Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: May 19th through May 25th

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 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.

 

Page One of Comments is HERE!
 
Page Two of Comments is HERE!
 

 

22 Comments

  1. Good Freya’s Day, Moosekind! It’s a beautiful day in NoVa but much too windy for my taste. It’s already 71 F. at 7:20 a.m., and we’re expecting 80 F. later. No outdoor walks for me, hating wind the way I do.

    We took the dog with us when we went on errands yesterday, as we knew we’d be gone for a while and he hates being left alone. At Target we bought seat covers for the bucket seats in the front. I’m determined to keep this new car nice, dog or no dog.

    Feeling overwhelmed by everything right now: politics, marketing the book, catching up on article writing, and so on. At some point we have to visit Goodwill (I refuse to give to Salvation Army after learning about their attitude toward the GLBTIA community) and other places in the interest of cleaning out our closet.

    Next week, I vow and swear I’ll get back to exercising. I don’t think I’ve eaten meat at all this week and I’m really enjoying that. Too bad the sweets-abstaining gene hasn’t kicked in yet!

    Here’s hoping everyone will have as nice a day as possible.

  2. Another 77 degree morning, and with the south wind, there’s a heat index even before the sun is up, it feels like 80. Going to an Iftar dinner that my church is hosting tonight — the people from the mosque are bringing the food (seems wrong that the fasting people are doing the food, doesn’t it?) Anyway. Hoping today is slow. One of my twitter friends is seeing Snow Patrol tomorrow, so I’m listening to this from when they were here: Just Say Yes.

    • Thanks, Sis. That’s the most moving post I’ve read for some time!

      New Pioneer rocks. Together we are going to elect Kamala Harris president!

  3. It was 70 at dawn with 100% humidity. sigh. Heading for mid 80s – which will be find with me if the humidity will ratchet down. A lot. Yesterday we got 19.75 KWHs and the m-t-d is 368.8 – depending on how much sun these last 8 production days we can still make 500 although I’m not sure about the 516 we need to beat the current highest May. I had cherries for dessert last night! Not all of them were fully ripe but they were ripe enough to still taste good. I’m afraid some 2/3s of the fruit is spoiled this year – so much rain the fungus is going gangbusters – but that tree is very productive when it produces at all. Until the birds clear the tree I’ll definitely have enough for desserts and maybe, perhaps, if we’re lucky, enough for a batch of jam. Need to get the ladder out back and do some serious picking tomorrow or Sunday.

    Evil Ones being evil. Dems holding line. So we work every election at every level to election enough Dems to push that line back so far the Deplorables go back under their rocks. I do wish folks in general – & Kamala in particular – would get off the geedee Medicare for All crap. I contributed a little cash & a bunch of signal boosting on a fundraiser to get the copay for some life-saving surgery for a woman who’s on Medicare. Medicare as it stands will be wonderful for upper-middle class males and post-menopause females (who can also afford a separate policy for dental & vision care and their meds) – and will leave everybody else in the grease. Never mind your minimum wage worker. Folks on $15/hour still won’t be able to afford surgeries, expensive treatment, or drugs because they won’t be able to come up with the co-pays. But before we can make any progress, we gotta elect enough Dems.

    I’m waiting for the roofer to come by with a handyman he recommends. The roofer will show him the roof work that needs to be done and then I’ll talk to him about a few other things – and get an estimate. The roof work and the carport support need to be done. The rest it would be nice. The local Dem Party volunteer coordinator will be here around 11 with a stack of event sign-in sheets. It’ll be good to be useful again. Got a cat on my lap but when he gets off – coffee! Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  4. Good morning meese from Oxford, MS. It’s 77 going up to 90 and is probably going to be very humid. Sleeping in a bit and will opt to skip the UM Blues Archive/Art Museum tours in favor of the Burns-Belfry museum which opens at 12.

    • I love smaller, local museums; the collections displayed may not be the type that scream HISTORY! at you, but they do whisper “real people lived this.” And while I may not be a huge John Grisham reader, I do appreciate his role in keeping Burns-Belfry out of the hands of developers. Good on him.

