My cell phone rang on Monday morning, and it wasn’t a robot selling me something or asking me to donate to some cause. It was my friend and riding buddy Paul, aka ‘G-Man’. “Rich can you come to lunch? It’s on me!” he said in a voice that sounded really upbeat and excited.

Actually G-Man is one of the most upbeat people I know. He always has a smile on his face and a friendly and outgoing attitude. He may get a little agitated discussing that World Series when the Astros used codes and cameras and signaling devices to cheat the Dodgers out of the title, but otherwise he has a very sunny disposition.

Ever wonder why there are so many commercials on TV and radio for the tribal casinos in California? It is because of customers like G-Man. G-Man likes to gamble. He doesn’t overdo it. He pays all his bills and doesn’t mortgage his house, but he does spend some of his discretionary income in casinos or on lottery tickets. He has some specific lottery numbers that he plays, eschewing the random ‘quick pick’. So he has to play every week, because if he missed a week and his numbers hit he would need therapy.

So I kind of knew why G-Man invited a few friends to lunch on his dime, but he saved the details for table talk. Here is what he told us happened. If I have a few of the specifics wrong bear with me, he was pretty excited while telling his tale and it was hard for this non-gambler to follow.

There is a casino game called 3 Card Poker, and there is a progressive jackpot for hitting the A,K,Q of Spades. At the Jackson Rancheria, the payoff had grown to $22,000, which G-Man says is much higher than usual. One afternoon he decided to take a drive through the low snow and see if it had been hit and if not spend a few dollars chasing it.

Alas, some other player had gotten lucky so the progressive was down to something like $1,200. Nothing to get excited about. So G-Man decided to sit down at a table offering something called ‘4 Card Poker’. I had never heard of this, but here is how it works. You make a bet, then the dealer gives you 5 cards and takes 6 cards for him/herself. You make the best poker hand you can with your best 4 cards, the dealer does the same, and the higher hand wins. Obviously the dealer has a huge edge, but how do you think the Rancheria pays for all those commercials?

No one would play this game except for the two enticing side bets with large payouts. One is a bonus for a ‘bad beat’ which means you had a very good hand topped by the dealer’s better one. The other is a bonus for hitting exceptional hands, of which a royal flush it the best, and a straight flush is a close runner up.

So G-Man sits down at the table, makes the three bets, and look what fate dealt him on his very first hand:

G-Man, in a very excited voice, “I sat down and the dealer dealt my cards and before I looked I shuffled them like I always do. Then I looked at 4 of them, like I always do. Holy smokes, I’ve got the 2,3,4 and 5 of Diamonds! A four card straight flush! The Ace or 6 of Diamonds would make a straight flush and a big payout. So I kind of peek and I see that I have a red Ace. Now I’m really excited…could it be? I expose the card a little more and it’s a Diamond! Whoopee!!!”

Whoopee indeed. The payout was $7,000. G-Man said it was his single biggest win ever. When you hit something this big the IRS and Franchise Tax Board get involved, so the casino gave him a W2-G or 1099-G and withheld something like 20%, but it was still enough to get excited about. And take your friends to lunch with.

My loyal readers will recall two of my favorite blogs titled ‘The Butterfly Effect’ about how some small event started a chain that changed lives. For example: the only reason Stoker and I ever met is because Jimmy Carter and Tip O’Neil were arguing about funding an aircraft carrier back in 1978. That argument led to forty years of married bliss for the two of us. And no argument would have meant no Rich and Stoker…a very sobering thought.

A $7,000 jackpot (before taxes) isn’t exactly life changing, but it is still pretty exciting, and G-Man started musing on some ‘what ifs’ of his own. “Suppose the 3 card bonus was still high and I hadn’t played 4 card? What if I had stayed home instead of deciding spur of the moment to head up the hill and brave the snowdirfts? What if I had gone to the bathroom when I arrived? Or parked in a different spot? I would have missed it! It hit on my very first hand!”

Well he didn’t miss it, and it couldn’t have happened to a better fellow. Thanks for lunch G-Man!

I’m back on the bike after a long layoff due to the flap fracas. My first ride was on February 9, and I’ve done 400 miles so far. That’s including 66 miles yesterday on the Pedaling Paths to Independence Ride to support the Community Center For the Blind.

