I made way too many chicken nuggets tonight. Two bags of anything is pretty much standard at our house, or it was. Included was some rice to go with it and for some reason multiple kids complimented my broccoli. Coconut oil and salt, I said, that’s all I had done to it. That is the thing next time I’ll make multiple bags of. I would’ve used butter but we didn’t have any in the fridge. Our grocery shopping system is still adjusting with the new fall schedules.

We talked to Ethan on the phone for over an hour tonight, almost an hour and a half. Last night there was a volleyball game, and I was happy. Tonight was more open on all of our parts. Our talking has dwindled more over the past week or so, more like the past two weeks. We’ve texted something almost ever day. This last high school track meet he had texted me asking if I was there and I didn’t even see it until almost an hour later when the meet was already over.

I texted back right away with all the pictures I’d taken. I am not usually a huge meet picture taker, but I am taking more now. There was a part of me that had hoped he would go to UIS and live at home and get a job and coach cross country especially for the freshman boys. He’d run with them before during the junior high practices. They still keep in touch now through their own group chat on Discord. This past Tuesday out at Seward they had to run 20 400’s.

I saw something rather amusing on social media this evening. My sister was on there asking, “Am I the only one that gets sad about all the things I’ll never be able to learn because the human lifespan (and my attention span) isn’t long enough?” Of course I had to call her right away. She was eating supper, and said in my voice I sounded down. I told her I was fine I was just kind of blah and I’d read her post. I told her I’d been going through pretty much the same thing.

The attention span thing isn’t something I’d thought of. But the rest of it, yes. We laughed about these painful ways. And I remembered that I am not the only one of my brothers and sisters who has this. She couldn’t talk long, they were eating their supper. It was almost time for ours too. We’d planned to call after seven but he was still eating by the time we were done. We asked and then we listened, new spikes, more socks, change and times, and I was happy.

I’ve been having these weird acute pains where I start crying because I’m not actually going to be an author. My husband found me this morning holding my pencil and journal, “I’m just needing to let some things go,” I said, but later I was able to give him more specific words. “But Tolkein”, he said, “he was older…” and I am grateful for the comfort but am unable to take it.

“I need to make room for the things in my life”, I continued, by now I was just working on one of our 2-3 page process summaries where we have to talk about the experience of class group therapy from our perspective. I’m actually saying these things to people, at least I am to the teacher. A musician. A dancer. The list keeps going on. These are all things that I have wanted to be.

It sounds really dumb. Of all the problems in the world this is definitely not one of them. I really do think about plenty of other things besides the things that I write here. A lot more. This doesn’t happen all the time, nowhere near all the time. But for whatever reason this is the place that gets the dance of my circles. The writing thing is different and the only one that I cry about.

One time I was in a Facebook group called Hooters for Husbands. I did not pick the name. It was an offshoot of a mom’s group I was in called Night Hooters. It’d been started by a group of moms who were up feeding their babies in the night and wanted some comradery. I liked it. It was a place of support for mothers with young children.

People will ask almost anything in Facebook groups. Several times the topic had turned to post-partum sex or related things having to do with marriage. So just as they had started a fitness group, a fashion group, a small business group, and surely a few others, they started a group for marital sex questions. It was me and two other women who become the moderators. I didn’t volunteer, the founder asked me if I’d do it.

One of the first posts there quickly became problematic. It turned into the women more or less bragging about where the craziest place they had ever had sex was. What made this group occasionally awkward at times was that you knew some of the people. These were people who sort of became your friends and were people in the circle of people you got to know online.

So then we had to course correct. One of the other moderators made a post about how this isn’t a comparison game. Some of the women were feeling self-conscious that they had never had sex on the hood of a car or on their dining room tables or wherever. I found the stories entertaining and I remember being taken aback by the sexual natures of women in general. It can be an interesting topic but also an incredibly sensitive and painful one.

I recently started reading Shannon Bonne’s new memoir The Woman They Wanted. So far I have found it pretty fascinating. This last chapter I read she is talking about the process of what felt like an audition to be the official girlfriend of Josh Harris, who at that time was becoming the poster child for the increasingly popular way of Christian (non) dating and courtship.

