April 30

Well--it has already been a frustrating morning and it isn't even 6am yet. I tried to get onto Facebook as usual but all I got was a blank page. Nothing I did brought up anything but that blank page. Mom was able to get on with Firefox so I tried than. I could get my page up but none of the games would play. After more than an hour trying to figure out the problem I decided either it would come back on Safari as it normal or I will ignore Facebook except for checking out the groups I am in. Those are mostly needlework and such and they provide some jaw dropping inspiration. On that note I have a lot of e-mail to get through and may find something to comment on.

I saw this item yesterday but wanted to let it percolate in my mind. I remember reading Countdown to Zero Day and Lights Out (by Ted Koppel) when they came out. Although both had a lot of new information none of it was exactly surprising. I think most of us have become somewhat used to disruptions of services we depend on--see the first paragraph. We have had difficulty several times over the last few years accessing our bank accounts and paying our bills. That governments (including our own) are deeply involved in developing cyberspace weapons wasn't at all surprising. Individuals at my level are left with only one option--figure out what you would do if those vital services failed.

A minor theme in the politics now is our (seemingly interminable) presence in Afghanistan. Neither Former Guy nor President Biden were able to extricate us without a quiet but intense fight among foreign policy factions over when (if) we should get out and under what conditions. A comment last night on one of the news/commentary shows summed it up nicely. Those factions are either warning the politicians that the situation is unstable and we will have to go back in to ensure the Taliban doesn't overthrow the government we support and those who say that the situation will never be stable, we can't make over Afghanistan into our own image and if not now WHEN. I would quibble with the notion that we will have to go back in sometime because nothing says we will have to do anything. I always thought that we should have chosen four targets in Afghanistan to match the four planes that hit us--perhaps a couple in Kabul, the Al Qaida's training camp, and another of some lesser significance. Then told them that since we had to repair what they destroyed they could repair the damage we caused. Instead we tried to hit a gnat with a sledge hammer for 20 damned years. This piece at Tomdispatch.com lays out our exercise in futility very nicely.

An interesting question cropped up in the wake of President Biden's address Wednesday night: Is America a racist country? It is interesting because there is no "right" answer. A country is a collective of individuals living in a specific geographical area and as such a country can't be racist or sexist, or (name your poison.) Individuals can definitely be racist, sexist, or (name your poison.) But you can have a population with a sufficiently large percentage of prejudiced people and who act on that prejudice. Such a large percentage of bad apples ruins the whole barrel. Our barrel has been tainted in all its institutions with the bad apples and somehow we need to clean it out.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has a good article describing why the student loan problem is worse than we might think. She considers only the financial (ill)logic of the programs but the harm goes beyond the financial losses which are, as she says, baked in now. The people saddled with loans they can't repay either because they never finished and so couldn't get the jobs they hoped would allow repayment or they finished and found no jobs that would pay enough to live on and repay the loans.

 April 28

Cool and wet today. I am not complaining because I was quite busy in the gardens yesterday. I filled five pots--three large and the two 3-cell pots from the tower. Also transplanted the rosemary and lavender. They seem to be doing well today which I am relieved at since the rosemary was quite dry and I had a real struggle getting the lavender out of its small pot. I also changed out our thermometers. The old one was hard to read from the door so we found an inexpensive large face thermometer. I put that up on the gate directly across from the door and put the old one up on the door of the shed. I have often noted here that the patio is basically an oven in the summer and an ice box in the winter. It seems to concentrate heat and cold. Example from yesterday: official temperature was 84F; temperature by the gate was 110F; and, temperature at the shed near the wall of the house was 78. I have already hooked up the hose and watered the pots already planted. That is the earliest I have ever had to do that.

Well, it seems that the CDC has changed the rules on wearing masks. Those who are vaccinated can now go outside without masks if there are no crowds or can have events outside with family members who are also vaccinated without masks. It doesn't make any difference to us. We haven't ever worn our masks outside if we weren't going into crowds. Going shopping we put our masks on when we approach the store and take them off when we get in our car. We have avoided crowds for over a decade. I don't think we will retire our masks any time soon. I am beginning to doubt that COVID will be going away any times soon and we may need boosters vaccines. Besides, there is always flu season. This year they say has seen the fewest flu cases ever.