  5. Good morning, Meesefolk; 54 when I got up with a high of 68 today. The day started out sunny, but now we’re at hazy, with cloudy and rainy coming sooner rather than later. Tomorrow is supposed to be 81, but there’s also an 80% chance of rain so I won’t be spending much time outside. A friend of mine just opened his second antique store and is having a huge [minimum] 50% off sale this weekend. I’m tempted to go tomorrow, but it’s a three hour drive, and my funds are supposed to be for a new washing machine and lawnmower. I’m not sure it’s worth the drive if I’m not going to buy anything, but I also want to be supportive of my friend. I’ll probably wait to see just how persistent the rain is before I decide.

    I see some of my favorite tweeters focusing on the pros and cons of impeachment, and as a result, I’m spending less time on twitter. If it’s not about MI politics, keeping the House or winning the Senate, I have little interest right now; even the presidential candidates are a lower priority for me. Once the field starts thinning, I might start paying more attention, but for now, I’m living by the old mantra, “All politics are local.”

    Good day to and for all!

  6. Good morning, 57 and cloudy in Bellingham. I have a few plants to spread around the garden this morning, and this afternoon we’re going to see Amazing Grace. The concert was filmed in 1972 but due to multiple complications it’s taken years to be finished and released.

    Best wishes to all on this cloudy day.

  7. Saturday Meese.

    56 going up to 74 here in NYS.

    Ugh.

    • Rep. Chip Roy was just channelling House Republican leadership. I hope people don’t fall for this “lone congressman” bull – he is Mark Meadows’ and Jim Jordan’s soulmate, racist and ignorant and eager to destroy good government programs that will literally save lives.

  8. Good morning, meeses! Saturday …

    It is 70 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 81. Sunny skies are in the forecast. I will be working today and can’t work when sweat is dripping onto my keyboard so I sense air conditioning in my future.

    The Republican House nihilists blowing up the disaster relief plan was one of those “shocked not shocked” moments. When a process requires a buy-in to doing the right thing as quickly as possible, you can count on Republicans to kill it. And don’t believe for a minute that the Congressman from Texas did not have the permission from House Republican leadership – this is what the Freedumb Cacas wanted, to buy time to convince Trump to veto the bill. The House is off for 10 days for district work time and the vulgar talking yam is out of the country so people who need help now won’t get it.

    I hope that representatives listen – really listen – to constituents about impeachment. It is very frustrating, as DoReMI pointed out, to hear so many people who I used to respect calling Nancy Pelosi out of touch and House Democrats cowardly. These are the same people who wrote blog posts screaming at President Obama while he was working on deals and negotiating with Congress to craft legislation only to have to eat their words when the things they were hearing about the deal were not true. Except they didn’t eat their words, they pretended they never spoke them – because they are idiots! I have no patience for them. In my opinion, right now Nancy Pelosi and the committee chairs are working at the right pace, building the case, gathering documents and arranging testimony. We are not Republicans, impeaching Democratic presidents for being Democrats and Nancy Pelosi knows that the impeachment weapon should not be used recklessly. Yes, I know, Donald Trump is a terrible person but terrible people have been presidents in the past – we should have a higher standard: real crimes like obstruction of justice and abuse of power not lying about sex in a deposition in a civil suit.

    The Democratic Party Weekly Address is by Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan talking about the “graveyard of dead bills” overseen by Proud to Be Grim Reaper Mitch McConnell. Except I can’t share it because for whatever reason Senate Democrats moved their videos to Facebook, something I figured out a couple of weeks ago. I wish our electeds would realize that some people can’t – and some people won’t – use Facebook and that is not the medium to use to reach people, there was nothing wrong with YouTube. Add to that the fact that Facebook is poised to ratfk another election as evidenced by their treatment of the doctored Pelosi video. We need to be smarter about not enabling media outlets that don’t respect democracy and the truth.

    See all y’all later!

  9. Well, Meese, after weeks of not having any trouble at all, I got the Grim Reaper message this morning when I tried to log in here! Blast. I’ll see whether this goes through.

    It was gray, “lour’ing” clouds at 5:30 this morning when I tottered out to the courtyard with Monty, but now the clouds moving slowly across the blue are white. We may or may not get thunderstorms today. We really should uncover the porch furniture but it’s such a bummer to the covers on again when it rains that I just don’t feel up to it. The current temp. in NoVa is 68 F., going up to 82 F.

    I promised to make a blueberry cake for the Memorial Day barbecue at Elder Son’s house. After months of not baking, I’m out of everything: all-purpose flour, white sugar, and so on. I wish I knew whether gluten-free flour can be substituted for the all-purpose variety: DIL does not eat anything containing gluten.

