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Going Off the Rails With No Way Back

By Frank Yacenda | March 18, 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon once again, there are some things that need to be said. If I’m a curmudgeon — I don’t think I am — so be it.

What brought this sudden bout of curmudeonness on, you ask? It began Saturday morning with telephone conversations with two different bankers in Maryland. I’d written two checks to a friend of mine visiting from Albania, repayment of an old debt. She took the checks to a local branch of Wells Fargo Bank (I’m naming names this time), the bank on which the checks were drawn, and someone from the branch called me to verify the checks’ legitimacy. Okay, I can see the point of that, though I wonder if they would have done the same if my friend was American or had, say, a British or Canadian passport and not an Albanian one. I also have questions about the need for a call given that Wells Fargo seems to have policies in place that deliberately make it as difficult as possible for customers to access their own funds. But that is a whole other story.

In any case, one of the checks was for $2,000.00, and the other one was for $9,000.06. I put the numerical amount as I always do, $2,000.⁰⁰/100 for the first check, and $9,000.⁰⁶/100 for the second one. And then I wrote out the amount in the proper format, the one I’ve been using for some 50 years virtually without incident: Two Thousand and No Hundreths Dollars, and Nine Thousand and Six Hundreths Dollars. Okay, granted, the proper spelling is hundredths, but close enough for government work since the words spell out what the numerals already show, and in my haste I dropped the “d.” But that wasn’t the issue.

Now, I don’t know, but I think anyone from about the age of 5 should know that a hundredth of a dollar is a cent. A penny. One hundredth of a dollar is one cent, six hundredths of a dollar is six cents. Even misspelled, I’d bet most 5 year olds can figure that out. But apparently this fine point is lost on Wells Fargo bankers, and I had to explain to two different genius bankers that Nine Thousand and Six Hundreths (sic) Dollars was not $9,600, but $9,000.06. The first banker said their branch policy was not to accept checks with the cents expressed that way. That made no sense to me, but finally he conceded and said they’d cash the checks. All good, right?

Not quite. A few minutes later another banker, the first one’s manager, called me, and after a few unnecessary and unwanted pleasantries, she repeated that the branch didn’t normally accept checks where the cents were expressed as they were on my check. She had me read off the amount of the check, and confirm the intended amount. I was rapidly losing my patience with this whole thing, and I told her I’d been writing checks like this for 50 years, it was the proper way to write a check, and what exactly didn’t she understand? She then feigned a brief reconsideration of the matter, and finally confirmed that they would accept the check. Hurrah. I got to tell a banker what should have been obvious to her by reading the check as it had been written. Duh.

Now I have better ways of spending my Saturday mornings than explaining the obvious to bankers, but this whole affair served to remind me the extent to which this country is going to hell in a hand basket. The signs are increasingly everywhere, how far off the rails we’re going, this just being the most recent one. It seems people, and the country as a whole, just get stupider and stupider by the day.

I’ve railed against the madness in the direction we’re headed before, but it’s time to do it again, drilling down a bit this time.

In the course of a typical day, I get messages – obviously written on a phone with a run-away spell corrector – that are virtually incomprehensible. I’m asked questions that I already answered, sometimes multiple times. And I get abbreviated messages that fail to respond to issues I raised. In short, I can almost always tell when someone is writing me from a phone, and the communication is seriously impaired as a result. This is a significant matter, since communication should be primary, not to mention I don’t understand how people don’t go crazy typing and reading on a small screen. Well, maybe they do, and we just don’t have a name yet for this mental illness.

If you’re a parent in this country, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you that your little darlings are no longer expected to learn cursive writing. At one point, some 45 states and the District of Columbia had dropped the requirement to teach cursive writing, and the dreaded Common Core was at least in large part responsible for that since Common Core doesn’t require cursive as part of the curriculum. Now blaming Common Cause for stupidity is a bit like blaming phones for errors. It’s the people behind Common Core who are exhibiting their ignorance, and the curriculum is just the symptomatic outcome of that.

There has been some retrenchment in a handful of states that realized the folly of dropping cursive writing from the curriculum, but overall this country is on the verge of entering a new Dark Ages where kids can’t even sign their own names. The idea is that they can do everything on a keyboard, but somehow that seems equivalent to saying they don’t need to learn to walk since they can get driven around everywhere by their parents.

