On behalf of everybody in the Northeast, I would like to bid a not so fond farewell the month of February, 2015 – for many of us the coldest month ever. Not that things are shaping up especially great so far for the month of March. We began ours with a low of -6° here yesterday morning, and of course it snowed. Only a couple of inches, I guess, and there was more snow for the ride to work this morning (I’ll probably have to plow the driveway when I get home) but we’re supposed to reach what passes for a summer-like high of 27 this afternoon – which is double-digits below what it’s supposed to be this time of year. On the bright side, they’re currently calling for a high of 37 on Wednesday which, if it holds true, will be the first time above freezing since January 29th and the warmest it’s been around here since January 18th. And then down to 0 with a high of 18 on Thursday.
I spent most of the day Saturday (cold, but sunny) watching our herd of deer hand out in my front yard. We have several little groups that like to hang out, but a herd of 8 or so seem to have decided they like the taste of the trees in our front yard, so I sat and watched them while they watched me.
If somebody would buy me a better camera, I’d have some much better photos.
On Sunday, our little (not so little, really) troublemaker Bud managed to find a new way to escape his containment area. Basically, he went over the fence. While the snow’s gone down considerably lately, it’s still about 2 1/2 – 3 feet deep and packed nice and hard. So I had to go out and dig a trench along the fence line (I felt like I was on the front lines in WWI for a while there).
Not that it stopped the little bastard from trying to jump over.
Oh well, time to get back to work.
Early Sunday morning my internets-tivity stopped and after doing all of those on and off and reset exercises when I was trying to call my phone and ISP i discovered that the phone was also dead. When the service desk opened the estimated time of fixing was March 3. What exactly does the T&T stand for anyway, A? So unless the job gets done sooner (I am betting later) I am reduced to checking for messages on my cell and discovering where there is Wifi in V-jo. I guess today I’ll do some thrifting and arranging and unpacking and listening to NPR. Enjoy the silence, my friends.
Addendum-I spent the day doing non-computer stuff from b’fast at a place with Wifi, a trip to Beast Buy to get them to deal with the poor install of my new washer and dryer, thrifting (V-jo has great thrift shops and it is a pasttime here), visiting the nursery where I spent way too much money but I will be trying to grow blueberries and asparagus this year, and a trip to Ben
icia. Then I thought I should find a bar with Wifi which I did by the ferry and the water where we just had a great sunset. I hope I get service back tomorrow but I will make do. I have a lot of gardening to attend to if nothing else.
Gardening, Vern? Does that mean you can see the soil? I don’t expect to see any until all this melts and that will take quite a while and temps above 32. At this point, even if some melting occurs, whatever melted turns into ice and just adds to the misery.
Gail Collins: And now, Homeland Insecurity
March 2, 2015
By GAIL COLLINS
New York Times
Great news! Congress has voted to fund the Department of Homeland Security for a week.
Does that make you feel better, people? The department was due to run out of money Friday night, and the new congressional Republican majority threw itself at the challenge. And after the seventh day, they rested.
Earlier, Speaker John Boehner had attempted a far more ambitious piece of legislation that would have guaranteed the department’s employees would continue to get their paychecks for 21 more days. Those folks would have been on Easy Street until the middle of March. But the Republican right rebelled at Boehner’s audacious reach, and the three-week bill failed miserably.
Then, after a few hours of scurrying around, One Week emerged. This time, Democrats gave Boehner a hand, and the bill passed on a bipartisan vote after a debate that almost literally boiled down to the following:
“This is no way to govern the nation.”
“This has been a day of confusion.”
There was absolutely no agreement on what will happen next. We look back with nostalgia on the era when congressional leaders would get together in secret and make deals to pass big, mushy pieces of legislation that were littered with secret appropriations for unnecessary highways and a stuffed-owl museum in some swing vote’s district. We complained a lot at the time, but that was because we didn’t realize it was the golden age.
Do you think it’s a little worrisome that the powerful right flank of the House is made up of people who believe a good way to show their opposition to President Barack Obama’s liberal immigration policy is to cut off the border patrol’s paychecks? That the critical role of speaker of the House is held by a guy who doesn’t seem to be able to control his membership? Or even count votes?
“If ands and buts were candy and nuts, every day would be Christmas,” said Boehner when reporters pressed him about his plans earlier in the week.
That used to be a saying he kept for special occasions, but now it seems to be cropping up a lot. I take that to be a bad sign. As was the little kissy face Boehner made to reporters when he got another question.
If the Democrats don’t bail him out, Boehner can only afford to lose about 27 Republican votes on any issue. And he’s got a new group called the House Freedom Caucus that was organized to mobilize about 30 Republicans who feel the regular conservative caucus is too mainstream. (Once again we will express our displeasure about the way people keep messing with “freedom.” It used to be such a great word, and now when it comes up we are often forced to recall that song about how freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.)
The Freedom Caucus hated the Homeland Security bill the Senate passed, which simply continued to fund the department for the rest of the year without a side assault on the president’s immigration policy.
“It’s an effort to punt, like Republicans like to do,” said Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, who seems to be the voice for the Freedom Caucus. If we have to have a brand-new group of people dedicated to making the House of Representatives more intransigent, we can at least take consolation in the fact that its spokesman is going to be a person named Raul Labrador.
This take-no-prisoners right wing is a large part of the reason the Republicans can’t come up with their own policies on anything. It’s embarrassing. They hate Obama’s immigration initiative, but they’ve never passed an immigration bill of their own. They’ve voted to repeal Obamacare at least 56 times, but they’ve never come up with a replacement. Last term, the guy who chaired the committee that writes tax bills produced a tax reform plan, and it went absolutely nowhere.
