Thursday.

I saw frost on our grass when I put the trash tote out yesterday.  We have seen heavy frost on the roofs for the last couple of weeks.  We never felt summer but we are definitely feeling autumn.  We haven't turned on the heat yet but that won't be long coming.  Inside temps this morning: 67F.  I pulled the cypress vine, stevia and lemon balm yesterday.  Hyssop, a bunch of petunias and the rose are all I have left out there and of those the rose will be the only plant I will leave out there over the winter.  The season of the seed catalogs has started.  I got the e-mail notice from Baker Creek a few days ago that their new catalog was coming soon.  I immediately ordered one.  Time to start planning for next season.

We are about two weeks away from election day.  I remarked a couple of days ago that I would be glad when it was passed because the political ads, which have become increasingly hysterical and brutal, would disappear from the airwaves.  Unfortunately, I don't think they will for long as I expect the 2016 silly season will begin earlier than ever.  My disgust with the political ads bleeds over into the commercial ads which seem to take up more of the air time than ever.  We seem to spend as much time seeing the annoying ads as we do the programming.  Another reason why we are closer than ever to pulling the plug on TV.

For a bit of humor on the subject of fad diets check out Gene Logsdon at the Contrary Farmer.  We always take dietary advice with a heavy grain of salt.  When Mom's doctor gave her a handout on low cholesterol diet we picked it apart with bouts of near hysterical laughter.  The sample weeks worth of meals were so totally unrealistic, expensive, and wasteful.  By the way, the heavy grain of salt on the dietary advice, doesn't pass our lips, is far more than we ingest in our food.  We have cut that drastically which does far more good for us that the doctor recommended diet.

The more I read about our, supposed, plans in Syria and surrounding countries the more skeptical I become of our foreign policy, if we really have a policy.  This only fuels my skepticism.  I wrote, rather sarcastically, about a deja vu feeling I had because our efforts at "training" various "armies" over the last two decades have produced decidedly counter-productive results.  Now, we are proposing that we recruit a force, which has to be not-Assad and not-Free Syrian Army and anti-IS, whose sole purpose is to defend territory from IS but not to take it back from IS.  This is not just a "flawed" strategy but a self-defeating one.  But perhaps the situation reveals just how tenuous our situation is and how few real allies we have.  We are trying very hard not to piss off any of the antagonistic parties involved over there.

Friday.

Yesterday my brother treated us to dinner out in honor of Mom's birthday.  It was a nice afternoon out so I didn't get much more written than what you see above.  Then we had an annoying interruption of cable TV and internet service in the late afternoon so I didn't publish the post.  Oh, well--I guess I will just continue here for today.

The news this morning announced a new ebola case--in New York City now.  I plan to not comment on the situation.  I am not overly tolerant of hysteria so I will only skim the news in print and dry to ignore the news on TV.  Or I will pay more attention to BBC and Al Jazeera.  The tone of the stories between BBC and Good Morning America were striking--the first calm while the other was strident.  I can do without the carnival barker hyping the situation.

I got to this article by way of Some Assembly Required.  I don't normally visit the Men's Journal.  However, this item makes a lot of good sense to me: our nutritional advice for the last half century has been wrong.  See my comments on the article about fad diets.