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Farmers are obliged to be patient. After all, can one hurry the sunlight? Or rush the rain? Grow-lights and sprinklers aside, our ability to bend Mother Nature to our will is pretty puny. I know this.  But the Would-Be Farm follows this particular lesson plan over and over and over. So here's me, learning. Since 2014, I have purchased and planted more than 25 fancy apple trees. At present, a dozen summers later, 7 trees still stand. I think there were five separate elderberry plantings before the current crop of survived deer incursion. Four different plum varieties passed quietly into the past, leaving Black Ice and native wild plums (but ones I paid good money for, and planted, and nursed gently) still putting out leaves in the spring.
These apple trees still standing have survived being lifted after I planted them too deep. They have recovered from deer and porcupine predation. They've resisted killing cold, drought, and flooding rains. They've kept going after tent caterpillar attacks and Japanese beetle bombardment, and countless forms of ick—all without the kinds of chemical aid most commercial growers use. And <happy sigh> this year, I have my first Honeycrisps, and Katherine's Favorites from those tough little trees.  She's no monster, but it's a Honeycrisp apple at long last. I'm grateful, sincerely, to see the result of patience. It's been such a pleasure to watch these plants (mere twigs when I planted them) finally attain "taller-than-deer-graze" height. It's a miracle to have a year like this one: no late frost, very little bug pressure, plenty of pollinators, enough rain and plenty of sun to produce—VOI-freakin-LA!–an actual crop of intentional fruits. It's an extraordinary year for the Would-Be Farm for fruit. The countless feral apples (planted fifty and more years ago and neglected for decades) across the two old homesteads are bent to the ground with heavy fruit. Some are delicious, some are even girthy. The smell of cider and overripe apples is intoxicating along the driveway.  These apples are plentiful, though frankly they are not pretty individuals, since we avoid the chemical helpers that would keep spots and dents from forming, but a couple of trees produce nice big fruit that makes solid apple-pies and toothsome pie-adjacent morsels.  In other fruit news, I've been plucking juicy blackberries along the pathways since July. The buckthorns (not edible for me, but still) are COVERED with dark berries. The bird cherries, looking like a dollhouse-sized fruit on a full-sized tree, made enough of an appearance that I had a handful. My planted plums, even fighting off some weirdo fungal disease, have hundreds of fruits. And for once, neither bear nor grey fox, not birds or rabbits, not deer and not even woodchucks have done damage to the orchard. I harvested Aronia berry this year –– Aronia or chokeberry is an astringent kind of fruit with tiny seeds, like a bitter blueberry. I've learned that when a fruit is "best used in jellies, jams, or syrups," it means that sugar is required to make that fruit acceptable to the human tongue. Having been a sucker for a good plant catalogue description, my collection of astringent fruits include, but are not limited to
By the way, alert readers will note that all these are ALSO known as super fruits, full of health-boosting compounds and very dark-staining pigments. After working with the berries, my hands could stand in for Lady MacBeth's. All the water in Neptune's ocean will not wash them clean.  But Aronia. It's a hearty brushy shrub that's been steadily producing clusters of dark berries without fail for a decade. After the first couple of years ("Oh, maybe these will get sweeter after a frost." and "Ooh, how about a little heat and sugar to make them a little less tooth-enamel-shrivelingly bitter."), I left the Aronia for the locals. The flowers are attractive to pollinators and I've heard that birds find the berries life-sustaining at the end of winter when everything tastier has been eaten. But in August, even the Aronia was bowed down under the weight of a heavy year. And if Amazon can get $35 a pint for Aronia juice, isn't it worth the experiment—virtually for free—to extract some of this superfood juice?
I harvested a mixing bowl of fruit, cleaned them of stems and unripe individuals, froze them, and then popped the berries into a blender. No sugar, no water, a whirr of the blades, and the result was a slurry of vivid fruit bits in a big Mason jar.
