Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: March 5th

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.

9 Comments

  1. Good morning. I slept in, and mostly actually slept — only waking up 3 times in a night is pretty great by my standards. Eating breakfast, watching the news. It will get up to 90 degrees this afternoon. I might actually go to the gym for my exercise.

  2. Good morning, meeses! Saturday …

    It is 55 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 72. Sunny skies this morning then clouding up with a slight chance of rain. We got into the 80s yesterday and it felt great.

    Why does it shock anyone that the owner of a bank that just failed 1) cashed in $3 million in stock a few weeks before the failure 2) lobbied the feds to loosen bank liquidity regulations? It is sad for the people who got sucked into banking with a marginal bank but JHC, people, were you sleeping through 2008??!? Yes, the really big banks are mean but they are solvent. Thank goodness for the FDIC – I hope people were paying attention to the $250,000 deposit insurance limit.

    Melon is doubling down on his plan to turn Twitter into a right-wing propaganda site, tweeting the most offensive things he can find including questioning the convictions of January 6th rioters. I saw a promising article yesterday about how Meta (Facebook) is getting ready to get into the Twitter replacement market. Yes, Meta is no saint but they will, first of all, not turn their service into a megaphone for one person – they want to make money. Second, they still have technicians and an IT infrastructure and the means to deliver an app. Their plan is to use the Instagram platform for signups (which already has a lot of overlap with Twitter accounts including ones for elected officials and governmental agencies) and link it to ActivityPub which is the connection that is used by Mastodon to link its communities together. So the new Meta service would be distributed across multiple servers and instances and organizations will be able to link into it but still have some autonomy to control their own content. PLUS it will connect with the current Mastodon structure meaning it will likely bring order to the chaos that exists in the Fediverse. If they can make it easy to sign up and they have a good app, it will mute Melon’s megaphone and send him back to peddling cars that burst into flames. He appears to be working overtime to destroy any business value that Twitter has by pricing access to the Twitter API in a way that makes no one interested in purchasing it. The API is the thing that takes a Share link on a web site article and turns it into a Tweet or a Facebook post or something else. I am going to play with the Mastodon and Instagram Share buttons for the Moose and see how they work. Time to get the Motley old Moose updated.

    See all y’all later!

    • Great thread from Courtney about the bank thing:

    • Jan – I just got the email from Spoutible – voice verification is now available!

    • Sounds promising Jan, I’ve been enjoying IG, reading mostly design, sewing, gardening and cooking sites but it would be easy for me to add news content to the mix. Thanks for keeping me informed re twitter alternatives.

  3. It’s 49 heading for 53, overcast and drizzling. The sun came back out yesterday by midmorning and we generated 13.6 KWHs – only our 4th over 9 for the month & most of the rest a lot lower than 9. sigh. The m-t-d at 82.6 is barely on track to beat the 2.5K system’s generation.

    I may or may not have found a new vet. The boys aren’t due for checkups until end of May but I talked to the folks at the other mobile vet yesterday. They’re a “fear free” group. Which means they probably aren’t going to do Bobbie and maybe not Freddy unless I drug them – which I can’t do – a couple of hours before the vet gets here. They’re more expensive than Dr. Jones, but I had expected that. We’re going to try, but I’m afraid I’ll need a backup vet for Bobbie at least. But the mobile vet, even for just Charlie, Cloud, and Rennie, would still be less expensive than taking all 5 to a regular clinic. Not to mention the logistics of getting them there. sigh.

    As far as I know, everybody I actually check on is doing OK. As OK as they ever do anyway. (Aji’s pain is so chronic and so bad she no longer talks about it much on twitter – but she does update folks on her own blog. And it’s pretty bad.) Anyway, off to twitter & spoutible. {{{Meeses}}}

  4. Good slow Saturday morning, Meese! It’s 38 F. in Ashburn and so blustery it reminds me of an ancient joke about three old ladies:

    First old lady: It’s windy.
    Second old lady: No, it’s Thursday.
    Third old lady: So am I. Let’s all go somewhere and have a cup of tea.

    Opened the door to the screened porch and was nearly knocked flat. I think I’ll go the long way to the gym this afternoon (10 minutes walking through the buildings, 4 minutes across Great Oak Common to the clubhouse).

    Told my Writers’ Group that I was giving them carrot cake petits fours for refreshments on Thursday because my birthday is Sunday, and carrot cake is my favorite. Dearly gave me some beautiful dark pink roses and astromeria; a friend sent a pound of my favorite chocolates (See’s); a writer in my group gave me a book of poems he’d published; and another writer wants to order a t-shirt and coffee mug for me with our Writers’ Group logo on it. Wasn’t that nice? So looking forward to my 106th birthday!

    Then the afternoon mail brought a flurry of cards. My sweet Christian cousin in Texas sent me some Christly bookmarks that I can’t use, because I no longer read paper books. ALL my books are on Kindle, which kills no forests as far as I know. Then my darling hubby gave me a card and an Amazon gift card, and my friend in Montreal sent such a sweet note I almost cried. My dear friend in another Erickson facility sent a gorgeous card with matching envelope. People have been so kind!

    The chocolates, unopened, are stored in the fridge until my weight gets down to where I think it should be. Saw something really funny the other day: “Most of us wish we still weighed the same as when we first thought we had let ourselves go.” I remember, distinctly, thinking that! And what wouldn’t I give to weigh 125 now!

    Ugh, enough about me. A morning’s work lies ahead, trying to lick the disability article into shape. Also, I plan to write thank-you notes first. Still in my dressing gown because Dearly is fast asleep in the bedroom after an Awful Night and he needs his sleep.

    Saw that it’s going up to 88 F. in Austin! Dear Goddess!

    Wishing a good day to all at the Pond. Try not to think about the evil Rethugs.

  5. Good morning, 45 and light clouds so it would be a nice day to be outdoors. I may do so later but for now I’m keeping my leg up and trying to feel relaxed. Been a long week of dental/medical frustration, but this is a nice moment. Best wishes to all.

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