Opportunity Arrives In Disguise

I'm that person that doesn't read the manuals.

It isn't that I don't understand the value in doing so: I just don't do it. I’d like to tell you that the reason is because I enjoy the process of figuring things out for myself, but the truth is that I hate reading manuals more than I hate figuring things out. To me just looking at the manuals is painful. Put it in an online format and it becomes tortuous. One might say, “well, that is because you are a Luddite, Melissa,” and one would be correct in that assumption. But it’s not the only reason. As I get older I have come to realize some basic truths about myself: some good, some not so. One of these truths is that I am inherently lazy about some (but not all) things. If you think about it, isn't long hair really easier? Another is that if something doesn't stimulate my brain, I'm just not into it.

I am fascinated when I watch people crochet or knit: they have this peaceful look on their face. Someone was knitting during a meeting the other night and I could not take my eyes off her because she then began to talk AND knit. Grandma Moses thing going on there. The meeting about sheep interested me. Knitting, while fascinating to watch, does not.

But in somehow believing myself capable, I will often pick up a needle and thread to repair a tear, mend a sock or even sew on a new button. Disaster almost immediately. I now have to wear magnifying glasses to thread the needle and look a bit like Geppetto. I can't get through the first button hole to even begin and then I seem to create my own zig-zag pattern making the backing on the new button about four inches thick. I can't knot the thread, my thumbs suddenly becoming freakishly large, so I just go back and forth and in and out until I run out of thread.

Once I was performing in an old town hall: perfect place to play, big windows, lots of seating, quaint stage and a beautiful, old wood floor. As I sat down I gave my end pin a bit of an extra push into the floor but really didn't feel I needed a rock stop or anything of the like. “Aesthetics”, you might ask. ”Lazy”, I might reply. We launched into our piece and things were going well, the ceilings in the building created the perfect resonance for sound production. As we moved into the final movement, a fast, furious tempo, as final movements tend to have, and my big vibrato began to move my end pin..just a little, and then a little more. I could feel the cello shift slightly and tried to balance it with my upper body. Apparently the vibrato won as my end pin quietly lifted and began sliding across the wood floor, which did not at this point seem quite so beautiful. I tried following the wayward end pin with the rest of the cello, hunching forward with my body adjusting for the increasing slide, but, law of physics talks about things begin in motion staying in motion and my end pin obeyed the law. I had to start over.

Lately I have found both thumbs bothering me. Through some Sherlockian deduction I realized that it was because I was alternating back and forth between my heavy bow and my lighter bow. While using my lighter bow for facility, I was trying to duplicate the sound production from my heavier bow by using my thumbs as a counter balance. I have since moved back to using just the weightier bow which does more of the heavy lifting for me. Interestingly, it is the remaining pain in my thumbs that is making me more conscious of keeping my right thumb flexible on the bow and keeping my left thumb loose on the neck. Apparently no pain, no gain.

It isn't our successes that shape us, it is our challenges, our pain, and especially our failures. I often tell students that I would like them to wrestle with a difficulty for a while on their own before asking for help. I remind them that it is the ten thousand times that things don't work for them that are doing the teaching rather than the one time that things do work.

There have been many failures and difficulties in my life but I can honestly say that, given a magic wand, I would not change them. It is the ten thousand things that didn't go right that taught me rather than the few that did. And it is the few that did that make me feel blessed and grateful. How could I feel that difference without the difficult?

Though it’s been many years since the endpin disaster, I never go into performances without being sure of where my end pin is going to rest because I know how it feels to have it slide away from me. I am more articulate with my bow use because of the pain in my thumbs. Pain, like failure, teaches.

I also have learned that when there is a button that needs to be sewn, I holler “Paul!!…...”

Melissa Perley

Daylight Spending

This weekend the clocks will spring ahead (that's how I remember which way to turn them) and we will begin to gain daylight into the evening hours. The mercury has climbed out of the negative digits and I can feel the increased warmth from the sun. We have had evenings of rain instead of snow and patches of hopeful grass peek out from still mounded snow. I watch robins navigate from ice caps onto dry land like explorers in the Antarctic. The other day I saw a robin slip on the ice, catch herself, give a bit of a feather shake and move on. I think that if she could speak there would be a blue streak coming from her beak. Who can help but admire these stalwart adventurers taking the early-bird-getting-the-worm to new heights? I feel slightly embarrassed when I see the Robins arrive ahead of true spring, like there might have been something I could have done to forewarn them of what they were flying into.

