Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: Oct. 29th through Nov. 4th

October 28, 2017 JanF Community 86

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 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

41 Comments

  1. Good morning, 39 and partly sunny in Bellingham. The leaves on my old maple trees are filling the sky with color. but they are dropping fast so we’ll be raking piles soon. We’ll clear the sidewalks for the kids tonight.

    We’re going to share pizza and Halloween fun with the grand girls so RonK will have to buy a bag of snickers just for himself. He loves to hide them and then find them!

    I’m exhausted from tRump angst, so I send all my weary best wishes to all.

    • My trick or treating will consist of disconnecting the doorbell so the dog is not alarmed and going into the basement to hide for 2 hours!

  3. Good morning, meeses! Wednesday …

    It is 32 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 43. The forecast calls for cloudy skies, light rain then fog into the evening hours.

    I don’t do New Year’s resolutions on the new year devised by old popes but I usually take time to ponder my new year, the one that begins on November 1st – TODAY! I will not be looking back but looking forward and my goal will be to achieve some balance between 24/7 outrage at what my fellow citizens have done to our country – and our world – and curling up into a ball in a corner. The outrage is dangerously unhealthy and the withdrawal is cowardly – there are things I can do to help make our world a better place. In the blogging world, I will focus on electing any Democrat and supporting right-to-vote initiatives. Last night I saw a report that said that 1/4th of black Floridians can’t vote because of that state’s disenfranchisement laws – 1.5 million people have no say in who governs them. I am going to guess that at least half of them would not think that Donald Trump and Rick Scott care about them and their families. I can only vote once and I only have two members of Congress who care about what I say and I will make sure they get my vote and continue to hear from me.

    See all y’all later!

  4. I wonder what it would take for this guy to get “woke”? His party, the institution he gives his allegiance and his votes to, is run by white supremacists:

    Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) on Tuesday pushed back on White House chief of staff John Kelly’s comments about the Civil War and said there “was no compromise to make” about the conflict, which was fought over the legality of slavery.

    “We need to stop relitigating and referencing the Civil War as if there was some moral conundrum,” Scott told TPM in a statement.

    Kelly on Monday said that the Civil War stemmed from a “lack of an ability to compromise.”

    “It was always loyalty to state first, back in those days, and now it’s different today,” Kelly said. “And men of women of good faith on both sides made their stand, where their conscience had them make their stand.”

    “There was no compromise to make – only a choice between continuing slavery and ending it,” Scott said. “We need to move forward together, instead of letting the divisions of the past continue to force us apart.”

    There is no compromise to make, Senator Scott, only a choice between empowering white supremacists or denying them legitimacy. Your choice – history will not be kind to those who willfully ignore what is happening.

    • Even if he votes 100% for tRump and the Republicans, he will never please people like this: Georgia man arrested for sending death threats to Sen. Tim Scott

      Federal authorities have arrested a Georgia man identified as Jason Kenneth Bell, who allegedly called Scott’s Washington office nearly a dozen times the week of Oct. 23, threatening to kill him.

      According to an official filing with the U.S. District Court for the middle district of Georgia, Bell called to express his disapproval with Scott’s recent condemnation of President Donald Trump’s statements after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August. […]

      “Saying that Neo-Nazi and white people are the problem,” Bell allegedly told a staffer over the phone while employing several expletives. “I am going to kill (him).”

      That’s your party’s base, Tim!

      :::sigh:::

  5. Good gray Woden’s Day morning, Moosekind! It’s cloudy now and “they” say it will continue through the day. Currently in NoVa it’s 41 F., going up to 61 F.

    The WaPo is cheerily promoting the idea that Rethug and Trumpalike Ed Gillespie is going to win next Tuesday’s erection—oops, I’m sorry, election. Good old Dana the Milbank has chimed in with a “Dems in disarray” op-ed. I love how the WaPo story on Justin Fairfax, who’s running for (Dem) lt. guv, is described as having a “narrow” lead over his woman-hating opponent Jill (“transvaginal probe bill”) Vogel. In the case of a Rethug candidate, Fairfax’s 5-point lead over Ms. Transvaginal Probe would be described as a “substantial” lead.

