Monday.  Cool today but sunny--though it is now about five minutes after sunrise so not much sun just yet.  Just some puttering planned for the gardens today.  The tomato plants need some slight pruning and some weeds need pulling.  We love watching the birds that come to visit our feeder but they are so messy.  I moved the feeder to a new area where fewer seeds will fall on my containers but I have to deal with the weeds in the area below where the feeder used to be.  My new starts of shiso and bee balm are doing nicely and a couple of lavender, chamomile and wonderberry seeds actually decided to sprout.  They are much too small to move into the gardens yet but I have a summer savory, an acquired transplant, that is ready.  The Arctic Flame rose is blooming but the Abraham Darby is still deciding if it wants to live or not.  Two of the Angle's Fragrance begonias are doing really well but the third is trying to come back from a difficult shipping.  It looked like it had been tossed and fell back into the pot askew.  But I see new leaves so I think it has made up its mind to live.

Major irritation this morning:  the first 4th of July commercial!!!  The holiday is three damned weeks away.  Once upon a time it commemorated the signing of the Declaration of Independence; now, the freedom to shop ourselves into a zombified stupor.

In case you thought slavery was dead... .  Isn't globalization wonderful!!  (and, yeah, that is sarcasm.)

Another major irritation from last night's TV news: the story of the helicopter escape from a Canadian jail.  The morning stories said that the escapees had been recaptured.  Not true.  More and more often those guys can't get the facts straight and rush to tell a story that is inaccurate (and that is putting the case mildly.)  At least the evening news was more accurate.  However, after the intro sentence or two the slewed off into a sequence of a film about a helicopter escape from a prison and then to "Hollywood" style escapes that had nothing at all to do with the original story--not even a damned helicopter.  If I were grading this as an assignment for a college level class, I would give it a D for more than half of the content being irrelevant.

Found this on two sites I always visit.  As usual the FDA has decided to enforce rules that were made by idiots who have no real understanding of what they are regulating and ascribe to the notion that all bacteria and other microbes are bad.  They also haven't read any of the research that show wood surfaces are actually better than plastics or other surfaces that can be sanitized.  Worse, the only cheeses I have seen recalled recently were produced by large food manufacturing companies not small artisanal outfits.  I am sure they do not have wood surfaces so please tell me why they produce contaminated product.

There are times when the unplanned is a timeless gift as Robert Brady at PureLandMountain reminds us.