July 10

Early yet so it isn't evident what the weather might be like. The Weather Channel predicts that it will be sunny and in the mid 80s. I fixed up a cream of chicken soup with veggies yesterday--from scratch. It didn't take long and tasted way better than any commercially prepared soup out there. We still have enough for today as well. Most of our cooking nowadays is from scratch.

This CNN story is interesting. There are a lot of good reasons to make public transit systems free to riders. But as usual it comes down to who pays for what. But no one realizes that all of us pay one way or another. Pay taxes for public transit or pay with increased pollution, congestion, all the costs of owning and operating your car. Remember the old commercial for an auto repair chain: pay me now or pay me later.

Just a thought: all the shuffling around about whether Ukraine should be admitted to NATO is ignoring something. Putin has cast the conflict as a "poor little Russia" vs. THE WEST. In other words, we are involved in a war that we don't want to call a war--at least for us. But we are supplying more and more lethal aid to Ukraine. We are doing everyone but sending our own soldiers. Perhaps it is time to admit Ukraine and let Putin decide if he wants to continue the farce when NATO would be obligated to fully support Ukraine.

The sunny prediction appears to be the accurate one. I wanted to harvest some of the herbs for dehydrating but instead watered everything, added soil to a couple of the pots, and rigged a bit of a fence to keep the alyssum  from overgrowing the hibiscus. If we still have good weather tomorrow I will harvest those herbs.

I wonder what is happening with our internet connection. It has gone out three times today. That has been happening more frequently lately.

Anthropocene Magazine has an interesting article describing a shift in attitudes toward climate change. The first phase described was the notion that what those who advocated that climate change was real was to find the right arguments, the right facts and they could convince the deniers that the coming crisis was real. I never thought that would happen. It reminded me of the recurring refrain of social improvement scheomes that all we had to do was educate people and suddenly they would buy into the middle class live and values. That never happened on a large scale either. Denialism has shifted to doomerism. Woe is us but we can't do anything. It is almost a "eat, drink, and be merry because it is all over anyway. Apocalypse fatigue is passing into fatalism. But there seem to be signs of climate change stoicism. Maybe that is a good thing. Stoics accept what is real and roll with it; finding ways of living with it.