Sandi Kahn Shelton

I have been having such a terrible problem, one so dicey that I haven’t wanted to bother you with it, you lovely person out there in cyberspace living your happy life.

For weeks now, I would be writing my novel…and my computer would just SHUT DOWN. No warning, no blue screen, no apologies. It would simply go black.

We writers are over-sensitive people, and somehow it always felt like a rebuke when it happened. As though the computer was saying, “DON’T write that! For God’s sake, you don’t think THAT’S interesting, do you? I’m sorry–I’m going to bed. Use paper and pen for all I care.”

I called the people you’re supposed to call at a time like this, tech support, otherwise known as The People In India Who Knows Things. The person I talked to was named Dharma (swear to God), and he knew immediately what I must do: pack up the computer and mail it back. Hard disk failure.

“No, please no,” I said. I’ve done that before. Your computer comes back with everything gone from its mind. It’s horrible. Like a lobotomy. You can never find your email addresses again. 

Instead, I called my son who knows many things. He said it might be the hard drive, but it also might be the cord was shorting out something inside the computer. I should replace the cord for $28 instead.

The guy at the power cord place said over the phone that he’d heard of this kind of problem before, and what was really wrong had to be that the motherboard had a crack in it. Bad, bad things were in store for me, he said mournfully. We shook our heads over the sad state of the whole computer industry. The motherboard would eventually have to be replaced, and in the meantime I would probably end up shorting out everything and losing my entire novel, all my music and pictures, and possibly my sanity. 

And then…in the midst of my sorrow, and with my computer going dark on me approximately every 30 minutes or so, I went to the fabulous internets, and there I came across the answer.

DUST. And possible golden retriever hair.

Yes, simple dust apparently gets into the teeny tiny vents of our laptops and collects on drives and fans and wires and who-knows-what-all-is-in-there, and it coats these components like a mohair sweater, and makes the fan wheeze and cough until the computer has to decide whether to burst into flames or shut itself down. That’s what the internets said. People even remarked, “Why is it that no one ever tells you this is a possibility? Why is it always ‘send your computer back for a lobotomy’?”

So last night I hauled out the vacuum cleaner and held the hose to all the computer vents for 30 seconds each…and then I turned the computer back on and…well, voila!!!

Ever since, the computer has run like a champ. It purrs. It hums. It no longer runs so loudly that it drowns out ordinary conversation. Just to make sure, I have also started typing with my laptop placed on the wire rack that I used to use for cooling cakes, back when it was cool enough to make cakes. This gives it even more air flowing through those bottom vents.

Who knew that a vacuum cleaner could work in such an amazing way? I may have to see what it could do with our rugs and floors!

I do not know why it’s so tough to do the things I need to do. (I think we all know what we’re talking about here: settling down to work, performing the yoga stretching exercises, paying bills, cleaning the dehumidifier, weeding the garden, flossing the dog’s teeth, washing the bath towels…that sort of thing.)

I have a sign up over my desk that says: “Hard work may pay off in the long run, but procrastination pays off RIGHT NOW.”

This is a bad attitude, I know. I should take it down and replace it with something like: “What? Do you think time is going to wait for you to get around to the things you need to do?” or better yet, something succinct like: “GET TO WORK!”

There are times when the only way I can get anything done is when I do something by accident while I am procrastinating from doing something else. In other words, I can only wash the bath towels if I’m, for instance, hiding from settling down to work. And the garden is only going to get weeded if I’m avoiding flossing the dog’s teeth. (No, I don’t really floss the dog’s teeth–but you know what I mean.) And as for yoga stretching–that just ain’t gonna happen.

But I hate being this way. I am too damned old to be avoiding things this way. I should have developed some true self-control by now. Shouldn’t I? My yoga teacher once told me that I should see this resistance, as he called it (that’s a fancy yoga word for procrastination) as the same as a paper sheet. All I have to do is press against it a little bit, he said, and I would break through–and find myself doing the downward dog without even a second thought.

Then yesterday I ran across this post by Allison Winn Scotch, about how she has beat procrastination! Her advice seems so simple, and yet so profound at the same time:

Something flashes in my brainscan and rather than waste the energy of thinking of when I could do it another time, I just did it! I wrote three blog posts, I started going through my proof pages, and best of all, I actually sat down – right when the impulse struck – and drafted the first scene for my new book.

