Good Saturday morning, everyone. We had rain and wind over night. The rain is supposed to leave sometime this morning but the temps will stay in the 50s or maybe the low 60s. I don't mind that. It is about time for cooler weather. Some areas are supposed to get overnight frost over the next couple of nights. I am waiting to see how soon I will have to harvest the rest of the peppers and clean out the remaining containers. I haven't done much of what I had intended this week. Instead, Mom needed to get her driver's license and car tags renewed and that took more time than usual. Not for the car but for the driver's license. Indiana is moving toward that secure ID that was passed on the federal level a couple of years ago. We can get the old style license but so many institutions are now requiring that secure id that we have decided to do that. Getting the documents together to prove who she is and where she lives was a pain. We finally got it taken care of after 3 tries and a trip one county over for a copy of one of her documents. Although I have more than a year on my current license I will change it over after the first of the new year. I would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Thanks for the compliment, Lois. The doilies did turn out nicely. I finally got off my butt a couple of weeks ago and cut down a section of the extra foam insulation board (from the time we put up my design board on the wall) to form two drying and stretching boards. I can dry two 24 inch doilies at a time now. In keeping with my resolution to do smaller pieces I did not want anything bigger than that. I still have a 2 foot by 4 foot section of board we haven't yet found a use for.

I didn't know that Budo is an author. Tell me how you like the book. I don't yet do e-books though I have been thinking about it. My niece has a Kindle and my brother (her father) is thinking about getting one. If I went to e-books I think I would go to either the Barnes & Noble Nook or to the iPad. Those would overlap more with my usual vendors and equipment. The iPad is more expensive and has more computer features than I need but then I can download the Barnes & Noble software onto my MacBook and dispense with the separate reader. Decisions, decisions.

I have been slogging through This Time Is Different by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. I say 'slogging through' because my eyes tend to glaze over now-a-days whenever I see pages of graphs and economic statistics. They write very well, thankfully. I think I can boil down their argument to a few key points. First, institutional and governmental financial crises of the past have always been, at bottom, a debt crisis. That is to say--too much debt. Second, the crisis is not related to the actual amount of debt but rather to the confidence creditors have that the debtor will continue to pay the debt. When the confidence evaporates the crisis comes on--often with breathtaking suddenness. One country, city, or bank can have much more debt on its books than another but will remain stabile while another with much less debt will go into a crisis. And no one can really predict when the confidence will disappear. Third, when the crisis appears very few will have foreseen it because 'This time is different.' This time we (whoever we is) will have taken steps after the last crisis to prevent a new one. This time we are smarter and know more about such crises. This time we are better prepared. The most dismal aspect about this study of historical financial crashes is--we don't really learn from history.