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 (every 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 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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Good morning, Motley Meese! The week begins …
It is 41 degrees in Madison WI, on its way up to 64. Sunny skies are in the forecast.
What are you reading on the Internets these days?
Have a great day, all y’alls!!
I put up a post on the passing of Beau Biden. It includes a video of Beau’s introduction of his dad at the Democratic National Convention in 2008. Bring tissues if you plan to watch it.
Good morning, Meese! It’s a fair morning here, 70 F. now, going up to 90 F. today. However, rain is expected in the afternoon, which tells me I’d better get out and pick strawberries before it starts. We’ve been getting a bowlful of strawberries every day or every other day. They don’t seem quite as sweet this year, wonder why.
Hope to be able to do something other than housework today. That would make a really nice change. We lost electricity for a couple of hours last night, probably owing to everyone’s turning on their air conditioning at the same time. I might give myself a break from the news today; it’s always bad. I struggle with this concept: it’s the duty of a citizen in a republic to be well informed, so one should pay attention to the news. However, the news is a constant, unrelenting downer—floods in Texas, corruption in government, murder of citizens by the police, murder and scandal in people’s private lives, not to mention what’s happening to women here and overseas in the Middle East. It’s hard to be calm or happy when your stomach is constantly churning and your mind is constantly horrified.
I read that Dr. Christiane Northup, who is highly regarded in some circles, advises women to stay away from the news. But there again, isn’t that infantilizing women? Patriarchs think women are stupid anyway, so how does ignoring the news help? But on the other hand, how does one cope when one’s outrage and sympathy meters are working overtime?
It is truly a dilemma, Diana. I careen between feeling like I need to read the news because I have to know what is going on to wanting to avoid it all. There is probably a healthy balance but finding it is tricky. I think the key is to skim past those stories that promise more anxiety (things that there are no remedies for) and hope that the headline itself is enough to keep you informed. For example, 1,800 people dying of the heat in India … armed vigilantes protesting against Muslims in Phoenix. Nothing I can do will help but I want to know that it is happening.
Speaking of murder of citizens by our police, WaPo put together a database that shows that police killings are not being tracked accurately by the FBI. Here is a link to it: Fatal police shootings in 2015 approaching 400 nationwide. This is an example of excellent reporting and a useful public service. It is also hopeful because many of the killings did include armed suspects, not all of them are the stories of Tamir Rice and Freddie Gray and John Crawford. So following the news can be helpful as well.
Btw, I can’t believe you are getting strawberries! We had a frost advisory overnight … I am not sure what it got down to but we brought the hanging plants in (the planted annuals will have to fend for themselves, obviously).
But we had our air conditioning on two nights ago so that we could sleep! Late spring in the upper midwest is a rollercoaster.
re: strawberry sweetness – too much rain. Fruit in general and strawberries in particular have to have sunshine to be sweet.
re: news – first decide what “well informed” means to you. For me, it’s mostly paying attention to what I may be able to do something about, whether that’s call/write/email my elected officials or donate $10 or write a letter to the editor. For everything else, in general is good enough – I don’t need to know the specifics of things that will do nothing but make me depressed or give me nightmares.
Good Sunday morning
Thanks for the diary on Beau Biden Jan.
Have to do my Sunday diary tending chores at orange.
Enjoy your day folks
Good morning, all. It’s going to be 86 with a real feel of 96. Ugh.
Am hoping Kerry’s broken leg is not going to interfere with the Iran deal.
Now for the news and more coffee.
Will check later to see how everyone is.
Hope today is a good one in the Pond and beyond.
It looked like they cleared a major hurdle: Six powers agree way to restore U.N. sanctions in push for Iran deal – sources
Let us hope.
Good morning, 52 and foggy in Bellingham today. It’s a quiet news day in the PNW. Local issues like the impact of the new Wa State Ferry reservation system on island residents and dumping of apples in eastern Wa. and of halibut in western are the main stories. The common thread is that of unintended consequences……the port slow down delayed apple shipping, regulations to control he halibut catch leads to waste and too many dead fish, and the reservation sysem moves traffic and visitors but takes spontaneity away from island residents.
I successfully avoided my desk yesterday, but I found a lovely new hydrangea at the garden shop, so I’ll see what today brings!
http://www.seattletimes.com/
Commenting to join. My weather is the same as Jan F. Beautiful sunny mild day! Lots of mowing and gardening to do after many inches of rain this week.
Good morning/afternoon!
It is about 70 on my back deck. I like this kind of weather, anything over 80 and I start melting.
Hi, nice to meet you! My own weather is more treacherous~
mfmurray is the blogger formerly known as GollyMissMolly on the old moose (and the GOS, I think). She chose to save a few keystrokes by having a simpler name on the new moose. :)
She lives across town from me! Her weather is often similar but occasionally different because of the lakes in the middle of Madison. Sometimes the weather that arrives on the west side of Madison is sent off in odd directions when it passes over the city and we on the east side have something quite different.
