Light and Momentary

Resolved

I went to confession this afternoon with the two youngest boys. Our parish offers confession seven times a week (twice on Saturdays) and there is always, always a line. This is a great thing in the abstract, but it is also kind of a hassle. The boys asked if we could go to the next-closest parish instead, where the lines are short unless it's Lent.

They have a newish associate who was hearing confessions today and you guys, he was so efficient that the three of us were out of there in, like, eight minutes total. As he was absolving me I couldn't stop grinning because it reminded me of this commercial. I wasn't going to mention it to the boys, but in the car afterward one of them said, "Did you guys notice that he was kind of...fast?" 

It led to a great conversation about how the grace of the sacrament transcends the characteristics of the priest hearing confessions, and about the homeless man who was asleep in one of the pews, and about the circumstances in which a person might legitimately sleep in church. Before that, though, the priest gave all three of us the same penance, instructing us to choose one place to focus during Advent.

I knelt down to think, uncertain about what might work best. Left to my own devices I have all kinds of wacky ideas. I will eat only Brussels sprouts! I will speak only kind words, ever, to my husband and 16yo! (The Brussels sprouts might be easier, unfortunately.) I decided instead that I would be open to the joy of the Lord each morning at prayer. We'll see how it goes.

I have posted before about the feast of St. Andrew and the vegetarian haggis that has become a tradition. Part of the tradition is that the younger kids don't eat much. This year I decided to make cock-a-leekie soup instead, using a turkey carcass instead of a chicken. Is that turkey-leekie soup, do you suppose? Anyway, I was surprised when my oldest wandered into the kitchen. He said, "It's the feast of St. Andrew. Where's the haggis? We always have haggis."

Just goes to show that you can't please all the people even some of the time. The caramel shortbread was a hit, though. This isn't exactly the recipe we used, but it's close enough.

Don't forget that the novena starts today! And NaBloPoMo ends! Phew! Thanks for stopping by, everyone.

NaBloPoMo Haiku

Tomorrow's the end
of NaBloPoMo. Tonight
I need one more post.

Obligatory

I cook the same Thanksgiving dinner every year. I mix it up at Christmas and Easter, but there is One True Thanksgiving Dinner, and I do not deviate from The Plan except to vary the green element slightly. Tonight I found myself entertaining heretical thoughts of making stuffing with white bread next year, or perhaps serving something chocolate for dessert, but I do not expect that they will survive until next November.

After dinner we played Apples to Apples and charades, and we cracked each other UP. My oldest son got my husband to say Coriolanus in about 90 seconds, causing me to say, "That's my BOY."

I am going to curl up in bed with The Hunger Games while the dishwasher does its thing. Good night, all.

Ten Things I Love About Watership Down

Weeks ago, Bearing and Melanie B. and I were talking about Watership Down on Facebook. Ever since I've been meaning to write this post about why I've loved it since I first read it in junior high.

1. It was alien in an appealing way. From the first sentence -- "The primroses were over" -- it's clearly not your garden-variety kids' novel. When I was 11 I wasn't entirely sure what a primrose was, or how it could be over, but I was a budding Anglophile. Watership Down was an invitation to learn more about a foreign world (the rabbits' world) inside a foreign culture.

2. It is full of real-world truths about getting along with other people. Bigwig and Fiver are never going to be best buddies, but under Hazel's influence they can transcend the bully/bullied dynamic that plagued the Threarah's warren. Blackberry is an object lesson for smart kids: sometimes your peers aren't going to get what you're saying, but that's okay. They'll appreciate you later.

3. It is full of real-world truths about leadership. The Hazel/Woundwort contrast is drawn so skillfully and its message is clear without being preachy: Vision demands humility as well as determination. Woundwort does himself in, really, when he assumes that Bigwig's chief rabbit must be bigger and stronger than he is.

4. It illustrates the importance of being a citizen of the world. The rabbits' attempts to befriend the other hedgerow creatures are repaid richly. And Kehaar! Who wouldn't love Kehaar?! 

5. I love the way it talks about the value of freedom without talking about the value of freedom. There's never a moment when Adams says, "And oppression is BAD, kiddies," but the regimentation of Efrafa is clearly not the way rabbits are meant to live. Freedom and security are in tension, and an overemphasis on security can wreak havoc on the heart. It's true for people as well as bunnies.

