Weeknotes 17 July

Forgot to write weeknotes last week! I'll have to come back to em. Anyway this was a busy week. Plenty to get around to.

Elvet Striders

One of the things I neglected to write about last week was that I joined Elvet Striders, a running club in Durham. I've never been part of a running club before, but I've gotten bored and frustrated running the same routes round Wingate on my own—so here I am. I attended my first training session with them (riding down on the YBR) on Monday—an interval session on the track at Maiden Castle. Track running is... different! It's a significantly more mental game; breaking your run down into segments (the curve, the straight, the finish line, individual laps) helps you get out of your head and right into the business of spinning your legs and breathing. Keen to take what I've learned back onto the railway paths around our house.

Middlesbrough FE

On Wednesday, I attended Middlesbrough Front End, a small web development conference held in (you guessed it) Middlesbrough. Locals will tell you that Middlesbrough is rubbish but I've never had a bad experience there.

This year's conference was held in the basement of the Town Hall, in a big old iron-girder-ed single room, with the speakers at the front and assorted catering at the back. A lot of conferences of this size and cost tend towards the homegrown: local speakers presenting some kind of web-dev-adjacent case study to plug their digital marketing agencies, one-man-bands logging into their clients' admin panels to update WordPress live.

Middlesbrough Front End was categorically not this kind of experience. The MCs were genial and enthusiastic, the speakers were high-profile and came with exciting talks that I (mostly) hadn't seen before, and the conference was well-paced, with plenty of opportunity to chat with the speakers and with other attendees. The only other conference of this sort that I'd been to was State of the Browser back in 2022, and while that was a lovely trip, this had such a better sense of community and togetherness. They made the decision to re-attend next year a no-brainer.

Stray observation: the post-conference social introduced me to another one of Boro's gems: Play Brew, a craft brewery-slash-taproom in an industrial estate by the A66. I thought you only got little homegrown spots like that in big cities. Up the Boro &c &c.

Bicycle tune-up

Late last week, I brought my bike (the pedal one, the Dawes Galaxy) over to a neighbour of ours who looks after bikes to investigate a clicky bottom bracket. It turns out that the bracket itself was shot, the bearings totally worn down and bound to seize one of these days. Over the weekend he swapped those bearings out & lo & behold: no clicking. Pleased, I returned the bike to him earlier in the week for a full go-over and tune-up.

When I retrieved it on Thursday, I found that he'd not only re-torqued all of the bolts, replaced the cables, un-bent the derailleur hanger, re-indexed the shifters, trued and dished the wheels, adjusted spoke tension, and replaced a seized front brake—but that he'd taken just about every unscrewable component off the bike and put it through his parts cleaner. The bike gleamed. The chrome shimmered in the sun. The derailleur clicked back and forth with verve and alacrity. The frame (scuffs and scratches aside) looked brand-spanking. In a high gear, the chain sang. The bike oozed strength and character. I was gobsmacked. But I was well pleased, since I had ample opportunity to open it up on the road as the weekend approached.

Castle Howard triathlon

Friday afternoon we packed the bike into the car with weekend supplies and raced down to Castle Howard for an open-water swimming orientation class at Castle Howard, south of the North York Moors. A long-awaited weekend had arrived: I was participating in a triathlon.

Orientation was straightforward but helpful: a quick introduction to getting into and out of a wetsuit, acclimatisation techniques for cold-water swimming, sighting, and a tour of the transition area. The instructor was helpful but dawdled a little bit, and I had to drop off early to check into the lovely Burythorpe House for dinner and a stay the night before the race itself. A wonderful steak dinner and a couple pints of dark, room-temperature beer would prove ample pre-tri nutrition.

I struggled to get more than a light doze the night before the race. Nerves kept me half-awake, half-hallucinating race scenarios as the summer sun rose at like 5 am. I woke and scarfed a light breakfast of porridge before checking out and hurrying down to Castle Howard for registration. A thin drizzle soaked slowly through our clothes as we waited for my wave to be called (Wave 4, the last (and slowest) wave of the sprint-distance triathloners).

