"Hey you with the pretty face, welcome to the human race"

You know how when you listen to that one song that makes your throat get all gulpy and mesh and swell with your tear ducts and the subcutaneous layers under your face start to feel puffy and goosey somehow and you realize you're almost crying, but you don't know why the hell you're almost crying because you're not sad you're actually really happy but you just think this song in this moment was written for you, which you realize is ridiculous? And you like the song so much that you keep starting it over while you're driving down the road before it even finishes which makes no sense at all and now you're totally losing it? No? Okay maybe it's just me.

Day 3: A song that makes you happy: Mr Blue Sky by ELO



Mr. Blue is due at the end of July. He was made with love, and let's be honest, a shitload of expensive science and the build up to his formation included a lot of torment for a couple that was already dealing with more shit than they should have been.

Luisito and I have been together for 13 years. I remember him telling me at the very beginning that even if we broke up, he still wanted to produce offspring with me because we were meant to mate (in Spanish it sounded really romantic).

When we first got married it wasn't the right time, according to me. I was going back to graduate school and even though every bone in my body wanted to say fuck it, let's make a human, we waited. Luis always always wanted to at any time since the day we got together. After graduate school we moved back to Spain and we thought it would happen soon, very soon. But then I got a new job and my boss announced she was pregnant and would be needing a lot from me to help out while she was away. She was back to work a few months when she announced her pregnancy with her second child. I knew it was wrong for me to let this influence me, but it did and I worried about my employers not taking me being pregnant well. So I continued to insist that we wait while Luisito continued to want children whenever would say yes. And then the problem was that we were still in that shithole and I wanted a real home before we started a family and I didn't picture my life like this and Luisito just pictured his life with me and some kids and nothing else mattered.

And that's when I screwed everything up. I got depressed with my life and lonely and angry and completely withdrew from Luisito for the first time in our 10 years together. I pushed him far away from me and we almost lost each other, and when I think of how close I came to being alone without Mr. Blue and Luisito I feel gutted. When we finally started to patch up and fix our problems, we had to face infertility. The guilt I held for waiting for so long to find that I was no longer fertile was almost more than I could bear.

But that was before and today it's a beautiful new day.

Mr. Blue Sky, please tell us why
You had to hide away for so long
Where did we go wrong

Hey there Mr. Blue
We're so pleased to be with you
Look around see what you do
Everybody smiles at you

This song will forever be my happy song about my baby Blue. I'll sing it to him in the car, I'll sing it to him while I rock him to sleep. I'll put it on and watch him dance. And I'll never ever take for granted again his Papi who I'm finally seeing happy for the first time in too many years. Today is the day we've waited for.

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I'm already gone

I’ve gone on about this before, but it’s a feeling that’s so strong, it’s hard to ignore as I do with all the other fleeting realizations, memories, potential posts that I push out of my lazy mind until they whither into forgotten possibilities, too busy with books and work and life. But this? This feeling, this moment is when I realize I need this space to eject something, and my guilt about not being good to you all is overridden by my need to slough something off, whether or not it’s even read, a need to dissect meaning and pore over fibers of sound and play with syllables and scrutinize the allegory of words until I am satisfied in my mind that what I’ve written is really how it is inside here, this place I want to understand, so my brain can call it a day and can stop being harassed by something I can't pinpoint.

I booked a flight to Phoenix (you know, to that one place where I grew up, that place I’m refusing to call home anymore), and as is always the case, from the moment I decided to go, my head has become filled with its every smell and tone and hue and nuance and I ache for it in ways that I didn’t allow myself to when I knew it was out of reach. I don’t call it home anymore because it feels ungrateful to allow myself the luxury of continuously claiming that the true fit, the realer real is taking place somewhere I am not, especially when this city is throbbing with spring like it is, true to how I remember it throughout these many years.

Besides, isn’t home supposed to be a place where there is warmth under my feet, where my sheets are blazed in sunshine in the morning, where a rogue strand of hair gets pushed behind my ear sending delightful shivers curling around my neck, where my toes get the lint cleaned out of them one by one, where daily negotiations on who will make morning tea get played out with kisses and promises of ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’? Yes.

Isn’t home where people, acquaintances I have not chosen to befriend but who have appeared in my life, have persistently gouged away at my heart by approximation until they have succeeded in finding a pulsating soft spot in it beneath all the barricades of bored sighs and disinterest due to hyperbolized cultural difference? Yes.

