Finally!

Meet Karla, named after our friend Kalle, who 
sadly died last month. His real name was Karl, 
hence Karla.

After 16 days over her due date, Amanda delivered a little female cria, Karla. I've been there, done that and got the t-shirt. Only my 15 day late baby is now 35 years old - sheesh how did that happen! My 17 day overdue baby will be 34 years old soon. I can still sympathise though. Dear Amanda has been looking tired for over a week now but still the baby was content to kick around inside until today. Silla is also due about now, but her udders are swelling and so another birth is imminent..... well maybe!

Father and Grandfather to Karla.

Amanda was looking rather large
the day before. We kind of realised
that she would be giving birth
soon.

Ooh! What's this? Is it mine?

Although Amanda is 7 years old, the same age as Aggie, Mari and Chanel, this was her first cria. She looked a bit shocked after the birth and was staring out of the alpaca house. Ian diverted her attention and she suddenly discovered the baby. It was almost like, wow, how did that happen and where did that come from? Fortunately she bonded very quickly and seems to be making an excellent mum. She even stayed with her baby when all the others moved off to the alpaca house. It is due to be another chilly night and Karla was shivering a little, so we put a coat on her.

Will George become a father next year? Hopefully
we will find out soon. We are going to try and see if 
he will mate with the older girls. They are a bit of 
a challenge though. Will he be up to the challenge?

Will little Jakobs be ready for the mating game?
We shall see!

Freddie has such a sweet character, it would be
lovely to breed from him, but we know that is
not wise. He has a dodgy back leg and skin
problems and so not the right kind of genetics
to pass on.

I spend most of last week trying to finish off an academic paper. It was close but the paper that seems to have gone on and on and on has been finally re-submitted, just before the second deadline. I had to ask for an extension as there was no way to get it completed and ensure my work with the Masters students was also complete. Now we, i.e. I and the rest of the team, all just hang around for weeks while they review it again. I'm sure there will be some changes that are still necessary. That's just the way it is, but for now I can relax a bit and finish off some other work before my holidays begin - whatever that is!

Enjoying the sunshine amongst the trees

Amanda was in labour and decided to lie down for
a bit to rest, so they all joined in. Looks like an
apacalypse

Sometimes both groups of girls just have to be
in the same place. It looks a bit of a tight squeeze.

We've now passed the point where our immunity to Covid19 should be sufficient to be able to travel across borders. We should be travelling up to Estonia, but that will still have to wait until the three babies that are due before the end of June have been born. There are some rather warm alpacas that need shearing, so it is a good job that they all have cool indoor places to shelter as we are expecting a heatwave this weekend.

Ian found this nest on the floor with three of the
five eggs broken. He managed to work out a way
to fix it and put the eggs back. The parents seemed
to accept his handiwork, so all is good.

Fortunately the swallow's nest in the boys alpaca 
house seems a bit more secure.

I did manage to attend a conference, online of
course. This was my view. Well some of the time.
This week I've been spending my time trying to
find the warmest spot out of the sun.

Despite the weather forecast for this weekend, the weather is still relatively cool at the moment. Even when the sun is out, there has been a cool wind. It's made working a bit problematic. It has been too warm in the caravan that is still in the greenhouse, but too cool to sit in the shade outside. Yesterday I spent chasing semi-shade all day. My cardigan was on and off all the time. Each time Ian saw me, I was sat in a different place. Down by the barn, I got chilled. Up by the greenhouse the sun moved around, I would start off okay and then the sun would move and I had to try and find another flat spot to put my chair. Then the wind picked up and it started to get cool. I finished working in the shade of the caravan in the greenhouse. 

Little Karla

Eventually I realised that Ginger Tom had the 
best idea, of taking advantage of the shade of
the caravan in the greenhouse. It worked.

At least the shade from the grapevines helped too.

It is so strange to still have the caravan in the greenhouse at this time of the year. Normally, by now we would generally be sweltering at night even outside the greenhouse. We will get the caravan out before the heatwave this weekend but the main problem is that now the grapevine is taking on its monstrous proportions and we will have to be careful it doesn't ensnare anything on the roof of the caravan as we take it out. 

Not me!

