I had an e-mail tonight from Pam and Joe Hebert with a link to a very moving commercial on YouTube, allegedly done by a teen for his mother. The link they sent didn't work for me, but I found it easily using Google. Here is a link - worth watching. Tea Party Commercial

Thanks, Pam & Joe.

I guess just about everyone knows about the young St. Johnsbury lad, 2nd Lt. Joseph Fortin, who was killed in action last week. The whole of the Northeast Kingdom turned out Saturday as his body was returned to St. Johnsbury. People lined up not only in St. Johnsbury, but along Rt. 2 in Danville and West Danville to honor him. His funeral was this morning at St. Johnsbury Academy, where he graduated in 2004. He was 22. Here is today's WCAX News report: Lt. Fortin

We are proud of the men and women who serve our country in the armed services, and mourn the loss of each and every life given. There are many thoughts and prayers for the friends and family of this brave young man tonight. I hope they find some comfort that so many people share their grief.

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We're tempting the weather gods tonight by not covering our garden and other tender plants outside. A couple nights ago we covered everything and we didn't have a frost. Other places did, but not here. I'm counting on the same situation tonight. I may be sorry, but even if the temperature does get to freezing, it's unlikely to damage any but the most tender plants because it won't get much below the 32 degree mark and even if it does, it won't be long enough to do much damage. I hope.

I worked outside this afternoon, collecting grass clippings to use later in the fall to cover this year's vegetable garden before snow falls. I'll get more tomorrow - there is a good crop below the house. The one crop that grew best this year was grass. Makes us wish we had a grass pellet burning stove. After working in the garden to pick the last of the peas and nab a tomato and a cuke for supper, I decided it was time to clean up the lovage plants that always grow to towering spikes, five or six feet tall with hollow stems that go POP! when I break them over. There is plenty of new growth coming along, and I got about half way through the job when I felt the unmistakable jab of a bee sting on my wrist. There were bees all around me, one on my shirt looking for skin, and I could hear them buzzing frantically as I sprinted across the lawn. Fortunately they didn't follow me far and I got only the one sting. I usually hear them in time to back off without getting them mad and me stung, but I guess I was concentrating too hard on tearing out the old stalks of loveage to notice.

My left wrist bone looks considerably larger than usual tonight, and there's a puffy spot about the size of a quarter, and a residual jab of pain off and on. I don't often get stung, but over the years have managed to have some close calls and a few really painful direct hits.

I remember one time when Uncle Bob and I were at the head of the pond herding some of our young cattle off the railroad track. The land that is now where Randall's house is, to the field where the cattle were last year, was our pasture at one time, where the young stock spent each summer. There was a fence through the woods, marsh and swamp next to the brook that runs under Deeper Ruts Road into the pond. The young Holsteins apparently found a weak spot in the fence and we'd had a call that they were on the railroad tracks. Back then the trains went through regularly, and the tracks were no place for cattle. We found the break in the fence and rushed to herd the wayward critters back the way they'd come, through thick underbrush and marsh land. In the process, one of the cows apparently stepped on a bee's nest. I doubt the bees bothered the cows much, but Bob and I had no chance of getting away quickly through the mud and underbrush, so the angry insects had no trouble finding a target. Fortunately there was no shortage of mud - the standard treatment for bee stings was to apply a thick coating of mud - and we eventually got the cattle back where they belonged. But we must have been a sorry looking pair, covered with mud, scratched and bloody from the brush, tired and aching with bee stings. Sometimes we hated those cows.