Sunday.  Welcome to June.  I can relate with considerable sympathy to one blogger I read regularly.  She wrote that the weather had gone from "too cold for my tomatoes to too hot to work in the garden within two days."  I try to get all of the work done early and in small bits throughout the mornings.  All I plan to do today is putter--maybe start some seeds that didn't sprout earlier, maybe plant some directly in the gardens.  I already have the stevia syrup boiling down and heating the water for a new batch of iced tea.

Update: Stevia done and tea done.  And the stevia syrup is very sweet.  I don't think we will need much for our dinner glasses of iced tea.

You know this had to come.  Too many stories about sick and dying pets resulting from, often still unidentified, ingredients in commercially prepared pet foods impelling pet owners to start preparing their pets' foods themselves from scratch.  I wouldn't be interested.  It looks like a nice bit of slight of hand, an illusion.  The companies give pet owners the illusion of preparing their pets' food themselves but the constituents are still prepared for them and the supply chain is still just as long and just as opaque as with the fully prepared foods.  It is rather like giving your kids a Hamburger Helper meal and claiming you made it entirely with your own hands.

Yeah, this is Caracas.  But how long before something similar happens in some of our drought stricken areas?  I have read about areas of Brazil and Argentina that are rationed to power and water only every third day.  How would you function in a similar circumstance?

Also from Venezuela.  I take these kinds of stories with a grain of salt.  The major problem though is that the past actions of the U.S. government in Latin America and elsewhere make the scenario entirely plausible.  However, plausibility doesn't necessarily mean fact.

This should add gasoline to the fire of the anti-vaccination movement.  And we really don't have any good basis for forming an opinion on the issue.  What are the chances of death or severe disability from getting a disease you might not get with vaccination versus the chances of getting some kind of long term disease (diabetes, obesity, autism) which requires long term (often expensive) medical treatment?  I haven't see any such data.  And what part of the vaccine may be responsible?  No one really knows that either.