Subscribe!Today I released the fifth album I've recorded and produced this year. I started work on this one back in April, so I've taken a lot more time over it than I've been used to doing lately. This time around I've been getting to grips with applying multiple effects chains to what I'm doing as I play it—specifically feeding synth and guitar into one chain consisting of a Red Panda Particle 2 into a Mk 1 Mooer Ocean Machine into my trusty Eventide H90, and a second chain with a Chase Bliss Mood Mk 2 feeding into the first chain. The result: sonic madness. There are also plenty of effects in the input signals too; and I couldn't resist adding even more effects in the box with Ableton, of course. The results speak for themselves, I reckon.
The album's called A Kind Of Lightning.
Do you recognise the typeface on the cover? It goes by the name of VAG Rounded, because it's the corporate typeface of the Volkswagen Audi Group. More importantly, it should also be instantly recognisable to any Peter Gabriel fan because Peter has been using it ever since 1977, when it appeared on the cover of his first solo album. Last week I was talking to Real World's chief engineer Katie May and being a nerd (of course) and I mentioned that I've used it on almost every album cover I've released as a small tribute to Peter. Katie said, "Oh, I'm going to tell him that. He loves things like that."
For the last week I've been working on getting the new album ready for release, working on tracks for ICH's upcoming third album, recording some bass and stick parts for a friend's project, and catching up on all the gardening and other chores that didn't get done while I was away at Real World.
And over the last couple of days, I began to realise that I was pushing myself too hard. I was getting overwhelmed and I could feel myself getting to the point where something was going to break. In the past I would have just ignored this feeling and ploughed on regardless—and that would simply have ended up with me getting ill. Not any more. Now I know what my condition is and what was going on, I was able to recognise that I needed to ease off and for the first time ever I could explain exactly why I needed to do so. When I told the people I've been working with what was happening, they were understanding and supportive and told me to take all the time I needed.
Wow. That's never happened to me before.
As you probably realised, I needed to take some time out for a pretty intense bout of personal reflection after the upheaval I experienced earlier this month (when I discovered that I'm most likely autistic). And when I say "most likely" what I mean is "I have finally found a plausible explanation for why my life has turned out the way it has."
The good news is that I don't feel unstable any more, and this month's blog banner has already moved from being an accurate reflection of my mental health to an historical artefact. For the past few days I've been experiencing a deep and profound sense of calmness, because now I have a context that lets me understand who I am, why I find so many aspects of everyday life difficult if not incomprehensible, and why I've always been the eccentric oddball who never really fits in anywhere. The sense of relief that it's not a failure on my part feels really weird; I'm simply not used to feeling good about myself. This week I noticed that my mood has dramatically lifted—importantly, it's done so without me having another manic episode—and I've found myself in wholly unexpected territory. Suddenly, I'm settled and relaxed, and it feels like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Is this what life feels like for everyone else? If it is, I had no idea just how badly I've been missing out.
And so now I'm quite positive that the diagnosis of chronic depression which I received back at the beginning of 2009 was actually something else entirely. In fact, this description of something called autistic burnout captures my default mental state with uncanny accuracy. That bit about it having a duration of "three months or more" is a bit of an understatement, though; it's how I've felt for pretty much the entirety of my adult life. If my recent self-diagnosis is accurate, and I'm very confident that it is, then quite frankly I don't know how I've managed to survive the past fifty years at all. If I'm right, it means I've also been taking a lot of medication over the years that was entirely unnecessary. That seems to track; as Rob said to me during one of several conversations we've had about this in the past fortnight, it now seems rather odd that I could come off the pills quite as easily as I did. It was only when I found myself being stressed and overloaded with work that I felt like I needed to go back on them.
Oops.
