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!
– Page Two of Comments is HERE!
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Good “morning”, Motley Meese! The week begins …
Morning low of 68 degrees in Madison WI with an expected daytime high of 86. Chance of thunderstorms.
Have a great day, all y’alls!!
We are on the new theme and there are some things that will need to be tailored. The comments are not threading, for one, we have a mishmash of fonts, for another. I want to return to the categorized front page which I think is an option. I got bunch of themes as a package so I can do a different one of I can’t get this one to work.
Update: The comments are threading, the indentation, however, is very subtle. Also, on smart phones it does not indent (maybe it never did!)
Update at 3:00am:
– In order to return to the categorized Home Page, I will have to build a special home page and populate it (the other Magazine format had the categorized Home Page as a default.) The use of a special Home Page is a more standard way of doing things, so in the long run it will be time well spent. However, I don’t want to commit that much time to this particular theme until I am sure that it will be The One. For now, it will show the last 10 posts.
– It looks like most of the things we are used to are intact. The font is a serif to make it easier to read and I think I have the font size where we had it before. Let me know what you think about the reading comfort.
– The good news is that our Edit Comment and the comment tags are working fine.
– Blockquotes lose formatting and need BR html.
– Some things that are different. Good, bad, indifferent?
. Blocked Quotes have the text italicized
. The featured image seems ginormous
4:40am
It’s all yours! Have fun!!
Wow! Thank you so much for your hard work!
Thank you. Bless you. That it’s here and works is the main thing. Everything looks bigger to me (except the reply font as I’m actually typing it). Yeah the picture look ginorous :) – Truly, truly appreciate your work. {{{HUGS}}}
Make the Republicans – and their president – defend their destruction of the US Postal Service. #VoteThemAllOut.
JanFBlogs! Were you up ALL NIGHT?
BlogGoddess, you are one dedicated woman!
I am still beset by early rising and an inability to get back to sleep. I have a few nagging projects that need to get done and when they are done I think sleep will be easier. I hope so!!
Understood. Hope you can catch up on sleep when the pressure is over.
Sunday Meese. Okay – this new format is going to take a while to get used to – thanks Jan for all the hard work you do.
I think the hardest thing is to figure out where the button is to add a comment. It took me a while!
Puerto Rico
How awful! Poor old PR can never catch a break. Let’s hope there will be a new Democratic administration that will embrace PR instead of repudiating it.
Sunday music sermon
Wow, will read this when I return from my walk!
Had a really good walk/run this morning — 6 minute-long segments of running, my most ever! It’s cool after yesterday’s thunderstorms, 68 degrees. Instead of both hurricanes hitting Louisiana, I really wish 1 would come west, having 2 hit them would be so terrible. Today: news, church, making “overnight” oats for the week.
Good Sunday morning, Moosekind! Oh, dear, it’s 77 F. on its way up to 89 F., so we’re in for a hot day to begin a hot week. Euww. Well, at least the week after next will introduce September.
Normally I resist new formats to the max, but I must say I like the fresh new look of the Moose Pond! The big picture won’t look so “ginormous” when we’re used to it. Jan, thank you for the enormous amount of work you’ve put in, and I gather you stayed up all night? Now, THAT’s dedication to the Moose nation!
Not much news here, still pottering about after breakfast. I’m about to go for a walk to see whether I find any shade. We had the Mother of All Cloudbursts yesterday when I was at Trader Joe’s. This morning we have to deflate the airbed and put the sheets in the washer. Miss Pink Cheeks, a.k.a. Nora, will be going home after tea. She has been GLUED to her laptop all weekend. I can see the beginnings of normal teenage defiance starting to bloom, although she’s only half-past eleven. We’re trying to get her to correspond with the four second cousins in Australia.
Speaking of that, has anyone had experience with a keyboarding or touch typing video for children? It’s so much easier to touch-type!
Elder Son Eric is already at the beach with his family and the dog. At one point Eric said he wasn’t taking Hudson on holiday any more, he’s getting so old and cranky. However, Hudson being a Labrador, he loves swimming in lakes, ponds, and the sea, so off he went.
