Tiny hats, possible ninja porn and thoughts of adoption.

Friends on Parade. Today's office special.



I feel like I’m insane sometimes. I guess mostly because I want to do so many things and I end up having no time to, or if I do have a bit of time, I’m too damned tired to do anything. I just want to check out from the neck-up and just watch a bunch of back-logged DVR recordings of Judge Judy and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist.


It’s hard to pretend the world doesn’t exist though, when you’ve got a vacation rental next door. It’s bad enough that the right side of our property is dominated by a tree-chopping, pot-growing doofus with unending hours of pot-business and a dog that never stops barking. But having the Larson house turn into a full-time vacation rental has been kind of a pain in our ass, and I’m being kind when I say that. We already have an issue with people who come up to our neck of the woods to vacation. People who leave their homes to go camping or to go stay in a vacation cabin don’t really perceive the area they’re occupying as anything more than a recreational venue. They give no heed to the folks who might appear to have to leave at ungodly hours in the morning for a job; a job that is where these visitors likely live, which is a hell of a commute. No, they just want to have fun.

Most of the time, the house will be rented through the management company by a single couple. They pay the base amount and head up. On the way, they get on their phone and start calling every one of their friends and say: “Hey guys, we just got a cabin up in Welches... come on up!” then they go to the slopes at Timberline, and invite the people they meet in line at the lift-ticket line too. By the time they show up after skiing, there are six or seven cars crammed into the driveway, they’re sucking on a hookah outside the front door, laughing it up in the hot tub at 2 AM and having a good ol’ time. We’ve seen sometimes as many as twenty people in a cabin that is supposed to have a maximum occupancy of 8.

The weekend before this long one, we got ninja/martial-arts photo-shoot weirdoes. They arrived in single car first, and then more arrived a bit later. Next thing you know, they’re moving all the furniture outside onto the little porch in the rain, and then took a brief moment to photos in the back of the cabin of their slick-ninja jumps and moves. They were all decked out in their martial-arts togs, from the split-toed socks, armlets and headbands. They were leaping high into the air while their friends snapped photos. As the day wore on, the number of cars increased in the driveway, and they retreated indoors where we could hear “Hyooh” ::thump:: “Hyah!” ::crash:: “HAI!” ::tumble:: “OUF!” ::boom:: all the while the tall windows facing the front of the building flashed from their photographs and glowed from their special lighting—well into night hours. I told my husband that I was becoming increasingly convinced they were shooting ninja porn in there. By 2 AM, two of the cars had left, and by 4AM, they were gone, and the furniture had been put back. Our dogs were stressed and frazzled but were finally able to settle down at 4AM. The next day, the lady who the rental management company pays to clean the place called out to my husband who was working on his bike out back: “Excuse me sir... but do you have any idea what the hell went on in here? Oh my God!” She went on to complain about how awful the task of cleaning this rental was compared to others. Apparently the management company isn’t too good and doesn’t really care if it is a party house. She told my husband that they don’t listen to her when she tells them that more people had to be there than they claimed. They don’t care. The management company is out of Portland, so I imagine they don’t get out here very much. I have fantasies of renting a giant backhoe, sticking the arm and bucket scoop out like a huge fist and punching it right through the Larson cabin. It would be so nice to not have neighbours. People can be such thoughtless jerks. Then I’d turn that backhoe towards the other neighbour and end his pot-operation once and for all too. Ahh, dreams. ::sigh::

June harkens the month of adoption/foster-care seminars. I’m not quite sure what to expect, but we’re signed up and I’ve set it up on my outlook calendar, so for a month, my Tuesday and Thursday evenings are going to be late nights home. They start on the seventh and are twice a week, every week until the end of the month. They start at 6PM and end at 9PM. It will be worth it though. I’m trying not to get too excited. It’s going to be a rough month, squeezing in these late seminars... and we have to take this on with a realistic perspective. But regardless, I can’t help but think of little dresses, murals and children’s songs. I’m such a dork.

I start small. This one needs a bit more height.

