Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: November 13th

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.

22 Comments

  1. Good morning, meeses! Friday …

    It is 46 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 68. Mostly sunny skies are in the forecast. I got up a little earlier than usual to see if I could catch a glimpse of the Leonids but 1) I will need to get up earlier to do that 2) I can’t just walk out on the deck in my jammies, I will need to bundle up and plan to sit for a while. I will try to do that tonight.

    Nancy Pelosi, as she told everyone she would do, will step aside and coach the next generation of Democratic House Leaders as a regular Member of Congress. I have her speech and the transcript and will post it later. I was pleased to see the accolades heaped on her – she deserved them. I am sure that the Republican Congressional attack ads will pivot seamlessly from demonizing Nancy Pelosi (blatant misogyny) to Hakeem Jeffries (blatant racism). The attack ads I saw made sure that there were enough Black people in them to scare Real ‘Muricans – from a huge Black man depicting the IRS grabbing your money, to Barack Obama lurking in the shadows, to a Black guy they kept putting in the Borders Run Amok videos who I finally figured out had a role at DHS. I think one of the most stunning things about the trump era of Republicanism is how quickly the bullhorn replaced the dog whistle – blatant racism became acceptable, and even encouraged, in political discourse.

    Well, the Twitter exodus (or Twitter backup plan, for some of us) entered a new stage last night. After Musk announced to Twitter staff that they needed to sign up for 60 hour workweeks and pledge undying fealty to him and his businesses – and telling them that otherwisethey could quit with 3 months severance pay – 75% of them chose to quit. People who seemed to know things said that many of those who quit were senior engineers and that it is only a matter of time before the site goes dark. My timeline was filled with people saying goodbye to each other and bemoaning how the richest man in the world could buy a communications platform used by millions of people around the world to connect to promote democracy and simply shut it down. His $44 billion should be looked at as an in-kind contribution to authoritarians worldwide. In any event, I harvested a bunch of new mastodon account handles and will update my follows there. I had already updated a bunch yesterday morning.

    See all y’all later!

  2. Yup.

    The biggest loss will be that if the site shuts down, these comments – and many posts – will simply be blank spaces. I remember when Photobucket shut down their free embeds, how ugly the Internet looked with messages from them in the place of cats and dogs and wonderful photography. We will lose a big chuck of our political history unless someone archives the tweets.

  3. Good morning. I wrote a diary yesterday. Got lots of good suggestions. I forgot today is Friday — was so convinced it’s Saturday I was seriously confused when my alarm went off. Still have terrible allergies — but at least I know now it’s cedar. They found 7 whole grains/cubic meter. That is enough to make me think I’m dying.

  4. Friday Meese. Stayed up way too late last evening dealing with trolling attacks on Rep.Hakeem Jeffries uplift to Democratic leadership by Speaker Pelosi. The fauxgressive group over at Orange are spewing – stuff is on twitter too.
    Me – I’m elated.

    Have made an account at Mastodon. Now to figger it out.

    Puerto Rico

    Puerto Rico

    • You knew that the haters would hate that a Black man was going to be Democratic leader and that the left-of-the-left would be livid that some berner who is totally untethered from reality would not be put in charge of an ideologically diverse caucus. You can’t win anything as a #BernieOrBust person. The next two years are going to be tricky to navigate to and we need to make the case that we should be returned to power – we don’t need leadership to be tweeting out slogans that will make their way into Republican Congressional ads in 2024. Defund The Police was instrumental in sinking the Democrat in AZ06.

      Thanks for posting your mastodon handle! I am following you now. I spent a bunch of time this morning going through my Follows to find people who had mastodon handles in their profiles. I am about half way through. I am getting an idea how it works and will post something about it, maybe over the weekend. It is not seamless at all and I hope some clever coders write some tools to make it easier for people to build their Follow lists.

      • Thank you Jan – I hate learning new software/online/tech stuff – it helps when people explain to non-tech folks like me :)

      • Really appreciate that Jan. Technically speaking I mostly don’t know what I’m doing any and as to new stuff. . . but if/when twitter goes down I want to find folks. And be able to interact with them.

  5. Good Friday morning, Meese. It’s 38 F. and sunny in Ashburn, going up to 46 F. I’m drinking coffee and feeling the need to get washed and brushed.