    The polls are all over the place so I believe none of them. One minute Northam has a 17-point lead, the next he’s barely squeaking by Ay-yud Gillespie with 3 points. All I know is that Dearly and I will traipse to the polls at 10 next Tuesday morning and vote Democratic, as we always do. Only the threat of an imminent attack by a king cobra or black bear would keep us from voting—and even then I’d call animal control and vote later in the day.

    Other than that, it’s the usual weird life here. Out to coffee this morning, no child care this afternoon, must do a Facebook ad for this month’s website story pronto. Wishing all a good day, and prayers for those poor souls in New York. All those people who thought they were doing the right thing for their health—jogging and cycling on the bike path—and now they’re dead or injured. All because of religious fanaticism and white imperialism. Sigh.

    • This!

      In the case of a Rethug candidate, Fairfax’s 5-point lead over Ms. Transvaginal Probe would be described as a “substantial” lead.

      And they still claim that the press is biased towards Democrats. Not on this planet.

      It is wise to not trust polls ever again. I am certain that the “Hillary is 99% sure to win” stories kept people home last November who might have made more effort to vote. That is the fakest news ever.

  6. Too foggy for the Space Station this morning, waaah. My NASA app says another opportunity in about 2 weeks. So unsurprisingly sad that Trump is using what happened in NYC to hurt people from the Middle East, when the perpetrator is from Uzbekistan. The expert Rachel interviewed last night said it’s unlikely he even actually speaks Arabic, just knows that one phrase. Ever since the additional Manafort news came out, I’ve had a Talking Heads earworm (“got 3 passports, a couple of visas, they don’t even know my real name”) I have so many questions about those passports….

    • The guy – and the ones who attacked Boston are “Caucasians” in my anthropology text. Doubt news media will report it that way.

      • When I saw his photo this morning, I did not think he looked anything other than Caucasian – which may explain why the cops did not shoot him dead when he got out of the truck brandishing a toy gun.

        The countries of the former Soviet Union have their own ethnicity that goes back centuries – in Central Asia most were overrun by Genghis Khan and have a lot of Mongolian blood – but they also have many people who look Russian because Russians lived and worked there for 70 years. Many Russians stayed on after the breakup in 1991 and many intermarried.

  7. 50 this morning heading for 63 and very foggy this All Hallows Day. Not what you’d call a good start for electricity generation – the system is off. I’m hoping that it’s just the fog and it will come on in a bit rather than we had a power outage last night and the system is shut down until I can get home and reset it. (I hope I remember how to reset it!) We did get the 275 KWHs for October so that’s a good thing. I have now made my second “present” of 180 KWHs to AEP/SWEPCO – the way they’ve rigged the game in AR is that I get to carry over electricity I’ve generated for 15 months. So whatever I had still in the sock 15 months ago just went away as far as my ability to draw from the “bank” and use it myself. The stretch is from April to October of the following year. I’m not crazy about it, but it’s OK – my neighbor paid the utility company for electricity I generated but still my neighbor did use 180 KWHs of clean energy over that time period. Starting the new cycle as well as month – reaching 200 KWHs is excellent for both Nov & Dec. We shall see what we shall see.

    making the phone calls is getting difficult. Not only am I running out of anything I can say politely but with an extra person in the front office, well – I’m not supposed to be making these calls from work so.. The Evil Ones keep doing Evil. We keep trying to block them and do Good. Nothing new under the sun. I’ll do my best – which really isn’t very good – to help block the Evil and do some good. Slogging through mire is tiring and we’re all tired. Having to fight off the alligators and Burmese pythons while we’re slogging is even more tiring. But i’ve never cared for the view out the Giving Up window.