I gave it a day in the fridge, and then used a fine mesh bag to extract the juice from the pulp. Many internet gurus suggested keeping the pulp and seeds for flavoring balsamic vinegar, but my hideously stained hand to heaven, I have been nursing a single bottle of balsamic for three years. I just don't use it enough to make it worth my while. My compost pile is just that much more healthy, right? That mixing bowl yielded half a pint of thick juice. It's still astringent, but I think some of the bitterness lives in the seeds, which were removed in the mesh bag.  So pretty and the color of dark rubies, it just has to be good for a person, right? While wandering around with the mixing bowl of Aronia, I noticed—how did it evade my notice for a decade? How!?—a 25-foot-tall black cherry tree on the edge of the home field. Like every other fruiting tree this summer on the Would-Be, it was co-ovv-covered with fruits. A wild black cherry is tiny, a bit smaller than a small marble, with a large pit (stone), like a domestic cherry but tiny. The flavor is subtle and layered: astringent yes, but most assuredly cherry.
Thank you, O internet, for providing guidance on this one: an easy use of the black cherry is to mash it manually (don't use a blender, as the pit of a cherry contains a kernel which in turn contains a compound call amygdalin.
Amygdalin converts into cyanide when digested. And even in tiny amounts, we like to avoid ingesting cyanide), add some sugar, and let it decoct with alcohol to make Cherry Bounce or, more as we might call it more genteelly, cherry cordial. As I'm sure I need not say, but I will, but Cherry Bounce was favorite of the OG cherry-chopper himself, George Washington. Martha Washington had a recipe.  This nectar is also well known among the moonshining community of North Carolina. It looks and smells delicious so far, but it's going to age for a few weeks before give it some sampling attention.
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Every spring is a little different. Sometimes we arrive at the Would-Be farm just in time for a late ice storm, sometimes, we have to dig out shorts and use last year's sunblock for the 80-degree balminess of it all. The chance of snow isn't over until Mother Nature says it's over, and that's usually not for-sure for sure until the middle of May. So I can't say how this year's spring is going to go yet.  But what a winter it was! I say this based on the scientific evidence of my own senses: nearly every North Country local I've spoken to this spring says something like "You know, I don't MIND winter, but this year—" Plus the sand-dunes at the side of the road indicate how much the roads were plowed and sanded. Plus, a bit of unpurged water burst pipes under the house. Plus porcupines ATE the top of two of my largest and most productive pear trees. One of which had a 4-foot-tall fence perimeter, just to keep the various pesky varmints at bay. I suspect the heavy snowfall piled up above the fence. A bit of thaw-and-freeze gives a surprisingly hearty crust to deep snow, and I imagine a porcupine simply wandered around until reaching the pear as it poked unprotected through the snowy desert. And oooh! ahhh! All that sweet, sweet inner bark ripe for the snacking!  Yes, they are adorable, porcupines. And sadly, it's true that when the inner bark is chewed so thoroughly, the tree's sap cannot rise above the damage.  So yes, my heart is a little broken over my 10-year-old pear trees reduced to sad 4-foot-tall stumps that may or may not live to sprout again. Alas sweet pear trees, I knew you well. Springtime has its own theme music, naturally. It's catchy, ear-wormitty, and all the cool kids are singing it at the top of their lungs.
(Cornell's Merlin app for the bird identification win.) One of the many persistent pleasures of the season is the annual gathering of the cards. In the autumn, we refresh the batteries and memory cards in our many game cameras. We document their location (because sometimes we forget), and wish them well as they watch over and record the events of the next few months. I suspect they have a lowest-operating-temperature limit, but they have yet to disappoint. They offer us a sample of what we missed.  Like the bright, bitter days when the wind whips ice-crystals into snow devils. Or when it's gloomy and snowing and snowing and snowing.  The highlight reel follows. Please disregard the dates; we never reset them. Zero trees fell on Would-Be buildings. The camp is mercifully holding out against rodent incursions. The chimney is not blocked. The waterline proved quite fixable, and nothing ate the electrical lines at the wellhead. We have a woodshed full of fuel for the little wood stove, and the satellite dish found its azimuth without pause. We recognize and are grateful for the astonishing good fortune that gets us here. If it must, let it snow. 