Poor Turbjørn. He's still having his ups and downs.
This week looked to be a bad week and so he got
a dose of a long-lasting painkiller. That helped. Also 
I've been putting a herbal fly spray on his nose to
keep the flies off. He can't do that himself very well
due to the lack of mobility in his neck, and maybe
that is why he was having a bad day. 

Going down or alpaca yoga?

I finally got our tomatoes planted up this last weekend, another way overdue job. Some of them were a reasonable size but some are still rather small. I plan to do far more watering than normal to see if they will catch up. Normally we only water once or maximum twice a week so they put down deep roots. This time they will need all the help they can get. I also got more beans planted out and some squashes repotted. Again the squashes would normally be planted up outside but the cool temperatures have slowed down their growth and they are not big enough to plant out yet. I shall just have to leave them in the pots and let them grow. At least in the pots they are easier to water. 

So pleased with the way that Amanda has bonded
with Karla.

Obligatory ET cria picture

Two tired alpacas.

We had two sets of visitors over the weekend. Larger groups than we've been having but still not as large as some years when we've had coach loads. However, it did turn out to be a fairly profitable weekend. Normally we do not sell much in the way of alpaca products. We just have not been set up for selling this year and so things have stayed in a box. Not the ideal selling point. However, one group bought a pair of Turbjørn socks and the hat and scarf knitted from Chanel's wool. Neither were cheap. 

Silla coming to check out the new arrival

An amazingly large caterpillar of the 
Drinker moth apparently.

Platystomos albinus, a fungus weevil

Clouded magpie moth

These comical caterpillar like creatures
are actually the larvae of a sawfly. Possibly
a Rose Sawfly. Not happy to see these
little fellas though on our apple tree.

Brindled Beauty moth according to
iNaturalist.

Stuff happens

A stork on top of the chicks' ark

I really don’t want any more weeks like this last week. There were some good points, like my youngest has settled in well to his new job, which is a great relief and we are very grateful to good neighbours, but some stuff we could really do without. We are a bit fed up with aspects of life at the moment. Don’t get me wrong, we wouldn’t swap what we are doing or where we are living, but such is life, things go wrong from time to time.

Agnese looking super cute

Agnese is still having feeding problems and we are now feeding on a regular schedule, approximately every two hours during the day. She usually tries to feed off her mum whenever we (well Ian usually) go up with her milk and we then have to wait until she is done. We would rather she got all her milk from her mum, but that doesn’t look promising, at least she is getting some. This is now a three month job and our next piece of research will be finding out about when exactly and how to wean her off the milk. One of the biggest problems is having to travel up to our friend’s farm which is 20 minutes away to get some goats milk every other day. We also brought our fridge out from our spare apartment to keep the milk in. Makes life a lot easier.

Snowdrop. She is doing fine after losing the baby, but
she still needs shearing

That trip up to our friend’s one morning coincided with our remaining pregnant alpaca, Snowdrop giving birth. Unfortunately the baby was dead when Ian found it. He was gutted. He said he wanted to be an alpaca breeder, not an alpaca undertaker. Our friend who helped with milking Veronica, came around to help out, as we were worried about the placenta, as that took a while for it to be delivered. I am beginning to wonder if he dreads our phone calls. He thought the baby had probably been breech, as the umbilical cord was ripped quite short and with the blood down the back of Snowdrop, it obviously hadn’t been as clean a birth as the previous alpaca babies. Ian felt really bad, because if he had been there early, like he usually is, there is a chance that he could have helped with the birth and saved the baby. Well maybe and we will never know if that was the case or not. I was meant to be at home that day, but decided my place was with my husband who needed some support and besides it would have been difficult to think straight to work with that news. We named the little one Snowflake, although we didn't think of it at the time, it seems so fitting for one whose life was so fleeting. Why Snowflake? Daughter of Snowdrop!

The fridge now resides in the barn,
where it stays relatively cool

That was the worse catastrophe of the week, but not the only one. The first one happened earlier on when our dear water company, without warning cut off the water supply to our side of the village, so that one of our neighbours could undertake work to his house he is building. When the water was turned back on, it caused the filter to blow in the apartment above our other flat and water started to cascade down. The neighbours at that apartment block saw the problem, as the water was pouring down on the outside of the window. One of them phoned a neighbour to the place where we live, who phoned another neighbour who he thought had our number and she phoned me to tell us the problem (are you still following?). Another neighbour knew someone who had the phone number for our friend who gives us the goats milk and he phoned her and she phoned Ian. Another of our younger neighbours used facebook to contact my young helper who has helped me in years past and made friends with the younger neighbours up there, who then messaged me, but I only found that one out later. One of our neighbours also turned off the electric from the box outside the door, for which we are rather grateful as the water was pouring in through light connections. It might have been a disaster, but at least with concerned neighbours we got to know about it pretty quickly.

