Counting Down

So many deeds cry out to be done,
And always urgently;
The world rolls on,
Time presses, ten thousand years are too long,
Seize the hour, seize the day!
-Mao Tse-Tung
January 9, 1963

I've got two more days to do a season's worth of work. But we're getting there. The plan is to have the farm caught up to March 31st by March 31st, the day of my surgery. But not only caught up to March 31st, but prepped to make the April work go smoothly. I will not be involved in that, the April work. I'll have to rely on others. I'll be watching from the window.
We've got 200 raspberries planted, and a greenhouse built. The Spring fields are plowed, and, miraculously, de-rocked. The peas are trellised. The potatoes are planted. The chicken coop is clean. We've been rolling, lately, and rolling fast and hard. Sleep is for after surgery, or, for winter, or, for when you're dead.
There's a bit of work to do in the greenhouse, and irrigation lines need to be laid. The strawberries ned a bit of attention, and I'd like to get more spinach in the ground. Plus, there are probably a million things yet to be done that I just haven't thought of.
Things got rolling early, yesterday. We had 200 raspberries to plant, and a forecast of rain. that's when the white Toyota came up the road. B* needed a compressor. B* needed a compressor because his fell out of his truck. So he came to load mine into his truck.
"Whaddya need a compressor for?"
He needed to blow up a tire in C*'s old camper trailor. C*'s old camper trailor had been left somewhere it didn't need to be, and it had to be moved.
"Where?"
"We're gonna leave it in front of C*'s apartment."
"What does C* feel about that?"
"He's out of town."
So he charges up the compressor and takes off. An hour later, he's back. With the compressor. And a trailor.
J* stops planting raspberries long enough to look inside the trailor. And says the last thing I want her to say: We could put an intern in this.
So there it is. We have a new addition to the junkyard in the back 40. C*'s old trailor, just sitting there. It may not look like much, but we have big plans.

March 27

On March 27, 1513, Juan Ponce de Leon discovered Florida, where he believed there was a Fountain of Youth that would make him eighteen again instead of fifty-three. He drank from every spring in sight and was much disappointed to find that he still had some gray hair and a crick in his back. Nowadays we know that a man is as old as he feels, and that's the catch in the whole thing. Ponce de Leon is sometimes looked upon as an awful old grumbler for wanting to find the Fountain of Youth. Well anyway, he wasn't kidding himself.
How To Get From January to December
Will Cuppy

An Open Letter To The President of the United States

Dear George,
Is it alright if I call you George?
I was in my doctor's waiting room yesterday, flipping through a month old issue of Time.
You may be wondering why I was at my doctor's. Well, it's a really long story. Let me just say that a few months ago I was climbing on something I shouldn't have been climbing on. Anyway, now that we're on the subject, would it be too much trouble if you did something along the lines of health care reform? I mean, I know you're busy with your war and everything, but this whole being at the mercy of the insurance megalith is getting old.
Okay, I was talking about Time. I read that Laura is really into organic food.
Yep, there it was, right there in an old issue of Time.
Well, George, there's something we have in common! I eat organic food, too! In fact, I grow organic food!
That's right, I'm an organic farmer.
Seeing as how I toured the White House with my grandmother when I was nine, I thought it only appropriate that I invite you and Laura here to visit me. You can show her where organic food comes from, and even help me weed a bed or two. We'll pick some veggies, then come into my trailor and make a scrumptious organic lunch! We'll have kale and sprouts and some whole grains and maybe even a fruit sweetened dessert.
Are you a vegetarian? I have lots of vegetarians who visit me here, so I've gotten pretty good at leaving meat out of things.
I have a feeling that you're gonna like lunch so much, and have so much fun visiting the farm, that before you leave you're gonna ask me if there's anything you can do to help me.
Well, as a matter of fact, there is.
What I want to do is hang a big sign over all the vegetables I sell: As Eaten by the President of the United States.
I know you don't endorse things very often, but just think about how happy Laura will be when she sees a big picture of you over my market stand, biting into a delicious kohlrabi!
Things are about to get busy here, what with planting season and my surgery and all, so if you could make it down in the next week or so, that would be great.
I look forward to seeing you.
As ever,
I remain your loyal servant,
Frank
PS You can leave Dick at home.