    Got work to do, got my Helping Humpday diary to edit, need to get the community comments in various diaries at DK, need to visit the Villages. (And maybe slip in a phone call or two on the evil budget, renew SCHIP, and help Puerto Rico if the office is ever empty.) Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  8. Good morning, 47 and mostly cloudy in Bellingham. Halloween was fun last night……pizza and veggies, kids and dogs in costumes, sharing (and snitching) candy. Our son’s neighborhood is full of young families so lots of babies came to the door as well. Better yet we were home by 8:30 pm.

    No pool for me today as RonK has a community college breakfast meeting and I’m still having dizzy episodes so I’m not driving. So I’ll find my endless list and decide what not to do soon!

    Best Wednesday wishes to all.

  9. Good morning, meeses! Thursday …

    It is 43 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 48. The forecast calls for cloudy with showers throughout the day.

    Looks like Janet Yellen is out as Fed chief. She had a triple whammy against her – woman, Jewish, appointed by President Obama. I hope that the Federal Reserve is one of those things that more or less runs itself using a pretty strict set of formulas because tinkering with the levers of monetary policy seems like something you want an expert to do, not a Trump hack.

    The stories you heard about the ACA Gold Bonus are true! Without the CSR, my insurance company raised premiums 78%. I expected 40% so that was a shock. When I logged in to find my premium support, I found that their lowest priced Gold plan – with lower deductibles and lower out-of-pocket (cut by 2/3rds) – became affordable ($6 more a month). The sad thing is that the marketplace application process instructs people who are under a certain income to apply for CHIP for their kids and won’t let them buy policies! So now with no CHIP and no ability to buy a marketplace policy for them – and no one to help them sort things out because the navigator budget was cut – the working poor are screwed. :(

    See all y’all later!

    • Amusing – however I think I’d rather see something with a woman getting people to fight back – running away from twitter, the news and Trump isn’t the answer.

      For an ending Trump drowning in a flood of fight back – handcuffed with his own power cord

      • Indeed! This video has a lesson to those who think that they can hide from the 10 minutes news cycle – as satisfying as it may seem, at some point we need to pay attention and choose one of those battles to engage in.

        I was reading an article this morning about the things in front of us: we still have DACA kids being deported in about 4 months, we have children covered by CHIP losing insurance right now, we have an EPA director who wants to mine uranium in the Grand Canyon, we have voting districts being redrawn that need to be closely watched – and we have elections in New Jersey and Virginia that we need to win to both send a message and preserve civil rights and women’s rights.

  11. Good Thursday morning Meese
    52 going up to 67 here in the mountains.
    Congrats to Houston for winning the WS

    Since I never look at my facebook page – I was curious about these Russian-bot ads they are talking about – this story has pics

    yikes

    • That one about voting from home was scary! Considering that a lot of the bernie babies did not understand how voting worked in their various states, it would not shock me if someone voted by Twitter. In Wisconsin, we had 17 year olds voting in the primary because they “read on Facebook” that if you were going to turn 18 by November 8th, you could vote in the primary. In some states, yes, but not here. Sanders did nothing to educate his young voters about voting and about the two-party system. I will never forgive him for his negligence.

    • p.s. I am still angry at Houston fans over their standing ovation for their first baseman who delivered a racist gesture and disparaging term to the Japanese pitcher but I am glad that their organization won. One of the architects of their turnaround is now the general manager of our baseball team!

  12. Back to sandal weather. Warm & foggy. So I know there was this baseball game yesterday & I have a lot of very happy friends, but for me yesterday was pre-order the new U2 album day. And I got 3 of the songs to listen to. And the 14th is presale code day for the next tour. I requested the day off because I’ll be slightly distracted. Going to sell some jewelry I don’t wear, to pay down my credit card balances & be sure I have enough room to buy a posh ticket. Yes I know I’m crazy. But by next May, the horrible bill from the HOA will surely be here — they’ve had trouble getting bids because literally every construction company is in Houston/Beaumont or Florida. So the same reason I had for the ticket this summer. 1st night is 5/2 in Tulsa. Tulsa. Ok. One night in Tulsa can’t be that bad. Here’s Get Out Of Your Own Way, it’s really pretty.

