oopsies

There was a post here that was meant to be private: it was just storage for a work in progress, not work to be read. I've adjusted its security. So if you thought you saw Chapter Five of the Conduit here, you did, and it didn't exactly go away, it got altered.

I may be adjusting the security of those chapters from private to a special beta filter, but not yet.

Yet here's a spot . . . out, out damned spot!

. . . yet who would have thought the old man had so much blood in him.

I have a laundry basket full of pomegranates on my deck. They are not the sweetest in the world, but they are very flavorful this year, and they are ripe before splitting, and once split, they are not molding up right away. So I have a laundry basket full of them. And a greencycle can bigger than that full of pomegranate prunings. And a new half-barrel to fill with dirt. Maybe this will be the tomato center next summer. I have still not put up the "chili sauce" (bumpy catsup) and tomato chutney for the year. I have to go to Watsonville and buy a case of tomatoes for that.

I have seeded twenty of them. That's a little more than three quarts of pomegranate seeds, in zip-lock bags in the freexer. My hands are the color of a nice Zinfandel and my fingernails have dark blue streaks in them.


On another front, government decision makers have not been on our county's side this week. A judge said to go ahead with the spraying for ligh brown apple moth, which has prople livid,even though the ingredients as listed are not dangerous to anybody but the light brown apple moth. We're just spraying the entire Central Coast with a species-specific sex hormone. There's no possibility that we're going to be embarrassed about this. None.

And we got our yearly recommendation from Medicare. Every year there's a big campaign for Medicare to raise the reimbursements doctors get in Santa Cruz County. Every year Medicare listens very carefully to the evidence, notes that the cost of doing business in the county is very high, that the county is not actually rural except in the sense that it has agriculture in it, and that doctors in Santa Cruz are getting less than 4/5 what doctors in Santa Clara are getting . . . and every year Medicare says "there's a formula we have to follow," and proposes to cut Santa Cruz County reimbursements by ten percent. Every year congress intervenes and the reimbursements stay as is.

And finally, if you have any favorite pumpkin, pomegranate, or garbanzo flour recipes, I will be very grateful.