We woke to a dusting of snow this morning.  Last I saw the weather people hadn't predicted any great amount of it.  We seem to be between torrential rain on the west coast and heavy rain/freezing rain on the east.  Otherwise nothing much going on outside.  I got three more seed catalogs in the mail.  They are giving me some ideas for the next season.

The first story on the morning news reiterated one on last night's news: with the falling gas prices sales of SUVs are rising.  The best sellers appear to be the biggest ones and the most gas-thirsty.  I guess people think the low prices are going to last forever.  Some may be feeling richer because the money they would spend on gas can be used for something else, but how temporary will that situation b?  Since most people buy their cars on time, when conditions change they may find themselves saddled with the car payment and fewer resources to keep them up.  Although I will say we recently drove an SUV that we would consider buying if we needed the hauling capacity.  We took our new-to-us car in to have airbags serviced.  They weren't part of the recall but the service light was on and the car was still under the 90 warranty.  The dealer loaned us a new Escalade while the work was done and we were impressed.  It drove beautifully.  We loved the rear-view camera.  I quipped that if we were planning a great deal of traveling and needed a home-away-from-home we could live comfortably in while traveling, this would be it.  But we aren't traveling, we don't need its hauling or passenger capacity, and it is way beyond our financial capabilities.  Just had another thought--I wonder how significant the so-called is?  If an incident increases from 1 to 2 that is a 100% uptick.  But how significant is the increase?  One more SUV sale in a market of 1000 vehicle sales isn't all that big a deal.

I saw this on-line yesterday and the evening news had a brief mention that said the outage was caused by two aging cables that failed.  The power company managed to fix the problem in a few hours.  One report noted this was the second recent power outage and that such failures have been increasing in frequency and duration over the last several years.  Given the state of U.S. infrastructure (pretty much awful) and the fact that most governments are under severe financial stress (Detroit is in bankruptcy) I wonder how they are going to fund basic repairs without even considering the improvements pundits say we need.