Been a while...

Since I updated! Well, the wet weather has had some bad effects on my garden, namely, problems with fungus on some of my tomato plants. Not all of the plants have been affected but it isn't pretty. One tomato was ripening but the water collecting on the top (stem area) rotted it and it fell to the ground, and the rot spread when I tried to salvage it by ripening it inside so I couldn't just cut off the bad part. Nonetheless, I still have lots of tomatoes doing okay (always plant more than you need). It's been dry for most of the last week (relatively speaking) and the past few days have been quite warm. My moon and stars watermelons are doing better than they were the last time I updated, so, if there's no early frost I should have at least one. I picked a sugar baby watermelon last week. Rather small but not bad considering the cool, rainy weather.

Locally, there was a group of four flatlanders from CT (as near as can be told) who shot someone in the leg in a town not too far away (who may have been involved with drugs or something from the sounds of things). Problem is, they didn't stop at their target (who survived and is in jail himself now in violation of his conditions of release; he was convicted of dumping some toxic stuff in a river some years back), and while fleeing towards New York carjacked from some innocent people (and this happened not far from a shooting range I was at while this was going on, I heard lots of sirens and didn't know what it was until the next morning). The people in the car were not surprisingly, terrified during and after their ordeal, as it was a nasty interruption while they were enjoying themselves). Now this is where things get very strange: the Rutland City police department got involved when they fled through the city, and were laying spike strips on the road with a K9 unit nearby. A state trooper ran through the spike strips and ran over the city's police dog, killing it, or so the articles I read say, which were later re-written to not make the police look so incompetent. Nonetheless, the suspects were found and jailed and have been charged. There was an article in the Rutland Herald ("We Don't Dial 911") in which residents tired of this crime were saying they're armed and will not tolerate these scumbags (I wonder if Officer Fuller has been over to them now to share his great "wisdom" that they're "part of the problem" if they carry a gun?).