Oops he did it again, he opened his mouth

President George Bush: 'Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter'

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

For real

Ex-White House Aide Rove Fails to Appear at U.S. House Hearing

July 10 (Bloomberg) -- Former White House political director Karl Rove, defying a subpoena, failed to appear before a U.S. House panel investigating whether the Justice Department prosecuted people for political reasons.

Rove's action today prompted the House Judiciary subcommittee to rule that his reasons for skipping the appearance weren't valid, setting up a possible contempt of Congress vote next week.

Rove? Contemtuous?

What’s eating Tommy Tomato?!

I was inspecting the garden after work today and I noticed that the tomato plant of smaller tomatoes was either getting woody or was growing thorns. And I said “Tomatoes grow thorns?”

No, No they do not.

I was shocked to say the least. I don’t remember seeing this tomato cancer destroying my plant the last time I was hanging out with them, say, yesterday but yesterday when I was looking at them, I was looking at them from the other side of the fence and  I was concentrating on tying up and securing the upper branches and not paying any attention the base and attention must be paid.

In retrospect, I’m always kind of concentrating on the branches and the tomatoes that hang from them and neglecting the parts that don't have tomatoes hanging from them . If I took a more holistic view of my plants health and well being, I might have caught whatever is attacking my plant sooner, before it had Stage IV tomato cancer.

But, but, they don’t look under attack. They look fine and they are growing taller and greener and making more and more nubs every day. They don’t seem sick - But they quite obviously are. Now I’m worried about my other plants and a quick inspection didn’t turn up any other instabark issues but who knows there could be all kinds of evils hiding just under the surface waiting to spring out like the alien in Aliens. I’m totally blaming the squash for this, I don’t know why but they suck but this must be their fault.

I think now that I should have never stopped my regular poisoning schedule. I poisoned frequently at the beginning but once their leaves aged out of the tender, sexy stage I kind of stopped poisoning and started thinking surrender monkey organic gardening thoughts and now my plant is hosting a million nutrient sucking hitchhikers.

And the worst hasn’t even started yet as the little bastards aren’t even hatched yet. The plant is thriving, despite being sucked on by a million tiny nutrient hungry beasties and it gets taller and greener and more productive everyday, all the better to feed the little beasties... The leaves are green there isn’t any wilting and it’s able to support and nourish it’s off spring plus a million little beasties. I see wilting and yellowing and failure to thrive in its future,; Oh and Tipping over! I see tipping over in it’s future and all the little beasties jumping ship to my other plants and crossing over to the neighbors and then taking over the street and pretty soon everything in Raleigh will be dead and it will be my fault the squashes fault.

It finally got around to the plant gawds that I was trying to grow things again and they hate that. I am not allowed to grow nice things and I believe this tomato cancer is retribution from the plant gawds for the happy flowers I have in the front of the house in pots - Maybe that’s what I did wrong! I disturbed the earth and pissed off some long undisturbed dirt deity and now I am paying for interrupting it's beauty sleep.

Garden update IV

The eggplants hate me. They teased me with pretty flowers and I said Go flowers! Bring on the eggplant nubs! and... they dropped them and by extension me. I would just say I do not need this many eggplant plants. I don’t even like eggplant it’s really making me start thinking about yanking out the least winsome of them and moving on. I think the peppers would like it, as they are rumored to not being into crowd scenes. The peppers are such picky bastards for all I know the only thing that has kept them from just going ahead of dying themselves is they are carrying on some sort of relationship with no doubt the lest winsome eggplant plant.. Next year though...

Yanking that which does not please me would be too easy and most likely immoral. I’m fighting the very real desire to yank things. I think : See ya eggplants! Feck off squash! and I look to the plants that are doing their jobs. Big raise for you Ms. Tomato! A corner office for Mr. Cucumber! You’re safe for now, Mr. Pepper but I have my yanking gloves standing by...

They certainly are all working together to make me crazy. The tomatoes still love me but the big tomato plant has worked so hard to produce the six it’s carrying now that it hasn’t even thought about starting another family. I’m trying to help it out by harvesting the kids ( 3!) as they are ready to leave the nest but it still hasn’t starting working on a new nursery. The small tomatoes don’t have this hang up and they just keep right on sending more down the pipeline no matter how many are all ready on the plant.