GH2 - We Needed A Come-Along, After All

When we last talked, the outer frame of the new green house had been pieced together.
I ran conduit down the ridgeline - not for electrical wire, mind you, but because I needed the additional support, and I had a lot of conduit laying around. A lot.
That's when I noticed that the whole greenhouse was leaning to the west, except for the parts that were leaning to the east.
I needed to do some straightening. I pushed this way, and then pushed that way, and just couldn't get the thing straight. I tied one end of a rope to the the greenhouse, and the other end to the tractor, and then lost my nerve and decided that wasn't such a good idea. Then I got the come-along. I wrapped a chain around the pieces that were pointed west and pulled east, and then, to keep everything in symmetry, I wrapped a chain around the pieces that were pointing east and pulled west. When I got done, everything was straight.
Well, as straight as I thought it would get. I bolted some diagonal braces on, and had a greenhouse.
Well, not quite. I still needed endwalls.
The ladder I had borrowed had already been reclaimed, so I backed the truck into the greenhouse and stood on a box in the bed. I bolted two vertical pipes to the whole thing to act as door frames, and then another pipe just above that, on a horizontal plane. (I have big plans for that one.) Then I repeated all those steps on the other side. The trick was to do it in such a way that I did not get the truck trapped inside the greenhouse.
Now, then. As for that last horizontal pipe. That's the base for the transom. The transom is the only soild surface on the greenhouse, all others being clear plastic. I've spend the last week sketching out ideas for just what picture needs to be painted on the transom. I haven't made the final decision yet - nothing has really jumped out at me. I'm waiting for that eureka! moment (it's sure to come) and then the right image will be obvious.

Next installment: fun with giant sheets of plastic!

I Used To Live In A Cave And Think About Such Things, But Now I Just Allow Myself To Be Confused

The light bulb in my office burned out today. Complete and total darkness, engulfing everything, including my shopping list. My question: How do you write light bulbs on a shopping list that you can't find because the light bulbs are burned out.
Such issues plague me.
A year or two ago, I needed to don the bee suit to tend to the hives. The problem? The bee suit had been rolled up and tucked on a shelf in the barn. For a while. Long enough for some wasps to build a nest in it. Thus: How do you get rid of wasps on a bee suit when you can't put on the bee suit that you need to get rid of the wasps?
Speaking of the inscrutible, or paths to enlightenment, as the case may be, here are a few Google entries that led people to this blog:
esophogus
yellow bellied sap sucker
smoke out of a dipstick hole
Steamtrain Maury
Los Pozas at night
real Mexican gardens
metaphors that are not screwed up
"and the cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue"
and my perennial favorite:
Ajahn Yantra

Ask And Ye Shall Receive

I'm not exactly comfortable with the title of this post, but I couldn't resist using a ye.
Also, I wanted to see if I knew how to spell receive.
I've gotten myself a number of needed things of late, and all I had to do was ask.
Most recently, and perhaps most significantly, I've found a scanner. Well, I've found means to use a scanner. Thusly, I'll be able to take some old writing projects I dug out of the bottom of the closet and introduce them to that ubiquitous object of these modern times: the computer. And share them with all of you. This is all part of my plan to keep myself occupied during my approaching period of recuperation. I'll be one-handed once again, for a while, and plan to do a lot of those things that I've been meaning to do for years.
The scanner search took it's up and downs. I've got some neighbors who have a scanner, but they are painfully obnoxious and I am loathe to deal with them. Having dinner with some other folks a few days ago, I introduced the subject of scanners into the crowd and waited for a response. One person present, who works with computers, indicated that I would be hard-pressed to find someone with one that does what I want it to, and that if I found a service that does this it would be costly. I resolved myself to a lot of one-handed typing.
Then, lo and behold, last night, around a campfire and in the midst of a group of people all enjoying the effects of copious amounts of alcohol, I struck gold. This appropriate device has been located, and its services have been offered.
In addition, an intern has been located. Yes, the mighty Let It Grow juggernaut rolls on, this time with employees. We'll have at least one set of hands out in the fields this year, if she actually shows up and doesn't freak out at the first sight of us. This is all courtesy of the ATTRA website, that matches needy farms and needy interns. You just post your name, and people show up.
Peas are in the ground, and, they're trellised. A young friend from Hot Springs has been coming out to help on occasion, and he was just what I needed to pound fenceposts and unroll woven wire fence stuff. All I've got to do now is keep the deer away from them.
And, last but not least, the freezer promises to be filled with various casseroles and such, thanks to the Spring Creek Book and Vigilante Club. They've become concerned about my coming surgery and subsequent period of one-armed-edness, and have decided it is their duty to keep me nourished.