Full of the joys of spring

What is it though about alpaca babies and flooding in our other apartment?  For those who remember in early February when we lost the first alpaca baby, born on the coldest day of the year, it was followed by a radiator burst at our other apartment. Our upstairs neighbour came down to look at the most recent damage that had been caused by water cascading down from his apartment and he looked very dejected. He asked us how much it was going to cost and to include the work, his shoulders almost slumping with every sentence. We know they don’t have much and yet they would feel bad if they didn’t contribute something. This is the third time their plumbing has caused a flood in our apartment. Our floors and ceiling are beginning to show signs of the repeated flooding. We are not sure we really want to replace floors and things though if there is a chance of it happening again. We have the dehumidifier on now, working away to pull as much water out of the fabric of the building as possible, then we will see what damage there really is.

Shorn Veronica, letting Agnese feed

All these unexpected problems has meant that I haven’t been able to weed the garden outside our apartments and so that is pretty bad and getting worse. I spent one day trying to find the carrots in amongst some self-seeded chamomile, not an easy task with both having feathery leaves. It doesn’t look like all the seeds have germinated either, or the seed planter gadget I used wasn’t set up right, both possibilities and so there are gaps in the carrot rows. I will give them a couple of days and if no joy will fill in the gaps with more seeds. The sweetcorn hadn’t germinated well either and that could be a seed problem or the cold spell we had. I had one bed covered with fleece and more seeds have germinated in that one, but it still isn’t good. I have already put some more seed in on the off chance there is enough time - in a good year there will be. I still have fodder beet to find yet and then start on the potatoes. At least with those I should be able to straw them up, which will stop some of the weeds from coming through.

Estelle being followed by Agnese

At least we did get some things accomplished this week. I have got some of the cabbages that were in trays planted out, some peas tied up and we also managed to shear two of the girls one day. They are a bit more feisty than the boys and shearing was more difficult, as the cutting comb was obviously not working as well. It looks like we need a new base comb every other animal, especially with those who have the thicker fleece like Tellus and Estelle. It also needs a new top comb with every animal. At least we know where to get them sharpened now. Ian went off today to buy some more combs so that we can finish of the last lady of the herd and have some spares for next week. Ian also planted up some quinoa, amaranth, sunflowers and squashes. We still have some more space to plant up, but that will be with squashes that have self-seeded in the greenhouse and some that have been sown in trays. We are getting there, slower than we would like, but hopefully something will grow.

Tellus in the ladies house

Talking of Tellus and Estelle, we started the process of mating them. We were getting a bit worried after a few hours, they seemed to be behaving like a couple of shy teenagers. They even greeted each other by sniffing noses, which surprised me, as I thought that alpacas just spat at each other if they got too close. Anyway we left them together and eventually they seemed to get the hang of what to do. The males though make a very surprising noise, apparently called “ogling,” it certainly sounded very bizarre. We have to wait though to see if Estelle is pregnant, chances are that she is not this time around. How will we know? When Estelle starts spitting at Tellus to make him go away. We know that Veronica is not ready to be mated yet, she was already spitting in Tellus’ direction, as soon as he looked at her, even though they were separated by a fence.  We still have to decide if we go ahead with mating her again, but since Snowdrop lost her baby, we think we probably will.

The gaffa taped up window

Other snippets from life on the farm is that we have had the first strawberries of the year. I put some plants in the greenhouse and they turned early. They were rather nice, even if there was only four of them. Our chickens have also been plotting their escapes this week. One lot got out of their ark when the door didn’t close properly. Probably because it had just been moved and the frame must have got a bit twisted. The other escapees were the two cockerels we have in the horse box, where they are waiting either to replace the free range cockerel if he doesn’t book his ideas up and stop wandering so much (he has calmed down a lot since we sent the other hens away to a new home, so I think he’s safe), or they will be for the pot, when we find some spare time to do the deed. However, they somehow managed to fly through the clear plastic in the horse box fabric top. It was obviously a bit brittle. At least they were all easy enough to catch, even if the cockerels took a little more persuasion. Chickens are quite easy to persuade to enter something when grain is on offer. As for the plastic window, that has now been criss-crossed with gaffa tape to make sure we do not have a repeat tomorrow morning.

