TGIF for all of those for whom the weekend is a significant break in work patterns.  For the rest, hope your Friday is pleasant.  The weather people say heat and probable thunderstorms.  We only got about a third of an inch over the last day--not enough to keep my large plants happy.  Just enough to make gardening a matter of sneaking out between the raindrops to pull a weed or too.

Glad you like my pics, Kay.  The gardens are doing pretty well.  I will be really happy if the weather cooperates but we know how that goes.  The lavender that survived the 2011/13 winter and came back lush last year didn't make it through this just past winter.  As I read somewhere "Man plans; God laughs" and Nature has been very bitchy over the last few years.

So much of our economics and politics is smoke and funhouse mirrors, Kay.  Unfortunately, the ones trying to control those areas each think what they see is real and that they can truly control such complex systems.

Our WTF!?? moment during the morning news came when we heard the news reader say that "Americans" have regained almost all of the "wealth" they had lost with the Great Recession.  Ezra Klein shreds the argument without any of the profanity we expressed.  Which Americans and what wealth?  If you are talking about the top couple of percent of the economic pyramid, maybe--but they aren't all of us.  If you are talking about paper (i.e., stocks and bonds) wealth, maybe--but not all of us have stocks and bonds.  First, that only becomes real 'wealth' when it is sold and converted into cash.  Second, those of us who had most of our wealth in our homes are still mostly screwed.  More smoke and funhouse mirrors.

One for the "It might not be as eco-friendly as we thought" file.  Generating power from sunlight sounds like a good idea--until we apply industrial methods.  A farm more eco-friendly idea would have been to fit those 75k homes (the ones the solar 'farm' is designed to power) with individual combined solar/wind systems.  But then there wouldn't be any continuing profits to a private power generating company.  Can't have than, can we?

Another sign of how times have changed.  My first comment when I heard the teaser for the story on last night's news was "I guess they are planning on using free lancers and citizens with cell phone cameras."  I learned photography in the Navy when it was done with non-digital cameras, film, and chemicals.  I never did it professionally but I always enjoyed photos that showed someone's true skill.  I even managed to produce a few of that kind.  Like most of us I have shifted to digital cameras and image manipulating software.  Believe me it isn't the same.

Talk about smoke and funhouse mirrors--or, as I thought when I saw this the first two times today, Potemkin villages.  We wouldn't want to disturb the delicate sensibilities of G8 leaders with reality would we.

I read the title of this post on The Agonist and thought "Oh, they've got a vaccine for that?" For a change someone was thinking more viciously than I normally do.

I have seen several stories recently about doctors refusing to take any form of insurance.  Here is one I just found.  For some time I have thought that third party payers are a major mover behind rising medical costs.  Not because of simple greed though that does enter into it in some cases.  Rather because of the wall that third party places between the provider of the medical service and the recipient of it.  Neither of the doctor nor the patient have much control of amount paid.  That is the function of the insurer.  I read one story where one of the doctors recounted the maze of paperwork that required dedicated employees to handle and the time lost dealing with denied claims and other such matters.  That doctor was able to streamline his paperwork, reduce his staff and spend more time with his patients while charging less.

On the matter of insurance this little item attracted my notice and I am sure that the sentiments aren't limited to Canada.  Our tornado season is making up for lost time and the costs are escalating.  The main point with both disaster insurance and health insurance is that the companies are profit-making businesses.  So the costs have to be passed on or made up somewhere.  They will charge their customers more in premiums, restrict what those premiums will pay for, or limit what they will pay the providers of the services involved.  In the end the insured party has to pay for all.  It might be better to pay the providers directly and cut out the middle men.

Good Thursday, all, and now that I have finished posting the tour of the garden I can go on to other things.  Let's see what is out there.

The baristas and shift supervisors in NY Starbucks have squared off against each other in court.  At issue: who has a right to share in the tip jars.  The legal point in question is whether the shift supervisors who are hourly but who have limited management duties are "agents' of the company and barred from getting a share out in the tips.  They say yes and the baristas say no.  Now the courts will decide.

What are the old sayings about getting toothpaste back into tubes or genies back into their bottles?  A strain of genetically modified wheat the Monsanto supposedly stopped testing in 2005 has turned up in an Oregon field and no one knows from whence it came.  The anomaly could threaten Oregon's exports to Japan and other countries who really don't want that crap.  By the way, the wheat was never approved by the FDA.  Update:  I didn't expect anyone to react so quickly.  I wonder how many others will follow Japan.

 I promised you all pictures and here they are.  I did get some nice pictures of the goldfinches feeding in the gardens.  I think this is a little female not quite sure if it is safe to stay.

 These are the only big containers I didn't change out completely.  though slightly misshapen they aren't in quite the bad conditions the ones I replaced were.  The red planter has kale and will soon have more.  the pink has beans, bee balm, pineapple sage, and basil.

Chamomile and zinnia in a large round pot.

Tomatoes (white bucket and near blue container) with chocolate mint in pot straddling the two buckets.  The far bucket is empty for now.  Haven't decided what to put in there.

 Just a reminder of the winter past.

Grapefruit mint, tomatoes (left bucket) and peppers (right bucket).

