Days Go/Gone By

It’s about 3am and I just woke from that wonderful dream.

It’s that dream of moving back into the dorms at Whittier College a few days before the start of school. Judging by the details of this particular rendition of the dream, would place it at the start of Junior year in the fall 1986.

In my dream, I had arrived at the earliest possible time to check into my dorm room.  I routinely did that to get out of Vegas and be anywhere else.

I had moved into the third floor of Stauffer Hall, room 333.   I was out and about visiting people.   There was that mix of new faces and then old friends/acquaintances (my what Facebook-like terms).   I was wondering how long it would take my roommate to drive down from Alaska.  For some reason, he had my dog of 2013 with him.  I am not sure why.  I remembered that my wife, Laura was not happy about Tango going to stay with my roommate in Alaska.  Something about bears.   I was excited that this year, I could call him on his cell phone to keep track of his journey down the coast.

As I explored the dorms and the houses I saw friends that were reuniting after the summer.   I saw them getting back into their, for lack of a better term cliques and I the feeling of not belonging rose up in inside of me.   So in my dream, I excused myself from where I felt that I didn’t fit. I did that quite a bit as a teenager. I did that just yesterday as I think on it. That behavior has excluded me from a lot of fun, or so I think.

I walked backed to my dorm room and there was a familiar face.  She was clearly the floor RA,  telling me where the cleaning supplies were.   In the dream I didn’t recognize her face at first.  It was the face she was wearing at our 20 year reunion last year.  I recall being shocked in the dream at how much she had matured over the summer.  In my dream I noticed the details of her face more than I ever did in real life.

I walked into my dorm room and the anxiety set in.   For some reason there was anxiety about whatever math class I was taking this year and how I was going get through it.   I’ve never been one to worry about classes, but my daughter last night was anxious over her finals this next week.   She also has cheer competitions in the coming weeks and there is cheer drama. There’s always cheer drama.

When I left work yesterday,  I had Keith Urban’s, ‘Days Go By” cranked surprisingly loud in my car as I made my way from office workstation to home workstation. Maybe that’s what triggered the dream.

Maybe, the dream was a function of how busy I am with work and training these days.

Maybe it’s the fact that I am a week away from getting on the road again and that after the stressful part of the trip is over, there will be a chance to visit friends and family in my typical hurried manner.

Maybe, it was just time to have that dream again.

Whatever the reason, it’s time to go back to bed.

Peace!

It’s the Shooters, Stupid

On March 19, 1982, just before the start of class, Clarence A. Piggott, a high school psychology teacher was shot and killed by Patrick Henry Lizotte, a disturbed student who came to school that morning to resolve a problem he had with a different teacher. Lizotte’s solution was to shoot Piggot in the heart with one bullet from a 22-caliber revolver. Lizotte then concealed the gun in the green camouflage jacket he always wore and made his way through the very crowded hallways of Valley High School and onto the residential streets of Las Vegas. During his capture, Lizotte was shot twice by Las Vegas Metro Police. Although Lizotte was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, the jury sentenced him to two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. He was also sentence to an additional sixty years of imprisonment for the attempted murder of two students he shot while leaving the school.

I was down the hall when the first period bell sounded that morning. I was in the crowd that obliviously flowed past Mr. Piggott’s classroom in his last moments of life.

The words one expects to hear about gunman applied to the 18 year-old Lizotte. Words like loner, outsider, weird and quiet all applied. He also had an obsession for guns. To paraphrase Emerson, for his non-conformity the world had whipped Lizotte mightily with its displeasure. From what I learned afterwards, Lizotte was picked on extensively during his school experience. Not just high school, but all 12 years of his schooling. He had thick glasses, he walked funny, he was the butt of jokes and teased unmercifully both by students and teachers. In modern days, we would say that he was bullied.

I read in a Facebook post from a former classmate that during PE, rather than participate in sports, Lizotte would often walk the perimeter of the athletic field to avoid the teasing and harassment. Tragically, that field now bears Piggot’s name, as does a Las Vegas elementary school. Another Facebook post reported that a teacher once warned students to lay off Lizotte, because if he ever snapped, it would be ugly. It seems that people knew that there was a risk, but other than Piggott few reached out to help.

Valley High School

As news of Columbine and Aurora and hit the airwaves, I always shut the TV off.  I don’t want to deal with these tragedies and I usually do not want to write about them.