I’ve been working on some new hat designs because of the Oregon Regency Society’s first Regency Retreat which will take place in December. You can get more information about that here. I will be holding a hats and bonnets workshop, and I will be not only revamping my existing pattern (it’s time). I’ve learned a lot more since I first made that pattern and it needs to be redone. In addition to that, I’m delving into other designs as well, including a nice riding toque designed after the ’81 Pride & Prejudice hat Lizzie is wearing. I’ve started making my usual miniature mockups. I may just keep my miniature sized hat patterns and sell them for dolls. :) I’m excited about creating new patterns. The first pattern is really popular, so I’m hoping a wider variety of hats will be just as popular too. By the time the retreat comes along, I’m hoping to have at least 4 hat designs to choose from for the participants—all ‘mined’ from period adaptations. I have some great ideas and examples, including Emma’s (Beckinsdale) triangle hat/bonnet and a twisted square hat.

I now have to put together some Spongebob characters out of polymer clay for an S-II cake project. I can’t forget, I promised her these by Friday. I’ll post pics of them when I’m done.

Today's office special is just another of my random whatevers that came to me as I poised my hand to sketch. Middle monster came first, then I added the girl to join him in his cheerful march, and then I thought, hey, we need a smiling fluff-ball. We always need smiling fluff-balls bouncing along as we march. Anyway, have a lovely week (it’s a short one! YAY!)

By the way,  I am stalled at 16 pounds this week, I'm afraid.  Too much 'falling off the wagon' and too little water!

Happy Tuesd... Oh nevermind.

Fastest Office Special in History. Don't ask about the tadpole.
Just had 'one of those moments?'

Sixteen pounds have left my body... can you believe it? I can’t. I don’t see it AT ALL, except for two pairs of jeans that were already moderately loose on me that now fall down my bum and reveal my fissure de plombier—most irritating.

WewHew!

I’ve been not-so-bloggy lately. Not so anything to be honest. It’s been an inordinately stressful past two weeks. I learned on a first-hand basis exactly how much the local news media can blow things completely out of proportion and incite unnecessary fear in people. Pretty soon they’ll be running headlines like: Playground of Death... the culprit... GRAVITY! Your child can be critically injured in playgrounds! Or Fatality on the Fly... how mosquitoes could potentially be your DOOM! I mean seriously...? I refuse to watch local network news anymore because what they report is so completely separate from what the truth is. Yikes. Anyway... suffice it to say, the incident that brought the news media down on my company was not a shade as bad as they painted it... but what can we do? Oh well.

What’s new? Well... nothing much. I’ve been dying to sew but my BFF (who doesn’t like me anymore because I haven’t seen hide or hair of her for WEEKS) is holding Mathilda (my dress-form) hostage. I haven’t gotten the ransom note yet, but I wager I’ll find one like this one on my windshield very soon:

I want to drape the back of my new gown on her. Damnit. There is NO way I’m hauling my big butt two hours down and two hours back on a precious weekend, nor am I going to get home at nine PM on a weeknight... I’m too TIRED. So I’ll have to be creative I guess. My body is changing shape so I have to allow for some flexibility because the event I’m making it for is in July (although there’s one in June I’m considering rushing the project for—a picnic at Delaford that involves the picking of strawberries which sounds divine.

I finally got everything back up and running on the ORS and RSA websites. Holy crap! What craziness. It’s nice to know that the group is in good hands. And we have events up again! Finally! I’m super excited for S-II’s retreat! Yay! Check out the events page for details.

Satan is still Satan (for those of you who don’t read my blog regularly, I refer to my mother as Satan). She is quite upset that none of her daughters were willing to drop everything for a super-short-notice trip to Puerto Rico to celebrate her birthday (in spite of the fact that she habitually forgets all of ours every year). “You don’t have any vacation time? What if I pay for the tickets?” Umm... No. If I’m going to use my precious vacation time, it’s not going to be doing anything even remotely involving my HM (High Maintenance) mother, that’s for sure. It wouldn’t *be* a vacation simply because she’s part of it. No way, José. A vacation for me constitutes going where *we* want, with whom we want. Too many times in my life I’ve been invited places on other peoples’ terms and ended up being a at their mercy and becoming housekeeper, caterer and babysitter while everyone went on with their normal lives.