Suddenly there is more bird chatter in the morning air as I head out to do chores and I can slip off my gloves for more than a few minutes without my fingers going numb. When I am finished I walk back into our hay storage to drop off my bag o' shavings and bucket and, without fail, find Muir lying next to the ATV looking up, hopefully, expectantly, his tail swishing back and forth like a windshield wiper. Now that he has recovered from his neutering procedure, we have returned to our morning routine.

My philosophy with my dogs, young and old, has always been that a tired dog is a good dog. Border collies require consistent work and exercise, including in the winters. Sam and Bronte, being older, are quite content with our hikes in the woods or playing ice hockey in the road. Muir, at just a year old, not so much. Each day, years ago when I was training Sam at a sheep farm in Virginia, the shepherd would ride around her farm on her ATV, a dog or two or three racing along beside, or more likely ahead of her. She told me that it was a great way to give her dogs some exercise while also getting some needed work done. I adopted this idea with Muir and he began running alongside us in our pasture as a pup in the summer and didn't see any reason why we should stop this just because there was a bit (or a foot) of snow on the ground. So, to keep both of us philosophically happy, I continued this routine into the frigid months of the winter. Each cold morning I don my red union suit, complete with flap, Buffalo check farm jacket, wool socks and Mucks. I jam a tight wool hat on my head and pull a neck warmer over it all. For the piece de resistance I grab my trusty Red Baron goggles and head out. When Muir sees me dressed like this, his ears go up, and when he sees the ATV key around my neck he begins to wail. It is a happy cry that begins with a bit of yapping and expands into full blown, open mouth howling. I stand and watch him and know that I could stop him, should stop him, but it is so damn cute and full of joy that I just can't bring myself to do much more than a good-natured grumble at him as I walk past.

I get onto the ATV and back out of the space. He lies still and eyeballs me. Once I am backed around and pointed in the right direction he begins to spin around in circles, think circus spins. I give him the command “Go” and he is off.

I have visions of neighbors down the road seeing a very brief flash of black and white, and in his wake me hanging onto the handle bars of the ATV, full-on goggled. “Come quick. You HAVE to see this...”

A lot of people can't wait for winter to be over and done with. Not me. I do love the cold and snow but it might be more about what I am most familiar with. In Vermont, winter can physically begin in late October and not end until mid-May. That is seven plus months of hunker-down. Our wood stove only sits silent for 2 months of the year. I like my flannel sheets and wool blankets. I prefer heavy socks to bare feet, icicles to black flies. When it gets dark earlier we settle in sooner and stop work earlier. There are soups to be made in the battered old crock pot and I like my tea hot versus iced.

Not to worry, I will enjoy the spring and the languid days of summer. But it won't be just Muir eyeballing the goggles and wool hat hanging on the coat rack.

Melissa Perley

Finding Your Farm

We climbed into the truck yesterday morning and headed north to Shelburne farms, one of my favorite places on earth. Before leaving we checked temperatures for the day and, knowing that we were going to be in a barn for about three hours, began layering up. There are odd little things that Vermonters take pride in; good manure, worst mud season, cheese, and layering abilities. You can be standing in a grocery store talking about the weather (of course) and somebody is likely to pull up their coat to show you just how many layers they needed to leave their house that morning. Forget high fashion, we go for the Michelin-Tire-Man look. Paul takes a great deal of pride in his layers. Before we left yesterday he paused, turned around with a big grin on his face and said, as if it was incredulous even to him, “I have on SIX layers!” and proceeded to both tell me about and show me the various layers. I, practicing deep listening, looked right at him and tried not to laugh as he deliberated with himself on whether or not his wool vest counts as a layer. (Apparently it does.)

Our destination was the dairy barn at Shelburne farms where we were participating in a lambing clinic. None of our ewes are pregnant but we figured the more we know the better, and that there would be cast-off info that we could pick up. And of course there would be newborn lambs. Enough said. We rolled out of our truck (I forgot to mention that layering is detrimental to the forward motion process) and proceeded into the beautiful dairy barn.