Following the events in Newtown, CT, the national dialog as it usually happens, has been taken over by the two great obstacles to reason on these matters, the NRA and the anti-gun lobby.   The rhetoric keeps focus on the guns and their specifications rather than the mental illness of the shooters.  Lizotte used Ruger single six, long-barrel revolver to kill Mr. Piggott.  He used only three of his available six rounds.  He didn’t need a semi-automatic with extended magazines.  None of that matters now.

Patrick Lizotte’s solution to get out of his oral presentation in his history class was disturbed.    Our national solutions should not be focused on the guns, but rather finding and aiding those in need of help.

Over the past decades (plural) our nation, our states and our cities have repeated cut services for the mentally ill.   We need to fund services that would identify and help treat those who need help.  We routinely screen children for hearing and vision deficits, shouldn’t it be possible to routinely test them for psychological problems as well?

In the past weeks,  Senator Barbara Boxer, who I have repeated voted for over the past 20 years, proposed $30 to $50 million in federal funds to install metal detectors, cameras in our nations schools.  She also called for funds be used to deploy the National Guard to protect our schools at the discretion of the state.   This proposal provides countermeasures to the symptom but doesn’t address the root cause of the mental illness of the shooters.

I’ve also heard proposals to put armed security in all the schools of the nation.   I have to wonder how much that would help.   Wouldn’t those armed guards be the target  the bad guys would want to take out first?  I know there were at least two armed undercover narcotics agents in Valley High School back in 1982. They just didn’t happen to be where the shooter was.  Maybe we need armed guards in every classrooms?   Perhaps if they had their guns drawn and safeties off they could have helped poor Mr. Piggott.

The Second Amendment protects the Right to Bear Arms.  Regardless of where one stands on the issue of gun control the right to bear arms is as much a part of the American culture as baseball and apple pie.  Yeah, I said it, as much as much a part of the American culture as baseball and apple pie.  The Second Amendment is not going away.   It won’t be repealed and it won’t be rewritten.  Unless there are some challenge in case law, the Supreme Court won’t have any opportunities to weigh in on its interpretation.

Trying to prevent a Patrick Lizotte style- school shooting with gun control laws is the wrong solution.   The kid was going to get a gun, legally or illegally.  At the same time, we as a nation have to be secure enough to have a national dialog exploring the possibility of putting more responsible gun control laws in place.  It has been my experience that gun owners tend to be disciplined and responsible in the care, handling, storage and use of their weapons. Might gun license renewals require a simple mental competence exam every 5 or 10 years?  Could we agree that an eye exam could be useful? Wanting to have a dialog on proper gun licensing makes us responsible, not communists.

To paraphrase an old expression, better to be thought a fool than to speak on TV and remove all doubt.

Prompt for 10 Dec: Money

Looking back at my 2011 Reverb posts, I noticed one that caught my eye.   So I copied it:

Sarah Rosemary at Sunny Side Up and DailyAngst were hosting Reverb11, a series of prompts on 2011,

Money.  Where did you spend your money this year?  Did you save it instead?  What, if anything, would you like to do with your finances this year?

