Random Attack of Memory

I was at the kitchen sink this morning getting ready to load dishes into an newly-empty dishwasher when a phrase a friend of mine from college used to say came back to me for some reason.  I haven't thought about him in a very long time, but that phrase was like a spade turning over winter soil for spring planting.  More and more images of him kept coming, more and more of the time we spent together, the comfortable and the uncomfortable, too.

I remembered Snickers ice cream hysteria, a custom-cut wax seal, a Martin guitar, and endless conversations, many of which we managed not to argue in at all.  I remembered a stained glass studio, a high-tech lab, at least four different apartments, restaurants of various quality, some of which no longer exist, some of which will probably be in Starkville after I'm dead and gone, and the smell of his shampoo.  I remembered the ubiquitous brown leather sandals, a trip to the coast that was almost a disaster, long hugs, juvenile fights with plastic swords, and getting so mad at him I couldn't talk.  I remembered that he was always the one who believed in my writing and that without him, I never would have found the courage to push for my first trip out of the country, Costa Rica.

It's strange the things that stick, the things that stay, the shards and pieces that remain after everything else is over.  I spent time with other friends tonight, old friends and new, good friends all, and we had a great time.  Now, though, for some reason, in this still quiet of the night, the fingers of my memory are stirring the fragments of the past around looking at that which is lost and gone.  I don't know what augury it hopes to accomplish with this exercise.  I just hope that it puts all the bits neatly and carefully away when it's done.  Some of the edges are still sharp, after all.

Honey, If I Just Passed Your Mustang in My PT Cruiser, You're Doing Something Wrong

So I'm coming home from town today, and suddenly, there is a pair of Mustangs hovering around and about me.  I didn't think much about them.  Usually, they zip away quickly.  This pair, though, sped up and slowed down in that annoying fashion meaning they were being driven by people who either a) don't understand the concept of cruise control or b) were too young to have been entrusted with a car like that, especially on a Friday night. 

One would blow past me, and then suddenly I'd see brake lights.  What the heck?  Short of a wreck or other road emergency, who does that on the interstate?  Repeatedly?  It wasn't like they looked down, saw they were going 110 and thought, "Whoa...I need to slow it down...."

I bumped my cruise up a bit and passed one (something a four-cylinder car should never have been able to do, a profound violation of the universe) and got away from them for awhile.  Eventually, whatever malfunction they were having resolved itself, and they streamed by again and disappeared.

Electronic Holiday

Lately, I haven't felt much like being on the computer.  I don't know if it's the Spring in the air or what, but I haven't wanted to be on FaceBook or blog here, either.  I've been journaling in my Florentine prize, but for some reason, as I've looked at this laptop, it has felt somehow like a chore to come to it and do the things that I usually enjoy.  I guess periodically everything gets old.  It's just a phase and I'll cycle through it, undoubtedly. 

There are, of course, things that I have found that I can say in the pages of my journal that I cannot say here.  Maybe the freedom of that is a little enchanting right now, too.  I can do both.  Really, it's two different kinds of expression, one that I only do for myself, and one that I am conscious of a reader peering over my shoulder while every word falls from my fingertips.

Some of my other electronic endeavors are on a more permanent hold.  I'll get back to them soon.  I just need a little holiday from it all.  It will feel fresh again when I return.

Art for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

Art for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad on the iTunes App Store

For 99 cents, you can't beat this app with a stick. It's wonderful. I found so many of the works I saw when I was in Italy and favorites I know from other places in this app. You can take the images and turn them into wallpaper, too, and since I change my wallpaper frighteningly often, this is a feature I am really fond of. This one, along with iBird Explorer South and Nightstand, is one of the few paid apps I feel was totally worth it.

Running Down a Dream

(with apologies to Tom Petty)

I dream now, and I dream of the twisting streets of Italy.  I think I'm dreaming of Florence, but it's all blending together with Rome in a pastiche.  One moment, I am standing and looking up at the multicolored sky in the middle of the piazza in front of the Spanish Steps, the sound of flowing water the only sensation.  Then, I am beneath a magnificent dome arching high above me like the cupped hand of God protecting me from all harm.  The next, in the way of dreams, the scene flickers, and I'm on the Ponte Vecchio, scaffolding gone, staring out at a night scene of stars on water, something I never saw save in the eye of my imagination.

