Several posts in the past I noted that I am a news junkie.  However, I also am a junkie who doesn't subscribe or otherwise buy any newspaper at all.  Mom and I stopped getting the Sunday papers (Chicago Tribune for me and Northwest Indiana Times for her) when we became unhappy with the coverage.  It wasn't worth getting out on a Sunday morning and driving to the store and forking over $4 for the two papers, and then having to throw away all that paper afterward.  This little blog from Eric Boehlert at Media Matters illustrates our disenchantment with the mainstream media whether print or broadcast.  Living within 50 miles of Chicago we, of course, got bombarded with the broadcast coverage of Jesse Jackson whispering that he wanted to emasculate Barak Obama.  We saw NO coverage of Senator McCain's comments concerning Social Security.  It seems that Senator McCain not only doesn't know much about economics; he doesn't know much about history either.  Surely such abysmal ignorance is relevant when voters judge the 'qualifications' of candidates to be President.

Going through my usual blogs this morning I noticed that Entitled To Know and AARP both carried updates concerning the votes Tuesday evening overriding President Bush's veto (of late Tuesday afternoon) of the Medicare bill eliminating the 10.6% cut in payments to physicians providing care for Medicare recipients.  The over ride votes passed, if I am reading the figures right, by larger margins that the original legislation.  It may be my imagination but it appears to me that the President and his cronys are increasingly desperate to secure as much increase to his constituents' (read the energy, finance, and insurance sectors) bottom lines as possible before he leaves office.  You know, just in case his pet successor doesn't win the election in November.  By the way, to continue the comments of the last paragraph, the veto override did not make the mainstream media. At least not yet.

Yesterday we finally experienced our second 90 degree day here.  Today and tomorrow are expected to hit at least the mid 90s.  We finally turned on our air conditioner for the today.  We decided that we will put it on about 11 each day and leave it on until between 5 or 6 in the evening.  We never have run it much.  We set the thermostat to 70  in the winter, only because the temperatures away from where ever the sensor is stays about 68-9.  Summer thermostat settings are 78.  We are always amazed by how early and how often our neighbors heat or air conditioning runs.  Each year we figure out how to refine how we use both the air and heat.  As a result our bills have remained the same or, in a couple of years, actually went down.

I had to move my tomato plants around because our little patio is like an oven.  even though most of the pots are light colored they still absorb a lot of heat and the plants looked a bit wilted.  The picture at the top are the plants as of a couple of weeks ago.  They are doing much better than the ones we planted last year.  I think the pots are still too small and next year we are going to put only two plants into a large 30 gallon tub we found.  I had to put foil on one because we converted a clear plastic container to planter and the dark soil in the container absorbs way too much heat.  This is something else we plan to refine over time.