Additionally, as studies confirm, the ability to write, and not just type, promotes some cognitive and motor skills that typing does not. Writing is not the same as typing, and while both skills might be worthwhile, school districts and states don’t want to spend the money teaching both. So out goes cursive writing, and with it one of the traits of an educated person. And people wonder why I’d never put any child of mine in a public, and probably most private, schools.

While this has been going on in more recent years, another long term trend – grade inflation in the nation’s colleges and universities – has been underway for more than half a century. It’s true that a degree of grade inflation began during the Vietnam War years, Recent GPA Trends when I was in college. Some attribute this to the desire on the part of many professors to keep students out of the draft, which worked for awhile, but based on my own experience it also probably had to do with the proliferation of pass-fail grading during the turmoil of years of sit-ins, walk-outs, and student strikes that closed some institutions, including the one I attended, for nearly entire semesters. But the grade inflation of that period pales to what has been going on since the 1980s, when grade-point averages have been rising an average of 0.1 points a decade, and the percentage of A grades given has gone up 5 to 6 percentage points a decade.

Since the 1990s, the A grade is the most common grade given in four-year colleges, and As are now three times more common than they were in 1960. At that time Cs were most common, and in my own era, Bs were most common. Now if they don’t get an A, students are at the professor’s throat as if the failing rests with the prof and not with their own performance. If you believe that is because college students have gotten that much smarter since 1960, I have a nice athletic building on a fine campus I’d like to sell you. Very good price. Just sign right here. Oh, wait, you can’t sign, because you never learned cursive. Okay, put your “X” on the line there.

Having been a college professor, I can tell you there is a strong tendency toward treating what are supposed to be young (and sometimes not so young) adults as 50 Years Rise of A Grade children. There is a stress on not offending the students, sandwiching any critical remarks in between praise, not being unduly harsh in comments even in the face of abject and repeated refusal on the part of the student to follow guidance. This is called the Student as Consumer Era, and it is indicative of schools that need to cultivate their students to stay enrolled and to pay the exorbitant tuitions and fees charged them and their parents. And instead of challenging their minds and belief systems, these educational institutions allow students to retreat to so-called “safe spaces” and to drive speakers with views divergent from their own off campus, allowing a new form of Fascism and sheltered closed-mindedness to run rampant on college campuses.

Moving from the swamp of so-called education, we have cars that stop themselves or keep themselves in their own lanes, ostensibly so their owners (“drivers” is too strong a word for them) can text and talk on the phone. Things seem increasingly geared toward the lazy and the ignorant. My own car turns its own lights on and off, doesn’t have a key, and tells me how many miles I can go before I run out of fuel. Thank goodness it doesn’t stop itself or do that lane thing, which would be way beyond what I would tolerate of my car. It does open its own trunk, though, for unknown reasons and at very inconvenient times, sometimes multiple times in a row. I guess taunting its owner is part of the deal. I can almost hear it laugh when it does this.

In the course of all these trends, we continue to lose human contact at an almost alarming rate. My most recent two forays into paying entry fees – one at a movie theater, the other at a major conference I attended – were done at terminals. Gone were the friendly ticket girl and the helpful conference gatekeeper, replaced by screens and credit card readers and keyboards. That may all be more efficient, but it’s a bit disconcerting, too. My local Walmart has installed all sorts of self-check-out equipment, but I have never found self-check-out to be faster or more efficient than dealing with a human cashier, and it’s also a tad insulting, I think. If the store wants my money, it should at least have a sufficient number of humans on hand to take it. So, unless I have just one or two items and am in a major hurry, I won’t use the self-check-out.

Meanwhile, the medical profession – one area that might benefit from more, rather than less, technology in enabling improved communication between physicians and patients – remains mired back a century or two. If anyone is able to email their doctor, or even their doctor’s office, I’d love to hear about it. And our prescription drug system seems designed to breed frustration and inefficiency, and we wonder why healthcare costs continue to escalate. I’ve written on these things before, and on the inherent inequities and inefficiencies of the medical system, and the most I’ve gotten in response from doctors is a smile and a laugh, as if I were proposing absurdities.