6. I am a SUCKER for books with invented languages. Sometimes in my most exasperated moments I still think to myself, "Frith in a fog!"

7. I love the structure of it, the folktales interspersed with the narrative. I've never been a big fan of trickster tales, but El-Ahrairah is irresistible. I still get the shivers thinking about the Black Rabbit story, and the bleakness of his realization that even his most desperate plans have been foiled. And oh, the hope he carries in those starlit ears!

8. There's no mistaking the difficulty of lapine life. A world in which a homba and lendri can seize you by the neck without warning is a grim world, to be sure. But there's also no mistaking the rabbits' certainty that someone is watching over them. That perfectly timed train is my favorite deus ex machina ever.

9. One of the blurbs on my school library's edition came from the London Times. It said, if memory serves, "I announce with trembling pleasure the appearance of a great story." And you know, that's exactly right.  It's just a great yarn. (But can you imagine a reviewer writing that today??)

10. It was mine. Watership Down seems to occupy a strange space: there's a contingent of kids who adore it, but it's rarely taught in schools despite being accessible and suitable literary fiction. I never had to analyze its structure or write an essay about Hazel vs. Woundwort, so I was free to plunge in deeply. I can't remember when it dawned on me that the book ended with primroses, but I still find it deeply satisfying. It makes me sigh a heavy and contented sigh as I close the book, already planning when I will read it again.

Same song, different verse

Do you know what I love to do, oh my friends in the computer? I love to GET STUFF DONE. I get a rush from crossing things off my ever-present list. One day last summer Elwood came home from work and called in from the back door, "Hi, what are you up to?" I said, "Oh, I'm just waxing the woodwork. How was your day?" This is a memory that makes me happy. Why, then, did I spend so many hours last summer drifting around the internet, a memory that does not make me at all happy? I do not know.

A few days ago I was rereading an old post about sloth and alacrity and internet use. (If you have a blog, do you get lost in your archives? I hesitate to admit how much I love to read my old posts.) A few days ago I thought to myself, "Boy, I'm glad I'm not wrangling with that particular frustration right now." Today, though, I am wrangling with that very frustration again: big-picture grand plans for GETTING STUFF DONE, moment-to-moment decisions to goof around on the internet instead. (And knit. Nupps are addictive, it turns out.)

When I dug up the link I noticed that I was sleep-deprived when I wrote that earlier post; lo and behold, I am sleep-deprived today. Part of the sleep deprivation is my own fault, because I stayed up too late watching Call The Midwife and knitting. Part of it is that Stella had a terrible night last night. She sleeps a million times better than she used to (and I am SO grateful), but she is just not good at going to bed and staying there, asleep, until morning.

Maybe Lesson Learned #1 is that sleeplessness fuels computer drift. But Lesson Learned #2 (though I am not convinced it really merits that perfect participle, since it seems to be a Lesson In Progress Forever And Ever) is that computer drift fuels joylessness.

Earlier today I was drafting this post in my head and thinking I would call it Manifesto: no more wasting time on the internet! Ever! Diligence always! Finish All The Things! Even aside from the surfeit of exclamation points, I'm not sure that's the post I want to write.

The resolution I described in that earlier post has stuck, and it has been a fantastic decision. It needs some tweaking, though. I'm not quite sure what to resolve about computer use in my office. I'm not sure how far to extend my earlier resolution about making sure my responsibilities at home are in good shape. But I have a pile of grading that needs to be finished, and a Thanksgiving dinner that's not going to cook itself. This is  a state of affairs that calls for A Plan.

Any ideas? How do you keep from wasting time on the computer? 

On the needles

I've hardly been knitting at all this fall. Pete has been waiting and waiting for me to finish the sweater I started for him in August, but I have been working slowly. Some of the problem is that I haven't had much knitting time. Some of the problem is that it's a plain black sweater, and knitting just doesn't get much more boring than that. I was trying to think of interesting things I could tell you about this sweater. Lifted increases make the prettiest raglan line? I used short rows for the ribbing around the hood so he could have a hood that went down to his eyebrows, as requested, without a ton of bulk at the placket? I need to play around with short row techniques before I try ribbed short rows again, because my stockinette short-row technique leaves some imperfections in the ribbing?

This post is leaving me cold, and I'm the one writing it.