Wherever this dreamland my mind is conjuring happens to be, it is not a modern place.  There are no cars, no hoardes of tourists.  The only light, when there is any, is that golden light that bathes the world of dreams, soft, surreal, and seemingly coming from everywhere.  It somehow suits this landscape perfectly, the colors, the stone buildings, the marble fountains. 

Maybe they were made for dreams and dreamers, Rome and Florence.  Maybe that's why poets and artists are born there, move there, sing of them, have built them lovely, lovely in their ancient splendor.  There is something about them them calls out to the soul that loves beauty, even from five thousand miles away, and my helpless dreamer's heart can't help but yearn.

Florentine Men

I think I found the place I need to go to find smart men. I went through the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, and it was only then that I realized how many geniuses came from that one city. Galileo, da Vinci, Machiavelli, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Dante,Vespucci, Fermi, Marconi...the list goes on and on through the ages. How is it possible for that one place to produce so very many geniuses in such diverse fields?

I might also add that the Florentine guys (not the stone ones above) I saw were very easy on the eyes. This does not hurt. Maybe I've just been on the wrong continent all this time. Hmm.....

The Colosseum

So many things a person waits for in life just turn out to be disappointments. The amount of anticipation and gift wrapping our imaginations carefully layer on top of the things we long to do or see frequently somehow diminishes the experience itself. When we reach that place or have a chance to do the thing we've always said we want to do, how can it live up to all those long-held dreams?

I have wanted to see the Colosseum for a long time. It has, in fact, been on my "list" for some time. On my recent trip to Rome, I had a chance to take a tour of it. Despite my many hours thinking of it and all the times it has shown up in film and drawings, it was more impressive that I ever could have imagined.

Just stepping into the cool shadows under the main seats and running my fingertips across the support columns made my breath catch. How many hands over the centuries have trailed fingertips there? What noble and awful things have resonated through those stones, those bricks, and that mortar?

Emerging into the sun again, I saw the vast bowl of the stadium itself open before me. Words fail. I tried to capture it with photographs, but there is no angle perfect enough, no lens ground well enough to show the heart-elevating majesty of the engineering, the beauty of brick and marble made perfect and true even after the ravages of the centuries. Right behind that emotion, though, comes the reminder of what it was built for, and a whole new set of feelings sweeps in. The eye is drawn irresistibly to the great metal cross that crowns the place where the jaded and self-proclaimed divine emperors of Rome once sat to watch the deadly entertainments that sated the lusts of their people, a fitting place for it, like a crucifix used to slay a monster, perhaps.

I clicked off photos from every angle, even a rare one of me standing in front of it. I want to remember always that I was there. For me, the Colosseum is both the best and the worst that we are capable of being. I have seen it with my own eyes now, laid my fingers on its bare and poignant bones, and I think that the sheer power of the place, both the great and the terrible, will always be a part of me.

Dante

I saw Dante's tomb while I was in Florence. He was everywhere there, one of the favored sons. I found this, of course, highly ironic, since they cast him out during his lifetime for being of the wrong political persuasion. Our guide, the lovely Marco, pointed out the fact when we passed the museum made of his "house." They tore it down when they exiled Dante. Later, after they recognized the grandeur of his writing, in a fit of guilt, they rebuilt a replica on the site. Irony abounds. A bust of him made from his death mask adorns a niche on the outside. I wonder if Dante himself would have been able to make that elegant shrug and say with his modern-day son, "Sometimes it happens" as he stood in that cobbled square. I hope so.

Inside a Migraine

I am actively migraining right now, and I'm going to try to write about it.  This may not make much sense.  This attack started this morning, and I finally broke down and took a Maxalt about fourth period.  It put up the necessary glass-block wall, and I observed the world from an uncomfortable distance the rest of the day, constantly pressing through to try to interact with people, feeling that horrible delay with everything as I tried to make my brain function. 

Once 7th period was gone, I left the lights off.  It was bliss.  Light is my enemy. I left the room dark and prayed for silence and stillness, leaving my stereo off and hoping not to have to talk to anyone too much.  I graded papers until it got too dark to see, and then I ventured back out into the world of overhead illumination. 

