Head to head

Great gobs of broccoli

Please turn up the volume LOL

Tony Matolla

How many evenings have we sat back, closed our eyes, and let Tony in? I forget the old musicians sometimes but Tony was the best studio guitar in the business. Sinatra insisted that Tony was the recording guitartist for all of his sessions and even in Vegas. Perry Como too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Mottola

Newt

So here is our blessed media beating up on Newt for having a line of credit at Tiffany's. I'm telling you the media, especially the Fox News and MSNBC are killing us with moronic stuff like that.
BTW being moderate means I make few friends :)

TARP-- feed the beast

I read "Too Big to Fail" a couple years ago. Big book... takes a lot of time (read old persons concentration) to finish.
Tonight we watched HBO's movie based on the book.
Incredibly well done.. my GOD!!
Please watch it.

How this fits? Bush followed the conservative doctrine " STARVE THE BEAST". Cut taxes and make socialist government impossible to sustain. Not to get into the pros and cons of big gov but the whole of this is based on debt. Get us further into debt so we MUST cut entitlements which reduces the size of govt.

Frankly this is for the young to decide but you simply MUST admire W for going against the beast starving far right  with TARP (which has been largely paid back).

W is misunderstood and should get credit where due.

White leaf tomato

Something is real wrong

The Rapture

Where did it go?
And here I was about to give up wine.

Garden catch up

 Cabbage about 6" in diameter.... will harvest soon

 Best lettuce here seems to be this one called Great Lakes.... forming a head

Snow Peas aka Oregon Sugar pod.

Have harvested quite a bit of broccoli over the last few weeks

 

Three peppers in early and set getting dripped. Black plastic is there to accelerate gowning season start. Soil temp is important to peppers and melons and stuff. So I soaked and covered the ground three weeks ago. Also better for dripping... less water.

 Mounding potatoes

Tomatoes

 Peas and spinach and beans

Those things spiking up in the cinder blocks are shallots. Shallots are incredibly versatile... from potato salad to stir fry.... and NO! if the gourmet recipe calls for shallots please please please do not substitute onion. ARGHHHHH!

Good onion crop this year I think. The red ones will last a full year after picked if you store them properly. Peas against the fence.

New grill

Got this one in town at True Value Hardware already assmbled and cheaper than Home Depot!
Its just wonderful.
Here are a few shots of making seafood kabobs.

The already assembled part was the best part :)

Uninvited house guests

One thing about living in the southwest on a large hunk of land is that lots of critters come to visit and sometimes even enter the house. So far this past week we've had four mice and one bird enter the house. The mice I can understand they are little and can get through small openings in the breezeway, plus the cats love to bring them inside to play with .. so far they haven't killed any. I just locate the mouse hiding place in the house, secure the cats in another room, put down a humane trap; it's a metal box with a spring loaded door at one end. you put some peanut butter inside, open the trap door, they go in for the bait and the spring lock door closes then you take the whole box outside, open the other end and they run off.

Our other visitor was a bird who somehow got into the breezeway and then into the house. The cats were going crazy, the bird was cheeping and flying to all the high places. Ron got a fishnet and towel and caught it. It was perched on the top shelf of the bookcase in his computer room. No harm done .. took the captured bird outside still in the fishnet, released it and it flew away. Betcha that bird won't venture near our house especially with three cats inside for a long time.

Got to have a little excitement in your life, right?

What's a million dollars worth?

Just a hypothetical story here but let's pretend an illegal, 30 years old, wins a $1,000,000 lottery.

Is that a lot of money? Can he retire in comfort?
Well first of all when he collects his check there will be $400,000 missing because the state and fed government gets their taxes up front. So the guy thinks he will retire on the $600,000 remaining. How can he do that? What will that give him as a monthly income?
If it goes into the bank he can say get 4% on it. But he cant draw the whole 4% because he has to make it grow at 2% to hedge inflation. So he takes 2% of $600,00 per year which is $12,000. How did he go from being a millionaire to an income below poverty level?
Thinking even deeper here. He's an illegal and has no Social Security, no home, no medical care short of Medicaid (lucky to get that being an illegal).

Now let's look at a retired couple getting $12,000 per year from Social Security. They have the same income but own their own home and get great medical attention with medicare.

Who is rich now?

SS is an annuity.  A closed annuity. It leaves no money in the bank when you are gone. There are many other annuties you can invest in that pay you at retirement but leave no cash to bother with. They make more sense than trying to make your fortune last "just long enough"

People are richer than they think they are some times and not as rich as they think they are sometimes.

As you already know Ron is totally obsessed with his garden and all the little green things growing there. Must brag that last night we had our first taste of home grown broccoli .. definitely a 10 compared to the grocery store variety which is a poor second place at best. He stays so busy in the garden I don't even know he's around, except for the dirt clods he brings in the house from mucking about outside on wet soil! Oh well .. that's the price I pay for having married a late blooming farmer man. Liz

Baseball cap not enough

I really need to buy a gardening hat.
Sun got to my neck and burned some. Sun burning, considering skin carcinoma already established, is not good.

Anyway I'm making great progress in the garden. I'm obsessing!! It has taken me over like a body snatcher or something. No camping... no photography... just the damn garden!  I am freaking possessed already!


R

Bush, a cowboy, was a thinker too.. a fine man overall.

Decision Points is a great read. We already knew the big story. It's the little sketches in between that makes this kinda fun to read. Especially the anecdotes of his "born again" experiences.

Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
explains how the Bush administration came to believe what they believed. Bush was not playing games because he "firmly" believed Sadam was a player in 9/11. The key in previous sentence should be given to its adverb because it caused him to make a lot of errors. A lot!

Put these two together and they feed off each other symbiotically in my view.

PS I still believe W was a terrible president. But was happy to read he is a nice guy.

 

Garden notes

Lots of things germinated and under a grow light

eight different kinds of tomatoes (experimenting this year)

two types of squash

five types (colors) of Bell Pepper

Asian Eggplant

Hatch chili peppers

other stuff

Some broccoli almost ready, same for lettuce and cabbage.

One of about ten strawberry containers (will move them around during the summer)

Potato plant

Short short

Although many people -- if not most people -- think of southern Utah as a desert and even though there are only four classified deserts in the USA and the closest one to us is more than 100 miles distant, they will never be able shake this idea.

 The grass was knee high this year. Like it is against the fence. No grass like this in deserts.

 Took the lawnmower and weed whacker to it just so I could move around. Will finish it when it gets a bit warmer.