Finally, though, I am done with the interminable black sweater, and moving on to greener pastures. Sort of. My oldest wants a felted laptop sleeve in dark gray. I thought it would be un-boring because he initially asked if I would knit Elvis Presley's face into it, but it turns out he was joking. (Who knew?) In terms of knitting interest a charcoal laptop sleeve is only marginally better than a black sweater, but knitting at 3 stitches to the inch rather than 5.5 means it should be fairly quick. And since his laptop has neither arms nor a head in need of coverage, I'm optimistic that I can crank it out pretty quickly. If it gets half as much use as his alien socks, it will be time well spent. He loves those socks.

But the project I'm really excited about is this one. My 11yo saw the pattern and asked me if I would please please please PLEASE make it for him. Please? I played it cool in the moment. Maybe, I said. Maybe at some point in the future I might knit that for him, when I had less stuff piled in the knitting basket and when I was feeling more inclined to pay $6 for a knitting pattern. Also, did he notice the "EXTREME KNITTING" designation?

I turned right around and bought that pattern, and I am itching to cast it on for a little Christmas surprise. The EXTREME KNITTING label only fuels my enthusiasm. Bring the extreme, I say!

I need to clear off my size 4 DPNs to get started, though, and they are currently occupied by the beginnings of a quilt. At the end of the summer I started two use-up-leftovers projects: a Beekeeper's Quilt (intended as a repository for all of my sock yarn ends), and a pair of colorwork nether garments (ditto, for worsted).

Also on the needles: a laceweight shawl that requires me to tackle nupps for the first time, a fingering scarf that needs to be ripped out and restarted with a generous garter border, and a second sock that could really be finished up in a trice if I just sat down and did it. And two adult sweaters, both in the very beginning stages.

Whenever my WIP count reaches the high single digits, I start to get a little twitchy. Five or six is the sweet spot for me, I think. Time to get some stuff finished up.

All is vanity

Before this year I didn't have any gray in my hair at all. I'm 43, so I knew it wouldn't last forever. 

I mean, I sort of knew it wouldn't last forever. 

As a kid I had a horror of going gray. Someone reliable (maybe my mother) had told me that when redheads went gray their hair turned an unattractive pink color, and that dye for redheads was hopelessly unsatisfactory. I remember being relieved that I wouldn't have to worry about it for a long time. At the same time I dreaded the future in which my hair would be irremediably ugly.

I had persuaded myself that I wouldn't go gray for a while, because my dad's hair was hardly gray at all even in his mid-sixties. More recently, I read somewhere reliable (it was on the internet, so it must be true) that red hair turns an intermediate color before the gray begins its inexorable takeover. My hair is pretty much the same color it's always been, so I thought I had some time.

All this to say: I've been a little bummed to discover some gray in recent weeks.

It's not like me to be bummed about getting older. For years I've tried to quash tendencies toward vanity. I've always been a little scornful about our culture's veneration of youth. I am candid about my age and I don't mind the lines around my eyes. (Mostly.) Maybe it's because being a redhead has always been part of my identity. Maybe it's because I've never done anything chemical to my hair, aside from turning it gray or blue for high school plays. 

Last summer I was talking to my 8-year-old about getting older. I can't remember how it came up, but I said, in what I thought was a calm and pleasant way, "In a few years my hair will fade and then it will turn gray. That's how it goes when ladies get older." Petely, who is usually a go-with-the-flow kind of guy, was emphatic. "No," he said, "you can't let that happen. How will I find you in a crowd if you don't have red hair? You're my mom and you have red hair. You're going to have to dye it."

Part of me thinks I should go read Ecclesiastes for a reality check. At the same time I am checking out the Just For Redheads henna selection.

Are you going gray? How old are you? Do you camouflage it or just roll with it?

Recently Read

I just tore through Someone Else's Love Story, Joshilyn Jackson's newest novel. It features the funniest sex scene I have ever read, one that somehow manages to be affectionate and hilarious at the same time. Some observations:

1. William reminded me of Maxon in Shine Shine Shine: spectrum-y and super-smart, but you don't mess with him unless you want your kidneys handed to you. Even their names are alike (CVCCVC: a labial phoneme and a checked front vowel, followed by a consonant pair that most people wouldn't think of as a pair (/ks/ and /lj/), ending with a nasal phoneme). I was thinking that Shine Shine Shine must have been an influence, but I just read an interview in which Jackson said she'd been thinking about William for ten years. I'm still curious about that confluence.

