Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: February 27th

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?

NOTE: The comments page will 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 (right before “Leave A Reply”) and use the Pages Tool to view previous pages, shown here with 3 pages of comments available and Page 2 circled.

28 Comments

  1. Good morning, Meese, happy Fat Tuesday! It’s mostly cloudy in Ashburn, 43 F. on its way up to 59 F., bone-dry until Sunday.

    I’ll look in my Fanny Farmer cookbook to see whether she has a recipe for thin pancakes. Two of my three monthly payments have arrived in my banks, so I’ll have money for a shopping expedition.

    Today is the DEADLINE. At least Joanne (the photographer) and I sorted out the photos yesterday. I have to check the story for accuracy and cut words where I can. It didn’t help that two of the people I interviewed, a man and a woman (married) talked at me, talking over each other, leaving me with the impression that they were BOTH Peace Corps volunteers. The wife was not. It makes the story a bit awkward.

    Oh, well, too late to do anything about it now. Can’t wait for this to be over so I can get to my taxes, house cleaning, and shopping for new pillows. Miss Pink Cheeks complained the last time she was here that the pillows were too hard.

    Merry King Cake and, uh, fried catfish to y’all for Mardi Gras! And I hope everyone at the Pond has a good day.

  2. Good morning, 52 and partly sunny so I hope a few puddles will dry up before the rain starts again. We need to have a load of gravel delivered but neither of us are shovel ready so we keep delaying. Might be time to cook a good meal and reward the grand kids gravel spreading skills! Best wishes to all.

    • That sounds like a very good plan. And always nice to see the grand kids anyway, right? :) Healing Energy & {{{HUGS}}}

  3. Good morning, meeses! Wednesday …

    It is 28 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 43. Cloudy skies clearing later in the afternoon. Yesterday’s promised mid-40s did not include the promised sunshine and it was damp and gloomy. At least it wasn’t bitterly cold, so there is that.

    I stayed up to watch the SOTU speech but did not watch the entire thing. I was having PTSD from seeing so many smirking Republicans in one place. I did see the We Are All Ukrainians parts and was glad to see the outpouring of support. I felt intense sadness watching Merrick Garland greet the Supreme Court justices – he should have been on that court and the smirking Republicans in that chamber who killed his nomination should go down in history as the worst people on the planet. The Republican Party’s reaction to the first Black president and their goal of making him – and America – failures should disqualify them as a political party. That they were given the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016 is a permanent blemish on the soul of our country.

    I woke up early with “things to do” in my brain and I best get to them. I took a break yesterday from my to-do list, ran some errands and then put my feet up. I can afford to do that every once in a while but have to be careful that it does not become a habit!

    See all y’all later!

  4. Wednesday Meese. 35here in Kingston NY, going up to 44.
    Watched the SOTU all the way through on CSPAN since the cable news channels and regular TV coverage made me crazy with too much bla bla bla chatter
    I’m not much of a poll person – however this was a nice surprise

    • Wow! That’s shocking!!

      It is my belief that Biden’s disapproval ratings are inflated by the anger of the ponyless “progressive” purity poopheads who prefer to have nothing instead of something imperfect. They would not be happy with anyone.

  5. Puerto Rico


    Excellent read from Ed Morales

  6. Good Wednesday morning, Moosekind! It’s sunny and clear in Ashburn, 36 F. on its way up to 62 F.

    Like Dee, we watched the SOTU on C-SPAN, being unwilling to put up with !@#$%^& Rethuglican-leaning journos talking over the president. I greatly enjoyed the sight of a woman vice president and a woman speaker sitting behind our entirely lucid, rational president.

    Read an interesting article in the WaPo about a man that wants us to bloody well pick one or the other times and stick with it permanently. This chopping and changing is madness. He, of course, wants an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day; wiser souls, mindful of circadian rhythms, say our bodies are attuned to the sun and just declaring an hour of sunlight at the end of the day isn’t going to make things work. Perhaps this movement has reached a tipping point?

    I finished Part 1 of the Peace Corps article, alarming the Committee biggies so much they’ve invited me to a layout meeting for the article and the pictures. It’ll be some time in the next couple of days. I hope they don’t expect me to chop the extra 250 words. Cut something else!

    I’ve promised Dearly a nice breakfast this morning as last night’s Shrove Tuesday pancakes were such a dismal failure. I made them myself and they were TERRIBLE. I wouldn’t have fed them to the family pig, if we had one.

    I am so sick of my email I’m thinking of using What’s App for friends and family and designating Gmail for my “throwaway” emails. I don’t like the way Gmail arranges itself to its own satisfaction rather than mine. I can never find anything. I’ve used What’s App for years when overseas.

    Also, from now on, when and if I contribute to a political candidate it’ll either be by postal money order or a check. Once ActBlue gets hold of an email address, one is bombarded by emails from every political candidate in the country and their pets. Enough!

    Wishing everyone at the Pond a nice, quiet day.

    • GMail is like all Google products – you take what they give you and your complaints fall on deaf ears. They do a very nice job of filtering out spam and viruses but their layouts are not intuitive and, sadly, not tailorable.

