Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

(Entrance to the Bowmer Theater)

We’re in Ashland, OR for our annual haj to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Once again, my mom has flown in from Toledo to attend with us, and once again, the weather is so far hot & sunny, such a change from the cool & overcast spring we’ve had in Seattle.

One big glitch: On the day before our departure, I received an email from the Festival that they’d discovered structural damage to a central beam in the large indoor Bowmer Theater, and that it would be closed indefinitely.  This was a pretty large deal, since 4 of our 8 plays were scheduled to be performed there:

• To Kill A Mockingbird
• Measure for Measure
• Imaginary Invalid (a Moliere)
• August: Osage County (a contemporary play by Tracy Letts set in small-town Oklahoma)

We were left with:

• Pirates of Penzance
• Love’s Labors Lost
• Henry IV, Part 2

all in the outdoor Elizabethan Theater, and:

• Julius Caesar

in the small indoor New Theater.

Since my mom was already in town, and we already had our airfare to and lodging in Ashland paid for, there was no thought of canceling.

As events progressed, the Festival devised a way to stage the canceled plays in the cavernous old Armory building just up Oak Street from our lodging, so we lined up in the street Tuesday afternoon to see if we could get a seat for To Kill A Mockingbird.  As it happened, there were plenty of seats inside, all on folding chairs in neat rows in a huge auditorium.  There was a certain sense of disenfranchisement, since I had bought front-row tickets for all of our plays last November in the members’ presale, and our seats in the Armory were more than halfway back.  Still, kudos to the Festival for going outside the box to deliver the product.  And, the Armory performances are free to anyone who held tickets to the original performances; we got our choice of cash refunds or vouchers for future performances of any play, this year or next.  I selected vouchers, since I have a glimmer in my eye about another trip down here later in the year, after they (hopefully) have re-opened the Bowmer.

To Kill A Mockingbird

I had never read the book, nor seen the movie, so this was my first introduction to the story.  The production in the Armory was done without costumes, props or stage sets.  It opened with the full cast on stage, sitting on folding chairs in a semicircle, with an adult incarnation of Scout narrating.  As she was reminiscing about that fateful summer, actors would rise from their chairs and create a flashback tableau of dramatic action, and the voice would pass from the adult narrator to a pre-adolescent Scout.

As the production progressed, the actors involved in dialogue used an area about 10′ by 10′ to represent their interactions, and their strength of delivery did a lot to overcome the lack of visual context.

The story itself has two major plotlines: the first, the depiction of the Finch family and the development of Atticus Finch’s character as a father and citizen; the second, the civic and legal developments leading to the trial and its outcome.  To begin to appreciate either, it’s necessary to be able to place yourself in Depression-era, small-town Alabama.  This is where the lack of scenery and the first-rate production values of the Festival is quite apparent.  The surfeit of family sagas and courtroom drama in the cinema and on the screen in the ensuing decades overwhelms this work taken in its components; it would make an ordinary episode of Law & Order.  It really needs to be viewed through its temporal and geographical context.

What gives the story its spark is the collision of these two plotlines: the precipitous ripping of the Finch family from its comfortable niche near the top of the town’s social foodchain and making them the embodiment of all its resentments, armed only with a nascent moral carapace; and the journey of Jem and Scout from a mostly passive and credulous acceptance of the world as viewed through Atticus’ lens, to the crescendo of lurid and unvarnished images that are thrust upon them.

This last thread, the passage of the kids from Atticus’ protection and control, is almost lost in the hurly-burly of the trial.  It begins with their unbidden, perhaps forbidden, foray to the jailhouse to stand with Atticus, and extends as they assert themselves (as invited guests) to view the trial from the black folks’ gallery.

I’m curious now to read the book and join the majority of the civilized world.  I’d like to see how Lee’s prose stands up to the expectations of its myth.  I’d also like to learn the elements of backstory necessarily excised from the play.

(40%) I’ve never been the one to say, “I work best under pressure.”  It is, in fact, usually calamitous.  But I’m flying home from Detroit to Seattle, and I was comped for free wi-fi, so I’ve set myself this task: to write and publish a blog post before my Macbook battery runs out.  And, be advised that my battery guage diminishes faster than the gas gauge on a Ford Explorer.