It was so energizing! I can’t recommend this more. Normally, I’m a list-maker – I jot everything down and axe it as I go. But right now, it seems like the only way for me to accomplish stuff is to seize the moment. Try it! It might work for you!

Okay, I am so on board with this. I am seizing the moment! That means…writing this sex scene that has been eluding me for days and days. I know. Poor me, having to think up a sex scene. It’s not like I have to go weed the garden or even do the downward dog.

But I’m about 25 pages behind schedule in this novel…and by God, I’m going to catch up this weekend! I am not only going to seize a moment. I’m am seizing the whole entire weekend.

Allison, THANK YOU!

You’ve heard of the summer of love. I am having the summer of strandedness. And after two days of it, I am already learning a lot about myself.

First, may I say that I haven’t been this carless since I was sixteen and waiting for California to abolish the parallel parking requirement in the driver’s test so I could get my license.

This time, my strandedness happened because I am writing a novel that is due in two months, and meanwhile, The Third Kid came home from college, having signed up for all kinds of exciting opportunities, all taking place Elsewhere:

• Babysitting for several families, one of whom took her to London with them for three weeks 
• Running a summer camp, which involves putting on TWO musicals in a four-week period, using actors and actresses who are between the ages of 6 and 9 and are anxious to begin their stage careers
• Doing an internship each evening, an hour away from home, helping to stage “Fiddler on the Roof” with middle and high school students.

A person could get tired dashing off in so many directions. A person could get tired WATCHING someone dash off in so many directions. She tears out of the house at about 8 a.m., trailing papers, changes of clothes, English muffins for breakfast, peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, turkey sandwiches for supper…and then we don’t see her (or my car) again until she comes home about 10:30 p.m. in a state of collapse. 

I used to be fond of my mobility, but here’s what I have learned about stationary life, things I would like to share with you in case you have a real life and don’t know what strandedness is like:

1/ Just because you are sitting at your desk does not mean that you are working. You can make yourself sit there, but you can’t make yourself stop reading wikipedia or OMG. 

2/ People call your house all day long. The phone rings and rings and rings. Telemarketers try to sneak through, even though you’ve signed up for the Do Not Call list over and over again. The firemen in your town are probably giving a parade and they want to discuss how much money you will give. Others simply want to put aluminum siding on your house. Friends call, probably hoping to just leave a quick message on your voice mail, but then they get you instead and don’t know how to get off the phone, and so you find yourself in hour-long conversations about nothing at all.

3/ Daytime television is probably one of the best arguments for outside-the-house employment that there is. Do NOT even think of turning it on, or it will demoralize you and make you wish that you lived in another century where television was not heard of. 

4/ Rabbits–yes, rabbits–visit your garden at the same time every day and munch on your basil and petunias and then hop away, to return in 24 hours, even though they don’t have clocks, as far as I can tell.

5/ Twenty minute naps are FABULOUS.

6/ Birds don’t stay on their nests as much as you need to stay at your computer. I am currently having a contest with a lady cardinal whose nest is right at my eye level, nestled in the lilac bush, to see which of us can stay at our post the longest. I am proud to report that she loses every time, flitting off somewhere to do something more interesting than sit on her eggs, and I win. Of course, if she had access to the internet on her nest like I do in mine, she could probably remain on the nest for much longer intervals, just as I can.

(To my editor, in case she is reading this: No, really! I AM writing the novel!  Honest! It’s zipping right along! Don’t even worry about it. September is still a long time away from now. I checked the calendar just this morning.)

My mother wasn’t really a fan of Mother’s Day. She always said it was one of your hokier holidays–just filled up with enforced sentiment and guilt, and whether her kids remembered it or not was no big deal to her. But we did it up just the same, the way children love to do: breakfast in bed, consisting of runny eggs and burned toast; necklaces made of pasta;  little two-leafed seedlings barely thriving in a paper cup, and of course the piece de resistance, the construction paper card.