Immediate tension and pain, like a vise tightening inside my skull.  I wanted to cry.  I think I can feel the nerves inside my eyes leading into my brain.  I stumbled out to my car and started the drive home.  Every time the horrible headlights of another car struck my windshield, every time I drove underneath a streetlight, I yelled and wished for a dark hole I could pull in on top of myself.  Those hellish blue headlights were like someone literally stabbing me through the eye.  Halos like some kind of special effects from a video surrounded every light source.  They would have been beautiful had there not been that pain and dissociation from everything that accompanied them.

When I got home, the pain had dulled down to a softly pulsing drone.  I microwaved the only food that didn't sound like something that would make me throw up, french toast sticks, and had supper.  Everything was funny for some reason, funny and far away.  There is still a distance I can't seem to cross, a divide that separates me from my pets, my house, everything I know I need to be doing right now. 

I'm going to go to bed now.  I hope that sleep will reset my fried circuits.  Otherwise, tomorrow, Tuesday, always a crap day, is going to be a real monster.

A Moment of Clarity

It took seeing them bring her out on a stretcher to make me realize the depths of my own absurdity.  There she was, frail and weak, and it struck me suddenly how tenaciously I'd clung to all those old grudges that ultimately mean nothing in the light of all the good intentions piled up on the other side of the scale.  As they loaded her gently into the back of the Metro amubulance in the darkness of the cold night, I let go of those old frustrations and made my peace with that piece of my past.

I can't count the Sundays we'd been herded into that classroom and told dubious things about Jesus.  As my own understanding of the Bible grew, so, too, did my personal frustration level.  By the time I was a senior, I had stopped going to Sunday School at all.  I would not be disrespectful, and since that was the year my parents told me that I didn't have to go anymore, I took myself out of a situation that caused me an endless form of tearing inside.

Over the years, friction continued to be there.  The basic conflict just never went away.  I kept it there like a piece of sandpaper, rubbing my thumb across it, constantly feeling that grit abraiding me instead of somehow doing what even that simplest of bivalves is capable of, wrapping it in something smooth and creating something of beauty of it.

Why did I do that?  I would have and have done that for most other people I know, even those with far fewer redeemed qualities than she.  I have consciously forced my mind to the positive, sought that which would enable me to see the gold among the pebbles, laughed at myself for my own grumpiness.  Here, though, for years, I have been unwilling to see her as a person and value her accordingly, and for that I am deeply and most humbly sorry.  She has always been only the monster of those long-ago Sundays, and she didn't deserve that blindness, that disdain from me.  Nobody does from anyone. 

It's horrible but necessary to be shown that you aren't what you think you are from time to time, to have that moment when your own blinders about yourself and others are painfully ripped away to force you to look honestly at yourself and your own behaviors.  I will take what I learned in those lightning flashes of the emergency vehicles strobes and try to remedy these faults.  I just wish the revelation had come earlier.

Yeah, So....SCORE....

I went to the Hell of Retail today and did my preshopping for Rome today.  I figured that if I could get the first run of tiddly-piddly shopping out of the way, I'd feel less stress later in the week.  Inevitably, I will have to go again for whatever it is I forgot despite the fact that I made a very careful list, but at least I think I got most of what I'll need and what my pets will need while I'm gone.

While I was in Hell...um, I mean, shopping... I saw an iHome dock alarm clock in their sale aisle.  It was last year's model and the last one they had or something, so they'd shuffled it off to the "sell it fast and cheap" section.  It originally cost $50 and I managed to pick it up for $13.  I think that's a pretty nice shopping score, actually.  Since I have been deeply ambiguous about getting one of these, I was glad to find this one so cheap.

I think it's going to be just what I wanted.  I can charge my iPod on it (it doesn't do my iPhone, but I don't really listen to a lot of music off my iPhone anyway....) and use my iPod as part of my alarm clock aparatus now.  I can also listen to music in bed without having to hook the iPod up to some elaborate and difficult clock radio system not made for that .  Of course, being the Queen of Geeks, my favorite part is that now I can run iLava all the time and it won't run down the battery....  What can I tell you?  It's the little things that get me through these troubled times.....

