We need rain!

Dead! Brown! Crunchy! That is the best description of the lawn. We have not had rain for a long time, and now we are experiencing an early and oppressive heat. Heat indexes today are predicted to go up to 107. That is VERY early for this kind of weather. Usually mid-August will see those kinds of indoors-staying, lemonade-sipping, book-reading dog days. In late May and early June it's the time to go with friends to the Park, sit by the river and read and have picnics. Take a walk on the trail. Go yard sale shopping. All of which I had plans to do, actually. But not in this heat.

I used my windshield wipers today

It's a start...

The drought has gone on so long I'd almost forgotten how to turn them on.

This is why we need Storm Fay:



These ole dry hills are a droughtin'






Here is Fay's latest track. I live in the upper NE corner of Georgia. Pray we get Fay's life-sustaining rain!

Black Monday? Or the Monday Bump? UPDATED

With second biggest bank failure in U.S. history Friday (IndyMac) and huge troubles with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae surfacing over the weekend, today's financial markets should be interesting. Will the markets rise based on calming assurance of the Fed's Freddie and Fannie bailout plan? Or will the Wall Street Journal's prediction: Investors Jumping Ship and Running for the Exits come true? Time will tell.

According to Bank Implode here are the 8 banks that have failed so far:

Metropolitan Savings Bank, Pittsburgh, PA, total assets $15.8 million.
Netbank, Alpharetta, GA, total assets $2.5 billion.
Miami Valley Bank, Lakeview, OH, total assets $86.7 million.
Douglass National Bank, Kansas City, MO, total assets $58.5 million.
Hume Bank, Hume, MO, total assets $18.7 million.
ANB Financial, Bentonville, AR, total assets $2.1 billion.
First Integrity Bank, NA, Staples, MN, total assets $54.7 million.
IndyMac Bank, F.S.B., Pasadena, CA, $32.01 billion.

The site also lists failed credit unions and lending institutions.

The FDIC has 50 billion dollars set aside for failed banks. The IndyMac failure alone just wiped out ten percent of the total FDIC insurance fund.

Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac are on ice so thin a straw would break it. Freddie and Fannie own or guarantee $5.2 trillion of U.S. home mortgages. That’s about half the outstanding mortgages in the United States. And in an AP story today,

"AP: US Government Says Other Financial Companies Will be On Their Own"

"The U.S. government is signaling it won't throw a lifeline to struggling financial companies — except for mortgage linchpins Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — marking a shift to a new and potentially more volatile phase of the credit crisis."

You know that financial times are bad when the talking pundits on weekend cable shows plead for Americans not to run on the banks Monday morning.

Is your bank safe? Now you can find out. Here is a site that rates banks and credit unions.

"Bankrate.com's Safe & Sound® service is a proprietary system designed to provide information on the relative financial strength and stability of U.S. commercial banks, savings institutions and credit unions. The system employs a series of twenty-two tests to measure the capital adequacy, asset quality, profitability, and liquidity (CAEL) of each rated financial institution. Individual performance levels are determined from publicly available regulatory filings and are compared to asset-size peer norms, industry standards and key absolute benchmarks. Combined results form the basis for our Composite CAEL and Star Ratings, which are described below. When possible, the system also produces a report that provides a detailed explanation of our findings, for each rated financial institution."

I am assuming that the ratings have been done in the recent past and may not reflect immediate conditions, but if your bank rated a "2 stars" in the recent past it is a sure bet that today's financial situation is not helping it climb up to a 5 star rating.

Add here is a site that lists imploded and about to implode banks. Find out if your bank is one of them.

In my opinion there are no longer any safe paper financial investments. Invest in commodities, not paper but hard goods, and you can't go wrong. Buy hard good you will use anyway. With food in short supply and about to get shorter, fuel costs rising, droughts increasing, and your right to drill a well on your own land under attack, I'd say invest in food, shelter, and water.

----------------------update---------------------
Nice to know I am not totally off base here:
'Unmitigated Disaster'

July 14 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Treasury Department's plan to shore up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is an ``unmitigated disaster'' and the largest U.S. mortgage lenders are ``basically insolvent,'' according to investor Jim Rogers.
Taxpayers will be saddled with debt if Congress approves U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's request for the authority to buy unlimited stakes in and lend to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Rogers said in a Bloomberg Television interview. The chairman of Rogers Holdings, who in 2006 correctly predicted oil would reach $100 a barrel and gold $1,000 an ounce, also said the commodities bull market has a ``long way to go.'' [snip]

Education section:
FYI: pundit and TPTB-speak:

TPTB = The Powers That Be
Food Insecurity = Hunger
Writedown = Loss

Good morning!

A few random things. I had a wildfire-like racing stomach-flu yesterday. Chills, shakes, spiking temp to 101.5. Thankfully it's subsiding now.

I am having really good luck with Christmas shopping on ebay. So far I've gotten a vintage 1960 bomber with pilot plane for .99, an alabaster carved nativity set from Peru for $6, and hard to find glow in the dark stars for $6. I usually avoid stores like the plague and especially at Christmas. Shudder. Shopping online through Amazon and ebay does the trick admirably for me.

Later today I'll be at Comer Elementary School helping out at the Good News Club, and tonight at church teaching the kids. A day with kids is always great and wonderful.

