Hello, All.  We have rain today.  Good thing--it means I don't have to water anything left in the gardens.  I think it is time to disconnect, drain and roll up the hose for the winter shortly.  I don't have many plants to water so using the large watering can will be no problem.  If I need to--I haven't had to water the plants for the last two weeks.
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Good morning to you all and what is now Friday.  We had a very nice, steady rain yesterday which has now cleared out.  We figure that this week sometime we will lower the last storm windows that are still up and put up the plastic over the windows.  We are supposed to get high winds today so I won't be opening the door for the cat.  He is already mad at me.  Nor will I get the last of my chores outside done.  Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and calm so those can wait.  As you can tell I didn't have much to say yesterday.  We'll see what I find today.

I agree, Lois.  Finding that an experiment worked is nice.  And I agree on the voting observation also.  I have often wondered what good my vote did--increasingly so in recent years.  I didn't really buy into the Obama slogans last time around but I trusted the other side even less.  It wouldn't be so bad if the elected leaders took the votes seriously but, as you said, they don't.  Your story about the storm water assessment resembles what is happening in Chicago.  Emanuel promised that property taxes wouldn't go up but his budget (just published Wednesday) includes increased water bills (a real whopper), increased fees to park, increased city stickers (especially for heavier vehicles) and I don't know how many other fees.  They may not get you with taxes but they will get you with 'fees,' which are taxes by another name.

I thought Herman Cain's "9-9-9" plan was somewhat simplistic but this story from Huffington Post makes me wonder about where he gets his ideas.  Do we really want a tax plan stolen from a computer game?

There is so much right on the money in this opinion blog about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that I hardly know where to begin the comments.  I have also had the feeling that those in politics and our mainstream media are not really listening to the demonstrators.  They want a single unified message and they aren't getting it spoon fed to them so they simply tune out and tell us there is no message.  Wrong!!  The message is that there is something systemically wrong here--the system is broken.

Coley Hudgins at Resilient Family echoes that sentiment in his blog post.  He is absolutely right: we can't rely on either big government or big business to pull us out of our current mess.  They are both much too invested in preserving the status quo.  Problem is we, individually, have to figure out how to break out of the dogma box we have been conditioned to accept from birth.  Most of us really, really, really want someone to save us and reestablish what we are so comfortable with.  That, perhaps, explains the wild oscillations in the electoral results of the last three cycles

Green Prophet had this interesting story about a village in Turkey which went completely off the country's electric grid.  A few years ago the electric company cut them off after they couldn't pay the bill.  They decided to invest in their own wind generated power which allowed them to both pay off their old debt and to pump water that freed them from the water utility as well.  Sounds like a plan.

Paul Krugman, also, has a good assessment of the current political situation and the Republican Party specifically.  But I think that in this world, which Krugman claims no one really saw coming, neither party's dogmas are working.  This piece from Michigan Today indicates that acting on the old dogmas, as the Federal Government basically did in constructing the TARP bailout, may actually be counter productive.  The banks which received the TARP funds were no more likely to lend money than were those who did not (though the whole rationale for flooding them with all that money was to give them the wherewithal to lend) and when they did the loans they made were riskier (though high risk lending was thought to be a major precipitating factor in the financial meltdown) and they shifted money into riskier investments.