    But first, a poem:

    ‘T’was the night before Friday and all through the flat
    Miss Mandy had pooped at the drop of a hat
    The lady got up, as grim as a hearse
    And cleaned up the mess with many a curse.

    Yeah, at 4:22 this morning, a smelly surprise! Dearly went to the doctor AGAIN yesterday, has to take more meds. and have both shins wrapped. He looks like a racehorse, the poor darling.

    With no wind, we may get in a walk today. I finished the dam’ article. It’s about a very unappealing subject, which is death. If the Powers That Be don’t want it, perhaps Jan will let me post it here. I’ll have to take out all references to the Home for the Aged, of course. Anyway, I’m only waiting for permission to quote and to use a photo, and then I’m DONE! I can start cleaning up the mess around here.

    I’ll miss Twitter, it’s been fun. Somehow the Virginia GOP got into my feed. I should block them. Watched Nancy’s farewell speech yesterday and cried. I remarked on Twitter that only a woman could appreciate what it meant, how it felt, to have a woman speaker after all those bloody men!

    Wishing a good day to all at the Pond.

  6. It’s 28 heading for 35, overcast, snow on the roof & solar panels (not on the streets, thank heavens) and I’m running “behind my time” since I basically only slept from 11-1 and then 6-8. The old “just as I was about to give up and get up, I fell asleep” routine. Yesterday we generated 6.1 KWHs and the m-t-d is at 97 – and certainly isn’t going to do any catching up today.

    Bobby’s home from the hospital is all I can tell you. He said he’s “fine” and has food in the house.

    I guess I’m going to have to figure out how to set up a Mastodon account. And I’m not sure what else. Anybody know if Jack is hiring the twitter engineers to run his new platform? If so, as much as Jack himself was a problem, maybe migrating there would be good. I don’t know. Whatever happens I probably won’t be boosting anybody’s stuff any longer. sigh. But while I can, I will. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

    • The best solution would for the media to create a consortium to purchase Twitter servers and hire their engineers and continue the platform as a feed for journalists and media and government – and people like us – to continue as we were. They will lose money when no one is pushed to their web sites for clicks and views.

  7. Good morning, 32 and partly sunny outside my window today. Between watching Nancy Pelosi’s speech and digging into my sewing projects I forgot to check in yesterday. I’ll be back in my sewing room today and I think all the problems with my so called easy projects are solved. I didn’t have quite enough paisley fabric for the duvet cover so some creative cutting had to happen with the denim I’m using for the back. I’ve added a fold over denim border at the top, hoping it will look like I intended to do so. If my legs cooperate I could finish it today.

    Best wishes to all.

  8. Saturday Meese. 27 degrees here in Kingston, going up to 39 and thankfully we didn’t get the snow that farther upstate NY did!

    Trying to get the hang of the Mastodon thing. Sigh.

    Puerto Rico

    Puerto Rico

    Cartoon commentary on funding for Jenniffer from Jones Act supporting US shipping industry

    • There is a lot going on in Puerto Rico! I suspect it got little or no attention during the election season and now with the air that tRump is sucking out of the room. :(

  9. Good morning, meeses! Saturday …

    It is 43 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 66. Sunny skies are in the forecast. I stayed up until after 11pm to see if I could spot the Leonids. I had realized that the “problem” with the moon being too bright could be avoided if I looked into the night sky before moonrise at 2:32am. Duh! In any event, I did not see the meteor shower but the stars were very bright although there was more light pollution than I would have liked. We have a certified Dark Sky state park within about a 45 minute ride and I think I will drive out there in the daylight and see how easy it is to set up a place to sit and star gaze.

    In Arizona, the attorney general race is still too close to call. Kris Mayes is up by 570 votes after Pima County (blue) finished up and a batch of Maricopa County (reddish) votes landed. It was a surprisingly pro-Mayes batch – the trump-endorsed #BrokenMirrorRepublican running for AG lost the batch 54 to did not net any votes as he had during previous batches. Maricopa still has 5749 total ballots that may drop (some are provisional and may be rejected) but that the last batch was 54-46 Mayes means that there is hope. Apache County (solid blue) still has about 312 votes left to count. The bat guano insane Cochise County is fighting over certification and risking that their ballots will not be counted by the canvass deadline of November 28th. I would laugh my ass off if the country “leadership” disenfranchised their voters because a random guy who once knew another random guy from CyberNinjas who told them that their election machines had been hacked. They are an R+80 district – it must be sad to be a Democrat there.

