Good morning, everyone. We had frost on the roofs this morning. According to our patio thermometer the early morning temperature fell to 38 degrees. But all my seedlings are fine. The plastic tents are doing the job nicely. Our city has a composting program for yard waste and distribute limited amounts to residential users free. We are going to stop by tomorrow and pick up some.

This report does not bode well for future food prices. A couple of days ago a news report noted in another of those one-liners that get ignored that a good percentage of Indiana corn farmers haven't been able to plant their crop yet because of flooding.

I wonder where the people you see moving into your area are coming from, Lois. I remember the early 90s when a lot of Californians hit by the dot.com bubble collapse moved into the front range around Ft. Collins and Boulder. They all had gained a lot of money from selling their homes in California at a market high. I remember benefiting from that because we got a good price for our house in Ft. Collins which funded our move to Missouri. I have read that a lot of displaced industrial workers from the 'rust belt' have been moving to the 'sunbelt' areas for the last 4 decades. That, however, has increased the demand for water in many very dry areas. I have been reading about the consequences of that for some time--like the legal conflicts with Mexico over the distribution of water from the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers, like the fact that the Colorado no longer empties into the Baja and hasn't for some time, like the disappearance of some rivers feeding the Rio Grande and seasonal disappearance of stretches of the Rio Grande.

You have a good point, Kay, on the simultaneous growth of suburbs at the same time that cities shrink. That has happened in Chicago as people moved out of the city proper to the collar communities. Ten or twelve years ago people followed the maxim "drive till you qualify" when looking for housing. But, in Chicago at least, that trend has been reversing a bit over the last couple of years with the rise in gas costs reversed the economic incentives. For those who could recoup the equity in their homes, that is. No one I have read has tied the financial troubles the cities face to the population loss--not even in the discussions of Detroit's problems. But is it surprising that tax revenues are down if the population has declined? I am not sure that the suburbs are thriving all that well. They depended on wage earners with good city jobs. I have read a number of accounts of suburbs becoming economic disaster zones as larger proportions of the population saw their city jobs disappear and their house values drop like a rock.