I felt it, home, I was sure of it, just the other day when for once it had stopped raining and the sun made a shy gesture from behind the clouds and so we (me and these people I'm discovering I might love) went outside to live in these streets again and drank and drank and we continued as the day turned into the dusk that only required a light sweater. And in changing from one bar to another, we had to stop and order beers in small glasses and bring them outside to the middle of the street. There we stood, leaning against a badly parked car, slippery thumbs fighting for their grip on cold beers, thanking Christ or somebody for having given us a sunny day, in the middle of Calle Mateos Gago, the street that leads to the heart of the Giralda. There we humbled ourselves before that radiant stone giant towering over all of Seville in all her raw beauty, the nimbus of dusk surrounding her. And as we inhaled the orange blossoms that bejeweled the trees lining the street down to her gothic door, we jumped slightly on tip toes and bumped into each other warmly, silly and cozy inside from the day of drinking, cheeks aching from smiling, and feeling, above all, lucky, and I thought, “Fuck yes this is home.” Where else on earth could it possibly be?

Tourists frantically snapped pictures of the Giralda with their cell phones trying to capture her perfection in the early evening light and they stared up at her as I would the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building, admiringly but as a jewel in someone else’s jewelry box. But this, I own her. I see her as I turn in to bed and she lights up my skyline. Those morning teas that get negotiated? I drink them with her, quiet but there. But it’s not just now that I see her more often, from a fortunate vantage point now that we moved into the house of windows. I also have endless memories across time at her feet in the twisted labyrinth of streets surrounding her, and this time is what confirms what I already know: that this is as home as home gets, complete with a long trail of memories, good and bad, following from behind.

But why then, if this is the case, just when I hesitatingly click 'OK' to confirm the charge to my credit card for my flight purchase, does my mind open up and a flood of mountains and heat and freeway traffic juggernaut into it and a landscape, a cityscape, a housescape snaps hard into focus and reminds me that, while maybe not home home anymore, surely Phoenix is something, and that something feels like it’s bruising me as it ironically gets further and further out of reach the closer I get to my travel date, because the closer I get to my travel date, the closer I actually am to my return travel date, and thus the further away any of it is altogether (Noble Savage wrote beautifully once on this very strange phenomenon).

As Phoenix pulls and tugs and begs and pleads and scratches and reminds and blames and guilt-trips with endless memories of its orderly grid of me flying through it with my window rolled down, I realize there are more memories there than can fill these labyrinthian streets. It lectures me, telling me that it’s definitely something if not my home and it’s more than just a place in my past or a holiday. And no matter how much I tell myself that I prefer the Giralda to Camelback Mountain, the lively plazas with cervesitas to the half-vacant strip malls of neglected Subways and derelict Jiffy Lubes and the cobblestone streets over sardine-packed freeways, a visit there is still akin to breathing and eating and human contact.

And I begin to find it odd and in some ways shameful that the sense of missing and nostalgia as an expat at least in my experience and the definition of home is sometimes not at all focused on people and relationships as one would expect, as it should be, as maybe some fault in my character or some coldness in my heart doesn’t allow it to be, as I often claim it is. Rather the missing is all intertwined with a way of living, a way of experiencing urbanization, a way of merely travelling through one's day, and sadly a way of consuming. And a feeling of panicked urgency to be coddled in that urban space once more invades my mind and takes hostage of my ability to look out the window and realize what a beautiful month I have ahead of me in Seville.

I stare out at those lone palm trees that are so very familiar to me, virginal from the sad winter but now spreading up and open in celebration to be penetrated by that hot Spanish sun, that are scattered across this city stuffed between baroque churches; they are normally reminders to me of the Arabia that once dwelt here that I get to contemplate because this is part of me and this is my home but now they only yank me back to that sun-scorched desert valley where I dread going because I dread having to leave.

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I'm losing my mind a little. Do you know what time I was supposed to be here?

There are a lot of things that I’m realizing about myself now that I’ve moved. Maybe with more light you see things more clearly. One is that I have been needlessly being a bitch during most of my waking hours for the past several years. Okay, it's true that I was utterly, hopelessly claustrophobic in my job and in my house to the point of wanting to headbutt my way out of reality, and now I feel like I’m finally out of prison, but still.

