We have nice bright sun today. We weren't expecting it considering the clouds we saw this morning.

I have been reading about people getting microchips installed for some time. Frankly, it raises alarm bells in me. As with any technology it has good, bad uses, and downright dystopian possibilities, as the Organic Prepper notes. For myself, I'll keep the inconveniences all those people want to be relieved of and let whoever is peddling this innovation keep it.

Didn't find much to comment on or link to. Has anyone else noticed that the "news" is monotonous and mind-numbing? Of course, the Repthuglicans have once again tried to attach another attempt to erase the ACA (a.k.a., Obamacare) to their so-called budget bill--which should be titled "The Welfare for the Wealthy and Corporations" bill. What the news coverage doesn't explain is the labyrinthine connections that link the repeal of the coverage mandate, their promises of tax relief for the middle class, their promises of corporate tax relief and the 2025 expiration of middle class tax cuts while the corporate cuts are permanent. Repealing the mandate gives them cover for their promises to cut middle class taxes, keep the deficit ten years out from passing their set cap, and paying for the corporate tax cuts, sort-of. What the whole mess involves is keeping the left hand from knowing what the left hand is doing.

The Wisconsin legislators have made it the 28th state to petition for an Article V convention to amend the Constitution to mandate a balanced federal budget. The process needs seven more states to get on the bandwagon and then the fun will really start. Read this article for an interesting overview. Although most commenters on the possibility will say that the process is "unprecedented" they are right in a narrow sense. It is unprecedented under the Constitution but not within the national experience. In 1787 a convention was called to amend the Articles of Confederation under which the U.S. operated at the time. In that case "amend" came to mean throwing out the entire Articles of Confederation and writing the new Constitution.

Here is an interesting piece by John Feffer dissecting #45's recent Asian trip about which we heard precious little on our "mainstream" news and without any real analysis.

And on this I heartily agree.

Heavy roof top frost this morning although the temps are nice outside right now. Cool but nice. Debating when to cut back some of the plants and just not ready to do it yet. It isn't a high priority because even if I don't do it it won't make much of a difference except esthetically--i.e., it will make things look a little neater.

I found this a bit ago and it raises some alarm bells. U.S. News has a similar story here. So a majority of the sales tax money goes to bond holders and reduces the amount of tax money going to the city. The city then will have to make up the losses or cut what ever they were planning to spend the money on. And, if the bonds are going to pay a part of their obligated pension payments, what will the city pledge to whom for the next round of payments which they will have to make with reduced revenue? I wonder when they will run out of road down which to kick the can.

It looks like another bad year for the Northwest fisheries.

Easy and slow weekend. Cold enough that all the plants outside are gone except for the lavender. We had rain yesterday and last night but, if it dries off, I might get the spent plant cut back. I often leave the roots of the last plants in the soil to decompose in place. This year I am spreading the cuttings on top of the soil to prevent splash from hard rains. We have had more of those kinds of rain this year than I can remember and autumn is an unusual season for the monsoons we have received lately. I cleaned out and dusted two catch-all areas. One of the new seed catalogs has come in so I started looking at it. The company isn't one I usually buy from because they sell larger packets than I like to buy but I found a couple of interesting possibilities.

Ah, the Baker Creed seed catalog has arrived. I will start reading through it tonight. I wanted the bulk of my seed/plant orders in by early December. Too much of what I like others seem to also. I missed out on a couple of varieties of seeds last year because they were already sold out by early January.

Bread baking day--honey whole wheat sourdough. Looking forward to sampling it tonight.

BRRRRRR!!!! Only 29F so far this morning with the chance it will go a bit lower. We might also get the first snow of the season. Good thing I got the patio swept, the bird feeder cleaned out and refilled and the clematis cut back yesterday. As cold as it felt yesterday it was better than today. Some time in the next few days--when it is warmer and dry--I hope to wrap the clematis in bubble wrap and cover it for the winter. I don't know if that will work but I would like it to survive and grow next spring. Inside I started a couple of pots each of Angel Wing miniature roses and a lavender variety. The lavender is old seed and I want to see if it is still viable. The packet of rose seeds was a whim purchase when we toured the Chicago Botanical Gardens last year. We'll see what happens.

Update: Temperature is now 26F and we have very light snow falling.

