Rain in Arizona - it's like Christmas! It's been drizzly for the past 2 days, which never stops me because rain is the best. Water from the sky!
Today I go to my garden and plant salsa and nurture my soul. There's something about slogging around in the mud and breaking fingernails that's necessary to Band-Aid whatever mental health I have.

The only disturbing thing about gardening is the quandary of what to do when I find a tomato worm? I try to remember to be gentle and loving but I hate them with a passion AND THEY'RE KILLING MY SALSA! I wish I had chickens because then I could throw the stupid worm at the chickens and then they'd kill it and my karma would be clean. I settle for snipping off what I think is their head quickly and cleanly and sending them off to a new and better incarnation - I'm sure that they appreciate it. Who wants to be a tomato worm, right?

So today I'll go to the nursery with the intention of buying 6 Roma tomato plants and 4 jalapenos, and will come out with a Jeep full of house plants and yard flowers and some weird bright idea for the garden (Last year it was tomatillos. If you ever have a chance to grow tomatillos, one plant will be more than sufficient. Trust me on this one. I was never real sure what to do with the damn things since I don't like to eat them, but the plants sure are pretty. Neither the Mission nor the Food Bank wanted them either, so I started lurking in the Safeway parking lot watching for somebody that didn't lock their car doors so that I could fill their back seat up with tomatillos. It was a crime wave that was reported exhaustively in the newspapers.)

There are my plans for my day, and it sounds wonderful! Best wishes for yours!

I just spent a week in Washington, DC for the National Association of REALTORS conference. Wow! DC is not one of the places that I would choose to go if it had been left up to me. DC is not even one of the top 100 places that I would have ever chosen. Now, it probably is in the top, oh, say 50. The history sent shivers up my neck. I marveled at monuments and artifacts that I've been looking at pictures of all of my life.
I saw one of the copies of the Magna Charta from 1260. I saw all of the de rigeur monuments, the ACTUAL be still my heart! Declaration of Independence, the Articles of the Constitution, a real dinosaur skeleton, an abandoned graveyard, miles and miles of DC sidewalks - I was a shameless tourist and I loved it!
I had to discipline myself to remember that I wasn't there to be a tourist. I had to fit sightseeing into late nights and one day of hookey when they hadn't scheduled me for anything except a guided tour of NAR - I felt fine about bailing on the NAR building.
I was there for the REALTOR Conference and the Summit. The Conference was great (REALTORS are an odd bunch, but extremely competent, especially at this level.) The Summit was incredible. NAR brought together the biggest of the wigs to duke it out over the economy. The concept is that Congress and the Obama Administration could watch and learn what's going on out in the real world.
That's what happened. Alan Greenspan gave a speech which I enjoyed quite a bit. (I didn't expect that - to enjoy Greenspan.) Then 2 round table discussions with big-timey bankers, economists, journalists, all kinds of economic gurus, all who pretty much ended up sniping at the bankers. Well, who deserves it more? Jane Bryant Quinn moderated and she was the best sniper of all.
The upshot is that Greenspan believes that the economy took an "upswing" in November, and he expects it to continue indefinitely. He explained why but I don't do econospeak and my eyes glazed over.
It was incredible, listening to all of these great minds finally admitting what we've known all along - the economy is in trouble, the housing market is a disaster, and "trickle down" didn't work so let's try some "trickle up."
That's my new license plate to replace my current "Turets." "Triklup."