 Hibiscus in the near pot and tansy in the far one.  The tansy is one of the survivors of the winter and came back luxuriously.  I have it for its insecticidal properties.  It is supposed to be good.  I moved it into its own pot because it is very invasive.  It tried to fill the whole large container I had it in over winter.  Pretty foliage.

 Beans (Yardlong asparagus), hyssop (small plants in the center), and kale.

Male goldfinch checking out the feeder.

Pyrethrum about to bloom.  Another survivor of the winter.  This is another plant the bugs don't like.  It didn't bloom last year.

 the left container has my left over pepper and tomatoes.  Sage (another winter survivor) and lemon thyme in the smaller blue container.  You can't see the foxglove and cabbage at the back.  I just snipped off the first blooms on the sage.

Squash, tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in the buckets with spearmint and stevia in the pots.  The cucumbers have been badly damaged by winds and cold.  I have never had wind damaged plants but this year the cukes and the cypress vines have had a very hard time.  I will be starting new seeds for both.

Strawberry--one of a dozen or so survivors and new plants in pots throughout the gardens.

 The lone surviving blueberry.  Look closely at the base of the green branch and you will see the new growth.  The other two didn't survive.  I plan to transfer it to its own pot.  Thankfully blueberries self pollinate so I don't absolutely need to replace the plants that didn't survive.

 Pair of goldfinches.

King of the garden.  Isn't he pretty.

Good wet Wednesday to you all.  We didn't hear the rain last night because the thunder boomed, and boomed, and rolled, and rolled.  The weather people described it as "house shaking."  We can testify to the accuracy of that.  We are supposed to get more waves of rain with possible thunderstorms.  The wind is up and rocking the trees now.  Needless to say--I haven't done much in the gardens.  I did stop by Home Depot to look at the plants but didn't buy anything.  I just don't know what I want to fill in and nothing spoke to me.  Saturday is supposed to be cool, sunny and dry.  I will try again then.

I agree, Kay.  Mom and I find ourselves going back in time with respect to diet and that the 'food Nazis' wouldn't like at all.  Some items, like ice cream, are treats and we treat them that way.  They are infrequent indulgences not something to eat three times a day every day.  As such we thoroughly disregard the so-called nutritional statistics.  Just this morning the news had a snippet about a new study which finds that there is an increased risk of obesity and diabetes if one drinks five or more cups of coffee a day.  I have known a lot of heavy coffee drinkers and been one myself for quite a number of years.  Guess what--no diabetes.  And the obesity can be traceable to other things in our modern diet like processed foods and a sedentary lifestyle.  The notion that the researchers claim they have isolated a chemical that may play a part cuts no ice with me.  Another example of what Michael Pollan calls "nutritionism" (In Defense Of Food)--the belief that one can identify specific compounds which have specific and individual and reproducible effects.  He shreds this quasi-religious belief system.  By the way--we just finished off a blueberry upside cake (made from scratch) and a blueberry pie is in the oven for the next week.  Again we don't much care about the calorie count.  We don't go for huge portions--an 8x8 cake lasts us four days.  Think about that.  The individual portions are only 2inX4in.  Our approach to any food is moderation not prohibition which seems to be alien to most Americans these days.

I haven't read the Thomas Friedman article The Contrary Farmer cites but I find it both interesting and believable.  A chapter in Jared Diamond's Collapse dealt with the 'genocide' in Rwanda which our media presented in terms of ethnic tensions.  Diamond made a good case for overpopulation and the resulting economic tensions being the prime mover.  The conflicts in Sudan with Biafra and what has become South Sudan were similarly resource driven (water and oil).  The ethnic aspects came in to define the 'us' who deserved the resources and the 'them' who had them and didn't deserve them.

As I read this article I flashed back to the scene in Jurassic Park where the scientist assures everyone the dinosaurs couldn't breed because they were all females--"we engineered them that way."  So what could possibly go wrong?

I can hope that the dear (expletive) will simply crawl back under her rock.  Unfortunately, her unsavory aroma will hang around in our media like a recently gone skunk.

The logic behind this article is mind-blowing.  They take scraps from the U.S. wood products industry, transport those scraps to the U.K. where it is burned in power plants instead of coal.  And the U.K. gets credits for going "green."  I guess the greenhouse emissions involved somehow aren't charged against the U.K.

Good Tuesday, Everyone, though it feels like a Monday with yesterday being a holiday.  It was wet and cool with a very brief flash of sun.  I spent a bit trying to get my camera to work without flash so I could try the get pictures of the goldfinches.  I had to work through the door and screen because opening either sent the birds flying away.  I think I managed to get a couple of reasonably decent pictures.

So now, at least according to a new study featured on the morning broadcast news, c-section babies have a higher chance of being obese by age 11.  I am sorry but this is another study I take with a ton of salt.  There has been a move for some years to curtail the use of caesarean sections (which I agree have been overused) and what better way to do that than to link the procedure to obesity about which everyone is freaking out anyway.