I am proud to say that I had a signature design that I presented year after year, made the same way for each and every holiday that might come up. I drew a bird on the front and wrote, “This birdie has dropped in to say…” and then you opened the card and it read: ”HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!” (or whatever the holiday might be…Happy Birthday and Happy Valentine’s Day worked equally well, and so did your lesser holidays, like Arbor Day and St. Patrick’s Day, if need be.) I felt this card was brilliant for its versatility, and I was quite taken with its rhyme scheme. It was easy to produce, could be dashed off at a moment’s notice (after a day of forgetfulness about the big day), and always was guaranteed to bring a smile.

I guess I grew up not really thinking much about Mother’s Day, once I was too old to make my fabulous card anymore. 

Last year, though, two days before Mother’s Day my mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, and two days after Mother’s Day they told her that it was incurable. It had spread to her liver and lungs and bones and was on the march to every other organ it could find, in a mad sweeping rampage across her body. 

She had, it seemed, been ignoring some symptoms for a very long time.

And so we started talking on the telephone every day during the next five weeks. We’d sit up late at night–her in Florida and me in Connecticut–and I’d hold the phone to my ear, hearing her laugh and cry, listening to her stories, to her fears, to all the random, stream of consciousness things she wanted to tell me. She’d light up her cigarettes and take sips of her beloved Pepsis, coo to her little dog, and we would stay on the phone for hours and hours.

What did we talk about? Just ordinary things, nothing momentous at all. We’d talk about songs playing on the radio, about the men she had loved and the crazy things she had done. Why she liked to sunbathe but didn’t like to swim. What the lady across the hall said last week. She had been diagnosed with bi-polar disorder years before, and she talked sometimes about why she hated taking the medication for it (“it makes me feel so colorless, like all the red has gone out of the world”) and we talked about the delicious freedom she felt in ordering madly from Home Shopping Network, buying jewelry and diamonds and kitchen appliances and makeup, even though she knew she wasn’t going to pay for any of it.

Whereas I had once seen it as my job to lecture her about all this, now I didn’t anymore–not when she was dying.

But now, in her final illness, she seemed real to me, neither manic nor depressive. She just talked, and I just listened. I felt it was the least I could do, to listen. Sometimes I would type the things she was saying to me on my laptop. My family was fast asleep, and I needed to be sleeping, too, but it was as if I were connected by this umbilical cord of telephone wires, hissing with static, holding me fast to her, even as the time grew short.

She said: I can’t understand how it’s going to happen that I’m going to go from being the fun-loving, lively-spirited person you see before you to being a dead person. Just how is that going to happen? How is it that I won’t be here on the Fourth of July? What in the world is going to happen between now and then that I don’t know about yet?

She said: I think I’m depressed. Or I would be depressed if I weren’t in denial.

She said: In this whole nursing home, all any of us want is to get naked. And they won’t let us.

And then she said: I’m not going to put up with this. I won’t live under these conditions, feeling as bad as I feel. I am out of here. Will you write about me someday? 

And then she stopped eating and let herself fade away. I flew down to Florida and sat beside her and played her favorite songs and held her hand, and she’d smile and squeeze my hand sometimes, silent now.

“Are you scared?” I asked her the day before she died, and she shook her head no. Emphatically NO. 

These days I think of her a lot, even without Congress enacting a Mother’s Day holiday to bring to mind all mothers.

My mother, like probably a lot of women out there, was often not that great a mom. Now, a year out from her death, I think that she was probably consumed with her illness, fighting to stay above it, to remain as clear as she could. Whereas for so much of my life–even as a child–I was the adult in our relationship, the one who needed to protect her and to try to manage her finances and her medications and her adventures, I’m so grateful to have had that winding down time with her. At the end, we were just two people, not mother and daughter necessarily, but just two people who had shared a whole lifetime (mine) together, having made mistakes and come to a place of talking and maybe understanding and forgiveness.

That is grace, I think. That lightness I feel now when I think of how, in the last five weeks of her life, she poured out all she had to me, and that I wrote it all down.

On Friday, I came home to find my cell phone bill in the mailbox…and it was double the amount it usually is.

And just when we had decided to stop our wild, spendthrifty ways, too. We have had three months now of trying to be soooo careful–radical things like eating at home ALL THE TIME, canceling subscriptions we can read on-line, cooking all the food we buy instead of throwing half of it out, not driving places unless we absolutely have to, and clipping coupons. I’m even learning to turn off lights when I leave the room.

And then, wouldn’t you know, the cell phone bill goes completely haywire.