2. Shandi reminds me of some earlier Jackson characters, a little broken and a lot determined, and Natty reminds me of Fisher from Between, Georgia with his grumpy-old-person-in-a-small-body mannerisms. This is not to say that SELS borrows too much from earlier books, only that it makes me say, "Oh, yes, I've known someone like you before."

3. She keeps coming back to this idea that it's hard to be with the people you love but it's even harder without them. She does it in a way that is beautiful and true and kind of painful all at once.

4. This is the first time I recall seeing a Catholic character in one of her novels. And this is a minor quibble, but she gets the birth control thing wrong. Surely someone like Bridget would have a Creighton practitioner all lined up. 

5. I'm glad I read My Own Miraculous first. It sets up the novel effectively and creepily.

Thou most kind and gentle death

I was kicking around a few different titles for this post: "In which I plan for a future without me in it." "In which I take control freakitude to new heights." I decided to give up on a title while I googled the opening hymn I knew I wanted, and boom: there it was.

When I die, please kick off the funeral Mass with All Creatures of Our God and King. You can skip the middle verses if you wish, but please sing the death one loud and clear. I have cautioned my husband that On Eagle's Wings will cause me to rise up out of my coffin and wail "Nooooooooooooooooooo," so let's make sure to avoid that one.

One thing I don't know is how much choice we have about funeral readings. Does anybody know? If I could pick today, I'd pick Zephaniah 3:16-20: the Lord our God in our midst, loving us tenderly and joyfully. But if we're supposed to pick from the set that seems to be in circulation, then I'd say Isaiah 25 instead. Funeral Masses at our parish always feature Psalm 23, but I'd prefer the last part of Ps. 116 instead. I don't know of a good setting, though. Maybe I should write one.

Second reading, non-negotiably, is 2 Cor 4:6-11,14-18. This will not surprise anyone who has sent me a non-work, non-bloggy email at any point since 1999, or indeed any readers of a blog that is, after all, called Light and Momentary. Gospel: John 11, as much of the story as the priest is willing to proclaim.

Offertory: It Is Well With My Soul. (Do you know the story? It's a cool story -- click the link if you've never heard it.) Catholics never sing that hymn, but I'm not sure why. It remains a favorite from my evangelical days. Communion, if this is not vain: That We Might Live (see the very bottom of this post). Meditation: Crown Him With Many Crowns, being especially for sure for certain to sing the Lord of life and Lord of years verses. Oh, and also the Lord of peace and Lord of love verses. The people from work who come to my funeral are going to be like, "Jamie's funeral just went ON and ON and ON." (Though really, it's the eulogies that have the potential to make a funeral go ON and ON and ON. Attention, potential eulogists: make it snappy. (Please.) More importantly, make it about Jesus and not about me, please.)

Funerals at our parish always end with the Song of Farewell, but if it's not too wacky I'd rather have mine end on a different note. All of my children's baptism Masses ended with a song called Thanks Be To God, a song that continues to evoke for me the enthusiastic hope inherent in the best beginnings. And what is death to a Christian if not the greatest beginning?

**

Please share a link in the comments if you are posting about this stuff, or leave as much of a comment as you'd like if you don't blog. (People often apologize for long comments, but I love it when people take the time to write about what they're thinking. I am still terrible about responding to comments, but I love them all the same.)

**

In 1990 the pastor's wife at my little evangelical church said she wished she had more options for communion songs. I went home and wrote one based on Philippians 2, but then I was too shy to share it. In hindsight, it's striking to me how Catholic it sounds even though it was written at a point when becoming Catholic was the LAST thing on my mind. I still like it, so I am sharing this version in case you might like it too. I recorded it in between dashing home and dashing off to preschool pickup, and my haste shows, but I'm ignoring the impulse to clean it up in favor of getting dinner started for my family. (Oh, I just listened to it and you can totally hear that I am sitting in the basement next to the furnace. Oh, well.)

TWML

Lyrics: From these wounds God's blood flowed: poured out, freely, that we might live. He who was one with God humbled himself, bled and died that we might live. He became nothing for our sakes-- obeyed unto death, even death on a cross, that we might live. Let his name be exalted! Let it be above all names! Come give praise to him whose body was broken that we might live. In his name we come now: Lord, come, fill us again that we may live.