 April 26

We have a lovely, sunny Monday for the last week of April. Damn! the year is almost one quarter gone. It is still a bit too cool to do a lot outside but I got out anyway. I loosened the soil around the roses and added a bit of fertilizer. Clipped the dead stalks of lavender and a couple of the longer ones just above the new growth at the bottom. The next two weeks are supposed to be warm with the lowest daytime temperature predicted to be high 50s. Otherwise 60s and 70s with an 80 in the mix. I am thinking about when to put in seeds. Tomorrow is supposed to be warmer than today and I hope to get into the shed and get it cleaned out so I can find things again.

Otherwise I finished the penguin table topper. Also put in a couple of rounds on the crochet table topper--the one I had to completely unravel a couple of months ago. It is doing nicely now and I am well beyond the place where it all went wrong before. I made a couple of notes on the pattern in case I ever get the ambition to make another. It was easy to make the notes since the pattern is on Kindle.

I haven't had much to say about most of the news. It is incredibly repetitive. We have been turning to BBC for some of the news that "escapes" the notice of our news media. However, this is a NY Times story covering what we had already seen on BBC. India provides a cautionary tale for those who think COVID is conquered. The BBC this morning noted that India has a major new variant which is both more communicable and more deadly. I just checked the stats for my state and they say that the case numbers are going down and nearly 2 million residents have had at least one shot. I don't know how many, like us, had the single shot Johnson&Johnson before the pause which has now been reversed.

I saw a news story about this a couple of days ago but this Crooks&Liars piece goes into more detail. I saw a bit of this "Medical Examiner's" testimony during the Chauvin trial and couldn't believe how inept the man was. After the prosecution's medical experts had already explicitly stated that the determining factor in George Floyd's death was Chauvin's knee on his neck and back while handcuffed face down on the pavement. Evidently the state is reviewing all his past reports.

 April 20

Cold enough to give us light snow showers though nothing has stuck or accumulated. The winter survivors in the gardens are still hanging on. Some are doing better than that. The woad is trying to bloom. I cleaned out the pot that had the dianthus even though it was trying to come back. I want to put something else in that container. I may plant some more dianthus in one or more of the 5-gal buckets. It has made a good show for the last two years. When things dry out I need to fill several pots and get things ready for seeds and transplants.

I have been spending more time with my needlework. My penguin cross-stitch table topper is almost finished and I finally got my crochet table cloth back to the place where the pattern went wrong forcing me to unravel the whole thing. I may actually get it finished before summer.

I have been listening to the asinine Republican arguments about President Biden's jobs bill (a.k.a., infrastructure bill.) Those boys (for the most point) have a very narrow definition of infrastructure--limited largely to highways, bridges and airports. They are cold to including rail, electrical systems, water/sewage system, or 5G and cable repairs/improvements. As for other 'soft infrastructure' like elder/child care, education, they are absolutely frigid. Perhaps they should read this Tomdispatch.com post on China's infrastructure spending. A couple of commentators have wondered if the Republicans will agree to anything Biden proposes. They tried to low ball the COVID relief bill and they are now trying to low ball the current proposal. Normally I would try not to paint all the Republicans with the same brush but I haven't seen any of them really ready to buck the Party of Trump.

We just watched the verdict read in the Chauvin trial: guilty on all charges. One of the commentators remarked that it is sad that a black person has to be blatantly murdered on video shown the world over followed by months of massive demonstrations before a cop will be called to account. I hope that more states will do what Maryland has done and remove the qualified immunity police enjoy. I believe that those to whom we have given the power of deadly force must be questioned closely when that power is used.

 ,April 14--half past another month!!

Another pretty day--sunny but cool. A bit too cool for much outside work. If I do get out my plan is to cut back the lavender which, astoundingly, survived the winter. A small pot of lavender also survived and I will transplant with the rest of the lavender. I have several pots that still need to be cleared and I want to move the pot I have in front because our landlords may be planning to refurbish that nasty patch I was hoping to beautify a bit.