(38%) So I’m at the end of a week’s travel.  It began at 3:30 am last Tuesday, when a shuttle picked me up for a 6am flight to Orlando, where I attended a software conference.  There’s just not much to write about that.  I attended a session on inventory costing which was very beneficial, but would be a recipe for further alienation here.

(36%) Flew Thursday night from Orlando to Columbus, where my brother had been working all week, and we spent Friday touring the new student union on the Ohio State campus, then dinner and an impromptu appearance at a Columbus Blue Jackets game. My first in-person NHL game.  Impressive skating and puck-handling.  The obligatory glove-and-helmet-disrobing fight, which had no discernible cause, got over with in the first period.  Perhaps the Blue Jackets spent all their passion in that pas-de-deux, because they went on to lose 6-1, including goals allowed to a short-handed Calgary team, and another with 12 seconds left.

(32%) Saturday was the piece-de-resistance: the Ohio State-Purdue football game.  I was extended the privilege to purchase a pair of tickets to the game due to my winning the lottery conducted for alumni of my caste (those who give $10 - $25 bucks, usually by the accident of answering the phone in time).  The seats were awfully good - 4 rows from the top of C-Deck, smack on the 30-yard-line.   We attended the marching band’s pregame rehearsal/concert in St. John Arena called Skull Session, which is attended by 10,000 - 12,000 people.  By bro’s old band buddy had saved us seats in the front row, and we reveled in the band’s extraordinary sound.  (I’ll post video later)

(27%) After the game, we drove up to Perrysburg to visit our mom and to complete some chores that we’d started on our last visit over Labor Day weekend.  Both of her bathroom fans, installed when my parents built the house in 1961, had failed, and we had managed over Labor Day to remove them and their housings, only to find that nothing at Lowe’s would fit into the same space.  We struggled a bit at that time, then solemnly promised to finish the job on our next visit (each hoping, of course, that the other one would be making that visit alone).

(23%) We worked part of Saturday and a lot of the day Sunday.  One of the new fans would not work at all, and we had started to think that we would have to engage an electrician to find the problem.  Meanwhile, we had discovered a problem with one of mom’s downspouts that, left untended, had the potential to wash dirt away from the foundation.  The house is already experiencing an alarming amount of settling (it’s brick, so the evidence is impossible to ignore).  Another trip to Lowe’s, and we got started on that chore just as, of course, it started raining.  We fitted a new length of aluminum downspout and reattached it to a drain as lightning and thunder crashed all around us.

(19%, red warning) Then the power went out.  Like it’s going to here soon.  We worked inside on the fan problem by flashlight, and wer giving up when my bro discovered a severed wire to a switch that was almost certainly our culprit.  We patched in a new length of wire and bolted everything together.  We wouldn’t know, however, whether we’d been successful until the power came back on.

(17%) We enjoyed the rest of the evening socializing with Mom with candles burning, and imbibing sports the old-fashioned way: listening to the Packers-Vikings game on a battery-operated radio.  We took a walk along the darkened street and watched a gorgeous full moon rise above storm clouds, one house flickering inside with candlelight, the next alit from the hum of a gas generator.  More than 4 hours later, the power came back on.  We reluctantly snuffed all the candles and plugged the critical electronics back in, then walked upstairs.  The errant bathroom fan was purring beneficently. We declared the weekend a success.

(12%) Scene.  And I’m not editing.

Still chewing on May here.  One of the fun things we did was band camp with Rainbow City Band.  It was held over a weekend at Fort Worden in Port Townsend (where most of the movie Officer and a Gentleman was filmed), and it represents sort of a breakpoint between the sit-down concert season and the less-structured marching season.  The fun started on a Friday night with a music rehearsal (of course), then a talent show that sounded like a gas.  We missed it, because I was out of town the week before, and didn’t arrive at SeaTac until nearly midnight Friday.

Mrs. Perils & I got up at 5 Saturday morning in order to catch a ferry at 6:10, as I really wanted to attend all of the planned activities on Saturday.  And planned they were.  Even as a late arrival, I still participated in 1 sectional, three music rehearsals and 3 marching/playing rehearsals in about 36 hours. In between, there were festive mealtimes in a dining hall where we sat at various tables and really got acquainted with other band members.  Our Tuesday rehearsals are so tightly focused, and the space is so cramped, that I actually had not met many of the people from the other side of the band. I was gratified by the warm and ready acceptance of Mrs. Perils, and of us as an entity.