Another thing I love about it is that I can just cut the lights on it OFF.  I hate light in the room while I'm trying to sleep.  I'm incredibly photosensitive.  Part of it has to do with my being a migraineur, I think.  If there's a lot of light coming into a room, even from a really bright alarm clock or a night light, I have to figure out some way to block it off.  I don't do the whole eye mask thing because it feels weird, but whoever designed this was thoughtful.  The clock will light up if you want it to, stay on like a night light if you like, or cut off if you want darkness.  Thank you, world of choice. 

Anyway, I'm looking forward to having music to doze off to now.  I haven't had that for a long time.  I used to love to use the sleep function on my old clock radio before I replaced it with my MoonBeam clock.  Now that I'm back to something that does music again, I guess I'll have to made a very short playlist of something dreamy.  I'm thinking that my usual listening fare isn't going to give me peaceful, fluffy-cloud dreams, somehow...

The Heart of Blue

The sky today was the most incredible shade of blue.  Just driving was a pleasure if I could look up into all that azure glory.  I wished for wings or for some improbable fantasy moment where my car left the road and suddenly floated upward.  I felt like I could happily drown in it.  I felt like I could reach up and grab a corner, could wrap it around myself like a warm blanket and sleep safely, suspended in that cloudless sky like some unfathomable resting place above everything.  Every word I know for blue flickered through my mind and felt like silken ribbons trailing through my fingers; there were shades that were cerulean, indigo, sky, true....  I feel moved to composition by that blueness, and maybe I'll post what I produce later if anything comes of it.  In the meantime, the sky now is royal darkening to navy, patiently waiting for the pearl stickpin of the full moon to be laid gently upon it.  What a lovely set of shades remains to be enjoyed.  Even though the sun is down, the heart of blue remains.

Freedom of Speech Quote

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
~ Soren Kierkegaard

Disconnection

Just when I think that everything that can happen has, another bomb drops, another knock at the door happens, another tremor shakes the foundations.  I'm past the point of being able to respond appropriately, I think.  I feel a constant hum of it, a physical sensation, and everything else becomes a touch, too, unpleasantly so, every word, every action around me, as stress makes me too sensitive to everything. 

I drove home this afternoon with no sense of being in this world at all.  I'm sure there was music on the radio, and I'm sure that is was, as usual, up loud.  I'm sure that there were other cars on the road and that I drove my accustomed speed, but the only thing about it I remember was being amused that the song "Under Pressure" by Bowie was on as I stopped at a light and that I noticed it was starting to get dark.  I couldn't tell you with any accuracy if that's because it was late or because rain was threatening. 

Stability needs to return.  Until it does, I guess I'll huddle here and try to heal myself in this brief moment of respite.

Hughes

I came home with a need to read Langston Hughes tonight.  I grabbed my massive Collected Poems and started flipping, slowly savoring, and revisited some of my favorites, wandered over some less familiar territory.  Sometimes I just need Hughes.  I don't know what it is about his voice that speaks to certain moods of mine.  I love McKay, too, and Cullen is wonderful in his way, but when I sit down to read for the joy of the words and the way they flow across the page in beautiful drifts, Hughes is hard to beat. 

His longer poems are wonderful, full of power, but tonight, it's not those weighty works that are calling me.  I'm flipping through and reading the little ones, the brief and shimmering bits.  He was a master of packing much into little, and I think it's nice, sometimes, just to look at those poems and appreciate them.  

I'm going to share a few that caught my eye tonight.  They are in no particular order.  I hope they please you as they did me.

Star Seeker

I have been a seeker
Seeking a flaming star,
And a flame white star
Has burned my hands
Even from afar.

Walking in a dream-dead world
Circled by iron bars,
I sought a singing star's
Wild beauty.
Now behold my scars.

Heaven

Heaven is
The place where
Happiness is
Everywhere.

Little Lyric (Of Great Importance)

I wish the rent
Was heaven sent.

and one last one:

History

The past has been a mint
Of blood and sorrow.
That must not be
True of tomorrow.

Flight of the Muse

It's February.  The local contest is here.  I have nothing.  I'm empty.  AAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHHH.....

There's a piece I wrote earlier this year, and I think it's strong, but it's not ready yet.  It needs to tumble around in that rock polisher between my ears for awhile yet before I send it anywhere.

