Having a hard time settling in today

I slept fairly well last night - woke up a few times as usual, but went back to sleep. I am still tired today and was nearly asleep when DH's cell phone started ringing, was almost asleep again when the house phone started ringing and I had to answer it. Oh well, it was lunchtime anyway and I need a shower before going to get the kids.

Part of my inability to get anything done today, is that I am getting nervous about NaNoWriMo. I mean, who do I think I'm kidding when I say I will write 50K words in a month? But hey, let's just see how it goes.

I sewed up DS2's cape. Not only is he a ninja superhero, but he saw the fabric I picked up at (ahem) that other, rival fabric store, which is a black tricot with skulls and crossbones, and so now he has a cape made out of that - ninjapirate-superhero? My sewing machine was being a total pain in the patoot and breaking the thread and/or refusing to pick up the bottom thread so it looked like it was sewing when it really wasn't, so a quick gather-and-stitch-on-a-tie took a lot longer than it should have and left me on the verge of tears, cussing up a storm.

I need to find a chunk of fabric for DS1's belt and he needs a sword or two to complete his samurai outfit.

No costume for me this year. I was going to make a regency gown so I could be Elizabeth Bennett (since empire waisted shirts and dresses make me look pregnant when I am not, I might as well wear one when I really am pregnant), but haven't done a lot of sewing, except for things I need everyday. I wore my pirate costume to work Sunday and might still wear it tonight, but I'm not that excited by it after 2 years!

I took my wedding ring off

No, not marital woes.

I was at my book group last night (* see below) and we were sitting in a warm, stuffy coffee house (with surly teenagers as backdrop) and I realized that my ring was way too tight and starting to irritate my skin. I slowly worked it off and wore it on my pinkie to come home and now need to find a necklace or something to put it on. I have a narrowed, shiny mark on my finger where it was. I think that was always there anyway, since other than the ends of my other two pregnancies, it has hardly ever left my finger in 9 1/2 years.

I had never noticed, really, how much I fiddle with it over the course of the day. It's usually the only jewelry I wear and now I have none. Weird.

* Irene Spencer is fabulous and chatty and just a super, warm, nice woman. Read her book, Shattered Dreams. Compare and contrast to Khaled Hosseini's Thousand Splendid Suns. Makes you stop saying "that can't happen here," doesn't it? She is working on another book that picks up where this one left off - she was leaving her husband and he died in a car accident at the end of this one. It is tentatively called Deliver Us From Ervil - her brother-in-law was the infamous Ervil LeBaron who went around assassinating other fundamentalist Mormons who didn't agree with him, then died in prison after sending death threats to the president. Because God told him to, y'know.

My akademik fortitood

I was helping out in DS1's 2nd/3rd grade class today, giving spelling pre-tests. When the last group that I did was correcting their own work, a couple of kids asked me questions about their math assignments and another about her homophones (didn't we used to call them homonyms?).

Then DS1 finished his math page while I was sitting right there, so I checked it over for him. It was about a dozen addition problems into the thousands with carrying. The really sad part was that I marked 3 of them wrong..... and he then had to show me how 2 of his original answers were right. *bonk head on desk* And he found the error in the 3rd one in about a second.

BUT as I am sitting here, I am once again pulled into the Free Rice game and I got my vocab level up to 50! OK, so some of the ones I have seen before, since I've played it a few times in the last few days, but I generally hover around 45. And OK, I couldn't maintain it at the 50 level, but I'm still hovering around 48 and 49 today :) But anyone know what "spile" means? I mean other than an Appalachian pronunciation of "spoil". Not a choice, sorry. Oh rats. It means plug, but I guessed wrong. Anyway, the sponsors of this game donate 10 grains of rice through the UN for every correct answer. It doesn't sound like much, but yesterday alone they donated 42 million grains of rice and since it started 3 weeks ago, they've donated 370+ million. How many grains in a serving?

And to my friends from Hiram: I knew the meaning of fulgent ;)

Also on the literary side, I was musing to myself as I lay face down with a heating pad on my back at the chiropractor's office this morning. I was trying to come up with cliches or bumper stickers or other short phrases to describe famous and popular works of literature. eg. Cormac McCarthy's The Road = "Life's a Bitch and then you Die" (or maybe "Waiting for Godot without the laughs"); Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights = "Mean People Suck" (or "It's all about ME").

