Hello, Everyone.  No 90s in the forecast for the next week.  Today we should be in the low 80s so we shut off the air and opened the doors and window.  We may not put the air on all week.  I just picked a handful of cherry tomatoes and another small batch of roma.  We didn't get any of the tomatoes in the half-bushel lots from our year-round farm market.  It was a disappointing trip up there.  We got nothing at all.  The tomatoes were almost over-ripe and I would have had to process all of them today.  Instead we got a nice bunch of roma at the local supermarket for 50 cents less per pound.  I will process them and what I got out of the garden today at a leisurely pace.  We also didn't get any eggs--that is one of the biggest surprises but when we thought about it we should have expected something like this.  They had a half empty cooler with Dutch Farms eggs instead of their usual brand.  I read that Rose Acre farms (part of the same company as Dutch Farms) had lost a couple hundred thousand laying hens with that heat wave.  I imagine all of the egg farms have had similar problems.  Even if they didn't lose birds the hens probably aren't laying as well as normal.  So far the egg prices aren't increasing that much.  Unlike the gasoline prices.  Over the last two weeks our prices have gone from the $3.50s to $3.99.

When I read this item I asked Mom if she had heard anything about a drought in Russia.  I haven't heard much but it is evidently worse than the few snippets I saw indicated.  My irritation with our non-news media has just increased yet again.  This morning I was watching the coverage of Hillary Clinton's Africa trip which focused entirely on her dancing at some reception in South Africa.  I would rather know what the business side of her trip is accomplishing and what are the issues she is discussing.  I am sure there is more going on than talks on AIDS.  You wouldn't know it from the broadcast news reports.

Shortly after reading the item above I found this one which highlights another problem brought on by this drought--water fights.  I have seen similar stories sporadically this year.  Several areas have seen contention between agriculture and the gas fracking companies.  Both use huge amounts of water.  Farmers on the lower Colorado and along the Rio Grand were upset when water regulators wouldn't release water from dams early.  Some cities are looking for new sources of water or seeking to stake a claim on water at some distance.  Las Vegas wanted to tap rivers in northern Nevada which had farmers there up in arms.