The last vacation I had on my own terms (to some degree) was a trip back to Europe in 1992 when I did a 12-day ‘round’ with my good friend at the time, Catherine, who was French and was married to an American. We flew into Charles de Gaul, from there we hopped the train to Brussels, then Luxembourg, then Metz, then we went to the Alsace region (and went into Germany for a day) and then mosied our way back towards Paris to fly home. She visited family and friends, so I was a bit at her mercy, but it was still fun and we had the freedom to stop and wander around towns of those old-style daub and wattle, cantilevered medieval buildings, drink white wine at local wineries and dine with friends. ::sigh:: I am so due for another vacation like that! I’d really like to show my husband Bretagne and Normandy (and let him see the Omaha and Utah Beach graveyards and Mont St. Michel first-hand)... take him up to Scotland, visit Denmark (for him to see old friends from VESTAS) and Norway to Belgium and Holland, and then down to Italy. That would be so nice. Someday. Someday.

A weighty whopper of a Wednesday

This office special was inspired by the
brief glimpse of blue sky we saw yesterday.

Hello all! I’m in a good mood for a change. Go figure. I’ve been so grumpy lately I’m not even bearable to be around I imagine. Poor hubby. :0D

I’ve finally hit the thirteen-pound mark. Things are moving again, I guess. Water is the key. There are a few things I am learning about this process:

1) it’s easy to think it’s not working. You’re doing everything right, eating the set amount of daily calories and you’re not losing weight... sometimes it’s just a matter of making a minor adjustment and to keep plugging away; but I can still see why so many people just walk away from the program. Plateauing can be disheartening. Luckily I have a wonderful support system in my hubby (who weighed in at 29.4lb mark last Wednesday), so he kept me from being discouraged.

2) This is a healthy way to lose weight. It’s not the way everything *thinks* you should lose weight, and it’s not a fast way to lose weight. The general consensus is diet and exercise and it’ll drop away. That’s what they’re pimping on ‘The Biggest Loser’... working the fatties into jiggling mounds of sweat and indignity like they’re at torture-boot camp. That is not my cup of tea. I’m not a jock; I’ve never been a jock. I used to find every excuse in the book to avoid going to PE class or participate in it, and gaze wonderingly at the kids that would bounce around like over-caffeinated psychos and run the whole mile and think ... wow, that person is a complete lunatic. It’s just never been my thing. It’s heartening to know that I can still lose weight and not be forced to run around like an over-caffeinated psycho.

3. This ‘lifestyle change’ (you are not supposed to refer to Weight Watchers as a diet you see) does one incredible thing... it makes you appreciate food a lot more. You take a lot for granted when you’re not really thinking about what you’re eating. You just go ‘yum’ and cram it into your mouth. But when you are limited to a certain daily allotment of calories, how you choose to consume those calories becomes the challenge. You aren’t deprived by any means on this program. You can eat whatever you want on Weight Watchers, but if you decide to go to McDs and stuff a greasy burger down your throat, you might not be able to eat much else for the rest of the day. So you end up avoiding these things so you can eat more for less so to speak. You avoid bad things like burgers and fries and red meat and pizza and chocolate mostly because you want to not feel hungry all day after you’ve satisfied that yen. You start making things you like with better ingredients, leaner products, less oil, etc. You don’t actually realize it until afterwards as you look into your pantry and fridge and sort of take stock of what’s changed about their contents. Things you love just seem to taste better, it’s more of a treat and an indulgence when you have to earn it.

4. Sometimes you fall off the wagon (which you are allowed to do... you have a weekly ‘wagon tumbling’ allotment of 49 points to do naughty things on. We hardly ever use those points but it’s nice to know they’re there for holidays and such). It’s okay. Just pick yourself up off the ground, dust yourself off, and start fresh the next day. It’s all good.

BUT you don’t *have* to fall off the wagon. You can do naughty things and still be *on* the wagon. There are all these little things out there for the ‘lifestyle changers’ that hit that naughty spot. There are these little slider burgers that you get with soft ooey cheddar on them for five points each, which hubby and I will indulge in when we’re thinking about burgers. We count out and oven-bake fries when we want to be naughty. Lean Cuisine makes these itty bitty dessert-plate sized pizzas, and Dan came home last night with these wafery dessert things from Skinny Cow... Oooooh my Goddd they are SOOO GOOD. Just eating those little indulgences are like partaking in the ambrosia of the Gods when you don’t eat them habitually. That one little 100 calorie bar was like heaven in chocolate form. Four points of heaven. It's a significant possibility that those little chocolate bars are the reason for my good mood today. Who knows?

That's a pretty big chunk.
I've dropped a little over two of 'em.