Help me out here.

Mountain lion update

There have been a few more sightings. At least some of those have been reported to Fish and Game.

Please keep this fabulous wild animal in your thoughts as they decide if they can trap and release (or trap and toss in the Folsom Zoo with the other "nuisance" cougars) or if they will make a harsher decision.

My thithtle theed thack ith mithing!

I have one of those thithtle theed..... thisssstle sssseeed sssack (thorry!) thingies and get black niger thistle seeds for the finches. Well, as of a few days ago, it has disappeared.

Were the finches extra hungry? Didn't want to share?

I think my sunflower seeds must have gone bad, too, because the birdies aren't coming to my feeder at all. Sigh. Sad.

It's been a sewing weekend

I made a skirt yesterday and put in the drawstring today (had to go buy it this afternoon). I got a new drawstring for a beat-up pair of old sweats I wear to sleep and around the house, because it had a shoelace in it that wasn't going to keep pace with my belly.

Finished DS1's samurai costume all except a hat or helmet or something like that for his head. I made a pair of black pants from leftovers of black flannel and interlock with the silvery fabric as the front of the bottom half of the legs. Oh shoot. Needs a belt and sword, too.

Have finished a blouse for myself all but hemming the sleeves and bottom edge. The neckline turned out kind of weird and scrunched, but otherwise it's pretty good. It looks like I'm wearing a tent, but it's a pretty white satiny fabric with big black flowers. So a nice tent.

Pictures to come when everything is modeled.

Still need to: hem shirt, make a cape and shield/logo for DS2's ninja-with-a-cape superhero costume (I ordered a ninja costume from our karate place), and make that purse that I cut out the pattern for that I've been meaning to make for almost 2 years.

Before Xmas I need to: make a quilt for my brother and his new wife, finish the Xmas quilt I was making for us that I started last year, and make PJs for the kids. I've been thinking about making them new stockings, but we'll see.

In the vague future I should: finish the quilting on a breast cancer fabric quilt I started ages ago to donate to someone who was doing the 3-day walk but I still am not done, bat and back another lap-size quilt whose top is just sitting around here, and make a pair of stretchy maternity pants for myself - note to self: find the PJ pants pattern I used a couple of years ago.

My bunco addiction

On top of my wacky day (after the u/s, I had to pick up the kids at noon, then took them to Fresh Choice for lunch, then to a friend's house, then I turned around and went back to the school for their conferences and then back to the friend's and then brought her son home with us - then ordered a pizza for them for supper), our neighborhood co-op's Halloween Bunco night was tonight. So I went and talked a lot and told everyone (whether I knew them or not) about my new baby girl.

I also lost BIG TIME. Out of the 18 rounds we played (3 rounds of 1 through 6 on the dice), I lost 14 times. It was getting highly ridiculous, I must say. For quite a while another woman (a friend from book group) and I were neck and neck, but she managed to win a couple later on in the game. I was a total jinx, for the most part.

Turns out, that's a good thing, because the kitty was divided among biggest winner, most buncos (when you get all 3 dice with the number you are trying to roll), and biggest loser. Actually, I came out better than the others, because they tied and had to split their share between two people. So I put in $5 and came home with $30. I have only ever played bunco once before, 2 years ago at the same co-op bunco party and that time I had the most wins. So when I play again in a year or two, I guess I'll have to win the prize for most buncos, right?

And I took a smelly candle in a jar as a gift and came home with a smelly candle and a plate. I almost ended up with a bottle of wine or the smelly candle I took in the first place, but someone traded.

And now it's 11 and I am wiped out! And I am going to feed lunch to and then take care of a friend's kids while she goes to their teacher conferences. At least that means that she's going to bring them all home from school and that will save me a trip.

P.S. These rules are pretty much the way we played: http://www.buncorules.com/rules.html , at least down through the "overview" portion though we played to 25 instead of 21.

It's a....

BABY! Yes!

Brain, mouth, nose, eyes, heart, lungs, various internal organs, arms, hands, legs, feet.

All about the right size for 22 weeks-ish.

And oh yeah. Looks like labia. No willy in sight. ;)

PINK PINK PINK!

