The Daily Brief

It has finally been read – DEATH! Whatever my feelings about the verdict, it is of no matter. I feel just now as though I have been waiting in the Dentist’s waiting room for two hours to have a painful abcess [ulled, only to have hime say, “I have to refer you to the oral surgeon.” Ack! will this EVER go away!

On January 10, after 1 year, 11 months, and 20 days of being unemployed or underemployed, I start a new job. Fulltime with benefits, in my career field, at a very reasonable and acceptable salary.

I’m grateful that I had the freedom to take my time finding a job. Since I only had to support me (and the dogs), I could choose to get established in grad school first, and then to work part-time until the right position appeared. Even so, it feels like a huge weight has been lifted, that I didn’t usually realize I was even carrying.

And I have 3 weeks to get used to getting up early in the morning again. Guess I need to find where I hid my alarm clock. LOL

Update: I also meant to add that had I been working, I might not have been as free to let myself grieve for Mom this past year. As it was, I was able to take time when I needed it, and process the emotions as they hit, instead of having to shove them aside while dealing with other stuff. That’s a blessing, as well.

The semester is all but ended – some last minute changes to assignments need to be made, but I have until later this week to finish them. The mad rush in the part-time job is over as well – the deadline for completion was Dec 11, and the target was reached, at least on my part. It’s 12:20am, and I’m curled up on the couch with my laptop, enjoying the remnants of my evening’s fire, and occasionally gazing around at the peacefully sleeping hounds (2 of whom are sharing the couch with me).

A peaceful night, or early morning, and given to thinking quiet thoughts, and remembering good memories.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, as I’ve driven around my city doing this project for my part-time job. I’ve done a lot of talking to myself, and a lesser amount of talking to God, and occasionally, I’ve talked to Mom. Some of these internal conversations have centered around today’s date – Dec 12. What would it be like, I wondered. What would *I* be like on this date?

What does one do on a day like this? One part of me says “Stay home, and remember.” But a friend has offered to buy me lunch (or dinner), to celebrate my birthday and my new job. So… meet the friend, or say “I’m sorry, but I’m planning to be depressed on Sunday.” (I’m meeting the friend, but I left myself an opening to change my mind. She understands – good friends are like that).

I want to spend my day quietly… not rushing around, not working. Reflecting, and remembering. Honoring and affirming a life that’s gone, but also affirming that life goes on. So I’m planning on meeting my friend. We’ll eat, we’ll drink cappucino, we’ll reminisce and catch up on each other’s lives, and we’ll be restored by the fellowship.

And at some point during the day, either before or after meeting my friend, I will raise a chilled glass in silent toast – “To you, Mom – thanks for all you did. I’m glad I knew you, and humbled to be your daughter.”

There might be some tears, at that point, some moisture in my eyes that can’t be blinked away, and a lump in my throat that precludes talking, or even swallowing. And that will be ok. Being alive means feeling things. I don’t want to bury my emotions, drain them of power, suppress them into non-existence. I want to experience them, and acknowledge them, and move through them to the wonder that lies beyond. The wonder… that my mother, dead these 366 days, is still vibrantly alive in my thoughts, and in my heart. As long as someone remembers her, she will never truly die, and even though I can no longer reach out for the warmth of her hug, she hugs me every day, whenever I think of her and her constant and unyielding belief in me.

Indulge me, if you will, as I remember her. Or skip this post and read another. The choice is yours. My choice is to remember, and to honor the memory.

One year ago today… Dec 12, 2003, Mom went to sleep and never woke up. It was what she had wanted, when it was her time to go. Dad thought she was still sleeping that morning, because she had a slight smile on her face, but she was beyond sleep, even then.

As I drove from Atlanta to southern Ohio, behind the first bad ice-storm of the winter, I tried not to think, and to focus on driving. Singing along to the christmas CDs helped with that. But towards the end of my drive, I switched to Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas CD (their first one), and while listening to the instrumentals, my thoughts finally found a voice. In the last 2 hours of my drive home, I drafted out what became the words that I shared at the funeral. I’d like to share them here, if you’ll allow.

