I took cuttings from both types of lavender (English and Elegance), the lotus vine and the lemon mint to try to root. I may take some more from other plants today. I have cucumbers to get into brine so they can become pickles and a bunch of cherry tomatoes to pickle as well. We'll see what else I get done today.

I concentrated on herbs I have been neglecting lately and harvested chives, thyme, stevia, and lime basil. Those are drying now. I found a couple of likely strawberry plantlets that I put in wet vermiculite to root--hopefully. I found two nicely developing Dragon's egg cucumbers hiding behind the trellis. That was a nice surprise but the tally of three for that variety is still a bit disappointing. I found two pretty, ripe strawberries so we each had one decorating the top of our peach/walnut/maple syrup yogurt.

Another cool night. The temperatures for today are forecast to reach 80 which they didn't yesterday. It was nice to leave the doors open to the breeze. I need to collect cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and water everything. Other than that I plan to work on some of the herbs. I think the mystery plant I found in the chocolate mint was a calibrachoa. I had them in planters on the fence last year or, maybe. the year before. Evidently one managed to shed some seed.

I checked my e-mail today and was totally bummed out. I had 12 in my in-box and 41 in the junk folder. I do check my junk folder because Outlook has a habit of putting some pieces in there that aren't junk. But it is ridiculous that my junk e-mail outnumbered real mail almost 4 to 1. It is beginning to resemble the snail mail box which is almost all junk.

I found six pickling cucumbers, one Dragon's Egg cucumber, six Patio Baby Eggplants, and a mess of cherry tomatoes. Mom is planning to use the Dragon's Egg and the two smallest pickling cucumbers in a yogurt/cucumber/onion salad we like. The four large picklers will be pickled as will the cherry tomatoes we don't eat with the chef salad today. I don't know what happened to the Ox Heart tomatoes this year because I don't see a one developing. The Dragon's Egg, which has been a good producer in previous seasons, has been disappointing also since I don't see any others developing.

Cool this morning--really cool--mid fifties cool. Something of a shock for late July. The calendar is also something of a shock--we have only three days left in July. We are having a problem with computers this morning. Comcast/Xfinity recently changed out our modem for newer model which combines the router and modem functions. We got the computers on with no problem but our printer can't seem to connect to the new modem. Damn! I do hate new systems.

Was anyone surprised Priebus was fired? He had a title but no authority. He had less and less access to his boss who continually humiliated him. At least Sean Spicer avoided the humiliation of being fired by resigning. I don't know how long the few old guard Republicans are left besides Jeff Sessions but I would guess not many. And I wonder how long before Sessions has had a belly full of #45's crap and leaves or is fired also. But Martha Raddatz on ABC News had a throw away line that was key though no other commentator picked up on it: #45 likes to be surrounded by people who tell him what he wants to hear not what he needs to hear. He likes "yes men." That doesn't speak well for John Kelley, his new Ass-Kisser in Chief of Staff. Nor does it bode well for the country.

Computer update: everything is talking to each other again. The technician on the phone was able to talk us through getting everything back like it should be.

I have been slightly under the weather for the last couple of days which contributed to my general lethargy. Slowly starting to feel better. I need to water the gardens no matter how I feel. What rain we had wasn't enough to do the plants any good. Thankfully, I am retired and don't have to go to a job and try to function no matter what.

Well, the so-called skinny repeal of the ACA failed when John McCain voted no joining two other GOP senators and all Democrats. Again I am struck by how much the Republican program resembles the falling domino kind of sculpture--you know, where the first domino starts a chain reaction of falling dominos to create a pattern. Some of those are awesome but, of course, if the first fails to start the cascade or if a domino along the way doesn't fall right the whole thing flops. Well, repealing (and, maybe, replacing) the ACA was the first domino. The administration depended on the "savings" from the ACA, mainly in the form of reducing taxes for the wealthy, to give them room to tackle the budget and then to tackle tax reform.

A second comment on the Repthuglican antics on ACA repeal and (probably not) repeal. As each vote came along there seemed to be a growing color of desperation permeating the Repthuglican senators. They wanted anything they could be stretched and spun into a "win." They wanted that no matter how many are hurt, how few benefit, how much economic harm is caused or how many of their rules and procedures they have to break. The Repthuglican Party is a party without ideology, without principles, without honesty. Murkowski and Collins are the only Republican senators. I appreciate McCain's vote which was crucial but I wish he would live up to his "maverick" label.

I think a suitable punishment for this jerk is to be force fed everything he contaminated. As an aside, I checked the dates on the original story. It is over a month and a half old. It never made our TV news and we aren't that far away.

We did get rain last night and it is cloudy now with more expected. I don't feel energetic at all so I won't do much of anything today. There are things I could do in the gardens but they aren't absolutely necessary.

We have been losing contact with nature for several decades now. The situation has become acute enough that, every now and then, one finds comments in the news media on it like this Guardian piece. I saw this when it first aired and could only shake my head. But we do live, for the most part, in man made environments which only allows small amounts of "tamed" nature in. We have our manicured and managed lawns where we spray to keep out untamed nature like dandelions or insect pests. We have our manicured and managed gardens where we decide what grows and how. The Ditzy Druid makes a few comments on the phenomenon and her attempts to teach her children to connect with nature. Her remarks roused some thoughts in my mind about my own journey through this life. Once upon a time I remember collecting plant specimens, leaves and flowers mostly, to identify. But over my adult life those contacts with nature diminished and much of what I once knew disappeared.