On Thursday, our ride coordinator posted this on Facebook:

Some break: When registration opened at 8:30 it was pouring rain. And cold too. Here is the data from my Garmin:

There were about 10 club members interested in doing the ride, and the plan was to meet at 8:45. Only Kent and Charles and I were at the start, and we waited until 9:30 when the rain finally quit to set off on wet roads in frigid and damp conditions. As you can see from my Garmin the temperature was mostly in the upper 30’s and averaged 41 degrees. And there was some rain in the last two hours of the ride. The sun stayed away all day too.

How to dress for such weather? Non-cyclists might be interested in what I had on. Which was almost everything I had. Here’s a list:

• Short sleeve base layer, long sleeve base layer
• Heavy bib knicker
• Long sleeve flannel jersey (my warmest), with arm warmers pulled over the sleeves.
• my O2 rain jacket (maybe the best cycling rain gear ever made, and under $40)
• my SBC vest
• shoe covers over shoe toe covers (2 layers)
• Glove liners under long fingered gloves (2 layers)
• A skull cap, topped with a knitted balaclava (2 layers)
• silk sock liners topped by wool socks (2 layers)

My riding companions were similarly clad. Here is a photo from the Farmington Fire Station rest stop.

For the first two hours, the three of us rode smoothly and stayed together into the irritatingly cold but fairly gentle SE wind. On Sonora Road my phone rang, and I was going to ignore it since most calls are from robots. But my phone is paired with my Garmin, which flashed ‘Missed call from Eddy Freggiaro’. Oops, that might be important. I always answer calls from my parents’ number. Today that meant digging through all those outer layers to get to the plastic phone bag stored in my jersey pocket. It was a minor matter, and I was soon back riding and catching my two soft pedaling companions.

As we crossed Highway 4 for the long stretch north to Milton, Kent was showing some signs of fatigue. Charles rode ahead a bit, but I stayed back. I was pretty hungry despite the brownie I ate at Farmington, but Kent was kind of bonking. Later I also learned he was having stomach issues, perhaps from the coffee he drank trying to get warm in Farmington. Kent is a tea drinker and I’ve never seen him drink coffee until yesterday.

When we finally got to Milton the turkey sandwich and chips tasted great. Of course we had some raindrops during lunch to remind us that there were a couple more hours of cold and wet riding to deal with.

Kent and I were so focused on food we didn’t notice that Charles wasn’t present until we were getting ready to leave. He couldn’t have missed the lunch stop, could he? It is off the road a bit, next to a cemetery of all things, in case anyone froze to death, but it is pretty well marked. Either he set a record for fastest sandwich stop, or he had ridden right past and missed the food. Later we learned that he somehow got the idea that I was ahead of him instead of behind, and he kept trying to catch a phantom. SBC ride confusion incidents are kind of legendary, and this was another one.

As Kent and I rolled out on the gravel path back to Milton Road, we saw our SBC buddy Steve just arriving. He had come to the start late and was behind us but made good time to get to lunch. It was too cold to wait any longer so Kent and I said hi and goodbye in one sentence and hit the road.

The turkey sandwich revived Kent and he rode much better after the break. We rolled along and even caught some people at the Sheldon Road climb. I got a little ahead of Kent but I was going to take the hill easy, until in my mirror I noticed a racer type trying to catch and pass me. So I put whatever post flap power I have into the pedals to try to stay away. He did manage to catch me at the top, but he had to work for it.

I waited for Kent at the Sheldon Road/Weimer Road ‘T’ intersection. Suddenly here comes a rider going the opposite direction from the course and whistling ‘The Surrey With the Fringe on Top’ from Oklahoma. Surreal…but he stopped and I realized it was Dr. Rose, out doing some afternoon miles. More irony: the Doctor had participated in the morning text storm about whether to ride or not, and who was in or out. He posted a picture of his stocking feet toasty in front of a fireplace. Now here he is getting cold and wet like the rest of us. But only for 30 miles, not 66.

When Kent arrived the three of us set out for the Belota rest stop, and then the final 10 miles back to Linden. The temperature finally got above 40 degrees, barely. Dr. Rose went home and Kent and I headed to De Vinci’s for the post ride meal. Steve arrived soon after and we all tried to warm up with pesto and chicken and coffee, with limited success.

