Certainly you've heard the "mommy joke":
What did the big tomato say to the little tomato when the little tomato fell behind?
“Ketchup!”
Groan! I know!
Catch up - The past couple of days have been catch up days. At work I've been filing emails and trying to get a handle on what are the current "hot issues". At home, I watched the kids last night so that Michelle could do major grocery shopping and restock the shelves. Tonight Michelle took care of the kids so that I could mow the pasture lawn. Many sections of it were very thick and overgrown — at least, the sections that didn't get burnt out from the recent heat wave. Michelle has been going over the stack of mail I picked up from the Post Office yesterday.
In the mail I was happy to see our new health insurance cards. There's nothing like transitioning health plans while you're away on vacation add a little anxiety to your "rest and relaxation".
We also got our offer to lock in a propane price cap for the season. The per gallon rate is likely significantly higher (I'll have to double check against last year), but the per month rate has dropped significantly because we used so much less last season due to the wood pellet heat. The delivery service is obviously extrapolating lower propane needs for the upcoming winter.
Peak Oil - I've been trying to research counter arguments against a recent enviro-buzzword: "peak oil". While I'm believe in appropriate stewardship of resources and taking reasonable measures to minimize our impact, it's just so hard to take this latest mantra seriously. The crisis du jour changes so frequently that soon it becomes difficult swallow the rhetoric. In the '60s we had "Population Bomb" author Paul Ehrlich telling everyone to have just one child because within a decade or two we'd run out of everything. In the '70s there were scares about an energy crisis (during the Ford and Carter administrations) and concerns about an upcoming Ice Age due to global cooling. Later we were scared by ozone depletion at the ice caps. There's currently the ever present "global warming" and now "peak oil". Peak Oil posits that we've hit maximum oil extraction capacity. Never mind that the US hasn't built a refinery in over 30 years and that many of the older refineries are closed. Never mind that various states have demanded custom blends and formulations of gasoline making refining more difficult. Nope, it's more effective to state "peak oil" production. Whenever there's scarcity in the market, there seems to always be a group that wants to make it seem permanent. Maybe this latest theory has truth, but the track record on similar scares hasn't been too hot.