Good Morning.  We did get sun yesterday but it was too cold especially with the wind that came up in the afternoon to do much outside.  I did get the tomatoes transplanted into larger containers.  No--not the ones outside.  It is still way too early for that and I haven't got the plastic yet to make the cold frames.  That will come later today.  I lost three plants.  Two were simply too weak to transplant and I broke one as I transplanted it.  I still have about a dozen.  I am trying two new varieties this year.  Both are from Burpee: a 49 day tomato they call the 4th of July and a very meaty variety named Fresh Salsa which is a mid season tomato.  My third variety is the Brandy Boy late season beefsteak tomato which produced well for us last year even though it became severely pot bound late in the season.

As I passed through MSNBC's home page going to my e-mail I found this article.  I thought it interesting for several reasons.  First, on the side bar of the second page they had video (which I did not view) of a multi-car pile up in California a couple of weeks ago--caused by a dust storm.  Second, according to the story, the Colorado high country has had 11 severe dust storms this year alone.  The highest number since the researchers cited have been counting.  Third, where the hell have the mainstream media stories been?  If that crash in California had been due to a snow storm it would have been all over the media.  Instead, we get the latest blow-by-blow description of the latest results from Dancing with the Stars.  I have heard that dust storms are increasingly frequent and severe in Africa and northern China.  In fact, wind blown dust was a major component of the pollution that so concerned the Olympic organizers and athletes prior to the Beijing Games.  But what I have heard comes not from news media but environmental channels like the Discovery Channel.  I wonder if we are in for another era of Black Blizzard which, by the way, is the title for a very interesting treatment of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s aired by the History Channel.