When I was called, I stickered up my (gleaming) bike and made my way into transition. Changed out of jeans and hoodie and into my wetsuit and swimming cap, double-checking that my shoes and race belt (with bib attached) were easily accessible for when I made my way back up the hill after the swim, and did a couple laps of transition to try and warm up. Hands clammy and shivering faintly with nerves, I followed the rest of Wave 4 down the hill to the boathouse by the lake.

We were briefed and then it was into the lake with us, yellow swim caps bobbing in the muddy water. Afloat with 50 others, you don't see much on the water, eyes only a few centimetres above the surface. Underwater, I saw even less: a hundred bare feet had stirred up the slurry at the bottom of the lake and made even my hands ahead of me invisible through the murk.

Before I knew it they were calling fifteen seconds, and then five. Then the race was on. I swam a few strokes of head-up front crawl and tried to navigate around my competitors, but couldn't find a rhythm. Whenever I tried to get my head down I'd drift into someone or start wandering in the right direction; without a black line on the floor it's hard to swim in a straight line. I'd get my head up to sight and lose track of my breathing and start sputtering in the loose surf. I swam over a number of anonymous legs.

By the 100m buoy the pack started to thin out. Passing another swimmer, I found myself with a bit of a gap ahead, and got down to business. Before too long, I'd arrived at the turn-around point, and after a brief mixup with which buoys to swim between and which to swim around, I was on my way back to the shore. Near the shore I passed one more swimmer and caught a mouthful of dredged-up lake slurry, and then clambered through the muck onto the boardwalk and up the hill towards the transition area.

I peeled my wetsuit off as I hiked it up the hill to transition, passing a couple of competitors on the way. My kit was soaked in the strengthening drizzle, but I threw on my shoes sockless and starting running my bike towards the road. Into the saddle and legs pumping into the wind: I was off. I'd practiced the ride a few weeks earlier so knew what to expect, but my neighbour's handiwork made the bike a pleasure to ride through the windy, drizzly countryside. Shifting immaculately as the rolling hills came and went, I passed other riders on the climbs, and was re-passed on the descents. No doubt my big unaerodynamic trunk on my big upright frame was to blame.

Not much to report from the ride; it was soon over and I was out onto two laps of trails through Ray Wood. Running is probably my strongest discipline, but after 80 minutes of all-out pushing, I could barely manage a hobble for the first lap. When I came upon a bloke I'd met the night before at orientation, I couldn't help but give him a cheery "Well done!" and a bit of beta for the course ahead. Soon the two laps were over and I was trundling down the last drop towards the castle, making a right turn onto the last straight and over the line. I was garlanded with a heavy medal and directed to a tent with more gummies and bananas than I could possibly eat in a lifetime.

The event wasn't without its tragedy, however: somewhere along the course, my wedding ring came off my finger and was lost. I avail-lessly retraced my steps up the hill from the swim to transition, and scoured the transition zone. It wasn't a particularly fancy wedding ring, nor an expensive one, nor handed down through the family—it's not the physical ring I was attached to, but the fact of wearing it, that I'm proud of. Missing it from my finger makes me feel awful.

Meeting folks

I think I've met more new people in the past couple of weeks than I had in the three years leading up to COVID. I'm talking real-life people, as opposed to the faces in squares that show up on my computer screen to talk shop on a daily basis.

But I'm rediscovering the joy of chat with people about whatever's going on, or what they did on the weekend, or what they've got planned, or about common interests, like bicycles or running or web development or being nervous about doing a triathlon. This simple pleasure is probably very obvious to a lot of people, but I'd sort of lost track of it over COVID, when the only person I really had to talk to was Sam. Sam's a really wonderful person, and I'd still count myself lucky if she was the only person I could talk to for the rest of my life—but getting to know people, and just chatting, is returning to me a sort of excitement in people that I'd forgotten.

Almost nothing at all happened in March 2023.

Broke my hand

Well, that's not strictly true. At the beginning of the month, going on a run with Sam and Ghyll in Weardale, I took a tumble on some ice, landed on my knuckles, and broke my hand. As far as breaks go, I was told that it was basically barely broken at all. Still: broken enough to warrant a cast for 4 weeks, immobilising my two last fingers on my right hand and effectively bringing my outdoor career to a halt.

