One year ago this week we were sitting on the side of a mountain in northwestern North Carolina. We aren’t the first Texans to have discovered and fallen in love with the Blue Ridge Mountains and I’m sure we wont be the last. The plan for this year was to head to the mountains next weekend for our two week vacation. Those plans were canceled once the diagnosis came in and the treatment schedule was arrived at. So this summer my North Carolina Mountain Dreams are all in cyberspace while I hold out hopes for a fall trip up the mountains.

The weather has been so screwy that the temperature down here on the Gulf Coast have been almost the same as the temperatures in Boone and Floyd. Blame ours on the rain with clouds, blame the mountains on…does anyone have a likely suspect besides climate change? Pushing record highs is something we know well down here on the coast, I don’t think my mountain friends are used to week after week of trying to set record temperatures.

In case you have never noticed, I do tend to go on about the weather…

Here is an interesting news story on a number of levels…

Texas is the new frontier for olive oil, the world’s “green gold.”

The state already has a small olive oil industry, but now that Spanish food giant Grupo Sos plans to plant olive trees in Texas, it could take off.

“We could have Texas olive oil in a few years,” said Jesús Salazar, president of Grupo Sos, which bought Houston’s American Rice and its Freeport plant in 2004 for $41 million.

Grupo Sos pumps out 15 percent of the world’s olive oil a year, making it a leader in the global industry, Salazar said. It operates out of Spain, the world’s top olive oil producer.

I love the fact that it looks like Texas is going to be getting into the olive oil business in a big way. But I find it not so lovable that American Rice is now a Spanish owned company. I do find it intriguing that the reason they are planning olive groves in Texas is that they are following low priced land…

Source: Texas olive oil tapped to bear more fruit | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

Here’s an interesting take on the Libby commutation…and every thing else President Bush has done for the last 5 years…

For Bush to have allowed Libby to go to jail, he would have had to live with the idea that someone who he thought was a good and loyal soldier was being punished for being a good and loyal soldier — a fairly extreme form of cognitive dissonance. The only way to keep such cognitive dissonance at bay, the psychologists said, was for Bush to see Libby’s prison sentence as overly harsh and do away with it altogether, even though Bush, both as president and governor of Texas, has long prided himself on refusing clemency to felons.

“He sees no inconsistency, just as we cannot see our own inconsistencies even though they are strikingly clear to everyone else,” Tavris said. “He is protecting one of his own, but his reasoning is consistent with the way the mind works to preserve consistency.”

Is it just me or does it almost sound like the ultimate Bush administration push back? I can hear Tony Snow now…”It is a proven fact that all Americans do it…You’ve done it in the past. President Bush did not do any thing that all other American’s haven’t done in the past…It’s old news, lets move on.” Do you hear it? Do you?

Source: Shankar Vedantam – Bush: Naturally, Never Wrong – washingtonpost.com

Again I find the coffee cup empty and the clock on the wall pushing me out the door…Later gator.