying things like that? The good news is that the only people that would try it are his base and, quite frankly, I have no interest in keeping them alive to vote in November. I just hope that their suicides-by-tRump don’t tie up needed medical resources.
I watched part of the NFL Draft last night. It was incredibly depressing. It was bad enough that the home decor of many of the coaches and general managers is so awful (geez, guys, you make millions – find someone to decorate your man-caves!) but the commercials and the PSA blurbs were a constant reminder of what the Republicans have allowed to happen to our country. You can’t install an ignorant, anti-science, self-dealing malignant narcissist as the president of the United States and not have serious problems as a result. The delayed response, the complete lack of preparation will kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and destroy businesses and livelihoods. It is all on the Republican Party who was happy to get someone who would sign their tax cuts and give them a federal judiciary to protect them. They must be driven from power and their party burned to the ground.
It is Friday, the last day of another (what feels like) wasted week. I am not making progress on anything, just staying one step ahead of deadlines. I need to snap out of it, probably.
See all y’all later!
Friday Meese, 40 going up to 54 with rain here in the Catskills
Disinfect our country of Trump and his Republicans.
Puerto Rico
Quick diary.
Skipping the walk today, my allergies are acting up and I just don’t feel like it. Supposed to be a record high today of 97, but the weekend is supposed to be nice. Got to get in my 8 hours of tele-work today. Yesterday’s hour of music & laughs by the singer for Snow Patrol was a great break.
{{{anotherdemocrat}}} – hope you’re feeling better soon. Allergies really sap your energy. At least they do mine. Healing Energy & moar {{{HUGS}}}
It’s 60 heading for 75 here and overcast. As in I’ve got my computer desk lamp on so I can see the keyboard clearly. sigh. It did clear off enough yesterday to get a little over 14 KWHs. The m-t-d is 283.5 – we’ve 7 production days left counting today. If we got major sunshine all 7 we’d at least get over 400 for the month. But we’re obviously not gonna. At this point I’m just hoping to beat the 2.5K system’s April generation of 335. sigh.
For what I was hoping to do yesterday, it was a good day. I did give blood and if that’s my only criteria for breaking quarantine it’ll be 8 weeks before I go out again. (I might have to in order to see what’s wrong with the laptop.) I got the garden stuff and the tomato is now (I hope happily) in its grow box. I’m putting all the non-recyclable plastic containers I haven’t been able to bring myself to throw away into the bottom of the 2nd box as a light-weight way to take up volume before I add the soil. One bag of soil only fills 2/3 the box and while the tomato needs the 12″ depth, lettuce and green beans do not. If I’ve got enough old #1, 2, & 5 take-out containers to fill 1/2 the box I’ll add the remaining soil to the tomato box. The tomato should be fine without it but it wouldn’t hurt. That’s a today project. If I’m going to get any lettuce at all, since the lettuce bedding plants are just gone, I need to get those seeds in the ground. I got the pet & wild bird supplies I really didn’t need until mid May, supplements that weren’t available 3 weeks ago, and enough food added to what I already had to pack the freezer. Except for milk, carrots, and fresh fruit I’m good until at least mid June and maybe end of June. I didn’t get my GF flour (they’re out everywhere), the CO2 cartridges, or the tire-scrubbing brush for getting the moss off the lower reaches of the house. I may have to create my own GF flour blend (sigh) but that’s at least doable. My son is very sweetly going to handle the rest. (Well, I’ll have to add the scrubbing brush to his list. I thought I was going to get it myself yesterday when I was at Lowes.) Anyway, yesterday was a very productive day. Now it’s quarantine, get the box ready & seeds in the soil, and wait for Nature to do what She does – both with growing things and pandemics.