  13. 63 heading for 77 and the humidity is 97% – walking in from the parking lot was not exactly comfortable but I’m not entirely sure how to describe it. Walking through a cool steam bath is as close as I can come. Got 6.5 KWHs yesterday – not exactly a good day, but not a bad one considering the system didn’t even come out of sleep mode until 10 am. 200 is my target for the month but anything over 150 is good.

    The ignorance paid for by the Kochs – they started taking over the school boards in the late 1960s – is so pervasive (and the ignorant ones are so proud of it) it’s another of those things you look at and just want to give up. We won’t but until we get people like Hillary who can see the problem and have plans to deal with it actually in positions to put those plans in place we are certainly fighting an uphill battle. Between the Rs who neither know nor care that JFK and John Kennedy are the same person but will vote for anything with an R after its name and the Extreme Left who neither know nor care about the voting laws (and just throw tantrums when things aren’t the way they want them to be) there are a lot of people who want to do the right thing but haven’t a clue as to how to find out what that is, much less how to do it. Replacing propaganda with education is key – which is why the Rs have been working so long and so hard to destroy education.

    Gotta get to work. Gotta see if i can think of more places to put the community needs links. So many groups at DK don’t want to be reminded of actual individual human beings in the DK community needing help, but I need a wider outreach. I also put the Puerto Rico and CA help links out with the community needs links and that too needs a wider outreach. goddess, I’m tired. But i will persist. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  14. Good Thor’s Day morning, Meese! It’s 45 F. here in NoVa this morning under a mackerel sky, going up to a beastly 74 F. later today. Autumn, have you forgotten us?

    Exciting times prevail here at Barky Manor! Yesterday my book, Saving the World Through Sex, came out on Amazon Kindle, iBook, Nook, and Kobo. It’s a political satire, so if you want a nonstop giggle, do have a gander at it.

    This morning Two Gentlemen of Verizon (not Verona) visited us here at Barky and installed a new hub or router or whatever it’s called. We now have blazing fast Internet at 5 gigglebytes! This will make us happy and our tenant even more so. While the Gentlemen were here, they desired my help on a couple of questions, so I got up from the breakfast table to answer their questions. As soon as I was out of the room that dreadful little dog stole my toast and marmalade! He’s supposed to be on a diet and going for long walkies. No lunch for him today, even though it’s a miserable diet lunch.

    Have been out of the loop this morning so I’m off to catch up. Wishing all a good day!

  15. Good morning, 44 and partly cloudy in Bellingham. I plugged away at my neglected must do list yesterday so I have a false sense of not needing to do more. I just can’t seem to keep my focus long enough to actually finish anything!

    This article comes with a profoundly discouraging warning but it speaks to the worry that’s keeping me awake at night.

    America is facing an epistemic crisis

    In short, an increasingly large chunk of Americans believes a whole bunch of crazy things, and it is warping our politics.

    • I am in a cycle currently of “too much to do” that is keeping me from reading a lot of think-pieces about how much our country sucks right now. I did see something positive on Twitter yesterday – that I can’t find now – that we always seem to recover from setbacks. And we need to learn something from our black brothers and sisters about the long game …

  16. Good morning, meese! Friday …

    It is 36 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 45. Sunny this morning then clouds will roll in this afternoon.

    This weekend daylight savings time ends and we get our hour back! I will probably be using it to set up a new replacement computer that will arrive today. The old one, which was used primarily for testing and communications to client’s sites, finally bit the dust. I got it up long enough to pull settings off but it is clicking and whirring and probably has a failing disk. It is 15 years old so I guess I got my money’s worth but rebuilding it will blow a big hole in my schedule. Computers!

    I only had time to scan the news quickly, Yesterday the Republicans unveiled their tax cut bill and there are some awful things in there that I hope are enough to sink it.

    On a brighter note, there seems to be some consensus emerging that Senate Democrats will block the Continuing Resolution to keep the government open if there is not a DREAMer bill brought to the floor for a vote. Good. That is a cause that we should be willing to spend every penny of political capital on.