My tomatoes over all are doing well but I want more. The little ones, if the flowers are indication tell me that I’ll be swimming in little tomatoes. What does one do with thousands of little tomatoes? Are they appropriate for sauces? I know that some tomatoes are listed as “sauce” varieties but won’t any tomato lend it self to sauce? Especially in numbers? My larger tomatoes are there but not anywhere close to the numbers of the little ones. I should have doubled up on the big tomato plants. Next year...

The cukes are still showing me the love even though I may have inadvertent pulled one of the vines up. I blame a terrorist trickster squash plant for tricking me. I was moving around vines and I found one that looked a little peaky and so I grabbed it a little... Fricken squash. I’m really beginning to question the squash, it was a nice idea at the time and people like squash and the flowers are certainly lovely to look at - but that isn’t enough! Being blond and pretty and useless is great if you’re Jessica Simpson and not so much if you are part of the produce aisle. I need those plants to prove themselves and they don’t have much longer, especially if they caused me to screw up one of the plants that is working. My cucumbers are very lovely. The camera adds 15 pounds and two inches.

The less said about the pepper plants the better.

Back to work


It took me a while but I finally figured out how I was going to spend my holiday weekend. I was going to sleep through it. I didn’t regain consciences until Sunday morning. All that time in REM gave me strange dreams.

I had one dream about the ongoing renovation of the Drug Dealers house : They had turned it into a massive garden center. A huge garden center that went on for miles. It wasn’t clear how I got into the drug dealer’s house or why but in real life, I toured a large garden center that seemed endless and maze-like a few days before and I have been reading too many seed catalogs . I exited the massive garden center at some point and ended up a very long way from where I started and I was having a hard time trying to get back home, which in theory should have been just on the other side of the massive garden center and then I was searching for a bathroom and it was a very good thing Dogger picked that moment to wake me up.

Dogger was so desperate to go she voluntarily used the back yard! Nature must have been more than calling her because under normal circumstance she does not think the backyard is really suitable for her needs. She wouldn’t have had to go slumming in the backyard if she had agreed to go outside the night before, but Princess Fluffy Tocks couldn’t go out then because it was raining and she can’t concentrate in the rain and before the rain ruined her concentration she wouldn’t go spend quality time outside because somewhere, like two counties over, they were setting off fireworks and she can’t be outside if she thinks she might hear fireworks or even firework anywhere in our zip code. She has developed very good hearing, drop a plate two blocks away and she’ll wind up under the bed. I am thinking of teaching her to use a litter box, it would make life simpler for the both of us.

Oddly, thunder doesn’t seem to bother her, a kid pops a balloon a mile away and she’s diving under the bed, but thunderstorms do not faze her. The Kitty on the other hand, laughs in the face of fireworks but thanks to the storms, but spent most of the weekend hiding in his travel crate. The Kitty who is afraid of nothing freaked out during the thunderstorms while Dogger who is afraid of everything took them in stride, The Kitty could have cared less during the fireworks while Dogger made like the big furry chicken she is. I remember when he was a young cat and we were living in Dallas and he would flee to the tops of the kitchen cabinets when it stormed. In the spring, when we got really powerful thunderstorms he would spend all his time up there. I ended up putting a pillow and his baby and finally his dishes up there with him.

What is it like to live with pets that aren’t neurotic?

Really lame, even for a Lame Duck

TOYAKO, Japan (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday kept up his tradition of informal relations with fellow world leaders by summoning Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper with a brusque "Yo Harper!"

...At the G8 summit

Long Weekend


So what did ya’ll do for the weekend? Lot’s of wild adventures? Spent July 4th evening watching amazing fireworks displays? I hate all of you. Sure, I had some “adventures”. On my way to Broskey and Alphagals on Friday, I bravely parked my car at the side of the road and intentionally violated a No Trespassing sign to take pictures of an artfully abandoned farm house.

Really abandoned?

Oh, yes.