As to the “outer world” way too many of our folks – including some in minority groups themselves – are way too fond of trashing our Dems in office, telling them to “get a spine” and do what they obviously don’t have the power to do or they’d have already done it. They’re screaming “25th Amendment” as if it were magic. Maybe they should go back and read it. Growing “a spine” isn’t going to give them the majority in Congress they’d need to either accept a written statement from a majority of the heads of the executive departments (which they ain’t gonna get) or to designate an alternative group to assess the president’s ability to perform the duties of office, much less accept a written statement from the majority of that group. The Rs put twitler in power. The Rs are the ones who control taking him out. The only way we have to get rid of him is by overwhelming vote in November. All the other legal ways are blocked by the same people who blocked Merrick Garland’s appointment to SCOTUS. Elder Stateswoman Nancy Pelosi has managed to average 2 bills a week sent to the Senate. Over half of them have been bi-partisan. MSM propaganda machine is striking again. Those people attacking Pelosi especially accuse her of “doing nothing” because of course unless you are looking at the actual record you don’t know she’s doing anything. Pelosi never brings anything to the table unless she’s got the votes. And she’s managed to get the votes for well over 400 pieces of legislation in the last 2 years. Pelosi also doesn’t tell anybody what tactics she’s working on to deal with the enemy, which twitler and the Rs certainly are, because she’s not stupid. As well accuse Eisenhower of not announcing to the Press the plans for Operation Overlord. sigh. OK. Rant over.
I’m worried about Amelia. She still hasn’t gotten to the doctor for her meds. I’m worried about Aji. Their sales have been diddly and they’re spending up front just like everybody else to stock up as well as dealing with the Spring expenses of vet and garden/pasture prep. I/we do what we can to survive, and survive comfortably, and to help others do the same. I’m gonna get some coffee then fix up my 2nd grow box and get those seeds in it. Then read Dee’s post and tour the internets. Healing/Helping Energy to everybody to their shaping. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 48 and partly sunny in Bellingham. I open the online edition of my local newspaper every morning with a feeling of dread re what’s happening to my community. The good news today is that there were no COVID deaths and the number of positive tests is decreasing. The bad news is that the Intalco smelter is closing and 700 well paying jobs are now gone. When we finally emerge from our COVID cocoons the world we knew will be changed.
I’m closing in the masks for our Oregon daughters family, so I’ll focus on that today and try to get them in the mail. I used some left over Dr Who fabrics for three of them so I know that will bring a smile.
Best wishes to all.
Good Friday morning, Moosekind! It is now afternoon. (Have had some interruptions since I started this comment.) It’s been rainiing since before we arose, bleary-eyed and disheveled, to begin our day. Right now it’s afternoon and the temp. is 53 F., going up to 57 F. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. It’s so cold and gray outside that I’m not sure I’ll feel like going for a walk, even though I haven’t taken one in days.
Monty escaped this morning before Dearly could get his leash on. He rain down the hall and around the corner before I was even dressed. Shuffling down the hall in my dressing gown and non-matching slippers, I caught up with him in the bar of the 1912 restaurant. He was being petted and cooed at by three admiring young women who are part of the outside cleaning staff. Monty really misses the attention he used to get when times were normal. Whether walking down the halls or outside with Dearly, people used to admire him and tell him how cute he was. All Mommy ever does is yell curses at him because he always wants to go out just when she’s poured a cup of tea or coffee for her long-suffering self.
Enough about the dog, whose diet I’m still watching carefully.
Moosekind, I would never make the following statement anywhere but here at the Pond, which is both safe and private: I wish I had been less impulsive in deciding we had to move here. Wish I’d ever actually known someone who was a long-time resident here before we decided to put our house on the market. While we were still in the “vetting” stage by the sales people, I asked one of them what a resident had meant when he said, “Everyone here is upper-middle class,” when we were touring the place one day.
“If that’s true, that lets us out,” I told her. “We’re certainly not upper middle! We’re barely middle.”
She shook her head. “Most people are just like you. Their house is their biggest asset.”