I struggled to cope for the first couple of days, but over the first week found workarounds for most of the important stuff: typing on a keyboard, putting on clothes, cleaning myself. No running, though, and no cycling; ideally no sweating at all. Measures in place to prevent the cast getting wet: an eye on the typically drizzly spring skies when taking Ghyll for a walk, plastic bags on my arm when taking a shower. Clothes with baggy enough sleeves to fit the unwieldy thing without tugging putting pressure on my immobilised fingers.

The first week was the slowest: the first night with the cast on, the second night, the first couple of days, the first weekend, a full seven days! By the end of the first week I'd gotten so antsy that I built a web application for tracking the passage of time with progress bars. I'd check it two or three times a day. Healthy coping strategy this was decidedly not, but it did help pass the time.

Besides not being able to partake in my favourite activities, the worst part was a sort of phantom-limb adjacent sensations I got every few days or so, where I'd feel that the two immobilised fingers were being contorted into all sorts of arcane positions: pinky bent backwards, ring finger twisted underneath, bent in half. After a few weeks I could sort of wiggle the fingers a couple millimetres within the cast to restore normal(-ish) feeling, but it was uncanny.

After three weeks or so I could tell that, deep inside the cast, bone was starting to fuse again. Intra-cast wiggling would trigger a bit of pressure around the break but gone were the sharp pangs whenever I accidentally bumped the cast up against something. I was forewarned against itching and an awful smell, but neither reared its head except on occasion (once prompted by accidentally spilling a bit of milk down into my palm while emptying the recycling).

The cast comes off on 5 April, which as far as I'm concerned can't come soon enough.

Ghyll

Ghyll's well into his adolescent years (months?) at this point and he's as big a bundle of energy as he's ever been—but nowadays, when we take him off the lead, he's quite content to sprint off into the woods or into the fields and poke his head out only occasionally to check that we're still there. I'm told it's normal behaviour for a dog his age—he's only 10 months old!—but it unnerves me.

Still, it hasn't so far eventuated in catastrophe. Although we did have a close call with a sheep and two lambs in Kielder Forest—where sheep aren't expected; it's a managed forest after all—when Ghyll got a little too curious for his own good. He's remarkably well-tempered, always kind, never aggressive at all, always willing to play and loving to be chased around—but sometimes his curiosity gets the better of other dogs or sheep.

Reading

I've been doing really well with the reading goal I set for myself at the beginning of the year; Goodreads reports that as of the end of the month I'm four books ahead of schedule. Reading seems to be one of the few things that I can do reliably with a cast on, so I've spent most of my free time with my nose in a book. As a result, I finished 5 books in March:

• Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, 5/5
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, 3/5
• Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, 5/5
• The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 4/5
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers, 4/5

Great books in general, though the Russian ones were a bit heavy. Life and Fatein particular feels like required reading for anyone interested in the Soviet Union.

Cycling

Sam and I completed a trip over the North York Moors by bike at the beginning of the month. We'd planned to ride from Kildale in the north all the way down to Kirbymoorside via the trails, but halfway there we decided that we just weren't making good time and headed back to Kildale via the roads. A couple of 20% grade climbs later, we were back at the car and drove down to Kirbymoorside (an unqualified lovely little town!) for a stop at the George and Dragon overnight.

No more cycling after that in March for obvious reasons.

February 2023

Not having the full use of my hand at the beginning of March prevented me from writing a proper monthnotes for February 2023, so here's a quick rundown.

Nabbed a couple of Wainwrights (Longlands, Brae Fell) on the back of Skiddaw at the beginning of the month; the rain was relentless but Ghyll went for a serious run and slept for the better part of the following couple of days.

Long ride with a friend from Newcastle, including a trip under the Tyne through the pedestrian tunnel and a long stint on an industrialised dual carriageway north of the city. Punctuated by lots of cake and coffee, which makes it all worth it.

Participated in a practice duathlon hosted by the Cleveland Triathlon Club; finished in 1:04. Hopes to eke out a sub-hour effort were dashed at about the exact same time as my hand was.

Sold the Volvo C30 that we had previously and bought a Skoda Fabia estate, which fits our lifestyle significantly better than the Volvo did. Breaking my hand at the beginning of March prevented me from writing a proper Monthnotes for February 2023, but We got a secondhand bike rack for the back and a dog fence so Ghyll can stretch out in the boot on drives. It's a terrific little car.

