Good Morning, All. We continue our cool, dry weather--at least for now. By the weekend we may get some of the remaining rain from Hermine which has been drenching Texas for the last couple of days. How much is always a question with these systems. It all depends on how the system gets directed. The rain would be welcome because I wouldn't have to water the gardens for a couple of days but, with the cooler weather, the plants need less anyway.

I found this article on HuffingtonPost this morning. Evidently Fidel Castro has come to the conclusion (which his brother, Raul, has been saying for a little while now) that their economic system doesn't work for them anymore. I can imagine that the old cold warriors are raising a shout of joy. But my thought: Ours doesn't work for us anymore either. His assessment came in response to a reporter's question of whether Cuban style communism was worth exporting. I would ask the same of our capitalist system. But no one seems to have gone that far.

We heard on the news this morning that Toy 'R' Us is opening a slew of temporary stores to get a jump on the Holiday sales season. Our first reaction was 'Damn, it isn't even Halloween yet." MSNBC also carried the story here. One bright note in this--there will be, maybe, 10k new temporary jobs and the seasonal hiring may take off earlier than usual. I noticed last week that some stores are already putting out their Halloween merchandise. Maybe we should convert all of our holidays that haven't yet succumbed to commercialization to 'sales holidays' and be done with it.

I have been wondering what to say about the 'Pastor' and his plan to burn copies of the Koran down in Florida. Then I found that Helen at Margaret and Helen has said almost everything I was thinking and did so better than I could. Let me say that I am an equal opportunity skeptic. The idiot child pastor has decided he has to combat a 1400 year old lie while I say that we should tolerate that lie and his own 2000 year old lie as well. I find a lot of good in both religions (and others as well) but I think it is a damned shame what people have done with that good which is why I am a skeptic.

Robert Brady has a humorous post at Pure Land Mountain on the problems of dealing with insect pests in the garden. I had an infestation of Colorado Potato Beetles this spring that turned some of the leaves of my ichiban eggplants to lace before I finally got them under control. I don't go quite as far as Bob does. I turned to the pyrethrin insecticide from my local garden shop. pyrethrin is derived from chrysanthemums, breaks down quickly without a nasty residue, and rinses off easily. Also, after my experience with processing cayenne peppers for drying in the dehydrator and Mom's with getting poblanos ready to stuff and cook, I want nothing to do with a hot pepper spray. We were hacking for a week.

Good Morning, Everyone. We had errands to run yesterday and spent most of the day out. I really didn't have anything much to say about the news I read and only had enough time to read a fraction of what I normally read. Since I have nothing new about the gardens I will get right to my commentary.

This article from the LA Times was the first thing I saw this morning. You might think I am outraged by this. I'm not. I have come to expect this behavior. This passage sums up the situation very succinctly:

"This is about intentional disregard for the interests of doctors, hospitals and patients in California, and the pursuit of cutting costs at any means possible," said Adam Cole, the insurance department's general counsel. "It's a story of intense corporate greed."

But the observation could legitimately be made about any of our major corporations. The finance industry has intentionally disregarded the interests of their shareholders, some clients, and the nation as a whole in their pursuit of obscene profits. I doubt that TransOcean and BP were the only companies that pursued their profits at the expense of the environment and local people. The problems these rogues cause affect so many people (and such a wide area) that we absolutely must have good regulation in place and agencies empowered to deal with them. But we still have a strong block of people who thing government can't do anything right and therefore should do nothing at all. Further, those same people still hold to the belief that "the Market" will some how force these criminals in suits to behave nicely in spite of all of the evidence to the contrary

Then there is this article from HuffingtonPost. The article deals, specifically, with the problem the Obama administration has had in getting its judicial nominees confirmed. But as I read this I remembered part of an article I read and a conversation that article triggered. Sorry I can't put up a link to the article but I can't remember which blog I found it on. The article talked about a crisis of authority in this country. At the moment I am remembering the old Paul Newman movie Cool Hand Luke: 'What we have here is a failure to communicate.' But we have much more systemic failure in this country and the situation has been building for a long time. The failure goes well beyond simply communication. The fundamental bedrock of this Republic is that we hold elections and then abide by the results but I have seen repeated cracks in this bedrock over the last few decades. While I lived in Missouri I saw ballot measures concerning riverboat gambling come up several years running. The proponents got the measure passed the first year. Then the opponents came back the next year with ballot initiates to cancel out the law. Then the proponents...yada, yada, yada. You see where this is going. One party may lose the election but they simply refuse to accept the legitimacy of the other party's right to rule. Obama won his election with a far greater margin than George W. Bush won his elections but the Republicans have refused to accept his right to rule. Their obstructionism has gone far beyond the actions of a 'loyal' opposition. We have a crisis of legitimacy and I don't know how we are going to deal with it.