    Nothing to say re politics, I’m too depressed. It’s funny, I was a charter subscriber to Ms. magazine and still subscribe every year, but rarely read it. It’s depressing and I’m already depressed, so I don’t want more of it, thanks.

    Wishing everyone a good day at the Pond and I hope this message goes through. I hate hackers!

    • {{{Diana}}} – there are several brands of GF flour that can be substituted for all-purpose white flour. See if you can find Bob’s Red Mill 1-to-1 all-purpose GF flour. It’s blended to substitute for white flour in any quickbread recipe. Have fun with the family. {{{HUGS}}}

    • Tomorrow morning I will run a cache refresh on the web site; that seems to help – or possibly it working better after that is a coincidence! I also notice that WordPress is getting more persistent about updates so I will see what they are going on about. If the change looks benign, I will apply it.

  10. Good morning from Oxford, MS, where it’s currently 69 degrees with 94% humidity and a high of 90. Fortunately I’m going to be indoors most of the day ;)

    Drawing for the order of play will take place at 8 am for the junior division and 8:15 am for the regular division, so I need to get over to the contest venue soon-ish. Fortunately the regular division starts at 1 pm so I don’t have to worry about getting into my costume before going over. The junior division starts at 9 this year; previously everyone started at 9 so there was a chance of going first (which happened to me one year).

    • Best of luck, basket! Let us know how it goes, okay?

      Don’t envy that humidity!

      I can’t “fierce” your comments nor anyone else’s while in the grip of hackers, sorry.

  11. The Iftar dinner last night was nice. Good food — and they sent me home with leftovers. This late in the month, the less groceries I need to buy the better. Don’t have to cook for next week’s 4 day week, so all I will have to buy is fruit & cheese. Watching the MSNBC weekend morning show. There is a free course on reducing gun violence from Johns Hopkins. When I’m more awake, I’ll look more closely at it. Listening to The Miracle

    We got language so we can’t communicate
    Religion so I can love and hate
    Music so I can exaggerate my pain, and give it a name

  12. It’s 67 with 100% humidity going up to mid 80s again. We got a surprise thunderstorm at 4 am – I got up and shut the windows. Nary a cat under my feet while I was doing it. Thunder can be useful sometimes. LOL. I managed to go back to sleep for almost 2 hours before the cats started the “Feed Me” chorus. Yesterday we crossed the “20 MWHs generated” for the life of the system which is a W00T! milestone. The daily was 22 KWHs and the m-t-d is 391 so if it stays as sunny as it is now we should reach 400 sometime just after noon. We are still on track for 500 by the end of the month.

    I’m beginning to think the folks screaming for impeachment and dissing Nancy Pelosi don’t really care about getting rid of twitler – they only care that they can say “not my fault, it was the evil Rs” – which says something not particularly nice about them. And damned privileged. Sorry. You give (or even sell) the rope to a lynch mob, you’re at fault. You give twitler & the Rs their acquittal, you’re at fault. People will die in both instances. I haven’t talked to a former friend in over two years because he couldn’t or wouldn’t get the point that voting for Stein wasn’t “keeping his hands clean” it was giving a mass murderer an armory of assault weapons. I’ve got a feeling there’s gonna be some blocking going on before this is over. There already is of course but I mean of folks I’d considered friends. sigh.

    I wish I’d been able to thin the fruit on my cherry tree back when it was first forming. I’d have a lot more healthy fruit it I had. There’s a reason all the pictures show 2 or maybe 3 cherries to a bunch – the other 5 were pruned off early on. The fungus spreads much faster by touch and with bunches of 6 to 8, well, they’re all touching. But I’m still getting enough for evening dessert and there’s a lot of fruit left to ripen. My friend thinks we’ve got almost enough for a batch of jam. For jam it doesn’t have to be perfect – a hail ding, a bird nip, or a tiny spot of fungus that hasn’t started to spread – none of that matters when you bung it all into the kettle to cook then sieve. So. When the dew’s off the grass I’ll go pick some more. LOL. But coffee and the #Khive diary first. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  13. Good morning, 55 and cloudy in Bellingham. I’m listening to Aretha sing Precious Memories and thinking about the movie. I loved watching her, the choir, and the community make the music. The Pickford Film Center is small and intimate, a perfect venue for experiencing Amazing Grace.

    I need to keep my leg up this morning, but lucky me……I’m comfortable and Aretha is singing :)

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