Good morning on this Memorial weekend Saturday.  Hope you all are planning something fun.  The skies are cloudy this morning but appear to be moving out.  If we got any rain, it wasn't much.  I have a new basil and a Mexican tarragon to plant.  We finished the dried basil we put up last fall so I planted more this season.  I also planted three stevia this year and hope to harvest enough to last through to next year when the new harvest comes in.  I ran out of stevia three months ago.  I also need to harvest some lettuce and spinach for our chef's salads for dinner today.

This story made the national news and happened only about half a mile from where we live.  We wondered, as we were doing some errands, what was happening when we saw three police cars, with flashers going, turn off Rt. 49 heading toward the north part of town.  Later we heard two helicopters flying over our part of town.  The Chicago station had reporter and helicopter on site and we readily recognized the area from the photos.  In fact, I once worked at a building only a couple away from the one the gunman was inside.

I don't often go on YouTube but this piece was worth the time.  I have read about 'bottle gardens' for some time.  I find it interesting as a gardener who is restricted to containers because all the space I have is covered in cement.

Charles Hugh Smith always has very nicely targeted essays and this on on the 'Argument Industry' is a bull's eye.  We have remarked repeatedly here that the 'news' isn't news anymore.  It is gossip, titillation, and argument.  When the reporters cover problems the coverage is superficial and presented in a 'he said/he said' manner that leads no where.

I have seen several small articles about dry conditions such as described in this article from Bloomberg.  I have remarked a couple of times that I have had to water my gardens sooner and more often his year.  Even when we had rain it wasn't enough to do much good for very long.  This article in one of our local papers confirmed my suspicion that what I have seen in my little patch isn't an anomaly.