If I had to describe what has happened to me this month to anyone, I think I'd say that my old self finally gave up the ghost. The personality that I had carefully constructed for myself since I was a teenager completely disintegrated. It was long past time that it did so, because it had become clear to me that being that person wasn't sustainable any more. Leaving aside the question of whether such a thing even exists, I would beat myself up every day for not having the "happy ever after" life I thought I ought to be leading. I kept thinking that I was failing because I just wasn't trying hard enough, when in fact it turns out that I'm simply not wired in a way that would make such a life even remotely possible for me. And I had no idea at all just how much stress I was putting myself under, trying to achieve an impossibility like that—or how much emotional energy I was wasting by pretending to be someone that everyone around me must have known immediately wasn't really me. But as I'm me, I had to keep pretending right up to the point when it all came crashing down around my ears. I'm still trying to figure out what I need to pull out of the wreckage and what I should leave behind. But I'm going to make damn sure that the version of me I end up being from now on is going to be an authentic one, not some stressed-out fake. No more pretending.
No, I haven't undergone some freakish transformation. I think it's safe to say that if you bump into me in real life in the future, I'll still be recognisably me. But I'm not the person I used to be. I can't do that any more.
Last weekend I was back at my favourite place once again, attending the second Masterclass event at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Box, just east of Bath. I was in a much better frame of mind for this event, to put it mildly.
I encountered plenty of familiar faces, but I also made some new friends this time, too.
I got to nerd out with another fantastic array of incredible musicians, engineers and producers.
Fi Cruickshank gave a masterclass on recording strings in the Wood Room and when we walked in to the room we discovered a string quartet all set up and waiting for us, surrounded by the most spectacular array of microphones I have ever seen. The setup included a Decca Tree (three omnidirectional mics placed up high), a Blumlein Pair (two figure-of-8 condenser mics set at right angles to each other, one sitting on top of the other, upside down), an X-Y pair (two small-diaphragm condenser mics positioned with their capsules together and pointing at right angles), an ORTF rig (using similar mics, but positioned 17 cm apart and pointing out at a 110° angle—I've blogged about my fondness for that particular recording technique before) as well as pairs of different room mics and a selection of spot mics for individual instruments that included a Neumann U87, a 67, and a 47.
That session was a personal highlight for me, as I got to drive the Wood Room's mixing desk (a Solid State Logic AWS 924) and audition all the different mic feeds through its ATC monitors.
And that brought on a serious attack of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) once I heard just how spectacularly detailed a stereo sound field you can get with Real World's Blumlein Pair of AKG C414 microphones. No, I can't afford a vintage pair of C414s like theirs, but my fellow delegate Lucas enthusiastically recommended the Austrian Audio OC818 which he uses as being just as good (if not better!) so the inevitable has already happened. Look, I'm in a position where I can indulge myself like this; not only does it make me happy, not only does it add a very different approach to my sonic palette for acoustic sounds and field recordings; it will also vastly improve the recording capabilities I can offer my clients as a sound engineer, so I've gone for it. And thanks to a bundle deal I discovered online, I'll get a free pair of Austrian Audio headphones and a bluetooth controller for the mics into the bargain, so why wouldn't I?
Once again, I was staying in the house; Lisa and Clare looked after me very well and Chef Jerome did us all proud with some wonderful food. It was rather self-indulgent, and I regret nothing.
There's something very special about Real World. It's not just the building or Katie, Maisy, Faye, Tim, Xav, Ben, and the other equally wonderful people who work there; the environment has an almost dream-like feel to it, full of swans and dragonflies, otters and kingfishers, bats and damselflies. It's a haven for nature and creative thinkers alike.
Sunday night was another highlight for me, as we all decamped to The Queen's Head for another jam session. I played 4-string bass, 5-string bass (there was SO much neck dive on that particular beastie) and even took a solo or two on a Telecaster. So much fun. And I even got to catch up with Real World alumnus Bob Mackenzie, who was back in town.
But once again I have to give special thanks to Katie May, who is not just a Grammy-winning engineer but also one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. Once again she went out of her way to look after me, and it is very much appreciated. Thanks, Katie!