It’s not like a regular human can actually READ a cell phone bill to try and figure out what happened, so I called up customer service and said, “Would somebody there please walk me through this 14-page document and explain how it is that my cell phone is always $114 but now is $229? Did I somehow walk in my sleep and sign myself up for a new deluxe, charge-me-for-everything plan or something when I had to replace my old phone last month?”

The woman who had answered my call said, “Oh, didn’t you just want to faint when you looked at that bill? I know just how this is!”

I was silent for a moment. ”As a matter of fact, I did consider fainting,” I told her, “except that I knew I would probably just bonk my head on something on my way down to the floor and then I’d have an additional medical bill to pay.”

“Well, let’s just see what’s going on here,” she said. “Sit down and take a few deep breaths, and I’ll see what I can do.”

She kept typing things–I could hear the clicking of the keys–and after a moment she said, “Oh! I see exactly what this is! One of the people on your family plan made lots and lots of calls last month!”

“Yes. That’s my daughter,” I said. “She’s at college and she doesn’t have a land line. She uses her cell phone for everything.”

“Ohhh. She must have had a tough month. Usually we see this when kids are stressed out at school. That’s when they need to talk to their friends.”

“Yes,” I said. “They do.”

(March had been a tough month: lots of sickness, a couple of friend crises, some heavy decisions about next year’s courses and housing situations.)

“Well,” said the woman. “Let’s just make all that go away. You’re back to where you usually are. Just tell your daughter to use the phone nights and weekends unless her friends are on the same network, and then they can talk anytime. This was just a one-time deal, though, I bet. She’ll be more careful from now on.”

I sat there stunned. “You took the extra calls away?”

“Yes. You’re back to where you usually are. Your bill is $114.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No! Have a good day.”

“YOU TOOK THE CALLS AWAY?”

“Yes. It wasn’t your usual bill.”

“Um, can I send you some chocolate chip cookies?” I said.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You know how much trouble I’d get into for that?”

Has anybody else ever had anything like this happen? Are there LOTS of companies just waiting for us to call them and say we need our bills explained?

Maybe I should call up the heating oil compan. Would they say, ”Ohhh, I see what happened! George Bush really messed up the economy with that war in the Middle East. You shouldn’t have to pay $3.80 a gallon for heating oil. Let me just put that back where it used to be….”

For those who don’t know what the FAFSA is, I say to you: bow down right where you are at this minute and kiss the ground. Pat yourself on the back, shake your own hand–and then take yourself out for a nice dinner and drink.

The rest of us will just sit here, gnashing our teeth.

The FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and it consists of, oh, about 103,000 questions designed to make you examine your entire financial situation. After all, you are asking the government to kick in a few bucks so you can send your child to college–and that help doesn’t come cheap.

They want worksheets from you if they’re going to think about doing something like that. And not only worksheets–they’d like to see your tax return, hear about your checking and savings accounts, and ponder with you how they might make use of your retirement funds before you get to them. They throw around inexplicable terms like “credit for federal tax on special fuels” and “foreign income exclusions.” Occasionally they mention the word “perjury” if you should fill out the forms wrong.

And they have STRICT DEADLINES. The kind of deadlines that mean you have to get your taxes done way before you would normally think of such a thing.

But all those are not even the worst things about the FAFSA.

The worst thing is that they want to operate the world on a system of PIN numbers.

Which you have to apply for in advance.

And everybody in your family has to have a different one.

And you are supposed to guard it with your very life and know where it is at all times.

Because if you forget yours, then you have to wait a long time while FAFSA thinks whether they will help you find it in their voluminous vaults where they store such things. Don’t even think about trying to get them to give you a new one. They won’t hear of it.

I don’t know about you, but I have had it with PIN numbers–especially PIN numbers that other people pick for me.

And so every year, despite the fact that I store the PIN numbers in folders which I mostly know the location of but not completely because too many things live in this house, I get heart palpitations just at the very thought of locating these PIN numbers and remembering whose is whose, and then entering them in just the right spaces, and worrying what if they’re wrong because I’ve waited until the very last minute ONCE AGAIN, and what if the government says these are the wrong numbers and they have to take a couple of weeks to go into their vault and look for my numbers, (which has happened in the past) and then we won’t get financial aid and it will all be my fault and March 1st is coming, which is the DEADLINE. The absolute DEADLINE for “priority consideration,” whatever that is.

