It's Memorial Day weekend in the U.S., and over here the tomatoes froze.
The grass was covered by white frost, plants that were not inside their tiny soda bottle green houses were dead. The potato plants showed the tell tale brown freeze damage but they have survived.
The amount of rain in May this year feels so disproportionate, and mushrooms, big and brown and inedible, have taken over in a couple of places where the ground is too dense for the water to run off.
In the Black Forest, people had to get their snow shovels out in the higher elevations.
While we are trying to save the planet one insulation panel at a time, stepmother nature demonstrates how easy a crop failure is. But we can report that we fulfilled our obligations under the Kyoto Protocol by reducing CO2 emissions by 60 plus percent compared to 1990.
With a mix of desperation and determination, we did put more tomato seeds in pots inside the house and within the next week or so, they'll go out to replace the Memorial Day weekend casualties.
One Memorial Day weekend not long ago, we were hanging out at Angel's Camp, in the middle of the county made famous by Mark Twain's jumping frog of Calaveras County.
The kids, anybody under 30, were having fun, and so did the local sheriffs. We were walking along the road when we saw a group of youngsters fifteen feet ahead. One of them was obviously rolling a joint. A group of sheriff's deputies overtook us at a brisk speed, and we saw the kid drop the joint and grind it into the ground with his boot just as the sheriffs passed them. One of the deputies stopped, looked at the youth, then at the ground and said "Why d'you do that?" with a smile. Then he followed the other deputies.
Nonsensical little episodes like this make chilly late May Germany more bearable.
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