This blog entry was originally multiple paragraphs of whiny, grossly self-indulgent text about how sad I was and what a tough time I've been having of things. It was WAY worse than Saturday's blog. Then I realised that much as I enjoy writing garbage like that, nobody else is going to want to read it and besides, I'm an unreliable narrator and you need to be aware of that, too. So I just nuked the whole thing.
Because I could hear a voice telling me,
"For fuck's sake just fucking grow up."
Yeah, I need to. Because after twenty years of being a loner the old me clearly hadn't made the slightest progress towards any form of maturity. Today I'm not sad any more; I'm fucking angry. The old me spent thirty years wasting his time inside a hamster wheel of misery and got exactly nowhere. Well, enough is enough; fuck that guy. He's done.
Unlike the last time I had a meltdown on these pages, now I have a mantra to fall back on, and I've been using it a lot, as you can tell. I think it's helped.
I was working on the "office" PC on Sunday morning when it unexpectedly quit on me. Not once, but twice. At first I thought the house's power supply had dipped out, but I have solar panels and a nice big battery these days so that doesn't happen any more and appliances in the rest of the house were all ticking over nicely. But it was still uncomfortably hot on Sunday, so I started wondering if the machine was overheating. In order to find out, I slid it out from its cubby hole next to my desk, disconnected everything that was plugged in to it (and that wasn't a trivial task, believe me) and hoisted it on to the table so that I could take a closer look at it.
I didn't even need to open up the case. Oh my god; every single vent on the thing was completely clogged up with carpet fluff. Inside, the fans had acquired a thick coating of the stuff on their leading edges. After a very sweaty, twenty-minute session with the vacuum cleaner and a blower brush, I managed to get things cleaned up and since then the machine hasn't exhibited any further signs of distress. Its fans have barely kicked in at all today and when they do, they're much quieter. The office PC is my only surviving machine running Windows 10 (I've had it for nearly ten years now) so I know I'll have to start thinking about upgrading it soon (or switching it over to Linux) but at least it doesn't look like I'll need to do that quite as urgently any more.
It's not just my computer and me who are relieved that the weather's changed. The plants in the back garden are looking a lot happier, too. At lunchtime it rained for the first time in what feels like weeks. After being well into the thirties all weekend, the outside temperature plummeted—firstly back into the low twenties and then, when the rain came back more heavily an hour later, down into the teens. It was a blessed relief.
Oh, the conversations I've had this week. I've been blindsided by them.
The initial sense of relief which I felt from recognising something that closely resembles what is going on inside my head has been tempered, very sensibly, by the advice from a large number of friends (who know much more about being neurodivergent than I do) that I was not qualified in any way whatsoever to declare that I had diagnosed my condition just because I'd read one book. Was I absolutely sure that the idea that I had seized upon was the correct one? Of course I wasn't. I need to do the work—as well as the research—before I stand any chance of determining the reality of what is going on with me. I've been given lots of sage and useful advice, particularly from Rob. Thank you!
My first thought was that the best way through this would be for me to seek a formal assessment (even though the waiting time to get one with the NHS is currently around two years). But then I realised that all that really gets me is a label for myself; it isn't going to help me, it's just a convenient way to manage other people's expectations of who I am.
Finding a way of explaining how I feel and how I think to others has its use and to start with I set about doing just that with a manic glee; you can probably see how fixated I had immediately become in that last blog post. But since then I have (and this is most unusual for me) somehow managed to restrain the temptation to bang on about it to all and sundry. That's why I've been quiet on the subject here for what is, for me, an unusually long time. Indeed, unless you read this blog or saw my initial post on the Book of Face, what's been going on may well have passed you by completely. Instead, I've been reaching out to seek opinions and advice from my friends as well as one or two former colleagues. How weird is that?