Presenting the program were: the president of the Vermont Sheep and Goat Association, a highly experienced commercial sheep farmer, the head shepherd of the Shelburne flock, and about one hundred pregnant or lambing ewes. We spent the morning into mid-afternoon talking about all things ovine. I raised my mitten to intubate a newborn ram-lamb as well as mitten up for ear tagging the little guy. There were also demonstrations on banding for castrating ram lambs. It was, at this point, Paul suddenly became involved in an intense conversation about hay on the other side of the barn..

At one point I was standing in front of one of the milk cows, back to her, when I felt a rough swat on the back of my wool coat. I turned and smiled at the cow licking my coat. For salt, I was pretty sure. (not as familiar with Bovines as Ovines.) However, the licking turned into tugging and I remembered that I had stuck a nut butter bar into my pocket for the just-in-case. Apparently hay and almond butter make a pretty good sandwich for a cow.

We had the chance to chat with people who had no sheep, people who were anticipating their first lambing, people who were experts in the process, and assorted pig and goat farmers. It was a wonderful day in a wonderful place with everyone wearing barn boots.

They varied in their methods but what struck me was that the two presenting farmers, one with a handmade wool hat pulled tightly over his ears and the other in well-worn coveralls, were both on the older side, yet each of them would be lambing between 65-100 ewes this year. They were honest about it being challenging, one admitted that he did not get up in the night anymore. Both expressed that lambing/April, was an exhausting season. Each had informative material organized, passed out and explained with a grin. You don't do this for over 30 years without loving it.

Deciding to start a farm, about five years ago now, meant a 365-days-a-year dedication to land and animals. Did we fully understand what we were undertaking? Heck no. Five weeks into the adventure one of our ewes was hit with fly-strike, and we spent the next hour shaving maggots off her wound. Each of us, including our vet, gagging. You can't make, explain or dream this stuff up. In the summer it is hot and sticky and you are still in Muck boots. (There are no flip flops in the barn..I found out the hard way). In the winter the metal buckets are freezing cold and it is dark at 4pm. If it has snowed heavily I often have to go and carry one chicken at a time back from the sheep barn to their coop for the night. They cluck indignantly when I scoop them up but I think I hear some laughter as they get a free lift home. Fall means spreading manure and spring means spreading seed. All flesh is grass. There is no break.

But the dedication is based on passion. Working 365 days a year gives our life purpose and I believe that we should be diligent in finding our passion and purpose. Because we might have a piece of paper that deems us proficient in one field does not, in any way, mean that we cannot be proficient in another, or several other areas. It changes and expands us as people to continue to grow our knowledge base. For some it is music and farming, for others it is boating and painting, or marketing and cross-fit.

As human beings we are, thankfully, becoming more accepting of our differences; our body shapes, our genders and skin color. Perhaps we can stretch this to become more accepting of the many differences living within ourselves. Understanding that we can be whatever we choose to be and can shift that at anytime

Is it time to pull on some Muck boots and find your farm?

Melissa Perley

Leaning In

Tuesday I pulled on mud boots to head to run errands. The temperature had climbed into the fifties and the warmer sun began to melt the skim off the top of the road, enough so that there were deep ruts to navigate. As I drove through downtown I noticed a few people wearing shorts, they were running to their destinations because it was fifty not eighty, but they looked pretty dang cool running. Being pretty cool myself, I had put on a vest instead of a full-on winter coat.

Thursday night the temperature dipped below zero: no more shorts (save those diehards and we all know them). Friday morning we woke to snow coming down hard. It continued throughout the day and only stopped that evening after we had received well over a foot. February.

Winter, especially the waning months of winter is, for many, the season of discontent. People begin to experience “cabin fever.” Which is exactly what it sounds like, people tired of their four walls. The isolation from Covid has not helped this phenomenon. Being an observer, I notice this playing out in several ways; my sheep, confined to a winter paddock and heavy with winter wool, begin to ram each other for space at the feeders, simply tired of vying for space They stand at the fence and look longingly toward freedom and greener, or any green, pastures. My chickens poke their heads out of the coop to see if they can gingerly step down their ladder to the snowy ground below. If that prospect doesn't look hopeful, they turn around and stay inside under the warmth of the heat lamps. However, once inside, everybody decides they want one nest and sometimes pile one on top of each other to lay their eggs in the most coveted spot. Often, while cleaning out shavings I will find an egg seemingly dropped on the floor as if it was just simply too hard to wait.

