Hello, again, on what looks like another sunny day.  Today is appointment day--Mom has one with her primary doctor and I have the next dental visit to fit the permanent crown.  Then I have to make the appointment for the last crown.  I still hate dental work but at least it should all be done by the end of April.  I visited my second favorite garden shop, Home Depot, yesterday to check things out.  They have more of their plants in but nothing I wanted.  I am mulling over getting a new rosemary and a couple of heirloom tomatoes.  But they don't have the tomatoes yet and I haven't decided on the rosemary.  I need to replant the bullnose pepper--none of the four seeds I planted came up.  I may have to bring the rosemary I have in a pot on the fence tonight because we may have frost tonight.  But that should be the only one because the other plants all came through the winter with no problem so they should have no problem with a frost.  I finally got the probe I wanted to check the pH and soil fertility so I want to check out what is in the garden now.  That should be interesting since I have conditioned about half of the containers so I will have an idea of what the original containers had before I started working with them.

I find this story a bit--curious.  I remember when the arrests were announced two years ago--great fanfare and a lot of publicity from the FBI and Justice Department.  Now--not so much as the acquittal is announced.  What happened??  I would have thought that the FBI would have had a better case given undercover agents and then two years to investigate further.  This is incredibly sloppy.  And incredibly wasteful.  And then there is the injustice of 8 people jailed for two years while the FBI failed to provide a convincing case against them.

Now this is interesting.  So the 'Millennials' are not buying into the car culture.  Good.  We have often said that we would do without a car if we could.  But we only have rudimentary public transportation, and seeing Mom's doctors and our family are all quite a distance away.  If we lived in Chicago, as an example, we would not have a car at all.  We do the next best thing--reduce our errands to a minimum.  Especially since the price of gas this morning was $4.45 and a bit per gallon.

And on the subject of gas prices this little BBC piece provides an interesting insight.  The powers that be have pointed fingers at international political flash points like the Straights of Hormuz or Nigeria, or the change from winter to summer formulations, or to 'speculators' although for the life of me I can't tell the difference between speculation and regular, plain old investing.  A couple of astute commenters noted that the drop in U.S. demand is very nicely made up for by the growing demand in places like India and China.  Now it seems someone has noted the irony of the talks between the U.S. and the U.K. to open up their strategic reserves for a momentary blip (maybe) while South Africa, India, and China (and god knows who else) are building their reserves.