Maybe a bit hard to see, but the black blob is the dead
mole. There is an arc of disturbed ground and that is
the path the beetles took the mole.

The strange thing is that we are usually greeted by cats on arrival to the land, but this morning it was by the two errant cockerels and no cats. This is partly because Sofie has gone on one of her walkabouts again and Bella, we discovered, had managed to get locked into the caravan overnight. Our cats though are usually proving their worth as we see lots of small gifts left lying around, usually voles that are so destructive to trees and vegetables. The strange thing is though that these gifts frequently disappear and we have now discovered this is due to Burying beetles. They literally dig underneath the dead animal and it gradually disappears into the ground, it is very bizarre to watch. We did wonder who the clean up crew were. The beetles did attempt to take on a whole mole, but the ground where it was was too hard, so they then proceeded to move it about 30cms away. Unfortunately for them, I think it was too old by then and flies had found it. Still deep respect for the wee beasties.

Video of Agnese. The end could do with editing

but I'm sorry, no time 

Spring is here... or is it summer?

The leafy lanes of Tartu. This is taken on
the hill near the centre of Tartu where
the ruins of a Cathedral lie and the vague
outline behind the statue is the outline
of those ruins

What a difference a week makes. It is almost as if spring is racing into summer. One week the trees are all bare, the next they are covered in rapidly expanding leaves. Normally we see a more gradual change, but this year, the late winter has meant there are some trees playing catch up and all seem to be developing at once. I'm back up in Tartu again this week and it has been so nice to walk along the paths that are not covered in ice and, despite the thunderstorm this morning, the temperature is rather pleasant. The last time I was up in Tartu, I was constantly afraid of going outside, in case I slipped on the ice again and hurt my arm even more. My field of vision was reduced to the path in front of me and it took an intense level of concentration to walk on them. This week I have been able to saunter along, taking in the peacefulness of leafy lanes. Watching the guys out on the grass doing push ups and laughing to myself at the fact they had started off so fast but were now struggling to keep going, still they managed more than I could do, perhaps I shouldn't have been laughing to myself. It must have been a club of some sort out training, but I didn't manage to work out what kind of sport they might be training for.

I'm not quite sure what this bridge is here for, but it is on
the same hill as the ruins. There looks to be an observation
point on the top of the mound, but what is viewable from
up there I don't know as the trees have grown up so much
around it. There was also a young couple up there and so
I didn't want to interrupt.

Last week was a week for planting, interspersed with revising for the dratted statistics or attempting the assignment. Ian managed to get the gardens rotavated and the flatter plot ridged up, which meant that we could get the potatoes in and we finished off the last two bags of onion sets too. One plot is on a slope and requires short ridges across the slope to catch the water and stop run off of nutrients and so that plot needs ridges putting in by hand, not as easy as using the ridger on the two wheeled tractor, but doable. At least the soil is not heavy clay and even after a shower the night before it was still easy to work. The plot that could be ridged was much easier to do and we just made holes with my spade, which is smaller, and pop the potatoes in. We won't hoe them up, but put straw around them as they grow to reduce the weeds. The British way of putting them in, maybe more productive, but is so much harder to do and in a wet year would mean the potatoes are sat in water, this way they are sat in the ridges and water can pool underneath them and we still get a reasonable amount of potatoes out of them at the end of the year.

Freedom! The alpacas have been given an even bigger area
to eat from now that the grass is growing well. The area
they had last week, only lasted about two days, before they
had eaten most of it down. They look so white against
the green grass!

Many of our tomatoes are planted in the greenhouse now, but still covered in fleece to protect them from the strong sunlight and any danger of low temperatures. In a few weeks time I will take the fleece off and start tying them up to the metal wires we have running along the length of the greenhouse for support. It is exciting to see the young plants bursting their way through from the trays I planted up and, before I left for Tartu, there were cabbages, chinese cabbage, calabrese, pumpking nut squashes and sweet meat squashes, amongst others, all starting to poke through. Ian also planted up one of our ploughed areas with oats, whilst I continued planting up carrots and beetroot outside. It has been dry since the snow melted and the ground needed a shower to encourage more grass growth and seeds to germinate and we have had that now. By next week I will probably be moaning about the weeds.