It is the time of year I hear cello students voicing their concern about the amount of time they have been working on a piece or how long they have been studying and wondering if they are making the progress they should be.

One of the greatest difficulties in learning something is having the patience to lean into the process, for as long as that take for each person or hen. I remember working on a movement of a cello sonata. I broke it apart; got the notes and rhythm but just could not make it say something. I couldn't explain why the soul of the piece was eluding me, but each time I would play it, there was nothing. This went on for months. And as hard as I was working on the music, I worked on being patient. I leaned my proverbial shoulder into the process and kept the pressure on. Nothing. I closed my eyes to the frustration and kept leaning. There were times when I would shake my fists, bang my music stand and swear like the sailor I am inside. Nothing. Then, on day two thousand and three, it happened. I sat down and something had changed, I moved my bow in a way that I hadn't before and suddenly the elusive part of the piece opened up for and to me.

In learning anything, there no shortcuts. The right kind and amount of effort is essential; but you cannot shortcut time by putting in even more effort. Our brains need the repetition and the time to digest and process information.

One of my tells in knowing if a student can go the distance is what happens when they hit their wall. And they will hit that wall. Some people listen, absorb and lean in: they respect and understand the process. Some people become frustrated, angry and try to muscle the process. And then the process muscles back and they quit. Soon they move on to the next challenge only to find themselves in the same loop of disappointment because there has been no learning.

Sitting next to the wood stove, three border collies splayed out on the rug near me in a sleeping pile, watching more snow fall as March roars in like the lion.

Patience and Perseverance- my second two favorite PP words.

Melissa Perley

Musicians Farming Sheep: Cold

In the summer months, heading out to do morning or evening chores means sliding on some barn boots. In just a few minutes we can be up to our knees in straw, hay or poop. In the winter months it takes time to prepare ourselves to greet the cold: it is all about the layers; wool socks with some kind of under base (formerly known as long underwear) tucked into the socks. Durable pants that don't allow wind to slip through, then the whole thing jammed into boots that are warm down to sub-zero temps. Two layers on the upper torso then the barn coat, dirty, dependable, durable (DDD) I like a wool hat with an inside layer. It wreaks havoc with the hair, but getting past that is another blog entirely. I yank a neck gator over it all to seal my neck and lower half of my face from the icy breezes. When I have the added pounds and can't see more than a few feet in front of me, I know I am ready to face the elements.

New Year's bells were rung by icy winds. January reclaimed its heavy-weight title as our coldest month of the year. We dropped well into the frigid zone, the mercury touching double digits below zero many times.

I love it.

Each morning as I walk to the barn with a bucket of water in each hand, I am stopped in my tracks by the beauty. The cold means that the snow that is frosting the branches of the pines stays in place. If there is a slight wind I can watch it catch some and toss it up into the air like a white mist. When the air is very dry and cold, any moisture turns to icy sprinkles that sparkle in the morning sunlight. I stand as still as I can and take it in. Often my breathing is labored from hauling and I can not only see it, but can hear it coming from my chest, like wind coming off the mountain.

Equally striking is the silence. Often there are complaints that winter can be oppressively isolating. I understand that but actually one of the things I love about winter is that isolation. The precious feeling of quiet and being alone with my thoughts and buckets. Everything is insulated by the deep snow so any sound can be surprising. Chickadees flitting about in the branches having a morning chat with each other, the bare branches of the trees clacking in the wind, any leaves that are fall-stragglers quaking with the cold. Between the snow and my hat pulled tightly onto my head, I often have the feeling of having noise canceling headphones on and there is relief in that dampening.

When I have finished my work and head back to the house, I open the door and am enveloped by the heat coming off the wood stove. My face flushes as I move backward through the layers I started out with. My hair stands on end and I feel very Einstein-ian. I pad across the floor in my thick socks to grab some oatmeal and I recognize that I could not fully appreciate the warm without the cold.

Sometimes when I am at the gas pumps I hear people grumbling about the winter. Their points are valid and understandable but they are living their lives in a kind of suspended reality, always waiting for the “something betters” to come along. When it is icy and cold they cannot wait until it is warm. When it is hot and we are melting, they long for the fall.

We tend to spend a lot of time in that suspended reality, waiting for summer, more money, bigger house, retirement. What we are suspending, in reality, is life.