Yikes, it’s already 10 a.m. Another, glad you’re getting so much exercise in. I look at Austin’s temps. every day because M’Daughter lives around there. When the temp is in the 90’s, I think, “My Goddess, they’re having a cold front down there!”
Wishing a good day to all at the Pond.
Good morning Meeses and the new format is interesting. LOL. Actually I think I’ll like it once I get used to it. (I may have a Libra sun but my moon and rising are Cancer and us crabs don’t like change.) It looks fresher somehow. Don’t ask me what that means. 😁😁😁 Anyway today is supposed to be more or less like the last several. Temps inching up but still low enough humidity to keep the heat index at or just above the air temps so still fairly comfortable. And the overnights are in the 60s which is low enough that as long as I close up the house by noon or a little earlier everything stays comfortable. Yesterday we generated 18.6 KWHs and the m-t-d is 404 so still on track.
Lisa needs help. & thus far she isn’t gonna get it. & I don’t know what to do besides what I’m doing. She can do “personal care” (dressing, bathroom, cooking sort of thing) fairly well but that’s about it. It takes enormous effort to do the laundry even with machines in the same building & using a cart. It takes even more to do shopping even via Instacart. & everybody from her insurance companies to Verizon is screwing her over making her have to do multiple steps, make multiple phone calls, sometimes personal visits, before they – maybe – deign to do what they’re supposed to do. So she need “home health” help AND she needs an advocate who can make those phone calls for her – & if she had that advocate maybe the companies would quit seeing her as “white meat for dinner” and do it right the first time. (& a secure living situation so that stress wasn’t draining her all the time.) sigh. Prayers and invocations please. Thank you.
Everybody else is managing. Bobby is without power but otherwise OK. He says they didn’t even get much rain where he is. Aji needs rain and revenue – and the less rain they get, the more revenue they need. Wings has some truly gorgeous things recently finished and more in the works. Maybe – please goddesses & for many more reasons than this – if we win in November across the board people will feel safe enough to buy presents for the holidays this year. Last year was…barren. Fineena is perking up which is good. Others seem to be OK. Busy and stressed but OK.
I, well, I’m finding it harder and harder to concentrate. It takes me half an hour or more to compose responses to emails or things like that. And my memory, which wasn’t great anyway, is shot. How much of this is long-term, low-grade stress I don’t know. I hope I’ll find out by having the effects go away with the stress, presupposing we get our “Blue Tsunami” in November and everybody sworn in as they should be in January. Meanwhile, I still have emails to respond to and Dee’s Sunday music to listen to. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
I think “Leave a Reply” is confusing me – did the old format say it differently? I think of replies as “to comments”, not “to the Post.”
I got our Biden-Harris 2020 category set up and have Joe’s and Kamala’s speeches there. I will do the Obamas’ later in the week. I am going to have to get a CSS fix for the italicized blockquote, though. That it smooshes all the words together and doesn’t preserve my spacing is a problem. I am sure it is an easy fix and I should have some free tech support with the purchase of the theme.
It is very odd that comment typing is a different font than comment displaying. Getting the fonts coordinated will be good.
I don’t remember – told you my memory is shot – but I don’t think it did. It might have and we had just gotten used to the placement and didn’t notice though. & yeah, odd that the comment typing is different from comment displaying. Both in font and font size. I do hope you can get that coordinated as the font size is small enough to cause me problems with reading/proofreading my comment before I hit post.
I will definitely enjoy reading the speeches in the Biden-Harris 2020 category. Thank you again.
Good morning, 58 and partly sunny in Bellingham. We’re celebrating Ava’s 13th birthday with burgers and cake at her house this afternoon. I’m giving her a cedar box that belonged to her great grandmother (Ron’s mom). I saved a ring with a leaf motif and 2 small diamonds from her jewelry collection, and have added a silver chain with an August birthstone charm from mine, so it’s a multi generational gift from her grandmothers. Sentimental me has sentimental grand daughters so I think she will be pleased. I’m including two graphic books written for youth readers as well. She’ll give me a polite smile for those, but I know she’ll enjoy reading them and I love giving her books…..and she knows that too!