It's a joy each spring to see what creatures are out there. The usual suspects are often good for a candid pic: a deer very close up, a coyote taking a whizz, a gang of raccoon hoodlums striding through the scene. But as years click by I crave novelty: The Kingfisher leaving the water after making a strike.  A daylight photo of a bear that looks kinda extra disreputable. This fella knocked over a couple of bluebird houses (and didn't even find the jelly-bean-sized eggs). I suspect he will not be moving on to the next round of Survival.  And the arty photos, like the dinosaur-like vultures going at some leftovers.  Or a downpour setting off the motion detector on the beaver pond  Or the raven and the vulture sharing a snack alfresco.  A bobcat is always good for a second look. Handsome and crabby, I suspect.  Please note that the dates at the bottom margin of the photos are proof of time dilation in the real world. Or possibly evidence that we don't always set the clock correctly. And because they are our largest resident, some big beautiful bear action:  For scale, the lower corner of the cow sign clocks in at a bit under 4 feet, and the lens of the camera does foreshorten a LOT. So 300+ pounds of hair and hunger? Thank goodness their evolution strategy, it's theorized, leaned heavily on the Flight rather than Fight during the last Ice Age. According to the theory*, this is why we don't see American Lions, Sabertooth anythings, Direwolves and Cave bears. Those megafauna leaned into Fighting, which may have led them right into the firepower of a certain bipedal humanoid species. *https://bear.org/bear-facts/why-are-black-bears-so-timid/ https://phys.org/news/2024-07-evidence-mounting-humans-responsible-extinction.html  Yet arguably even more intimidating, and for sure more aggressive, I bring you a squirrel.   The idea of a fierce Goth mouse that hunts on the wing has a certain appeal. To some. Or to me at least. Bats feature in some vivid childhood memories: my sister and me huddled under the dining room table, as the thump of footsteps circles us, punctuated by the whomp of a straw broom swatting the air and making contact with walls and pictures. The sweary battle-cries of our parents, whose bare white legs periodically flash past, and in counterpoint, the tiny high-pitched keening of a bat that has taken a seriously wrong turn in Albuquerque.  This is how scientists weigh bats. A tiny vest! Just look at those tiny fingertips! And that frowsy little frown! In college, bats kind of saved my life. My first year at Cornell, I was sitting in one of those enormous classrooms in Goldwin Smith Hall. My life was in tatters, with no money, a boyfriend off the rails, and the prospect of having to retreat home looming over me. I'd thought there were kind of a lot of bats in Ithaca, but that morning, I nudged the person next to me and had my index finger already pointing up at those flapping scraps of dark when some instinct of self-preservation shut my mouth. I realized, with sudden clarity, that there were, in truth, zero bats inside the classroom. That I was, in truth, hallucinating bats. That my subconscious, always a wag, was poking an elbow into my ribs and saying, "Girl, you're bats!" I did not ignore that message. I made some healthier life choices after that morning, though I have always since kept a weather eye out for warning flaps. So bats are all right by me. Knowing my penchant for the little insect-eaters, my favorite skipper constructed a couple of bat-houses and in the summer of '22, we performed the engineering marvel of hoisting one up on a pole high above the home orchard at the Would-Be Farm. The other went up on the south-facing peak of the barn. My favorite skipper has since kept up a steady stream of batty complaints. "We don't have any bats," he will tell anyone. "We have them, but he just doesn't see them," I will add to Jeff's declaration. "I built two bat houses. 100 bats per house and we don't have a single bat," he grouses. I make the correction with gritted teeth, "We don't have any YET." We're like old married people sometimes. But the truth is, I have an eye for bats, and Jeff seemingly does not.  This summer, however, has categorically refuted Jeff's hypothesis. Mr. Linton stepped into the cabin, and said, with restrained emotion of some sort. (Ire? Shock? Outrage?) "There was a BAT in my PANTS." Okay. What?! For a literal thinker, this kind of statement sets all circuits buzzing and causes a momentary freeze response. Jeff brought me up to speed: As is his wont, he'd removed his very wet and dirty trousers and tossed them over the porch railing to air out the day before. He went outside in the morning and, in preparation to folding them, he held up the trousers, gave them a brisk snap, and Voilá! a chunky brown bat tumbled out of a pantleg. And it was still on the porch. "Aww," I said, pulling on a pair of work gloves. "The poor thing is stunned." As I reached to lift the velvety creature, the bat looked up and opened its jaws like a nightmare and hissed. I drew back and it flapped unsteadily off. "Well we certainly have bats," I said to Jeff. (I didn't add that this should put an end to our perpetual wrangling about them, for pity's sake. But really, it should.)  