On the same day the Republican leadership failed to find enough votes to fund Homeland Security for three weeks, it also failed to find enough votes to pass a bill rewriting No Child Left Behind, the massive 2001 education law that desperately needs updating. The Republicans chose not to compromise with the Democrats, and the right wing was angry because the bill didn’t include enough of its agenda. The House spent hours debating it, but, in the end, the leaders had to pull it off the calendar.
Before Boehner got his new, bigger majority, he did manage to get a No Child Left Behind bill through the House. Then it faced inevitable extinction in the Senate. Maybe the speaker will remember that as his glory days, when his troops were fully capable of passing a big bill that had no chance of making it into law.
Still to come: raising the debt ceiling and passing a budget. And, oh yeah, getting Homeland Security through a second week.
Pass the candy and nuts.
WTF? Enough already!
#Winter Storm #Thor continues to bring #snow & #ice to #Midwest & #Ohio; could bring up to 8″ of snow to #Northeast. pic.twitter.com/U4Z0wfxClU
Yes! It’s snowing…again. I am disgusted.
Sleet, ice then snow…today’s forecast. Next week…our temps will reach the 70’s. Great photos ^ up there, you guys!
Just to keep up our momentum to beat Mississippi as the worse educated students in the country, it looks like we will replace science class with Purity classes. YeeHAW!!!
Anyone else disgusted that Petraeus’ guilty plea is only to a misdemeanor? Do these guys just wink at each other saying, weakness for sex with a hot babe is very understandable? And Petraeus wasn’t even a freaking whistleblower, Jeezus.
So, for the first time in 32 days, we were actually above freezing for a while today. Which of course meant freezing rain which will of course lead to snow later on and we shoudl be back down to 0 tomorrow.
As if that weren’t depressing enough, now I read that Oomegang Brewery is coming out with its first IPA and Saranac is introducing “Clouded Dream” – a “cross-over Belgian White / Imperial IPA,” unfiltered and made with wheat and oats.
All while I languish in my dry, frozen hell – 47 days without a beer.
And, while I’m not exactly in the market, I’m pretty pissed off to hear that they’re charging old people (assuming you can call people over 30 “old” – I have underwear older than 30 though I have to admit that they, like me, have lost a bit of their snap) more to use Tinder.
Ageist fucks.
There is truly nothing left to live for.
It is snowing, It’s been snowing. I am sick of snow!
Sometime last night the snow ended. This morning Mr. Shepherd plowed the driveway, Mike shoveled the front walk and I shoveled a path for Lola on the deck and steps. It’s 33 where the sun shines. It will take many warm days for this to melt. The wind has distributed the snow unevenly so in its lowest spots it’s 2 feet and in others it’s 6. The deer are eating all sorts of vegetation they normally don’t like, but they are very hungry. Soon, I hope, they will find vegetation more to their taste.
I, for one, welcome our new vegetable overlords.
Why, Pat? Why not? Beats being a slave to an invisible man in the sky or to a greedy fucking telelunatic.
With all the disease and death caused by animal eaters, why isn’t ole Pat calling out those enslaved to animals?
Yesterday, the daughter of the mayor of Selma, at the time of the march, said her father was not a racist…he was a segragationist. I can’t remember her name. Sorry. But I found the comment unforgettable.
Diane Smitherman, daughter of Joe “Martin Luther Coon, er I mean, King” Smitherman.
Obviously Smitherman can not be accused of racsim. He just wanted to segregate the races because????
Because that is what his daddy did.
(Six feet of snow is a whole bunch snow, sp. Yikes! Only in the alps and Lake Tahoe one long moon ago have I witnessed such snowfall. This is in my head for some reason:
[Boy] “How was I to love him? He has never spoken to me, never smiled upon me. I do not think he ever touched me.”
[The Weir of Hermiston] “He was more afraid of death than of anything else. And he died as he thought he would, while the first snows of winter fell.”
[Boy] “He was more afraid of death than of anything else.
[The Weir of Hermiston] “And he died –“
[Boy] And he died while the first –“
[The Weir of Hermiston] “He died as he thought —
[Boy] “And he died as he thought —
[The Weir of Hermiston] “As he thought he would.”
[Boy] “As he thought he would while the first snows of winter fell.”
Imagine living in the village of Copenhagen, NY (in, appropriately enough, the Town of Denmark). They’ve had over 21 feet of snow so far this year.
Makes our 114″ look rather paltry by comparison.
I know how he felt, Okat. Today, however, it got up to 40 and melting started at the edges of the snow on plowed streets and walkways. Tonight it’s supposed to get below 32, so some of that melt will freeze. But, it was better today and there is no snow in the forecast, Perhaps there will be spring. Lincoln Kareem reports that Palemale and Octavia have begun mating so spring had better come.
We had a nesting pair of bald eagles this year and they successfully raised 2 chicks. I have not seen them. They are in the wildlife preserve that occupies 1/4 of the island. They get their pictures in the paper quite regularly.
I don’t know how you do it, PJ. We got a lot less snow than you and still the snow was really tiring. Everything required factoring in the snow and ice. A little cabin fever, too. For sure we are not moving to Vermont.
That poor old house in pj’s photo looks as though the snow is holding it up.
Speaking of birds, I sure hope these pigeons nesting above our door will hatch those eggs soon. Pigeons are prodigious poopers.
Well, we have all the infrastructure in place up here to plow the streets and clear the sidewalks and all that kinda stuff. Plus we’re more or less use to it. I have to admit, though, that as I get older, the winters get more unbearable, and this particular winter has been a difficult one both mentally and physically. I really hope it ends, soon. If I had money, I’d retire and go someplace warm – at least for the six months of winter.
But I don’t so I can’t.
Sam Simon. Another good one passes on. A real shame.
I don’t always find Stanfoo people very agreeable but now and then they haave a good one.