Good morning to you all on this sunny Wednesday. The temperatures reached a bit over 90 yesterday so all I did before we closed up was get some of the more needy plants watered. I saw the first blossom on the melon vines this morning and all of the vine plants need tying. Right now all the gardening involves maintenance and waiting. When we drove by the site where our favorite farmers' market but it hasn't appeared yet. I hope it does soon.

Here is an article for the 'Same story, different time and place' file. Remember all of the stories about the air quality (or lack of clean air) in Beijing at the time of their Olympics. Well the same kind of stories are appearing concerning London. And then the Tucson to Phoenix area had a dust storm that was eerily reminiscent of the Dust Bowl era. The morning news had a brief line about it with some rather dramatic film. The first story I found this morning on this was from the Guardian in the UK. MSNBC has a whole 19 seconds of film and comment from NBC's Nightly News broadcast.

The European sovereign debt crisis carousel continues to spin out of control. They barely got the temporary fix arranged for (extorted from??) Greece when the ratings agencies downgraded Portuguese debt further into the junk realm. Ireland, Spain and Italy have more question marks on their fiscal situation. I have been wondering for some time how long they can keep the merry-go-round going.