Then, a few weeks later, I noticed a few mouse-like turds under the bat house at the barn. (The varieties of scat I contemplate on the regular here at the Farm surprises me. We like to refer to it as spoor, as if we are tracking big cats on the veldt.) A consult with the Goog, and then the careful use of telephoto revealed yet more proof: The bat house has an inhabitant! Whoohoo! If you build it, they WILL come. And, let's not lose this particular bit of Google gold: a bat's guano can be differentiated from mousey dung by the degree of sparkle. I kid you not. Bats cannot digest the crunchy outer shell and the iridescent wings of the insects they devour. Sparkle poop. It doesn't particularly show in the photos I took, but...Just another cool feature of die fledermaus.  Bonus Chiroptera (from the Greek for "hand-wing")-adjacent material: Did you know that as part of the Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) program during the Great Depression, we spent around $6.5million across 4 years to support unemployed theater professionals? I love hearing that part of the FDR plan to help the country recover from the stock market crash and subsequent depression was to rebuild the cultural institutions of our society. How radical! Out-of-work actors, writers, directors, costumers, janitors, secretaries, and so forth, as made up the country's live theater found employment through the Federal Theater. For instance "The Bat," a Broadway hit that the Federal Theater staged in various non-Broadway-ish spots around the nation... Meanwhile, my grandfather enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps, another WPA program, where he lived in company with dozens of other young men in a camp, where they were fed, given the odd lecture, sometimes shown a play by the Federal Theater company, all the while building parks and roads.  Just hangin' out with the bats at Carlsbad Caverns. You want more bat content? Or WPA content? Here's a couple of links:
https://www.batcon.org/the-scoop-on-bat-poop/ http://www.amysmithlinton.com/blog/meanwhile-on-the-farm https://www.loc.gov/collections/federal-theatre-project-1935-to-1939/articles-and-essays/wpa-federal-theatre-project/  There are too few hours in the day, even as the days grow longer in leaps and bounds. When we arrived at the Would-Be Farm in early April--in time to spare for my sister's birthday and the total eclipse-- the sun was up from 6:30am to 7:34pm. On the day we left, the sun peeped up at 5:40 and lingered until 8:19. At midsummer, according to the 'webs, it'll be 5:30-8:45. At that latitude, twilight and pre-dawn last for ages. Every year is different, of course ("It's a planet, Jim, not a calendar."). This year Spring sprang extra early. The daffodils that I would hope to see the first week of May were blooming their faces off the second week of April.  Early spring meant that only a few plants that I treasured were nibbled into oblivion over the winter. It also, critically, meant an early fishing "bite," as they say.  I was grateful that Jeff and his fishing captain, Dan ("Captain Dan! Captain Dan!") stuck to the inland lakes and the little bitty tin boat, because early thaw or no, that water is co-co-cold.  Each year, I worry about pollinators showing up for the many feral apple trees, and for the handful of sturdy fruit that have survived our custodianship (looking at you, pear trees!). ...and was reassured again by the pastoral hmmmmmmm of a battalion of bees working the trees. It's one of the unexpected sensory pleasures, to stand among fruit trees in early spring, listening to the sound of insects at work, ensuring the annual miracle of fruit growing on trees. The bees are noisy, but there are other, quieter pollinators to observe: butterflies and moths, damselflies and wasps. Hummingbirds, orioles. We run an all-you-can-sip buffet out there.  In the past decade, I've grown accustomed to the sloth pace of the season: first bluebells and rock iris, a few days later, maybe a touch of snow, and then Dutchman's britches and early saxifrage, a few more days for the first hint of wake-robins and daffodils.  Buds will start to swell, and the hint of green will return to the putty-colored fields. Bluebirds and bright goldfinches will look like confetti scattered in the wind. These and less crayon-ish birds will be making a racket earlier and earlier in the morning.  Then maybe spring peepers will start up, along with the excited hooting of barred owls and the good-lord-that's-annoying-after-the-first-three-times sound of the whip-o-will. This spring, everything seemed telescoped into a couple of weeks. By the time we migrated south for our annual pilgrimage to the Florida Keys (fishing! friends! regatta!), new leaves the color of radiator fluid stippled the woods. Like an inverted dance of the seven veils: the naked rock bones and tree trunks covered by swirling layers of buds, blossom, tiny leaves, bigger leaves, a variegated canopy, dressing rather than undressing. Though, naturally, we hope not to begin (or end) with someone's head on a platter.
