Wednesday, March 9, 2011

This and that, diary stuff

I'm busy getting my Food Storage presentation ready for Saturday.  I'll be teaching at the stake women's day 9am-12.

I got some seeds planted in little cups, in three weeks I can transplant them into my garden.  This will be my third summer to have a garden.  Every year I learn a little more.  I got some more boards today at Home Depot, for Wayne to build a 5th "square foot garden".  And I got some more trellis, because last year I didn't have enough space for all the climbing vegetables I had.

Tara has decided to attend Wake Tech in the fall, so she will be living at home again.

I have discovered I absolutely love baking with white wheat.  I don't know why everyone told us to buy hard red wheat 30 years ago.  It was all we ever had.  Now I am buying only white wheat, it tastes so much more like regular flour.

I learned to sew a bit on my treadle machine.  It is like sewing with no brakes and with no steering.  I have to pedal full speed, because if I slow down at all, the wheel goes in reverse and it breaks the thread.  The only way to sew is FAST, and that means I never have time to straighten up the fabric layers as they fly through the needle.  Lots of crooked seams.  There is no way to do anything but straight seams on it, I can't imagine setting in sleeves.

On Friday night, Wayne and I attended the Young Adult regional dance.  We always sit in the game room and play board games or talk to the other members of the bishopric, but occasionally we hear a good song and run in there and dance one dance.  So we heard some great swing music and hurried into the gym and started dancing.  Wayne is such a good leader, we were doing spins and doing so well, basically the whole crowd was just standing in a circle watching us and about two other couples dancing.  It was very fun.

And here's my bad news for the day:


http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/03/08/bowles-simpson-fiscal-crisis-could-come-within-2-years/
"Bowles, Simpson: Fiscal Crisis Could Come Within 2 Years"


Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, who co-chaired the White House’s deficit-reduction commission last year, said Tuesday the U.S. could face a destabilizing fiscal crisis in two years or even sooner.
At a Senate Budget Committee hearing on Tuesday, both men chided Congress for focusing so much time and energy on cutting domestic discretionary spending, which makes up about 12% of government spending, and not focusing enough on entitlement programs and the tax code. The U.S. has $14.1 trillion in debt and is projected to run a $1.65 trillion deficit in 2011. Debt levels are projected to grow rapidly, which many believe will force the U.S. to borrow more money from other countries.
“This problem is going to happen long before my grandchildren grow up,” said Mr. Bowles, who was White House chief of staff during the Clinton administration. “This is a problem we are going to have to face up to it maybe two years, maybe a little less, maybe a little more.”
He said the crisis is “predictable” and will take place when “our bankers over there in Asia begin to believe we are not going to be solid on our debt, that we are not going to be able to meet our obligations. Just stop and think a minute what happens if they stop buying our debt. What happens to interest rates? What happens to the U.S. economy? The markets will absolutely devastate us if we don’t step up to this problem. The problem is real. The solutions are painful, and we have to act.”
Mr. Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, said, “I think it will come before two years.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the panel, said “the remarks you have just made are very sobering.”

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