Tuesday--March 28

Ah, yes---the daily life of the self-made man.

Do we really want to live forever?? Well, some of us do. Some of want to think more carefully about the whole issue.

Wednesday--March 29

Information "smuggling"? New term for an old phenomenon. I remember when Ayatollah Khomeini used smuggled cassette tapes (copied hundreds of times) to keep in touch with his followers during his years of exile in Paris. Now it is all done by computer.

We have said that if we ever have another pet (not likely) we would prepare the pet's food ourselves. Here is another reason why.

Thursday--March 30

We had rain with thunder and lightening over night. Today and tomorrow are supposed to be wet so no outside work today. But I got a good bit done yesterday: cleaned out the dead mums and lavender, and emptied about 3/4 of the first large container we are discarding. The rest will wait till the weekend when we should have two dry, sunny days. I also made about 20 paper pots. Some of my new seedlings are getting too big (already!!) for the cardboard tube starter cups but I want a larger pot that I can sink into the ground with the plant and not disturb the roots.

Just got an e-mail from Gurney's that my citrus has shipped and I will soon have six little trees to pot. I got two each of lemon, lime and orange. They are all small trees and will work well in the house.

For some time now I have thought the environmental action/climate change/pollution mitigation would have to move to the states and local areas. This simply confirms that notion.

Friday--March 31

Welcome to the last day of March and the last day of the first quarter of the year. Already!!

I didn't get much done. Too wet outside and I yielded to a frustrated impulse and got a new iPad yesterday. I have used the Barnes and Noble nook e-reader for years and, until recently, they (I was on my second one) functioned quite well. But I found that some books were available on Kindle that weren't available on the nook and some were available at a better price. The reverse was also true so I didn't want to give up the nook for the Kindle and I didn't want to buy a second device. So, realizing the nook was simple software on a Samsung tablet, I downloaded the Kindle software onto my nook. But over the last couple of months I have bumped up against the device's memory capacity twice--the second time after I moved most of the contents to the "cloud." I am not quite a Luddite but I simply don't trust that the material stored in the "cloud" will be there when I want it or that I will always have an internet connection to access the material. I want it on my machine or on storage media I control. Hence, the new iPad. I spent most of the afternoon getting the nook and Kindle software installed, the accounts adjusted and my library downloaded.

Any time any one issues the asinine phrase "We're number 1" refer them to this article. No, we aren't "#1" except in very specific areas: spending the most for the military often for weapons "systems" that don't work as designed and in spending the most for health care (or "sickcare" as one blogger calls it) much of which, also, doesn't work--at least not for the patients.

I have lost count of the many ways Federal Government agencies can f%^k us over. Here is another one.