    I am seriously thinking that the Democratic Party needs a colonic. We should start by sh*tting out the berners and anyone who trashes our brand. Republicans elected Donald Trump by voting for their party’s nominee. Our response is to feed the Democrats in Disarray meme? Stop, just stop. I do not want my daughter to grow up in a country where Trumpism wins by default because the left-of-the-left did not get their ponies. Fk ponies, people are dying and the world is burning up!

    See all y’all later!

    • Sorry about the computer. It is VERY boring to restore everything!

      Wonder whether we’ll wake up earlier because the mornings will be lighter.

  17. Good Friday morning Meese

    60 rainy degrees here in Saugerties NY going up to 70.

    Continuing my Puerto Rico crusade.

    • Thank you, Denise! My friend in Puerto Rico reports that she’s been two months without electric lights. She’s raising funds so she can go to a mountain village and help the women there. They have nothing, she says. I sent a donation to a sister priestess who is organizing it from the mainland.

      And the water is contaminated…? We aren’t supposed to hate people, but I LOATHE Rethugs for ignoring PR and VI!

  18. I walked 20 minutes this morning! Around the Capitol building, where it’s well lit & no curbs or rough sidewalks. I think Monday morning, I’ll do step-ups on a curb, to get over my fear (lifting my leg for a curb or in/out of the shower was the most painful thing when my hip was hurting). The very rocking American Soul playing in my head.

    Put your hands in the air
    Hold on the sky
    Could be too late
    But we still gotta try
    There’s a moment in our life where a soul can die
    And the person in a country when you believe the lie
    The lie
    There’s a promise in the heart of every good dream
    It’s a call to action, not to fantasy
    The end of a dream, the start of what’s real
    Let it be unity
    Let it be community
    For refugees like you and me
    A country to receive us
    Will you be our sanctuary
    Refu-jesus

  19. Good morning, Moosekind! It’s fair and partly cloudy here in NoVa, 55 F. now, 75 F. later. (Fall, when ya gonna fall?)

    Got a child-tending interview this morning at 11:30. Have to spend this afternoon at a specialist miles away for an unusual root canal. Prediction: I won’t feel like cooking or eating dinner, so will foist a frozen dinner on poor old Dearly Beloved.

    Not sure whether I provided a link for my novella, available in Kindle, iBooks, Nook, and Kobo. Here’s the link for Amazon. Hope you all enjoy the adventures of Caramel Tart, El Presidente, and the Nervous Service!

    There being no race this weekend, we need to work on the garage some more. The contractor will be here before we know it. Wishing all a good day!

  20. 60 at the moment heading for 68 and humid! I’ll want a fire this evening but I’ll probably have to open the windows when I light it to keep from filling the house with smoke – the temperature difference between in and out won’t be great enough without assisting the draft (even with lighting a wad of paper actually in the chimney). Oh well, the cats will be happy – they love open windows. PV system still in night mode, I hope (as in I hope it isn’t error-fault and off). I got just a hair under 8 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 14.5 – not a bad start for a month in the dark of the year.

    Not happy with DB (or EW) but I will reserve judgement until her book is actually out. The media (probably with an assist from Russia) released the most divisive few pages of Hillary’s book before it was released and of course certain people went back to their favorite pastime of attacking Hillary. That died down once the book was actually released. It’s possible the same will happen with DB’s book. We shall see. As to EW, there are some things she is very, very good about. This isn’t one of them. And the whole bloody “oooh, we can attack Hillary some more” crap is of course giving a new online “squirrel” to people who need to be getting their butts out the door and working to win those elections next Tuesday. liddle bastids are trying to take out our flank in this really desperate war we are waging.

    Fundraising is a few angels and otherwise not much movement. Although last i heard we’re about 60% done on making the $1K match for Aji – once met the $2K has several places it needs to go, sealing the deck and other exterior wood surfaces being one of them (or payroll for the crew or…)

    Need to check in with the Villages and then get back to work. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

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