We don't have many problems getting them put away now,
they just follow Ian into the shed whenever, he has their
evening feed in hand. He doesn't even herd them in.

I had an interesting time this morning meeting with fellow doctoral students, all a little further on than me, even if it is just a semester. It makes a change from sowing seeds anyway. I was so pleased to hear another student was also struggling with the statistics course, as I at least felt it wasn't just me, not so good for her though. I also found out that doing the course in Estonian wasn't any easier, even though the slides for the lectures are all in Estonian. The task for today was to give a presentation about me and the aims of my research. Being a little older than most students meant my introduction was perhaps a tad longer than most, but folks enjoyed it and there were questions not just about the topic of my research, but also about the alpacas we are raising. My fellow statistics sufferer said it had always been a dream of hers to have some land and alpacas. Maybe we can sell her some in the future.

The carpet of wood anemones look wonderful

On a completely different note, one of the things I have found I am getting quite good at is spotting what I have found out are called Spambots. They are comments that people/companies put on blogs to encourage others to click through onto their webpages. It is obviously too much hassle for them to actually personalise their comment on the blog and so they tend to be fairly vague in their wording, with phrases that are so general they can apply to many different blogs. The trick to working out whether a comment is a spambot, is there is no reference to the blog post at all, not in any direct way anyway.  usually check a comment that I'm suspicious of by copying it into google and seeing what comes up. If the same comment comes up all over the place, then I definitely delete it. If you want to know what I mean and see some of the types of comments that are posted all over the blogosphere here is a site with a list of them. It makes quite entertaining reading.

Ian grading the road with our friend's grader he welded
together. It has helped a lot to flatten out the ruts and bumps
on the road and where the wild boar have been. The areas
have also been raked and seeded with a hay mix of seeds

Updated broken link

Competition time

Lovely blossom, I thought it was a mock orange at first but
on closer inspection it didn't give off the heady aroma of
a mock orrange. Beautiful flowers though

Excited? Well you will have to wait as the competition is further down the post. First of all it has been planting, planting and more planting, weeding, weeding and more weeding this week. It's monotonous and boring really and my back aches, but when I step back and look at the result it is good and worth the while. Most of our recent plantings are growing well, some of the types of squashes are struggling a bit, but I reckon with enough sunshine they should recover as they can be fairly resilient (as long as we don't have a frost that is), if not, we won't have certain types of squashes. We have three different plots where we grow food as well as the greenhouse and some things grow better in the different places, something we are still learning about. At least, despite the still cool temperatures we have had just lately we have had a crop of peas and salad leaves from the greenhouse and our broad beans are nearly ready. One evening we had sauteed peas, radish and chinese cabbage with the roast carrots and beetroot thrown in at the end. The peas and radish were from this years plantings, the chinese cabbage was from the shop after the desire for something fresh and not stored in the freezer, jar or in boxes of sawdust overwhelmed me, and the carrots and beetroot are last years rather rubbery, but still tasty produce from last year. This mixture of veg is much more my style of cooking and something I would do regularly when we had a much larger household, it is more difficult to maintain when there is only the two of us and also when I rely on our own produce.

I love lilacs and we have loads around
here, all on the wane though now.

This time of the year does mean there is an awful lot to do, some of it can wait but often it is weather or time dependant. We got the oats in at nearly the last opportunity to get a crop, the weather being against us on that one and perhaps some lack of preparation - ie getting the seed bought, but it is not like we can just pop to the nearest shop to get some, we have to travel about 30 miles to get it, which means a trip has to double up to get other provisions and so takes time. The weeding, if left I am sure you know, can quickly overwhelm a garden and keeping on top of that can be a major task, especially if other things crop up to distract or take priority. I was disappointed therefore, this week to have to turn down the chance of meeting up with some old friends, but we had to acknowledge that we haven't got as much time and travelling quite a distance to see them for just a few minutes is not really something we can afford to do now. We are more than willing to do airport runs if it means we get a good chance to chat with someone - we don't mind chatting and weeding if the other person doesn't mind us carrying on, or there is always the evenings, we don't even mind giving up a whole day if we get a good chance to really share heart to heart with someone, but unfortunately from past experience meeting up with people at camps where they have come to lead activities is not the place for a good place to share. When we started coming to Latvia we used to teach English in some of these camps and in those days they were much less structured, they had an innocence about them, but times have changed and children have changed in the last 12 years. Today children expect more and camp leaders have got more organised, not always sure that is a good thing on either account, then again parents pay for their children to attend camps and I guess they are looking for some sort of value for money from them. What that does mean though is that camp helpers are busy and the chances of an uninterrupted couple of hours chatting is highly unlikely and perhaps a bit selfish to expect it, so we declined.