And it’s abandoned grapes

And its abandoned landscaping, which was still nicer than mine.

Later on, Adventure Girl, now armed with Dogger, again decided that she was more special than everyone else and the rules did not apply to her and that her dog was not among the unspecial dogs covered under the “no dogs” rule as her dog was kept on leash and she was carrying bags. Obviously, the rules did not apply to her.

 Dogger and I went on a hike through the No Dogs Allowed forest. I had a good time but Dogger had a great time wading through ponds until she noticed that she was not wading alone . It turns out that we can add fingerlings to the list of things she is afraid of. Yes, the specter spending a few moments in the company of a two inch fish was enough to chase Dogger out of the water, but not the forest. . We went because I noticed that the ponds while lovely to look at, were filled with water that stank and the longer we spent in the forest the worse Dogger reeked.

Later, we went to see Raleigh’s fireworks. We saw some pyrotechnics but they weren’t Raleigh’s. We sucked road dust then the lightning started and the thunder and then the rain. I had a great time driving home in a deluge in the dark down unfamiliar streets. Yay July 4th!

On Saturday I watched TV and napped until after three in the afternoon and then I went and checked out Seaboard Station and its grocery store and True Value. I had all ready visited the very fab if very expensive plant nursery and went to go see what else was there and discovered everything is like the plant nursery - Very fab but very expensive. I don’t think I’m going to change my allegiance from Food Lion and Kroger and Home Depot at this time. Everything was very new and shiny and I think even the pipes and fittings at the Seaboard True-Value were certified organic. These stores were put there for the folks who will be living in the condos they are building on that side of downtown. It’s great for them if they are searching for organtics and free trade wrench sets but gawd help them if they have anything larger than a pocket pet waiting for them back at home because they didn’t stock food for anything larger.

So much for bargin shopping. I went home and played with my garden. My one squash died, I think I might just pull those plants out as they don’t seem well suited to the environment and are taking up room from those plants that are. I think I had twelve squash plants and not a single one has done anything but produce a lot of male flowers and then die. The eggplants are also narrowly dedicated to solely producing flowers but at least they aren’t teasing me by making tiny eggplants and then letting them die on the vine.

Saturday night I went back to Broskey and Alphagals and again tried for some fireworks. It rained. Again. I left early and as I was going home I looked up and there they were, fireworks! I pulled into a parking lot and had my own private show. I didn’t do anything else ya’ll did, but July 5th I did get a private fireworks show.

HAPPY     SUNDAY    !!!!!!

Dogger for her part doesn't think fireworks are all that entertaining.

HAPPY     SATURDAY    !!!!!!

Friday Dog and Cat Blogging July 4th Edition

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MOM!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MOM!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR MOM!!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!!!!!

Nummy Numbness


I went back to the dentist today and got another temporary crown. It is even more fun the second time around. The dentist worked fast so my jaw wouldn’t lock open like with the root canal. I thought that was very thoughtful of him. Of course I feel like crap almost immediately and I didn’t feel like crap after the root canal, I went back to work. One little temporary crown and I want to die, and going back to work was not an option. On the up side, nothing hurts yet, but my whole head feels offended.

I drove home playing with my numbness Ha! Ha! I think I'm biting my lip really hard and I can’t feel it! Oh, I’ll bite over here and it hurts! Bite here and it’s numb, bite here and ow! Lips are chewy!. I finally got tired of this game and stopped by the Cook Out for dinner, a lovely chocolate chip mint milk shake and went home. I walked in the door, greeted the animals, picked up my mail and collapsed into my chair. I didn’t have the strength or the energy to go further. I sat there until Dogger started to do her I-need-to-go-pee-right-now-or-else song and dance. I asked her to cut me a break and go upstairs and use The Kitty’s box  for once, and she growled at me.

I was busy. In the mail were two new seed catalogs! Once they have your name, they all have your name. Seed companies and garden catalogs are like  horticultural borg. These catalogs were different then the others, they didn't seem to think we all running our own truck gardens and these companies want to sell me  plants.

