Good Saturday morning to you all. The sun finally broke out yesterday and we got to near 90. In the late afternoon we had to close up the doors and windows and put the air on. My tasks for this morning are to fertilize the peppers and tomatoes, stake both sets of plants, and add some soil to some of the containers because what is in them has settled. Update: well I got everything watered and fertilized but it got too hot too fast to do anything else. I will do the stakes later this evening.

Hey, Kay. Enjoy your trip and decompress a bit. I saw some encouraging reports this week that all of the Repthuglican lawmakers with recall petitions against them in Wisconsin will face recall elections--the petitions have been validated. Those filed against three petitions filed against Democratic legislators all have serious allegations of fraud that are under investigation so no Democrats are yet scheduled for recall elections.

HuffingtonPost had this story about job seekers' reactions to the dismal employment numbers from this last week. I guess 'dismal' is a good description of numbers that come out half to one-third the levels the 'experts' expected. I am not surprised because I generally don't believe the numbers. The powers that be have so cooked them that they are meaningless. Now even the mainstream media is talking about a so-called 'double dip' recession. My only observation: when did we get out of the first dip?

I heard a disturbing little line on a news program last night. It started with the e. coli outbreak in Europe and then proceeded to talk about safe handling of vegetables. The reporter used a black light to show the bacterial load on a cucumber before she rinsed the cuke with hard hand rubbing under the faucet. The black light showed that much of the bacteria still remained. That wasn't the disturbing aspect of the report. The comment that got me was the last observation that, with ground water contamination, bacteria could actually be growing inside the veggies where you can't wash!! And ground water contamination has been an increasing thread on many of the news sites and blogs over the last couple of years.