Dept of First World Problems

This business of teenagers learning to use the internet wisely? It is a tricky business.

Nobody is doing anything dreadful -- it's not that at all. It's just the issue of how much time is too much, and how little supervision is too little. Hard to know. Maybe I will blow up the internet, she opined on the internet.

Come back tomorrow and we can talk about something happier, like death! What's on your list of things to take care of, just in case? What do you want your funeral to look like? There are only nine more days in the month of the dead, you know.

The wise took oil

A man named Tony died last night.

We knew each other through a retreat program when my husband and I were in grad school. He was younger than we were and ran with a different circle of friends, but we were all part of the same big group. I was Facebook friends with him and his wife. He didn't say much on Facebook until September, when he was diagnosed with metastatic cancer.

He was relentlessly upbeat, as were the posts from friends on his Facebook wall. He was planning to beat it, and that was that. Chemo had been rough, he'd say, but he was feeling better.

Last night his wife posted to ask for prayers. He was heading back to the hospital in preparation for a new round of chemo. It might be a rough night, she said.

It was his last night. He wasn't even 40. He leaves three young daughters.

You may remember that my brother-in-law succumbed to a vicious cancer back at the beginning of March. It's strange to see their faces looking back at me from my FB friends list. It's stranger still to think that everyone on that list will face the same fate sooner or later.

I am thinking today about my own loose ends that need to be tidied: life insurance, will, a filing system that is sure to be opaque to anyone besides me. We still haven't resolved the re-opened guardian question since my BIL's death. It's easy to be superstitious, to think that it can't happen to me if I choose not to prepare for it.

Maybe that's what the foolish virgins were thinking.

If I could pick, I would die in November when the trees are bare and the year is dying too. You don't get to pick, of course, but you can opt to be a bit more ready. Do you ever think about your own funeral? Would a funeral planning link-up be too grisly? 

Maybe I'll post some funereal thoughts on Friday. Join right in if the topic appeals, or check back Saturday for your regularly scheduled NaBloPoMo fluff.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

I was in Chicago for a conference late last week, and I slipped away for a few hours to go to the Art Institute. It's a cliche for a person to say that she loves the Art Institute, but I love the Art Institute anyway. I used to visit regularly in the days when I could hop on the el and go, but we're too far from Chicago these days for regular visiting. So I just get there when I can.

The thing I especially love about the Art Institute is that being there shows me how long people have been hungry for beauty. If you were making an amphora in ancient Greece, it would have been sufficient to make sure it didn't leak. But everywhere you turn, there's evidence of the insufficiency of the apparently sufficient. You can see that people wanted beauty around them: that someone had the itch to turn the functional into the beautiful, and that someone else, or a long string of someone elses, had the drive to preserve that beautiful object so it could be enjoyed far into the future.

I used to love the medieval art in particular, with its wonky perspective and inscrutable faces. In college I would stand in front of those images and think, "Eight hundred years ago people cared about the same stories I am trying to understand." I always have to visit the Inness landscapes on the lower level too. I think if I were a genuine art buff I would look down on Inness, but I love his paintings too much for that. I'd never heard of him before the day I stumbled across a temporary display at the Art Institute: Inness and Remington together. I still don't care much for Remington, but there's something magical for me in the way Inness looked at the world.

Change at the Art Institute makes me a little grumpy, although I recognize that it is unreasonable for me to expect them to preserve the 1988 configuration that I first learned to navigate. (Okay, I am still kind of miffed that they moved the Burgher of Calais. That was my standard meeting spot. Coming to the Art Institute? Let's meet by the Burgher of Calais. How do you move the Burgher of Calais in the first place? And where did they put him?) Anyway-- I entered the modern wing a little skeptically. I was pleased to see a couple of delicious Jackson Pollocks right off the bat. (I might vote to eradicate pictures of Jackson Pollock's work. You have to see the texture of it, I think, or else it does look preposterous.) And then I was unexpectedlly taken by a Tobey painting. I don't know anything about Tobey, and I don't even remember what this painting was called, but I stood in front of it for a while -- tracing out the not-quite-patterns, soaking it in.

Beauty from prehistory, beauty from the moderns. I followed it up with some delicious squid and taramosalata in Greektown, and then hopped a train home to see my sleeping family.

