Week-long Welcomings from Moosylvania: October 15th

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.

19 Comments

  1. Good Friday morning, Moosekind. It’s another blah day in Ashburn, 63 F. with clouds now, going up to 72 F. and rain later.

    After Dee’s stunning news, I feel funny about mentioning that the Covid jab, combined with caffeine withdrawal, have knocked me out. My arm is swollen and sore. I have done nothing but eat, read, and sleep since noon yesterday. Useless as um…well, that’s a bit too rude for a refined blog such as this, but in polite terms it would be “mammary glands on a male feral pig.”

    I just canceled my pedi appointment and can only hope to do something halfway useful before the rain begins at three o’clock.

    Wishing a good day to all at the Pond.

  2. Good morning, 54 and raining outside my window today. I hope to work in the garden this afternoon so I hope the rain will become just showers.

    Dee, I am so sorry to read cancer is part of your life now. RonK and I send you healing thoughts and will gratefully contribute to your recovery. Take care.

    Happy birthday bfitz! I’m glad you have enjoyed a nice birthday week and I hope today is relaxing and fun.

    As always my best wishes to all.

  3. Good Saturday morning, Meese! It’s 55 F. here, don’t know how much higher we’ll get. It’s a lovely day for our 56th wedding anniversary. We’re not going out as neither of us feels 100 percent, and we’re going to experience 30-mph-winds starting at 3 p.m.

    For the past two days I’ve done nothing but lie in bed and gritch to everyone within earshot, all the while aware that compared to what others are going through, especially our beloved Sister Dee, my complaints are very small beer. I haven’t ached this much since I went on that no-sugar diet a few years ago.

    Today there is a meeting of the Drama Club, so I’ll be there. They’ll enact the first scene of my play and of the other two plays.

    Dearly will celebrate our anniversary by watching THREE British football matches plus Qualifying in Formula One, so he will be very happy. I have letters to write, before and after the Drama Club meeting, so that should keep me off the streets and out of the pool halls. Tonight I’ll make a chicken pot pie for our dinner, followed by pears baked with a little butter and vanilla. Yummy!

    Talked to our darling bfitz last night and we had a good old argy-bargy. Wishing a good day to all at the Pond, especially Dee and RonK.

  4. Good morning. Watching the local news, national news is too depressing. Though the local news about the special session on school vouchers is pretty sad also. Yesterday I saw Deep Sky, an IMAX movie about the Hubble & Webb telescopes. Absolutely gorgeous. Way too short, not even an hour but I still highly recommend it. I think if I put my plants back where they belong, the construction people may finally put my porch light back and the numbers on my door.

  5. Daily Reminder from our dear friend Dee:

    GoFundMe: Covering co-pay costs for cancer treatments

    (Denise Oliver-Velez is organizing this fundraiser.)

    Hello all. I’ve been diagnosed with both lung and brain cancers, and am currently undergoing treatment – both chemo and now radiation. My doc feels like they both can be beat! Unfortunately, the co-pays for treatment have wiped out my savings -and my home is no longer insured due to needing a new roof- so I’m reaching out for help to cover both treatment costs and to put a non-leaking roof on our home. Anything you can send to help will be a blessing! If you can’t – your prayers and healing thoughts are welcome too!
    Much love to you all. Pa’lante!

    • I’m glad the GFM’s gone over and hope it keeps going a while. GFM takes a chunk out the total off the top and the govt will want its share next April. As a rule of thumb I never count more than 2/3 the total, usually more like 1/2, going to the actual goal. moar {{{HUGS}}} Healing Energy to Dee.

      • I am glad to see that the Orange Place does not have a hard ban on fund-raising, is it just a “don’t go to the well too often” thing? I saw that Dee’s diary was at the top of the Recommended List which it should be. She is a site treasure and deserves to get back something for all she has given.

        • You know, I am surprised that Markos doesn’t offer substantial help. Dee is one of the most valued DKos writers. Years ago, I worked as a contract editor for EDS. Conservative and pushy though Ross Perot was, no one could fault Perot’s care for his employees.

