Hello, again. My goodness, how this week and this month have flown. It seems like we just got finished with Christmas and New Years and now we are looking at Labor Day. The weather people have confirmed my suspicions--this is officially the coldest summer since 1942. Why do they specify 1942, you ask? That is when they moved the official weather station away from the lake front. The temperatures between the inland areas and the lake side areas can be 20 degrees or more. The gardening segment also confirmed my suspicions that the low temps have greatly delayed the tomatoes. Nothing has grown as well as I expected. I am just now getting ripe tomatoes and peppers. One pepper--on the MexiBelle. But the Chocolate Beauty is getting ready to flower and the Gypsy has a few peppers developing. Unfortunately the Poblano will produce only a few peppers. We will have to watch our farmer's markets for them and buy when they come in. I think we are harvesting about half of what we should have--if the weather had cooperated.

I found this little article in my google alerts. It is nothing really new. Senator Diane Feinstein of California has written to the Secretary of Agriculture asking for help in re-filling the state's food banks depleted by the increased demand (thanks to the economy) and the drought. What was interesting, on reflection, were my thoughts on it. Republicans, you see, are claiming that the water problems are entirely man-made. If certain people weren't so concerned about that damned inconsequential little smelt that they reduced water usage to maintain its' habitat, they would have no problem at all. I find it interesting how these guys parse their problems. Climate change cannot be caused by man because how could insignificant little us affect such a big atmosphere? But water problems are entirely our fault because we misplaced our priorities--all for a damned fish. The basic premise underlying both of these positions is the furtherance of man's rapacious, unsustainable, immediate and greedy exploitation of our world. I wonder how far up the food chain we would have to follow the effects of allowing the smelt to die out before we would discover a human activity that would be adversely affected? But these fellows cannot go beyond the smelt.