The weather's turned a bit colder, but thank God we had about an inch of rain. Driving by you look around and see the cow ponds all dried up like African Plains mudholes where the gazelles vainly try to drink from. Scary. The inch will not remedy the drought but it may help people whose wells are very low make it another month or so.

I'm letting my color grow out. My hair is 100% gray, a nice, silvery gray. I may scoot into town later and have my haircresser cut another inch or so off. It's growing out nicely. I was afraid I'd have that old skunk line atop my head, but the gray is melding through all over and the brown is just lightening up uniformly. I don't know why I'm doing this, after coloring it for over ten years. Maybe I'm tired of the chemicals. Or maybe I just want my real hair back. We'll see.

The HS Art Dep't joined the Annual Artisan's Show recently. I think that is a super idea. I bought a high school student's work, a painting I like very much. She was so thrilled to make a sale. And the proceeds from that table's sales go back to the Art department. How wonderful. Everybody wins. Above, Hannah Shelton, grade 12, "Seaside"

Take it easy and remember to be nice to someone today. Random kindness works.

At the laudromat

At Danielsville laundromat, I park next to Papa and his boiled peanut and fried pork skin vendor cart, and enter past a bulletin board advertising the annual chitlin dinner at Watson Mill Fish House. Inside is a women in a brown tee shirt advertising Bubba's Taxidermy.

Above, Papa attending to a customer, wearing his trademark white cowboy hat, matching his white, flowing hair.

I watch my delicates spin, and my interior chortles on the typical southern markers fade as I chat with a woman who owns a washing machine, but there's no water at her house because her well ran dry...so she's here at the laundro. Her well gave up the ghost, and the drought doesn't seem to be easing anytime soon. "I wonder how long it'll be till they tell us we can't use this place," she said morosely.

She runs a farm and has to haul water for all the animals. She heats the water for dishwashing in the microwave. She takes a shower at her friends' house. One load of laundry takes 60 gallons..."I know. I've hauled them," she said.

As I pack to leave, I wish the the no-water dry well woman good luck. She brightens, saying "Nice chatting with you!"

We're in a drought

A really, really bad 100-year drought. No need to waste precious water on our cars...for vanity purposes

Water, Canada, drought, and thirsty

At a party fourteen years ago a Canadian friend announced that if the US ever invades Canada it would likely be over water rights. My husband at the time and I shook our heads, the very idea that water could be at the center of any fight was so strange to us. We lived in Maine, where snowmelt swelled rivers and flooded towns each spring. Water. I mean, there is so much of it everywhere. Right?

Since then there have been studies done about the issue and it turns our friend wasn’t having a senior moment. Canada has only 0.5% of the world's population, but its landmass contains approximately 9% of the world's renewable water supply. I learned about water’s finiteness when shortly after our Canadian friend made his statement, when we became live-aboard cruisers.

Live-aboard cruising is like camping, you take with you what you need. Carry-in, carry-out. That included water. Our sailboat was a solid, heavy and roomy. It carried 100 gallons of water in two tanks under the bow.

We didn’t think about water too much while we sailed in the US. When we needed some, we filled up using one of the available water taps at a marina. However, after crossing to the Bahamas we learned different. Rainfall during the months that we would be there average an inch and a half. The Bahamas Islands are a desert country, situated on limestone and coral, only inches above sea level, and wells are unheard of. Locals collect rainwater in cisterns. For visitors, marginally drinkable water is available for prices ranging from 5 cents to 60 cents a gallon. Many boaters own reverse osmosis contraptions and make their own water.

All this was new to us Mainers who see so much snow, ice, and rain each year. “Conserve water” became our norm. Showers consisted of stove heated water, measured and poured into a bottle that had a pump and handle. If it rained, hubby quickly stopped the scuppers and collected it. You never saw a man move so quickly as when that first raindrop hit the deck. He could go from a napping prone position in his berth to standing on the forward deck with bucket looking at the sky in 5 seconds flat.

Living for two years with a finite amount of water made an impression. Not having enough water scared us, and never mind that it was our choice. What about the people for whom having no clean water is not their choice? We were sobered by our American lifestyle of waste.

Now with the Georgia extreme drought those memories surface again. I see the pond level outside my apartment slowly sink, revealing long-submerged trees and branches. I hear of nearby wells going dry. I worry about the farmers. I cringe at the maroon parts of the drought monitor maps like the one on the left. I like water. I like Canada. I just don’t want to have to go to Canada to take a shower.

For More Information: May 10, 2006 CBS article:
Drain Canada The American Prospect: Prepare For U.S.-Canadian Water War

Drought...fire...what next? locusts?

We’re having a 50-year drought here

Groundwater levels are dropping statewide. Many wells are approaching their average yearly low water level, which is reached normally in late summer or early fall. Little if any widespread, sustained relief from the drought is anticipated. The long-term outlook is for the drought to continue to intensify. Drought conditions continue to worsen across the entire state. Of Georgia's 159 counties, 74 are classified as being in extreme drought, 79 in severe drought and six in moderate drought.

We’re having wildfire smoke here

Fire conditions throughout the region are the worst in decades, and fires are expected to burn throughout the area for at least another six weeks. In the past few weeks, smoke from wildfires has impacted metro Atlanta, with reduced visibility at Hartsfield International Airport, as well as the towns of Athens and Columbus, which are more than 250 miles from fires burning in southern part of the State.