Call me a curmudgeon if you like, but somehow this all feels like we’re headed off the rails with no way back. Maybe, as the illustration says, you’ll get it eventually, but by then it might be — probably will be — too late. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. Am I the only one who feels this way? I’d love to hear your thoughts on all this, regardless which side of things you come down on.

Charts from http://www.gradeinflation.com

Seeing the Future Through a Hole in the Clouds

By Frank Yacenda | February 8, 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

When SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket left Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, it confirmed the company’s commitment to establishing an ever-larger presence in space. And SpaceX is doing so as a private enterprise, a leader in an industry only vaguely foreseen just a few decades ago, at the time I was a science writer covering the nation’s space program on a daily basis.

As it lifted off, the Falcon Heavy became the world’s currently most powerful launch vehicle, capable of boosting 141,000 pounds (64 metric tons) into low earth orbit (LEO). The imagery of the giant rocket rising into the sky from the same pad where the moon rockets of the Apollo program took a dozen humans to the surface of the moon wasn’t lost on the tens of thousands of onlookers at Cape Canaveral. Nor was it lost on SpaceX founder and chief Elon Musk, who sent his personal red Tesla roadster – a product of another of his companies – with a mannequin at the wheel that Musk named Starman – after the David Bowie song – into deep space orbit around the sun.

The launch of the Falcon Heavy seemed designed to give birth to a renewed vision of space exploration, a vision that had gone off the rails from the fading days of the Space Shuttle program and which reached its nadir in June 2010. That’s when then-NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced that the space agency’s primary mission was outreach to the Muslim world. Bolden said he had been charged with three missions by President Obama, this being the foremost one, and none of which had anything to do with space exploration. While the White House later insisted Bolden misspoke and that such outreach was not part of NASA’s mission, all indications were that there was little commitment to setting a new course for America’s drifting space program.

It was a different vision on Aug. 30, 1983, nearly 35 years ago, when the Space Shuttle Challenger left that same Pad 39A at 2:32 in the morning. The mission, officially named STS-8, just the eighth Space Shuttle mission, was the first night launch of the Shuttle. It also carried the first American black astronaut to fly in space, Guion “Guy” Bluford. But the element that often is omitted from accounts of that mission was the fact that its launch nearly was scrubbed due to the weather.

The night of Aug. 29-30 at Kennedy Space Center was marked with thunderstorms. Applying normal parameters, the launch almost certainly would have been postponed given the danger posed by a lightning strike on the vehicle or the conductive contrails of its solid rocket boosters. As I sat at my desk in the KSC Press Center that night, I had already completed the draft of my story stating that the launch had been scrubbed due to weather. I was about to file my story when a hole opened in the clouds over Pad 39A, the launch window was extended and the countdown resumed, and Challenger raced into space through that hole, lighting up the Cape like it was day and illuminating the night sky from Havana to Hatteras.

There was talk at that time, in the early years of the Shuttle program, whether the vehicle would ever be run like an airline, keeping to a schedule of frequent launches and dropping costs. I saw the willingness of flight controllers to bend the rules and launch through the hole in the clouds that stormy August night as a major step in that direction, and I said as much in the piece I finally filed. In some ways, my prediction was prescient, and Tuesday’s launch of the Falcon Heavy was the logical extension of what I saw through that hole in the nighttime clouds.

There were other things that I didn’t see that night, though. I failed to make allowance for things like political pressure, human miscalculation, and the arrogance of managers not willing to admit when they are wrong. In some cases – like launching Challenger in sub-freezing temperatures that clearly exceeded launch parameters on Jan. 28. 1986, or failing to heed the warnings of flight engineers regarding penetration of Columbia’s heat-protective tiles prior to the orbiter’s reentry on Feb. 1, 2003 – dead wrong.

The Challenger and Columbia disasters, like the fatal Apollo 1 test module fire of Jan. 27, 1967, remind us that space exploration is not without its risks, nor without its losses, including and especially human losses. At least until this point, space travel is not analogous to contemporary airline flight. I accuse myself of missing that key point in my STS-8 prognostication, but not of missing the point of where things were headed. And now, with private space enterprises, like SpaceX, Orbital ATK, United Launch Alliance, and others developing new vehicles, taking over more of the functions formerly unique to NASA, and putting private capital at risk, a new chapter is being written in America’s venture into space.

