Well, it is New Year's Eve. We have very warm and wet conditions. The temps reached the mid 40s yesterday and will be in the mid to high 50s today. I am amazed by how much of our mountains of snow have disappeared over the last couple of days. We are expecting some rain and possible thunder out of that storm that gave so much of the west floods, mudslides, and blizzards. The east looks like it may be dug out in time to celebrate tonight.

I am enjoying the gardening catalogs that have arrived--two ordered and two a complete surprise. Those last two we think came because Mom got a free subscription to "Better Homes and Gardens" with her new mixer (which she loves) and the companies share the mailing list. We sent off our first order--a bay laurel seedling and a mini-greenhouse perfectly sized for a particular spot on the patio.

I guess this is one possible solution to the problem of potential seal level rise and global warming. But I do have to ask several questions--how much would such 'floating hotels' cost, how many can we afford to build, how many of our nearly 7 billion people (according to worldometers) can we accommodate, and who would be left behind?

Here is a mildly humorous entry from Firedoglake on the Republican plan to open the new Congress with a reading (aloud) of the Constitution. Might be a good idea for the idiots among them to be reminded of what the document actually says. We just had another interesting thought. There is a proposal to force each member who writes a new bill to include the Constitutional justification or authority for the bill. So we might be faced with the comedy of seeing 1200 page bills (which they don't read now) with equally lengthy legal brief attached. I feel sorry for the poor trees soon to be sacrificed in this futile exercise.

Yves at Naked Capitalist has this interesting item which takes the robo-signing scandal from the mortgage fraud realm into the credit card collections hell. Not only do people attesting to the validity of legal documents not have to be working at the firm for which they are signing the documents or examining the documents they are signing but they don't even have to be alive to do so. Once upon a time we were proud to say that we were a 'government of laws, not men.' We have now morphed to being ruled by a 'government of corporations, not laws.' If we had to change I would prefer we took a step backwards. Men can die, corporation don't.