Another realization I've had is that I’ve spent far too many years acting like clocks and watches were for pussies.

So, tickety tock, I bought a new clock.

It’s a beautiful brass and metal German antique clock from the 1950s. It's in the shape of a starburst which makes me feel all hip and in-the-know decoration wise. But best of all, it has the most lusciously subtle whispering tick tock you’ve ever heard and listening to it is like Earl Grey and cashmere and bubble baths and pine-scented candles and chicken enchiladas and sunsets and foot rubs reformulated as the sound waves of a metronome.

When I sit on the sofa I don’t want any bullshit electronic gadgets jacking up my tick tock time. Not like Luisito. Luisito has to have some gadget carcinogenisizing my oxygen every waking second of the day (but I'm turning over the nice leaf so I don't yell, I just drown everything out but the tick tock). But when he's cooped himself up in his office, fabricating homemade 3D glasses or planning his robot project, I sit in almost-silence with only the tick tocking of my new timekeeper to be heard. The sound of finely gauged progress over the sundial is all I need; to hell with nanotechnology and interceptors and shufflers. I don’t even want any music. I only want my tick tock.

Tick tock reminds me of the clock in my grandparents home that used to bewitch me and calmly terrorize me with its swinging pendulum. I would stand before it on an almost-silent-yet-ticking Sunday afternoon when there were no lights on in the house, but the sunlight would pour through the Frank Loyd Wright style skylights above and into the entryway where the clock patriarched over the rest of the furniture and the light would make shadows all over the bluish porcelain statues spangling the neighboring shelves. I imagined unlocking it's chamber and slipping my lanky skinny body inside and coming out the other end where there would be another world beyond it, a melty flowery surreal world, with crystalline streams and pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Maybe one where everyone was a centaur or people served you Turkish Delight from sleds or where you could drink some potion and become really small or really big or you could cross into an enchanted forest and ride through it on the back of a tortoises where you would only survive because you would find a nice cow that you could milk or a giant white dog looking thing would give you a sky-ride to a princess where you could fathom one grain of sand.

But tick tock also reminds me of the clock in my house when I was in high school, a mini grandfather clock because my mom was trying to be fancy when she bought it and thought it would go well with the cherry wood entertainment center that was way too nice for everything else in our house. This clock in particular and I were engaged in a constant game of wits as I pushed the gas pedal to the floor in my Toyota Corolla racing myself home on the freeway from my boyfriend's house in the wee wee hours. That clock usually won and would proceed to ruin my life every time I came in past curfew bracing myself for another encounter with one teary-faced mother who was taking it very hard that I no longer did what she said.

When I was in college, I decided I was done with clocks altogether and I even swore myself off watches. At that point all they did was remind me of how incompetent I was, of my total lack of organization and they impulsed me to feel that frantic panic of running late every time I needed to be anywhere. I used to talk about how timepieces in general represented some kind of human bondage. God was I ever pretentious when I was in college. I wish I could wind the clock back, oh a good twelve years or so and stuff a sock in my mouth and tie myself up and force-listen myself to the tick tocking while erasing my brain of the cliches I'd learned that I didn't know were cliches. That shit would get reprogrammed quick like.

Now? Now my clock feels like home for better or worse and grounds me in something I fully accept as mine. It makes my future gain its will to glow again. But at the same time it makes me panic slightly and feel like I'm running late for something really fucking important that I don't know how I've managed to not show up on time for. I feel like I've been hitting snooze for several years.

I know now why real grown ups have a real ticking clock in their homes and I understand why twenty one year olds that don't have to worry about anything other than if they are going to drink Four Peaks that night or Tom Collins don't. Real grown ups need to be reminded, subconsciously that time is actually moving, even if you act like an a-hole for five years pretending it isn’t.

Tick tock. I already miss my new home, because I know someday I’ll move from it. I know the landlord will want the flat back long before we are ready to leave, or maybe, if things aren't entirely fucked, our family won’t be so small anymore. I wonder how many ticks that clock will breathe in and how many tocks it will breathe out before that happens, if it ever does.

So now I’m on the market for a watch, preferably with subtle tickage.