Gotta go gather up my flowery fabric and go crazy :)

field trip! and fires

Field trip today to a pumpkin patch. It HAD to be the one that's almost an hour's drive away, didn't it? It was pretty cool, with a train and hay ride and slides and a pig race/animatronic chicken show (gaaaaaaaa!) and corn maze. But by that point, who really cares about pumpkins? Oh, and lack of shade around some of the stuff. I have a mild sunburn on my face and upper chest. Yikes! They told me there was a lot of shade, so I didn't bother with a hat, especially since it's freakin' October!

The kids are all ready to carve the pumpkins, but I told them no. It's 80-some out there and even only a week before, I have a feeling they would rot by the time H-ween rolls around.

I am just wiped out, though. I was power-yawning the whole way home and about to toss the 3rd grade girl who can't stop talking out a window. Nice girl, but let's just have some silence for a few minutes, please? I guess it kept me awake.

And hey, it earned me 6 hours of parent volunteer hours and only cost me a bit over 2 gallons of gas, plus hefty fee so I could wear wristbands around saying I could go on the slides of Coyote Mountain (because a 5-month pregnancy wants to go down a huge, long, bumpy slide, of course) and ride a bouncy hay wagon to a field that was down to only small pumpkins, because it's late in the season. Whine whine whine, I know. I am at over 40 volunteer hours already and want to get to our required 70 before the baby's born. I hope baby appreciated all the bouncing.

Speaking of baby, we have an ultrasound this Thursday morning. Stay tuned to find out if it's blue or pink :)

One of the other moms said her sister was being evacuated from her home in Southern Calif - with four kids, including a one-month-old baby. Mmmm fun. I am sending good thoughts of the thousands of people who are running out of their homes, not sure what's going to be left when they get back.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

http://www.thebreastcancersite.com/

Don't forget to click the pink button every day! It always earns mammograms, but if they get to their goal this month, their sponsors will fund 150 bonus mammograms on top of their usual pledge. They're almost there with 9 days to go, but we wouldn't want them to fall short, now would we?

I try to remember every day for Jane and Judy and Judy and Jeannine and Rhonda and Liz and Pam and oh shoot what was her name Sara's mom and that nice lady who was in the fabric store with her friend cracking jokes yesterday buying up loads of fun fabrics to make hats, and...

Garbage, garbage everywhere

We have just way too much JUNK and CRAP and CLUTTER lying around our house. I don't often have the energy to do anything about it or to hover over the kids so they pick up their stuff. I also get really cross when I start, because it's just an endless, thankless task.

1) Sorted laundry this evening (about time: there was a week's worth, including most of the stuff from last weekend, so more like a week and a half),

2) then went through the boys' stuff to see what was too small and moved things out/handed them down,

3) moaned about the stupid, stinking broken drawer on DS2's dresser which looks like we're going to have to get a new dresser and so we might as well get one for DS1 as well, because he's been keeping his clothes in the cupboards in the hall since we moved here about 3 1/2 years ago, and then

4) picked up all the other crap on the floor in my room, where the toys migrate to hide behind full baskets of unsorted, clean laundry,

5) then, as I discovered some pieces of fabric that had migrated there, though the kids aren't supposed to touch my fabric and sewing supplies, I found that

6) a stack of fabric that was folded and neat has been jumped and walked all over in my sewing area so everything was spread out and balled up, so after an hour and a half with very few visible results,

7) I screamed in frustration.

What's making me laugh today

Every time I chuckle at something on the computer, ds1 eagerly asks me "What's so funny?"

This:
http://www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com/index.php/weblog/help_a_bitch_out_space_princess/ (especially the comments)

and this from a NaNoWriMo email group I just joined:
"Also, we need some challenges that aren't so word-count oriented, since some of
us may be working toward different kinds of targets (like, maybe, hours a day,
hours a week, first to freak out and write an unexplained ninja into the
storyline, etc.)"

And these:
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/10/21/fixted-yuor-speekurz-is-all-good-nao/
http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/10/20/popeye-cat-eatz-spinach/

He doesn't get it, though, poor guy. OK, so he got the spinach one.

P.S. Mom says the itchy plant with pink and yellow flowers is lantana. Yeah. That sounds right. Just keep it away from me, OK?

