What A Week

Well it's still Friday so the week isn't over but given all the kerfuffles in Congress and the White House this week it seems even longer.

The good news is that the "skinny repeal" TrumpDoesn'tCare health bill died with a classic thumb gesture from John McCain. Now that doesn't mean that all is well and everyone will get insurance and care since Trump has already announced that he is going to stop paying the money to insurance companies that was in the first ACA and that has been under litigation brought up by Republicans for a long time. If that happens disaster will follow quickly but Trump doesn't care.

As for the other news--where to start? Scaramucci's arrival as communications director instigated the resignation of Sean Spicer who now walks around with a smile on his face. Scaramucci named Reince Priebus as the senior leaker at the White House and described him as a paranoid schizophrenic 24 hours before Trump kicked Priebus to the curb at approximately 4:30 EDT today. Trump named John Kelly, the current DHS secretary, to be the new chief of staff at the WH so he also has to find a new DHS secretary. I don't imagine that search will be easy unless he goes for Giuliani or Gingrich, both men who want power in the worst way and I mean that literally. Sources indicate that Bannon is only holding on by his fingertips as is Jeff Sessions. But if Trump cans Sessions Congress will go completely nuts.

I am nearly done with the Lilies and Ferns block and will post pictures soon. We are getting our first tomatoes now, making summer seem better even though we have had 22 record setting hot days just in July. Some of the records have been for the high during the day (100 plus F) and some have been record high lows (70--74F) in the morning. Two days ago we had two inches of rain in one hour and then thunderstorms for the next 48 hours. With all the rain and the heat we have much higher humidity than is usual for the high desert--good for fire suppression but hard to bear.