Although we are mentally/spiritually disconnected from nature we are all to well connected when it comes to our garbage. A huge garbage patch has been found in the southern Pacific. The one in the northern Pacific has been studied for the last ten years or so. So much of our trash stays around for a long time and there is no easy way to reduce it. We have managed to make some headway here reducing our trash from a full trash tote weekly to a third or less of that amount. We have tried to reduce our plastics and have succeeded to a point.

I don't follow economic theory the way I used to. My reality and that of the economists just don't seem to resemble each other. Jesse's Cafe Americain thinks the same. Unfortunately too many economists try to insist that reality adjust itself to their models. That alone suggests that economics isn't a real science because real scientists would adjust their models to account for what happens in the real world.

I read a couple of articles on the U.K.'s program to ban fossil fuel vehicles by 2040. This piece from Naked Capitalism notes a bottle neck in such plans: the availability of cobalt for the high performance lithium ion batteries. The efforts to shift to EV sounds good but it involves using a technology that requires a scarce input, namely cobalt. And I would have to ask what pollution is created by making the batteries and decommissioning them. We are already aware of the pollution fossil fuel vehicles involve but we might be shifting to something as bad or worse.

The weather report says we should be getting rain later today and into tonight. I have the chocolate mint and peppermint to grind. I may cut some more herbs to dry but right now my energy is rather low but it is early, the sun isn't yet up and that may change. I found a couple of peppers developing on one of the plants--rather meager production this year. It has been a bad season from the beginning for my peppers. None of the seedlings I started survived to be transplanted so what is in the garden came from the garden shop. Everything else is doing well.

Though I haven't said much about politics I have followed events--as much as I could stomach. So much of it seems to be happening in some Bizarro world (which some of you may recognize from memories of old Superman comics.) The press seems to be obsessed with the alleged hacking by Russians of the 2017 election but I can't get too upset about it. After all, is it any worse than the manipulations by the DNC to ensure Hillary Clinton won and Bernie Sanders lost? Or the efforts of Republicans to disfranchise potential Democratic voters on spurious charges of voter fraud? I say spurious because damned few proven cases have emerged of such fraud. Why are the Russians so much worse than the DNC or the Republicans?

The Republicans in the Senate finally got a "win" on health care. I put that in quotes because their definition of "win" seems to be rather loose. And they got it by violating every rule they once insisted the Democrats abide by. Evidently rules don't matter for them so long as they get what they want when they want it--just like their Peter Pan of a President (as in the boy who never grew up.) Soon after the "win" the Senate voted down the "Repeal and Replace" plan and a new idea took shape: a "skinny repeal." That doesn't involve the thorny issues of Medicaid and other popular parts that depend on the funding provided by the parts they want to get rid of (i.e. the mandate that everyone have insurance and that some employers provide it and the medical device tax.) I feel somewhat like Treebeard in the Two Towers: I'm on no body's side because nobody is on my side. Over the last few years health insurance costs and benefits have recurred frequently here. Mom's insurance has changed and become more expensive and with each increase we actively look at what that means for her finances. We have even contemplated what would happen if at some point she had to let the supplemental insurance she gets by way of her deceased husband's union membership go. Then we would both be solely relying on Medicare. Scary thought that when you think that a $10k medical bill of which we would have to pay $2k would wipe out our meager finances. Another aspect of the Bizarro world where somehow or another the immiseration of large numbers of people is considered a good thing--that is if the narcissistic political idiots even think about that at all. Beyond damning the majority of Americans for not being rich.

I got started doing things earlier than I normally do. Got beans and cherry tomatoes harvested. The beans are frozen and the tomatoes are waiting for a salad. I saw a small cucumber I am watching for the right time to harvest and pickle. Got chocolate and peppermint cut and in the dehydrator and then ground the lavender and spearmint I dried yesterday. I brought down the drays for the older dehydrator which fit the newer one so I can load one set of trays for drying while I grind the herbs on the other set. I don't want to use both dryers if I can help it. That makes the grinding and loading awful grueling chores. I decided to grind the few eggshells I had that were dry and add those to the stock of slow release calcium for next spring. I put about half a tray worth of peppermint into white vinegar which is now steeping on my shelf. As I pick and cut  and trim I think about where I will put what plants next spring and plan the order in which the beds will be put to sleep for the winter. Nice thing about gardens--there is always something to plan and think about.

This story makes me glad I am now retired. Obviously I have other notions of what is "the right thing to do" and putting microchips into employees isn't among them. The CEO of the company claims it can't be hacked or tracked but that is ridiculous. If there is enough incentive for less than ethical people to hack or track they will do just that. I recall stories earlier in the year about problems the Chicago transit system had because the machines were misreading cards or reading cards in someones wallets or double or triple charging the cards. The stories also mentioned criminals using readers to read the magnetic strips or the chips while the cares were in the wallets--all they had to do was get close enough--like bumping into you distance.