There is a book called “The Rules”, a semi serious and hilarious set of do’s and don’t for road cyclists. One of our favorites is Rule 9: If you are out riding in bad weather, it means you are a badass. Period. Yesterday 4 SBC riders (5 if you count the Doctor and his 30 miles) qualified for certain.

Until recently I had never even heard of a culinary concoction called ‘chicken and waffles’. Then my friend Dave posted a picture of himself eating this at a bar/restaurant in Memphis. He was on a road trip to see Iowa State play in the Liberty Bowl. That is ‘liberty’, as in ‘freedom’, a concept Google and Facebook and Gavin (no gas stoves or heaters, and vax or else) Newsom could take a few lessons in.

Dave posted a photo of his plate of fried chicken and waffles and syrup and butter. with a large craft beer to wash it down. Dave is a tall and rangy fellow, and how he stays so slim eating like this is a mystery. If I even look at a pizza or burrito I gain 5 lbs.

So I went to the internet, and apparently ‘chicken and waffles’ is a real thing. The story is that it originated in Harlem during the heyday of jazz. The musicians would play late into the night and afterwards wanted to get something to eat, but the restaurant kitchens were closed. Some enterprising and accommodating chef threw together left over pieces of fried chicken and whipped up some waffles to accompany them, and an instant culinary classic was born.

Of course this story, like every part of history, is being debunked, but whatever its birthplace, chicken and waffles is a well known dish in much of the southern U.S. Not on Brumby Road though, where our cultural cooking leans more toward pesto or home made salami or polenta with mushroom gravy. And yes, we call it ‘gravy’, not sauce.

But even food can get you in trouble these days…

A New York middle school is apologizing after serving students with a meal on the first day of Black History Month that was deemed to be culturally insensitive.
Administrators at Nyack Middle School say that the hot lunch menu was changed by the vendor without their knowledge on February 1st, the first day of Black History Month, to include chicken and waffles with a watermelon dessert which the school’s principal called an “unfortunate situation”, The Journal News reported.
“We are extremely disappointed by this regrettable situation and apologize to the entire Nyack community for the cultural insensitivity displayed by our food service provider,” Nyack Middle School Principal David Johnson said in a statement.

Now let me say that when I was in school, if the kitchen had served me fried chicken and waffles for lunch I would have been in heaven, no matter what day it was. But that was back when schools taught grammar and arithmetic and spelling and not gender awareness. We never considered how the food we ate and when we ate it could be culturally insensitive. Because it’s food, not a political statement.

Besides, it seems to me that serving chicken and waffles, if it is indeed a product of Black culinary tradition, is a TRIBUTE on the first day of Black History Month, not a demeaning culturally insensitive stereotype. If I go to a Cinco de Mayo celebration, I expect to consume tacos or burritos and drink a Negra Modelo. And gain the aforementioned 5 lbs. If a school serves tacos on Cinco de Mayo are they going to be reprimanded and forced into diversity training? On St. Patrick’s day the consumption of corned beef and cabbage and beer dyed green goes off the charts and nobody gets mad about it.

Since Stoker and I are retired, we barely know what day of the week it is, so it would be easy for us to slip up and order something ethnic on an insensitive date. But I doubt chicken and waffles are going to be a part of our diet, whatever day it is. So, for this one ‘trigger’, we are safe.

This photo appeared on a friend’s Facebook page. Apparently one of his favorite restaurants had to close because of a skunk under their building. As they say in poker “I’ll see your skunk and raise you a dozen…”

Stoker and I love our quiet home on Brumby Road, but living in the country poses a few challenges. Coyotes trot by, worrying Stoker and driving Luke crazy. Raccoons come into our yard looking for water from the birdbaths when things are dry, and threatening to eat Diane’s Koi for a late night snack.

One time we noticed a distinct but faint odor of skunk in our house. We started to see skunks wandering around our yard and discovered that they had taken up residence in the crawl space under our house.

We were kind of desperate and I took to the internet trying to find a pest control company to deal with the problem. This turned out to be quite difficult, but then a miracle occurred and I stumbled across a real life Daniel Boone type who could trap anything. And he had the required Silver Card, a state license for structural pest control, so he was legit. I know about these things because I myself had a Brown Card, the agricultural pest control equivalent.

He came to our house over the course of three weeks and caught 13 skunks, three possums and a raccoon. We paid him for each visit and when he finally had them all I added a generous tip to his bill.