Nature on a smaller scale

I was sewing in my front room, next to our big, front window, which is dirty and mostly covered with rose bush and uhhhhh what's that smelly plant? Anyway, a bush that makes me break out, but which has pretty yellow and pink flowers that attract hummingbirds. The curtains were pulled back, but covered the part next to my shoulder at the edge of the window. I kept hearing a scraping and bumping, so I got up to look out to see what was going on out there. Didn't see anything. Sewed some more and heard more bumping and realized it was coming from the window. It's not that windy, so the rose bush shouldn't be scraping that much.

I peered out right by me and jumped. Two nasty, old alligator lizards were creeping around on the screen, which is loose at the bottom. One was over a foot long. The other's body was about the same size, but it looks like it lost half its tail, which is growing back. Ugh. Shudder.

Update on the mountain lion from yesterday: my friend's husband really really doesn't want to believe that it was their cat, as the man who reported it hasn't told them what color it was.
We were also wondering if he called Fish and Game about it and officially reported it.

And the sewing? Stupid machine keeps missing stitches, but the samurai armor is coming along. I am faking it from liquid silver (a lame with a slippery knit backing) and sewing sorta pleats in it instead of separate sections sewed together. Clear as mud? The rough draft might be ready by this evening when we go to the kids' school's Harvest Festival. I need to attach the upper arm armor to the body and make something for shin guards and I think we're good.

DS2 now wants to be a superhero in black clothes with a cape and two T's, for Tremendous T__ (his name). He's wearing his too-small black sweatpants already, so that half is done. Phew! ;)

Us confronting nature and vice versa

An email was sent out two days by our neighborhood co-op president that a neighbor had seen a mountain lion crossing the street toward the greenbelt at around dawn.

So yesterday, I was on the phone with a friend of mine who said that her cat was missing for a couple of days and she was thinking of going to the animal shelter to see if it had been picked up. It was an outdoor cat, but generally stuck close to home.

"Uh oh," I said, "Did you get that email?"

She hadn't, so I opened it up and read that not only was it crossing the street that intersects her street, it was right by her street.

She called the man who reported it and he told her that yes, the cougar was carrying a cat.

Awwwww :(

He was 14 but no one thought it was his time. So RIP, kitty.

a-vee-oh correction

My mom points out that I shouldn't make fun of the Aveo, because it had really cool window openers. The kids were excited and fascinated. They'd never seen anything so wild and cool. Windows were opened and closed constantly at all times of day and night, in all weather.

You turned a little handle and your window went up and down! Yes way! Believe it! Who'd-a-thunk!

I suspect that the best part was that Mommy couldn't close your window and lock it to keep you from playing with it.

Wedding pics (other pics from the weekend - 2)

K, D, Dad, and little brother on the pier near the Arts and Science Museum


DH and DS1 looking down from the Louisiana Capital Building


K's cousins and my mom, the night before the wedding at the party at the cousin's house.


Oh this deserved a picture of its own. Tres Leches cake made by a friend of K for the night before party. Oh boy. Oh yum.


DS1 spending time with the only real, live alligators we saw, even when we went stomping across the boardwalk trail in Bluebonnet Swamp. Maybe the stomping had something to do with the fact that we didn't see any? And DH ate some breaded, fried bits of alligator one night when we went out to eat. No. Really.


And I wanted to post some more pictures of the day after, but Blogger's giving me an error message now.

Any specific requests for pictures - people I haven't posted because I went heavy on the little kids, events you'd like to see that I might have hauled my camera out for, etc - just let me know!

Wedding pics (other pics from the weekend)

My kids and my brother's dog


DS2 tormenting the chickens


K & D and DH


My little sister and brother


DS1 on the "G" in "Baton Rouge" with Mississippi River

Wedding pics (part 2)

D&K


The moon was very bright!


Jazz combo playing Dixieland


Granny and 4 grandsons


Granny and youngest nephew (with his foppy)


Happy Boy

Wedding pics! (part 1)

Click on the pictures to see them bigger.


The gazebo where they took their vows. The moment of the vows, it was getting dark and without getting up and standing in front of everyone, my pics were too dark and the long exposure ones I took are blurry. So you'll just have to imagine it or wait for the official pics.

\
Officiant in front. My aunt sitting, my dad standing and not smiling.


Dogpile! My kids and one nephew. The other nephew's lying behind them.