The future

Daylight Saving Time had started and what a difference it makes! Suddenly there's plenty of light after work; suddenly the sun is out three days a week; suddenly the world seems wide open and ready for exploring! I sit dourly on the deck out back with my cast on, stewing in the sunshine and the warmth with the budding bushes all around me.

Sam and I are working on plans for the summer. We have a busy April ahead of us and a May full of sunny weekends just waiting to be filled up with adventure.

Struggling to account for October. It went by in a blur and punctuated by the full stop of Daylight Saving Time coming to an end and the darkness descending on us like a black wing at 4pm.

State of the Browser 2022

Took a trip down to London to attend State of the Browser 2022—the first real conference^[1] I've ever attended! And it blew my expectations out of the water.

I don't think I could ever live down in London but I sure as heck love to visit. There's a deep-down part of me that gets a secret thrill out of riding the subway, born probably in the Metro in Montreal on the one day a year I'd ride it with my dad to Île Notre Dame to see the Formula 1, the Yellow Line doglegging off the side of the map and the well-worn doors around the Jean-Drapeau metro station blustery and smelling of cigarettes. People moving anonymously through their day, looking conspicuously at anything but each other. Hell of a time. I love to be a silent particle in a crowd of people all heading off to somewhere or other with purpose and élan. I love the sense that there's something happening everywhere. I love a good city, and I love a good subway.

Enough about the Chyube—The State of the Browser 2022 was held at the stunning Barbican Centre, a massive architectural statement indicating just what heights Brutalism can rise to when you let it converse with nature a little bit. Unmistakably 1970s but feeling fresh and modern and well-built, capable of outlasting us all, already half-overgrown. The conservatory in particular was worth the visit.

But the talks were the star of the show: a heady dose of web standards and JavaScript conservatism, which is just about the only conservatism that I can stand. When you spend too much time on Twitter, it feels like every question posed is answered with a hefty dollop JavaScript—a new build library or a new framework or a new metaframework eking out a soupçon of performance for only an extra megabyte or two. JavaScript is where the conversation happens.

But it was good to get together with 150 or so other folks to spend a little time coming back to terms with how powerful the browser has become in the past few years. I wasn't around for the Bad Old Days, but browsers have become eminently more capable even since I started in 2017. To hear from Bruce Lawson that early Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator actually implemented entirely different specifications was absolutely wild. Andy Bell, Michelle Parker, and Jhey Tompkins both covered the modern ways that developers can leverage modern CSS to build robust interfaces that scale across a broad range of devices. Sophie Koonin and Alistair Shepherd both presented on creative approaches to design leveraged by modern APIs, and Henri Helvetica put our work into the context of the environmental and performance impact that an overreliance on JavaScript can yield. We capped off the day with a couple of heady stouts from a nearby pub, the kind of exciting beer that you really only get in the city.

Cycling

Started the month out with a bang by going on a big 30 km loop near Lanchester with maybe a little bit more vertical than I was strictly ready for.

Humbled, I took to eBay to find anything in the way of bike components that could plausibly make climbing easier. I came back with a new chain, a derailleur with a longer cage, an absolutely minuscule front chainring, and a new freewheel (which didn't end up fitting: oh well). A bit of wrenching (and copious cleaning) later, my bike felt more capable, slicker, more tightly coiled. Ready to spring up a hill with nary a sweat broken.

Spent the rest of the month chasing distance around the notoriously flat part of Northumberland just north of Newcastle. Enjoyed a cannoli in Morpeth; cycling really is about the finer things in life. In November it'll be back up into the hills.

Motorbike

At the beginning of the month I rode the bike down to Hartlepool for some candy at the shops, and while I was in Asda, some kids strolled by and tried to steal the bike. I'd put the steering lock on to prevent just such rascals from touching my stuff but, unperturbed, they put all of their weight into the handlebars in an attempt to break the steering lock off and make off with it. Japanese engineering won out in the end and the steering lock made the bike un-make-off-able, but a bent handlebar was the reward for my foolishness. I rode home safely but with arms all skew-whiff.

Nevermind—lesson learned, and anyway we're resourceful folks. We found a replacement set of bars on eBay for pretty cheap, so off with the old and on with the new. Too late, we found that the holes for locating the switches were all in the wrong place, but we took a chisel to the pegs on the switches and made do. I suspect that the handlebars are generics but made to spec for one of the knockoff YBRs coming out of China.