5) It’s working. I’m losing weight. It’s not ghost weight, or water-retention fluctuations... I’m actually losing poundage. It’s pretty astonishing after feeling so defeated by it. And I’m not starving myself, for putting myself through diets that yo-yo my weight, like when I did the Atkins and then gained back the 40lbs I lost + 10 more. I *am* challenged by other factors, my PCOD for instance messes with my cholesterol and my insulin levels and makes losing weight all the harder, which is a pain in my butt. But even with that and my plateau weeks included, I am averaging 1.8lbs lost a week. That’s nothing to snort at. Even my boss said something to me about it. “If I may ask, how much weight have you lost?” he asked, but before I could fully reply he said: “15 pounds, huh? About 15? It looks good.” GLOW! I’m noticing it a teeny bit now. My jeans are looser, for one; and my double chin seems to have receded by a smidgen (I could be imagining it). I don’t have a goal weight; I have a goal ‘appearance’. I’ll stop lowering my calories when I get to the point where I can look in the mirror and say: “Okay, I’m good with this.” Then I’ll go into maintenance mode and hopefully stay there. I really, really, really want to sew myself a regency gown and have it look like it’s supposed to look on me.

When I lived in Belgium, weight wasn’t ever really an issue. I’m not saying I was skinny, I wasn’t. I was healthy. And when I went through puberty, I was curvy. I was size 10 in 7th grade and I had D cups. I was DD by the time I was in ninth grade. But I wasn’t overweight by any means. I only gained weight when I moved to the US, and I think that has a lot to do with the amount of calories that are served per meal, the type of food and believe it or not, the frequency and time of meals. I ate 4 meals each day before. Breakfast (light), a huge lunch, goûter, which we had at around 4PM and it was something as simple as a tartine (a slice of bread with something on it... pate, cold meats, cheese, Nutella and some cornichons or something) and dinner which wasn’t even close to the proportions it is here. Lunch was closer to the dinners served here. You’d have soup, then a plate with meat, starch and veggies and salad. I ate a lot. I know I did. I like food too much; and I also ate bad things, like tons of fries with mayonnaise, and waffles, and chocolate of all sorts. But I never had a weight problem until I moved to the states. I gained 40 pounds in the first three months here (it was also partly culture-shock and depression that contributed to that weight gain... I hated it here when I first arrived and went into this weird state of fugue. I’d left everything that meant anything to me behind; friends, horses, a life, so my heart was broken and I had nothing in common with this crazy mall-riddled country).

I'm amazed how well the detail is maintained in the printing process. Exciting!

Aaaaanyway... MY SPOONFLOWER FABRICS ARE HERE! They are SO cute. OMG! I had to scale down the graphic size on the ‘Cameo’ one. As you can see in the picture, it’s pretty giant. I scaled it down from 12x18 to 7x10ish. Hopefully it won’t be so ginormous.

This scale might work for a bedspread or curtains or something.

I also have another special project underway. I found some beautiful voile-like cotton with a delicate roll-pattern on it. So I have bought a number of other things and plan to make myself a new gown for the Pittock Mansion picnic in July. I have been accessorizing as well, and am so thrilled with a few of my finds. But these will not be revealed until July 31, and I will also be posting a project journal on the costume piece, something I haven’t done in a while (this is the first sewing I’ve done in about a year... the last gown I made was for Faren so she could go to the Fox Hunt). It’s weird to feel excited about costumes again. It’s been forever.

My mom brought me this item when she came for Mother’s Day on Sunday:

Those bedazzled sails are just my sorta thing. ::ugh::

It’s obvious she put a lot of thought into what I like and pays attention to what I wear because it’s *just my style* ::eyeroll:: What’s worse is she said to me once again: “I got this for you. I’m sure it will fit, it’s huge.” And the reason I waste my time with her? The jury is still out on that one.

A wordy update and a diatribe....



Because every post, regardless of its subject should be preceeded
by images of Alan Rickman in all his sexy hawtness (and I didn't draw anything today).

I’ve plateaued at 12 pounds so far, damnit! I’m apparently not drinking enough water daily, so I’ve decided to discipline myself more about that. My husband hit 29.4 lbs in weight loss this week. I’m so proud of him it hurts! I want that 30lb mark too! Jealous! Damned men and their fast weight loss.