    Merrick Garland chose to cement the narrative that Attorneys General cannot be trusted to make decisions without politics being involved. Sigh. Granted, the DOJ had been trashed during George W. Bush’s reign of error, cleaned up by Barack Obama and then completely destroyed during TFG’s presidency. It was going to take more than putting the right people in charge to fix things but I find it sad that he felt he had to choose to undermine his own authority to placate the chattering classes. Jack Smith looks like a sturdy fellow, has a strong resume, and knows how to deal with international criminals. Fingers crossed that he will be the one to finally bring to justice a man who has evaded conviction for his crimes over his entire adult life and came within a few feet of destroying our democracy.

    I got nearly nothing done that I needed to this past week – it is good that it is a quiet time of the work month. I decided that I am not going to stress out and will kick everything (except some accounting projects) done the road to the Fourth Thursday in November long holiday weekend. I am hoping that I can make some progress to get ahead of December projects so that I have a good working list of end of year hard deadlines.

    See all y’all later!

  10. Good morning. It’s 40 degrees & expected to stay there all day. Today: groceries, and cooking some stuff for next week. I got risotto mix, will have mushroom risotto for Thanksgiving. I finally set up a Mastadon account, though I still hope the laid off Twitter people will make a 2.0.

  11. Good Saturday morning, Meese. Which day is this? What planet is this? It’s 35 F. and sunny in Ashboredom, going for a high of 44 F.

    Have y’all seen a photo of Jack Smith? He even LOOKS silent but deadly, like a King Cobra. May he succeed in his undertaking. Understand that he’s flying home from the Hague as we speak. Dum-de-dum-dum! (Theme song from “Dragnet.”) Remember, it was Merrick Garland who prosecuted the Oklahoma City bombers. Where is Timothy McVeigh now? Deader than a post.

    The thought of losing all the people I care about on Tweeter is saddening. I love reading my feed at breakfast and lunch. Twitter is where I find out things, as do we all.

    This morning we were awakened by a “pip pip pip” noise that went on for 15 minutes, which was accompanied by a light flashing outside. This was at 4 effing 20 a.m. The poor dog was in hysterics. I sat in a chair with her in my lap to comfort her. It was only our building, BTW. Enraged lights were on in all the windows, I noticed when I took Mandy out at 4:30. Great Mother, what does a person have to do to get some sleep around here?

    Needless to say we are dead, despite lots of hot, delicious coffee and toasted English muffins with butter. Mandy pooped again in the early hours, but this time on a pee pad, so that was something.

    Have errands to run this morning while I’m still coherent. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond and hope that you are nowhere near the 66 inches of snow afflicting Buffalo!

  12. It’s hard to get out of a warm bed. Cats, backache, and bathroom finally forced me out. LOL. It’s 28 heading for 44 and sunny at the moment. Yesterday we generated 4.2 KWHs and the m-t-d is a hair under 102. Next week my son plans to scrub the tree sap off the solar panels. (Would you believe next Wednesday’s high is 60?) Then we shall see what we shall see.

    While twitter’s still there, I’ll keep doing my boosting. And hoping a miracle will occur and it will continue to be there. People eat because twitter is there. Whether it’s fundraisers or sales generation for small businesses, there is no other platform that gives folks that range. So. Off to twitter. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}

  13. Good morning, 27 and clear skies outside my window today. I was distracted with tRump angst yesterday so I made slow progress on my sewing projects. Not having enough of the print fabric has ripple effects so after making yet another stupid mistake I fixed it and quit. I think I have the fix pinned and ready to sew today, but I’ll see soon.

    RonK got the lights on the porch tree yesterday so today I hope to do the seasonal winter arrangements for both porches. I don’t have enough greens cut yet, but if my neighbor agrees I can cut a few branches from his big fir tree and then I will. One area at a time seems to be all I can manage this year. Best wishes to all.

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