I wrote something about New Orleans, too, after I came back from my recent sojourn there, but it's a little on the dark side, a little eerie, and it's the most recent thing I have produced.  I need to work on it more than any of the others.  I'm going back to NOLA soon, too, and I want to see if I still feel the same about the poem and the city after this second trip there.  Travel always makes me write, and I was in such a whirl during that first trip that there wasn't any time to do more than get fleeting impressions.

There's a piece I started,felt strongly about, and shelved called "For the Girls" that was inspired by watching the interaction between my students, watching how mean they can be to each other sometimes when one of them doesn't quite fit the expected pattern or is a little different.  It, too, is too rough to send. It needs pruning, like a wild-growth shrub that sprang up too fast.  I wrote three pages worth of that one before I put it away for later.

I guess it's not true then, to say that I have nothing.  I guess it's more a problem that everything I have is weak and unfinished, like a string of houses the builder walked away from, windows gaping open, doors unhung.  I don't know whether or not to try to get something together or just to skip it this year.  I need my muse to descend and slap me around some so I can get something concretely polished.  Maybe a miracle will happen here in the next few days. 

The "Real" Housewives

Bravo has a lot of reality TV these days.  They have a whole string of shows that are variations on a theme, the Real Housewives series.  I know you've probably seen the commercials if you're here in the States.  They go to Orange County, New York, and Atlanta and follow a group of ultra-rich women around as they basically ham it up and fight with one another.  What the hell kind of entertainment is this? 

Granted, okay, I've never seen more than about five minutes of any of these, and that was only because I was in the kitchen or the middle of something I couldn't turn loose of to get to the remote after a show I do watch ended.  What little of them I have seen has consisted of catfights, romantic melodrama, excessive spending, and dubious parenting.  Again, I ask, why is this entertainment?

It pains me to watch someone wreck their lives or the lives of others when its fictional.  How much worse is it when it's real?  These shows have been on for several years now, so we've been privy to all sorts of moments and momentous decisions that probably are absolutely none of our business at all.  Why?

To me, these shows are a part of a larger trend in culture to make the private public.  I don't believe that every single thing in a person's life is the public property of the whole world.  There seems to be a growing Brave New World mentality that "everybody belongs to everyone else."  I don't care for that very much.  Maybe it's because I've read that book so often and I know how it turns out.  Maybe it's because I am, at heart, such an intensely private person myself. 

"But you write a blog," you say.  "You're putting your life out there for others to view."  Yeah.  You're right.  I do.  And some of the stuff I share here is very personal indeed.  However, that being said, I do not have a camera following me around every day (at least not with my knowledge...otherwise, greetings Big Brother, and that's the end of my dystopian novel allusions, I swear....) watching me fall on my face and screw up for the amusement of the whole world.  What you see here is what I want you to see.  Think of me as a magician on the stage, the juggling fool and not the trainwreck on the news.  To me there is a difference.

Maybe that's the way the Housewives think of their shows, too.  Maybe once those cameras stop rolling, they take off their cat claws, put away their damp hankies, kick off their heels, and just are.  Maybe, after all of it, there is not much reality to it at all. I guess I'll never know.  I wish we could find a way to be more fascinated by things other than the spectacle presented.   

Recycling the Barn

I made something for the first time today in a long time.  I haven't done anything useful with my hands in ages. I've been thinking though, about doing something with one of my favorite quotes by Emerson for some time now, and cruising around on Etsy has been inspirational.  I wanted to have the quote up in my room, but I didn't just want to print it off and frame it.   I wanted an actual piece of something with it on it.  Today, I decided I would see about making something to fulfill that desire.

I started with a piece of old oak barnboard from the collapsed structure on the north side of my property.  I poked around out there, and even though most of the siding was stripped off it two years ago before it fell down to help make the Red Field cabin, I was able to find an interestingly-shaped piece and extract it from the pile.  I took my grandfather's hand sander and went after it to clean it up a bit after I got all the old nails out.  When I got the roughness and dirt off, a beautiful pattern of graining appeared where the board had been planed.  I don't know enough about such things to know if these are hand-planing marks or the marks of one of the old sawmills that ran around here, but it's not the sort of thing you see on modern wood.  When I put the final coats of sealer on it and bring out the detail in the wood, it's going to be gorgeous.