Time Goes By has a guest post this morning by Saul Friedman that deals extensively with similar issues. I realized as I was reading this that I also miss the old time conservatives. I often didn't agree with them but you had to respect them. They stood for something. I don't have any respect for the so-called conservatives of today. They are shills and hacks too often for something before the political winds blow them in the opposite direction. They do something that Lillian Helman and other brave Americans refused to do before Sen. Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities (witch hunt) committee: cut their consciences to fit the current moral fashion. Or what they think is the moral fashion that will get them re-elected. We don't have statesmen anymore--we have political prostitutes.

Happy Labor Day to all of you. I don't know about anyone else but I really haven't celebrated Labor Day since I was a kid. It has become just another retail 'holiday' and the unofficial end of summer marked by the last cook-outs or what ever. Once upon a time working people had something to celebrate--not so much any more. Everything the Labor Movement gained from the 1930s to the 1970s seems to be disappearing--family wage, health care, pension plans, vacations. I have often thought that the last two-thirds of the twentieth century was a bit of an anomaly. Before that a 'family wage' meant a man's wage plus his wife's (one-half the man's) plus at least 2 kids (each earning half the woman's wage). A work day was anywhere from 12 to 16 hours without breaks. A work week was (usually) 5 1/2 days with Sunday off and maybe you celebrated the feast day of St. Monday if you were too hungover to work. If you were lucky, when you died you had a burial account with the local workers association which paid for a nice funeral. And if you were real lucky you didn't get seriously ill because the charity hospitals were gruesome. I read the news and wonder if that is what we are returning to--with some nasty twists.

Good Sunday morning to everyone and I hope you are all having a nice Labor Day Holiday. We experienced our lowest overnight temp since early May last night. I noticed a couple of days ago that some of the trees are showing the first faintest sign of their fall colors. The seasons are definitely changing but we are ready for the change. We don't really care much for winter but at least we don't have to go out in bad weather in any season. There is nothing so pressing that we have to risk life and limb (or even mild discomfort) by venturing out. That is one thing we definitely do not miss about having a job we have to go to come hell or high water, as they used to say. Soon we will have to close up the windows, reset the storm windows, and put the plastic up. Soon we will be wearing our flannel nightgowns and pajamas and our heavier robes. Soon I will shift from short sleeved t-shirts to long sleeved turtle necks and then into sweats. The normal progression of the year.

I hear you, Kay, about the energy. I have noticed that I don't have nearly as much as I did ten or twenty years ago. But then most of what I do doesn't require that much. I don't think I have spent more that, on average, three hours any one day working my garden containers. Much of the work is done in spurts and none of it is so pressing that it as to be done now. I generally spend a few minutes each morning looking at what is coming up. I took out the Mother's Day tomato yesterday but I could have waited till today (or I could have done it the day before yesterday). I dried about half of the herbs I picked yesterday but the dehydrator did most of the work. All I did was arrange the leaves and sprigs and turn the machine on. Today I will bag up the herbs, label the bags and put them in the refrigerator. Next year I may do a bit more work because I think I should cultivate the beds more often. I don't have a lot of weeds anyway and cultivating for that reason isn't a high priority. But I think the plants would benefit from being in looser soil and cultivation will accomplish that. The key to anything is to find the most efficient way to do what you want to do. A second key is to find out what you really want to do and then do it. Right now, my situation allows me to concentrate on three things I really like to do: gardening, reading, and needlework. When the garden demands attention I shift my energy that way because the books and needlework will always be there to be picked up later (or when the necessary chores in the garden are done.) When the garden is done or dormant I can shift my energy to the other areas. I find that with the garden winding down I have done more needlework. Over the last month I finished crocheting two large market bags and a dozen wash cloths to use up some cotton yarn I have had for years as well as taking apart a half-finished bedspread that I knew I would never finish and using part of it for two sofa pillows that also used up some material I had accumulated. I have some new projects in mind for the winter and a couple I want to finish. We'll see how they go.

