Monday.

Not much going on here.  Temps are in the mid 40s and are supposed to drop.  Today and tomorrow will be more like winter with possible wet snow.  Yesterday turned out very nice with plenty of sun and warm.  The patio dried off nicely and I got it swept--again--before rain fell in the afternoon.  Several new spinach coming up but I think one variety of lettuce is a bust.  The seeds are too old.  Update:  I may have written too soon on that lettuce.  I just found a sprout.  Tomorrow is transplanting day--into larger pots not outside.  Second update: just checked the status of the second rose I ordered back in January.  I has been shipped and should arrive in a couple of days.

In case you consider this far, far away and of little to no impact to us over on this side of the broad Pacific, think about the hundreds of thousands of cattle in the Dakotas and Montana that died in last fall's unseasonably early and severe blizzard.  I noticed that all of the news segments concerning rising food prices cite the drought in California and other points west.  That has been conveniently forgotten.

Last week I linked to a site that gave the results of a poll which showed (supposedly) that a "the less Americans know about Ukraine's location, the more likely they are to support armed intervention."  I found this one today that takes the statistics apart.  Though only 1 in 6 of us can locate Ukraine on the map only 13% of us say we want armed intervention.  That, thankfully, isn't a resounding vote of confidence in such a policy.

When is insurance not really insurance at all?  This might give an indication.  After the Obama Administration withdrew the notion of a single payer I gave up on the whole thing.  I figured it was simply a transfer of money from those who had worked for it to those who would rake it in while making sure as little of it as possible would go for what it was supposed to go--health care.

Been there, done that, and here we go again.  What really gets me is that they don't know how long the breach might have gone on.