16 February 2004 Today Sara told me that she doesn't want to cook dirt. It's not that we're poor, or that we've decided to follow a strange diet (Dr. Atkin's Really-low-carbohydrate diet), but that we now have a nice little rose plant that we wish to grow. Sara placed it into a larger pot, and we found that we need more dirt than we currently have, and were deciding how to get some more. I thought that we could just find some outside, but Sara said that it would have bugs in it. I replied that we could cook it to kill the bugs. But that would probably make our house smell bad, so we probably won't do that, but just buy some dirt instead. Which sounds incredibly silly, the idea of buying dirt. It's as silly as buying water, or air (oxygen, with the various other elements and compounds in it). Those are rather raw materials that can, or at least should be, easily accessible to everyone. Of course, what we would really be buying was clean, fertile dirt, but it still sounds silly. Actually, oxygen bars exist in Japan where one can buy various kinds of scented oxygen to relax with after work, and I think that I've seen bottled oxygen on sale, for people to breathe. Some companies probably buy large tanks of pure oxygen for various purposes, but then oxygen and air aren't exactly the same thing. Really oxygen is only a small component of the air that we breathe, so I suppose that that somewhat justifies buying pure oxygen, at least in mass quantities. At any rate, at least now we have a new plant that should thrive. Thoughts and Events