M.D. Creekmore at The Survivalist Blog – a survival blog dedicated to helping others prepare for and survive disaster – with articles on bug out bag contents, survival knife choices and a wealth of other survival information is giving away a 1,000 round case of 9mm – 124 Grain FMJ (a $200 value – donated by LuckyGunner)! To enter, you just have to post about it on your blog. This is my entry. Visit The Survivalist Blog for the details.

Here’s a little perspective on the gulf oil spill versus Cap and Trade . . .

Via The Patriot Post:

Today’s dinner menu was one of my favorite meals. We had Chicken Fried Steak with mashed cauliflower/potato medley, savory home grown green beans and bacon and Damsel’s killer white gravy.

The steaks are actually made from Fillet Mignon (beef tenderloin) pounded flat. The steaks are coated with flour and seasonings and pan fried to golden brown. The same pan is used to prepare the gravy. Damsel uses the pan drippings and adds a little extra virgin olive oil and flour. after simmering the flour, some milk is added to combine with the other ingredients.

The mashed potato medley actually is half cauliflower, half red potatoes with a few cloves of garlic thrown into the pot. During the mashing, butter, shredded Romano cheese and a little milk are added to the mix.

Our green beans were home-grown Kentucky Wonder beans cut into one inch pieces and boiled until tender. The beans are removed from the pan and drained and a couple of bacon strips chopped into bits are browned in the pan. Savories (chopped onion and minced garlic) are added in and carmelized. When that’s done, the beans are added back into the pan, a little granulated sweetener and a splash of red wine vinegar is added to deglaze the pan. It’s my job to prepare the green beans.

It was an awesome meal. I was tempted to clean my plate, but I saved some of the steak for a lunch this coming week. I enjoyed Fathers Day dinner a lot.

The new solar cycle antes up a massive CME for Fathers day. From SpaceWeather.com . . .

FATHER’S DAY BLAST: Consider it a Father’s Day gift … from the sun. This morning around 1 a.m. UT, magnetic fields on the sun’s eastern limb became unstable and erupted, producing one of the most spectacular explosions of the year. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the action:

The explosion did not cause a solar flare (a flash of electromagnetic radiation) but it did hurl a massive cloud of magnetized plasma into space. Because of the blast site’s location on the eastern limb, the cloud will not hit Earth. There won’t be any geomagnetic storms or auroras.

The first of the Santana Hibiscus flowers opened this weekend. I love these miniature hibiscus hybrid flowers for their vermilion color and bright yellow stamens. Photo taken in the patio today. Click on the image to enlarge.

I can honestly say that this Pencil Cholla Cactus is growing in our back yard. Not our yard in California, of course, but on our recently purchased Arizona property. I took this photo on June 10th while we were on the property talking to our contractor about the placement of the house and RV pad.

According to Desert Tropicals, Pencil Cholla is also called the Desert Christmas Cactus due to its olive-sized red fruit that appears in December. The tiny flowers appear in the spring months and disappear in summer.

I’m really looking forward to having a cactus garden at the new place including this Pencil Cholla and one or two Palo Verde trees already on the property. Click on the image to enlarge.

After the Oval Office speech and really brief meeting with the CEO of BP, Captain Kickass is really starting to be annoying . . .

Why would that be significant? Well, it would allow for a full 4PI (360×360°) view of the sun. The animated movie of the sun on STEREO’s Website currently has a gap in the coverage of the sun. The spacecraft are in a heliocentric orbit drifting away from the Earth, one leading and one lagging. This diagram shows the current position of spacecraft A (ahead) and B (behind). The scale is in astronomical units, the average distance between the earth and sun.

Sun-monitoring instrumentation on spacecraft like SOHO and STEREO have gone a long way in discovering what makes the sun behave in mysterious ways. Also, the data coming back (when not intentionally distorted by the IPCC, the CRU or NASA’s James Hansen) can be used to chart the relationship between solar activity and global climate.

From mid-spring until late fall, this beautiful shrub blooms continuously with these colorful flowers. I have loved them for years and I was very disappointed that they don’t grow well in California coastal areas. I brought one home from a nursery in Indio, CA, a few years ago but it didn’t take to our coastal weather. Now, that we’re going to live in Arizona, I’m looking forward to having them in our desert garden there.

The shrub is called “Red Bird of Paradise” or “The Pride of Barbados.” They are native to Central America, parts of South America and the West Indies. Desert Tropicals, a Phoenix based garden information website, has information on cultivation and care of these pretty shrubs. They recommend planting them six feet apart and after summer in November or so, to cut them almost to the ground to keep them compact. In mid-spring, they will grow quite rapidly to between six and fifteen feet high.

I took the picture above when we were in Arizona last week. Click on the image to enlarge.

After we returned to our California residence, we found that the white epiphyllum “orchid cactus” was in bloom. Once a year, these beautiful flowers adorn our garden. Click on the image to enlarge.