The plan for the day was to go on a hike with a friend, that plan ended when her car started smoking outside Sandy, OR.  Several gallons of water and radiator fluid later and after driving 30 MPH with stopping every eight miles for a refill later we managed to get back to my place. We eventually decided that I would follow her half way home and if things went well on the way there then I'd just hang out at a coffee shop until she got home.    I figured I'd take the dogs with me just to give them a treat (Sammie can't really walk very well any more, right legs problems).  

If anyone doubted the resilience of your average earthworm, doubt no more.

The story starts a few days ago when the dogs were a bit muddy one day from a walk so I used the 'dog' towels on them. After forgetting about the towels for a while I noticing the towels today then forgot about them and they sat out on the cement of the back patio. I gathered up the towels and with a few other old towels and threw them in the wash.

Imagine my surprise when I emptied out the washing machine and found a live earthworm moving around fairly well, which is fairly remarkable as I have a particularly efficient washing machine that spins at 10K revolutions per minute. As I also have a new worm bin it seemed to make sense to add my very, very clean earthworm to my worm bin.

Since I nearly started a brawl on the two mailing list I forwarded this article to, I might as well post it here.  Actually there are two stories from the Wall Street Journal, the first is about suburban farming and the second is the near brawl starting article.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120881517227532621.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Load Up the Pantry

April 21, 2008 6:47 p.m.

I don't want to alarm anybody, but maybe it's time for Americans to start stockpiling food.

No, this is not a drill.

You've seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they're a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.

Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

"Load up the pantry," says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street's top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. "I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn't going to happen here. But I don't know how the food companies can absorb higher costs." (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker Strategic)

Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you'll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.

Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.

Click here for the rest of the article.

As my blood type is O-, I'm rather popular with the Red Cross and they talked me into doing a double blood donation on Friday. I have gone through apherisis previously, but had a massive case of the tingles because of a reaction to the the anti-coagulate. The new process doesn't use any were near as much anti-coagulate because there is only two cycles were they are pumping fluids back into. I still had to hit the Tums pretty hard (nine tablets) but it was manageable.

One particularly interesting aspect of the new method of a double blood donation is all the saline they pump into you. While I did look a little pale the rest of the day, I felt particularly good and several people commented that I had bright eyes.

Not having to water the garden is a good thing and I was also starting to feel sorry for the grass. I don't want to imply I would actually water the grass, but just feeling a little sorry for it.