I tell you, it could make a person delirious.

But last night, FEBRUARY 28, I sat down with all my trepidation and the online FAFSA, filled it all in, and typed in the PIN numbers.

Wrong, said FAFSA.

So I had the requisite minor heart attack, possibly a small stroke, began developing an ulcer and possibly some kind of tumor.

Retyped them, this time very carefully, so as not to transpose any numbers.

WRONG!

Then, through blurred vision, I realized that, ha ha, I had switched our numbers by accident. I had used MINE when I needed to use Stephanie’s. Ha ha ha.

I re-entered all the data. Filled out all the rest of the thousands of pages. Pressed the button to file my E-SIGNATURE, which is a hocus pocus thing so you don’t have to wait two weeks for them to process a piece of paper with your actual signature on it.

The FAFSA said NO.

Had another minor heart attack, several small strokes, noted that my ulcer was in full bloom now.

So I called them up! Yes, it turns out they have a phone number. And human beings. A HUMAN actually talked to me, and at first the human was as mystified as I was. I thought this was going to be another one of those times when machines have defeated us, like when you try to get your bank balance online and your bank pretends not to know you and says you didn’t type in your name, but YOU DID, it’s RIGHT THERE, but the machine says it isn’t, so you just have to leave the internet and go drink something alcoholic.

But then, when all seemed lost and there wasn’t going to be any financial aid this year after all, the human said, “Aha!” and explained that there was one teeny tiny question, one way way down at the bottom of the screen, which due to my hysterical blindness caused by the major illnesses I was contracting, I hadn’t noticed.

So I answered it, and palms sweaty and heart palpitating, pressed the SEND button–and the FAFSA left my computer screen and MAY HAVE GONE TO WHERE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO, that part remains to be seen, but it left at least.

I printed out all relevant documents, slumped over the keyboard, and promised that never again would I wait until the Last Possible Minute to do this, even though really there wasn’t any other way.

It was then I noticed that–hey, we have a Leap Day! March 1st is still technically waaaay off. We were awarded another whole day for the FAFSA this year.

I’m actually ahead of the game for once. AND, best of all, because Stephanie will be a junior next year, I only have to do ONE MORE FAFSA in my whole life.

One more to go. I might even be able to remember where I put the PIN numbers.

I haven’t been writing much lately because, like the rest of the country apparently, I have gotten just a tiny bit addicted to politics. I am reading politics online and in the newspapers and watching politics on television and following every last “he said, she said” waaaay too much. If Obama ever gets tired and doesn’t want to deliver his well-worn speech, I am ready to jump in and deliver it for him. I think I could do it verbatim, even without the teleprompter. (“McCain can’t say I supported the war…because I didn’t. And he can’t say I gave George Bush a blank check, because I wouldn’t.  … I was born to a teenage mother. My father left when I was two, and I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents…”, etc., etc.)

Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE this speech! It plays in my head day and night. I could listen to it for ten more primaries if necessary.

Luckily I had some major distractions come to visit me this weekend. And Mike (he’s the one on the left) put my camera on a chair in the dining room and then had us all face forward (how we got babies to face forward was a minor miracle, and then he ran and jumped in the picture–and this is what we got. Amazing!

Here is just one of our runner-up pictures…before we got the main one to work.

And what is a day without a little puppy love? Jordie, who normally runs when he sees anyone under five feet tall coming toward him, was patient and submissive for this kiss. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that Miles had his nose in a vise grip.

You  might not think those two topics have anything to do with each other: haircuts and writing fiction.

I wouldn’t have either, until yesterday.

Yesterday was the day I suddenly couldn’t stand my hair another second. You know what this is like. It was either go to the hair salon or get the pinking shears out of the sewing box and have at it myself. The night before, my hair had been subpar but acceptable, and then Tuesday morning, it was unbearable. Go figure.

Luckily I see a haircut person who is not only wonderful, but she works a million hours and seems always to be able to get a person in if she hears that pinking shears might become involved. So I called up, got an appointment for 2 o’clock, and then spent the morning writing my novel.