The happy couple


The dinner tent

Wedding, foppies, and you say A-vee-oh

First off, apologies to various friends who, though I mentioned my brother's wedding several times, didn't realize I was going to be out of town this weekend and were worried about me and/or the baby. Apology also, to my supervisor/coworker at the store who called Sunday morning because I hadn't shown up for work. Apology to my coworkers who scrambled to get someone in to cover my hours. No apology to my manager who took my requests for time off and didn't put it on the office calendar and didn't refer to it when making this week's schedule.

The moment I was supposed to be clocking in? I was in my brother's house in Louisiana having scrambled eggs from his free-range chickens. Right before having to go outside and help put those same chickens (Breakfast, Dinner, and Buffet - Lunch died) back in their run because the kids thought they should let them out as usual, even though my brother wasn't there to catch them.

It was a really great weekend. I got to meet my brother's fiancee/wife and spend some time with her, hang out with my parents, sister (and her kids), and aunt. My nephews are 4 and 2 1/2 and were very excited to play with their "big" cousins. It took a couple of days, but the 4 yo and my 5 yo ended up being really good buddies by the end.

Oh, and the kids made a couple of new friends - hyper boys, meet hyper dogs. Bliss. My brother said over and over that he didn't understand where all that energy came from. It's kid energy. It comes from the fourth dimension or something. They had never seen their dogs that worn out before. The cats, though, only came out from under the daybed in the guest room when my 2 year old nephew thought he should get to know them by crawling up under there. And then they only came out long enough to run and hide behind the toilet. Poor things.

I swear we all still smell like dog. Maybe it's my shoes that I smell on me, because the rest of my clothes are clean and didn't even go along with us.

The wedding itself was fabulous. Oh yeah, that WAS why we went there, wasn't it? It was informal and just sappy enough, but short and sweet. And slightly late, because the officiant and half the guests were inside watching the LSU-Kentucky football game. Triple overtime and finally someone wised up and turned the stinkin' TV off. Probably for the best, since LSU went on to lose.

They had candles all over the place and the only problems came right at the beginning when they were first lighting them and discovering that the pretty, clear, plastic beads were highly flammable. Not many had beads where flames would touch them, but we put out a couple. Then they encouraged the kids to blow them out at the end of the evening and my 5 year old wasn't the only one to blow too hard and end up with wax spattered on his face - no burns, luckily!

The food was fabulous. Bayou-something caterers put on a great spread with some fabulous dishes. DS1 even tried a bunch of things and liked some of them. DS2 had fruit and rolls and cheese cubes and then petit-fours, but hey he had plenty to eat. I also made the mistake of letting him have a Sprite (and a Fanta the night before). He's never had his own can of soda before, so now he wants one all the time. DS1 doesn't like fizzy stuff (though didn't say no to a can of orange Fanta, either, the night before the wedding), so it's never been a question with him.

Photo-palooza coming soon. I must've taken 150 or 200 digital shots over the weekend. I got one of my brother's larger insane dog, who runs away when you pull out a camera - she apparently hears the high-pitched whine of the flash warming up or the digital camera being on.

Oh, and if you are offered a Chevy Aveo? (A-vee-oh? A-vay-oh? Let's call the whole thing off.) Don't. Seats are hard as rocks and I never did find a position that I was even vaguely comfortable to drive in - and the passenger seat was almost worse because there was no comfortable position even though you didn't have to hold the steering wheel. Back seat has no legroom. Back seat belts are so closely set that DS2 had a really hard time every time to fasten it around his booster seat. The thing had only about 6000 miles and shuddered at idle worse than my 103K Corolla. I don't know what gas mileage we got because I didn't pay much attention to starting and ending odometer readings. Um, let's see.... the trunk was pretty big, that was nice.

Effin' stinkin' bloomin' sewing machine

Effin' stinkin' bloomin' sewing machine seems to have a belt loose somewhere, because on attempting to sew together 2 pieces of flannel and a thin piece of elastic, it started making a whizzing sound without the needle moving.

I am down to the parts like closing the hood and putting elastic around ankles that could, theoretically, be hand-sewn, but I have absolutely no desire to sew a 20" piece of velcro by hand. I mean 2 pieces, 20" each. All the way around the edges.