Good Morning, Everyone. We had nice cool weather yesterday and will have more of the same today. I definitely am not complaining. Mom and I have been shifting mentally into fall mode for the last couple of weeks. We realized that when we decided two weeks ago not to get any salad fixings because we simply don't want summer salads any more. We are thinking more and more of the cool weather meals like chillies, soups and casseroles. It time for the seasons to change and we look forward to that. I have taken several spent pepper plants and the globe basil out of the garden containers and replaced them with mums and some spare marigolds and portulaca. Mom suggested I leave the mums in place and see if they survive the winter. I will do that. If they survive I can split the plants and pot them in the spring for use next fall. If they don't I can simply replace them next year.

We were taking stock of what we have produced this year something a lot of the gardening bloggers I read are also doing. Some go so far as to measure in how many pounds of veggies they get. Given the small size of my planting area we measure more in how many meals we can get with the produce we harvested or how much of what we would normally buy that we won't have to because of what we have produced. Here are our calculations so far: 1) we won't need to buy any cayenne pepper for the next two years. We have enough drying on a line in the kitchen or that are dry in baggies in the fridge and more is ripening. Next year we will plant some other hot pepper in its place. 2) We have harvested all of the eggplant we would normally eat over a year plus some. We have already had our fill of fried eggplant and have more frozen fresh without any cooking, frozen cooked, and dried. We will try all three over the winter. Next year won't plant the fairy tales variety but will plant the ichiban andonly two plants. 3) We got a good harvest out of our Big Bertha bell peppers and False Alarm (minimally hot jalapeno style variety) and cow's horn cayenne plants; not so good out of the Mexibelle (too small--don't know why), poblano (won't plant again--we only need 8 good sized ones for stuffing with cheese and ours don't get large enough); and a modest yield from the gypsies. We put up a lot of frozen bell pepper slices and dried a lot more of all varieties. I will definitely plant the Big Bertha variety again along with the False Alarm but will put in something else in place of the others. 4) We got a very good yield out of the Fresh Salsa variety of tomatoes which we put into a fresh salsa that lasted most of the summer, cooked spicy tomato some of which is still frozen (we used some already), and some we dried. We only got a moderate harvest from the Big Rainbow and Brandywine varieties. I want to try to start the tomatoes very early next year and get them out early under plastic, and, hopfully, they will produce before the summer heat takes hold. We figure we produced about one-third of the tomatoes we normally use. 5) The yardlong beans produced very well and we have five quarts in the freezer for the winter. That should be enough until next summer when I plan to add Blue Lake pole beans to the garden as well. I also saved seeds from the yardlong that I will plant next year. Since that is an heirloom variety so that should not be a problem. We will see. 6) Our sage, thai basil, stevia, and lavender plants have done very nicely. I will try taking cuttings of those to root inside over the winter. The globe basil is a very pretty plant and smells wonderful but the thai basil is just as pretty and the leaves are easier to harvest. Next year I want to expand the herbs to include thyme, marjoram, rosemary, and other culinary species.

Happy Holiday Friday morning to you all. I guess we can call summer ended. I know we will probably have some more hot weather but I will enjoy today--low 70s. After last night's heavy rain with a lot of thunder I have to take a good look at the garden. I know already that I will have to pay particular attention to one of the big pepper plants but I have been planning to do that anyway. I has too many large peppers for the branches so the dehydrator will be working for the next couple of days. I will also freeze some of them. We had a nice spaghetti yesterday which included some of our Italian spiced home-ground sausage and some of the peppers we had frozen earlier. Oh, it was SOOOO good.

I agree with you, Kay. I don't like Alan Simpson one bit. But I think he is malicious schemer whose agenda is to discredit anyone who receives (or can reasonably expect to receive) or who supports any kind of government mediated payments. If he can do that they can more easily repudiate the programs under which the payments are made. I read two weeks ago (I think) that the IMF is strongly suggesting that the U.S. repudiate some obligations and you can bet they won't be the Treasury bonds that have been bought by China or other sovereign funds around the world. They want our government to repudiate the obligations owed to our own people. What really burns me up is that a large part of the guarantees Germany (for one) has provided to help Greece out of its economic mess are provided by the IMF which in turn receives a large part of its funding from US.

Good Thursday, everyone. As you can tell nothing much has happened that is all that worthy of comment. The news is the news. It hasn't changed much. It is wet outside this morning so I will move my out of house errands to today and deal with some of my garden work tomorrow. I need to pick up a book from the library and then I will wander around a bit.

