Why I don’t watch the local news

Watching NCIS (and NCIS:LA), I always get some exposure to the local news and whatever they’re breathlessly hawking as something I should be interested in/terrified of enough to keep the channel tuned after these shows are over (hint: it will never be enough). Tonight’s poutrage involves some pedestrian crosswalk that apparently cost the city of Jacksonville a cool $200K. The news folks – whom of course I trust implicitly to design pedestrian walkways, or bridges, or multilevel structures that may need to hold hundreds of people at one time – want to tell me about the cheaper options. I’m tempted to watch to see if they offer up a solution of buying a couple of cans of spray paint from Home Depot and enlisting the services of some random homeless dude for ten bucks to lay down the lines. But I’m not going to.

Waiting for rain

We live (as I think I’ve mentioned) in the Bermuda Triangle of weather here. Common mythology says it rains every afternoon in Florida in the summer for a short while. In our corner of the county, the fronts and clouds and rain seem to break apart or skirt to the north or south of us, never quite reaching potential. There was a period last year where it didn’t rain for over a month here although it rained in areas around us. So when we look at the forecast, and it says 20% or 40% chance of rain for us, we plan on watering because the better chance is that it won’t rain on us. Things are looking up tonight and tomorrow, though: 60% tonight, 70% tomorrow. We may get lucky, and the trees back in the orchard will stop looking quite so sad and pathetic, and the garlic will be watered without me having to get the irrigation rerun on the reconfigured frames out front.

Two more flats started: habanero, jalapeno, two types of cayenne, tabasco, pepperoncino.  Next up: more onions for our short days here.