          One of my editing colleagues, an EDS employee, fell down the stairs at her house and broke her neck. She was unable to work for six months. EDS paid every penny of her salary, which she and her family badly needed. I also heard of Perot sending his own personal airplane to convey an employee’s sick child to a city that offered specialized treatment for children with that condition.

          There is a lot billionaires and even millionaires can do to make life better for their employees.

          • Dkos helped me by giving me a monthly fellowship – without which I don’t know what I’d do. It pays much better than many online outlets do.

        • DK doesn’t have a hard anything about fundraising. How often you can go to the well and how much you can ask for pretty much depends on the whim of the moment as far as Admin is concerned. But the closest to a rule they can point to when they want to ban somebody is no more than 1 fundraiser per month per person.

          • Markos and Will both – gave me substantial donations – as did the rest of the staff. I have participated in fund-raisers there in the past – for Aji and for Joan Mar and Bobby and for others.

  6. Good morning, meeses! Saturday …

    It is 70 degrees in Tucson with an expected daytime high of 93. Sunny skies are in the forecast. “They” promise that Fall will arrive next week – we shall see.

    Turns out that Gym Jordan, a man who has never introduced legislation that has passed in the House of Representatives, is unsuited to be Speaker even for the low bar Republican Party. The latest candidate being floated, Tom Emmer, a rabid hater from Minnesota, is despised by tRump who vows to whip votes against him. Really, the Republican Party cannot win an election on its ideas and can only win by frothing up their various bases – is it any wonder that the various frothing bases can’t come together? The white evangelicals, the Wall Street tasseled loafer crowd, the big business coalition, the white supremacists, the nazis and the duped voted to empowere the various Representatives and these are not people who know how to compromise or even want to. The Republican Party as it is currently constituted is not designed to govern, only to throw feces from the back benches. Goddess help us and the vulnerable who depend on a functioning government to survive.

    I pushed off all my eyes-forward projects to the weekend because there were too many distractions (some mine, some from externals). Time to put my nose to the grindstone.

    See all y’all later!

    • emptywheel explains this “coaliation problem” better than I did and describes how far Germany would (and would not) go to create a coalition:

      In Germany, despite growing electoral support for the far-right AfD, no other parties will include them in a coalition. Yes, adding them to a coalition could put your leader in power, but the cost of aligning you and your party with racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, hatred of the EU, and historical revisionism is much too much for the leaders of the other parties. […]

      McCarthy and others made their coalition with Jordan, Gaetz, and the far-right AfD-like folks, thinking they could blunt their harder edges and rougher policies.[…]

      What is left in the House is Democratic party with a strong plurality of votes, and two smaller parties fighting over the rest. I don’t know what you would label these two small parties, I don’t know how many votes each group wields in the House, but I know this: they are two separate parties.

    • woah

  7. It’s 57 heading for 85 and sunny at the moment. We got just over 7 KWHs hours yesterday. The m-t-d at 149 is still on track to reach 230, but just barely.

    I had a very pleasant chat with Diana last night to end a very pleasant birthday. I got cards, e-card, emails, actual mailed cards, gifts, and phone calls from folks I haven’t heard from in months or in some cases years as well as the folks I talk to daily. And the celebratory week hasn’t ended yet. My older son will be coming by this evening to cook a steak dinner for me. He’s an excellent cook. The one he did for me for Mothers Day was better than I’ve had in any restaurant and even better than the really fine charcoal-grilled steaks my friend’s 1st husband used to do. So I’m wrapping up this 8th cycle of 9s quite nicely.

    Hands are creaky as usual and will get creakier as the weather gets colder but my stuff is not even big enough to call small potatoes compared to that of other folks I know & care about. So. Off to start my boosting day. Holding the Good & Healing Thoughts for everybody. {{{Meeses}}}

  8. Good morning, 51 and foggy outside my window today. I was to tired to work in the garden yesterday but Bri will be here next week and knowing I will have help means I am not worrying about what’s not done. Nice to focus on what we will be doing. RonK is feeling much stronger now, so good to see color returning to his face. Best wishes to all.

Comments are closed.