Not as cold this morning as yesterday but since the sun isn't up yet the temps may drop a little more before the day really begins.

Ronni Bennett and Crabby Old Lady have a cute post on the "end of literacy." I have thought for some time that we are on a downward slope where literacy is concerned. It goes beyond emojis to writers who don't distinguish between words like "were" and "we're" or "their," "there," and "they're." More often nowadays I find items like a comment I read this morning where the writer used no punctuation at all and disentangling where one sentence ended and another began was difficult. And I find bloopers and really poor word choices in professional writing more frequently as well. Worse, my own writing has suffered over the years from many of the same defects. Often I catch the problem but I know I have missed just as many as I caught.

Fed my sourdough starter, swept the patio, cleaned out the bird feeder and refilled, and watered the downstairs plants. I still have the upstairs plants to do but I am glad to say that three of the four cuttings I tried to root from my hibiscus are still standing. The fourth looks like it is ready to give up the ghost but hasn't quite decided yet. I will let it go until it decides. Late this last summer I started using bamboo skewers to check the pots for watering--same principle as using one to test doneness of cakes etc. If the skewer comes out dry the cake is done or the plant needs water. I do have a high tech water probe but I haven't gotten good results with it. The results with the skewers have given me hope that I can try the citrus and blueberry again and, maybe, have more success.

Current temperature is 29F so we may see a lot of frost this morning. The prediction is for sun and a high temp in the 40s.

Evidently the temps have gone into the 40s. Nice that a weather report has been accurate for a change. We did get frost all the way down to the grass. I pulled a pepper plant that had refused to die after I cut it down a month or so ago. It had been a disappointment from the start but suddenly it decided to do something--too late, of course. The other disappointing pepper got the same treatment and did the same sudden growth but is in a more protected area of the patio and doesn't look so cold shocked as the other. It will stay for a while. Begonias, geraniums, creeping jenny and petunias are all still doing nicely.

I tried a new recipe for small batch sourdough pancakes which turned out well although not as fluffy as we like. That may take a bit of tinkering. The sourdough bread is almost ready to come out of the oven and smells wonderful. We love it when I am baking bread or drying herbs. The scent pervades the house.

It looks like the computers/internet is acting normally today. Yeah, we have Comcast and it was having a nationwide problem that they claim is fixed. Maybe it is my curmudgeonly perception but these problems seem to be appearing far more frequently. I used to get really pissed when it happened and I mean "throwing something against a wall" pissed. Now I am just mildly annoyed. That is one reason I would rather put my e-readers on my computers so I can have all my books stored on the computer also. Internet down? No problem. I can still pull up any of my books and read. The only ones I put in the "cloud" are ones I don't want to read again--ever.

I noticed that the trees have finally gotten the message that fall has arrived. They have been almost sulky about turning colors with one here and another there sort of deciding to change from green to yellow or red or orange. I think I said I had pulled the marigold and impatiens out of the gardens. They were looking pretty frazzled. I wonder how many more plants I will pull out tomorrow if the temps drop to the predicted 29F. So far the geraniums, begonias creeping jenny, lavender and petunias are doing well. The purslane stopped blooming a month ago but I am leaving it in as a ground cover. The creeping jenny, begonias and geraniums are still blooming.

Golem XIV has an interesting and scary take on a headline I saw this morning that had me scratching my head in bewilderment. The Saudi government has claimed that Lebanon has "declared war" on it. Lebanon?? Really?? Last I heard the rockets that caused a bit of an uproar for the last week came from Houthi controlled Yemen. That the unstated issue might be oil or gas and whether payments would be made in dollars doesn't surprise me. We seem to be fighting a rearguard action to keep the petrodollar system in place.

We had heavy rains over the weekend with dense morning fog. That is very unusual for this time of the year. Hopefully the weather report is more accurate than those of the last few weeks. The predicted 60F temperatures never materialized. I plan on taking things slow and easy today, like yesterday, and maybe for a couple of more days. The time change always throws me off. Thankfully I don't have a job to go to and we have no errands planned so we can be lazy. I really, really hate that shifting of the time. I watched an interesting short Youtube piece on how it so does not save us energy but actually costs money, increases the number of accidents on the road and heart attacks the day after. Yeah, yeah--I know correlation doesn't prove causation but when it happens year after year and the savings are proven bogus--you have to ask why do our politicians insist on keeping it. Well, the answer, according to Youtube, is major lobbying by the restaurant industry, the entertainment industry, the retail industry and any other industry that benefits when consumers have more afternoon and evening hours to get out of the house and spend money because the daylight lasts a bit longer at the end of the day. Another reason to hate our commercial culture.