Where The Demons Lurk

For months now I've been thinking about digging some old manuscripts up from somewhere deep with-in the closet.
I shouldn't have.
It's dark in there, and there are boxes that contain things I haven't looked at in years. It's my past that's in there under the folded cardboard tops, only it's all the stuff that makes me what I am today, so it's my present and future, too. And it's not always pleasant to rummage through, not late at night after a few glasses of wine.
I started out with high hopes. I was going to find a manuscript I put together many years ago, go through it again, show it to a few people, maybe even post it on this site. Instead I found myself with a flat tire, blocking traffic on Memory Lane. I finally found the manuscript, though, dammit, in tact though a little dog-eared. Even managed to find the disks that I had it saved on. They don't work. They're floppy disks, if you remember those, and they're from the early nineties. They've held up about as good as an old Micheal Jackson hit. (Sorry, I couldn't stop myself.)
What confused my was the way various parts of my life have intertwined deep with-in my closet, all without me knowing about it. I swear that some years ago I went through all my stuff and put things into boxes carefully segregated into diffferent decades, but everthing's been mingling amongst themselves when I wasn't looking. I'm going through old Chinese texts and Thai postcards and stuff and out falls a notebook and written on the first page is: Started: 200 Cucumbers, Bed 17, Field 2, May 29th. Or, I've got a stack of newspapers clippings dealing with unemployment in the Reagan administration and out falls my third grade report card. How do these things happen? I thought I had everything neatly compartmentalized, but I find instead an unplanned stew with spices from a dozen different areas and meat from several continents. I thought everything was just where it was supposed to be, neatly labeled on the outside in bold strokes from a magic marker, but what I find are different momentos from my life left to hybridize into something entirely new and different. Books that I read decades apart lay next to each other. Letters sent to me at addresses on different sides of the country share the same rubber band, and at least three different girlfriends have knitted me hats.
A lesser man would cease trying to keep things in order. A lesser man would allow his past to spill out onto the floor in any random order, like leaves cast down by a tea reader. Not I. I believe in string and tightly closed box, and, yes, I believe in magic markers. I'm going to keep everything just where I want it, where it should be and where I can deal with it as I want to. The carefully constructed little reality I made for myself will not be upset by a jumble of things from my past. No. I am what I am, evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Oh, and another thing.
For those of you who were wondering.
Fortune cookies do mold.

Bukowski, Again

You Do It While You're Killing Flies

Bach, I said, he had twenty children.
he played the horses during the day.
he fucked at night
and drank in the mornings
and wrote music in between.

at least that's what I told her
when she asked me,
when do you do your
writing?

