Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: September 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.

33 Comments

  1. Good “morning”, Motley Meese! The week begins …

    Morning low of 57 degrees in Madison WI with an expected daytime high of 79. Sunny skies are in the forecast.

    Have a great day, all y’alls!!

  2. Sunday Meese. Happy Labor Day Weekend. 58 going up to a rainy 70 here in Kingston NY.

    Puerto Rico

    Joanne Rodríguez Veve, Senator representing the Proyecto Dignidad Party in Puerto Rico, which is arch conservative, anti-abortion, trans and homo phobic. She voted against legislation to ban “conversion therapy”

  3. Veve is a bitch, there’s no question. Hasn’t she anything better to do with her time, like staying home to bake bread and grow her own vegetables?

  4. Good morning. Watching the news while my tea steeps. Velshi had a good, long segment on climate change. Later today, I’ll make “overnight” oats for the week.

  5. Good Sunday morning, Moosekind. As I stood looking out the living room window on this cool gray September day, I remembered other gray September mornings at home. (To me the house we lived in for more than 41 years will always be “home.)” In bygone days I’d go out to gather windfall apples from the tree in our front yard. Later in September I’d have to wear boots as I waded through the dew-heavy grass and the scent of windfall apples would be mixed with the scent of woodsmoke. (Cue the chorus of, “Why did we ever leave that house, bla bla bla.”)

    Anyway, this morning as I was gazing out the window I saw a little fox running about. It ran to the 10-feet-high black chain link fence that separates this property from the woods beyond, but apparently forgot the spot where it had emerged into the manicured lawn. I watched until it disappeared from view.

    If I’m not wrong—I often am—this Texas abortion law has just handed Terry McAuliffe his second victory at the polls. M’Daughter says even in Texas they’re up in arms about it, even Republican women. She reiterated her statement to me that she and her husband want to move somewhere else within two years, even though it will break their hearts to leave that house, not to mention her son, who’s working on a master’s in anthropology at UT.

    On the home front, I now have five members in the Blue Ridge Writers’ Group! We are going to use a version of the Amherst Method, which I admire very much, and will meet once a month in the Blue Ridge Clubhouse.

    Need to finish my coffee and start my day. Wishing a lovely, calm Sunday to all at the Pond.

    • I get what your daughter is thinking. I loathe moving with every fiber of my being. I lived in 17 houses by the time I graduated high school. When I came here for college, I swore I would never move again. I’ve actually looked at cost of living in New Mexico. For me, that is extreme behavior.

      • Maybe if you move to a purple state, you can help make it bluer! My daughter is considering where she will move when she graduates and Texas is NOT on her list. Even if she lived in Austin, she would be surrounded by angry people who would like to kill her if she ventured out. :(

    • I don’t know that moving will really make a difference. AR went from mostly blue (blue dog blue, but still blue) to 100% super-majority Deplorable with the 2010, 2012, 2014 elections. No matter where you go, there’s no guarantee it will stay blue. Even CA – the recall of Gov. Gray Davis (rolling blackouts & skyrocketing energy prices, essentially he got blamed for the Enron ripoff) handed CA over to the gropinator and a state legislature to match. It took well over a decade for Dems to fight their way back into majority and start cleaning up the mess. But folks should do as they think best with their own lives. And if that’s moving, then it is. (Heaven knows I’ve moved enough times.)

      • So have I, both as an Army brat and as a married woman, from Arlington to Falls Church to Fairfax to the middle of nowhere, which is Loudoun County.

        The benefit of Daughter’s moving here would be that she’d be at hand during the last 10 years of my life. She didn’t find me until she was 28, so we need more time together.

          • Actually, I don’t think any of you do. She was born when I was 18, the result of the one and only time I had sex at age 17. (He told me he was “sterile,” and like a fool I believe him.) The normal procedure was to go away and hide for six months, then relinquish the child for adoption. However, my mother wasn’t having any of the relinquishment-to strangers-part, so she arranged for her childless brother and his wife to adopt her.

            Naturally, it was supposed to be a deep, dark secret at the time. The Aunts knew and Grandmother knew, but never said anything. My daughter always wondered who her real parents were, but it wasn’t until she was about to get married that she seriously undertook a search. It all came to nothing, so she confronted my aunt and uncle and demanded the truth. They told her. (It would have been nice if they had let me know so I would have been prepared.)

            To make a long story short, she found me and we are now the best of friends. We text several times a week and before Covid, visited as often as we could. Sometimes we FaceTime.

            She was conceived at Samhain and born at Lammas, a fact that amuses me greatly. She’s not a Witch herself but she’s sympathetic. I adore her and often tell her so. I often think my enormous love for Miss Pink Cheeks is that she represented my second chance to have a little girl of my own.