She wasn’t a virgin. Her parents were divorced. She wasn’t raised in a Christian home. It’s painful to hear her write all of this. I can remember when Josh’s second book came out, Boy Meets Girl. I was surprised that she was the one he picked. He told a little bit about her story. She says she didn’t feel shame about sex at first. She had thought sex was just a regular part of growing up.

I was thinking earlier today about Jesus when he talks about a man looking at a woman lustfully. Like, he doesn’t say anything about women there, that is, it made me wonder, do women in the same way ever look at a man lustfully? The Christian women’s books likened lusting after a man more in the way of wanting a man who wasn’t yours and comparing your husband’s perceived faults with another man’s perceived strengths.

I don’t know why I’m saying this.

People have lived such different lives.

September beach days and skies are the best. This afternoon I took a nap, and when I woke up I called my husband to see where he was and what he was doing. He was over at the CGC. There was a Lutheran Laymen’s League meeting happening over there and they’d asked him if he’d come and give a devotion. As soon as he said that I remembered. He’d told me about the LLL group already.

The kids were watching Finding Nemo or some other movie that looked like it. I asked if they wanted to go down to the beach. We’re in those days now where the weather starts to turn and the beach days slip away before you realized they were over. Dad came down when his devotion was over. There was a group of younger, teenage girls down there swimming. You get used to sharing.

They left after about twenty minutes of us being there. The water was chilly but felt good. Everyone relaxed and did they’re own beach thing. These are what Saturdays are supposed to be like, or Sundays, whatever day you want to make it, but these times when there is nothing else going on except being together or relaxing in nature and filling our cups in the ways that bring peace and rest.

My Dad took these first two pictures last September. My mom had texted while I was working on homework and asked if it’d be okay if she and dad came up and baptized each other in the lake. I said that should be fine, just to let me know when they were coming. They came on a Thursday.

I don’t remember what now, but there had been more going on to where I didn’t feel comfortable walking down and back to the beach, so we drove. When we got to the bottom of the road they parked by the shed. It was me and my parents. They started talking about the baptizing and my mom shared her reasons for wanting to be baptized. She’d been baptized before on a mission trip in South America somewhere. But for various reasons wanted to be rebaptized.

My dad, after hearing this, said that maybe it should just be her that got baptized. He wasn’t feeling the same need to do it again, but was still happy to do it for her if that’s what she wanted. So my mom gave her testimony while dad sat in the drivers seat and I sat in the back seat of the truck and listened.

Then we went over to the water and they both got in. Dad baptized Mom and it was awkward because you’re not as agile to lean backwards once you get into your upper decades. He said the only other person he’s baptized was Brandon. We drove back up in the truck and they stayed at the house for a little while longer. They played me a song, I don’t remember the name of it. They hooked it up to their speaker and we listened.

Dad started sharing about his life then, how he’d become a Christian during his young adult years. He’s told these stories before but I think it helps him to tell them and I do like to hear them.

After that they went back home. They passed Josh on the road who was coming home from the high school and picking up the boys. When they left I sat on the couch in awe of the ins and outs and fleeting nature of our days. I’d already asked about the baptizing thing a while back when they had asked another time but it didn’t end up working out to come. I’d almost forgotten all about it until today, when I was locking up the beach shed.

“I think we need to get you some new shorts”, he said to me this morning while reading from the table. I was up in the kitchen in that half hour between waking up the boys and leaving to take them to school. I get dressed, or try to eat, or ask if everyone else has eaten or what they’ve put in their lunch or if they found enough to make their lunch or if anyone needs anything.

It sounds more hectic than it is. But I answered him something along the lines of, “Well, if you want to take me to the store to find some shorts, that’d be great.” I don’t like clothes shopping. I’ve already been out a few times this summer and I did already look for new shorts. I’m down to one pair, the one I’ve been wearing for the past three years, not counting the other pair I wear to the beach.

They are pretty beat up. They are fraying on the inseam and the once light aqua color has faded to what now looks more like white. They’ve had period stains including ones I gave up on and they are so worn and stretched out that they don’t even fit. I have to pull them up constantly, or at least wear a shirt long enough to cover the areas where everything droops off the waist.

Besides the pulling them up part they’re comfortable. It’s hard for me to get rid of these kinds of clothes, the ones I’ve worn and liked and have become like a layer of skin to my frame because of how much I’ve worn them. But I guess he was serious because later this morning he said something about going over to Scheels to get shorts before we picked up the boys. I would’ve never thought to go there.