GH2 - We Follow Straight Lines and Fragment

When we last left off, I had recounted my dissatisfaction at bending pipe to form a half-circle greenhouse. I decided to play with the idea of various intersecting straight lines, all made from the same salvaged iron pipe. I wanted to follow the concept of the typical pitched roofed house. Bending the pipe around a post in the barn didn't work to my satisfaction, and it became necessary to cut each required length and then piece them together. The roof top was easy. I found couplers at Lowe's that seemed made for the pipe I was working with, and like an elbow at 90 degrees. Two pipes fitted into this coupler formed my roof. Transitioning from the slope of the roof to the vertical walls proved to be challenge. A 45 degree coupler like the 90 degree coupler I used at the roof top would have proved ideal, but I couldn't find any. (It's the sort of thing that you know that someone, somewhere, makes such a thing, but I didn't want to take the time to search. I was on a roll. It was time to get to work.) I discovered that 3/4 inch conduit fit inside my iron pipe almost perfectly, and if I could bend the conduit to 45 degrees, I could fit the whole thing together. There was a pipe bender in the barn, which I finally found, but was not happy with the results. The sweep of the curve proved to be too broad, and didn't look or feel like it would prove to be as secure as I wanted it to be. I didn't think I had any options but this - it didn't occur to me that you could bend pipe with anything but a pipe bender - but I found a way. I cut metal conduit into two foot pieces, placed one end into a short length of 1" iron pipe, and put another length of pipe around the other end. With a friend standing on the first pipe, I lifted up on the second until the conduit bent to 45 degrees (this proved to be when the second length of pipe was lifted to just below my knee.) I was well underway.
The conduit, incidentally, came from a neighbor who once used them to prop up some walnut trees he planted.
Hauling everything down to the greenhouse site, I set about driving rebar straight into the ground on three foot centers. I fitted my walls, five foot long pieces of iron pipe, on top of these.
The next morning, two friends came out and helped me get the roof up. With the aid of a ladder, the branch of a chestnut tree, and several miles of plastic twine, we fit the pipes together to form the roof and lifted them up into place.
We had our overall frame, and I liked it. The lines and the dimensions were pleasing to me. The structure looked gentle but sturdy when viewed from the road, and the greenhouse itself fit well between the two fields surrounding it. In retrospect, I find myself wishing I had replicated the pitch of the barn of the roof, and drawn those two structures together in symmetry. It would have been a logical perspective for the eye to follow as it swept up the hill from the greenhouse to the barn and to the cemetery hill behind it all. I hadn't thought of that, though. Nonetheless, the two structures complement each other and are far enough apart that inconsistencies are hardly noticeable.
Next each individual rib had to be attached to the rib before and after it. I fired up the torch and blew small holes in each pipe, and then got another length of pipe and blew holes three feet apart. I bolted this pipe lengthways down the greenhouse roof, forming what is commonly called a purlin. Then I backed the truck into the greenhouse and set the ladder in the bed, for this was the only way I could reach all the way up to the top of the greenhouse. Up at the tippity-top, I screwed conduit down the length of the greenhouse, forming one more support structure. The thing was sturdy enough to climb on, and balance beam on the roof.

Next installment: Adventures with Wiggle-Wire, and, how pipes form end walls.

Long Ago, I Hung Up My Beads

Depression is associated with brain disorganization and nerve-cell atrophy. Depression appears to be progressive - the longer the episode, the greater the anatomical disorder....Depression has been linked with harm to the heart, to endoctrine glands, to bones.... It is poor company. Depression destroys families. It ruins careers. It ages patients prematurely.
-Peter D. Kramer
writing in The New York Times
April 17, 2005


They're on a sconse on the living room wall, hanging idly and unused for many years now. They've gathered a bit of dust, but still smell of sandalwood. The little red tassel on the end is still intact, though a bit faded.
I left it all behind me, oh so long ago, because it felt like time to do something else. No longer would I sit on a cold floor at 4 in the morning chanting in a strange language. No longer would I shave my head. No longer would I twist my legs into a firm and stable base and contemplate my inhalations. God is a tough boss. You never get a raise and the overtime is grueling. Forget about a vacation.
Rarely if ever do I get the urge to pick up the beads. You won't find me calming thumbing through the circle, persueing eternity, nor will you see them around my neck. They're hung on the wall, on the sconse.
Working for God, though, is a bit like working for the CIA. You never really get away, and are liable to be sent on a secret mission at any time.
The phone's been ringing a lot, lately. Various friends at their wit's end, calling to - well, I don't know, I guess just calling to call. I can't help. I have no advice nor words of wisdom. That's the other reason I hung up my beads. I just wasn't very good at it. I can listen, though. That's about it, but it's something I can do. It's probably enough, and my failure to see this has probably always been an obstacle to being really helpful.
That's the other thing about working for God: the employee manual is really hard to understand. It was written in a foreign langauge that nobody even speaks any more.
The original title of this post was going to be Pain, because I've witnessed a lot of that lately. I find myself surrounded by people whose brains don't work right, or, don't work in the way they want them to. (I could explore that issue some more, but that would require putting on the beads.) These are difficult and complicated times, and there's no such thing as mercy. You're stuck with the hand you're dealt, and you're in it til the bitter end. A few fold early, but that's even worse.
I can tell a tale or two about working with inadaquate tools. Try fixing a truck or plowing an acre or building a greenhouse with tools that don't work right, and you end up going in circles and never getting the job done. You get things so screwed up in the initial stages that you can never get things right, if you can even figure out how you screwed up in the first place. So if your tool is your brain and the work to get done is your life, you're even worse off than I guy covered in grease and staring at a cold and mute engine at midnight. And the big difference is that there's no parts store, no upgrade, and no gift of a new one, not from anybody.
But I'm getting stuck in useless metaphors, and that's not doing any of us any good. I mean to say that depression is a serious and terible thing, and I am currently watching several lives laid to waste by it. It's not something that I nor anybody else understand, and there's no cure for it. Any treatment that makes good sense usually makes things worse, or, at the very least, is completely useless. Those suffering feel useless and those treating are helpless. And then it gets worse.
The thing that gets me is that it's permanent. There's no do-overs. I don't completely understand the vascular system of a plant, and there's very few deseases that I can identify. But I know that I can plow everything up and start all over again. Threre's no doing that with a brain or a nervous system. You're stuck with what you've got forever, and you end up sitting around wondering how it all works and how to fix it. And there's no solution.
All this has little to do with me, and for that I'm grateful, at least. My biggest problem is a broken bone, and they know how to fix that. I'm just the one who who sits by feeling useless as I listens to others' descriptions of pain. I don't fight it. I don't persue it, not anymore, but I don't fight it. You play the hand you're dealt. If your fields grow wheat, then grow wheat. If you're fields are better suited to rice, then grow rice. If your climate is good for avocados, then plant a few. There's quite a few things these fields are good for, and I didn't choose any of them. I just look after what's here. I painted a WELCOME sign and nailed it to the door when I got here. It's still there. The gutter has a leak, so one side of it is rotten and moldy, but it's still there, and I mean it. I hung up my beads a long time ago, but I haven't exactly walked away from all that. I can't, but, really, I don't want to. I'll dust off the beads, from time to time, for all the good it does, and walk the path once more.