It takes effort to layer up and go outside. Water in cold metal buckets makes my hands ache but animals need to be fed. We clean our driveway only to have another foot of snow the next night. Large avalanches slide off our metal roof depositing jagged chunks of ice and snow in our walkways, making them impassable until we shovel ourselves back out into the world. When it is cold, it takes more motivation to drive to a store or even take a walk.

The work of winter makes me feel alive.

Only difficulty makes me appreciate ease. It is an empty stomach that makes me appreciate food. And I remind myself that it is the icy path that leads to daffodils in spring.

Melissa Perley

C is for Cello, Chocolate and Comparison

My studio has two recitals a year, without fail. We have our winter recital after the holiday-hoopla and then spring recital in late May. Last year our two recitals were both virtual. This year, as did most people, we zoomed into the new in-person fall semester full of hope for a “normal” season. I don't need to tell you about the actual Zooming that we did.

As the winter recital approached so did a new Covid variant. Feeling the need to respect everyone's right to decide whether or not to play in-person, I sent out a poll to the studio. The results were a bit lackluster (it is a recital, after all) but leaned to another virtual [recital.] performance.

I once again asked people who felt willing, to record their recital work at their convenience and send it to me to share with the rest of the studio. In my mind this fostered a feeling of cello-community where there hasn't been able to be one.

Just before my face would freeze in that lovely way to end a lesson, I would screech, “Don't forget to record!!”. Amazingly I didn't get many enthusiastic responses before the screen went black, but that was easy enough to blame on Skype.

Each recital, people could, if they chose to, invite family or friends to join the call. I'd have Paul come in from the shop and we would all stare at each other on the screen waiting for the student to begin. There was, as you can imagine, a lot of hair adjusting going on.

As the curtain came down on the second full week of recitals, the recordings began to dribble in. Interestingly, an adult student, who has studied the least amount of time, sent her recording in first with a flush of bravado born to someone new to the terror of recording themselves. I applauded her bravery as did others. Then, feeling that the dam had been broken, they began to send in their own. I had told everybody that I didn't care if they recorded it fifty times before choosing the one to send in. If there is one good thing about virtual over live recital, it is that you get more than one shot at it.

I would receive the recordings and send [it] them out to the studio. Everyone began to respond to performers with cheers, bravos and clapping emojis. I watched it all with some trepidation; I had mentioned to Paul that my only concern with doing this was the big “C”. Comparison. He reminded me that they were given the opportunity to record or not and in a live recital, wasn't there even more of a chance for comparison?

Like many things, it all seemed good until it wasn't. There had been a few responses to an especially good recording, 'That is how I would like to play”, and “Man, I won't ever be able to sound like that.” I cringed a little from behind the screen.

One evening I received an email from a student who made a confession that I felt spoke for many people when they record themselves for the first few times. He said that he had really felt like he sounded like Yo Yo Ma when playing at home and when he clicked open their recording was devastated. He had been depressed for hours because there were students older, younger, less studied, more studied, all of whom that sounded “better” than him. Now if the recital had indeed been live, there would have been these same feelings but he wouldn't have felt that pain over and over again in the way he was sadistically able to experience with a recording.

I sat at the computer and stared at the screen for a long time. In the email he said that he had not been able to pick up the cello since hearing these recordings. He was, quite literally, crying for help.

In everything that we do, especially things that mean something to us, there is the danger of comparison. Without fail there will be someone who is better and someone who is worse than you. When someone is worse you can smile magnanimously and feel pretty darn good about dolling out advice on how to be you. When someone is better, we don’t feel quite so compelled to send congratulatory emojis or, for that matter, send in our own recording. The silence is visual and deafening.

What my student wanted was to have me say, in strict confidence, that he was just as good, or maybe even a bit better. That would have made everything OK again. But I could not. Not because it was or wasn't true but because it wasn't the important thing to do or to say. An unwritten rule of teaching is to never be comparative, even within yourself. When I am teaching Sam, it is Sam and how she learns that matters to me. She won't learn like anyone else and my job is to help her to see exactly how she learns and when to turn left instead of right. Nobody's anatomy is the same, nobody's brain works in the same way. We are not in any way homogenized.

Two pieces of wood, cut from the same tree, will not produce the same sounding cello. Two students playing the same Bach, will not tell the same story: because the story they are interpreting is unique to each of them.