Nor would I have taken time out of my day today to do it, but, if he was going to come, and since it really would be nice to have more than just that one pair of shorts, I went. Shorts are not cheap there, not even on the clearance racks where the picked over sizes of shorts are these days. Out of the pile I tried on I found three that fit. They weren’t perfect, but since he’d brought me…

Actually they were alright. I put them back on and tried to roll up the bottoms. That looked better. Something about the straight leg looked too boxy, and I wasn’t going to spend that much with my husband on anything that would leave me feeling less than at least average. The lights in these fitting rooms get you every time. It’s like anything that ever used to be smooth catches the bright fluorescent ray.

So then while I was there I went ahead and looked at the shoes. I’ve been wearing these strappy open sandals to my practicum site. The dress code there is business casual, and no one’s every said anything about my shoes, but I feel like I would look more the part in closed shoes, and more comfortable, and as the weather starts to get cooler it would be more fitting. I found some light pink ones.

Which then needed a few pairs of no show socks. I have the socks I kept from my oldest sons dresser, but those are too thick for those kinds of shoes. The other socks I do have are not the no show kind. “We can just go to Walmart”, I said, seeing the prices. But we found some that were not as expensive. After spending almost $300 we went to the uniform store to buy a school shirt for each of the younger boys.

We had time after that to walk in the park. “I still can’t figure out where I am in this place”, I said, or something like it. MacArthur is that way, and Chatham road that way. Before too long we were back in the car, and the boys were at the office door eager and waiting. I think they liked their shirts. They didn’t have much selection or color to choose from, but something new sometimes is nice to have.

This feels hard to write. Yesterday was Josh’s birthday and everyone was free in the evening to celebrate. I’d bought food to make his requested dinner and most of the stuff to make one of his favorite desserts. He’d taken the boys to visit his dad and I’d gone after resting and falling asleep. I made the first part of the dessert and started on the meal and a short while after my daughter came home I said, “Elianna, I am needing some help.”

“Yeah, I know”, she said, “I could tell the minute I walked in the door”. She was joking, I was joking, and I did the whole thing when I act proud of myself for doing something basic like making a birthday éclair crust. But I really did need help and was serious about that part, and she was serious about helping me. She finished the dessert after going down to camp and finding cream cheese in the main camp fridge. The boys set the table and we had a nice supper.

I guess Hobbits for their birthdays buy other people presents. Anyone who comes to their party gets a gift, so that’s what he’d planned to do for each person. We called Ethan over Facetime and were all outside on the picnic table with the last of the sun giving light to our gathering. We sang Happy Birthday and the “God’s blessings to you” verse like we have done for a long time now whenever it is somebody’s birthday.

After the singing I took the phone and we dispersed. I wanted to catch up on the latest college news since I’d heard last. My brain will fill in its own stories if I don’t have the facts, so I just plain out asked, is it going okay? Are you liking it there? He said it was alright, not the shrugging kind of alright, but the assuring yes, college is good kind. Sometimes you can read a person and other times it’s like I am crawling around in the dark waiting for somebody to give some kind of thought direction.

The last two posts I’ve written have got me triggered for some reason. It’s like this is all starting to get and feel a little bit too real. It’s one thing to go to school. It’s another to have to show up at a place where I am scheduled to be there and expected to be there. It’s one thing to talk about constellations and act all cutesy about liking the stars and yeah that’s one of my interests and a thing that makes me myself.

But it’s another thing to show up here and not be able to explain basic orbits after all of these years. It’s one thing to talk about being a student and writing papers but to never show a single one because they aren’t “good enough” in my eyes to seen by smarter people. But even if they were, average enough, would I show them? And this is what’s got me. This realization that the longer time goes, the more I can’t hide this, the more I am realizing who I am not.

I don’t know if it’s the hospital, or the being at my practicum site with these strangers, or my son going away, or my husband’s father facing down a terminal illness. But it’s like all of a sudden I am seeing who I wasn’t, who maybe I could have been but chose not to. And then there are things that you wanted to be but couldn’t be. Either that was not your gifting, or the genes you were dealt, or the choices you made for yourself, or God’s plan for your life.