And you know what else? I want to see an infertility specialist (or is it a fertility specialist?). Because I'm 33 years old and and I fear my clockwork may need repair. Luisito doesn't want to because he thinks we're maybe just wound up too tight causing our hands to spiral backwards frantically, not allowing our mechanics to function properly at all. But I wonder if there isn't some spring that's been dislodged or a wheel that's been rusted, or maybe the wheels' teeth aren't matching up properly due to misuse.

On the other hand, maybe we're a time mechanism that is set to a fucking explosive.

Or maybe I'm a perpetual motion machine that's has suddenly been told that perpetual motion was disproved by physicists.

Help.

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Just Sunday

Yesterday was the ideal Sunday.

After a Saturday filled with midday partying (which is so underrated), causing me to fall into a beer slumber at an unusually early hour, I awoke Sunday at the bird-chirpingly early hour of 7:30 a.m.

After talking a reluctant and sleepy Luisito out of bed with the promise of tea and milk and lemon madalenas, we watched a blood-orange sky drop hints that a triumphant sun would rise over this sleepy Spanish city. The days here are cloudy and unpredictable making for the loudest, most incestuous tangerine and pink grapefruit sunrises, where exaggerated violets zealously mate with silky blues and apricot yellows, thrusting me back to the Phoenix monsoon summers.

After the sky flaunted the pinnacle of celestial achievements and the sun fearlessly confirmed a coup over dreadful weather, I dropped the blackout shades in my bedroom and crawled back under the feathery down comforter with my cat and patiently waited for him to find his position at my ankles and I fell into a blissful lazy morning nap.

At 10:30 I awoke rested and ready for Breakfast Part II: coffee with cream and french bread toasted with drizzled dark green olive oil and heirloom tomatoes.

I settled in to a long-overdue session just me and Microsoft Word and click clacked away letting my brain unreel and my thoughts disentangle as my fingers unshackled phrases that have been tugging at and crowding my neurons persistently all week; nothing spectacular to speak of, but a release all the same.

Soon we mosied downstairs to a nearby Mexican restaurant where Luisito consented to me ordering everything on the menu that had melted cheese on it. I washed it all down with a Corona.

Since it was cold outside and was hardly the day for a casual stroll through the Alameda, we made our way home with hurried steps and I ran a hot bath, turned on my audiobook and soaked my ice cream thighs in sultry bubbly goodness.

Soon we were two in the tub and my pruned feet claimed ownership of Luisito's shoulders while my arms almost involuntarily linked themselves around his wet calves. We steeped in silence, Luisito patiently waiting for me to finish listening to my audiobook. I disappeared for awhile into the story, hypnotized by the voice of the narrator, barely conscious that I was smoothing the hairs on Luisito's legs with a washcloth.

When the book finished, further naked activities commenced, but their impracticalities were soon recalled as knees and elbows and ankles seemed to multiply in the most unexplainable way and press themselves into unforgiving porcelain. An immediate transfer to the locale of standard procedure was in order: an invitingly fluffy bed where I had already spent a good portion of the day but was happy to return to under the auspice of far more lively undertakings.

Nail-biting tautness was contrasted with the clemency of timely release as we felt the heavy strain of two jumbled minds fall under the irrational persuasion of our much more resourceful bodies.

That night with very little convincing, Luisito agreed to make vegetable lasagna from scratch and I somehow found room to welcome more melted cheese into my belly. This was finished off with a slice of decadent chocolate cake that I had slaved over the day before using some premium German chocolate I had picked up at a gourmet shop.

Then, we melted into the couch under a blanket, the cat curled up into a donut between us, the heater warming our previously neglected toes to lazily watch a little TV before turning in.

Luisito turned to me and said, "Hey Honey, it's Valentine's Day."

I really had completely forgotten.

Of course, with Sundays like these, who the hell needs Valentine's Day?

Can't I just post an audio clip of myself groaning and you'll know what I mean?

I miss being able to write. I'm blocked and I know that it's mostly just the not doing it that's making me not do it. I see some of you are blocked like me. But say you're not quitting for good. That would be awful and it would force me to think about that one time when it was really cool, back in the day of good blogging. Nostalgia is my worst enemy right now, so please don't do that.

My reading is suffering. Pretty lame of me to beg you to not quit when I haven't even remotely done my part to encourage you.