Make no mistake. America still has a long way to go before it reestablishes its place in space. It has always struck me as tragically sad that there are people alive on earth today who were born after the time when men walked on the moon. A dream humans held for thousands of years had come and gone, and now we are back looking into the heavens and dreaming of a return to the moon and beyond. And as impressive as Tuesday’s launch was, to put things in perspective, in 2018 the Falcon Heavy generated just half the lift of NASA’s Saturn V lunar rocket, first launched from the same Pad 39A on Nov, 7, 1967, half a century earlier. The Saturn V could lift 120 metric tons to LEO, a launch capability that has yet to be matched. So powerful was the Saturn V that its sound waves broke windows in Titusville, 10 miles away.

But the Falcon Heavy is not the end of SpaceX’s design train, and the company’s Big Falcon Rocket or BFR – the mundane name is actually Musk’s play on words, with the “F” a stand-in for another less polite word – will be a monster affair capable of lifting 136 metric tons to LEO. Musk sees the BFR as the rocket that will take colonists to Mars, or carry up to 100 paying passengers into space. Meanwhile, the company has been flying unmanned missions for years, and it expects to bring astronauts to the International Space Station aboard its smaller Falcon 9 rocket paired with its Dragon space capsule later this year.

The TSA isn’t going to be setting up security checkpoints at KSC any time soon, but an era when space travel becomes accessible to more and more people is increasingly easy to envisage, and in large part it’s due to the vision and perseverance of private space entrepreneurs. It’s an era that, while it will come a bit later than I saw at the time, there was a small glimpse of through a hole in the clouds one stormy night in 1983.

Photo of STS-8 launch by NASA

Read My Novel and Vote for It!

By Frank Yacenda | January 17, 2018 | Comments 0 Comment

Time for a little cross-fertilization. As you probably know, I have a fiction blog called Stoned Cherry. I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I just can’t do one thing, so my writing crosses both non-fiction lines (here) and fiction ones (there).

Well, here’s your big chance to read my novel, Don’t Try Any of This, and comment and vote for it. Just click on the image immediately above, and it will take you to Inkitt where you can be among the first to read the full novel. Your vote actually counts and helps let other readers know that you think the book is worth reading.

Inkitt is a new kind of publisher. It lets writers post their stories and books and lets readers decide which ones have enough merit to be considered for publication. It also periodically runs contests and the best received books and stories rise to the top in the contest ratings.

Why would you want to read the book? Well, if human drama, wry humor, enticing dialogue, the colorful journey and off-beat challenges a teenage girl faces as she moves through such exotic places as Paris. Thailand, Amsterdam, South Africa, and Lake Como, and (if I can say so) some damned good writing and storytelling appeals to you, go read the book now.

So even if you’re already a big fan of the novel, be sure to go to Inkitt, read the book (or as many chapters as you can or want), post a comment, and vote for it. Reading it on Stoned Cherry won’t have any effect. You need to do it on Inkitt (and did I mention to comment and vote for it? I did? Good. Do it!)

And thank you!

‘Tis the Season

By Frank Yacenda | December 30, 2017 | Comments 0 Comment

Indeed, ’tis the season to find a deal on a new car. Even I’m sniffing around to see what I might find to sate my very limited preferences to replace, or at least supplement, my current ride, the Ford Windstar I’ve had for 14 years (and which is actually 21 years young), is pushing 250,000 miles/400,000 kms, and stubbornly refuses to die.

In these parts, the commercials run on local TV are mostly for car dealers, tort lawyers, back surgeons, furniture vendors, and, of course, drogas. There is hardly a station break (of which there are lots and lots) without at least one car ad.

It’s interesting observing the different kinds of buyers each marque is aiming for through its TV advertising. For instance, Chrysler-Fiat and Nissan appear pitted in a competition to see which can appeal more to the remaining muscle-car drivers out there. You know, the kind of drivers who get their thrills driving through walls and burning rubber on the open road in a quest to see who can be first to the finish line somewhere out on the salt flats, or accumulate the maximum number of speeding tickets. Meanwhile, Chevy mostly makes use of supposed buyers in its ads, revealing in those chosen to appear the low opinion in which GM must hold its customers. Lately, though, in the spirit of the season, Chevrolet has been running its employee-discount commercials, and based on those apparently Chevy employees are vastly more intelligent and appealing than Chevy buyers. For its part, Ford also makes use of prospective buyers in its commercials but, based on the ads, Ford buyers are a great deal smarter and more likable than Chevy buyers.