      This regarding Daylight Saving Time vs Standard Time:

      Read an interesting article in the WaPo about a man that wants us to bloody well pick one or the other times and stick with it permanently. This chopping and changing is madness. He, of course, wants an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day; wiser souls, mindful of circadian rhythms, say our bodies are attuned to the sun and just declaring an hour of sunlight at the end of the day isn’t going to make things work. Perhaps this movement has reached a tipping point?

      Choosing to stick with Daylight Saving time (the one we will soon Spring Ahead to) will simply lead to more chaos. Arizona does not change to DST because they already have too much daylight in the summer evenings and would like the sun to go down so that life is bearable, thank you very much. So if DST is the time “chosen”, they will permanently become Pacific Time rather than Mountain Time. I agree with you, the time people should adhere to is the one called “Standard” – I haz spoken.

  7. Good morning. Almost all of the primary races yesterday went my way. The one that didn’t….. I knew he was going to lose, I love Eddie dearly but he ran an awful campaign. Weeks ago, several prominent Democrats even wrote an open letter asking him to change his commercial. Anyway, I’ll take 90% of the races won. There are a couple of run-offs, but not in races I care that much about.

    Another gorgeous day today. March is a month that people visit Austin & decide to move here. I didn’t get in a walk yesterday, I should try again today. I’m going to my church’s distributed Ash Wednesday this morning, cutting out early this afternoon would make for a super short work day but oh well.

  8. It’s 49 and headed for 70 – at least – and sunny. We started of the month nicely with 13.6 KWHs. If we keep this up (I know – we won’t) we’ll get over 400 for March. Which would be very nice.

    I didn’t watch SOTU yesterday. I’ll see if I can find a transcript sometime today. I did listen to – and enjoy – the 1st hour of Dee’s Twitter Space interview. I’ll try to get another hour in today.

    Jill got a visit from the cops yesterday. (Goddess! Cops are really pro-abuser, no matter how stupid or impossible the accusation the abuser makes against the victim.) Seems according to a “tip” Jill is supposed to have vandalized the Hospice office where Ronald gets his treatment/help. The office is in GA, just like Ronald. Jill is in NM, doesn’t have a vehicle and couldn’t drive one anyway because of the familial tremors – and has an RV full of dogs she daren’t leave for more than a few hours at a time, max. And again, the cops were “warned” she could be violent. White privilege is part of why she’s alive and not a victim of “murder by cop”.

    Everybody else is hanging on. Me, too. Actually, I’m getting better. Hands, sinusitis, and shingles are all easing up. Not a lot and slowly, but they are easing up. Holding the Good Thoughts that “easing up” will happen for everybody else.

    Off to twitter. To do my own “chores” and then check what’s going on. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  9. Good morning, meeses! Thursday …

    It is 25 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 30. Mostly cloudy skies are in the forecast. It looks like we will get one day of warm weather on Saturday and then it will get unseasonably cold.

    The images of buildings being destroyed in Ukraine is demoralizing. Even if the war were to end – not a sure thing – it will take years to rebuild their cities. I read something yesterday that suggested that Putin now has nothing to lose – many of the sanctions are more or less permanent so even if he stops now and leaves the country, Russia will continue to be a pariah nation. There is no military solution and there is no political solution. Goddess help us.

    It was good to see Judge Jackson making the rounds in the Senate. I hope that the nearly-useless Chuck Schumer sticks to his plan to get her confirmed before the Easter break. We need a new justice ready to take over at the end of the term before we lose our razor thin majority. Joe Manchin sat with the Republicans at the SOTU – probably to remind people that he can destroy the Democratic Party’s agenda single-handedly. The Founding Fathers would probably love that the Senate has turned into a bastion of white male supremacy, poised to block anything helpful to the “rabble”. They baked into the Constitution that white male elites should rule because the people can’t really be trusted. No one should be shocked that one of our institutions, the U.S. Senate, reflects their vision.

    I have a stack of notes that needs to be sorted. Yesterday did not turn out to be very productive – I need to grab some waxing moon energy and see if I can harness it and get some nagging projects done.

    See all y’all later!

  10. Thursday Meese. Sigh. Woke up to a changed weather forecast – we were supposed to be sunny all day – now I see snow predicted. 28 here in Kingston.

    Thanks to following Moose founder Peter Jukes – saw this critique of “the left” supporting Putin

  11. Puerto Rico

    • The Rethugs do not want DC to be a state, and we all know why. It’s so confusing about PR. It is a colony right now, right? It would be bad for it to be a state. It would be good for it to become its own country, like the Dominican Republic, correct?

  12. Good morning from Austin where it’s warm enough that I didn’t wear a jacket. Going to check the weather report to see if it will be warm enough for sandals tomorrow. No news here, though a Republican candidate in the Dallas area dropped out because of a sex scandal. Because of course. Anyway,wishing a good day to all at the pond.

  13. Good Thursday morning, Meese. It’s 48 F. and cloudy here–it’s rather interesting, because the top half of the sky is gray but there’s a broad band of white underneath, like Yamiche Alcindor’s eye makeup. I watch “Washington Week” mainly to study her eye makeup. Does that make me a flibbertigibbet? I used to rather like her, but then she started parroting Rethug talking points.