While we had the bike in parts, we did an oil change as well: remarkably easy, and ery clean inside: Yamaha builds bikes like tanks.

Music

Saw Destroyer and Bon Iver; I've written elsewhere about that but suffice it to say that I wish live music was a regular part of my life. Maybe when we've got a bit more time.

Health

After having blood drawn regularly every six months for the past 8 or 9 years while monitoring my thyroid hormone levels, I was finally put on a light course of thyroxin, and it's made a massive change for the better. The skin on my face has always been a little bit dry and flaky, and it's been getting worse with time; before being medicated I could barely go a full day after a nice hot exfoliating shower before my forehead started to litter white specklets on the pillowcase. But now, it's two or three days before I start peeling. It's not perfect, but it's a definite improvement.

Maybe more importantly, though, my tolerance for cold has absolutely skyrocketed. I spent most of last winter wrapped in multiple sweaters, under lap blankets, hauling the duvet around the house, trying to hold onto the little warmth I seemed to generate. Ghyll's put an end to my duvet-carrying days (he'd love to sink his fangs into it & tear it to shreds), but no matter: I can get by with a t-shirt and jeans even when the wind gets up and the mercury drops. I feel superhuman in my ability to manage the cold now. When Sam, who runs notoriously hot, complains of the cold, all I can do is to repeat to her the advice she liberally doled out last year: put on another sweater. It feels like a superpower; it feels unfair.

The *waves hands* state of things

The government had a bit of a Moment midmonth, and the economic instability that it wrought has stuck with us well into Sunak's prime ministership. We're glad that we're on a fixed-rate mortgage and a fixed-rate energy tariff, but the general cost of living means we're being a little tighter with funds than we'd be otherwise.

We didn't put the heating on all month, though, which we both consider a real victory.

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1. By "real conference" I mean something somewhat more structured than an after-work meetup of likeminded WordPress developers.

Ghyll progress update

Everyone tells me that he’s getting bigger, but I’m not sure that I see it. In pictures of him from last month, he looks basically the same. But I can tell that he’s actually getting bigger because he can reach the edge of the countertop now, just barely. Give it another week or two and the whole countertop will be fair game. In a sort of escalating arms race of Mischief, I’m developing a sense for which objects, laid idly about a room, are catalysts for trouble. We’re getting better at tidying up after ourselves: not leaving cups around on the arm of the sofa, not leaving plastic bags near the edges of the counter, not leaving magazines unattended on the coffee table. Something we'd been meaning to do for a while but never with enough of a standing threat to do something about it.

He’s had his vaccines as well, which means that he’s allowed out and about among other folks and other dogs; he's generally interested in dogs but he wants to be best friends with every human he sees. He hasn’t figured out how to greet people (or other dogs) yet, so at the moment he just jumps up and chews on sleeves.

He’s also getting better with house-training; maybe 2/3 of the time he’ll quite happily make his own way downstairs to relieve himself in the garden. The first time he did it on his own we were very pleased. He still whines when we’re not around—especially when Sam leaves the room—but we’re told that he’ll grow out of it and develop a strong independent streak in the next couple of months, so we oughta enjoy the attention while we still have it.

Eric

Midmonth we had a visit from my second cousin (or first cousin once removed?) Eric, whom I’d last seen a few years ago at Family Day. He was on a tour of Europe over the summertime and was stopping through the UK near the end of his trip, so we took him out for some of the best that the North East has to offer: a jaunt up to the bothy at Haughtongreen, a takeaway from Wingate’s finest, and a trip up to Hadrian’s Wall and the Roman fort at Housesteads. As the sun set we stopped at a country pub for a pint of local ale to round the trip off. The following morning, Eric was bound for Scotland on an early train out of Durham—talk about a whirlwind tour.

Yamaha YBR

After doing our motorbike Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) back in July, we figured it was high time to get our hands on a 125cc motorbike (the only kind you’re allowed to ride with a CBT) and get practicing. Lots of folks are getting their bike licence at the moment, with the high price of fuel, so we had some trouble finding a decent-looking bike. 125s at competitive prices generally disappear within a couple of hours. By and by we found one for a great price up in Scotland, the owner a bit bemused that we offered to put a deposit down sight unseen. Only problem: it was up in Scotland.

