Almost as cold this morning as yesterday.  High yesterday: 5F.  I am so ready for winter to leave.  But we still have a month of official winter and we can get snow/cold into late April.  Our average last frost date is May 15 so we have a good way to go yet.

Over the last few years we have moved away from processed/prepared foods because of all the crap (to use a polite expression) included--and that is in addition to the high levels of salt and sugars (often highly processed or fake sugars).  These kinds of reports confirm our strategy and force us to consider going further in that direction.

Here is an interesting assessment on the character of the 21st century:  going nowhere while very, very frightened.  We have drastically reduced the amount of news we watch and our moods have improved greatly.  We get a lot on line but we can more easily avoid what doesn't interest us and skim for the relevant information without getting all the drama.

A couple of questions came to me as I skimmed the outrage in certain quarters this morning that the second day of the White House conference on violent extremism because it opened with a Muslim prayer but "no other faiths were represented."  What question you ask?  Did the first day of the conference open with a prayer and, if so, what faith was represented?  And if it was a Christian prayer were any other faiths represented?  I can't find the answer to those questions.  I am left to speculate that the answer to the first question may be "yes" and the answer to the second would be "no."  Smacking people in the face with Christian sentiment is a fact of life in this country and Christians think they have a right to do the smacking.