And so no, I’m not going to be an Olympic gymnast. I’m not going to join the traveling circus as a trapeze artist or a clown. I am not going to be a journalist, or an orthopedic surgeon, or a scientist, and yes while I’ve kept my license up I’m not even really a nurse anymore. I don’t have almost decades of experience under my belt. I’m not the charge nurse of a unit or training new grads or working part-time at the local college as a clinical instructor.

The obsession with being great, I don’t know where it comes from. The arrogance, the hubris, I didn’t ask for these things and no one made me this way. My sisters don’t have this, my brothers don’t have it. It felt brave back then, defiant and large. To say no to “the world” and embrace my life as a wife and a mother. It was enough, and it’s all I wanted. But there were these parts you left along the way, that you had to leave behind, that you had to let go of.

The clouds are still out but this picture was taken at some point recently. I was out for a walk trying to get some steps after sitting. The sitting is good because it gives me a chance to not have to be physically active. But then you still have to walk and be out, so you need to have both in order to stay more balanced.

That’s another thing I like about the yoga. I still can hardly stand saying (typing) the word, but the way I describe it is like with exercise we talk about the importance of moving our bodies. Our bodies need movement to keep our lymphatic fluid flowing, our muscles active, our joints from becoming too rusty and stiff.

I had heard before about intentional movement. What I had not heard before was anything about intentional stilling. There is benefit to having your body stop in way that does not involve being unconscious in bed or watching tv or some other passive bodily state where our mind is not also tuned into the moment.

It’s where the mind and the body catch back up with themselves and are given the chance to come back together. If I could lead my own sessions I would do it where everyone had their own space on a mat. I would also want to have men in class. In yoga classes when I used to go you hardly ever saw men there.

It was harder for them. Women would be holding the positions just fine but the one man in the room would be sweating buckets and shaking trying to hold himself up in the twists. These weren’t men who were out of shape. It might have been different if it were men who’d been practicing yoga for longer.

I would want to be able to touch people. There is debate whether or not touch is a good thing or a bad thing. Some say touch is good because it allows for corrective experiences in a safe environment for those who have had bad experiences with physical touch, such as assault or other forms of abuse.

One reason you would touch a person would be to adjust a position. If someone’s hips were sagging or someone’s arms were slightly out of alignment, you would gently adjust the person’s body or body part. The anti-touch people say it is actually more healing for people to not have the pressure of having to do it “right”.

I would not use gloves like I did, I think, too much as a nurse. I wouldn’t necessarily need to correct their positions but would want any of the energies between us to flow. You can touch a person and energy passes from you to them and from them to you. If you hold it long enough, in theory, things become balanced.

It’s cloudier outside tonight which means it won’t be a good night to look at the stars. Overhead I missed Cancer (the crab), Leo (the lion), and Virgo, the apparently gorgeous mermaid of the sky but with legs. That is at least what she looks like to me. Each constellation of the zodiac has a timeframe in which the sun passes through it. So for example, the sun passes through Virgo between August 23-September 22 (give or take). You know what month it is based on what constellation the sun is passing through at the time.

I’m trying to wrap my mind around exactly how this works. When you go outside and look up at night, over time it looks as though it is the sky that is moving. But it is actually the earth that is traveling and making its way around the sun. As the earth moves it passes by clusters of stars. The stars do not stay in the same place hour by hour because as the earth is traveling in its orbit it also is spinning, causing the stars to move past us in the night. I am going to need to think about it more in order to be able to better explain it.

Well anyway, Cancer is the constellation between Gemini (the twins) and Leo. I was never able to see it with my naked eye. I could see the open space where it was supposed to be, and where my SkyView app told me it was, but I could not see it. Even when it was darker and my eyes had adjusted to the night. So I am figuring that my eyesight has changed just enough that I am no longer able to physically see that star group. This was back in the days of Taurus who I can still see in my head now where he is and how he moved.

Today was a regular day. Yesterday I didn’t end needing to be early to school. For labor day they canceled our before class group meetings. That allowed me to catch up with the rest of the family who were attending the junior high track meet in town. These meets are so much more chill than the others. I left when my son was done running and met one of the girls who is part of the group paper we’re supposed to be writing together.

I like this class better than the Family Systems class. For that one we had to role play different family members from 9-10PM. It was okay but having to perform and be somebody else got kind of old. Not in a bad way, but more in a this isn’t exactly fun way. For this class we’re done by 8:15, we get a 15 minute break, and then from 8:30-10 the teacher leads an actual group therapy session where all we have to do is show up as ourselves.

