Tuesday--

Chilly as promised this morning.  Temps might go up to 60F.  So far what I have already put in the garden is doing well.  I saw several of the sunflowers popping up so I should be able to plant the beans next to them in a couple of weeks.  I still have peppers, the Roselle tomatoes, hyssop, lemon balm, lemon basil and marigolds to put out.  And sweet potato slips coming in the mail.  I just got all of the Tumbler tomatoes off the fence and into the little greenhouse along with the Red Robin in a small pot.  All the others are under caps.  The weather people are calling for frost warnings for areas west of Chicago.  We may be east but I really don't want to lose tomatoes I started myself and nurtured for the last three months.  The herbs should be able to handle the cooler temps.

I find stories like this amusing.  Often we hear a statistic on how much of something "we" Americans consume and sometimes we wonder who is getting our share.  Things like chocolate, or beer, or something like that.  Other times we wonder who would want all that crap.  Some of the stats in the article were more accurate once--when we were younger.  We've pared down a lot over the last few years and our shopping over the last 20 years especially has changed drastically.  The totally unstated point lying beneath the statistics is that we reduced to that nebulous identity "consumers."  Our value, for decades now, has been in how much stuff we could accumulate which was a rough estimate of how much money we earned and could waste on ephemera.  Martin Luther King, Jr., said he looked forward to the day his children would be judged by the content of their character.  Instead we all are judged by the contents of our closets (and garages and storage units and where ever else we can pile the crap.)

Wednesday--

Low 40s this morning.  I could probably have left the Tumbler tomatoes on the fence but the wind was brutal which would have ripped them up.  In spite of the chill I took my claw cultivator out to attack the weeds in my containers that are the results of the birds scattering their seed all over.  Checked the covered tomatoes while I was at it and was totally surprised to see tiny buds on my Microtom tomato, a small pot variety.

This 5/3 Bank commercial is more blackly humorous than they realized.  It tells more truth about the employment prospects of college graduates than I think they really intended and offers less assistance to those graduates than promised.  If the jobs aren't there the bank's job search assistance won't do a hell of a lot of good.

Another good reason to eat as little fast food as possible.

Something to ponder as you watch the news reports about the latest Amtrak derailment.

This actually tops the policies of Florida Governor Rick Scott which prohibits state employees mentioning "climate change" and related words.  Wyoming and other states simply don't want to know if their streams are polluted and have criminalized the collection of such data and transmission of such data to state or Federal agencies.  Brings "Know Nothing" from the 19th century into the 21st.

Hee hee!!  A new infestation spreading.

I adore the quote from Smedley Butler that starts this post.  It is a perfect lead into the iniquitous list that follows.