Time to bring the plants in/ The Most Anemic Presidential Debate Ever.

It’s that time again. Tomorrow, with heavy hart, I bid farewell to summer by bringing my twenty-five cacti, ten jade plants, three large bonsai trees and two huge agave inside for the long dark winter. 

The major draw back to owning a condo is the lack of yard space, but almost every inch of my porch space is filled with greenery, which creates an urban tropical cacti forest day and night.

People think cacti are "indestructible" but that's not close to being true, especially indoors as they are not considered house plants.  Like me, they also don't like extreme cold. Further, Chicago's winters deprive them of light as well. They go through dormant stage from November to March, but they have to be closely watched indoors because they can completely dry out and die. Even worse because Chicago is so different than their natural environment they get weakened as the winter drudges on   and often get infected by a cotton like fungus that weakens them until they rot. I know how to treat this fungus if I catch it early. But I use to lose two or three cacti a year this way.  Last year I only lost one right at the end of winter. I've grown a lot more experienced in their care over all. But it's still nerve wracking to watch them weaken, becoming more visibly stressed as the winter drips by. 

But I also enjoy them inside during the winter as my house assumes a tropical look and my plants  consume the toxins out of the stale and stagnant winter air replacing it with pristine oxygen for my dog and I to breath.

The above cactus is a Rhipsalis, which is actually more of a rare cactus. I keep this one indoors year round inside a salvaged world globe in my study/library/ studio.

And Now.......................

On To...........................

          "The Lackluster Presidential Debates"

 

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 were seven debates in each of the then nine Illinois congressional districts. Lincoln road a mule through out the state to reach each point. I wonder what he would have thought of this first Presidential Debate of 2012?

Leading up to it, both campaign's  adviser's felt comfortable enough to actually admit publicly their cynical objective and work "to dampen the [ public's ] expectations" for these debates.  It would have been great to hear those eternal conversations.

But, they certainly earned there money.

And President Obama as the front runner didn't even seem to want to participate in this farce of a democratic debate.

The irony is that the candidate that actually wanted to be there, and should have been there, Jill Stein of the Green Party was refused entry.  Most media outlets declared Romney the winner.  But this debate will go down in history as the most anemic and where the moderator had to struggle to find issues on which both candidates actually, disagreed. Yet another glaring example of how far gone, what passes for our democratic system, is.

But as Abraham Lincoln said "The people get the type of government they deserve" and now they also get the campaigns as well.