I keep forgetting that Madison has lakes! By any name, am happy to see mfmurray!
We are almost all lakes!!
When the storms come in from the west, they often lessen in intensity when the heat from the lakes changes the air flow.
It must be gorgeous!
Hi and welcome!
Hard workout this morning. 3.8 hilly miles: http://www.mapmywalk.com/workout/1008059059?fb_action_ids=10207166492586385&fb_action_types=fitness.walks&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B894803250558788%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22fitness.walks%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D. The walk back was so steep, coach actually said we were to stop at each light post to rest. Had trouble with all the standing at church. Gotta make next week’s breakfast & cook some spinach to blend in to the hummus I got. But I also desperately want a nap.
65 and gonna be 65 til dark then drop into the low 50s – and overcast. I’m getting awfully tired of overcast! I did something dumb yesterday – tried to install a free ad-blocker and somehow got “SafePCRepair by myway” – which annointed itself my homepage. I can’t figure out how to get rid of it – I’ve tried several free uninstaller/malware destroyers – now have icons all over my desktop from them – but I’ve still got SafePCRepair by myway as my home page and have to search for everything I used to be able to click a link to. I just hope nothing else snuck in with it. My son (who set this system up for me) lives in Austin and will probably not be up here again for at least 4 months. sigh. Oh well. I’ve been without a computer at home before and can do it again. And the LTE I was hoping to reprint here and at teh Orange turns out to be one I wrote prior to my last computer trojan-takeover/crash. I’m trying to see if any of the folks who were in that writers group with me might still have it – it’s over 6 years ago anyway. more sighs. Hope everybody has a very nice rest of Sunday and an even better first week of June. {{{HUGS}}}
OK – update on my computer situation – Trish more or less walked me through uninstalling from the Windows Control Panel, my son suggested plain ol’ malwarebytes (which found and got rid of 306 nasties) then Trish walked me through resetting my home page from teh Google settings thingy up in the top corner. From all appearance, everything is back to normal. :)
That is good news. Hope you got all your missing stuff.
I’m so glad for you, bfitz! There’s nothing more maddening than have weird things going on with your computer. That always sends me into screaming fits.
Glad that all is quiet on that front, hope you don’t have any overcast tomorrow, and thanks for the advice on the strawberries.
Those of us who use but don’t understand computers get funny looks when we don’t know how to undo whatever the heck we did that we didn’t want to do. Fortunately my friends and my sons don’t hold it against me. :) It is still overcast – I am truly glad I added those extra panels since I usually get at least 5 KWHs even on a cloudy day (and this time of year would get over 25 KWHs if it were a sunny day) – but electricity generation is a bright spot (heh) in a depressingly overcast day.
The guy I get my strawberries from plowed his field under last week – so much rain he refused to sell them. (Which of course is why I get my strawberries from him – I can always trust them to be the best.) He’ll replant, hoping for a smaller but good crop in the Fall and then a gangbuster next Spring. Meanwhile his tomatoes, melons, and squashes are coming on nicely – but won’t be ready to sell for at least another couple of weeks. My blueberry guy is worried about the rain. He says the crop is plentiful and looks wonderful but if we don’t get some sunshine in the next couple of weeks they aren’t going to taste like much of anything. I’ll buy them anyway – that’s my “local” fruit I winter over with – but sweet is always nicer.
That is great news, bfitz.
I was hoping someone could walk you through the cleanup. I was going to try via email but some things need a back and forth. Malwarebytes, found at malwarebytes.org for those who need it, is an excellent (and free) program. Whenever I have a malware attack, even when my resident anti-virus program says it caught it, I run a MBAM scan to make sure nothing snuck through.
What happened to you is fairly common: a tool you think you need comes with a bunch of other programs that you don’t need or want. These other programs often hijack your computer’s browser (an easy fix), or infect it with malware (much more serious). The problem is that when you download a program and then install it, you have told your anti-virus program that it is something you want on your computer. AV is looking for drive-by installations and things sneaking in. So the badly behaved new program gets a free pass (“oh, she wants this!”).
The easiest way to keep the bad stuff off is to never do a “Typical” installation of a free software tool. Always choose custom and make sure you look at the options. Very often they have a check box, “conveniently” checked for you!, that tells the program you would like to also install a whole bunch of other things. It is not just your ad blocker software but Adobe does the same thing with its Flash products. If you don’t uncheck the box, you get Ask (a terrible terrible toolbar) or, worse, Chrome … and it is automatically set as your default browser.
Can I ask what ad blocker you downloaded? I can tell you the one I use.