What becomes important is to realize that where we are on our own paths is individual. I like to remind people not to fix their gaze to the end of the process, but to be right where they are and dig deep into their own process and enjoy it. When you listen to your best recording, smile and feel grateful that you are able to hear yourself smack dab in the middle of where you are right now. Yesterday you were different and tomorrow you will be different again. Change is the only constant.

My job, as I see it, is to walk beside each and every student along their path. I'm not there to judge but to help navigate the stones that inevitably get in our way as we walk. Someone else might be walking faster than you but you also might bump into someone who is sitting on the side of their path taking a break, intent on returning to the walk, but resting. What remains the same is that with each and every step that we take, we get closer to the top. All we have to do is to keep walking.

I wrote all of this and received an email telling me that he was going to begin practicing again and that he was happy to have company on his hike. It made me smile and I wrote back that I was delighted to walk beside him and that the only responsibility he had, other than to keep walking was, of course, to bring the snacks.

Melissa Perley

Musicians Farming Sheep: Losing a Farm Hand

The year is brand new and, as we turn the page of the calendar, the cold arrives. There are two kinds of cold; December cold which is moist: you can smell the possibility of snow but that can, just as easily, foretell rain, The weekend before Christmas we had a rainstorm that, because the temperature was (oddly for rain), in the 20F region, it was a freezing rain storm. The holiday season almost in full swing and we were left with patchy grass spots and an overall brown pallor. However, Sunday morning of that very same weekend, we awoke to white. It was as if someone had shaken a blanket over our earth and covered it with almost eight inches of clean snow. And just like that, things changed.

January brings in the second kind of cold - the frigid cold. If you live in a climate that has distinct seasons you understand that difference. If you are dressed for it, working outside in December cold isn't bad. You are able to take off your gloves and carry a metal pail full of water to the animals without too much pain. When you take off your gloves in the January cold, it only takes a few minutes before your hands begin to tingle and then move quickly to a full-on throb. There is a Vermont “move” that we all recognize - somewhat like the universal sign for choking. It is the one glove-off -at a-time hand-whack. You are either whacking your exposed hand against your own body to bring warm blood to the appendage or you simply moving it back and forth at an accelerated rate, like a crazy wave hello. This phenomenon is not for lack of work gloves; we have a mound of them at our disposal and, if you are willing to play the find-the-glove-match game you should be set. It is just that there are basic truths; gloves or mittens, frigid is frigid and animals need to be fed and watered, twice daily.

This year we have had some change at our farm. Besides Omicron arriving in the area and the car-crushing tree episode, we are losing our farmhand.

By definition a farm hand is someone who works on your farm: who is around when you need wood cut, paddocks changed, sheep sheared or chickens let out in the wee early morning hours. And by that definition our farm hand has been our son, Joshua.

Josh has grown up here in our woods. He left only to head to college to study, surprise, wildlife, and was here in and out between internships and working gigs in Montana, Minnesota and Alaska. He came back to Vermont to enter the Masters program with the intention of living near campus. And then came Covid (how many sentences start or end with that statement?) and Josh moved back home to study virtually. It was then that his farm hand stint really began. Josh is about 6'3 and built like an oak tree. He can lift heavy bags of feed, wrestle resistant ewes and toss trees off flattened vehicles. He also happens to be smart and good natured as well. For the past five years the three of us were, self-appointed, three musketeers.

And then came love.

Paul and I work well together in both our cello business and on our small farm. But this winter, increasingly, Josh is staying warm elsewhere and it is Paul who hauls bales of straw into the barn and me who wakes the chickens a little later than they might like. Together we finagle the schedule of running the border collies that include the ten month old pup, Muir. We can do it. It’s just different.

There is more food in the fridge, less laundry in the basket, more silence in the house.

It is as is should be and as hard as it can be.

When you have a farm, you know the day will come when your farmhands will pack their things and set off. So you stand at the end of your driveway and wave, Border collies sitting at your feet. Like you, they are a little unsure as to why they aren't invited along but wish our farmhand all good things just the same.

Sometimes farmhands leave for another gig, sometimes for another adventure entirely. Ours won't be far away, a phone call and promise of food will, most likely, bring him back to lend a hand. But there is love on both sides of the leaving of our beloved farmhand: and just like that things have changed.