Monday July 19, 2021 - 06:36:00 PM This feels like a week to pour a glass of wine, pick up a mindless book and eat chocolate. That is as long as there is water left to grow the grapes and the crop doesn’t cook in a heat dome and the tiny chocolate midge insects survive to pollinate the cocoa plant. The drought map https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/ looks worse each week and unless we can learn to appreciate the critical importance of insects and their host plants a lot more is at risk than just chocolate. Summer has barely started. The West is burning and so is Siberia. The flood waters in Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium are starting to recede and we are supposed to be on watch for lightening. As for mindless books, there is no shortage, but I can’t seem to pull my head out of the books on politics and the environment.