I deplore talking about money, so again (in 2012) this might be a short post. Senior year of high school back in 1982, I took a computer programming class.  Back then, we had a computer lab stocked with Apple IIe systems.  I took to programming like a fish to water.  I talked to my mother one day about the possibility of her getting a loan so we could buy one. Let’s just say that the proposal was not well-received and summarily rejected with extreme prejudice. We lived in Las Vegas, somewhere between the poverty line and the middle class.   My mom was a medical assistant and my step-father a stage hand.  The two of them didn’t manage their money well.  They had issues that prevented them from being where they wanted to be… on many levels. Notices to pay or move out were routinely posted on our apartment door. It was not uncommon for the power to be turned off at least once a year for anywhere from 1 to 5 days. If we had a phone the number was never in service long.  This meant that more often than not, if I wanted to talk to my dad, I had to walk down the block and cross the street to the payphone and try to call him collect.  He had no way to reach me. On August 28, 1983, I arrived at college in a nice new car my mom bought me that morning.  While I was driving to Southern California, the credit company decided that mom was too big of a risk and wanted that they car back immediately.  Mom and my stepfather flew down that afternoon to retrieve and return it to the dealership.  Mom and Stepfather never delivered the funds to pay the difference between my tuition and my scholarships.  I actually was one of those Las Vegas lowlifes who had to borrow $500 from his girlfriend in order to stay enrolled in college. So needless to say, I’ve had money issues in my life. In college, I double majored in Chemistry and English, but I worked in the computer center on the work-study program. The school ran a PDP-!! computer system which ran RSTS, a time shared operating system. My Sophomore year, the computer center purchased a half dozen Macs.  I fell in love with those systems. In 1988, I went to work as a chemist in the real world, where they used DOS and then later Windows.  Early in my career, I did some programming in Pascal. I figured out pretty quickly in the late 80′s that there were many people who could program and that I was better off sticking to Chemistry. In 1997 when my daughter was born, we decided it was time to by a computer so I could work from home.  I wanted to buy a Mac, but Apple wasn’t doing well, and a Mac wouldn’t do what I needed for work.  So we bought a PC.   Then a few years later we bought another PC.  And another.  When I started working on my MBA, I wanted to get a laptop.  Money was a bit tight then so I settled for a cheaper brand.  I still recall the day I checked my voicemail and I heard the message from my daughter, “Dude, you got a Dell!”.   It was a piece of crap. We got into the PC cycle and it wasn’t until I bought my wife an iPad for Mother’s day in 2010, that we had an Apple product under our roof.   In 2001, my daughter wanted a MacBook Pro for High School.   Given my personal history, I bought it for her gladly. In 2012, a full thirty years after I first floated the idea of getting an Apple IIe to my mom, I let it be OK to buy a MacBook Air for myself.   There was no good practical reason to buy this computer.  It was expensive, it was unnecessary, it was redundant and the purchase was completely self-indulgent. I bought it anyway.  I bought it with money borrowed from our car fund.  I borrowed from myself, but I paid the good people at Apple cash.  I had plenty of financial reserves to make the purchase.  On my 47th birthday, I broke the PC cycle and the financial one all in one fell swoop of the debit card.

Prompt for 7 Dec: 12 Months, 12 Pictures

Today’s prompt was inspired by a post from  Jennifer Wells

Post your favorite picture from each month of 2012

January: A good-bye the day after the brides wedding

A very fit angel at the top of the 1000 steps cheered participants on at the Mission Gorge Trail Run in February

March in Shanghai

Church of Saints Peter and Paul in Ennis Ireland in April

In May the New Yorkers came to Anaheim.

International colleagues over for a crawfish boil in June

Meeting up with the Primos in San Francisco in July

During the Disney Half Marathon in August

Laura and I still dancing after 22 years

The castle in Nyon in October

November in D.C.

December – Someone is learning to drive.

Prompt for 6 Dec: Highs and Lows

Today’s prompt is courtesy of Carolyn Rubenstein.

Year in Review As you reflect back on the happenings of 2012, what were your high points and what were your low points? What do you notice as you look back on the year as a whole?

Thinking on it, the high and low point of this year both revolve around, airplanes.  That’s been a recurring theme the last few posts, the roll of airplanes in 2012.  As I think on it some more, there were at least 30 airplanes in my year.

The high point was jumping out of a perfectly good plane to skydive for only the second time in my life.   It was an amazing experience shared with a friend from work.  We crawled into this piece of crap plane with a pull down door make of what seemed like it was made out of cellophane.  We took off and climbed up over the desert.   Then one by one, people started jumping out, some on their own, others, like me in a tandem.

My favorite part is still the image of the plane flying away from us as we fell.  There was nothing below us but brown Southern California desert.  It didn’t seem that we were falling that fast.  Then the parachute opened and the world became quiet.

The video of my landing is below.

What I didn’t tell anyone about that landing is that I injured my tailbone.    I was uncomfortable for about 4 weeks, especially during my flights to and around Europe later that month.  It was still all good.

The low point was in March when I had to get on a plane to China.  My daughter had a cheer competition that day and I had to miss it.  The Child has been cheering for 7 years now.  Prior to that day, I had never missed one of her competitions.   I complained about them all.  I complained about the early call time and the endless waiting.  But during those 3 minutes when her teams perform, it’s completely worth everything, the money, the time, the pickups and drop offs, it’s all worth it.

