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?
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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 (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.
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Tuesday Meese. Yay Katie Hobbs! It’s only 25 degrees here in Kingston- brrrr, going up to 43.
Puerto Rico
The light went out again!
Sheesh! When the lies catch up to them that quickly you would think they would be embarrassed to spout them.
Good morning. Good to see Kari Lake lose yesterday, and I hope we can hold on to the House. It’s cold (by Texas standards) 38 degrees. Watching astronomy, getting ready for wfh.
I love this retort to those who were claiming that Katie Hobbs blew it for not debating Kari Lack on live TV. She knew it would be a sh*tshow and refused to be part of it.
Good Tuesday morning, Meese. Gray is the day in Ashburn. It’s 34 F. right now, going up to 44 F. later. We have been promised at least half an inch of rain. We’re 4 inches under normal rainfall at this point in the year, so all contributions gratefully received.
We’re taking Mandy for her “new patient” visit to the Good Vet in Reston in a few minutes. I do wish something could help my Dearly Beloved with his breathing.. He has to sleep on the sofa for comfort, and it’s so boring with just Mandy and me snoozing at night. Had a rotten night, BTW.
My writing day was completely derailed yesterday by an unscheduled doctor visit. Stupid old Erickson Insurance doctors don’t have email, so I have to discuss intimate matters in person. The doc has doubled my blood pressure meds. Oh, Goddess, this is too boring, let’s talk about something else. I hope we hold the House.
Wishing a good day to all at the Pond.
It’s 35 heading for 41 and overcast. No rain, just clouds. We did get snow overnight. So even though the Ozark Solar guy came yesterday afternoon and replaced the optimizer I won’t know if it works until the snow melts off the panels. Which won’t be anything like as quickly as it did the other day when we had temps slightly below freezing but bright sunshine and a stiff wind. We generated 4.2 KWHs yesterday and the m-t-d is 83.4 – not promising. OS guy says I’ve got tree sap on the panels and since he can’t find anything wrong with the other panels/optimizers he’d recommend cleaning them before anything else. Easy to say. It’s a telling point that’s not a service Ozark Solar offers.
We had an adventure last night. Nothing like Puerto Rico of course. My power went out. Just a bit before my normal bedtime. When it didn’t come back on within a few minutes, I built up the fire, got out my emergency candles, and checked over my emergency food stores in the pantry. (I’m not going to say I’d have balanced meals but I’d be able to eat relatively decently for about 3 days without opening the fridge or freezer.) But this not being Puerto Rico and SWEPCO not being LUMA Energy, they got it fixed in about an hour. Holding Good Thoughts for Puerto Rico.
Gray and overcast (and warm bed) means I was late getting up. LOL. Now off to twitter. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 29, clear and cold outside my window today. I really don’t want to sew Christmas gifts this year, but I’ve got everything I need to make a few gifts so I’m wavering. I’ll have to decide today, but my knees rebelled after trying to do some shopping errands yesterday so it’s a dilemma. So do I stay in my comfortable sewing room or do I attempt to rejoin my community and support local businesses? Time for coffee, and then I’ll try to decide. Best wishes to all.
Wednesday Meese. 32 here in Kingston and we had a few snow flurries. Going up to 47 with rain.
Let’s boost support for Sen. Warnock
I almost retweeted that clever Brian Schatz tweet when I saw it last night but I am not going to tweet anything that has TFG’s name in it related to the presidential election. I look forward to retweeting the announcement of his indictment and then the announcement of his conviction. He needs people to buzz about his candidacy, he lives off it. I won’t feed it.
I will retweet Reverend Warnock – with the ActBlue link!
Puerto Rico
Good morning, meeses! Wednesday …
It is 46 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 64. Sunny skies are in the forecast.
Sigh. From being connected to the news for midterm coverage to having to figure out how to filter Donald J. Trump out of my news feeds in 24 hours. It sounds like CNN carried TFG’s hate rally live; not unexpected as they created him in the first place and they are struggling to keep the lights on – they will ride his clicks to a profitable quarter. They will get none of mine and I will start muting people who tweet their links into my timeline. I need to get my ass in gear and get my mastodon account updated; I have been gathering handles as I come across people who I follow who have an account. It will never be Twitter, it is too confusing with multiple servers and the signup procedure, but as people I follow start getting banned for mocking Musk or pointing out his idiocy (he fired an engineer for pointing out how ignorant he is about how the platform works) and the controls deteriorate even further (how long will we be able to block?) I will need a place to get commentary. I need my news feeds and since there is no longer RSS I have to find some other way to get news in real time.