Pipe Dreams

Before I proceed, I want to apologize to all of you for the above title. I had no choice.


The new greenhouse, while neither green nor a house, is well underway and should be functioning shortly. It stands, now, outside in the dark and the rain, awaiting but a few finishing touches from yours truly. I shall scribe the whole process, perhaps in more detail than you really desire, for no other reason than to document this particular greenhouse and to demonstrate that you, too, can do this.
No. There won't be any pictures.
Our project began with a pile of one inch iron pipe (hence the regrettable title.) The pipe started out life as well pipe, was useful in such a capacity for a long time, and then retired. Replaced, like so many things in our world, with cheaper and lighter plastic. I scored the pipe from a well digger who has a seemingly unlimited supply behind his shop. Nevermind its original purpose. Suffice to say that it was piled behind my shop for a few years. I finally got around to doing something with it last week.
Our existing greenhouse, heretofore to be referred to as GH #1, is made of plastic PVC pipe. I rescued it from behind the house of a guy I used to work for, and set it up in my front field. It has served us well for oh so many years, but we've ourgrown it and require additional space. GH #1 is of the traditional half circle design. I sometimes call it a Hemi. This shape can be achieved with iron, as well. The traditional method, as you may know, is to wrap a pipe around a grain silo until the pipe is a half circle.
I have seen many adaquate structures built using this method, but none of them have really grabbed me. They always seem a bit cattywampus, no matter how much care is given to silo selection and subsequent bending. I've also seen greenhouses made from pipes bend with homemade jigs, and these too, are perfectly functional, but never seem to have perfect symmetry. I began to explore alternate designs.
I envisioned a greenhouse built from a series of strait lines, what is sometimes called, in the business, a gothic arch.
I planned a greenhouse built from sticking my iron pipe strait into the ground, where it would rise six feet, then bend 45 degrees. At the pinnacle of the greenhouse roof, this pipe would be coupled to another pipe, which went downward at another 45 degrees, until it, too, was six feet above the ground, where the pipe would be bent again and head straight down into terra firma.
No. I don't have any pictures.
My first challange was to put a forty-five degree angle at the appropriate place along my iron pipe. The plan I devised held to pipe in place and braced against one of the poles of the barn (the poles, locust, are two feet in diameter.) I's chain the tractor to the free end of the pipe, back up until it was at 45 degrees, and viola!
The plan worked surprisingly well. The pipe bent just where I wanted it to, and to a surprising degree of accuracy. One problem was the inherent flex or lack thereof in the pipe. It wanted to spring back to its original shape. I learned that I had to pull the pipe to forty-five degrees, and then pull it just a bit more, to get it to spring back to forty-five.
The second challange was caused by the varying degrees of rust in each individual pipe. They wrapped themselves quite neatly around the locust post, but each successive pipe bent in a slightly different way, depending on where the most amount of rust was. I bent six or eight pipes, and then stacked them all on top of each other, checking for uniformity. Each pipe bent in a slightly different way from all the others. I determined that they were all usuable, that I would be able to piece them all together and play with them all enough to make the structure work, but, still, I was not satisfied. The slight difference in each pipe could make the plastic hang funny, and that was not acceptable to me. It was back to the whole drawing board.