Other than marriage, the parent-child relationship is probably the most complex relationship we’ll ever experience. Who doesn’t remember either saying or hearing, at some point in their life, “I hate you! I wish you were dead!”

And then one day you wake up, and they *are* dead, and your entire life is changed forever.

Hopefully, the “I hate you’s” were replaced by “I love you’s” over the years. Mine were, and I’m eternally grateful for that.

I’m still trying to realize what all I lost last week. Before I can do that, I need to realize what I had.

Mom was so much more than just a label – “wife,” “mother,” “sister,” “friend.” She was a human being, full of the complexity that we all are made of. I’m not going to tell you that my mom was perfect – she wasn’t. But I’ll let you in on a secret — neither am I. 🙂 She accepted my lack of perfection, and I learned that it didn’t matter if she wasn’t June Cleaver – what mattered was that she was my mother: the only one I’ll ever have. And now all I have of her are memories.

The nice thing about memories is that we can choose what we want to remember. I’m choosing to remember the good things, and the happy times.

I remember hot breakfasts on cold winter mornings before we would walk to school. I remember walking home at lunchtime to eat a hot meal that she fixed for us. I remember family dinners with home-cooked food, all made from scratch.

I remember our yard not having any grass, because all the neighborhood kids played at our house. I remember hallowe’en parties, with our basement turned into a haunted house. I remember a fairly happy childhood, with a mom who was involved. She had 4 kids in school, and juggled the class visitation and room mother duties somehow.

My mother, who was always nervous around large bunches of kids, became a den mother for my brother, and a girl scout troop leader for me and my sisters. She helped start an after-school activities program at our church.

As a kid, one of my major complaints was that she knew where the “off” button was on the TV set, and she would use it. 🙂 Instead, we would play games, or do arts and crafts, or even – gasp – clean house. Back then, I complained. Today, I tell my friends about these times, and treasure the memories.

We’re in the middle of the Christmas season, right now, and for me, that will always bring memories of Mom baking. She’d start baking before thanksgiving, and continue on until… forever, it seemed like. We had a cookie tree — a small, table-top artificial tree, decorated with candy canes and Christmas cookies. No matter how often we ate all the cookies off the tree, there were always more to replace them. Pies lined the counter, at Thanksgiving and Christmas both. And Mom made her pie-dough from scratch.

She made her bread from scratch, too — twelve loaves at a time, every week. Four kids go through a lot of bread, after all.

And in the middle of all her Christmas baking, she would find time to bake me a birthday cake, every year. I don’t know how she did it all, honestly.

She cared about people, deeply and genuinely, and people responded to that caring. My brother brought home a friend in the early ’80s — Mom gave Tom a “certificate of adoption” for Christmas one year, and treated him as if he were another son. Tom’s still a part of our family, 20 years later.

She was a determined woman. She knew what she wanted, and she made it happen. Although she didn’t graduate from high school, all of her kids did, and all of us attended at least *some* college classes.

She was terrified of lakes and pools, but she made sure we all learned how to swim. She didn’t drive, but she made sure that we all got our drivers’ licenses.

It’s hard to grasp what we’ve lost with her passing. She was our historian, and our glue. She was our constant – she would always be there, she would always love us, she would always believe in us, and want us to be happy.

She was our “doer” — “mom will do that,” we’d say. Or “ask Mom – she’ll know.” And she usually did.

She was a unique woman – an original. Not perfect, but not too shabby either. And she had a fantastic sense of humor.

I called her for Thanksgiving – a day late, as usual. We talked about how I hadn’t mailed her card yet (or her anniversary card, from late Oct, or Dad’s birthday card from mid-November, or even her own birthday card from last January) — I BUY the cards, I just forget to sign and send them. 🙂

A week later, I got 2 cards from her in the mail. One was my Christmas card, and the other one had a note that said “so you wont’ be embarrassed about how late your cards are.” I opened it up, and it was a Valentine’s Day card, for last Feb. I laughed out loud, and was going to call her and let her know how much I had enjoyed it. But it was the last week of the semester, and I had three papers due. Besides, I could tell her when I called her in a couple days, on my birthday, I thought.