In Arizona election news, Kris Mayes holds onto a narrow lead of 711 votes this morning in the Attorney General race. I think the votes from Apache County’s tribal region have not been counted or reported yet so she has a chance to pick up a lot more. There is an automatic recount that kicks in at .05 % which I suspect we will end up triggering. Fingers crossed! It is always better to be ahead than behind when a recount kicks in – the ballot tabulating process here, despite the vilification, is pretty accurate.
I had to wait to get in touch with the hosting firm to address the 406 issue. They moved the physical servers yesterday and pretty much shut down support. I will try again later this morning.
See all y’all later!
Good morning. I think the most recent front blew in some new pollen, because I could not stop sneezing yesterday. Just exhausting. Good thing yesterday & today are wfh. I have 2 astronomy shows and all the posts about Artemis, so that’s cool. Speaking of — our unusually cool weather continues, and this weekend will be cooler and maybe precipitation.
Good morning, Moosekind, ’tis Wednesday. How quickly the week is passing! Yesterday it rained relentlessly from 11 a.m. on, including through the night. (Hail, Yemaya!) It must have stopped just before dawn, because when I took Mandy out the tables and chairs on the patio were still wet. Overhead the clear blue sky was overlaid by passing wisps of white cloud that sometimes showed, sometimes hid the waning quarter-moon. There’s a grey mist rising from the trees but now the sun is shining it away. Current temperature in Ashburn is 38 F., going up to 49 F. I’m hoping that the .28″ of rain was all the WaPo had time to record before it went to press.
Also hoping for a writing morning. I’ve a Committee meeting tomorrow. This afternoon I’ll need to get my hair done.
It turns out that Mandy is overweight. She’s lost a pound since she’s been with us, she now weighs 37, but the vet wants her to weigh 30 to 32 pounds. It also turns out I’ve been overfeeding her, but I didn’t know what her requirements were. Apparently she’s to have 1/2 cup of kibble morning and evening. Uh, OK.
Princesspat, I sympathize about not wanting to sew Christmas presents—I’m not going to bake any this year. I’m just going to order from my usual place, which does an eye-catching and delicious job of creating petits fours and packaging them. Elder Son still has not told me what we’re supposed to contribute to the Thanksgiving feast.
I’m still not sure which House seats remain in contention, nor am I sure whether Crappy Kevin is going to be the next Speaker. I did so enjoy having Nancy Pelosi in that role. How anyone can vote for Rethugs, I’ll never know.
Wishing a good day to all at the Pond.
The best projections are that the Republicans will have a three seat majority. Pretty dicey, in my opinion! All it would take is for three Rs to get convicted of a crime, resign to spend more time with their family after some unfortunate personal failure or choose to vote with Democrats on bills that are important to their constituents. The tricky part is getting a Democratic sponsored bill to the floor – it requires leaping through a lot of hoops. If Republicans choose to never bring a bill to the floor that they can’t pass – the Hastert Rule, named after a Republican pedophile – then nothing will pass. I found out that the Democratic mayor of Tucson was the one who suggested moving the Congressional District 6 line a little to the east – which moved the University of Arizona out of CD 6 allowing the #BrokenMirrorRepublican to win the district (she wanted the UofA to be in the same CD as downtown). Picking up that seat would not have tipped Congress but it shows how close everything is and how redistricting ratfked Democrats. I hope that the people in my CD who chose the Latino American MAGAt running on border security and abortion bans – or who stayed home because they did not think their vote was important – are energized and make him a one-term Congressman. At least it is only a 2 year mistake – after the terrible 2016 outcome, Democrats were energized to take back the House in 2018. With a good candidate, we can flip that seat.
That’s unfortunate, Jan.
It’s 27 heading for 42 and sunny. For which I am very grateful. Frost on the roof and solar panels but with this sunshine it’ll be gone by mid morning. We didn’t get a whole KWH yesterday and the m-t-d at 84 most certainly is not on track. I have no idea whether or not we’ll be able to catch up in the 15 production days we have left in November.
I’m heading out the door – credit union for cash and Harps for grocery shopping (hopefully the last trip to Harps for the month). Meant to be gone 20 minutes ago but. . . Anyway, I’ll head to twitter when I get back. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good morning, 32 and the fog is lifting outside my window today. Wish I could sat the same about my inner fog, but oh well! I reluctantly dug into my fabric stash yesterday and have two Christmas gifts I can make underway. If I can stay focused it and keep the sewing simple I should be ok. It’s just two round table cloths to disguise the speakers in Lisa’s family room, and a duvet cover and shams for Hans. So, time to get busy!
Best wishes to all.
Good morning. Cold spell continues, and I’ve been sneezing my head off the past couple of days. In the office, I thought about claiming I have a cold to stay home. Listening to Bono’s memoir to make up for being here. I’ve got to get to work on that second job thing.