It's been a busy week so far. Mom had a doctors appointment Monday and we did our meager grocery shopping also. We normally would have put it off til next week but why waste an errand when it could be combined with another. We hoped that we could get cat litter but, like our last trip, they had none on the shelf. For about two months supplies of cat food (canned and dry) and cat litter has been scarce. Signs on the shelves say that the manufacturers are experiencing problem. I have been reading about all kinds of shortages in the blogs and in their comments: electrical supplies, canning supplies, cleaning supplies. Even the mainstream media has noticed the semiconductor shortage. 

Oh well, getting back to our week--yesterday we finally decided to do something about our sheets and bedspreads. They are getting a bit thread bare after about 20 years of use. Replaced them all. I will be cutting the spreads up into placemats and binding their edges. I will cut out the unusable parts of the sheets and those will become parts of other projects. We have a bigger project on tap--going through the linen closet and sorting those that are still useable from those whose best days are long gone. I will refurbish, reuse, and generally make something new from what is old.

The news has been covering the suspension of the Johnson&Johnson vaccine pending a review because six women developed rare blood clots in the brain. A similar suspension affected the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe. This story at the New York Times lays out the story pretty clearly. About a month ago we got the J&J vaccine but we aren't worried. We aren't under 50,  it has been double the time for the clots to appear, and the six cases represent less than 1 case in a million recipients. If we were still planning on getting a vaccination and the AstraZeneca were the only one available we would get it. The numbers are similar.

 Besides the shortages I noted above (and many more I didn't mention), we have also seen price increases. Driving past the sign our landlords have on a major intersection advertising the units they rent we noticed that the rent has increased to $950/month. That is a $100 increase from the last change which was $100 above the last increase before that. All of that has happened over the last six or seven years. We started renting here in 2000 and the initial rent remained $650 for the first 13 years. Thankfully, the landlord hasn't raised our rent so far. But our little dairy has also had to raise their prices. Almost everything costs more.

I wonder how many remember Bernie Madoff. According to Axios the author of the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history has died at age 82 while still serving his 150 year sentence.

April 18

As I mentioned above our week has been very unusual. We have spent more time out and about. Mom had a problem with her cell phone so we went to the local vendor to try to sort out the problem. Some time ago we spent a lot of time both on line and on the phone with the company which provides our phones and service trying to resolve the problem. I will say they tried but nothing worked. So she got a new phone. And I mentioned replacing our bedspreads and sheets. That also took more time than one would think. Problem: we wanted bedspreads and went to several stores trying to find what we wanted. No luck. We had to finally settle for comforters which meant we had to get bed skirts as well. That was all in addition to our normal grocery shopping.

I keep telling Mom that we are in retrograde. We got rid of almost all prepared foods and cook from scratch. We got rid of our so-called non-stick cookware and got stainless steel and cast iron. They both work better than the non-stick and will probably out last us.

We watched Prince Philip's funeral. It was an amazingly simple and moving ceremony. I was a bit amused by some of the news coverage because it focused on Queen Elizabeth's isolation during the rites. The poor, lonely Queen all by herself in her pew. Bosh--to be polite. The arrangements were made with the COVID regulations in mind and I give the family and the Queen herself admiring kudos for doing what all her subjects are expected to do. That is called leading by example which Former Guy and his minions over her total failed to do. I wish her peace and healing with her family and thank her for a magnificent example of grace under trying conditions.

 April 10--rain again, with possible interludes of sun

I am already irritated by the new. The three stories dominating are the Gaetz mess, the Chauvin trial, and Prince Philip's passing. I am utterly sick of the puerile shenanigans of Former Guy's sycophants. I don't need a blow by blow account of the latest sensational trial on police violence. And we wondered how long Prince Philip would last after his last hospital stay. So the amount of time is a waste. We have already turned off the cable and gone to our stock of DVDs.

