2015 - Another fine year shot to heck! Year end musings

What's a tree worth? This interesting thought came to me while watching the chainsaw pros quickly clean up the ice storm tree debris.  As TPP watched a nearly 20 foot limber pine zip through the chipper, you know you only paid $130 for the tree plus the cost of delivery and planting (too big), but even if someone were to give you $200 for a replacement, you can't get back the 8-10 years of growth. That begins to tell you how much a really big tree is worth, they're really priceless and they should not be taken down without damned good cause.
So instead of a tree limb mess there now exists a 15 foot wide 20 foot long empty space although TPP's Sinocalycanthus appears to have escaped tree fall damage.  Good thin it'd be pretty tough to replace.  So the Phactors get to rethink this border garden and maybe try something different; it was a bit too shady for the limber pine. 
This ends TPPs first full year of retirement and the most surprising thing has been how busy his life has been. So no daytime TV, no shortage of chores, no shortage of gardening jobs, no boredom at all. On the positive side, he cooks more Italian food and shops more for groceries. Further he resolves to clean up all of the kitchen messes he creates. 
This blog is also almost 8 years old. Although very few people noticed at first, readership has been pretty steady for the last few years. Hope you all appreciate the total and complete absence of annoying popup ads or pathetic bloggers begging for donations. Heck, TPP hasn't even tried to flog his real life counterparts book; hard to do when writing under a pseudonym. The assumption is that readers appreciate these efforts.  Hard to know what my readers think because - in general silence. TPP admits that the primary purpose of this blog is to get things off my mind, to blow off steam, and lower the blood pressure in a semi-constructive manner.
Politics is so very bad this year that TPP can hardly write anything at all because it all comes out sounding so very pessimistic that it doesn't help the old state of mind at all. Seriously thinking that candidates should be asked if they garden, and if not, then we should forget them completely. Hoe some weeds, mow some grass, grow some tomatoes and then we'll talk.  Maybe 2016 should be the year of Gardening for better government, then we sharpen our hoes and weed out all of the baddies.
Send your local politicians some seeds and see what they do with them. Maybe we can grow some better government, a real grassroots effort.  Tell the blogger what you thinks. Time to cleanup the kitchen.