Another day, another help desk duty. I hate this. Why did I volunteer to do it? Someone of my intelligence and wit (if not my spelling ability) should not have to sit answering phones regarding why a phone line in Finland won't work (probably because of the pickled herring wedged in the adapter). I could be writing my book I suppose but you'll have to wait and see about that. I could write some poetry but I am in one of those 'nothing I write is any good' phases which is generally interspersed with ideas which I imagine are going to be the best ever poems in the history of word-smithery. I want to write a poem about trees which I consider among the most beautiful things on this planet. Look at them with a new eye and you will see how strange and wonderful they actually are. I remember reading somewhere that if an alien came to this planet, the strangest things for them would be the trees. Of course that is only for an alien which comes from a treeless planet and maybe the writer was trying to say that they thought that trees were uncommon in the universe but how could they know. Maybe the evolutionary processes for trees are that much more complex from the other myriad types of life on earth and therefore relatively unlikely amongst the life which the writer suggests may exists elsewhere in space. I am adding all sorts of conditions to this writer, none of which have any reality because I cannot remember anything about the piece I read other than the fact that trees would appear strange to an alien. Well they are so there.