Something else that irritates me is the political gridlock in Washington. David Kaiser has an interesting take with a dismal forecast for the possibilities for Biden's program. The sad part of the stand off is that most of the program gets high approval numbers according to polls, even among Republicans. Kaiser's comparison of the situation leading up to the Civil War and through the rest of the 19th century is one I have read often of late. But there is another instructive piece of history--Poland when it was a kingdom before being partitioned between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The King had little power and was elected by the nobility. Legislation had to pass an assembly of nobles in which each individual could block any measure--a librum veto. Given the close divide in the Senate now each Democrat has what amounts to a librum veto. Joe Biden's search for bipartisanship in the Senate is chasing a ghost of past Senates so he has continued the pursuit by appealing to the polls. I don't think that will work either.

Several articles including this from the Miami Herald report that NOAA has predicted another "well above normal" hurricane season with a possible 17 named storms and 8 hurricanes of which 4 will be major.

This Gizmodo article reports on new information from Antarctica's Thwaites (a.k.a., Doomsday) Glacier. Not good news for forecasts of sea level rise.

France has had a major frost that is going to impact all of their agriculture. This will reverberate throughout the EU and UK.

I found this interesting piece this morning which I haven't seen on any of the mainstream media. I have seen a few stories about western fires already but hadn't realized that the midwest is having a spate of fires also. The strange winter that didn't provide much snow cover which melted very quickly. January, February, and March were all had above normal (if that has any meaning anymore) temperatures. April is shaping up the same.

 A rainy April 8

It is cooler today though not uncomfortably so and wet. No gardening today. But I noticed that several of the plants are doing very well. The valerian has almost doubled in size in the last couple of days. I will have to move it back against the fence and move the rose forward. Valerian is a tall plant--much taller than a miniature rose.

When we did our trip to the dairy and stopped off at the close supermarket to get a couple of items we forgot (even with a list!!) earlier this week I saw pots of spring plants out. Tempting--but not yet.

Have any of you seen the story about the toxic pools of waste water in Florida one of which was threatening to burst taking the other two with it? Well, state officials authorized the massive release of the toxic water into nearby waterways averting the bigger disaster if the other pools also ruptured--that water had radioactive materials as well as toxins. As it is the pollutants in the released water may cause fish kills and toxic algae blooms. Has anyone heard anything about the "superfund" sites that were all over the headlines twenty+ years ago? They are still out there, still highly polluted and still not fully cleaned up. Some aren't even partially cleaned up. The "superfund" cleanup was anything but super funded. Does anyone know what happens to bacteria in a petrie dish? The population grows spectacularly--and then dies spectacularly. The population crashes long before the nutrients in the medium are gone because of the waste the bacteria produce. This is our "petrie dish", folks.

 April 7

Sunny again today after an absolutely beautiful day yesterday. Temperature yesterday was in the low 80s and today's is expected to  be in the high 70s. I have already been out in the gardens today. I took apart the tower planter. I moved the middle planter to the bottom with its nice growth of chives. The other two I simply dumped--the lowest planter had a growth of fungus and I wanted to wash it before refilling it and the other had oregano the roots of which simply filled whatever space was there and made a good start on invading the planter below it. That oregano hadn't survived. The other oregano in the window box style planter had survived but I plan to move it to the front of the house and fill it with flowers. The survival wasn't worth the effort to move to another pot since I don't plan on doing much in the way of herbs this year. I plan to prune the roses which did survive nicely. I am thinking of adding other roses if I find ones I want. I might try a blueberry bush again. I tried roses and blueberries before but they didn't survive. I changed from buckets with bottom drain holes when those began to breakdown (after about 15 years of use) to new ones in which I put drain holes around the sides about six inches above the bottom. They drain better after being frozen in winter. The old ones became waterlogged. I will get what I can done today but we expect rain starting tonight and extending through the weekend. Next week is forecast to be cooler (50s and 60s) with lows in the mid 30s.