Other times, when I can, I carry on across your blogs like we're still in touch, like you're in my head and you too have read that pretentious post that went through me just the other day that lingered there in the center of my nervous system, playing Double Dutch with my neurons. I played with it and tapped at it and scratched and tortured it, the poor stupid thing. None of this happened with my pen, which would have required entirely too much effort. I pulled its little legs off of its twitching corpse and carried the carcass around the house in my mouth until its gut juice seeped through the incisions my teeth had made and its bitter taste made its way to my tongue. And then I didn't like it anymore and how could I give you such a foul cliche in hopes that you would praise me for killing it?

I know I should have some things to say about home, other than the cheap overview I gave you a couple of weeks ago.

I suppose I should tell you how it takes going home to realize that home's definition has apparently been revised in the 2009 edition of My Mind and that I actually feel the calmest and best in the anti-home, the scapegoat and seed of all of my turmoil. My inner dictionary has been rewritten, without consultation of its primary user. That thing had always been so reliable up until now.

Home is apparently not where one is safe and secure and comfortable and at peace. It's a place of confusion where I'm no longer cut to that mold and when I leave I'm relieved to say goodbye to release the pressure and intensity surrounding the visit, to let home fall into the background of memory and fuzziness and distance where it now resides permanently, quieter and quieter, its unbearable decibels turning to a light hum.

I fall into non-home and the excited pace of 'see this, go there, enjoy! Enjoy! It will all be over soon!' ceases and the heart goes back to a healthy steady pace feeding oxygen to the cerebral cortex again, a bit less frantically now, but certainly providing all that is needed to keep those synapses from going on strike.

And now I think I can make it through the winter without you, you infidel of synonyms. I won't be flying over your mountains and swimming pools and palm trees any time soon because I'm to the gills with you. I'm ignoring your threats that the longer I am away, the less you'll resemble what I thought you were. We were separated for so long and you became so perfect and tender in my mind and then you go and throw a fucking antonym at me right when I'm trying to cuddle up in your arms? That's lame.

There -- I went and brought you a carcass and placed it in your shoe, a hunted token so you know I love you, and I looked up at you blankly. I know. It's not as good as new and its legs are missing and it has teeth marks in it and one of its filmy wings is down the hall near the bathroom. But it's the only kill I could find in this lifeless, quiet place.

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Puzzling

I'm off soon.

Three whole weeks in the states.

I don't know how steady I'll be on the blogging front. Sometimes when I'm home, I get floods of feeling that I need to put somewhere, but maybe I won't be able to.

I'd organize guest posters, but my guest posting karma is pretty much crap right now, as you may recall.

I've never gone home for this long before to visit.

Three weeks is roughly 6% of the year. Add that to the two weeks that I go home for Christmas and it's roughly 10% of the year. That means that I have 10% of the year to try to find a balance to outweigh the favoritism of self that I give this place – the place that gets 90% of my day to day, that sees 90% of my breathing, 90% of my blinking, 90% of my yawning, 90% of my sighing.

During that short time at home, I get to feel like a puzzle piece that fits perfectly into place. I know I fit when I smell the freshly cut grass in the morning and hear the lawn mower outside my window at 7:00 a.m.; when I wake up in the dark and my feet find the soft carpet below just like they should, instead of the unwelcoming tile floors of Spanish homes, just after realizing that the bed is exactly the height that a bed is supposed to be. I know I fit here because there are garbage disposals that suck the shit out of the kitchen sinks, out of life, instead of getting all clogged up where I have to spend forever picking out tiny pieces of food with a chopstick, never quite getting all the bullshit.

And I think, this is it, babe, this is where I fit so snuggly, see? I nudge him-- this is where everything dovetails, where the tenon finally fucks the mortise. And I see him trying to cram the little uncooperative bits of his puzzle piece onto my part of the puzzle with all his might, bending and folding and partially fucking up his appendages. I see him thinking it must be here where he fits too because he's relieved at finally seeing me comforted by the shape and form of the architecture surrounding us. But he can't make the cardboard edges line up properly; the outgrowths are too big where the holes are too small, and besides, he's a piece of sky with clouds on it and there are clearly no clouds in this sky.

And it sucks something out of me like the garbage disposals I miss to know that where I match up and fit all compact and sheltered like a cubbyhole he does not, where his bits align and contour just right, mine. just. won't. -- try as we might to fit our puzzle pieces into the same surrounding structure.

