Nice sunny morning. It should get warm but I have done everything out on the patio I wanted to do. I took the 3-tier planter apart, and cleaned out and discarded the lower two tiers. The top tier makes a nice large lobed pot with its own drip pan--and the begonias are doing very well and have bees visiting. I transplanted the best of the portulaca into individual pots. I try to conserve the soil as much as possible. Next year I will mix the old soil with potting mix for the season. Tomorrow I want to trim several of the plants that have become more than a bit over grown. With the lower temps, especially in the morning, I can get out there more. I simply can't take the heat any more. I have to make a list of plants I don't want to put in next year. I think I mentioned several a while back.
I finished two crochet pieces yesterday and today. One is the fillet pattern dragon which I plan to stitch onto a backing to better display the dragon. The other is a pineapple pattern doily. I left it for several days because I knew I didn't have enough of the red thread I was using to work the last row of pineapples. That presented a problem because I am trying to work down my stash and don't want to get more. I also didn't want to change colors in the middle of the pattern. So I simply pulled the stitches back to the base of the pineapples, which is a nice fan, and finished with a row of single crochet stitches. The smaller pattern is still large enough to make a pretty doily.
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I started this yesterday but never got around to posting. Oh, well--Welcome to Half-Past September. We are a week away from the Autumnal Equinox and astronomical fall. I was out on the patio a bit earlier and got a bit of the mess the birds, messy feeders that they are, left. I plan to rearrange things a bit so I have a nearly clear space around the feeder. That should make cleaning up a bit easier. I also cut back a couple of plants. The weather forecast predicts a whole week of sun with no rain so I can plan to do a couple of small (or smallish) chores done each day.
Bill Astore at Bracing Views picked up on a story originally from NBC concerning the soaring levels of medical debt even for people who have health insurance. I am not surprised. We did some math a few years ago. If you only have Medicare (as I do) a $1000 medical bill will leave you on the hook for $200 asuming Medicare pays the full 80% (which isn't always the case.) For me, that wouldn't be a problem because I do have a bit of savings. However, statistics I have seen say that a large percentage of Americans can't cover a $400 emergency. A couple of years ago Mom, who has Medicare Advantage had a $2000+ bill for a bout of pneumonia which had her in the hospital for four days. That is what neither Medicare and the Advantage supplement didn't cover. Luckily, mom is even better situated for emergency expenses than I am. As Astore mentions medical debt isn't the only kind of debt burdening Americans and it is adding up. We have an economy which is fueled by debt. Our economic "growth" is propelled by debt. If a significant number of debtors can't pay the whole system will seize up.
Stray thought: John Ganz, in a long post covering several topics, cites an observation that the Israelis "under the guise of destroying terrorist infrastructure" have destroyed about 70% of the civilian infrastructure as well. So that leads to a question: what distinguishes civilian infrastructure from "terrorist" infrastructure? I had that question in my mind reading stories about the problem of getting "humanitarian" supplies in when Israel would allow an item in at one time and refuse at another claiming in the latter incident that it would support Hamas. I wondered then what items could be allowed in that wouldn't support Hamas if they got their hands on it. Can anyone tell if the person eating the food is Hamas or "civilian" or if the person using the medical supplies is Hamas or "civilian" or... . You can continue this and I challenge you to mention ANYTHING that can be used only by civilians.
Found this after reading Last Week in Collapse. I didn't know there were toxic varieties of yams.
Another stray thought: I do read some "conservative" blogs. Sometimes they cover topics I find interesting that don't involve politics. However, I have noted that they see "facts" somewhat differently than I do. Or rather they see facts that I don't. For instance, the people who insist that Haitian immigrants they claim are illegally here (they aren't) are taking local pets and eating them (again they aren't). As you can see from the construction of that sentence there is a basic disagreement on what is a "fact." I have also noted that "conservative" bloggers are far more willing to disregard what I have long thought was a serious mental decline in Trump. I said in 2020 the he wasn't the man who ran in 2016--he seemed fuzzy; he wandered and he had trouble putting a coherent sentence together. This time around it is worse. But they have been willing to ignore that while really keying in on Biden's mental lapses which were far fewer. And any attempt to point that out sets his supporters off on a convulsive rant about how unfair the critics are. There seems to be no moderation and that scares me. It scares me even more when people, who may or not be Trump supporters, start calling in bomb threats or swatting perceived "enemies." I say "may or may not" because there are idiots who are happy to make trouble for the hell of it regardless of politics. I hope they are identified and prosecuted.
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