I did get the seeds I wanted to plant done yesterday and transplanted the hibiscus cuttings. One is doing very well and was almost root bound. The other not so well but I transplanted it anyway. I put aside the sunflower and black-eyed Susan vine seeds for planting directly in the gardens in late May. Time to get the initial draft of the garden map going. (update on the garden map: I tried to start it but visualizing where everything will go is a bit of a struggle. I am taking out three large rectangular containers and one large pot. I will replace them with 5-gal buckets and a different arrangement of smaller pots. Because of all the changes I am going to get transplants from various sources for all except strawberries, tomatoes, and the other plants I have already started. I have no idea of what I will eventually have out there.)

We find articles like this and ask ourselves how long have humans been drinking coffee and now they want to label it as potentially carcinogenic. I seems to me that everything is carcinogenic in some sense. Do we really need to label everything we eat, drink, wear or otherwise come into contact with?

Isn't it interesting how the notion of "choice" masks the move to "privatization" and the looting of public funds to line private pockets? We have seen what "choice" means in the debate over education. Those who have the money can choose whatever education they want for their children: private school, charter school, or (horror) public school. Those who have less can try to get their kids into a charter school which picks the cream of the crop and rejects the rest. The rest of us are stuck with increasingly underfunded public schools. "Freedom is another word for nothing left to lose," as Janice Joplin sang and "Choice is another word for no choice at all for most of us." Yes, veterans' medical care needs to improve in a lot of ways but privatizing it isn't the answer because many veterans won't have the wherewithal to make a choice.