Last day of August--oh my!! It seems like I just planted my gardens and already I have been  the tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers, beans, and cucumbers. I think I said on an earlier post that this weather feels more like the end of September than the end of August. Many of my herbs are flowering and the bees are enjoying that. The cuttings I took some while ago are doing well and several are showing roots. I put them in those little amber pill bottles filled with vermiculite a process I will continue since it has worked so nicely. I am slowly deciding which plants I want to take cuttings from to, hopefully, use in the gardens next year.

Found this on Crooks&Liars which sums up #45's visit to Texas. It was, purely and simply, a selling opportunity. And a failed chance for him to show he was something other than a self-centered psychopath/sociopath.

And right on Harvey's heels comes Irma. It became a tropical storm and earned its name earlier today and is expected to become a hurricane tomorrow. Irma is the 9th named storm of the season which is a milestone the meteorologists say isn't normally reached till the end of September.

This is supposed to be in a science text book???

Echidne of the Snakes has taken note of #45's cancelling of the Obama rule that firms with more than 100 employees have to keep records of pay by race, gender and ethnicity. They don't believe it proves or disproves discrimination but, as she noted, absent even that information such discrimination can't be proven at all. That is precisely the point: if you don't like believe what data might indicate, make sure the data isn't collected at all. And she is also right on concerning the Repthuglican definition of "burdensome." And how selectively it is applied.

Friends on Facebook linked to this statement from the American Historical Association concerning the debate over "Confederate" monuments. I put the word in quotes because I have often been unsure exactly what the monuments commemorated given they were erected well after the end of Reconstruction and even longer after the Civil War. The other side is often perplexing as well. Not too long ago a furor erupting on Princeton's campus with demonstrators demanding Woodrow Wilson's name be removed from one of the buildings because of his segregationist legacy. But he was a President of the United States, a governor of New Jersey, a president of Princeton University and a respected academic. Perhaps it would be far more instructive for the present if his segregationist legacy were as well known as the accomplishments we honor. Perhaps we should learn something of the times during which the contested monuments were erected, what the people at the time were actually honoring by honoring defeated rebels, and what people today are actually saying on each side of the argument.

Not much actually gardening going. We may get rain today and, if we do, it may not be enough to do the plants any good. I will check things again a bit later. My little blueberry gave up the ghost. I managed to keep it going for three years but it curled up and died almost as soon as I brought it inside.

I was wondering if I would find anything worth linking to or commenting on but Margaret and Helen provided this post. I wasn't screaming at the TV because I turned it off. I was miffed mightily pissed though. The network preempted the last fifteen minutes of Jeopardy because #45 had landed in Texas. For Gods' sake, they were fifteen minutes away from the regular news cast and they couldn't wait.

Bread baking day yesterday. It was nice to get back to that. I had so much trouble with my breads last spring I gave it a rest when the weather got hot. Just didn't want to heat up the kitchen and it gave me time to think and research a bit. We threw out our old metal, non-stick pans because the finish had deteriorated but we didn't replace them. I used our glass loaf pans instead but couldn't get the timing right. The loaves seemed to be done but not really. After reading a bit we decided to get a couple of new metal pans and that seems to have done the trick. The German dark rye I did up yesterday came out beautiful. We have missed the homemade bread tastes so much better than the store bought.

This story deserves some expletives!! Once Hurricane and now Tropical Storm Harvey is expected to back out of Texas and move over to re-enter Texas closer to or right on Houston. Mother Nature sure doesn't like that area much. James Kunstler has a post this morning which details some of the possible and probable repercussions of having the fourth largest city in the U.S. put out of commission. I read elsewhere that 15% of the U.S. gasoline comes from the refineries around Houston.

Nice day yesterday but a lazy one. The weather still feels more like late September than late August. A couple of days ago I harvested the first couple of the Mitoyo eggplants and Mom got them peeled, blanched and frozen. I have about four more ripening.

Matt Taibbi has a good piece in Rolling Stone. I was on my high school competitive speech team specializing on what they called "extemporaneous speaking." That meant we had half an hour to prepare a five minute speech on a question drawn from recent news headlines. I prepared by reading the major weekly news magazines (Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report) along with a host of other monthly magazines and six or eight daily newspapers taking clippings and notes on what I was reading. The difference I notice between then and now is the lack of explanation and specifics in today's media. Taibbi is right that the media has reduced our attention span. And the news is even more written (or spoken in the case of TV) to the outrageous and emotional. It is designed to push buttons and, by so doing, garner consumers. And what we have now is a man occupying high and responsible office whose attention span is less than that of a goldfish, who can't seem to stitch together a coherent sentence, and who specializes in pushing the emotional buttons of rage, far, xenophobia in its broadest sense of people as stunted as he is himself.

I do like this cartoon!!

I hadn't known that Britain had a competition to find means of "carbon capture and storage" to reduce their CO2 pollution. They are ending it after 10 years because it simply doesn't work. The power plants have to burn more fuel to make the CCS system work so the it becomes a trade-off: more declining fossil fuel or CCS. The most cost effective way to reduce carbon emissions is to simply use less fuel.

Lovely morning but I am not doing anything much except reading. Yesterday was a busy day cutting down the tomato vines and generally cleaning up some of the accumulated mess around the pots.

I looked at this story and blinked because the number of Americans living paycheck to paycheck was more than cited in the last such story I read. I was right. The article mentions that the number was "only" 75% last year not the 78% for this year. Some 56% have less than $100 in savings. Another factoid which says a lot people aren't doing well in this so-called economy.

Really nice day--not too hot and sunny. I took out all of the tomato vines. We are, honestly, sated on tomatoes so I only harvested enough for our salads today and maybe a side dish later in days to come. I am rethinking some of my notions for what plants I want and what I hope to achieve from them. I always preferred indeterminate varieties of tomatoes but I am checking out the determinate varieties. I hope they will be more controllable and produce as much as we need. Since I only have about 30 sq. ft. of garden space available, I have to admit I simply can't produce everything we would use. We have a good farm market nearby and we can get what I can't produce there. However, I just had the pleasure of harvesting two of the Mitoyo eggplants. Next year I won't put in any of the patio sized plants and just stick with one of the Mitoyo. I have generally been unhappy with patio sized veggies. They aren't worth the space they take up.

Cool this morning and not likely to warm up significantly. I'll see what I get done.

I read this kind of thing and I am, honestly, totally pissed off. I don't think we can really afford billionaire presidents (or their families).