I got to thinking about the skunks yesterday when I started to notice another scent common in the country: the smell of a decomposing rat that crawled into our wall to die after eating the rat poison I put under the house. There is nothing you can do about the stench except wait it out, unless you want to tear all the sheet rock off of the interior walls.

Usually the problem goes away in a day or two, but this one seemed to be lingering. I asked Stoker if she noticed anything, and she said no. Then the light bulb came on..

When I had the flap, one of the many joys was the rather putrid odor. Since the wound was so close to my nostrils, I got a good whiff.

After I was de-flapped I felt so much better that I didn’t realize that the healing had to continue. What I though was a decomposing rat turned out to be my healing post-flap wounds. I finally realized how similar the two smells are. It isn’t as intense as before but it is still there.

The stitches are supposed to come out February 9. That should put and end to the dead rat smell I’ve been living with since December 28. I’m cleared to start exercising on February 2, which means I have zero cycling miles in my legs instead of the 600+ I usually do to start the year. They say you never forget how to ride a bicycle, but I think my cardio has lost the thread of how to climb anything higher than a freeway overpass.

But un-able to cycle for at least another week.

I just had the un-flapping surgery. It was scheduled for 30 minutes but ended up taking almost an hour. Lots of needles, pressure, cutting, cauterization, and discomfort. A very unpleasant process.

After it was over I asked about exercise and the dermatologist said to wait at least a week. So the entire month of January will be ride free. I’ve written about ‘starting from zero’ before, but after this layoff I’m into negative numbers.

Now all I have are two areas of stitches that don’t need to be bandaged all the time. So life can return to something resembling normal:

Example 1: the flap made it impossible for me to kiss Stoker. Before this a quick buss was the first thing we did upon seeing each other in the morning. Now it has been over a month since I’ve kissed any part of her. Something I intend to rectify later this afternoon.

Example 2: I need bifocals to read and different glasses to see the computer. The flap made wearing glasses in the correct position impossible. Plus the bandage, which partially covered my left eye, impeded my vision and depth perception. I was able to drive but I had to be extra cautious. Speaking of cautious…

Example 3: I now have less to worry about. After the flap failed and came off the first time, I spent the next two weeks in mortal fear that it would happen again. And since December 28 I have been paranoid about getting sick, since I couldn’t blow my nose or sneeze without risking disaster. So I limited my exposure to people the way Dr. Fauci wanted me to during Covid. No lunch out or socializing. Now I can relax about that. Finally I never thought about getting into a car accident when I’m behind the wheel, until I started to visualize what an air bag deployment would do the my flapped visage. Not a pretty thought… and no longer an issue.

So my flap flap is almost over. Supposedly I can start riding in a week and begin the long road back to some cycling fitness. The stitches come out in two weeks and I have been warned that things are going to look ‘lumpy and bumpy’ for a while, as the dermatologist put it. He also said there are things they could do to improve that…I’m pretty sure I’m going to pass.

I had the pedicle flap procedure on December 28. It detached on January 9. Why it detached is anyone’s guess. The doctor is not taking responsibility, so that leaves me. I was as careful as I could be but it just came loose. I could suspect a faulty first flap fusion, but I have no proof.

He reattached it on January 10. More needles, stitches and stinging pain. I heard him tell the nurse to schedule me for surgery on January 19th.

On Tuesday this week the nurse called to check on me. I asked her what would happen on Thursday. She said the doctor would remove the flap and suture the wounds, then two weeks later remove the final stitches and restore me to my normal good looking self. She also told me I could start riding after a day or two. Finally!

Today is the 19th. The nurse had me down for a 30 minute surgery. That is what she heard the doctor order on January 10. That is what I heard on January 10. That is what it said on the medical record. But the doctor claims that is not what he said.

When I saw him today he said there had been a ‘miscommunication.’ Today was just an exam and I need another week of healing.

Confronted by this depressing news, I questioned him about the previous detachment. He said it had never happened before. I told him I was incredibly careful, much more gentle than the nurse when she cleaned me up. He said he couldn’t speak to what I had or had not done. The clear implication was that it was my fault.

Later the nurse told me it had happened before, once. But she said it so quietly and reluctantly that I’m sensing a conspiracy.

