Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Monarchs!

🌿🦋 We found two tiny Monarch caterpillars in our Pollinator Garden! 🦋🌿


     

54 comments:

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    1. In the story they call it a "mini" aircraft carrier. It is "mini" only in comparison to a supercarrier.

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    2. A friend in San Diego reported smelling the smoke 15 miles away. I hadn’t been thinking it would include “plastics and the exteriors of cabling.”
      Yipe!!

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  2. This site shows how fast COVID-19 is spreading in each state!
    https://rt.live/us/

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  3. Vermont: 1305 total cases(+4) 56 deaths(0x27days)
    Now 150 active cases Recovered 1099
    In Hospital = 2 ( 0)
    Tests 77,624 (+1043)

    We learned in today's news conference that there has been a new outbreak in the Manchester, Vermont area, due to someone having traveled out of state to a COVID hotspot and returning without quarantining. Testing is under way and it sounds like we will see a spike in cases later this week, in the 30-42 range.

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    1. I'm so frustrated because Maine and New Hampshire are doing better than before and now we're going to be the place to avoid. Sigh. Why is common sense so uncommon?

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    2. My theory is that they have never known the same level of deprivation and hardship their ancestors did. They are not used to being denied anything. My mother was a child of the Depression, I was born during WWII. I can still remember that margarine came in a plastic tube. It was white with a red dot in the middle. I was a toddler and Mom let me massage the red dot in the tube until the margarine turned yellow. In WWII everybody pitched in at home. There were shortages of things we wanted because they were needed for our soldiers. I don't think anybody under 50 has ever experienced that kind of struggle.

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    3. Oddly enough, I don't remember that as a struggle. (I was 5 when the war started.) That was just the way things were.

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    4. My mother told of having to add the color to the margarine before WWII--the butter producers got a federal prohibition on the sale of colored margarine. So that was no change.

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    5. It is slightly off-topic, but Miyoko and I from time to time remark on how strange it is that so few people are average, like us. . .

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    6. I agree with Susan. Young and to some extent middle aged people do not comprehend restraint, saving up to buy something you really want or waiting for anything. It's all instant gratification for me, me, me...NOW! No consideration for other people. No thought for the future. Just what I want when I want it.

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  4. OHIO: As of Tuesday afternoon, there have been at least 67,995 confirmed or probable cases in the state, 3,069 deaths, and 9,049 hospitalizations, according to the Ohio Department of Health.

    Now I'm off to the bookstore to pick up my two reserved copies of Mary Trump's book!

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    1. 4.5%

      I'll be interested to hear if you find the book worthwhile! Does it tell us anything we didn't already really know?

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    2. The book is worthwhile even if it serves no other purpose than to piss trump off because it was purchased. Given that Mary is a relative I expect it will have revelations that couldn't come from anyone else. I did have to take the dust cover off immediately because the sight of his face sickens me.

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    3. Oh good, so the inside scoop (couldn’t resist the pun) is that when you take off the dust jacket the photo is no longer seen? Plain cover?p

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    4. It seems to me that DT is more and more clearly losing it. May he soon be reduced to a quivering lump of primordial ooze.

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    5. Mary Trump was interviewed by George Stephanopoulos and she sounds like a real and sane person.

      George Stephanopoulos asked her, “If you’re in the Oval Office today, what would you say to him?”
      She responded, “Resign.”

      https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/message-president-donald-trump-niece-resign/story?id=71779486

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  5. Replies
    1. VERY cool about Maine!

      Daughter voted (by mail) there today.

      Burlington VT City Council voted unanimously for ranked choice voting. Now it goes to the Mayor.
      https://www.wcax.com/content/news/Burlington-City-Council-passes-ranked-choice-voting-heads-to-mayor-571754191.html

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    1. Gee, that's impressive! Do you know how many registered voters there are?

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    2. I became sufficiently motivated to look it up for myself: 343,000.

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    3. Wow, that’s more than half the population!

      So, we have aways to go, to get to all mail-in voting.

      Today my Town Clerk told me she awaits the decision from the Board of Civil Authority (possibly tomorrow) on whether in-person voting will be drive up or inside.

      I jet yer know that I am unwilling to contact the public but would be willing to help process the mail in ballots in a careful setting. She is grateful. It may be that this year the BCA will allow some extra people to help out. We’ll see. Ballots cannot begin to be counted until she has at least 100 in. So far 35 have come back of the 8000 that were sent out.

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    4. If we figure that 60% turnout is heavy for Vermont (wild guess there), that would be about 200,000. 75,000 would be nearly half-way there.

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  7. US Green Party nominates Howie Hawkins for President, Angela Walker for VP.

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  8. “The U.S. backed down from a high-profile confrontation with Harvard and MIT over visas for foreign students who take online-only classes, ending a tense standoff that could have sent thousands of students back to their home countries and left colleges scrambling to plan for the fall,” Bloomberg reports.

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    1. Good. Nice to see somebody standing up to those damned bullies and winning. From what I saw, it looked like the admin. thought they'd sneak in the change too late for any university to do anything about it.

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    2. It seems that smaller and smaller pushbacks make him give way.

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  9. I thought it felt cooler; the high is only 98F today. Now, where did I put my wool socks...

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    1. Whack jobs with knives and in some cases guns. It’s a world gone paranoid and crazy.

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    2. I have seen paranoid psychosis in methamphetamine abusers. It can vary from pathetic to frightening.

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  11. Ilhan Omar’s Primary Challenger Takes Big Money Lead [Click] I sent her a little love. Same for Rev. Warnock in GA the other day.

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  12. Bonhomme Richard fire update 5:14 PM ET today [Click]

    Overhead view [Click]

    Detailed official afternoon statement included [Click]

    Navy Times story [Click]

    Mostly the smoke is gray-brown, but for a while the smoke coming from the forward part of the ship was a horrid black.

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    Replies
    1. Click on the overhead view to see more and bigger.

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  13. Trump’s Meandering News Conference
    July 14, 2020 By Taegan Goddard

    “In theory, President Trump summoned television cameras to the heat-baked Rose Garden early Tuesday evening to announce new measures against China to punish it for its oppression of Hong Kong. But that did not last long,” the New York Times reports.

    “What followed instead was an hour of presidential stream of consciousness as Mr. Trump drifted seemingly at random from one topic to another, often in the same run-on sentence. Even for a president who rarely sticks to the script and wanders from thought to thought, it was one of the most rambling performances of his presidency.”

    “At times, it was hard to understand what he meant.”

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    1. "At times" is presumably a euphemism for "By and large."

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    2. The cheese is slipping off the cracker, as it were.

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    3. Dana Milbank in the WaPo about Trump’s cheese falling off his cracker [Click] Good God—I could not have imagined his Rose Garden riff could be THAT bad… If you can't see the original in the WaPo, go googling for:
      Dana Milbank Trump's Window is Closing

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    4. I tried that, but all links lead to WaPo. I went to Dana Milbank's Facebook page, though, and got some of it from context via Comments on the article.

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    5. Check beneath the rose shortly.

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  14. Replies
    1. To be replaced by. . . a football coach?

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    2. A football coach who got tangled up in a Ponzi scheme, at that.

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