Burpee will mail me a selection of tomatoes. Two kinds of cherry tomatoes one  white and a red that grows in bunches, three larger tomatoes, one orange, one yellow and the largest one kind of a hot pink! The Cooks Garden catalog, which seems a little more hoity toity then the others I've looked at, sells a collection of six varieties of peppers! From large banana peppers to  grilling peppers to  peppers for stuffing and baking And these just come through the mail!  I wonder if Amazon sells plants? I should check.

Seedlings through the mail, it’s like an automatic garden. No dealing with seeds and no having to deal with the non-variety of seedlings in the stores. It costs more up front but pays off in the long run. It just sounds like the coolest thing ever. Burpee will send you a whole seedling garden though the mail and I thought Now, that’s sexy... until I looked closer and it included two varieties of eggplant. Ew. Not sexy.

It’s too late for this year but wouldn’t it be cool for next year? The varied selection was really what I was going for this year but didn’t really achieve. Okay, I haven’t actually achieved anything but three tiny tomatoes and some collard greens, but it’s never too early to begin to think about next year, it would be kind of nice to have a plan in place before I get started. I have all ready learned for instances, that peppers aren’t in love with direct sunlight - they like it, they don’t mind hanging around with it but they aren’t going to ask it out for dinner. It’s their friend they don’t like it like that. Next years peppers are going to go in pots on the front deck where its cooler and they don’t get as much direct sunlight as the sliver of back yard / surface of the sun where this years unhappy pepper plants are. See, I know that now. I have achieved some wisdom all ready. Not much of a harvest, but I have grown some knowledge.

Seed Thoughts, By Diana Nothandy


I got another seed catalogue today. A big, glossy catalogue full of beautifully photographed vegetables and short on frivolities like flowers. The pictures of flowers in the last seed catalogue I received withered . My house is such a floral dead zone that even pictures of flowers wilt the minute they get inside. It’s very disheartening.

Yeah, well. I don’t order these catalogs for flowers. They can shove their exotic bulbs right up their manure spreader. I’m not in the market for decorative items. I’m in the market for vegetables.

Do I want to deal with seeds though? They don’t call them seed catalogs because the have pages and pages of interesting seedlings . I’m more of a seedling person I think. I’m not sure I have the patience it takes to grow things from seeds. All the pictures are of these gorgeous, lush, healthy all ready grown and harvested vegetables. There aren’t a lot of pictures of the seeds. They gloss right over the seed stage of the vegetable. I think that's a little disingenuous on their part.

I was thinking about all of this while I was riding my bike. Dogger refused to go for a walk, which was not her being head strong.. Dogger is in the middle of her yearly bout with doggy prickly heat and part of the treatment for doggy prickly heat is massive doses of benadryl. She’s on enough downers to stop a smaller dog or a full sized human in their tracks. When she’s sleeping she’s not itching and when she’s not itching, her rash has a chance to heal. I think walking also exaserbates the problem because the rash is in her little doggy arm pit and walking makes it chafe. She wasn’t so tired that she wasn’t able to run from me when I approached her with her leash for a walk though. Bitch.

But it was way too pretty last night to not take advantage of the weather, I mean really. It would have been wrong to not be outside.  When I left for my ride I left Dogger in the back yard and I didn’t even feel bad about it.

And while I was peddling along I was thinking about seeds.

How big a pain in the ass is starting seeds? A 4 or 5 on the PitA scale? Don’t you need light for that? Do windows count? Do I have enough light coming my windows in for that? Peddle, peddle, peddle Do I really see me doing that? And where would I grow them? Peddle, peddle, peddle Would The Kitty agree to a destroying-my-things detente’ and wouldn’t taking care of seeds be almost like taking care of another animal?  Do I want dozens of tiny pets? Do I want dirt in my house? Peddle, peddle, peddle And how pissed would I be if I did take on all that and they ended up just being stringy and leggy and later ended up not producing anything or what if they all died? But what if they all lived? I don’t have room for dozens of plants, even really interesting plants. Peddle, peddle, peddle And the interesting seeds aren’t free either and at least with two or three cheap boring seedlings you know the plants are viable and under your control Peddle, peddle, peddle Hey look there’s my Church! I could ride my bike to Mass! But.. pretty much the only way to get really interesting vegetable plants is to grow them yourself from interesting seeds because gawd knows the vegetable seedlings available at the stores are not interesting. I mean, what I’m growing I could buy at the store.