But by some manufacturing fluke, both of us as pieces fit so perfectly together, like we were certainly meant to dwell in the same part of the jigsaw puzzle, like our fibrous matter belonged attached, unsevered, having always been tethered even before when we were just sheets of paper board smoothed down to be cut with the fretsaw by the puzzle-maker.

He rolls over in bed, prostrates himself on his stomach and his shoulder presses against the mattress and he extends his arm with the palm of his hand facing up, finding the place it wants to find, cupping over the fleshiest part of me as I lay face up. This is my cue to place my hand on the small of his back and let sleep wash over me again.

It's as if we originated from the same cellulose pulp derived from the same wood, from the same tree, as the same organism, to later be disjointed and scattered unfound inside a box of a thousand imposters.

So we stay as two perfectly fitted pieces reserved to the side of the card table. We go together. It's just not really clear where exactly we go.


See you soon.

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I went on a hike this weekend, that's what I'm trying to say

I have this thing.

This perpetual thing that is hardened to me from over-use that I sometimes call "homesickness". If it is a sickness at all, it is most certainly improperly diagnosed.

Truthfully, homesickness was what I felt my first semester of college, when I had to say goodbye to the home I had finally found after having put a stop to my parents bouncing me around in a ping pong match. Homesickness was what I felt when I spent a few weeks too many in the Amazon jungle, bathing in a fucking river and trying to determine where the tribal folk took shits and had sex. Homesickness was what I felt as a study abroad student, completely out of my element and way, way, way before the assimilation of culture.

True homesickness only happens when you know for sure, beyond any doubt, that you don't belong.

Herein lies my problem. When I go home, my suspicions that I might belong here are supported. And shadows of doubt hover over my fantasies of belonging there, only there.

No, this...this is not homesickness.

Call it perpetual maladjustment (cultural or otherwise) or incessant emptiness or constant unease. Or something.

"I'm homesick". This just makes me not have to deal.

It will be eight months of not being near my organic place. Eight months in what feels like a plant pot that's way too small for me. Eight months away from my original soil, away from my familiar precipitation and that sunlight that I've been perfectly acquainted with all my life touching me just so, just the same way as always, photosynthesizing me from within just as intended, allowing me to flourish as I was meant to, as I was taught to subconsciously, through gestures and symbols, language and allegory, and place, oh, especially place.

This misnomer is an unscratchable itch-inducing bitch that doesn't hide, and whenever I hit a wall, as I am wont to do, it's often the delinquent responsible for my misfortune or discontent. Problems don't exist for me here that are separate from this one problem, see, I don't let them.

How ridiculous. How irresponsible of me to attribute everything to this misnomer. Doesn't hate exist anymore? Or pure loneliness? Or pure disappointment? Or pure wrong-doing, independent from this worn out crutch?

This thing I've mislabelled is difficult to alleviate, mostly because I am constantly concentrating on the banana skins that exacerbate it, like being hogtied by red tape. I stop on my path and pick up the stones I've tripped over despite having seen them.* Then I study them under microscope and determine their mineraloids, whether they are sedimentary or metamorphic, noting their texture and chemical composition, when all I really had to do was kick them the fuck out of my way to begin with and keep moving.

Until last weekend.

When we went for a hike.

When I left my misnomer somewhere and I left the stones I had tripped over in my fucking geology lab of doom and we sat on a rock near a waterfall and had our lunch.

Suddenly, my roots were nourished in soil that felt damn near original. The sun shone on him and me bright as ever, but it was actually raining at the same moment; one of those impossible moments in nature, one of those impossible moments that happen all the time in Arizona. And then the rain cleared away and the sky held the horizon sharply in focus from the dryness in the atmosphere so much like home. I looked out at the leaves, grateful that they moved in just the same way as I knew they would, that the water flowed just as it was supposed to, that gravity held me down on the rock like it always had before, and that the birds sang those same songs I remember from the warm spring days from long ago and far away.

And I felt my inner photosynthesis happening in it's old way, it's familiar way. For a few hours, I flourished and I knew I belonged to that place at that moment, without tripping stones or dangerous banana peels, or crutches to blame.

*this comes from something Denise sent me that says "La experiencia me sirve para reconocer la piedra con la que volver a tropezar" - Experience is good for recognizing the stone that you will continue to trip on. I think I translated that right. Thanks Denise, if you had a blog, I'd link to it.

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