I thought wrong, unfortunately. She didn’t make it to my birthday. But she knows now, how tickled I was. And she knows, better than I could ever find words to express, how very much I love her, and how much of her lives on in me.

We share the same faith, so I know I’ll see her again, as well. Until then, I’ll make do with my memories, and I’ll make sure I’m hanging onto the good ones.

I have seen few sites more unnavigable than that of Fox News. I can never seem to find the story I want there. Although I know it’s been posted. But that’s not the crux of this bitch. It’s a response to a comment from Bill O’Reilly tonight.If any of you care to forward it, I’ll thank you:

No dude: The myth of the Virgin Birth has nothing to do with Christianity. It is another latter-day construct of the False Church.

I’m currently watching on Fox News, response among NBA players to the criminal indictments of 5 Indiana Pacers players over last month’s brawl.. The most distinct thing I heard was that this “kind of overshadows all the good things they do”.

No, dude, this is not renaissance Spain – you don’t just buy indulgences to gain forgivenance. The things you do are the things you do – over and atop of living a good and reverent life.

Get a clue.

In addressing National Guard troops on the way to Iraq today, Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld was slightly taken aback by questions about the sufficiency of armored vehicles they are being asked to use:

You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

This is spot-on. If you can do any sort of effective deployment of the resources you have, that’s what you must do.

“It’s not a matter of money or desire,” Lt. Gen. R. Steven Whitcomb, the commander of Army forces in the Persian Gulf, told the troops after Mr. Rumsfeld asked him to address Specialist Wilson’s question. “It’s a matter of the logistics of being able to produce it.”

This is pure bullshit. We are the nation which, three years after our entire Pacific Fleet was decimated at Pearl Harbor, floated an armada larger than the accumulation of all that history had seen to date. This goes back to my core criticism: we are not conducting this Islamofascist War, in the Iraqi theater or elsewhere, like a real war. We are doing it off-the-cuff, and on-the-cheap. A wholesale change in attitude is in order.

Received word today that my college Tenure and Promotion Committee and Dean have approved my application for tenure. Next, it’s on to the University-level committee and the Provost. They tell me I’m over the hump, but it will be nice to have that final letter sometime in Feburary.

It’s an odd process, tenure. Evaluation in the academic setting is quite different from the military setting just from a process standpoint. Only recently has it hit me how I’m being evaluated primarily by my peers instead of by my superiors. While a strong adminstrator is critical, faculty have a tremendous influence over the running of the university.

Faculty governance is a big deal in academia. As you can imagine, the faculty are very concerned over what is in their domain of influence and what is not. I was really taken aback by this when I first arrived at here.

Anyway, one more goal reached. If I can just make it through the rest of this week and then Finals week, I can relax for a while, and maybe even post more to the blog.

I just finished watching History Channel’s piece on TWA Flight 800. I admit, it causes me to wonder about what REALLY happened. It is just a bit too hard for a pilot of many years to believe that a fuel tank went boom on that flight and no other, considering just how many 747’s are in the air. A little hard on the braincells, no?

I doubt, though, that we will ever see the truth in not only this, but a lot of other mysteries that the government conveniently made to just go away. I don’t really subscribe to most of these conspiracies going around, but some of them leave me scratching my head just a little bit. There were more than 200 witnesses to the TWA crash, and a whole lot of them saw traces going up toward the plane. After the CIA (Now, why them? ) released their “animation” of what the NTSB claims happened, the witnesses, almost unanimously, decried the explanation. It leaves a great big hole of doubt in my little pea-brain.

I doubt we’ll ever know.

You should be watching C-Span right now. They are currently airing a forum recorded Friday at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs on the future of CIA intelligence operations. The current speaker is former CIA spook Howard Hart.;

His near future outlook is quite bleak. The main reasons he cites for this are the time required to get a clandestine service officer trained, and problems with recruitment.

Oh, it was just cut short because of technical difficulties. I hope they air this again.