    Anyway, I slept until 6:30. For once I was able to go back to sleep after getting up at 4 -something. Isn’t that great? Could it be because of the exercise I did yesterday? I did a 15-minute “scenic row” down the River Hamble and it was great. I could hear the water slapping against the boat and see the great yachts berthed on either side of the river as I worked my way down. I want to work up to half an hour one day.

    Busy day ahead. Must do taxes and collate my writers’ six-word stories. I asked them to write a story following the well-known example: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” My own, titled “The Challenge,” was five words: “Swords. Dawn. End after first blood.” Quite violent but not as bad as the first one I thought of, which began with pistols. A couple of the writers have really run away with the idea!

    The Committee is meeting this afternoon. I hope I don’t have to fight with them about the extra wordage in my story.

    Wishing a good day to all at the Pond, and Goddess please watch over Ukraine.

  14. It’s 43 heading for 80 and sunny. It’s supposed to start clouding up after dark but we’ve got one more day to give March a good start. Yesterday we generated another 13 KWHs and the m-t-d at 26 is on track for 400.

    I haven’t checked anything anywhere yet so I don’t know how anything’s going with anybody. As of last night everything was pretty much the same as yesterday morning. Which wasn’t much different than the day before. Except for the amount of damage and number of people dead in the Ukraine of war. And here of “don’t-say COVID”.

    I’ve got to leave for the clinic in half an hour. Once I’ve finished there I’m heading for the Co-op to replenish my supplements. And get some L-lysine. Someone online mentioned it can knock a week or more off a shingle attack – & help prevent them in the future. Since shingles is a herpes virus and L-lysine treats herpes in cats, that’s at least logical and something relatively inexpensive to try. (Yes, I’ll get the vaccine too. But this is something I can do now.) My treadmill was supposed to have been delivered yesterday but wasn’t. The tracker says “out for delivery” now. If it comes while I’m gone I hope the driver puts it close to the house and not in the middle of the carport.

    I agree with Jan on Daylight Savings Time. If I didn’t have family here – and own this house free and clear – it would almost be a reason to move to AZ. Almost.

    Gonna go set up over on Twitter, then get out the door. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  15. Good morning, meeses! Friday …

    It is 21 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 41. Mostly cloudy skies with a chance of rain overnight. Tomorrow the high will be 63 then Sunday the high is 41 again. Crazy weather!

    I am not sure why prosecutors even bothered trying the ex-cop who was part of the raid that killed Breonna Taylor. There is no “being held accountable” when the outcome is pre-ordained. Law enforcement will always be able to claim that they felt threatened by whatever they saw – a toy gun, a suspicious shadow, a Black person sleeping! – and get off the hook. No knock raids in the middle of the night need to be banned. The ones that go awry, where innocent people are killed and lives are ruined, present a greater risk than allowing a possible criminal to go unapprehended for one more day.

    Wisconsin’s Supreme Court did the right thing! :::tips over::: They had signaled earlier in the year that they would use the Republican gerrymandered redistricting maps in order to “avoid change.” Well it turned out that trying to maintain the gerrymanders resulted in more change and they selected Governor Tony Evers’ map instead. There is some hope that democracy could eventually return to Wisconsin but even with the new maps, it will be an uphill battle – the hole that was dug is too deep. I wish them luck.

    Floriduh! Another day, another Ron DeSantis video of him acting like a complete jerk. Besides the terrible optics of him berating school children for wearing masks at an indoor event, what he called “COVID theater”, he got the science all wrong. The guidance is still that if you have a person in your family who is at risk, you should mask and social distance in order to avoid bringing the virus home to them. I hope that if one of those kids’ grannies get sick, they sue the ass off the governor. Republicans are awful people, period.

    I woke up thinking this was Saturday and that I had time to putter around on the Internets. It’s Friday and I have things I need to get done before clients start work.

    See all y’all later!

  16. Good morning. Probably safe to put coats and jackets away here, I didn’t even need a sweater this morning. I’m loudly ignoring the news, it’s terrifying and there’s nothing I can do about it. Rodeo and South by Southwest are gearing up, things I didn’t do even pre-covid.

    • I can’t figger out our weather – it’s 16 degrees here. Sunday it will be 65. The following Thursday we have snow.

  17. Good Friday morning, Moosekind! It’s a sparkling day outside, clear, sunny and so bloody cold that even staying indoors and doing taxes seems preferable. Right now it’s 25 F., on its way up to 48 F. On Monday it’s supposed to be 82 F. Our heads will collectively explode.

    Went to the meeting yesterday and did not have to fight for my extra words in Part I of the Peace Corps article. It was just fine. We may not even have a meeting in two weeks, which would be St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday I refuse to celebrate.

    Not much other news except that what’s happening in Ukraine is terribly depressing. If only a meteor would descend on Putie’s head! No one would miss him.

    Wishing a good, quiet day to all at the Pond.

  18. Friday Meese. Attacking Dolly Parton is not smart

  19. Puerto Rico

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