Yeah, it was a combination of phone call (with me writing stuff down) followed by multiple emails (I emailed you, Trish, and my younger son at the same time – I always take a “shotgun” approach to solving problems) with Trish describing to me step by step each piece of the action. And I mean describing – telling me exactly where on the screen to look for what I needed to click on and what it would look like. The real pain is I’m not sure what ad blocker it was but it didn’t download at all – just the unwanted chunk of junk. I probably still have a few things on that computer I don’t want on there but I can’t figure out how to copy the list that comes up when I go to the Control Panel and pull up my list of installed programs to send to any of the 3 of you so I can be sure I get rid of stuff I don’t want without getting rid of something I’d better keep.
I’d appreciate knowing the ad blocker you use. It’s that issue I brought up a few months back and never followed up on. When I’m playing music or listening to an audio clip an auto-playing ad will (loudly) come on and blast over whatever I’m trying to listen to. Sometimes – last night – I’ll get almost to the end but still. I really don’t need the jolt to my nerves I get when I’m trying to relax to Pachelbel and all of the sudden there’s a very loud ad for some hamburger chain we don’t even have in NW AR! Which happened last night. sigh. Anyway, always thanks for your help and advice. (When my son was setting up my system I told him what you said about Symantec and he set me up with mcafee instead – totally agreeing with you but had been willing to have me keep what I was used to.)
I use something called Adblock Edge … it is a Firefox add-in. I was having much the same issue you were: the videos that popped up on pages and ads were killing me. After I got it put on, it has been peace and quiet; no more Flash Crashes and I can open sites like Wonkette and Washington Monthly.
The best way to show someone what is on your screen is to take a screen capture of it. Just press the PrtScn button and the system will copy an image of your screen into its memory. Then you just open MS Paint (from Accessories) and paste it in. Save the image to a file (on your Desktop is easy) and then send that file to your tech support team. :)
Another thing that I am surprised your techie son has not suggested is a free service called Join.Me. You go to that web site “join.me” and you can set up a temporary online session for someone to connect to your computer and help out. You start the meeting, send them the 9 digit code, they Join your meeting and ask for the mouse and then can wander around the computer looking for the stuff that needs to be fixed. It is similar to what the Geek Squad and computer manufacturer guys use for from-the-cloud tech support.
Good morning, meeses! Monday …
It is 43 degrees in Madison, on its way up to 67. Sunny skies are in the forecast.
The Patriot Act expired at midnight and the new surveillance bill, the USA Freedom Act, was not passed in time to bridge the gap. A compromise bill was finally agreed to but it has to go through the legislative steps in the crazy place called the Senate. Good riddance to the weirdly named Patriot Act, a bill created from fear and filled with assaults on constitutional protections. I do hope that those who say that there are other ways to keep the roving wiretap provisions are correct because the old laws on court orders were written before you could buy a phone for $10 and throw it away after one use. If a bunch of right-wing extremists are plotting to overthrow our government, it would be good to keep an eye on them. Oh, wait! We just have to watch Fox News and the Republican presidential candidates … we don’t need any wiretaps!!
Whatever comes of it, people who were “Standing with Rand” are extremely misguided. Why would you stand with a misogynistic white supremacist who wants to preserve the wealth of the wealthiest? If he is stopped-clock right about the NSA bulk data collection, that does not make him a suitable candidate for president. He ticked off the Republicans so much with this last maneuver (he has been poking the party in the eye for about a week now), I wonder if he is readying a third party run. THAT would not be a good thing.
Today is June 1st and the Supreme Court is due to start releasing rulings on the cases heard this term. Some big ones are due: King v Burwell, the marriage equality case, the Facebook threat case, the Arizona citizen redistricting case. I am going to put up a SCOTUS watch post and watch along with the people at SCOTUSblog.
See all y’alls later!!
Good morning Jan
Look forward to the SCOTUS watch post.
Can’t stand the stand with Rand crowd – who claim to be progressive.
Good Monday Morning Meese
53 and cloudy here in Saugerties – not going to get much warmer – the damp is bothering my bones.
Off to read the news and then its bill paying time (ugh)
Good morning, Meese. It’s going to rain and then rain again.
Am anxiously awaiting the news from SCOTUS. Am also anxiously waiting to see if we and others have a deal with Iran.
Have stuff to do so will be back after coffee and news.
Hope it’s a good day for all, here and everywhere.
One of the cases we are waiting for is a death penalty case involving the use of certain drugs. I did not realize how many important cases were pending; I knew marriage equality and ACA subsidies but after checking with my off-site peeps, there are a lot of cases we should be agonizing over! ;)
There’s not much we can do about what SCOTUS does until we can change the makeup of the Court. My only hope is the change of Popes. Most of the male RCs on the Court use religion as an excuse. Kennedy does not. While the previous Pope held sway he voted very predictably with the RWNJs. Now we have Francis and that may bring Kennedy back at least to center.
Good morning, Moose Pond People! 72 F. and partly cloudy now in NoVa, going up to 85 F. with thunderstorms later today.