Stay tuned for further installments.

The telephone rang this morning with good news: my body is going to be cut open.
A date for my surgery has been set, the last day of March, and thus concludes a very frustrating and very infuriating process of dealing with doctors and hospitals and insurance companies. Worst of all, insurance companies.
I'll be cut open, my collarbone will be pieced back together, and I'll be stitched back up. Then I'll be one-armed again for a month or so, and then, if all goes according to plan, I'll be back to my old self.
This is not a fate I'd wish on anyone. Not the broken collarbone. That's not too bad. It's the dealing with insurance companies, or, insurance company clerks, that I wouldn't wish on anyone. They make the Forest Service look efficient, but that's another story.
For now, all I'll say is that all the proper forms are filed, all the proper forms have been faxed to the correct number, all the proper phone calls have been made, and everyone involved in this procedure has removed their head from their, well, you understand.
The bad news is the surgery wil take place the day before spring planting is to begin. I'm yet to figure out a way around that. Put some stuff in early, and get some help putting in everything else. I'll need to find away to take care of the zillion other things that need to get taken care of around here, but find a way, I will, I'm sure.
I know need to find something to do with my morning for the rest of the month. I'll miss calling the insurance company every morning and asking them if they've done what they said they were going to do, but, somehow, I feel that I'll be able to find a more useful way to spend my time.

It Was News To Me, Too

God Hates Shrimp!

Flying The Coop

The chickens have flown the coop - at least in the daytime. They won't lay in their nesting boxes anymore - they go to boxes in the packing shed or under the intern house or God knows where. It's a bit of a pain, especially when you want an omelette, but I'm content to view it as yet another sign of Spring. Everything's coming back to life, and nobody wants to lay around in bed.
A new greenhouse is on the way. I spent most of this morning bending some old pipe that S**'s younger brother gave me a few years ago. The site got graded a few days ago. I braved, yesterday, Tunnel Road on a Saturday afternoon for the inevitable Lowe's trip. So, yeah, everything's coming together. Another week - hopefully - and we'll have a place to put all the extra baby plants.
J* got a new car last week. That sentence deserves a few exclamation marks, but nevermind. The whole J* vehicle situation can best be summed up in one short anecdote: circumstances put me near Weaverville late one afternoon, so I offered to get I* from day care. I call J* and she's calls the day care center. The day care person tells I* that his uncle will be picking him up today, and his first question is, "What's wrong with the car?"
Well, now, nothing. She's got something that runs, and will hopefully run for a very, very long time.
We're itchin' for a road trip, but will probably settle on G*'s birthday party next Saturday.
Went to Swannannoa last night for A*'s bus warming party. She's really got the place spruced up nice, and, typically for A*, the grill was full of steaks when I got there. Interesting: she put the bed over the steering wheel. I never would have thought of that.
Two bee hives arrived last week. That's a story in itself, but I don't have the energy for it right now. Suffice to say that I only got stung twice and details will follow.
Potatoes will go in the ground soon.
I spent most of the morning on the phone with my friend I*. He sounded like he's off his medication again, but that might be a good thing.
Finally cleared all the brush from above the upper field last week. I got real lucky: March is about the only time to do it. Earlier than March, and it's too wet to get a tractor up there, later than March, and there just isn't time. I hit it on just the right day: it was dry enough to get a bit of traction, but moist enough that the ground let go of the rose briar roots. Took all day, but it concludes a chore I've been working on every March for years. It was kinds trippy: K* happened by as I was doing it. She hasn't been by the holler in a while, and came by as I was clearing brush. I reminded her that I was hard at the same exact task three years ago, the day that G* was born.
Might even plant some carrots this week.
No, I'm not supposed to be doing all these things with a broken collarbone, but I can't help myself.