Conversation at the supermarket:  Mom: Do we want canned milk or regular milk or 2%?  Me: Well, no 2%.  I don't really like chalk water.  But the 2% canned milk is not on sale.  Mom:  we could go with fat-free canned milk.  Me: I wonder how much difference there is.  Look, the whole canned milk has 3g fat and 30mg of sodium.  The 2% has 0.5g fat and 35mg salt and the fat-free has 0 fat and 40mg of sodium.  You know what they have done?  To make the reduced fat and fat-free palatable they increased the salt.  We finally decided to get the whole canned milk.  Mom is on one prescription medication for high blood pressure and another to lower her cholesterol.  Interesting choice here--the fat-free or low fat would reduce her dietary fats and therefore her cholesterol but the increasing sodium would act on her blood pressure.  Can't win for losing.  In the end we decided against buying the fresh whole milk and replenished our canned with the whole variety.

Good Sunday to everyone visiting here.  Cool yet again but I hope we will get more sun than we had yesterday.  So far everything outside is hanging on.  My goodness what weather we are having and not just here.  I have read about temperatures throughout India that range between 112F and 120F.  Yikes!!  Then snow cancelled a major bicycle road race in Italy and they have had snow from Spain through parts of France into Italy.  Parts of the U.S. from New York through Main have had either snow or flooding rains and massive rain resulting in floods in Texas.  Please don't crow about the "end of the drought."  All it would take to bring it back is a month of high temperatures and no rain.

Hi, Kay.  I don't know when 'supersizing' meals became the norm but I do remember when I began rejecting such meals and the reactions I got.  The first time I said "no, thank you" to the girl at McDonalds who asked if I wanted the to "Supersize" the meal she was shocked and insisted that it was the better deal for my money.  She seemed disgusted when I informed her that it was no deal if I threw half of it away because I didn't want all that food.  I got a similar reaction when another clerk at another McDonalds (a decade later) offered me a two-for-one deal on the apple "pies."  I told her flat out that I only wanted to eat one and they only taste good hot and didn't reheat well.  I don't remember when we started bringing home half of the meals we get in our restaurants.  They make a second meal for us next day.  We usually choose the kinds of meals that reheat well.  But then we have also noticed that some of the sit-down restaurants have cut the size of their meals--a reaction to the economic downturn, I think.

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Good Monday and Happy Memorial Day, Everyone.  Rain today and we have temperature is ten degrees warmer than yesterday.  I am glad of the rain because the upper parts of some of my containers were drying out.  I planned to water today if we didn't get any rain and I did water the tansy.  It is a big plant and sucked up the moisture in its pot very quickly.  I will have to watch it over the summer.  I dug up the two blueberry bushes that looked thoroughly dead and found the only living roots belonged to weeds in the root balls.  I pulled them.  The third is showing a couple of new shoots so I will transplant it to a smaller pot and try to nurse it along.  The winter was particularly nasty for the blueberries, German thyme, and lavender.  I put in lemon thyme and new lavender which are doing well.

So, the New York Times has taken notice of a phenomenon I have read about for the last couple years: the varieties of vegetables we consume have had the nutrients bred out of them.  This chart illustrates the case.

I do like gadgets--not necessarily to own.  These are in the "cute--but" file.  I can, usually, keep up with my inside plants' needs without high tech toys. The highest tech I have are the moisture meter and the combined pH/fertility meter.  And most forms of self'-watering planters are more trouble than they are worth.  My opinion--others may find them useful.

And another in the "overblown medical/science fears" file.  I remember the hysteria over 'crack babies.' How many other so-called medical crusades are similarly overblown?

Good Saturday to you all.  Cool with possible showers--and the pattern should hold through Monday.  I won't be doing much outside except pulling a weed or two.  I took my little dawn walk through the containers and found that most plants are doing fairly well.  The Amish paste and Supersauce tomatoes have wind burned leaves but new growth so they should be all right.  The Mohawk peppers are still hanging in.  Thankfully the wind should not be so vigorous today.  Update: I just checked the cypress vines.  The winds shredded them but I saw new growth so they may recover.

The first little goldfinch showed up at our feeder this morning--ever.  Yeah!!!  Update:  the first finch is back with friends.  They are all exploring the feeder and everything else on the fence.

I am not at all surprised by this story.  I don't believe many people think in terms of calories when they decide what or how much to eat.  When I went into a fast food restaurant (some years ago) I thought in terms of "hamburger, fries and coke."  I didn't think in terms of  "number of calories for the burger, y number of calories for the fries, and z number of calories for the coke."  Even at home we don't think in terms of how many calories we are taking in but in the volume of food.  A frequent topic of conversation here is how we have reduced our food intake over the last decade or so but we aren't talking about calories but volume of food.  Once a bowl of chili was a large bowl filled to near the rim. The bowl remains the same but it isn't filled quite so full.  Not because we want fewer calories but because we want less volume.  I am not surprised that people can't accurately estimate the calorie content of their fast food choices.  We just don't translate meals or meal components into calories.  Let's also be honest about portion sizes.  Have you ever seen a realistic portion on the nutrition panel of a food product?  We always find the portions they say are 'normal' are either too large or more often too small.  Who eats a quarter cup of nuts or a dozen chips (or however many they say is a portion)?