In retrospect, I wonder whether it’s really a good idea for people like us to live surrounded by people much better off financially than we are. These are people who spend winters at their condo in Florida, summers at their house in Long Island, or two weeks out of every month at their farm in Pennsylvania. We are not in that class, let me tell you.
Of course the fact that they’re well off doesn’t mean everything is perfect for them. Most of them have real, not imaginary, health problems. Last year emergency techs came running down our hallway to rescue one of our neighbors. (He is OK now.) We have less money but much better health. Although Dearly suffers from COPD and arthritis and uses a cane to walk, he’s still ambulatory enough to take the dog out every day and do household chores. The only problems I have are chronic bitchiness and worsening laziness.
Sometimes I think the ideal solution would be the one related to me by the mother of one of my granddaughter’s friends. Her parents hailed from India. She said they (her parents) bought an enormous house, with a ground floor master bedroom and bath. They live on the ground floor. One daughter lives on the second floor with her husband. The parents completely outfitted the walk-out basement as a self-contained apartment with bedroom, sitting room, bathroom, and galley kitchen, which they rent out for extra income.
When the time comes that they can no longer care for themselves, the current downstairs tenant will be invited to leave and a full-time, live-in caretaker will be hired. He or she will live in the basement apartment.
Anyway, back to the subject at hand, this little outburst was precipitated by the following excerpt from a letter printed in yesterday’s issue of the weekly Purple Paper:
Can you imagine a person that out of touch? I mean, one person at a meeting I attended in the past said, “Some of us are living on our dividends.” Since the cheapest monthly service fee here is $3,000 (for one person), can you imagine living on your dividends? We live on our Social and our pensions.
Of course, living here is very safe for us. Our meals and mail are delivered. We are encouraged to stay in our apartments and to refrain from socializing. So far there has been one death (in the hospital portion of the community), that of an elderly resident who had underlying health issues. Four other residents in the hospital part are recovering. Four of the caretakers who came down with the virus have now recovered. The one resident in Independent Living, where Dearly and I are, is recovering. (He went outside the community to do an errand and was exposed to coronavirus.)
Still, before All This happened, I wondered whether it was a good idea to live in a place where I don’t really feel that we fit in. I still wonder.
Well, that’s all from me today. Hope everyone at the Pond is avoiding the news as much as possible. We don’t need to be even more depressed than we already are.
{{{Diana}}} – I think stress and depression are the worst of things. For your feelings about where you are living as well as your increasing disinclination to exercise. Your ‘new’ place is safe and that’s important. There are at least a few folks you can safely interact with and that’s also important. And you aren’t dealing with the expense in money or energy to take care of a too-big house, as dear as it was and is. (I wonder if Monty would walk with you on a treadmill, presupposing you had room – and money – to get one? That could solve a couple of issues if you did and he would.)
As to the “stimulus” everybody up to $100K will get it so it could go out immediately without the demeaning hassle of a “needs test” – especially not a “needs test” based on 2018 income (which the Rs wanted) for those who need it the most. Those in the upper ranges will pay taxes on those checks next year. Those who aren’t won’t. And the Dems got it set up so those on SSI/Disability aren’t penalized for it – it doesn’t count against their income caps – which the Rs also wanted to do. moar {{{HUGS}}}
Saturday Meese . 42 here in the Catskills going up to 62. We are going to get a sunny day – it’s been raining all week and will next week
Russian bots, Bernie Bros and Green party asshats were up in the middle of the night pushing “Biden drop out” on twitter which is still trending.
Grrrrrr.
Puerto Rico
Dee, today’s journos are absolutely abysmal at their jobs. From not covering Puerto Rico to ignoring Kamala in their vice-presidential “sweepstakes,” they disgrace the field of journalism. I despise practically all of them for their “both-siderism.”
Joy Reid will have Kamala on her show at 11 am eastern. At least some journalists pay attention to her.
Joy Reid has dissed Kamala multiple times. I hope this time was different. Will go take a look now that I’m home (been out all day)