The piece de resistence occurred Saturday night. The theme for the weekend was Alice In Wonderland and, after our post-dinner music rehearsal came a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.  All of the communications about Band Camp had encouraged costumes, but since I was out of town the previous week I never got anything together. This, as it turns out, was a huge mistake.  The costumes at the party ranged from clever to extravagant.  There was a fully-formed green caterpillar with a hookah, Tweedle Dee & Dum, a Cheshire Cat, various playing cards including the Queen of Hearts with a formidable-looking axe, and one or two Alices in drag.  The costume that tickled me the most, however, was a guy in street clothes with a pregnancy tester hanging around his neck.  When we asked what he was supposed to be, he looked at it, frowned, and said, “I’m LATE! I’m LATE! I’m LATE for a very important DATE!”  There were numerous tables with various board and card games going on, and every 20 minutes or so, the Mad Hatter would scurry around the room forcing people to move and mix with others at different games.  Among all of the wine and other beverages and hors d’oeuvres, someone uncorked a huge barrel of a deadly concoction called Strip and Go Naked (contents: beer, lemonade, vodka), as if this occasion needed more encouragement.

We slept in a large dormitory building that used to be barracks at the Fort, and the organizer thoughtfully polled everyone regarding their bedtime/noise level preferences, and arranged our accommodations accordingly.  We were fortunate to land at the end of the “quiet” folks, as there was apparently an after-party to the tea party that left one wing of the band decidedly fuzzy Sunday morning.

At one point during our marching practice, we were approaching a chapel in which a wedding had just been consummated, and it was our (or their) misfortune that we were just finishing Bad Romance (Lady Gaga).  We tried to make it up to them by playing Over The Rainbow and Don’t Stop, but I’m not sure they were amused, and it seemed politic for us to hie ourselves to another part of the facility.  One other amusing thing: a guy who played French horn during concert season is playing Glockenspiel for marching, explaining that he’s bisectional.

We got a lot of work done, and had a great time.  Even got several beach walks in (click to enlarge):

The trumpet section…and the perspective of the drumline

Fully decompressed now from my two weeks on the road, and today (Saturday) slaps me upside the head with some true spring weather.  Son and girlfriend took Mrs. Perils off to Index for a Mother’s Day rock-climb, and I’m mellowing in a coffeehouse after mowing the lawn.

As mentioned previously, I followed my monthly Milwaukee gig with a trip to Atlanta to attend the Microsoft Convergence 2010 conference.  One of my clients uses one of MSFT’s ERP packages (Navision), and we’re about to undergo a significant upgrade, so a handful of us attended in order to learn what changes were afoot and to perhaps apprehend additional ways we could use the software.  Since my youngest brother lives in a northern suburb of Atlanta, I bunked out at his house for the 4-day conference and rode the MARTA rail system right up to the doors of the Georgia World Convention Center.

The first day, I arrived and thought I could just saunter into the first session.  What I didn’t realize was that 8500 people were attending the conference.  Registration reminded me of a huge Customs operation, perhaps what it might have been like to land at Ellis Island.  The whole thing was very well-done, though - everything ran like Swiss trains.  It was lavishly catered, at least in the context of other things like this I’ve attended.  The first night, there was a reception with all kinds of performers, and about 15 different food a beverage kiosks scattered around a massive hall:

(Shaquille O’Neal clone)

In another area, there were several hundred networked PCs set up so attendees could run tutorials and demos on their particular software package (4 ERP systems were represented, plus several other productivity tools like CRM):

One thing that was kind of hilarious was hearing the session moderators repeatedly say, “if you Goo…uh…BING it…”

On the Tuesday evening that the conference ended, my brother & sister-in-law had tickets to a Jimmy Buffett concert at an outdoor venue south of town.  I rode the train down to meet them in the parking lot, little realizing what an event the pre-concert tailgate is for a Buffett concert (it was my first, but they’ve been Parrotheads for years, and they love going diving in the Florida Keys).  You could walk around the parking lot and encounter various tableaux, almost like dioramas, often with a bowl of jello shooters set out like Halloween candy.  The guys below had built a tiki bar out of bamboo especially for the concert.  The guy sitting behind the bar sported a pair of false (I assume/hope) buttocks that he invited all & sundry to autograph (Click any photo to enlarge):