I sat down in the floor with my calligraphy lettering book and some paintbrushes and lettered  in my quote.  That took me about an hour and a half to do.  Trying to do some of that fancy lettering with a paint brush on a rough board surface might not have been the best of all choices, but I think it came out okay.  I should have put the paint in a squeeze bottle and done it that way.  It would have given me a "pen nib" to work with instead of the spreadable brush fibers.  Oh well.....

When I was done lettering, I looked at the piece and it was missing something.  I thought about the quote, and I knew I'd like to add some symbol of knowledge, but I knew that I wanted whatever I added to be something from the barn, something in keeping with the style of the board.  It came to me quickly to cut something out of the tin from the roof.  I've seen lots of things in catalogs and at craft shows where people have taken old license plates and so forth and done projects, so I decided why not try to do something with that roofing tin?  I went and borrowed a pair of tin snips from my father and came back with the plan to cut out an owl for my piece.

I'm glad I formulated the world's simplest owl pattern.  Good LORD.  Scissors and paper, it ain't.  There has to be an easier way to cut tin.  Otherwise, how do all these craftspeople do it?  I got the owl done, but it took me at least an hour to get it there.  Once I was satisfied with the shape, I hand shaped it to give it a little dimension and started applying some color other than that already present from the rust.

 The owl is drying now.  Once all the paint has had a chance to cure, I'll assemble it and do any last minute touchups or corrections.  Then I'll seal the whole thing.  I think it's going to look pretty good considering this is my first project of this kind ever.  I like the look of the owl, especially.  I may try to do more to recycle pieces out of the old barn.  I like the idea of giving things from it new life.  It feels good.

The Blue Eagle Returns

After a frustrating afternoon of trying to install my doc cam and not being able to do it (why, oh why won't that USB connection error stop???), I came home expecting a very lackluster evening.  There was a minor moment of excitement and curiosity due to a large and unusual piece of telephone company equipment parked in my pasture.  They're laying new phone line here, and if you've never seen the machine they use to do that, it's really sort of fascinating.  I had no idea it kind of  injects the line into the ground.  They're working now, in fact.  I think I may go out and watch them in awhile.  How often does that happen, after all?

I opened my mailbox once that minor mystery was resolved and gathered what was there.  In it was a small, flat, red, white, and blue USPS mailer envelope.  I was instantly happy.  There was only one thing that could be that size:  my passport.  I had applied for my renewal the last week of January, and just that act had been refreshing to my soul.  I hadn't realized how much I missed just knowing it was sitting there, safely waiting for me to grab it and head off somewhere. 

My passport had expired several years ago, but I hadn't gotten it renewed because I hadn't had an immediate travel need for it.  I should have realized that just having it there was a type of need.  There is a calmness that comes from knowing that if a trip comes up, I can go.  If I decide at some point for some reason to go abroad, the biggest legal hurdle, that official document, is already secured.

It frees up my daydreaming, and apparently something in my subconscious mind as well because I dreamed of moving away last night.  The place I moved to was a mixture of Japan and Ireland, all mountains, sea, and verdant everywhere I looked.  I don't know exactly what place my brain was cooking up, but it was gorgeous and full of peace and wonder.  Maybe having the passport will be a ticket back to the land of dreaming if nothing else.

The Things That Thrill Me

So apparently I'm getting a doc cam soon at school.  Freakin' YES.  I can't wait to have that thing set up on my desk and running.  I've been wanting one for years, and I've really been craving one since I saw a teacher at the school we visited in NOLA using hers with her AP classes.  There are so many applications for one in English that it practically boggles the mind.  I have so many things that I like to show students that I can just pop under the doc cam now and make huge.  Students can put samples of their own work up for discussion.  I can share my annotations on texts when we are doing discussion.  I guess, if things get really desperate, we can make hand puppets under it, too....

Tech stuff thrills me.  All the way down to my geekish socks and Chucks.  I know the toys are bells and whistles and that none of them are necessary for good teaching, but man oh man, they make the job so much easier, so much more appealing.  They also save me time and help me innovate.  Every time I get a new tool or have a new service placed at my disposal, my little brain starts turning, and I start coming up with new projects, new ways to approach my curriculum, new angles in to that knowledge.  It stays fresh for me and hopefully it's enjoyable and challenging for the students, too. 

We have some new things headed our way soon, and I have just been to a tech conference, so all I need now is a little time to scheme...er...plan.  That's what I meant to say.  Plan.  Right.  Plan.