Mother Nature News has an interesting notion: put everyone, worldwide, on the same time. I didn't know there was anything like "Coordinated Universal Time." CNN has more here.

Just pulled the marigold and dumped the impatiens. The combination of chilly temps and monsoonal style rains battered them both badly. I should sweep the patio after things have dried out and after I warm up from that brief bit of work outside. I pulled one jar of sourdough starter out of the freezer yesterday. It thawed overnight and I mixed it up adding a cup each of water and flour. It is beginning to bubble nicely. I will feed it again tomorrow night so I can do up of loaf of bread Wednesday.

Well, every now and then, probably by accident, #45 says something I can agree with. I won't link because it is all over the news feeds. He proclaimed the Texas church shooting to be an "act of evil" and a "mental health issue" not a gun issue. Yes to both those points. That last is why I am not an advocate for gun control. I don't blame the tool for some ass's misuse of it. Unfortunately, we don't do much to address the mental health issue and our political idiots are trying desperately to scale back any health care at all, mental or otherwise. I would go and have gone even deeper in the explanation. For the last fifty years our society has enabled rampant and entitled individualism and then winked at violence perpetrated by those entitled individuals. We have a growing anger management problem and are doing nothing about it except verbally deploring it.

I am going to quit here because something is happening on the internet and several of my favorite sites are not loading. Why--I have no idea. I was on them earlier for other articles but now they simply won't load. Time to call it a day.

We did get the promised rain beginning Wednesday night and continuing all day yesterday. Nothing to report in the remains of the gardens. What was doing well is still doing well while the impatiens and marigolds which are showing signs of distress with the cold nights are still hanging on.

I Baked bread yesterday--a nice lavender/macadamia nut loaf. I used other nuts because Mom doesn't like macadamias. So far the recipe has worked well with both walnuts and pecans. By the way this was a yeast bread not a quick bread. I am glad I decided to try to work it by hand rather than rely on the instructions for a bread machine, which I don't have, or the stand mixer, which is a pain to set up and take down. It takes up way too much space and is used so infrequently we don't leave it up all the time. Usually I don't even print out bread machine recipes.

I found this by a circuitous route involving a couple of different links. What a lovely Christmas present this would be for Amazon and Walmart: a large slice of the $53billion in the federal government procurement budget. And on a no-bid set up. And the wording is structured to make it look like openly competitive but only two companies can qualify to participate. Crony Capitalism at its best (for them not us.)

An interesting account of the heatwaves in San Francisco this season from an emergency room doctor. We live far from the California coast but it has been an odd year for us as well. In years past we kept our thermostat at 85 in the summer which was usually comfortable. Not this year. We lowered the setting to 78. I think we had far more humidity in the air than normal. And, so far, our usual practice of setting the heating thermostat to 68 has been uncomfortable also. We moved it up to 70. Nothing seems "normal" about this year which just continues a string of such years. I have almost forgotten what "normal" really looks/feels like.

Welcome to November. Supposed to be wet and cool today. We did get sun for brief times yesterday. The very cool mornings has just about ended the impatiens in the gardens and the marigolds aren't far behind. I spend a bit of time going through a couple of my binders--the ones for the gardens and recipes--getting the ring holes punched on the printed pages and filed. Also made some notes on the pages I printed about the plants I put in this year. I am on track for putting in seed and plant orders for next year and planning the arrangements of moveable containers and where I will put arrangements on the fence. A couple of days ago I printed out my updated "map" for this year's garden with notations on what did well and what won't go in again. Next year's "map" will be different except for the largest containers arranged along the fence. Those are almost immovable unless I want to go through the trouble of removing most of the soil. I do that only when I have to replace a container which I will next spring. One of them has developed a large crack.

An absolutely perfect assessment of what has happened to the U.S. over the last 16 years.

And Helen at Margaret and Helen have a few appropriate words concerning our dysfunctional politics.