Eventually, there was actually a concert:

Mrs. Perils flew in on Wednesday and saw my brother’s place for the first time.  Then Thursday, it was off to Myrtle Beach for our annual spring family reunion.  I’m not sure how long we’ve been doing this spring meeting.  It started back in the mid-90s when my parents would golf their way south from Toledo and end up at my middle brother’s place near Charleston, SC.  They found this resort called Litchfield By The Sea on Pawley’s Island, just south of Myrtle Beach, and started making it a destination.  I’m not sure when I began joining them, but it must have been ‘98 or ‘99, because I’m sure I tagged it onto a business trip for the company I was working for then.

It’s a really nice time to be there - it’s usually 65 - 70 degrees, which the locals find too chilly to draw them to the beach, so despite the colossal condo buildings there, we have a lot of beach to ourselves.  Attendees this year were all 3 of us brothers and our wives, my mom, my niece and her squeeze.  We walked a lot, rented bikes, ate, drank and generally enjoyed ourselves (and each other):

View from our room

My bro, SIL and Mom

Watching the Kentucky Derby at a seaside bar

Mrs. Perils saddling up (in blue, center)

Probably happy to see our plane leave.

The world finally slowed down a tad, before turning on its heel and hurtling into 2010.  I’ll recap December a bit, then turn and face the new year head (and blog) on.

The month started, I think, with a cold, enough of one to make me postpone a business trip to eastern Washington.  It was still lingering a bit on a Friday afternoon when I boarded a plane for a week away from home, first to visit my mom in Toledo for a weekend, then on to Milwaukee for a week of work.

We had a really pleasant visit.  I did something over that weekend I hadn’t done in about 40 years - practiced my trumpet in the basement of the house I grew up in.  See, I’ve been hauling it on my business trips since I’ve been playing in this band, because laying off for a whole week would just kill any progress I’ve been making all fall, and our holiday concert was coming up the next weekend.  (In the hotel rooms, I put my cup mute in, sit on the floor and point the horn under the bed. On a good day, it might sound to anyone in adjacent rooms like space alien sex.)

We made a trip to visit the Toledo Art Museum.  It’s one of those venerable old civic institutions endowed by industrial barons of the gilded age (in this case, Libbey Glass), and has a surprisingly extensive collection.  I would say it’s easily twice the size of Seattle’s.  Toledo was known for a long time as the Glass City, owing to its housing the corporate headquarters of Libbey Glass, Owens Corning, Owens-Illinois and Libbey-Owens-Ford.  It’s no surprise, then, that one of its featured collections is glass art and artifacts, dating from ancient Egypt.  They opened a Glass Pavilion annex a few years ago, and we watched a glassblowing exhibition and perused the exhibits (Click any photo to enlarge):

On Sunday, I did a few odd jobs, including hanging some curtains, that required me to go out to the garage and riff through my dad’s tool shelves. They are laden with tools that date from the 40s and 50s, and the sight of them stirs some of my oldest memories. My dad was a delegator, and when he was doing some job around the house, he always wanted one of us there with him - ostensibly to learn the particular task or skill, but more to the point, to run to the garage and retrieve tools as he needed them. As I touched them, I could hear his words: “electric drill; brace-and-bit; 3-in-one oil; Phillips screwdriver (this one confused me for a while, as they called me “Philip” in my early years). The tools remain there even with the infrequent use they get now, a shrine to a doggedly resourceful DIY guy.

As expected, I paid for the time off in South Carolina with a very busy 4-day week, especially as I’m headed to Milwaukee Sunday. Here are some additional pics from SC that I particularly like. The first two sets were taken just after a rain squall, and were presided over by a full, horizon-to-horizon rainbow (with a hint of a double-rainbow in the lower left) (Click any photo to enlarge).