Kids, you may have noticed, figure in a disproportionate number of car ads. Car manufacturers and their advertising proxies have calculated that kids help sell cars to families, and a little child exploitation is worth the bump in sales. This trend is all the more apparent in this festive holiday car-selling season.

I’m not sure to what kind of people Honda is appealing with its advertising, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to meet them. Hyundai, on the other hand, mixes music and humor to appeal to buyers’ lighter side. Upscale Lexus, though, both in its advertising and design philosophy, seems intent on appealing to buyers who like cars so aggressively ugly it would not be unfair to characterize them as the Darth Vaders of the automotive world. Meanwhile, Kia takes on Lexus directly in its Sorento commercials, belittling the Lexus driver for not realizing he was being out-flanked by the supposedly off-road competent Kia Sorento.

Taking a different tack, Lexus competitor Infiniti focuses on the kind of nice people having fun with its cars that it’s hoping to attract, while Acura, word in the industry has it, is focusing more on mobile advertising, with a barrage of vertical images and music by Kid Ink, aimed at a younger yet upscale audience.

Among European manufacturers, Volkswagen is out there slugging, its commercials aimed at mostly younger buyers, maybe folks out buying their first new car, and looking it. At the other end of the spectrum is Mercedes-Benz, which futilely attempts to convince us that kids (speaking of unbridled child exploitation) fantasize about owning a Daimler when they grow up. I recall my childhood car cravings, and Mercedes never once figured into them, the marque more associated in my mind with stodgy old people, crooked lawyers, and wearers of mink coats. Not the kind of car most kids would aspire to driving. But at least the current breed of Mercedes commercials, unlike an earlier iteration, don’t feature cars sliding sideways and crashing through plate glass windows, apparently careering into young children dreaming of Mercedeses inside those windows.

In fact, for awhile it seemed that the only direction most cars in automotive advertising went was sideways. That unfortunate trend seems, happily, to be reaching an end, or at least tapering down. But now the latest thing is to show how a car stops by itself, or comes veering back into its lane after nearly sideswiping a passing vehicle. Or, clever trick, parallel-parks itself, positively impressing lovers and prospective relatives. Drivers, passengers, and passers-by all seem incredulous at these amazing feats of the semi-self-driving cars. Of course, one would not be faulted for wondering what drivers would have done had the car not stopped itself or corrected course. Would they have just allowed the car to plow ahead into whatever caused it to stop itself, or maybe paid a bit more attention before drifting out of a lane? Or, gasp, perhaps going to the trouble to learn how to parallel-park? Increasingly, possession of those skills seems to be too much to hope for in late 2017 on the cusp of 2018. My guess is that all these car tricks can only encourage more distracted driving, leading careless drivers to believe they can get away with texting or yakking away on the phone while behind the wheel.

Indicative of how things are going, Volvo, the Swedish car maker now owned by the Chinese after its sale by Ford, previously always focused on the safety features of its cars in its advertising. Now it looks, based on recent Volvo advertising, that the car’s self-driving features can compensate for brainless drivers who find it bothersome to pay even modest attention to their driving. And then there are the other Volvo commercials showing cars just driving in ordinary ways on ordinary roads, with the warning in small type at the bottom of the screen admonishing, “Professional driver on closed course. Do not attempt.”

And I guess that’s where we’re headed out on the road. If you don’t have a car that does everything for you, don’t attempt to drive. Or if you’re one of those drivers who actually are in control of their vehicle, maybe you shouldn’t attempt to drive, either, given all those other idiots out there whose cars have taken over for them.

Come to think of it, judging by some of the driving I see regularly, maybe it’s better to just stay home and watch car commercials, and let the admen and adwomen do the driving for you.

Happy New Year, everyone!

The View From the Shoulder

By Frank Yacenda | December 24, 2017 | Comments 2 comments

To point out the obvious, I survived the surgery that was the subject of my last posting, and have been in a process of slow recovery over the past three and a half weeks. The surgery – a quintuple cardiac bypass, which I didn’t even know was a thing – went well, and I’m told my recovery has been as good as could be expected. I’m grateful to my surgeon and all the others who were involved in getting me through this, as insane as it all seems to me.