Book Club

I finished Far from the Tree -- it is full of beautiful stories, beautifully written. It is thought-provoking and distressing and unforgettable. I need some of you to read it so we can discuss, please.

Stopgap

I was going to tell you all about my trip, but we have no power. Please pray for those hit hard by storms today.

Update

It went really well. Better than my most optimistic imaginings, actually. Thank you!

If you would--

I am giving a presentation this morning to an audience that will be much larger than I anticipated when I wrote the proposal in the spring. Would you pray for me, if you're a pray-er?

RSS Roll Call

If you have a blog, will you leave me a comment and tell me where it is? Some of my feeds didn't make the transition to Feedly, for some reason.

Thanks!

JamieBot

Simcha FIsher's link is cracking me up.

taught her an amputee who is the new breastfeeding study

Seven days when I asked a room that holds >400 people. Yikes. I have the schedule wrong, Epiphany carnival until the finished product needs a bath now.

Gestating babies are breeding when I'm not going to announce that one.

You're taking on from her current obsession with grated cheese like, eight or a big number.

is looking unsuccessfully for me while my married name was a scant quarter-teaspoon of baking powder, and Andrew played electric guitar.

Baby needs a funeral tomorrow and they needed a mudfest?

Pandora insists on breastfeeding duration and 700 on getting pictures into albums, the spring semester!

needs ideas on decontaminating her dolly, who changed his bday!

highly recommends some chipotle Tabasco for breakfast with my knuckles.

Psyching myself up for the Mongolian death worm?

I sing that Henry VIII wasn't satisfied with destroying the way to symbolize the fire of the CSA greens can get group projects graded and pie Make a long run and a Cubs or 'sperimental.

Speedily

1. I have resolved to end goofing-off computer time by 10:00, which means I am cutting it fine tonight. While Stella fell asleep I was reading Joshilyn Jackson's recent short story (Kindle single sale today!), and I stayed in her bed and finished it after she dozed off. I am looking forward to Someone Else's Love Story.
2. I have never exchanged an email with Joshilyn Jackson and I have only left her a couple of comments in the nine years I've been reading her blog. But it is one of my Very Favorite blogs, one of the top two Blogs Most Likely To Make Me Snort Coffee Up My Nose.
3. How's that for an exalted category?
4. This is a busy busy week, and I am a little behind.
5. I gave an exam today. I didn't know that exams would make me nervous as a professor, just like they did when I was a student. It takes me a loooong time to write good multiple-choice questions. I like for them to tell a story, and to cover the material in a fair way, so that the amount of time I spent on something in class reflects the weight it gets on the exam, and for the questions to be hard enough to separate the students who get it from the students who have sort of memorized the catchphrases. 
6. I think some of my students would prefer it if I wrote questions that rewarded the memorizing of catchphrases.
7. I was talking to my grad school advisor, for whom I TA'd twice, about the avalanche of grading that has repeatedly threatened to pin me to the slope and leave me there twitching bluely. I said, "I think my students think I'm kind of a hardass about writing." She said equably, "Well, you are kind of a hardass about writing."
8. Listen to me grumbling again. So here's the good news: some of my students are GETTING it. They are making real progress, and I can see it happen. In the last batch of papers I graded, one of them made me want to get up and dance around the living room because it was, like, EVIDENCE OF LEARNING in blinky blue lights.
9. I love Evidence of Learning.
10. Three days from now I will be done with my nervous-making presentation. This means, however, that I have to get it finished in less than three days. No time like the present, baby.

Heart, quieting

I wasn't expecting snow today. I walked home in falling slush, expecting it to stop any minute. Instead it began accumulating. "Snow!" said Stella. "Will you find me some mittens so I can build a snowman?" I did not point out that he would have to be a snowman of Lilliputian proportions; I just fetched the mittens.

My oldest was at rehearsal. It's tech week, and I knew he would be coming back late, tired. In the snow, after not having driven in snow since last winter. When the phone rang at 9:13, my heart leapt up into my mouth. When I heard my husband say, "How did that happen?" it started coursing like a hummingbird's.

He and a friend had stopped for dinner after rehearsal. When they went in, the driver's side mirror was intact. When they came out, it was dangling by its cables. Bummer, yes. Hassle, yes. Annoying, yes.

But I'm overwhelmingly grateful he's home, safe.