We’re not supposed to talk about anything we talk about unless it’s sharing about ourselves. I have to say, that in this last intensive class and then this one, I’ve been starting to get annoyed with all the therapy talk. Even as someone who likes to reflect and be introspective, it just starts to sound like too much navel-gazing going on. Something the teachers always say is “process over content”. You need more than just the information.

One of the boys and I went and visited my father-in-law today. We arrived right about the time they were wheeling him out for physical therapy. He asked if it was alright if we came along with him, so that was nice. They have a big open therapy space where they do rehab with people. It was my mother-in-law, myself, and my son all watching as he did his session. An example of a process question would be, “What was that like for you to sit in on that session?”

His rehab place is in a hospital which feels like home to me. I actually love the hospital environment and about 95% of the time find hospitals to be exhilarating. I had not seen him since we were in the ER together, after we’d spent part of the day in radiation and then the evening needing to go down through the ER to get admitted. It was actually thrilling to be there, even though I hate ER’s. You learn your nursing skills fast there. I would rather not need any.

I was happy to see him and glad he was closer. I don’t like any of this that is going on with him physically. I feel lately like I need to cry but do not always do so. On our way off the floor the elevator opened and Josh and one of the boys was there with him. I hadn’t known he was coming, so it was again a fun surprise to see them in route. When I was home I put some leftover spaghetti in the oven, and at the table dried my eyes for the running one who wasn’t there.

My hands want a baby. Someone I can pick up and hold close to my chest where I know they are safe and still in my presence. And there we both can rest from our labors. I stop. He quiets. In unison we breathe.

Babies breathe faster, but my own breath cares not. If his is there I can sleep, and I will wake to check his breath, to reach my hand for his body where it rises and falls. And I will kiss him every day, every night.

Every day. His face was made for my kiss and dad kisses him too. With all of them he kisses through all the years they were pick-up-able. Every time you picked them up, and put them down, and kissed their face.

Josh took the boys out to the farm this afternoon. On the way there he stopped by his mom and dad’s to pick up the mail and do some more measuring. The hope is for his dad to get transferred back to Springfield tomorrow. They are not anticipating him gaining back the use of his leg. The other one can be used but also is weak. They are hopeful that he will be able to transfer himself around enough to come home.

My mother-in-law’s brothers are also farmers. They have made arrangements to harvest my father-in-law’s crop mid-September. They think that with help they can get it done in a day. The roof is finished on the new house now and the front door is also one of the newest additions. My daughter had practice this morning and then spent some time with a friend in the afternoon. I spent the day printing and reading articles.

I wasn’t exhausted after our trip but I have spent the time resting since being home. When Josh came home from the chicken fry sometime late-afternoon he laid down next to me and we both fell asleep. When we woke up the boys were moving the television downstairs into the basement where there were a couple of counselors and a few other high school friends. They were going to play Jackbox on their phones and devices.

I wanted to text Ethan and tell him and did. I wasn’t trying to make him sad, or transfer my missing him onto to him but I wished so much he was there then. They ended up making it so he could play and they played downstairs until it was time for the evening game outside. Uncle Glenn stopped by and visited with us in the living room for a while. Whenever he’s in town he stays overnight here. Not at the house but in one of the camp buildings.

When my husband was in college his parents called every Sunday. They did that for the first several years of our marriage and I can’t remember when it stopped. I think it was once he officially became a pastor and we were living only two and a half hours away. I don’t remember it ever being an issue, and I have not had those kind of in-laws problems you hear about. If anything I wish they had been more nosy not less.

But still they have been there for us in great ways. We haven’t really established a set thing with Ethan where we call at a specific time. Earlier before the Jackbox playing I’d told him we could call when Dad was back. At the time he didn’t have any plans but by the time I checked back in later on he was doing something with some of the cross country teammates. That is of course more of what I wanted to hear, that there were others.

I still am not completely convinced that the running thing is the path he’s supposed to take. I don’t think I really gave it much thought, I was mostly just glad that we’d gained some direction and sight with a college plan. It’s hard because you don’t want to push your kids into something that isn’t so much their idea but more yours. You also want to support their endeavors but to do so in a way that still gives them freedom to change.