Peddle, peddle, peddle

But there are more than just tomatoes, green beans! Spaghetti squash! Peddle, the squash I have now hates me! Peddle, peddle Garlic! Dozens of different types of garlic! I love garlic. Everyone I know loves garlic. And I’m pretty sure I could grow broccoli here in the fall, I love broccoli! Peddle, peddle, peddle But geeze, I’m all ready going to try growing multiple varieties of garlic over the winter. How much work do I want to do after it gets cold and the garden isn’t green and sexy any more? Answer:  Not a lot.

Peddle, peddle peddle.

The newby

I have a squash! six thousand squash blossoms later, I have a squash. In my reading I learned that in some varieties the plant will produce 25 male blossoms for every one female flower produced, which gives me comfort that it isn't just me, I was afraid it was, I was afraid I had done something to my plants to alter them in some way or I had bought a whole flat of male flowers and should have known to also buy a flat of female flowers at the same time and that made me mad at the people who sold them to me because why didn't they say anything to me? They saw me wandering away with all those male plants! And they said Lets to haze the garden newby!

 It didn't help that I started doing reading and learned that there are plants that really are strictly male or strictly female and that it would be possible to get hosed like that. The book promised if the variety was like that the flat would be sold with both genders of plants. Trusting fools. I mean, my plants are lush and green and the flowers are pretty if you are out and about early enough in the morning to see them and I could conceivably see squash plants as being quite adequate ground cover but damn it, I want to see the produce aisle from Whole Foods in my back yard! Merely being green and pretty doesn't cut it in the Dianaverse.

The book did say that many plants today have been engineered to produce both kinds of flowers and many don't even need any outside help with pollination, a good thing because the bees aren't around to do it for them. My squash need the bees though. I may have found a second female flower on one of my squash plants and in their absents I am so going to artificially pollinate that flower. I feel bad for my squash plants. I had to do some thinning a couple of weeks ago and the main victims were three undersized squash plants that weren't thriving and were getting in the way of my cucumbers that thriving and producing. It wasn't a hard decision. I had one sad little squash plant that seemed to only serve as a host for tendrils of a lovely, but pushy, volunteer morning glory that I am trying to train to grow on the little barrier fence that helps keep the garden in place. Of course the morning glories I planted where it would be more convenient to have lovely vining plants, never came up.

My cucumbers are perking along. Of my three cucumbers, one is growing very well. The two others, I think may need more sun then they are getting, The robust specimen is on a vine that is climbing my fence and it's really doing well, the others are more terrestrial and while they are both older veggies, they are smaller and aren't growing as fast.

Now that everything that is going to grow is growing and has reached its adult state, I haven't had to poison in a weeks but early on when my tiny plants were still tender and alluring, they were getting chewed voraciously. I felt personally violated - Those beasties weren't just chewing on shoots and leaves, they were chewing on me. My very fingers and toes were being munched on! It had to stop. So I poisoned the hell out of them. The first tomatoes I washed three times, the collards went through multiple washing and rinsing cycles before I felt comfortable eating them but it was worth it though because no one else had eaten them before I had a chance to.

Speaking of collards. I babied them, watched them, coaxed growth out of them. I talked with them, visited with them daily and I still didn't like them. And I tried! I put them into a dish I really enjoy and I got all excited and they stilled tasted like collards. Blech. I had thought that after putting all that work into them they would taste like something I do like, like pizza or cheetoes. I guess I had hoped to have more influence over them. I had thought that they would take after the tomatoes, another food I don't usually like. The tomatoes tasted really good, I could almost forget they were tomatoes. They were almost cheeto-like. I don't eat peppers either, but if they ever actually produce I'm going to stuff them with ground beef and force them into being edible. It's a big if though, if they ever produce anything I'll probably end up being so excited that I won't even eat them, I'll have them bronzed instead.