Hoppy having some time out of the box, so it doesn't get
run over in the bun fight when I gave its box mates some
potato, cucumber and oats.

Our little chicken hoppy, has been giving us cause for concern. There was one point I was praying for the little chap (or is it chapess?) and I wanted to see a miracle, a sign that healing will flow in this place. Well a miracle happened but not quite in the way I expected. For the first time ever here in Latvia I saw comfrey. I had been kind of looking out for it as it is good for composts and since one variety is called Russian comfrey I thought there was a good chance there was some somewhere, but never seen it, till the other day that is. We were wending our way home in the car and had just pulled off the land and travelled a few metres down the road when I saw some. I got Ian to stop the car and we both got out and had a look, sure enough it was comfrey and I took a leaf home just to make sure. The comfrey was so close to the edge of the road that it was in danger of being cut by the road maintenance crew when they clear the road edges, or removal by the grader when they level the dirt road and so the next day I got out my spade and removed it to our garden. As the stems were tall, I reduced the size of it as that should aid in the transplantation and it also meant that I had some comfrey to use as a poultice for the little chick's leg. We needed to get the inflammation down and the wound healing and the comfrey seems to be doing the trick. It also gave me an idea, I know there are lots of herbal books out there but I also know that my Latvian friends use different herbs to the ones we do for some ailments and I was thinking of gleaning the information from them to produce a different kind of book, one based on the seasons as well as the recipes from the Latvian countryside. Worth a try anyway and may save some of the knowledge from being lost in the process. Just have to make sure I take plenty of photos this year of all the different plants to go in the book.

Hoppy's box mates. Two got taken out last night for bullying
Hoppy and were put in the big box, but they in turn were
getting picked on by those in the big box so had to be put
back. I think they have calmed down a bit though after
the experience.

The chicks in the big box, no longer yellow fluffy chicks
as they gain their feathers. They are a varied group of chicks
some buff colours and some speckled grey and some white.
Will be really interesting to see what they turn out like

One of the stork chicks outside our other apartment. There
are definitely two and may even be three in there

The flower bed outside the other apartment. I'm really pleased
how this is turning out but I think I have a purple and blue
theme going on here. Click on the picture to see the flowers
better

Well while I have been weeding and planting, Ian has been constructing again, here are the results so far. I'm not going to tell you what they are, I want you to guess and all will be revealed next week when we show the finished constructions.

Construction No 1. Can you guess what this does?

Construction No 2. Photo 1
Is it a coffin? No! (Yes Ian has a macabre sense
of humour at times)

Construction No 2. Photo 2
Is it a bobsleigh?

Construction No 2. Photo 3
Sleigh?

Construction No 2. Photo 4
Nearly there but not quite. Any guesses yet?

Construction No 2. Photo 5
Maybe this will help? (Vital farm equipment Paul)

Chamomile

An interesting comment was posted by a friend of mine, Liz, on someone's blog, the question was essentially "Did they give the money to the wrong people? What would have happened if the money instead of being given to the banks was given to people to pay off their mortgages? The money would still go to the banks then, but people would have been better off in the process.What would they have then done with the money released from not paying off mortgages? Some of them would have squandered it surely? But what about others? I also wondered what would local farmers in this area do with a cash injection? Would they have replaced or invested in new equipment? Would they have repaired dilapidated housing and barns? Would they have tried some new innovative approaches to farming? Would that have had more effect on the economy than giving it to banks to fund bankers bonuses? At this point I guess we will never know.

I shall leave you with a video that someone posted a link to on facebook, that basically explains in cartoon form what I've been trying to say about the Latvian crisis for the past goodness knows how long. How we measure success is important and this really puts it in perspective and besides is funnier than me pontificating on the subject, yet again!