So either I am incredibly ham-handed, incredibly unlucky, or something else is going on. Also either the nurse and I both misheard the doctor or are both deaf dolts, or he did in fact schedule a surgery instead of an exam.

So after getting so excited about returning to a kind of normal life, I have to live with this flap for another week. No exercise, no cycling. I have to be cautions about colds so I don’t see people, and I’m even limiting driving since if the air bag deployed it would f… up the flap. Another week of bandages and Vaseline and an itching eye.

I did my last road ride on December 26. I did four trainer sessions in early January. My return is now delayed to January 28 at the earliest. Want to bet? Take the over…

Today Diane and I mark forty years of marriage. On January 13, 1983 we said our nuptials in our rented condo in Des Moines, Iowa. There were 7 guests. We catered our own wedding feast: Korbel Brut for an aperitif, a prime rib roast with all the timings accompanied by BV Private Reserve cabernet sauvignon, and an ice cream wedding cake from Baskin Robbins. After dinner the male guests adjourned to the living room to watch the second half of the Iowa Hawkeys basketball game.

No newly married couple can really be sure about what the future will bring. Remember my blog about the only serious question? If not you have some homework to do.

The only serious question is “Who knows how to make love stay?” We’re not sure, but our forty years together might mean the answer is ‘We do”.

Not everything has been sweetness and light however. Occasionally there was friction, shouting, and anger. Followed by resolution and reconciliation and re-connection, which can be most enjoyable.

I remember one particularly acerbic dispute. Actually I don’t have a clue what we were arguing about, although it was almost certainly my fault. I know we went to bed, in separate rooms, still quite angry. What followed is about as close as Diane has come to going all “Lorena Bobbit” on her husband.

This happened back when I was still farming. It was summer, and I got out of the house early. I think my job that day was to cut dead wood out of cherry trees. One of those jobs Americans won’t do.

About 9 am I see Diane coming towards me, crying her eyes out, We shared a hug and she bawled “Rich, I did a terrible thing! I’m so sorry!”

OMG, what could it be? Reformat my hard drive? Dump pesticide into the well? Take a hacksaw to my Look 586? “I cut off one of your sprinklers” she sobbed, the tears flowing.

She continued “I was so mad that after you went to bed I got your pruning shears and went into the orchard. I wasn’t going to do anything but I put the shears around the pipe and pulled just a little, and it broke! I’m so sorry!”

I tried to keep from laughing. When a sprinkler breaks on top, say because someone trips on it, the fix is easy. On the other hand, if a tractor of backhoe runs over it, the break occurs about 2 feet down and is a wet muddy mess to repair. Kind of like my flap.

She showed me where it was. I brought my sprinkle fixing supplies bucket, and it took all of 5 minutes to make everything right. Just like we both apologized for being stupid the night before, making everything right between us too.

And for forty years, there has been a lot more of everything being ‘right between us’ than otherwise. So happy anniversary Stoker! My flap will have to modify our plans, but we can make adjustments.

Have I mentioned that I can’t ride my bike? In fact any exercise more strenuous that walking Luke the Dog is verboten.

After Monday’s flap fail, I’m not taking any chances with the reattachment. I don’t have to bandage it if I’m inside the house, so I stay inside the house. I don’t think the bandage was the reason the flap detached, but I’m not going to take the chance.

So I’m going a little crazy. But not as crazy as professors at USC.

The University of Southern California’s School of Social Work will no longer use the word “field” because it “may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign,” according to a letter from the department.

My father and his father spent their entire working lives doing ‘field work’ in their fields. And I don’t mean sociology, economics, engineering or mathematics. I mean fields with dirt that grow food. I don’t think they consider the success they had at making a living that way demeaning.

And guess what? After getting a BS in mathematics, working for an ag consulting firm in DC, and a year of grad school I did the same thing! I spent 25 years doing those proverbial ‘jobs Americans won’t do”!

My math degree taught me that there were three elements to algebra. Abstract algebra that is, not the kind taught in high school. They are Group Theory, Field Theory, and Ring Theory. Apparently only one of these is racist. Memo to USC Math Department from the Department of Social Work: change the terminology. WOKE UP!

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On Monday I was concerned enough about the state of my flap to call the doctor’s office The nurse gave me a script for antibiotics over the phone. But I decided if it really was infected it should be looked at and maybe have a culture taken. The doctor said everything was normal and there wasn’t anything to worry about. When I mentioned the continued oozing and the odor and the pain, he said all was normal. They took a sample to culture and in a few days I will know if I have an infection or not, but I’m taking the antibiotics anyway.