I found Dr. David Katz's article on HuffingtonPost this morning. He doesn't say anything I haven't heard before but I absolutely love his assessment of modern life: "The root cause (of most modern disease) is modern living. Everything about modern living that makes it modern -- processed food, suburban sprawl, labor-saving technology, mass media marketing -- is obesigenic, and conducive to the insalubrious application of feet and forks". I also think he is right in identifying the root problem--population growth. It is an interesting and vicious cycle. We need to feed, cloth, and house people but if we do it well we will have more and more people to feed, cloth, and house. We have always relied on technologies of varying complexity to solve the problem but those technologies have two consequences. They solve the problem of producing the more that the initial population requires but they then allow that population to grow to the point where the technologies are strained. And at the same time those technologies produce other not so benign consequences: water pollution, air pollution, soil degradation, and health problems due to those consequences. So we are locked into a pattern of developing a technology and then dealing with the problems of both the success of the technology and the unintended detrimental effects of its use by developing the next generation of technology which will have its own problems of success and unintended detrimental effects.

I found this item at Crooks and Liars this morning concerning Alan Simpson, Co-Chair of that fiscal responsibility committee designed to deal with the budget deficit. Although the committee is supposed to devise ways to fix the deficit overall it seems fixated, thanks largely to Simpson and his ilk, on Social Security, Medicare and other 'social entitlements.' He has taken to spewing outrageous sentiments at people who contradict his own notion of the budgetary mess. Last week he emailed a woman activist whose article noted how devastating a cut in social security would be to older women that Social Security was a "milch cow with 310 million tits" and she should contact him again when she "got a real job." The comments that have the blogosphere up in arms today are directed toward Viet Nam era veterans, their health concerns, and the costs to the Veterans' Administration of dealing with them. As Simpson so nicely put it "The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess," said Simpson, an Army veteran who was once chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee." I think the reactions to each of Simpson's individual 'indiscretions' miss something very, very important. Simpson is attacking and trying to trivialize anyone or any group who has a long established claim on the social, political, or economic collective that is the country. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), author of Leviathan, wrote that Man in a state of nature was engaged in a 'war of all against all' and life under those conditions was 'solitary, nasty, poor, brutish and short.' To cure that and provide stability societies and governments were formed. Unfortunately, it seems to me, society has evolved to a point where we may be recreating the conditions Hobbes saw as pertaining to the state of Man in nature but within societies and governments. We have a war of all against all where the social bonds among us atomized human beings are so weak that life may again be solitary, nasty, poor, brutish and short.

Ronni Bennett's alter ego, Crabby Old Lady, has a good post at Time Goes By today. The experiences she describes sound very familiar. We have also stopped buying the packaged salad greens partly because of the safety issue but also because the packaged greens never keep very well. We don't buy any ground beef any more. We get the cheap beef roasts from our supermarket and grind our own. For half the price of the higher grades of ground beef we get much better by doing it ourselves. We also get the cheap pork roasts and grind it ourselves to make sausage; again for about half the price of the commercially prepared product. We have almost stopped buying canned veggies--way too much salt. For that same reason we will not buy prepared pizzas again either. We have cut so much salt out of our diets that we can really taste it now and the frozen pizzas, canned navy beans, and sauerkraut are unpalatable. Mom drained and rinsed the last can of sauerkraut which left us with a tasteless mess. Now, sauerkraut is supposed to be fermented in brine but the crap we got tasted like the producer had boiled the cabbage, packed in cans with brine and shipped it. We still enjoy our eggs but we buy them from a local year-round farmer's market which gets them from a local producer whose chickens are cage free. Even though the local supermarket did have a sign like the one Crabby saw claiming that the eggs didn't come from the targeted farms we won't go back to the supermarket for eggs. We switched before the salmonella scare for reasons other than safety and the safety issues simply reinforce our decision. We have been so disappointed so often with our commercial food producers that we have reduced our use of those products drastically. We have been told for so long that our market system gives us the widest choice of the best products at the best prices but that is a lie.

I found this alternet article that struck a chord with me. Earlier this year I 'officially' retired. I could say that I had retired two and a half years ago when I lost my last job. Over the intervening time I got applied for a number of jobs but got only one interview which went south within five minutes as the manager noted I was 'over-qualified.' The last time I looked at the job listings I found more work-at-home and other scams than legitimate jobs. Most of the jobs are part time. Why did the article strike a chord? Well, many of the jobs I applied for (and never even got an acknowledgement that they had received my application) were part time but required the employee to be 'on call' for when ever the employer wanted them. For a part time job the employee basically had to put family on hold. And to make a living I would have needed at least three of those jobs while praying I never got sick because none provided any kind of health insurance. Given the prospects I took Social Security at my earliest opportunity. We have a running joke now about all of the jobs that are out there. Neither of us misses them and all the s#$t that goes with them. The author is right--we do need a different approach to work. Something a lot more humane.