In the lower left, I like the sand patterns that our grand-step-niece is splashing through (Mrs. Perils in the background, step-niece on left). The pic on the right is one of several little tidepools that were teeming with juvenile clams all huddled together, siphons extended lasciviously. I never had so much fun on spring break

After leaving Pawley’s Island on Sunday, Mrs. Perils and I drove south to visit with a man whom we met in our online book club. He lives near Hilton Head Island, and we drove out there Monday just to say we’d been there. We didn’t have a lot of time to explore, and it seemed that all of the beachfront was taken up by private resorts. We did find a little Audubon preserve, and decided it was our only opportunity for a little outing before blasting up to the airport for our Monday evening flight back to Seattle. There was a pond there with a viewing platform, and as we walked out on it, turtles from all over the pond jetted over to us. We felt like the Rolling Stones of brackish pond-dom. We had nothing to feed them, and probably wouldn’t have anyway, and they soon lost interest, and I swear I could hear them grumbling darkly. I also spied a bright green gecko skittering beside the path. He hauled himself onto a large leaf, and I really like the backdrop it makes for the photo on the right:

We usually head down to the beach for our nightcap. Here’s my middle brother, step-niece and me on our last night:

Since I had used frequent-flier miles to purchase Mrs. Perils’ ticket, she was not eligible for a first-class upgrade. My ticket was, however, and we lucked out on both the outbound and return trips. Since I gave the seat to Mrs. Perils on the outbound, I got it on the return. Not all upgrades are created equal, however, as I had an…um…interesting seatmate on the 4-hour flight from Houston to Seattle. Thank heaven it was first class - he’d have been a load in coach. He was actually very affable and friendly, and engaged in a lot of nsfw banter with his trainer, who was seated behind us.

Extended slide show of photos from the trip here.

That’s the view today from the Northwest Airlines Worldclub in Seattle - it’s the Olympic Mountains behind an Airbus A330 bound for Incheon, Korea. I won’t be on that plane - I’ll be on a much more modest 757 headed for the balmy climes of Minneapolis (for a short layover), then Milwaukee. The temperature will be nudging 6F when I arrive.  I’ll post more once I arrive and get my keyboard de-iced.

Update

Sitting now in the Minneapolis Worldclub, where the WiFi password is “COLD”.  Go figure.

The red tail in the photo above is an endangered species, as Delta bought Northwest and is slowly repainting NWA’s aircraft.  It’s one more change that I’ll have to accommodate, since I’ve spent so much of the last 10 years or so in and around NWA aircraft.  I’ll have to countenance changes to my frequent flyer plan, even though my miles and status (Gold) will be merged into Delta’s.  It’s superfluous in the overall scheme of things, but when you travel a lot, you can limit the variables and uncertaincy by flying the same airlines, booking the same rental cars, etc.

Here are some images from the flight out of Seattle.  We’ve been experiencing a thermal inversion, so the air is clear once you’re above the inversion layer:

I woke up to this sight this morning at my Milwaukee hotel.  The one I checked out of because I have a flight to Seattle this evening:

And the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had this cheery tidbit:

The sixth storm of this trying winter season proved today that the first five were mere practice. Nearly a foot of snow blown by wind gusts topping 30 mph stopped flights at Mitchell International Airport, stymied motorists and Milwaukee County Transit buses and shut down businesses and government operations.

And even if I get to depart MKE tonight, I’ll be flying into this in Seattle:

The weather’s just warming up for weekend blast

Forecasters say wind, heavy snow to hit again — hard

By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER

OK, now get ready for a real winter blast expected this weekend bringing much heavier snowfall with dangerous winds and possibly even freezing rain followed by the potential for avalanches in the mountains.

“It’s going to be a real mess,” said Brad Colman, director and chief meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Seattle. “It’s a much more dangerous storm because of the wind element. … I think we will have power issues.”

So, I’m biding my time here at my client’s office, where hardly anyone showed up this morning, and those who did are mostly going from office to office describing their commutes.

As much as I’ve flown in the northern tier over the past 10 years, I’ve never been stranded anywhere, not even the week of 911.  But I think there’s a high probability that I’ll be bunking out either in Milwaukee or Minneapolis tonight.  Then who knows what will happen as everyone tries to reschedule into the teeth of the holiday travel season.  I think it might be wise to transfer some of my dainties from my checked luggage to my carry-on pack.

Update

I admit I spent way too much of my client’s time this afternoon obsessively refreshing my NWA flight status screen, trying to determine how my fate thread was unraveling from the spindle of the confluence of airframe vs. atmospherics.  As the day evolved and the Milwaukee airport stayed closed, more and more of the scheduled flights started to post “Canceled” or “Delayed”, but my 6:05 pm departure remained miraculously “On Time”.  I presumed that this was simply because Northwest had not been able to think, and cancel, that far ahead yet.