In the course of a season my daughter’s team may have 7 to 10 competitions.  Normally, I have the luxury of setting my own travel schedule and I never miss big events.  I may run to the airport later that day, but I don’t miss competitions completely.   I did this trip.

That Saturday morning, the team had a competition at Universal Studios.  We would have driven carpool that morning, but we had to made a stop at LAX.   So I loaded my bags in the car, we drove to my daughter’s school and we dropped her off to be carpooled to the competition.   I felt horrible.  My daughter didn’t care at all.  It was strange to get on a plane and know that by time they told me to turn off my phone, the Child would be warming up to perform.   The text that would tell me they won would not come for 14 hours later when I was in the back of a car, heading to my hotel.  I smiled, wished I had been there and closed my eyes to rest.

They won

Decades after I graduated college my mom once told me how bad she felt that she couldn’t come to my freshman orientation.  She had to work.  Now I know how she felt.

Just a Few Times Around The Parking Lot

The Child turned 15 and 1/2 this past weekend in Palm Springs.

Too little

During the years I was working on my MBA, there were trips to Palm Springs where the girls would go to the pool while I stayed in the room and studied. In the hours before we had to check out, this weekend, I had one of those “Cat’s in the Cradle” moments where I was at the pool while The Child studied AP Euro History in the room.

One of my objectives for the weekend went unmet.  I had not gotten The Child behind the wheel of the car.  As we were leaving town, I saw the perfect place for her first lesson.  I pulled in, put the car in park, and set the emergency brake.  Although I didn’t say a word, everyone in the car knew what was coming.

I sat shotgun and Laura took the backseat.  The Child took her spot at the wheel.   The instructions were as follows, “with your left foot, take the Emergency brake off.   With your right foot, you press on the brake and then put the car in gear.  Your right foot stays on the break.  No gas shall be applied.  You will ride the brake around the oval parking lot.

The first question was “what’s an emergency brake”.  I pointed and explained how to disengage it.  Oh boy.

We started to roll slowly through the parking lot to the first turn.   This is where it got a bit dicey.   She is used to Autopia at Disneyland, where one can turn the wheel forever and not go off the tracks.  She  didn’t have a really good sense for how much to turn the wheel.   The car would straighten and she would keep turning.  In fact, on the second time around she even ran the back rear wheel onto the curb.

Eventually, she wanted to give it some gas.  I told her she could give it a little, but to immediately put her foot back on the break. The dayglow orange nail polish she was wearing made it easy to see what her feet were doing.  She kept wanting to put her left foot on the break and her right on the gas.

About the fourth time around the parking lot, she was a bit frazzled.  She wanted to end the session, but I insisted on once more about the oval.   Then when we were done, I had her put it back in park, set the emergency brake and after a big hug, get in the back seat.

She goes to get her permit tomorrow.

She looks too little to drive

P.S. I Love You

I’ve been home from my trip for nine very intense days.  I landed at LAX a week ago last Thursday and was in the office first thing on Friday.  Reentry into work is always rough after a long trip.  There is the normal catch up of the organic work that comes every day.   There is also the follow through on the dozen meetings that I hosted in Europe.  And then there was some new stuff.  Stuff that pretty much dwarfed everything else and consumed my days and my thoughts in the evenings.

After about a week home, I realized that this was not a normal reentry.  My stress level was way too high for this time of year and I am unfocused, opera

ting like a humming-bird going from issue to issue and kicking thing into the tall grass to buy time.  I hate people who do that.  I was also too tired to run, that’s another bad sign.

With all this in mind, Thursday night I called our timeshare and asked if they had a room available for Saturday.    They did and we booked it.   Micro-vacation planned.

This morning, we jumped in the car and drove to The Plaza Resort and Spa,  our second home (for at least 7 days a year) in Palm Springs.

Home Away From Home

Last month marked the 22 year that I have owned here at the Plaza. Palm Springs hasn’t changed much in that time.  Downtown is still downtown, it’s just that some of the Mexican restaurants are now English and some of the tchotchke stores are now frozen yogurt places.  It’s still the same town that has 1 foot firmly planted in the early 1970′s and the other foot on the golf course. The residents are still as friendly as the climate is warm. If one subscribes to the idea that LA is phony then one should believe that Palm Springs is genuine.