Jan, will be checking back for the SCOTUS watch. Thanks for doing that! Portlaw, Iran suffered a 4.5 earthquake over the weekend, did you hear?
Off to Younger Son’s house now to get Miss Pink Cheeks to school, etc. Today will be Younger Son’s first day on the new job, which is 15 minutes from his house instead of 90 minutes away in Maryland. :)
A good day to all at the Pond and Beyond!
Had not heard about that earthquake. Am going to check out the news on it now.
Great news about your son’s new job! Earthquake in Iran? I guess I’m glad I put my $10 donation to ShelterBox on the automatic monthly program.
Walked before work. Not super hard – 1.3 mi. It was the ungodly early alarm that really hurt. oh — and it actually isn’t raining & won’t for the next week.
Now I’m eating breakfast so I can guzzle some tea. Have had a weir conglomeration of music in my head since church yesterday. The current sermon series is on Jesus in the movies, yesterday was Godspell. Which I don’t think I ever saw but if you were in church youth group in the ’70s, you know the songs. The preacher wore a Superman t-shirt, which started the REM song Superman. Then the pastor wondered why “blessed are those who morn” was in the Beatitudes, which also started California playing in my head because of:
I’ve seen for myself
There’s no end to grief
That’s how I know
That’s how I know
And why I need to know that there is no end to love
All I know and all I need to know is there is no end to love
So, it is very loud in my head. Must try to narrow it down to just 1 song.
I walked in today – 40 minutes so guessing about 2 miles although I’ve never clocked it – we’ve got the same reprieve on rain. Back when I lived in Austin and did Little Theater I worked Godspell (in the office doing reservation seating – I didn’t get to start doing lights and stuff until the next show). “Earth Shall Be Fair and All Her People One” has always stayed with me – but then the words (different tune) are in the Episcopal hymnal. :)
LIVE BLOG at SCOTUSblog
I’ve got it up in a tab!! Plus the Moose News Network liveblog …
A grim reminder. Today the Smithsonian will announce the find of the remnants of a slave ship that sank in 1794. What horror. Unimaginable.
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And there is more here http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/world/africa/tortuous-history-traced-in-sunken-slave-ship-found-off-south-africa.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=mini-moth®ion=top-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0
Thanks for the link
62 heading they say for 76 but I’m betting over 80 this overcast Monday in Fay., AR. Listening to Pachelbel (backed by ocean waves – a Dan Gibson Solitudes recording) that I know won’t be interrupted with some loud commercial since my work computer has ad blocker on it. :) Can only listen to music when I’m soloing but it’s a good way to start the day when the secretary’s out. Pardon me if I don’t go read any more about the found slave ship. Stuffed into a black hole with hundreds of others then dying by drowning is just about the most panic-sickening thing I can imagine and I don’t need the nightmares. And those may have been the lucky ones. I REALLY don’t need those nightmares. I have never understood “Man’s inhumanity to Man” – I accept it, it obviously happens and on a regular basis – but I don’t understand it. Hope everyone has a peaceful week. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 57 and partly cloudy in Bellingham today. I’,m enjoying fresh air from the open windows, and a moment of sunshine on the leaves of my old maple trees.
Later today I will share Dee’s “ugh” as I pay bills, and bfitz I’ll think of you while I attempt to scan 3 computers and install a new Kaspersky security system. But that will be after going to the pool and recovering from the workout!
My local news remains very quiet. The museum is planning to expand the interactive area for children, and a retiree has built a steam boat that still needs work :)
Good morning, meese! Tuesday …
It is 42 degrees in Madison on its way up to 73. Sunny skies are in the forecast. Perfect weather. If I could find a place that had this weather year round, I would move there in a heartbeat.
So the GOP clown bus has found room for one more and this one brandishes a mighty sword! From Charlie Pierce on Lindsey Graham’s saber rattling:
Well, at least this time “Obama’s failed leadership” is being harped on by a Republican candidate, instead of the DLC Democrat who got into the race on Saturday. I am not sure how any Democrat wins without the Obama coalition.
There is probably other news but it will have to wait.
See all y’all later!!
Good morning – I can’t keep up with the clown car crew- how many are running now?
I think there are 9 official and another 6 still vacuuming up money into their 527s under the radar of the FEC. Ha! Even if it were in plain view of the toothless FEC they would get away with it. We have no enforceable campaign laws in our country right now. Anytime someone tries to enforce one, the legal consortium put together by the rich guys sues to get it stopped and declared unconstitutional. Anthony Kennedy owns this with his Pollyanna view of corruption in politics that led to his ruling in Citizens United. From his ivory tower perch, and his lifetime appointment, he has no clue how dirty and nasty and corrupt electoral politics has gotten in America.
It’s hard to see any of the DLC as a Democrat, at least for me.