Those with no knowledge of history are doomed to repeat it. This Peter Beinart article from The New Republic is a MUST READ:

On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington’s Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that “the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction.” Liberals, they argued, “consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West.” Unless that changed, “In the spasm of terror which will seize this country … it is the right–the very extreme right–which is most likely to gain victory.”

During World War II, only one major liberal organization, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), had banned communists from its ranks. At the Willard, members of the UDA met to expand and rename their organization. The attendees, who included Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Reuther, and Eleanor Roosevelt, issued a press release that enumerated the new organization’s principles. Announcing the formation of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the statement declared, “[B]ecause the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere,” America should support “democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over.” That meant unceasing opposition to communism, an ideology “hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which the Republic has grown great.”

At the time, the ADA’s was still a minority view among American liberals. Two of the most influential journals of liberal opinion, The New Republic and The Nation, both rejected militant anti-communism. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, a hero to many liberals, saw communists as allies in the fight for domestic and international progress. As Steven M. Gillon notes in Politics and Vision, his excellent history of the ADA, it was virtually the only liberal organization to back President Harry S Truman’s March 1947 decision to aid Greece and Turkey in their battle against Soviet subversion.

But, over the next two years, in bitter political combat across the institutions of American liberalism, anti-communism gained strength. With the ADA’s help, Truman crushed Wallace’s third-party challenge en route to reelection. The formerly leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled its communist affiliates and The New Republic broke with Wallace, its former editor. The American Civil Liberties Union (aclu) denounced communism, as did the naacp. By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: “Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped … by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism.”

[…]

The Kerry Compromise

The press loves a surprise. And so, in the days immediately after November 2, journalists trumpeted the revelation that “moral values” had cost John Kerry the election. Upon deeper investigation, however, the reasons for Kerry’s loss don’t look that surprising at all. In fact, they are largely the same reasons congressional Democrats lost in 2002.

Pundits have seized on exit polls showing that the electorate’s single greatest concern was moral values, cited by 22 percent of voters. But, as my colleague Andrew Sullivan has pointed out (“Uncivil Union,” November 22), a similar share of the electorate cited moral values in the ’90s. The real change this year was on foreign policy. In 2000, only 12 percent of voters cited “world affairs” as their paramount issue; this year, 34 percent mentioned either Iraq or terrorism. (Combined, the two foreign policy categories dwarf moral values.) Voters who cited terrorism backed Bush even more strongly than those who cited moral values. And it was largely this new cohort–the same one that handed the GOP its Senate majority in 2002–that accounts for Bush’s improvement over 2000. As Paul Freedman recently calculated in Slate, if you control for Bush’s share of the vote four years ago, “a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters [in a given state] citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect.”

On national security, Kerry’s nomination was a compromise between a party elite desperate to neutralize the terrorism issue and a liberal base unwilling to redefine itself for the post-September 11 world. In the early days of his candidacy, Kerry seemed destined to run as a hawk. In June 2002, he attacked Bush from the right for not committing American ground troops in the mountains of Tora Bora. Like the other leading candidates in the race, he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. This not only pleased Kerry’s consultants, who hoped to inoculate him against charges that he was soft on terrorism, but it satisfied his foreign policy advisers as well.

By all means, read the whole thing.

20041203/1230ET

Reports are coming in that at least five bombs have gone off at gas stations in Madrid, Spain. No report of fatalities or injuries as yet, and the explosions are said to have been initiated by the separatist group ETA, a Basque organization that has been f0r years demanding a separate state for ther Basque population.

Whoda’ thunk ya’d need a “hunter’s license” to play a video game?

Norton says all it says is “You need to be an Xbox Live subscriber, which I am.”

Tim already pays $50 a year to subscribe to Xbox Live, so his son can play the games online against other players.

But only after opening this game did he discover that inside the instruction manual it says to play the game online “you will need a hunter’s license in addition to your regular Xbox Live…this license must be purchased.”

The cost is $8.95 a month, more than $100 a year.

“That should be disclosed on the outside of the game before you buy it,” Norton says.

Microsoft, in a statement to CBS 2, says it “places a sticker on each game” that “clearly states the additional fee to the consumer” and adds “we regret any instance where the sticker might have fallen off the product.

