Good morning to everyone out there. I agree, Kay. The sooner all this snow melts the better and I have my fingers crossed that we don't get a spring blizzard. You are so right--they have happened all too often in my lifetime. We often talk about moving somewhere else where we wouldn't have to worry about snow and cold. But all the areas we think of have their own drawbacks--like hurricane season down south or tornado season southwest of us. We figure we will take the devil we know best and make do.

It was a productive weekend on the non-blogging front. I finished the last two of the great-grandmother's jacket figures. I will post pictures once they are washed and pressed. I started a little cross-stitch table topper that has languished in the not-yet-started bin for the last decade. I don't know anymore which of us bought it originally but it needs to get done. I transplanted my lavender, sage, and one of the basil. I don't know if the lavender and basil will make it to the time I can put it into the gardens. We'll see. Later this week I need to transplant the other basils and the stevia which are doing well but do need larger pots. I couldn't do these with the others because the potting soil was frozen at the bottom of the bag. It should have thawed out by now. And I have four ground cherry seeds started. Those are about the smallest seeds I have ever seen--maybe a third the size of a tomato. I need to review my plans and see how many of each plant I want to start and when. I have often said over this winter that we have been hibernating--usually when we had bad weather that required a change in our normal shopping pattern. But I wonder if I haven't been hibernating in another sense as well--I got very little needlework done over the winter. Now that seems to be picking up.

Your comment, Kay, on whether we used up all our outrage in the 60s struck a chord because I have read it more frequently lately. A number of bloggers who remember and may have participated in the demonstrations then are wondering about the lack of vigorous protests now. I don't know if anyone has a good answer. But then, as I look at the news, I can't tell anymore when protests are real and when they have been manufactured. Reporters looking at the so-called Tea Party Movement found that a number of the associated Tea Party organizations are shells and have no more than a name only presence. A significant part of the opposition to government policies seem to come from the 'astroturf' fringe rather than the true grassroots. How much of the protest energy has been co-opted?

Taking a different view on the topic, Ronni Bennett at Time Goes By contrasts the revolution in Egypt (still very young and fragile) and its promise of democracy to the United States which is in the process of losing its democracy. Instead of one Hosni Mubarak stealing our lives and livelihoods we have a cabal of moneyed interests intent on doing the same. She wonders if the kind of demonstrations we have seen in Egypt (and saw thirty years ago against a war in Asia and for civil rights at home) will come again when we are driven by the corporate run kleptocracy into similar poverty. I have heard that notion frequently in the coverage of the Egyptian protest--the Egyptians protested, many pundits claimed, because they had nothing left to loose. Well, the Egyptian middle class (small as it is) also joined the protest and they still had a great deal to lose, comparatively. Perhaps they were faced with the prospect of a slow but definite decline into poverty or the possibility of a successful revolution that might preserve their prosperity and provide a foundation for a better life in the future. That reminds me of the dilemma of our Founding Fathers. They were men of position, influence and property whose future under continued and strengthened British rule would only decline. They rolled the revolutionary dice and, although we wound up with an independent republic with strong democratic tendencies, many of them lost what they had. Some recovered. Some went on to greater fame and fortune. Many did not. The key wasn't a population so poor they had nothing left to lose but a group who were willing to risk what they had. Now-a-days we have a lot of people who are only too happy to suggest that we have to sacrifice to stabilize our economic situation but the sacrifices they demand are always made by someone else. The big banks and financial institutions are too big to fail (and too big to be accountable for their frauds). The wealthy are too important to tax. The big corporations demand tax cuts to create jobs and expect that no one will be so impolite to not that they have been off-shoring jobs with gusto for the past several decades.