Thanks for the Moose update Jan. I appreciate all it take to keep the Moose Pond full every day. Best wishes to all.
You are a wonderful granny, princesspat!
Good morning, meeses! Monday …
It is 70 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 91. Mostly sunny skies are in the the forecast.
An ABC poll released yesterday was pretty illuminating: there really is no way to bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats when Republicans think the economy is great and pretty much “oh well” that 180,000 of their fellow citizens have died due to their president’s incompetence. Here’s the tell: 3 in 4 say that they are better off now than they were 4 years ago and 70% cited “the Democrats are not in power” as the reason. You cannot rationalize with people who prefer having no health care, having no job and no place to live rather than having Democrats control the government. I hope something between now and November 3rd makes them decide it is not worth going to the polls and that they stay home.
There is no magic font settings screen to adjust the fonts so I am going to have to find a document on changing fonts via CSS (the underlying code). This is no big deal, it is done all the time, I just need to put a list together of where I want to change them so that I can do it in one support visit. I can’t see where the comment display font is different than the comment typing font – for me it isn’t. The font name is Noto Serif, by the way. One thing I may try is wide versus block to see if it gives the screen a less squished look. I did manage to lose the left hand side of the page by expanding my comment box – that is not something I want to have happen! For what it is worth, I use the browser magnification to make a screen feel better visually. I am looking that the Moose at 90% for example. I will not have time until later in the week to dig into this. If there is something that is a show-stopper, let me know and I will address it right away.
I almost feel badly for the broadcast networks having to show the Trump Sh*tshow live on national TV for 4 nights. _Almost_ because their love of the chaos that brings ratings led directly to his being mainstreamed in 2015 and 2016 and people saying “what could go wrong if we elect a malignant narcissist with a disgusting personal life, deep-seated racism and misogyny who has failed at every business venture he has undertaken?” What could go wrong, indeed.
See all y’all later!
Jan, the Moose Pond is here and that’s what counts. I don’t know what font this is that I’m typing at the moment. Aside from smaller – that’s the part that makes it harder for me to read – I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s a sans serif style, or very close to it. It’s a little weird but nothing I can’t get used to. There’s nothing with the new theme at all I can’t get used to. Again, the main thing is it’s here and we still have our Moose Pond community. So thank you again for all your work and if you do nothing else, you’ve still done more than enough.
I won’t give up on font issues – to me they are critical. It is interesting because when I type, I get a nice serif font! I wonder if it is from my browser which is FireFox. I may experiment with other browsers and see if that is where the comment typing font is coming from.
Happy Monday! I’m going into the office to drop off done paperwork & pick up new stuff. We’re back to 103s for highs, except if Marco takes a westward turn, we might get some rain on Wednesday. I hope it does, if only to spare Louisiana a double hit. Anyway, y’all have a good day.
Good Monday morning, Moosekind! We’re in for a dreadful week of high temperatures. Right now in Ashburn it’s 78 F., going up to 89 F. later today. Although the weather outside is sunny, it already looks hot around the edges. I’ve notice leaves already swirling gently off the trees, even when there’s no wind. Wonder what this presages?
Busy day today. I need a walk, and when I come back from that I need to put fresh sheets on the bed and start practicing my voiceover. From 12 to 2 I’ve promised to text voters. At 3 I have to be next door at the Great Oak Club House to record the voiceover for the commercial about the Benevolent Care fund.
Also this week I need to put most of my forthcoming book together for the copy editor. While she’s doing that I have to format the front and back matter.
Elder Son is already at the beach, Younger Son and family will join him there tomorrow. I do hope the hurricanes don’t come barreling up the Atlantic Coast to North Carolina.
Wishing that DeJoy will be grilled on the Hill and that all at the Pond will have a nice day.