I bought this time share back in 1990, just as Laura and I started dating.  The joke in our family is that if Laura had come with me to the presentation, she would have talked me out of buying it.  Turns out it was well worth what I paid for it.  The Plaza is not a luxurious resort, but it’s our 3 start home away from home.  We come here to relax, recuperate and most importantly, sleep.

Although we are only here for the night we have partaken of the normal rituals.  We stopped at Vons, the same way we have for two decades to do our food shopping.   In Palm Springs, we eat vacation cereal.  You know vacation cereal, the stuff that’s loaded with sugar that we would never keep at home because there are healthier alternatives.  We also bought post cards.  Filling them out and getting them in the mail is another ritual of Palm Springs.   Dinner our first night was at Upper Crust Pizza on Highway 111, just near our resort. That’s one of the four restaurants we eat when we are in town.

After food shopping, we checked in, unloaded and went straight to the jacuzzi.  I had to sneak onto the golf course to take some pictures of sunset behind Mt. San Jacinto.   Sunset was beautiful tonight.

The Oasis of Palm Springs

The Child was a baby here.  She has been here almost every year of her life.  Tomorrow, we might take her out to do a bit of driving before she goes for her permit later this month.  Afterwards, I will practice my tennis serve for an hour (or until my shoulder decides that it has had enough).   There will be more time around the pool, eating of sugary cereals and a time change that will allow us to have an extra hour of sleep.

Before The Child started kindergarten, we used to come here in October for Laura’s birthday.   These visits inevitably involved Yankee playoff baseball.   If anyone remembers a certain memorable play involving a ball thrown from left field by Shane Spencer,  caught by Derek Jeter just right of home plate that was quickly shoveled to Posada in time to tag out a certain Giambi brother, I was here, in this building, eating pizza from the same restaurant I had dinner at tonight.  It was like it was yesterday; but it wasn’t.  It was 2001.  It just feels like yesterday.

In Palm Springs, in this building back in June 2004, we watched the Ronald Regan funeral processions.   We came here for the viewing of Gerald Ford when he passed.  If you ever go to Ford’s Library, we are told that visitors books from that day are on display there.   The Child was the first entry in one of those books as we were on the first bus of visitors who came to pay our respects.

My favorite Palm Springs story happened on the day of my 40th birthday.   We wanted to go to our favorite rib restaurant, Babes for lunch, but we weren’t sure if they were open.  I plugged my computer into the phone line,  fired up the modem and Yahoo searched for “Babes in Palm Springs”.  A number came up and I dialed it on my cell.  The next few seconds seemed to take an hour in my brain.  While the phone was ringing, I was staring at the Yahoo map for “Babes in Palm Springs”.   The map indicated that there was no location listed.  I thought this strange and kept scanning the page.  Then I realized that Babes is really in Rancho Mirage, not Palm Springs proper.  Perhaps the second ring was underway at this point.  My eyes moved to the top of the page and to my shock, I realized that the “Babes in Palm Springs” that I was dialing was an escort service.  I hung up quickly and walked into the bedroom to tell my wife of how I happened to call an escort service on my 40th birthday.   As we were both laughing about the matter, the escort service called back.   Seems people often start to call and hang up.  I explained it was a wrong number.  I don’t think the lady on the other end of the phone believed me.

It funny as we sit here with three wireless devices going.   Two years ago, we had to pay for wireless.  Now it’s free.   Ten years ago, I brought my computer and we used the phone line with a local modem number. The DVD players now sit above the TVs on these huge wooden shelves hat used to house the VCRs.

Times change.  Technology changes.  People are born, get older and die.  Businesses come and go.  Palm Springs, stays the same.

About to make my shoulder hurt.. again

At the Apple Store

Out of the blue, The Child came out this morning and asked me if I could take her to the Apple Store for an 11:45 appointment.

I drove her to the mall and we walked to the Apple Store.  She checked in and is sitting at the Genius Bar getting help.  I am staying on the other side of the store to let her manage her business.

Turns out, if she had asked me, I could have fixed the problem for her. But she’s just a bit too independent to come to daddy for help (like her mother suggested she do).

Oh well, she is growing up. She is figuring things out.   I am not sure she will need me once she starts driving.

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If You Are What You Do, Then You Don’t, Then You Aren’t

Summer of 1991 was a memorable for a great many reasons reasons.