We did our regular shopping yesterday. That has gone down to every two weeks for both the grocery and the dairy instead of every week. We also had to fill up the gas tank and got sticker shock to see the price at a tenth of a cent below $3/gal. We haven't even come to the seasonal shift in the blends to the summer gas which is always more expensive. Some of the pundits I read are expecting more increases and in groceries as well as gas. We try to keep an eye on such things and are always looking at "what if" situations. So far we haven't had to make changes because of a tight budget but we are always prepared for that possibility.

I found another survival in the gardens. I think it is dyer's woodruff.  I will let it go and see how it blooms. One of the two mums that had survived the worst of the winter did not make it through our last really cold spell. I should have given it some protection but I didn't.  Although one of the oregano sort of survived I pulled it anyway. I will put something else in that pot.

 April 5

Damn--I almost wrote March instead of April. I wonder if I did that over the weekend. I just checked and I didn't. Sometimes we just loose our place in time unless we have to be somewhere which isn't often. Today we have to go to get Mom's lab work going for her next doctor's appointment. That was another case of losing track of the schedule. She thought it was two weeks later that it actually is. Thank goodness her doctors call to remind us. Normally we have no problem because we make notations on our calendar. But for some reason our sense of time got screwed up.

Yesterday was an absolutely lazy day and I got just about nothing done. However, my mind has been working. I have been getting an itch that it is time to scratch. I did a lot of quilting several years ago but haven't recently. It is time.

Evidently Spain is going to try a 4-day work week with no reduction in take home pay. That last bit--without reducing weekly pay--has always been a sticking point. Companies don't want to pay someone 5 days wages for 4 days of work. And workers can't afford to lose 1/5 of their wages no matter how much they would like to have the time for themselves. I once did have a job with a four-day work week. Since I made $10/hour the $1600  for a four week month (before taxes) I would have earned for 40 hour was only $1280 (again before taxes) for 32 hours. After taxes that was abut $950 per month which is almost $200 less than my social security check is now. Also at no point would I have been able to live anything above a hand-to-mouth pay check to pay check existence either way.

Naked Capitalism has a good post today. I have been following the handling of the Coronavirus pandemic and the various responses. We have had an unfortunate situation in that the Former Guy and his faux "administration" saw the health crisis that morphed into an economic crisis as a political problem--one that threatened him directly. They strove to dismiss it as inconsequential or as a problem that they at the lofty level of the Federal Government shouldn't be concerned about. The result was mixed messaging which turned innocuous recommendations (masking and distancing for example) into political bombs. And as the author of the linked post noted local/state officials did everything from nothing at all to imposing lock-downs, school closures and quarantines. We have no real measures by which to judge what was beneficial/harmful or to what extent. China imposed stringed lock-downs in Wuhan and the surrounding provinces. Italy followed suit as did the rest of Europe and we followed them. It seemed like a reasonable idea. But I wondered: what if we had had a serious, concerted effort to persuade people to wear masks, to keep distant, to curtail their travel and limit family gatherings; what if we had provided conditions that would allow sick people to stay home without losing the pay checks they depend on.

 April 4

The temperatures have gone up. Yesterday was in the 60s and overnight we didn't go much below 50. I got out in the gardens and pulled some of the dead stuff. I plan to go out later today and do some more. I think I found another survivor--the oregano in the window box planter. I will take a closer look and see if it has survived and if it is worth keeping.

David Kaiser had another good article that reflects some of what I have been thinking watching the move in Republican controlled states to place new procedures to "secure" the electoral system even though concerted and repeated efforts to find fraud. The real problem is that people voted in large numbers who they think shouldn't vote because they aren't likely to vote Republican. Though the argument has largely been couched in terms of race (too many black and brown people endured all of the hardships heaped on them to vote) in truth poor people of all ethnic and racial groups (including) white are also subject to the new restrictions. Class is also an issue. I wondered if the Republicans were considering property qualifications like those in place in the early Republic.

It has been a bit over three weeks since Mom and I got out "jab" and a little longer since my niece got her last dose of whichever 2-shot vaccines she got so we were glad when she called to ask if she could visit. It was a good visit and we look forward to more now.

Oh!, and Happy Easter to those who observe the holiday. I almost forgot about that.