Where I’m at now is a world of difference from where I was in the first few days after the surgery. There are still lots of inconveniences and things that are not yet back to normal, but at least I’m past the excruciating pain and weakness that characterized those initial days. At that time I had to wonder why I ever put myself through such mutilation and torture, and still I can’t imagine ever going through anything like that again. I had a pretty clear sense throughout the whole ordeal that I could return to normal functioning and an active life, but I realized that if all I had to look forward to was permanent disability and struggle, as others I saw around me, I’d have a pretty hard time justifying it. Even today, as far as I’ve come, I had to wonder how the mechanisms that are my heart and body could sustain all this and keep on functioning. This is a mystery I may never unravel.

In case you’re wondering about the title for this posting, as much as I’m now ambulatory and functioning at a relative level of normalcy, I still feel I’m sitting on the shoulder of the road. Other than emails and shopping lists and questions for my doctors and a couple of business-related items, this is the first piece of any sort of coherency and even marginal creativity I’ve been able to write in 26 days. And it’s admittedly pretty thin. I’m hoping in the next several days I’ll be able to write more, and then more, and I can resume more regular posting to these blogs, but I’ve found that gathering mental energy is virtually as hard as gathering physical energy. And having anything worth saying is yet a step beyond that.

Four days past the surgery I attempted to get online, and was met with the shocking reality that I had forgotten all my passwords. I still couldn’t muster the strength to have someone fetch my laptop from its bag or to hold it on me, and trying to do things on my phone reinforced the feeling of insanity of doing anything serious on a phone, even when in normal health. I had that sense before the surgery, and that disconcerting experience only confirmed it. Two days later, when I finally did get onto my laptop, I was astounded at the number of typing mistakes I made. It was like my fingers were not in direct contact with my brain and they took on twitches and strokes that defied my best attempts to control them. Not quite as disjointed as the time I tried to work on a Turkish keyboard, but close. I’m told that anesthesia can really scramble both brain and body cells, and so I’m chalking these aberrations up to that. I’m doing a lot better now with typing and other fine motor skills, and the files on my laptop helped me recover my passwords, but the process has been a continuum.

Other bodily functions – notably an astoundingly annoying throat irritation and coughing, and problems with peeing – have slowly been recovering, and while not back to what I’d characterize as normal, are hugely better than they were in the early days.

I had five and part of a sixth day in the hospital following the surgery, and then four and part of a fifth day in a rehab center, located on the same complex as the hospital, after that. At that point I got the boot, and two wonderful friends and fellow boat people came to fetch me, assist with getting food and medications, and establish me back aboard my boat, which is my home. I don’t know what I would have done without them, and I’ll be forever grateful to them. It’s two weeks today that I’ve been back aboard, and I think returning here was the best alternative. This past Tuesday my surgeon, with some persuasion, gave me back my driving privileges, and that made a huge difference in my life. And two days ago my primary physician told me I’m very impatient. I told her I know I’m a pain in the ass, but I wasn’t challenging her expertise. That’s just me. And she laughed.

I’m going to have lots more to say about the medical and healthcare situation in this country in coming weeks and months here on FJY.US and I may have some fictional things to say about it on Stoned Cherry. I’m fortunate in that I have access to Medicare and private insurance, and that made a huge difference. It shocks some people, but I really have nothing negative to say about my insurance company. And I have lots of praise for the doctors, nurses, aides (known, it appears, as Patient Care Technicians in some circles these days), therapists, and all the others who assisted and supported me through all this. That said, when there were rare failures they were pretty notable, and one thing I came to discover is that it usually is the little things, the small details, that can have the biggest impact on a patient and the patient’s experience. I’ll have more to say on this, too.

I really feel bad for writing all this self-centered drivel, but I felt some explanation of where I’ve been for the past weeks was in order, a kind of transition from the breakdown on the shoulder I went through to getting back into the traffic pattern. I’ve seen the moon and the sun since my last posting, and so day-by-day it’s time to get on with life. I promise, barring any unforeseen circumstances, this will be the last posting focusing on this whole thing, and I now can say, enough of these adventures.

I’ll be pulling off the shoulder pretty soon, so watch this space for what’s to come.