Sounds pretty lame to me. Anyone that’s spent some time around a shipping and receiving department knows those stickers are applied with automated equipment, or at least an applicator gun, and are unlikely to just “fall off.”

I just got done deleting 50, that’s right five-oh, spam ads for something ending in “-ine” that were que’d up in our comments holding area.

Which brings me to this story I’ve seen around about Lycos’ new screen saver which sends multiple requests to spammers’ servers, thus slowing them down.

As soon as their server is back up, I’ll be downloading that one.

Attention Spammers: No one here is going to let your spam into our comments, you’re wasting your time, your money, and you’re pissing us off. I like playing Texas Hold-’em and really, who’s against a bigger erection? But you want to advertise for it here? Get ahold of Mom or Stryker and BUY AN AD!

Update on the Screensaver. Figures…

As I said at the end of my earlier post, it just gets better.

Yesterday (12/1/04), we learned that Larry Birnbaum had contacted the RFA folks, and said he wanted to donate ANOTHER promising pup to Race for Adoption, with shares to be sold to a consortium again, and that he would AGAIN match the first 100 shares, resulting in another $20,000 to be donated to adoption groups. This time, both benefitting groups will be in FL – one is the FL group we were helping with the original RFA hound (Whistler’s Betty), and the other is another panhandle group, because of the huge overflow of dogs that exist in those areas. They’re working it out so the original NJ group will get a percentage of this dog’s wins, as well.

After this announcement was posted, Larry surprised us again (his generosity knows no bounds, from what I can see). He thinks it’s easier for folks to get excited about raising money when they can see a pup who’s already racing, and he’s got a Grade A girl running in St Petersburg. So he’s donating 50% of her last 3 purses to RFA, to help out the adoption groups, and generate excitement for the fund-raising. This is in addition to the new pup he’s promised that will run at Wheeling.

So there’s a very real possibility that in a mere 7 months, stemming from an idea in one man’s brain, almost $50,000 will be raised to support greyhound adoption.

That’s almost $50,000 raised without appealing to pity, or dredging up urban legends.

Almost $50,000 raised because the adoption programs and owners of adopted greyhounds teamed up with folks who work in the racing greyhound industry to put their money where their mouths are, and to make decisions that are in the best interests of the hounds.

Almost $50,000 raised because people have chosen to put aside their concerns about whether greyhound racing is good or evil, and concentrate on their area of agreement, which is how wonderful the dogs are, and how great it is to help them have a new life after retirement.

Now, I’m wondering… .why should the greyhound lovers have all the fun? If you’d like to join the consortium, and do your part to help these wonderful dogs find new lives as 45-mph couch potatoes, there’s a sponsorship form on the RFA website. If you follow the directions on the form, your donation will be tax-deductible, as well.

If you’re wondering why an animal adoption group needs so much money, there’s an article on the front page of the RFA website from one of the Florida groups, describing their typical expenses.

Thanks for reading. 🙂

Sorry I’ve been absent this week. Been in the dumps because, for the first time in 37 years of flying, I had a bad ending to a flight Sunday night. I posted the story on my personal blog, http://patriotflyer.blogspot.com, and you can read it there. Yes, I’m alive, no I didn’t crash, but it was just as bad…..

See y’all next week.

As the happy companion of two retired racing greyhounds (that’s Angie on the left, and Casey on the right. Angie is a retired brood, as well), I have a special place in my heart for these wonderful skinny-legged dogs, and the folks who work so hard to keep them fit and trim so they can perform at their very best athletic peak, as well as the folks who work so hard to find them homes when their racing career is over.

There is lots of greyhound information available on the internet, and not all of it is accurate. Some websites persist in perpetuating urban legends, and/or decades-old horror stories that villify people or businesses, either because they believe them to still be true, or because they want to eliminate greyhound racing. Other sites will tell you that there are no abuses in the system, that all dogs are well-treated, and no bad apples exist in the industry. As always, the truth lies somewhere in between those 2 extremes.