Good morning, meeses! Thursday …
It is 45 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 64. Sunny skies are in the forecast. I saw the waning moon to the east this morning over my mountains.
More counted ballots that dropped yesterday in Arizona cut Kris Mayes’ lead to 711 in the Attorney General race. There are 3938 ballots from Maricopa County (R leaning, breaking about 55 to 45) and 4852 ballots from Pima and Apache (D leaning, breaking about 60 to 40) so it will go down to the wire. The deadline for ballot curing was yesterday at 5pm so the total number of valid ballots is now a known quantity. There will be an automatic recount triggered on the AG race but Katie Hobbs’ margin of victory over election denier Kari Lacking is large enough to avoid that. Other good news is that Proposition 308 which gave in-state tuition to Arizona’s DREAMers passed and Proposition 309 which wanted to make it more difficult to vote by mail was rejected. We also passed Proposition 211 by a 3 to 1 margin to require people trying to ratfk our elections with dark money to disclose their identities, not just their groups but the people whose money funds the groups. We will also, after many tries, add a Lt Governor to our statewide offices. He or she would run with the gubernatorial candidate and the new Lt Governor would be next in the line of succession. Right now the next in line is the Secretary of State who may not be in the same party – that can lead to control of government shifting to the party that was not elected to lead the state. When Democrat Janet Napolitano resigned to take over DHS, the heinous Jan Brewer became governor. We will have a Democratic SoS as backup but it is good to know that the line of succession will be fixed – I think the change will be for the 2026 election.
The Republicans took back the House of Representative by a narrow margin. It was clearly a win for the Republican Supreme Court which not only put their blessing on partisan redistricting and destroyed the Voting Rights Act but this year refused to look at the racial gerrymanders in two states until after the election. Courts matter and fk all the berners who sat home and let our Supreme Court become what it is.
Busy day here so back to the grindstone.
See all y’all later!
Thursday Meese. Cold here in Kingston and snow is predicted. Sigh. Not a snow fan.
Puerto Rico
Posted.
Ok, I threw together a diary, posted it here for comments. Let me know what y’all think.
First – prayers up for Bobby. Amelia got 2 DMs from him yesterday – 1st at 11 central saying he was in the hospital, his doctor sent him, with his left side numb; 2nd at 3 central saying they were moving him via ambulance to a larger hospital where they had critical care beds available. Nothing since.
It’s 27 heading for 50 and sunny. And my PV system is still borked. We don’t know whether or not the old optimizer was the problem because the system doesn’t recognize the new one. We’ll have to fix that so the system recognizes/accepts data from the new optimizer before we can tell if that fixed it. Meanwhile the installer is leaning kind of heavily on the idea that the other 12 panels aren’t producing up to par is that they’re dirty. Which, since cleaning the panels isn’t his problem, absolves him of any responsibility for it. My son’s store will be closed next week (University shut down for Thanksgiving) and he’s going to try to clean them for me. We shall see what we shall see. We generated 6.8 yesterday and the m-t-d is 91.
Yesterday was busy. Also expensive. I visited the credit union and got cash, Braums for milk, and Harps for groceries in the morning. Then my son was able to get off for a few hours and we did Tractor Supply for cat and bird stuff in the afternoon. But once my son picks up my meat from Sams Club on Sunday (what I got the cash for) I will hopefully be set (except for milk) for a month. (Of course next month I have to do supplements.)
Anyway, slow starting and all that so I’d best get over to twitter & also DK for Dee’s diary. Bright the day, Meeses. {{{HUGS}}}
Good Thursday morning, Meese. It’s 39 F. in Ashburn, sunny, cold, and windy. Girl, we will not get much higher. I don’t mind the cold but I hate the wind. We had a wild, adventurous night during which Mandy peed in various places and pooped on a pee pad. At least I can wash the pee pad. Then this morning, I lurched blearily into the kitchen to find she’d pooped near the front door. That part is not carpeted so, other than gagging on the smell, I was able to deal. I just drank two huge mugs of coffee, hoping to deal.
Looks as if I’ll miss the meeting today since Don has got an emergency meeting with his doctor. It doesn’t look good.
What else…nearly finished my second article for the quarterly which is good, because now I can concentrate on other things.
I like this time of year, with the bare grey trees and the feeling of the year coming to an end. I like the bright lights people put up to banish the winter darkness. Oh, Goddess, that reminds me, gotta call Dining Services to see whether we can use the patio for a Winter Solstice ritual.
Need to get on with my day. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond!
{{{Diana}}} Holding the Good Thoughts/sending Healing Energy for Dearly. moar {{{HUGS}}}
sending all good thoughts