We are just the caretakers of the Would-Be Farm. Oh, we pay taxes and insure against disaster, but the land is its own, really. As the springtime photos reveal. Even the game cameras have some autonomy. For instance, the crossroads camera chose to take video this winter. Ooh, look, bobcat! A few new players appear on camera this year. Like Pekania pennanti, the second-largest member of the weasel family. Commonly known as a fisher-cat, this somewhat alarming creature goes about three feet long with retractable claws and sharp teeth. We are grateful to know they tend to be shy by nature.  Likely the same fisher on a different camera. The fisher, as I learned fifteen seconds ago, is the rare predator that feasts upon the porcupine. "Nature red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson wrote (I grant you, of the 133 cantos of In Memoriam, this single bit is all I retain). Our largest predator is Ursus americanus. The male Black bear has a range of something like 25-50 square miles, so it's not a surprise to see these big guys popping up on camera from time to time. Wish the camera had chosen to continue rolling film a bit longer. Around the corner, on a still camera, more than one bear showed up in the frame... The stars of the show for me this year are the pair of foxes that are frisking about all over the Farm. I suspect the shortage of coyotes this year (possibly the result of the natural 7-year cycle combined with the neighbors' willingness to speed that cycle along) has encouraged the foxes to be out and about.  I have high hopes for fox kits this spring. Love is in the air for others as well. There's more, but I have wood to cut and chapters to re-write (squee! the new book!).
Until next time... I'm fond of the Progressive ads in which Dr. Rick attempts to keep young homeowners from turning into their parents. They are subversive and sometimes thrum home like an arrow hitting the bullseye. But really, blue hair!  Porcupine. They eat wood and have zero fear of humans. Bit of background: we traveled to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan last summer, where I hoped to find yooperlite rocks. These are a UP specialty -- rocks that glow under UV light. I bought a flashlight that included a UV (blacklight, baby) setting. We didn't find a yooper, but we did have a neat-o-keen time discovering that spiders' eyes often glow in blacklight. Not to mention the CSI-style investigatory moments.  Young possum ready to hit a rave. This fall, however, I heard that opossums will fluoresce pink. It sounded cool, and since the Would-Be Farm comes very well supplied with possums, it was the work of one evening to track one of the dear creatures down and bother it with light. My experiment says: possums show pink-ISH anyhow. Then, because everything looks like a nail when you're holding a hammer, I went in search of other creatures to flash. Enter the porcupine.  Un-retouched photo of a porcupine under black light. Blue hair. We all see it.
 Farming is hard. From the time Mr. Linton and I started this experiment (ooh, here's the first dispatch from the Would-Be Farm), we expected challenges. We welcomed challenges. Neural plasticity, baby! And sure enough, we learned some new stuff. We knew that rust never sleeps, but we found out that weeds will pull all-nighters all summer long in the interest of world domination. Looking at you, burdock.  Burdock in the snow We discovered that even with zillions of established apple trees on the property, it's hard to get them to bear fruit larger than a golf ball. If the frost doesn't nip the bud, or caterpillars devour the leaves, or porcupine eat whole branches, well, then it's some other bug, some other mammal, some other weather phenomenon. And we have stuck by our decision to avoid toxic chemicals, regardless the wormy little apples.  So when we have success, it seems the sweeter, and also, paradoxically, the fruits do not seem to be from our labors. Instead, it's as if they show up as serendipity. A gift from the farm. Passive agriculture.  Our first plum. We put seedlings into the ground. Three or four years on, we see the first production of plums. Also, this year's single pear (yes: one fruit from the whole five trees), which has not been raided by raccoons yet. Does it count as work if we planted it so many years ago?  Safe from marauders. So far. Currents, aronia, and honey berries produced well this summer. For what it's worth. Tart, tart, and tarter. We have not, as my genteel mother-in-law puts it, developed a taste for them yet.  Pro grower's tip: if the description in the nursery catalogue suggests that a fruit is used in jam or compote, beware. Tomatoes and garlic and potatoes are standouts again this year. Likewise those leggy volunteer cousins: fennel and dill, one bronze, the other pale green, popping up everywhere.  Garlic harvest I picked a bumper crop of blackberries (was it the extra rain? it's a continual mystery why some years do and others don't) but after the first disappointing pie––So seedy! So very seedy!