All in all I am glad to have kept in touch with him. The thought now of me having held back my thoughts, or just general interest in what he is doing, all for the sake of meeting some imaginary standard or fear-based interpretation of how I am supposed to be existing in life feels so wrong when I think about it now. We are not meant to hold back who God has made us to be. As parents we shepherd our kids through transitions.

One of the boys had a meet in South Dakota over the weekend. I left early Friday morning and drove up to South Beloit to pick up my sister and niece. She’s homeschooling one of her daughters this year and the other three are back in regular school. I tried to get some of the other boys to come with me but they wanted to stay here at camp for the chicken fry.

The drive through Wisconsin is always nice. There are pine trees and hills and a stretch where you spend a longer time by a river. Somewhere once we’d been in Minnesota my sister asked about going to see my brother in northern Iowa. We called him to see what he was doing on Saturday. He was actually taking a trip to Illinois.

She’d wanted to go through Forest City and see my brother and sister-in-law’s new house. While we were there we could stop by the other places including the A&W and Brandon’s grave. I told her I was fine with that, but when my brother wasn’t going to be there on Saturday she thought maybe we could stop by on the way to Sioux Falls.

I said that wasn’t going to work because there wouldn’t be enough time. Our GPS had us arriving there around 7. That was later than I originally wanted to be getting there but I didn’t end up leaving at 5 like I planned. I told her it was going to take some time to park and actually find the team and that the meet itself would go by fast.

She thought we should get a hotel ahead of time and I didn’t want to do that. When she asked me why I said it was because I had commitment issues, and if plans changed then I didn’t want to be pegged into a hotel. We found a Super 8 nearby but when we went in side they said they were full. We got back on the highway and could see the meet from the road.

It was absolutely enormous. There were tents everywhere and people everywhere. The website said they have over 5,000 participants every year where they have a JV high school race for boys and girls, then varsity high school for boys and girls, then college women, then the college men ran at 9:10PM. They called the it Augustana Twilight Invitational.

She started looking up hotels online. There was one that said it had one room left. We pulled into that one and I went inside and asked for a room. They said they had a single queen bed suite. I said that would be perfect and it was. My sister and I shared the queen bed and my niece took the pull-out sofa. It was a very nice room.

We freshened up and got established and then it was time to go to the meet. By the time we were parked it was around 7:30. I texted Ethan to let him know we were there. He’d said there team did not have a tent but that they were right next to the University of Nebraska tent with the big red N. They were also right next to the big lot of buses.

It wasn’t hard to find him from there. He was sitting by himself which made me sad, but I was happy again when I was sitting beside him. I’d brought along two bags of snacks and drinks that he had asked about when I asked if he wanted me to bring anything with me. We got to see each other for a little bit before they had to go warm up.

I knew we wouldn’t see him then until after the meet. My sister, niece, and I found a spot by the race trail so we could watch a few of the other races. The high school girls were finishing up and the varsity boys race was crazy. I don’t know how they run so fast. I had taken some anxiety medicine earlier that day and took some more once we sat down.

After the varsity boys were finished running we decided to move to a different spot. That race definitely had the heaviest crowd but I wanted to go to somewhere with a little more space. I didn’t get any pictures from there, but it was a good place to stretch out and see the college girls run. Next was the college men. He did better this time and it felt alright.

After the meet we got to see him again. This time he was talking to another teammate which made me happy. There were more people congregating around the team camp this time including other parents. I’d already met the coach during the earlier time. After the race he wanted a picture of the team so he called them out to a field for pictures.

I started to go too but no other parents were going. So I watched and took pictures from far away. Sometime after the meet some of the boys wanted pictures and there was a group of freshman boys that Ethan was standing with. I didn’t know any of them, but I met one of the moms. It’s weird even as a parent when your kid’s teammates are different.

We talked a little bit longer but then they had to pack up. By then it was somewhere around 10’o clock. The team was not staying over night anywhere but was driving back to the campus that night. It was around a 3 1/2 hour drive for them one way. I forgot to ask what they did for supper but I remember the coach pointing to a cooler of sandwiches.

We hugged and said goodbye and I told him I loved him very much. We went back to the hotel and had a good night’s sleep. The next day we visited the Big Sioux River, visited a museum in Sioux Falls, and then stayed the night with my sister and family in Rochester. I miss him very much now but was thankful to have been able to do go and see it.