      • I am not sure that Arkansas was ever a blue state – it was more a Southern state that had not yet caught up with the fact that they were supposed to be Republicans. West Virginia was that way for quite a while and finally figured it out, Kentucky has a lot of registered Democrats who are still mad at Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves but who vote for Republicans. Missouri is technically a border state and they have devolved into permanent idiocracy because the call of the stupid is too strong and those who called themselves Democrats realized that they weren’t. Some states you can give up on – others are still salvageable.

  6. It’s 68 going up to 86, the rain’s stopped but the clouds are still here. We’ll have slightly lower highs for the next week but very nicely lower lows (mostly 60s and even one in the upper 50s). Which should mean I won’t have to use the A/C. I hope. We generated 11.9 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 49.49 – not on track to beat the most productive year (2015), not even on track for 400. If we keep averaging 12/day we’ll end up in 5th place. Get a little more & reach 365, 4th place.

    Everything’s either in a holding pattern or getting worse for folks I follow/try to help. Just need one more piece to fall into place & Jill will be safe. But until it does her danger grows daily. Aji’s fam/friend circle just had 3 more emergencies they’ve helped with, pushing their own needs out as far as they can. (While it would be nice to win the lottery or something to take care of that for her, I really wish I had connections with people who like and can afford good Native jewelry.) And my friend here, and her family, are wondering what’s going to take their dad – heart failure or kidney failure – and not sure what to hope for. (Among other serious issues my friend is facing.) As with our nation, and the environment for that matter, things are bad and I can’t do any more than I’m already doing. I’m not even sure how I could fit more praying in.

    I need to figure out something to destress myself. Sleep is lousy and my digestion is almost as bad. Oh well. Still minor compared to other folks issues – even the sleep and digestion issues which are pretty much all I have right now. Anyway. A few more Sunday chores, more coffee, then off to twitter & DK. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  7. Good morning, 61 and cloudy in Bellingham. We enjoyed a rare dinner out in Fairhaven last night at a restaurant requiring proof of vaccination. The outdoor dining accommodations are comfortable and the food is wonderful but the grief they are receiving from the anti vacc crowd is dismaying. We did learn that it’s a good idea to keep a photo of the vaccine cards in our phones though. Ron forgot his, but it was a short trip back home to get it.
    Best wishes to all on this Sunday morning.

  8. Good morning, meeses! Monday …

    It is 57 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 73. Sunny skies are in the forecast. A perfect Fall day!

    A quick scan of the news shows that it has not changed much since Friday. It is nice to have a president who does not feel the need to fill every slow news day with garbage tweets and new outrages. You can see why the New York Times and the cable news networks are so anxious to manufacture controversy (“Joe Biden is still sad about the deaths of his children – what is wrong with him?”) (“The Taliban are still terrible people, why can’t Joe Biden fix that?”) (“It is Joe Biden’s fault that COVID deaths are rising in states run by #RepublicanDeathCult governors!”) – they thrived on the chaos of a completely unfit mentally imbalanced malignant narcissist and long for tRump’s return. Blast them!

    I am going to treat this as a bonus weekend day and use it to get caught up and then ahead of what will be a challenging short week that will be fragmented with appointments. I have several soft deadlines and some small projects that have been set aside and shouldn’t be delayed any longer. The soft deadlines are mine but they will quickly become hard deadlines if I procrastinate!

    See all y’all later!

    • I saw this written on a blog this morning: “Getting gravely ill from COVID is now mostly voluntary.”

      Except for children – which my guess is that many of those maskless people shown either have or occasionally come in contact with. We are truly an awful people. :(

  9. Puerto Rico

  10. Good morning. I only woke up twice last night, and I was deep asleep and dreaming when the alarm went off. I’m watching the Harry Potter movies, but I keep seeing all the plot holes. I don’t have any cooking to do, and it’s going to be 100 degrees again so I think it’s movies all day.

  11. It’s 60 heading to 90, sunny, and no additional heat index projected so low (for us) humidity. Yay! Didn’t need the A/C yesterday, won’t need it today. Double yay! And we generated a little, not much more but a little more than we have been – 13.48 KWHs. The m-t-d is 62.98 and hopefully will get over 75 by end of day.

    Jill’s still waiting on that one piece to fall into place so she can get out of this dangerous situation and to safety. Or at least remove several of the dangerous factors. My friend’s father and elder dog both passed yesterday. The dog just after midnight. She got the text from her sister (whose turn it was to be overnight with him) that he’d gone around 8 am. Everybody else is holding. I think. I hope.

    You’d think by now the Birchers/Deplorables would have figured out that fascism is bad for the economy. But they keep driving for power and trashing the economy, tell the MSM to let us in long enough to get the economy back on track, then back to pushing for a legally ChristoFascist society. But here we are.