Nevermind—we heeded Hokkaido’s informal motto, “Boys, be ambitious!” and struck off for Scotland with the intention of riding our new bike the 200-odd miles back to Wingate. No problemo.

Nerves elicited an uneasy sleep the night before; and on actually taking ownership of the bike, the first laps around the estate where the (erstwhile) owner lived were fraught ones. After half an hour of rickety shifts and undismissed indicators, however, we took to the open road and the prospect of a long trip home.

We took the trip in short stints at first: 15 minutes, then half an hour, then an hour of continuous riding at a time. Sam & I stayed on the phone while I rode, but as we took to the rolling hills of the Borders—no way we were taking the A1 home—signal cut in and out and left me alone with the buzz of the single-cylinder engine. Stopping for energy drinks in Whitburn, fuel in Peebles, Carter Bar for photos, and Woodburn for dinner, we rode out the sun and into the dark as only Northumberland is dark. Ghyll bore the long miles out better than any of us, causing only a minor stir at the pub over dinner despite having been forced to spend the whole day in the back of a car. Leaving the windy roads behind us, I gunned the engine, hopped onto the highways, and sprinted the last long stretch home.

In the office

At the end of the month, I headed down to Leeds for my second-ever day in the NHS Digital office. Last time I was there was back in February. While the pandemic has made a remote work convert of me, I always feel supremely productive when I'm in a big faceless environment. It's probably just the change of scenery.

After work we dropped into Editor's Draught for a couple of beers with the team. I don't think that meeting teammates for the first time in real life will ever feel quite normal; seeing someone you thought you knew face-to-face always reveals something else about them that doesn't come through over the camera—even if it's just that they're a lot taller than you thought they were. I'm sure you've read more thinkpieces about remote work than you'd care to consider so I'll leave it at that. We had a great time, though, so I'm already trying to plan out my next trip down, fuel prices permitting.

Awful road works on the A19 northbound on the way home, though, so from Thirsk to Yarm I was stuck on B-roads behind a Lithuanian lorry that evidently had a 20-mph speed limiter installed. Home very late.

Outdoors

Outside relatively little in August, owing at least in part to the heat. At the beginning of the month we took a trip out to Waskerley Reservoir with Ghyll to see how he'd like being out in the wild and lonely places that we like to frequent. We didn't go much further than 2km but that must have been a bit more than his little legs were ready for, so we fell back on training walks around Wingate for the rest of the month.

After a couple of weeks we got the sense that he'd developed a bit more stamina, so we brought him up Guisborough Moor, which he seemed to love. We even let him off the lead for a little while, and his strong puppy desire to be near us kept him from getting into too much trouble, even if he was a bit over-keen on eating sheep poo. A walk down Castle Eden Dene late in the month confirmed it: the pup loves the outdoors.

Besides that, our gym in Hartlepool was closed for refurbishment and my knee's been feeling a bit better, so I took back to the gravel tracks around my house for a bit of running, the first in a while. I'd like to get back to the Hartlepool parkrun, as well, but most Saturday mornings I'm so spent that I struggle to get out of bed at all.

Also got back out on the bicycle for a 25km trip around Peterlee—the first preparations for an attempt at the Coast-to-Coast ride from Whitehaven to Tyneside, tentatively scheduled in for May of next year. I've wanted to do Wainwright's Coast to Coast for a few years now but it requires two weeks to complete and I don't have that much PTO left—so doing the cycling version is, for the moment at least, an adequate substitute. Based on a 250km trip I did before leaving Hokkaido, I'm scheduling two days for the ride, which feels ambitious—hence the early start on training. More to come as plans develop.

The weather finally seems to have turned at the very end of the month: the first rains are starting to fall, the wind is picking up more often than not, the nights are getting cooler. After the hot, dry summer we had, it's a huge relief—even if it means I'm not as likely to get out on the motorbike. The days are getting shorter as well: we take a headlamp on our evening walks now. England's a weird country for the changing of the seasons; it gets dark before it gets cold, and daylight saving time knocks you for a loop. If you're not paying attention, changes in the climate sort of sneak up on you.