Thursday--

Nice cool and sunny day yesterday.  Collected the last of the dragon's egg cucumbers and removed the vines.  The season is definitely winding down.  We also combined the cherry tomatoes with some romas for another batch of sauce for the freezer.  They have been ripening faster than we can eat them.  Collected the largest of the cupcake squash.  Mom cooked them but came up with too little make a meal.  I pulled the rest of the plants which cleared up a lot of space on the patio.  I have to stick with a couple of made and broken repeatedly:  fewer tomato plants and no squash.  The tomatoes have grown into a jungle and finding the ripe fruits is a real chore.  Squash plants take up more of my small space than they are worth.  We caught a brief of a hummingbird--the first since spring.  It visited the sunflowers briefly but I doubt it found much.  The first blossoms are done along with most of the secondary ones.  I left them for the finches and other birds that like the seeds.  They might find some nectar when the tertiary blooms open.

I do love spunky old ladies.  This one is my hero of the day.

Friday--

Our temperatures were warmer than predicted yesterday.  The only gardening I did was collect Peppermint and dried.  But then I found a crack on one of our plastic shelves and decided to replace them.  Should have been a nice, easy project.  Get new snap together shelves.  Remove the cracked shelf an reconfigure the old stack.  Put it back in, put the new shelves together and move it into place.  Well, it didn't go quite that way.  The new shelves didn't exceed the width we had available but the depth was a bit more than would be convenient.  We decided instead to keep the new stack for another area.  We moved one of our bookshelves (a 7-foot monster) into the open space.  That meant we had to take everything off it and jockey it into place (and it was a very tight space) while not breaking the globes of the "dining room" light.  We still have cleaning and rearranging to do today and are sore in muscles we forgot we had.

Naked Capitalism has this post on an early example of what adoption of TTIP (the ugly doppleganger of the TTP) could mean.  Over the last few months I have seen reports that one of the tobacco giants is suing Australia for new laws restricting tobacco sales and use.  The public health measures cut into profits--hence the suit.  What makes the Spanish suit described so much worse is it involves the subsidies energy companies want maintained even though the government is facing a financial mess.  Another example of modern "Capitalism" where all of the profits accrue to the corporatocracy while all of the risks, and other costs, are pushed onto others.