 April 2

Nice and sunny today and a bit warmer. I saw one of the lawn care crew the landlord retains picking up downed tree limbs and twigs and generally cleaning up. I would love to get out and do some of my own but I really don't want to freeze doing it. I will wait until later in the coming week when we should get warmer temps. I gather from the news last night that March was warmer than normal continuing the pattern for the January and February, in spite of the cold snaps. The snow we had yesterday, I think, has disappeared. Actually none of the snow we had really lasted long except where it got piled up from the shoveling and plowing.

Yesterday was opening day for baseball. I have dear friends who will be very happy. They have truly missed it. I saw clips of the Cleveland opener which featured snow showers. They got some of what we got: lake effect snow just a different lake. I can't tell you what the score was. I don't follow any sports at any distance. The information I get is just in passing.

I read the headline that the CDC has decreed that those who are vaccinated can travel now. I didn't read the entire article. I have noticed that quite a number of people frankly don't give a damn and are traveling whether they have been fully vaccinated or not. And I keep seeing bloggers and other writers up in arms over the proposed "vaccine passports." The most vocal of the QAnon representatives in Congress calls them Biden's "mark of the beast." We know it is spring because the blooming idiots are out in full force.

Last day of first quarter of 2021--DAMN!!

 Well, at least it is sunny--but it is way too cool and a bit windy to do any garden work. I am not toon anxious since I hadn't intended to really start on the garden chores until April. However, I recognize the signs of what one blogger calls IPS--impatient planter syndrome.

Happy April Fool's Day

Mother Nature is providing the joke--we have light, intermittent snow. Well we do have next week with the possibility of 70s and maybe a bit more. So no gardening today. Instead I will alternate reading and some needlework.

I have been listening to the talking heads debate the current administration's policy on Afghanistan and the pull out Former Guy (a.k.a., #45) agreed to sometime ago. They always talk about several of factors: whether an orderly pull out is possible in the month we have left on the agreement, what effect our leaving will have on our allies who also have troops there, whether pulling out will open the way for the Taliban to take over and what would happen to vulnerable Afghanis, especially female Afghanis. One of them today wondered if we have the resolve for an indefinite stay to keep the status quo. I think they are not asking the right questions. First, if we decided to stay indefinitely would we really stabilize the government we recognize. Or would we really just postpone an inevitable outcome we find very distasteful. Second, would our leaving simply open things up for a new "terrorist" center in Afghanistan that would threaten the U.S. or Europe? In case anyone has forgotten, the Taliban didn't conduct the 9/11 attack. That was Al Qaida and most of those who carried out the attack were Saudis. All the Taliban did was allow Al Qaida to set up on their territory. One day we might realize and accept responsibility for the growth of terrorism in the Middle East. Third, I find extremely "conservative" and "fundamentalist" Muslim groups as repulsive as I find "conservative" and "fundamentalist" Christian groups. However, what power do we really have to force other cultures in other countries to tow the line we dictate? We have a long history of triggering regime change and trying to remake nations in our image. That hasn't really worked out well and we have been dealing with the blowback and will be for some time. This is another area where we really need to creatively rethink our actions in the world.

Well, we finally have a real "infrastructure week" courtesy of the Biden Administration. Of course the Republicans have suddenly regained their suspicion of debt, deficit, and large spending programs. We didn't hear a single mewling squeak from them during the Former Guy's administration which added trillions to the deficit and debt with massive tax cuts that benefited the wealthy few and big corporations greatly without doing much for the rest of us. But I noticed that the critics of the plan have a very narrow view of "infrastructure." Basically they want it restricted to traditional energy systems, roads, airports, and water and sewage systems. No alternative energy, limited support for electric vehicles, and almost nothing else. And almost all of it directed to either private companies or to public/private "partnerships." I put that word in quotes because those partnerships usually mean that the public pays, the consumer pays and the private "partners" get a windfall. What is really sad is that voters generally, including Republican voters, appear, from various polls, to support various parts of the program by 60% or more.

Take a look at this for a bit of levity in a time when a laugh is worth a lot.