These past couple of weeks, my emotional craziness has tempered itself a bit, but the hot flashes have arrived and seem to be here to stay. Holy hell. I went to the fabric store with some friends on Monday, and I had this horrible hot flash that not only made me feel as if I was radiating heat like a nuclear fuel rod at Fukushima, but also, my entire thought process sort of short-circuited and it was impossible to focus on even making basic conversation. At the check through, I was fanning myself and sweating like a hog and the lady asked me if I was alright. I told her about the Lupron treatment, and she said: “Oh, my... how wonderful, you get to experience menopause TWICE, what a privilege,” she laughed. I didn’t think that was really funny at the time, but since my brain was in short-circuit mode, I just stood there fanning myself and staring at her blankly until I realized she was asking me for money.

I got my second Lupron shot yesterday. Month 2. Yay. Bring on the hot-flashes. ::urgh::

Last weekend hubby and I went into home impro-mode. We had bought some flooring material sometime back, and we decided it was time to install it in the bedroom and I thought, hell, if we’re taking everything out of the room, why not slap up a coat of paint too? So Saturday I rolled out a layer of really awesome coating paint (BAER Premium; that stuff ROCKS. I may sound like a cheesy commercial but as an experienced room-painter I declare its quality now!) while the rug was still in. I did not feel any remorse when I tracked paint on the floor and dripped it here and there. It was all going in the trash anyway.

Simon managed to get a blue dot of paint on his forehead and to also step on the lid of the paint can and make blue footprints into the kitchen. Once I got the majority of the painting done (everything but the cutting-in), we proceeded to tear up the carpet in our bedroom and O...... M...... G....... Carpet is GROSS. I ... for as long as I live, VOW never to install wall-to-wall carpeting anywhere ever again. It’s no wonder we woke up every morning congested and sniffly. It probably didn’t help that the previous owner left the old padding underneath the new carpet, and it was SO GROSS! It looked like someone had died on it and lay there for a few weeks before discovery. And the smell... ::gag:: It probably didn’t help that my mom’s dog saturated a corner of it with pee, which my dog Simon decided would be a wonderful tradition to continue. Luckily it and our subsequent scrubbing with Nature’s Little Miracle didn’t soak into the sub-flooring (thank GOD). The whole thing was just all out icky. I washed my hands like I had OCD for the rest of the day, and had to scrub the dust from it from my face and hair. We pulled it up, cut it into strips, rolled them into little tubes and crammed them into garbage bags. The padding ::gag:: we also tore up and garbage-bagged for the dump. N.E.V.E.R...A.G.A.I.N.

Underneath was a very plain wooden plank floor that was painted brown, with knotholes that were covered up with flattened tin cans secured to the floor by nails hammered in all around the edges. The bay window was floored in cheap particle-wood sheeting. So we scraped up the staples and other debris (apparently the carpeters didn’t mind just spitting out their gum onto the floor, leaving their cutting blades and didn’t bother to sweep up all manner of dust and dirt) and swept it all up. It took a long time to clear off that floor. I wiped it down with a bleach/water solution and we put down the thick plastic moisture barrier first before we laid down the foam base on which the floating laminate floor would sit. Before laying the plastic, I quickly, with hubby’s help, cracked out the cutting in on the high-areas of the painting, and we plastered holes and such.

Hubby spent most of Sunday on the floor locking together pieces of laminate flooring. I helped in whatever capacity I could, but in about four hours he had the bedroom floor pretty much done. We haven’t put in the new baseboards yet (or bought them at this point either), but who cares. We put the bed back in there and our dressers. We’re waiting to install some cabinets we also bought to provide much-needed storage in our teeny house. We’re missing some components and are waiting on IKEA to get their sh*t together and get the parts into inventory. Once that’s done, our room could be magazine cute—except the existing closet which still lacks doors, but that will happen someday. I even found some lovely dark fabric (for privacy) that has the same dark brown of the floor and a similar tone of blue to match the walls. I have some IKEA track system stuff to hang up so I can have a background of sheers and then the heavy drapes in front of those to close when we don’t want our pot-head-alcoholic idiot neighbour looking in our window (we were woken up last night to screaming and laughing from next door as his drunken, high friends stumbled out of his house and into their remarkably loud ramshackle pickup trucks and trundled off to wherever they crawled out of. My levels of dislike for this neighbour have been escalating for a while now, but when he cut down half of a cluster of maples straddling our property on Sunday, my feelings graduated to something akin to hate... MORON!), Ugh...