    Anyway, cocoa-cherry-walnut muffin bread about to come out of the oven. This is the last of the cherry jam from 2 years ago, the last time I actually got cherries from my tree (late freeze wiped the crops for the last two). Then coffee & over to twitter. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  12. Good morning, 60 and sunny in Bellingham. I’ve got no plans for today, but have plenty of possibilities so I’ll see what happens. Being outside is always appealing but I finally have some momentum re donating more fabric so maybe I’ll do some of both. Or I’ll do what I did yesterday and read the next book in the Ancillary Justice series. It took me awhile to get engaged with the characters and to understand the story but the second book, Ancillary Sword, should be easier reading. It helps that the main character now has just one body. Trying to keep track of multiples of him/her was difficult.

    Best wishes to all.

  13. Good morning, meeses! Tuesday …

    It is 66 degrees in Madison with an expected daytime high of 77. Chance of thunderstorms. It looks like a couple of perfect days are on tap after the line of storms moves through.

    I am still trying to figure out what it is exactly that the Justice Department is doing to “help women” in Texas. It sounds like the Freedom of Access to Clinics Act is only for violence – how can that stop civil lawsuits against people helping women get abortions? Laurence Tribe suggested enforcing a different law, Section 242 which was passed to stop the KKK from blocking Black voters. That one makes more sense – first, why wait for violence, and second, they need a tool to stop the civil suits, not people standing on sidewalks. Maybe it will become more clear as people start getting arrested. If filing the lawsuit brings you up on criminal charges, maybe that will deter some of them – it certainly won’t stop the diehards – and those well funded. SB8 needs to be blocked completely. A woman being interviewed on one of the MSNBC shows said that if Roe v Wade is repealed, several states have laws that will kick in saying that life begins at conception. Holeey sheeet! People who say “just change the state’s governance” don’t understand how red states, thanks to the courts and Senate Democrat “traditionalists”, have locked in permanent gerrymandering. There is no fix – our majorities are useless in this fight.

    I need to take a break from House Clearing Phase II for a while. I was sorting a file cabinet while standing and the bending was tough on my back. When I realized what was happening, I rolled a chair over to sit while sorting but the “damage” had been done. I am moving a bit gingerly today and just need to give it a rest. I need to be smarter – I have a hard deadline of 9/20 for this next phase and need to pace myself!

    See all y’all later!

  14. Good morning. Back to work. At least I don’t have a stiff back from being in the office yesterday. It’ll be about 100 degrees again today, so I’ll avoid leaving my apartment. Local news showed a swimmer coming home from the Paralympics, she won silver in butterfly. Wow. Happy story to start the day.

  15. Tuesday Meese. 56 going up to 79 here in Kingston, and no rain. Finally got a chance to mow half of my lawn yesterday – it’s been so wet here, had to wait several days for grass to dry up.
    When you think wingnuts can’t get more awful they never fail

  16. Puerto Rico

  17. It’s 67 heading for 92, humidity still low enough no extra heat index expected, and sunny. Yesterday we generated 13.8 KWHs – not great but getting better – and the m-t-d is 76.78 to start the day.

    Things in the world are Deplorable. And all the deplorable things in the world can be tagged back to the Deplorable people who’ve been working towards this end for decades. Well, all along but put together an unfortunately workable plan decades back and have been implementing it over the years. Somebody on twitter commented “maybe the alarmists were right” – No Shit, Sherlock award of the century. But we’ll keep trying. Until we win or die.

    Jill had some more drama yesterday. The harassers have been freaking the dogs as well as her – which they don’t care about either – and one of them bolted yesterday afternoon. Made it down to the road (mile & a half away) and was hit by a car. They thought he was dead – Jill blaming herself of course as her abusive mother & more abusive husband trained her to – and buried him. But graves are shallow there. When the dog came out of his death-like seizure he got out and went back towards the house, hid under the truck. Jill managed to find a vet tech. (Only 2 vets in Taos. One a large-animal vet for the farmers. The other a “foo-foo” dog vet for the elite/privileged/part-year residents.) She came out, said the poor boy’s muzzle is a mass of hairline cracks, but doesn’t look like concussion or anything else except a lot of bruising. As best she could tell, no tears or internal injuries. As of last night he’s in pain but drinking and lapping liquified food. (Jill’s got a hand-crank blender.) So. On top of everything else. . .

    Fineena emailed me yesterday. I’d been meaning to email her but kept getting derailed. Nothing changed as far as her health is concerned – pain, back troubles, breathing issues – a friend has COVID and she hates it she can’t help. Heat this summer has put her power bills above her ability to pay. She’s not sure how – or if – she’s going to manage the one due next week. (& my taxes are due this month so I can’t “borrow” from that and pay it back later.)

    Everybody else is pretty much the same as yesterday. Unfortunately a lot of yesterdays. Or at least only gradually getting worse rather than all at once getting worse. Holding the Good Thoughts all around. Coffee’s ready. Now over to twitter. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  18. Good morning, 57 and sunny in Bellingham. While I watered the garden RonK made roasted corn and zucchini tacos for dinner last night, a nice end of the summer evening. I didn’t do much yesterday but I did think about the possibilities!

    Best wishes to all.

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