This post is not about the controversies. This post is about the dogs, and about a unique partnership between some NGA breeders/trainers (one in particular) and the folks who are interested in furthering greyhound adoption. It’s a partnership that deserves to be shouted from the hilltops, and shared across the land, not just in the somewhat isolated sphere of greyhound message boards.

Last May, Dennis McKeon, a former greyhound trainer who is fascinated by all things greyhound, and passionate about the history and breeding of the racing greyhound, was pondering the career of an Irish greyhound named Late Late Show, whose entire racing career had been dedicated to supporting greyhound adoption. He started chatting with a friend about how wonderful it would be to do a similar thing in the US, with a greyhound racing in the name of greyhound adoption, and the proceeds going to benefit the adoption programs. In Dennis’ words,

I ran this idea by Larry Birnbaum, who is the owner of one of the most promising and accomplished young sires
in American Racing Greyhound breeding today—-the beautiful and mercurial Craigie Whistler , winner of the 2001 Derby Lane Sprint Classic. I was hoping Larry might be able to steer me to a nice, promising litter—-maybe even one of Whistler’s.

I was totally unprepared for his reaction; “I would be happy to raise a track-ready pup at my expense. I would then sign ownership rights to you. Then you could sell this pup to the group and I’ll race it at Southland or Wheeling in our kennel at a 50% payout.” Larry is the co-owner of C&C Kennel which has bookings at both tracks.

Thus, Race for Adoption (RFA) was born.

Dennis posted his conversation on a couple greyhound message boards, with a request for participants to join a consortium. He was hoping to sell 50 shares, and the money raised would be split between two adoption programs: one in the Florida Panhandle, and one in New Jersey. The greyhound community was stepping up to the plate, buying shares in the consortium (25 in the first day after the initial posting), when Larry Birnbaum dropped another bombshell on us.

Two days after Dennis first told us about Larry’s generosity, we had 37 shares pledged for purchase (with a goal of at least 50). Larry was keeping track of what was going on, and he posted an offer on the message boards, stating that he would match the contributions for the first 100 shares sold. Since the shares were selling at $100 each, this meant he was not only going to donate a pup with good bloodlines, and the expense of raising/training said pup until it was ready to race, but he was also going to add $10,000 cash into the mix.

The remaining shares were sold in record time, and two adoption groups received checks for $10,000 each. A website was setup for the consortium members to keep informed on what was going on with “their” pup, and Larry donated one of Craigie Whistler’s offspring, a promising young lad named Whistler’s Stud. Unfortunately, there were some track quarantines this summer due to kennel cough, so Larry then shared the proceeds from one of his girls who was already racing at Wheeling, also a descendent of the ever impressive Whistler’s Craigie. Whistler’s Betty runs regularly at Wheeling, and 1/2 of all her proceeds go into the pot for the two adoption groups. Originally a temporary replacement, she became the permanent RFA hound when Stud had some setbacks during his training.

In the 6 months since Dennis first posited his idea, Race For Adoption has contributed over $28,000 to the two greyhound adoption groups. Twenty grand of that came from the initial sale of shares, and Larry’s generous matching contribution, but the rest has come from Betty’s winnings, t-shirt sales, and other donations.

But the story doesn’t end there. It just gets better.

Promoted out of his job. Never been there, but know it’s got to be tough. But then again, the ‘stan to Hawaii at a moment’s notice isn’t all bad in my mind.

Go wish him well.

As I was headed back to work from my lunch run, I heard the DJ mention Stevie Nicks and my ears perked up. He said that Stevie has a letter to the troops posted on her website. I read it, and thought it was nice. The website is www.nicksfix.com.

At this point, several people on the web are asking if there is a procedure in the UN bylaws to impeach Kofi Annan. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds thinks we should draft Vaclav Havel for the job. In any event, the organization is in serious need of a turnaround expert.

Update: While Glenn likes Vaclav Havel, I would also like to put forward the name of formet Georgia Senator Sam Nunn. As my regular readers know, I am a big Sam Numm fan, having previously promoted him as the ‘White Knight’ who might save the Democratic party.

I will likely never get a chance to play…