––I set my sights on a cordial. I muddled pint after pint into mason jars of moonshine, which now lurk, dark and powerful, like untested ordnance, in the fridge.  Cordial-yet-to-be. At this end of the summer, I tend to wander moodily around with a basket, swatting mosquitoes, marveling. It's a numbers game: we planted more than 25 modern apple trees, and only 5 are currently alive. And we have yet to see a single apple from those trees.  Hazelbert bush. We put in 20 hazelbert whips and though a dozen died for being planted in the wrong place, 30+ hazel shrubs flourish now. The eight elderberries I bought and nurtured over the past decade have yet to survive a third year, but the two newest? This year -- THIS YEAR! -- I will foil the deer.  A pocketful of hazels. The six basket willow are growing by leaps and bounds, and have doubled in number. Of the five hackberry, I know for sure three are still living. The other two might possibly have slunk into the night. It's easy to find them in the spring, but once summer gushes forth––! The abundance of uncultivated food astonishes me. Things we never did a lick of work to encourage. Nanny berries and hickory nuts, big puffball mushrooms and black walnuts, not to mention, though I do, the free-range non-vegan options. So many good fishes! And ruffled grouse bursting from the underbrush would be happy, I can see in their ruthless dinosaur eyes, to dine on me in the rather likely event that they SUCCEED in startling me to death.  And then there are chickadees, who chatter when the birdseed is running low. One or two of these lillies of the field are especially bold. They barely need coaxing to land on my hand, where they look me in the eye and take their time picking a seed.
I've really done nothing to earn chickadees. But I'm grateful that the Farm has provided them too.  The suspense builds as we hike the big loop around the Would-Be Farm –– which trees are down? Which bulbs are up? Are the beavers still damming around? What happened while we were gone? As we hike, marveling at the frost-heaved rocks, the exquisite timing of the grouse that explodes from underfoot at the exact moment we are least prepared, the wide expanse of northern sky, the tracks left by deer, coyotes, skunk, mystery beasties. This year, on the first 500 yards, we spotted hoof prints. "That's a big deer," Jeff said. "That's an enormous deer," I said, then, hope springing eternal, "Oooh, maybe it's a moose!" Moose used to roam these woods. They, like the bobcat and the bear and what-not might also return. One can hope –– seriously, the biggest cervid, back again?! Goofy and majestic creatures, sporting dingle-berries and draped with stringy green plant material, near-sighted and not suffering of fools –– that's a great wild life. We followed the tracks until the next game camera, where we got distracted checking batteries and removing the memory card.  We have a bunch of game-cameras. They are back-up security, entertainment, and animal-spotting tool all in one. Admittedly, there's always one that we misplace. Sometimes it appears, just where we left it, after we've passed it dozens of times. Ocassionally, it gets dragged away by varmints. Anyhow, on this first circuit, we go from camera to camera, pulling batteries and collecting memory. Back at the cabin, I fire up the trusty card reader and begin the uphill slog: 8000 images on this disk. 5300 on this one. Oooh, only 1430 on this one! 6000 on this one. 7600 on this one. I do not exaggerate on this issue, there are thousands of images, some triggered by actual animals, others by the whim of the camera, and not a few by the movement of branches in the wind. So I am approximately 12,000 images into the winter's story when I discover –– Eureka! –– the large-hoofed maker of the tracks that we hoped might be moose.  Cows on the run. Oh, I have questions. Will I get answers? We'll see, once the great dumpster debate (oh! neighbors!) of 2023 is settled. (Two neighbors, one actively squalid, the other just trying to raise a few cows. Add dumpster full of trash, stir until state cops arrive...) Meanwhile, here's a few of the winter's highlights. Understand that I have selected these from a pool of zillions, and I DO find it amusing that so many are butt shots. Quick novel update: things are moving along. I've been gathering publishing intel while the manuscript spent time at the editor. Details will follow on this page here.
A few years ago, I read a book with a title something like this. The Book of Dead Days? The story did not stick with me, but I've adopted the phrase as a description of the time between the midwinter holidays and New Year's.  It's a week for not getting work done. A week to kindle up some fire against the dark and then sit poking the fire with a stick. But I did mean to share the results of a recent photo safari. It's seasonable to the odd week. Here's hoping for a bright new year.
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