It's the Vernal Equinox!

So I went out to the yard and took some remarkably bad pictures of flowers. I don't know what happened, but most of the pictures are washed out, ill-composed and littered with debris and whitefly. (Yes, I have both whitefly and aphids, and spent some time this morning wiping aphids off the new growth on my Japanese maples.)

Unfortunately we still have little pesky sucking insects infecting our major banks and other financial institutions and we can't get rid of them by wiping them off with a wet paper towel or aiming for them with a shot of water from the garden hose. You'd think that the recipients of our government's largesse would feel just a teensy bit ashamed at taking taxpayer-funded bonuses after crashing the economy, but then you'd be thinking like a person who doesn't make $165 million a year. And when you make $165 million a year, by golly, you DESERVE a taxpayer-funded bonus because, well, you were one of the people who came up with the very idea of, well, Credit Default Swaps. And then you convinced your fellows that they were a really, really good idea and that you couldn't lose and everyone would make piles of money and that you all were really great innovators and, like, positively entrepeneurial. And while they didn't turn out to be such a good idea--although certainly innovative and kind of entrepeneurial, in the same way that a Ponzi scheme is entrepeneurial--you and your buddies did make piles of money, like $165 million a year.

I, for one, hope they figure out some way to get all the money back, every blessed penny of it. We can surely think of something better to spend it on.

Now I find that I've lost all the pictures I took today. Sometimes good things happen.