Turns out that I was just lucky in my scheduling.  When I arrived at the airport, there were two classes of Northwest customers:  Those whose reservations were still “alive” - i.e. not canceled, and whose connections had not been mangled,  and those who were fucked and not likely to get un-fucked real soon.

This photo shows (not really starkly) how this divide worked down in the Black Hole of NWA Calcutta:

Those directly behind me were in a short line to check bags for flights that were still on schedule; those to the rear were the tip of a line that snaked around the cramped ticketing area, waiting for agents to patch their lives back together.  As I checked my bags, I felt like a resident of a miraculously intact building in a city that had been carpet-bombed.

After I checked in, I discovered that I could catch a seat on an even earlier Minneapolis flight and, reader, I grabbed it as if it was the landing strut of the last helicopter leaving Saigon.  Under those circumstances, when you see an actual plane actually loading actual passengers, you can’t turn it down.

And, yes, just to prove that injustice can still be propagated in these post-bailout times, I was upgraded on both legs.  Boo-Yeah!

So we met at my middle brother’s place near Charleston, SC to roast oysters and watch the Ohio State-Michigan game last weekend.  The weekend sped by, and I could do no more than hold on for the ride. I mean, nominally it was a 4-day weekend spanning Thursday through Sunday, but so much of my time was taken up on airplanes that I only got 2+ days of ground time with my peeps.

I arrived in Charleston on time, but at midnight on Thursday. On Friday, my middle bro, the host of the festivities, and I went shopping at the oyster store and (natch) the liquor store, then stopped at what used to be a rice and indigo plantation adjacent to man-made Lake Moultrie. His employer now owns the grounds, and entree to the place is an employee benefit. It was chilly the whole weekend, and on Friday there was a 20-knot wind. As we strolled, the sun was lowering and the angle of light was making the sea oats and Spanish moss look like it was on fire (click photos to enlarge):

My youngest brother and his entourage arrived Friday evening and, after going out for a gala dinner, we stayed up late drinking his home-brewed beer around a campfire. Saturday, Gameday, arrived all too soon, and I dragged myself out of bed just in time for the noon (Eastern) kickoff.

Even though Michigan has had its struggles this season, I had expected the usual nail-biter. Instead, the Buckeyes finally fulfilled the potential that seemed imminent early in the season, and won the game easily. We usually watch the game outside, back by my brother’s garage, but the chill, and the presence of a new wide-screen TV in the living room, kept us inside for the first half.

My SIL was the first to notice it - my bro’s have finally devolved to watching the Buckeyes in rocking chairs, and spending time-outs in barcaloungers.  Eventually, in the second half, we tentatively migrated outside to start the grilling marathon.

The game won, we turn to developing a hot bed of coals for roasting the oysters. The pets don’t escape the madness (the dog is from Columbus, and is named “Beanie Wells”.  Go figure). After eating way too much, we hang out around the fire despite temperatures in the 20s, savoring the win, my brother’s excellent hospitality, and each other’s company.

I’m chillin’ at the Northwest Worldclub at the Minneapolis airport, waiting for my 9:30 flight home to Seattle. A hectic Friday, as usual for these expeditions.

The last couple of times I’ve gone to Milwaukee, I’ve been checking Craigslist to see if anyone’s selling a bicycle for a reasonable price. The area where I work and stay (Glendale/Fox Point/Whitefish Bay), north of town, seemed to be a great place to bicycle, and I often see serious training going on there.

So, last Saturday, I saw a likely candidate on Craigslist.  I stopped at the seller’s place on my way to my hotel from the airport, test rode it, and plunked down my money and drove away with it!

It’s a little bit bigger than I would ride if I had been shopping for a main squeeze sort of bike, but I had a great time cruising around on it this week.  It’s my first “modern” bike, with brake-lever index shifters and a 9-speed cassette in the back, triple-chainwheel in front.  I locked it up at my client’s when I left tonight, but kind of hated to leave it behind.  I’ll get good use out of it through the fall, and it adds some zest to the humdrum life of the road warrior.

Have a good weekend, everyone!  I’m glad to be headed west.