By the time the appointment came around, I was lost in the book, totally immersed in the story–but, hello, this is a haircut we’re talking about. You have to go to a haircut! So I went.

“What are you working on lately?” asked the hairdresser, whom I will refer to as R, for her own protection. She took me over to the sink to be shampooed.

So I told her about my book. (I have to stop here and say that I knew this was very, very bad to do. Writers are not supposed to discuss the plots of their books with anyone, not even kindly, interested hairdressers. I have never understood this rule, but all the other writers will tell you this. It has something to do with spending the energy of your book in your excited retelling of the plot, when actually all that energy belongs on the page. Or something like that. You  just have to trust me on this: all your better writers won’t discuss their books.)

But there I go, blabbing away about my plot, which involves (here I go again, telling) a massive, almost unforgivable infidelity between a couple who has been married for a long time. The infidelity took place at the beginning of their marriage, and has been…well, smoothed over. So I’m telling her this story as she’s taking out the scissors and the combs, and she’s nodding and looking very, very interested, and so I’m telling more and more.

And then she says, “My father left my mother after 30 years of marriage, when I had just gotten married and was pregnant with my first baby. It turned out he had been having an affair, and he just left.”

Now is that fascinating or what? We got into such a wonderful conversation then–all the gory details of love affairs and how people find out, and how my characters find out and what happens next, and what happened to her mother, and how she wouldn’t speak to her father for years, and yes, he’s still with the other woman, but it’s very awkward, and how her mother tries hard to forgive him but can’t really, she’s broken now and has no self confidence…and we talk all the way through my haircut. By the end of it, we are so overcome with emotion that we have to HUG before we can go our separate ways.

And I go home and sit down and work on my book for the rest of the afternoon.

But then last night, as I was combing my hair before I went to bed, I noticed that…well, there’s a big chunk of hair that’s simply missing. On the right side. Like, ridiculously so. I can’t pull  my hair back anymore because on one side I seem to have  a pixie haircut and all the other sides are kind of regular…longish, even.

I have no idea what to do. The obvious lesson is: I should stay home and write my book, quietly, until my hair grows back in again. And when I go back to her later (as I will), and she asks me what I’m working on lately, I’ll say, “Ohhhh, nothing really,” and open a magazine. With a yawn.  

Today I woke up late, drove 30 miles to pick up a friend to go to a goal-setting workshop that took three hours, (my goals were not to be in such a hurry all the time), then stood in a thirty-minute line for lunch, took her back to her house, drove home, went to the grocery store to buy ingredients to make Thai soup for dinner, rented two movies, drove back home, and then drove 30 more  miles to pick up my daughter from her babysitting job, drove to a second grocery store to get the rest of the Thai ingredients that I couldn’t find at the first store, and then drove home, decided the Thai soup was going to take too long to cook when we were all so hungry so I made chicken curry in a hurry instead, and then washed the dishes, and then came downstairs to work for a little while, sending out a bio for a talk I’m giving in April and tracking down sources for a story I’m working on for the newspaper.

And I came across this quote, which seems to sum why I still feel in such a good mood:

Leonard Bernstein said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

I rarely take on issues in this blog. Mostly it’s just me, talking about my own life, showing pictures, going through the throes of writing and parenting, and talking to my friends about both of those things.

But today I got a comment on a post from Mother Pie, and since it’s always so much fun to meet new bloggers, I went over to her blog and read a few of her posts, which were wonderful…and then I came across this one, a post from a soldier in Iraq, who has been writing a blog for the past five years for the Rocky Mountain News.

Andrew Olmsted lived constantly in the presence of great danger, and so he wrote a very thoughtful, heartbreaking post to be published in the event of his death. Aside from the political ramifications of the war in Iraq (which he asks us not to use his death to talk about), there is something so poignant in being able to read a man’s honest and forthright look at his life. Without even a trace of self-pity, he talks about what he would have done differently and what he will miss and the people he wished he could have met, and then he tells us about his wife and what he hopes for her future. He tells about his feelings for the job he was doing and his country–and says that if he had to die there, he hopes we will all spread the story that he must have died liberating a village and saving innocent women and children, though he admits that probably isn’t the way he died.

It is a beautiful look back at life. And I’ve been sitting inside today, typing away while it is nearly 60 degrees outside…and, well, I just think I’m going out for a walk.