I was relieved to see tRump impeached by The House again yesterday, this time (!) for inciting the insurrection at the Capitol a week ago.  But as incredibly amazing as it is to have had him brazenly ignore the Constitution (again!) and send his cult on an attempted coup to derail our democratic procedures, sadly the POS GOP Senators (who just love to scream about Law and Order) "likely" won't do anything.

Today has started with another too-early (4:30) morning, though before last night I had been working on a much happier trend: not getting up during the night and then sleeping in until almost 7:00... for two days in a row! It would have been so nice if I could have added a third day to that run... sigh.

The tree trimmers arrived at first light to finish up.  If Paul is again motivated to rake the latest crop of leaves that have fallen in the two weeks since their previous visit that would definitely go far in helping to keep the pool cleaner.  Though the trees aren't completely barren yet, at least the volume of leaves still left to fall is just a tiny fraction of the trees' total output each year.

Interesting note on trees:

Watching a taped NOVA the other evening (about various ways new technology is being used to address global warming), there was a segment included on how planting more trees (we know that as our 'lungs' they are a major component of cleaning the air) 'couldn't hurt' in one respect, though the down side is that as population continues to increase so does the need for more food, and thus more land is needed for farming.  An initial step was to count how many trees are already in existence on the planet, and I was stunned by a statistic (garnered from new technology used to count them) that "there are more trees on Earth than stars in our galaxy."  (At least I think it was 'galaxy'.) Can that be true?! 

Stars are not scattered randomly through space, they are gathered together into vast groups known as galaxies. The Sun belongs to a galaxy called the Milky Way. Astronomers estimate there are about 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way alone.

I have a substantial number of phone calls left to make, some of which I have been putting off. Yesterday I spent the better part of a frustrating hour on the phone arguing with the bank over a ridiculous service charge - but at least in the end I was successful in having it removed. Don't expect today's calls to be any more enjoyable, but if I tackle one a day it shouldn't be too bad, right?