That year that Queen released the song “These are the Days of Our Lives”.  I remember exactly which street I was driving on, what radio station I was listening to and all the circumstances around that weekend.  It was a special song at a transitional time in my life.   I carry that song and the feelings associated with that first musical experience to this day.

Another thing that I carry from that summer is a line from a Robert Subby book that I was reading about 5am one Saturday morning.  The line went,

“If you are what you do, then you don’t, then you aren’t.”

I highlighted the words in blue and I had to reread them several times before I really got it.

Subby was speaking to our tendency to define ourselves in terms of one thing.  For me, I was about my job.  For others it was about being someone’s parent or someone’s significant other.  For some it’s about defining themselves as that thing they want to be.

Those definitions are ephemeral.  I can lose my job, my child can move away, my significant other can die… then what am I?  Who am I when that which I use to define myself ceases?

So 20+ years later I find myself ( in alphabetical order) as an asthmatic, a  bad-joke maker, a blogger, a brother, a Business Development guy, a California resident, Catholic, a chemist, a Chopin listener, a cousin, a  fan of old country music, a deadhead, a diet coke drinker, a dog lover,  an early riser, an English major,  father, a guitar player,  half Colombian, half-Irish a half-marathoner, a hockey fan, an eater of  frozen chocolate cake, a husband, an INFP,  a kale eater, a 30 year wearer of K-Swiss tennis shoes, a lacrosse junkie, a motorcycle rider, an MBA,  New Yorker, a peludo, a pelado, a photograph taker, a poor proof-reader,  a purple wearer, a recovering from Las Vegan, a rock climber, a runner, a son, a tennis player, a traveler, a twenty-four year employee, an uncle, a Whittier College Poet, Dr. Who and Yankees fan, and probably a few other things that I will remember once I push PUBLISH.   None of these things define me, but  in aggregate, perhaps you start to get a sense.

I feel the need to put some kind of picture of myself in this blog.  Some type of self-image which represents all these pieces.  These pieces have accumulated over 47 years.   They could be considered fragments, broken pieces that fit together with some gaps.   Alternatively they could be a set of appreciations developed over the first half of my life.  Instead of  a picture of myself, I will leave you with a video of Freddie Mercury.

I always knew that Freddy Mercury was a bit off-center, but I never really bothered to learn about him.  I didn’t know he was gay nor did I care.   I know he made some great music during the time we shared on this planet.  He left me with songs that are strongly associated with more than a few times and places.  He was a part of my life.  He is gone but not forgotten.

So, how do you define yourself?  Is it in terms of one thing or many?   Is it in terms of things you do, you have or you want to be?

Where Has My Child Gone!?!

About 3 miles into my run this morning, I stopped and sent The Child  a text:

“Sorry I missed you this morning. I was going to wake you up with a song, but Mom thought that was a bad idea. Have fun today and know that I love you.”

This was immediately followed by a second text:
“And remember text your mother every once in a while”

During the last 1/4 mile of my run,  I saw my neighbors turn the corner in their car with my dear daughter in the back seat.  They  were starting their journey to San Diego.  About 3 hours later, my texts were acknowledged with a very concise, “OK“.

So here I sit  about 8 hours later with my precious child 90 minutes away. This is difficult, but certainly not as bad as last month when she went to Arizona for 3 days with friends.

I like my daughter at home… where it’s safe. I dislike her being out in the world. I suspect that God is giving me these times of separation so I can start to get used to it.

The Child: Safe as a bug in a rug

In the past few days, she announced that she was planning on taking AP Euro History this next semester.  The students in that class have had all summer to work on an assignment due the first day of class.  She reached out to some friends to get the assignment and started working on it this weekend.  She actually took some of the work with her on this road trip.   She has a lot more free time now that she finished her two semester on-line geometry class last week.  Frankly, I didn’t get volunteering to take a class on her computer for six weeks, but she did it.

A slightly more recent picture

Did I mention that she does extra work? We are waiting for her appearances on a Nick TV show called “Victorious” to air.   She is going to be on an episode airing in the next few weeks named, “The Cell Block” and another called “Tori Saves Jade and Beck”.

We are about 3 months away from the Child being able to get her permit.   She wants a Jeep.  Yeah, a Jeep.

We just got a text that the baby is on her way back from San Diego.  I just need to appreciate the time remaining.