Good day to you all and I hope your Sunday is proceeding pleasantly.  I finally got some paper strips cut yesterday so I can fold up a bunch of paper pots today.  I also need to get a few of my seedlings and the cranberry and pineapple sage repotted.  My hibiscus arrived Friday and, Oh, was I surprised to find a bare root plant.  I thought I would get a potted seedling.  I checked back on the web site and found I had totally missed the description of what would be sent.  Thankfully I didn't miss the description of how hardy it is supposed to be--well above my growing zone.  So another job today will be to get it into a pot.  I hope it warms up to the point where I can do that outside.  I also got about 12 to 14 inches of the crochet chain stitched to the table scarf that has been sitting by my chair forever.  The other one with the cross-stitching started has been keeping it company.  I need to get to it also.

I don't know how many of you read Riverbend's Baghdad Burning blog and wondered what happened to her and her family after they left Iraq for exile in Syria.  Yesterday I made one of my rare excursions on Facebook and found a bit by Tom Englehardt which linked to her update to which I have linked above.  I wondered after her last post from Syria when I read about the difficulty Iraqi refugees had finding housing and work in a country that didn't want them.  I wondered again after the vicious civil war started in Syria.  I never though our invasion of Iraq was wise or just, as most of you who have read my posts know.

Technology is always a double edged sword as this article demonstrates.  Our technology is re-writing our definitions of privacy and we hardly even notice.  And then there is this item.  We have become so dependent on computers and no one really considers what might happen if that technology failed in some way.  Our banks depend on computers.  Our information systems depend on computers.  Our refineries depend on computers. Our electrical generation systems depend on computers.  How much else?  How much would our lives change if our computers didn't function?

The fall out from the Cyprus mess gets murkier.  It is bad enough when banks operate (and often mis-behave) across state lines but it gets really messy when it is across national boundaries.  Isn't globalization wonderful?  And, yes, I am being sarcastic.