Anyway... It’s so nice to walk into the bedroom now. It’s so much more... sanitary-feeling. The problem is, however, now the rest of the floors in the house look even crappier than they already are and I am now wishing we could do the whole freaking house in the laminate (except the bathroom which I’d like to tile in ceramic and take out the tub and install a nice roomy standup shower instead). But finances are finances and even if the flooring is reasonably priced, it’s still requiring money we just don’t have... so I will have to content myself with the kyute bedroom for now. ::grumble::. I’d rather not go the stupid route most other people would and get ourselves neck-deep in credit card debt; it’s the sort of stupidity that put this economy in the state that it’s in. So responsible=shitty floors for now and no closet doors.

And onto more serious things...

So Bin Laden is finally partying it up with his great harem of virgins in the sky. I confess, as welcome as this news was to me, I was kind of a bit sickened I have to say, after Obama made his speech and the cameras turned onto the crowds of people waving flags and having a good ol’ time in the streets and landmarks. The image of it brought right back to the morning of September 11, when I stood before my TV frozen in horror and the international news broadcast images of people in the Middle East waving flags and having a good ol’ time in the streets celebrating the act of terrorism and deaths of what turned out to be 3,000 people. It was horrifying then, and I was horrified now. What REALLY astounds me is that the age of those people dancing and cheering at our landmarks are kids in their twenties. They were just rug rats when the whole thing went down... So I imagine they didn’t see how awful it really was. Either way, it was just so... unclassy. I guess is the way to describe it.

I remember 9/11 with an astonishing clarity. I was already in a depressed rut and when my home co-owner phoned me that morning to tell me to turn on my TV. I switched it on just in time to see the second plane hit and I was immediately and completely drawn into the spiral of misery that the whole thing became—my rut became a chasm I could not climb out of. I did not leave the television for days, I am not exaggerating. I lay on the sofa bawling as they broadcast images of people wandering around the devastation holding pictures of their loved ones, begging for someone to tell them they’d seen them alive somewhere. I was morbidly riveted to the dog searches, the eye-witness stories and could not look away from the footage of people jumping out of windows in desperation to escape the heat of the fires. It was a dreadfulness that took forever to get over and I didn’t even lose anyone in the tragedy. I cannot imagine the horror of the families affected by this tragedy. That event is what spiraled me down into one of the darkest moments of my life; a moment I almost did not survive. If it weren’t for my dog Eddie giving me a reason to get up every day and the intervention of a boyfriend who was bewildered by my utter depression and frightened for my safety, I don’t know where I’d be today. I began therapy then (was nearly committed) and began the job of learning to cope with what seemed to me, a pointless and hopeless existence.

It was impossible for me to quantify the reasons why anyone would do that. I couldn’t bear to live in a world where there were people who would be willing to harm so many others for ideological reasons alone. It was too bleak for me to cope with. Seeing other people celebrating the event like it was a wonderful accomplishment drove me further into depression. There was nothing redeemable about humanity to me. I was sick by it. I sometimes still feel that way. Cruelty can sometimes send me into periods of despair now and again. Survival for me is a matter of just forcing myself to face the world and its daily brutalities in hopes of finding some of the positive things in between.

Surviving depression at that level is not an easy task. Those who’ve never been through it cannot really understand how completely powerless a person can be against the wash of chemicals your brain is guided by, and a lack of dopamine can manifest itself into some pretty terrible things. I can say I’ve been dealing with it sans medication and on my own with some measure of healthiness for about six years. But it doesn’t take much to pull me right back to memories of that fugue; and seeing those kids wooing and yaying, waving little flags, dancing around in exuberance at the death of a mass-murderer, giving his expiration WAY more attention that the man deserves, I felt it for a second... that horrid darkness. I felt like humanity would not ever be capable of bettering itself and rising above the animalistic behaviours that seem to define us. Those kids seemed just as awful as the people in the Middle East celebrating the events of 9/11. I’m sorry, but that’s what I felt. 1 mass-murdering terrorist vs 3,000 innocents; none of those deaths should evoke joy on anyone’s part. The fact that it does makes me so very, very sad.

Anyway, that’s my view on it. /diatribe.