I have until Wednesday morning to get this thing done, though I suppose I could do the hand-sewing on the road. That velcro though.... *shudder*

NaNoWriMo, baby, wedding, costume, lunch

NaNoWriMo (see sidebar if you don't know what I am talking about) is coming up in a few weeks. As if I didn't already ignore my kids enough... Maybe I should clean the house top to bottom at the end of October. And buy more socks for the kids so I can do laundry even LESS than I already do.

I'll be 20 weeks along tomorrow or Wednesday, depending on whose counter you read. Haven't scheduled a mid-way ultrasound yet, as I got a call at the end of my midwife appointment and totally forgot to ask about it. The baby's kicking harder, but I haven't felt it from the outside yet. Lots of extra padding there.

We're going to my brother's wedding this weekend. Still no present. It'll either be last minute or else I will offer to make them a quilt. I did print out and gather all the info we should need to get to the airport, rental car, hotel, and wedding. Let's see if we can remember to take it all along.

More progress on nephew's penguin outfit. The hood is half done. I have to do the lining, which includes the bottom part of the beak, plus little stuff like elastic around ankles (of both the body and the spats) and velcro closures.

It's nearly one and all I've had for lunch is a piece of whole wheat banana bread (which sounds healthy until I mention the white sugar and chocolate chips). Nothing else looks even half good. I'm no longer craving spicy stuff, but chocolate sure looks great. And though there's the beginnings of chicken soup in the fridge (I cut most of the meat off and stir-fried it last night, then boiled the bones to get the rest), I am saving it for supper tonight.

Not much else to report. For the third night in a row, I fell asleep last night in a book within minutes of the kids going to sleep. But I'm still tired.

Press???? (Pingu part 2)

Now why in the world would a pattern that's for use with fleece tell me to press? I mean, other than melting the fleece into a crease, I don't recall being able to iron it.

The glory of fleece is being able to fake it; the pain of fleece is having to fake it.

Spent 45 minutes today on the penguin. Wings are attached and bias tape done around neck to stabilize the neckline.

All that's left on the body is stuffing the tail, putting elastic around the ankles, and adding the Velcro closure. I still have the hood, beak and feet to go.

Note to my sister: Don't expect Z to walk a whole lot in this thing. It doesn't actually have LEGS.

Sewing for Pingu

I started on 2 1/2 year old nephew's penguin costume today. Shhhh don't tell my sister that I got the fabric ages ago and just started less than a week before I will see them.

There is about a ton of leftover fabric. I was supposed to get 1 1/4 yards of white for the tummy, fronts of wings, and sides of the hood and I had about 1/2 a yard left. I decided to do the the wing lining in white, too. Then I did the black parts and had almost a yard left of the 1 1/2 it called for. I am doing the feet and beak in orange instead of black (it's supposed to be Pingu) but that accounts for about 1/4 of a yard of the leftover black. I am also coming out way ahead on the flannel for the lining. Maybe my 4 yo nephew would like some black and white PJs? Or a fleece penguin jacket? I feel like I should do or make something for him, too.

Anyway, I have the body and wings done but not attached to each other yet.

And oh, yeah. What to get my brother for his wedding?

Good news from work, this time

Our district secretary gets to keep her job! The new district manager begged and is allowed to have 2 secretaries (both are part time) one each in Arizona and California.

HUGE sigh of relief :)

Cute

We were over at some friends' house last night for pizza and chocolate chip cookies - all from Papa Murphy's take and bake. DS1 (7 yo) finished his cookies and a couple of minutes later, I noticed he had a huge glob of chocolate next to his mouth. I po9nted it out and recommended he go get a napkin to wipe it off. A couple of minutes later, I saw the glob was smaller but still there.

He said, "Nobody's perfect," quite nonchalantly.

And the big news from work....

To go along with our 4th store manager in about a year (1 fired, 1 quit, 1 demoted then transferred to another store to be re-promoted), our district manager got fired last week. Apparently, she went and picked the regional manager up from the airport and they got back and he fired her and combined our district with another. I hope he didn't want a ride back to the airport.

Oh boy do I have a whole lot to say about this, but a blog is a public place and my identity isn't exactly secret, so I will only say that it's probably a good thing. Except for the district secretary who has about a month to find a new job.

Oh, and apparently, the employees at the big rival fabric store are spreading the word that we are going out of business. Unless they know something that we don't, we aren't.