The day is off to an slow start after a COVID booster yesterday. It usually only lasts for one day. Add to that very high pollen and I'm sneezing and achy, without having a cold or flu.

I'm into the next book in the stack, this one about the history of the business and production of sugar (Sweetness and Power) and am finding interesting parallels to today from the 1650-1850 period of colonial plantations that were protected and subsidized by governments. They operated in a way that the "capitalist slaveholders were quasi-aristocratic.(57)" Written in 1985 about stuff he was thinking about in the 1960s and 70s, he used lots of Marx and Adam Smith types as sources. Having read a fair amount of theory and philosophy in graduate school, it seems a bit ironic to be a postmodernist scholar reading a modernist work about that industry through the lens of what is becoming a Plutocratic era of rich technocrats. Modern industry is supported by the very things that Musk wants to privatize. Where have we seen this before . . .

I haven't started dusting and cleaning yet for company, but I'd best get to it. And mowing and gardening. And my friend sent home a bunch more boxes for packing my fragile eBay stuff. Time for a cuppa tea and decide what to do next.