Good morning meese. It’s 72 with a high of 95 in the forecast in Folsom, CA. We’re not under an evacuation advisory or order yet but I’ve been discussing with my house mate about having a “go bag” ready in case we have to.
Jan, thank you for keeping the Moose updated and running! I like that comments on mobile are not threaded so they don’t start becoming unreadable (squished) when there’s more than 2 levels of threading. They seem to be threading fine on desktop.
{{{basket}}} so happy to see you. What my veteran friends call a “bugout bag” is a very good idea. Holding you in The Light. Healing Energy & moar {{{HUGS}}}
Hi, basket! Good to see you. It might be a good idea to go ahead and put together a go-bag. Doing it under pressure is so stressful: much better to have it ready.
Hope you’re having a good day!
Nice to “see” you, basket!
Yes, I gave up trying to reply from my phone – the deep indenting was part of it. I think the new theme is more mobile-aware. Or maybe the way the front page works right now (with just a list of posts and no category blocks) makes it cleaner on a mobile. When I install the new front page, I will keep that in mind.
The temps are just inching up but we’re moving back into summer with enough humidity to raise the heat index to uncomfortable and overnights/just at dawns temps not quite cool enough to keep the house comfortable the whole day. It’s 70 now heading for low 90s/heat index high 90s (I hope only high 90s) and sunny. I’ll need to close up the house by 10 cdt. Afternoon cloudiness coming back too. Yesterday we generated 17.6 KWHs and the m-t-d is 421.6 – but both are still on track so that’s good.
Not much of anything changing but the weather. Nation, economy, environment – all running full bore in the wrong direction. We’re amassing troops and materials to fight back and get the helm back from the one’s steering us that way. On the micro front – my online “family” not much changing either. Some far enough from the edge they can’t accidentally fall over, some not. So work. In the large and in the small. Do what we can, get comfort and strength from our communities. And joy in whatever good things, beautiful things, happy things come along. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Late Monday posting – got side-tracked
Good day, 63 and partly sunny in Bellingham. I slept late and my phone has been busy this morning so I’m even later than usual checking in. We had a lovely birthday dinner for Ava yesterday and she did love the gifts. We were in her other grand parents garden and it was both relaxing and reassuring because they have moved from being life long R’s to disgusted by tRump and firmly voting for Biden. They watched every night of the Dem convention and were pleased with what they saw and heard, yay!
Best wishes to all.
That’s good news about the switch from Rethug to pro-Biden, princesspat! Glad Ava had a lovely birthday party in the garden, that sounds so nice.
This Congresswoman is a rock star:
Good morning, meeses! Tuesday …
It is 68 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 84. Sunny skies are in the forecast. Last night’s sleep was disturbed by a cell phone tornado warning that was close enough to include me (about 30 miles north and east) but not close enough to trigger our tornado horns. Then the storm it was tied to rumbled through and my doggie was very unhappy for at least an hour.
It will be easy to ignore the news this week as it will be 24×7 the Donald Trump Show with willing networks spewing his hours of lies. The problem is that it is a rerun and the cast is neither attractive nor entertaining. Maybe unemployed MAGAts, convinced that preserving the supremacy of their whiteness is more important than food on the table or a roof over their heads – or their health and the health of their loved ones – will tune in. There is nothing there for anyone else.
It is shocking to me that with all the attention given to police shootings and the killing of unarmed Black men that the police in Kenosha Wisconsin really thought that it was okay to pump 7 bullets into the back of a Black man who “disrespected” them by ignoring their requests to talk to them. JHC on a popsicle stick! Then you remember that Kenosha County is where the Sheriff said he won’t enforce mask ordinances because they are tyranny since they come from the Democratic governor. Kenosha had been a blue-collar city for many years, a place where regardless of your race you could find a good family supporting job in one of the car factories or the factories that supported the automobile industry. Now it is just another rust-belt city where the slice-and-dice gerrymanders created a situation where the majority of state representation in the area is by Republicans who don’t care about cities or people of color or good government. :(
Well, I was up at 2:15am thinking about what I needed to get done. Now I need to get back to it.
See all y’all later!