That night I removed the bandage covering my flap to clean the area and apply the recommended Vaseline. I was very careful and gentle. I applied alcohol (the rubbing kind, not Stolichnaya) to loosen the tape that holds the non-adhesive pad in place. The tape gave way easily, but the pad kind of stuck to the flap. I gave slight tug and suddenly the connection between flap and nose tip was severed. Time to panic…

There was no pain and no blood and the upper end of the flap was still attached to the bridge of my nose, but the rest of it was swinging freely, similar to another, much more enjoyable appendage somewhere south of the now flapping flap. An emergency call to the doctor’s cell phone produced instructions: bandage it in place and come to the office the next morning, He gave me his cell phone number right after the first surgery back on December 28. Perhaps he knew something about the likelihood of necessary ‘redo’s’ with this procedure that I didn’t.

I went in and he reattached the flap to the tip of my nose. It sounds so easy. It isn’t. Numbing needles which really sting, followed by more stitches. Recall that the December 28 procedure produced uncontrolled bleeding and about 1/3 of it had to be redone that same afternoon. And now this.

The cause of the flapping flap is unclear. Was it my fault for carelessly removing the bandage? The nurse said not so. One MD friend says that if I have an infection it could weaken the stitches. The dermatologist said that was not correct, and that I didn’t have an infection anyway, although the culture is pending. I’m still going to take the pills.

Since I have a new wound with stitches, I have been ordered not to exercise at all until the flap is scheduled to be removed (on purpose this time) on January 19. That will entail another couple of weeks on not riding while those wounds heal. I might get back on my bikes in February.

The last time I rode my bike on the road was December 26. I got cleared to exercise on January 5 and I did 4 indoor cycling rides. That’s going to be all for January.

Oh yes, our 40th anniversary is this Friday. We were planning a getaway with an ocean and a fireplace and Veuve Clicquot. Another failure thanks to the flap.

I saw the dermatologist yesterday, and he informed me that my flap and skull sutures are healing normally. I guess normal means slight oozing and continuing pain. I feel like there is a bee sting under my left eye extending to my forehead.

I also got an updated timetable for this unending ‘repair’. Next Thursday the stitches in my forehead come out. Two weeks from today I have another surgery (Oh Joy!) to cut off the flap. I’m sure that means some new stitches and some more healing time. Then perhaps a month from now the last stitches will come out and I will finally be back to my handsome self. Try to restrain your laughter.

The flap has really changed life on Brumby Road. Example: I always get up before Stoker, usually by a couple of hours. When she finally arises the first thing we do upon seeing each other is to enjoy a quick kiss, to remind us of what is really important. The flap makes that a dubious choice, and even a buss on the head is uncomfortably close to the stitches. I suppose she could kiss my feet, but she doesn’t worship the ground I trod on.

Another change: I am now concerned about things I normally don’t worry about. When I drive somewhere, I imagine what a disaster it would be if I was in a collision and the airbag deployed. My flap would be f….ed. (I like alliteration but not profanity in my blog: you get the idea). Consequently I only drive when necessary, which is mostly to the skin doctor’s office.

Also I really cannot afford to get a cold or flu or Covid or RSV or CVS just now. I can hardly touch my nose let along blow it or sneeze. So I’ve decided to shelter in place here on Brumby Road. No lunch with friends or grocery shopping or socializing until I’m unflappable. At least another two weeks. And I’m doing something I have never done: wearing a mask without being mandated to do so. I had to run an errand at the UPS store yesterday and I wore a mask over my bandaged face (not easy to do). I normally don’t worry but the flap is flipping me out.

One good piece of news from the doctor: he says I can exercise. I asked him specifically if I could perspire and he said I could. Until yesterday I was under orders not to do anything strenuous. Obviously I cannot ride my bike on the road, since I can’t possibly wear a helmet or risk a fall which would f… my flap. But I bought a Kickr trainer and did my first ride on it yesterday. One whole hour!

So that is how things stand on Brumby Road. The Sampson is complaining about being put in bondage on the Kickr, and the Look and Tarmac are looking at me with woeful eyes wondering why they are being neglected. And Stoker and I wave at each other in the morning.