Their responses were, almost without exception, not what I expected. For a start, I rapidly realised just how many of them have also discovered recently that they are neurodivergent. My buddy Mel summed this tendency up by observing that like-minded people tend to seek each other out, and one of my other WGB friends (we're a tribe, and proud of it) told me that she doesn't have any neurotypical friends any more because she found them too boring! When I simply asked them "Do you think I'm ND?" I was almost without exception answered in the affirmative, usually along the lines of "Yes, obviously." But when it comes to identifying the particular dimension of neurodivergence that applies to me, that hasn't been so easy to pin down. The depression and PTSD I suffer from have most likely clouded that issue, too; the depression may well stem from it.
But it was after my sister suggested to me that, rather than having ADHD, I needed to consider that I was autistic instead (because, as she went on to explain, she is sure that this is actually what is going on with me) any remaining certainty about my condition evaporated. Yes, I was already thinking that I might have jumped to a conclusion much too hastily; I didn't expect to be told by someone who knows me as well as my sister does that they didn't think I'd jumped far enough.
Most of all my thanks go to Helen, who has patiently helped me to talk through what I'm feeling (and believe me, I've been all over the place) and understand what is going on with my mind. She's probably already sick of all the "I have just realised that..." messages I've been sending her as one more piece of the puzzle drops into place (for example, we both agree that obsessively drawing things in minute detail was what I did as stimming but that these days it's kinda obviously making music). She has been incredibly kind and understanding to me this week, and (as she always has done, and always will) she has my undying love and gratitude.
So, where am I right now? I'm mindful of having a strong tendency to explain every problem I've ever encountered in my life as being caused by whatever it is that is the latest quirk I've uncovered in my journey of self-discovery. Look, I've been doing that right here in front of your eyes! I've been lumping everything I do in the new box I've been given marked "neurodivergent" when a lot of them really belong in the boxes I've already got: the one labelled "mental illness" and—more importantly—the one that is simply marked "normal human being".
Helen said, "You've had a shock," and I hadn't really thought of it that way, but she's right. Rob warned me that this was probably going to hit me hard, and he wasn't kidding. I've been on the edge of a meltdown for most of the weekend. I need to decompress. I mustn't give in to the temptation to shut down completely, because I know that the overwhelming feelings which I'm having are part of the healing process, but equally I don't want to let my freak flag fly unrestrained and leave what little social life I have left these days a smoking ruin. I've already made a complete ass of myself once, and that was once too much. That was me being stupid. But frankly, I'm just too old and too tired these days to fall back on my old habit of wallowing in self-pity and I am damn well not going to turn this into the sort of histrionic drama queen "woe is me" production I used to be so fond of resorting to (because as a child that was the only reliable way I had of signalling to my mum that I was in distress). Weirdly, I'm rather thankful that I just can't spare the spoons to pull that sort of stunt any more. It no longer works for me; instead, I need to figure out a way of dealing with all of this which doesn't involve embarrassing any more of my friends or drinking myself into a stupor. It's well past time I learned to deal with it all like an adult. And I know what my mantra needs to be, now:
"For fuck's sake just fucking grow up."
I woke up at 3 am this morning drenched in sweat and even though I'd had the upstairs windows open and the fan going all night, when I checked the thermometer in the bedroom, it was reading exactly the same as it had been when I went to bed: 30°C (86°F). According to my max/min thermometer in the conservatory it hit 36°C (97°F) in the back garden yesterday afternoon and it's forecast to be hotter still today.
Do not want.
It strikes me now that my proclivity for reporting on the minutiae of temperature readings here in the blog over the years is about as blatant an indicator of being neurodivergent as anything you could look for, isn't it?
Lots of little puzzle pieces, all dropping into place...
Well, yesterday turned out to be an interesting day, to put it mildly.
Alan Guth wrote those two words at the top of this entry—in all caps, just like I've done—in his notes back in 1979 after coming up with the idea of Cosmic Inflation and seeing that this would explain the unexpected smoothness of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). It's been described as the biggest shake-up in cosmology since the discovery of the Big Bang.
I've used them here because yesterday afternoon, when I'd finished reading the book which I mentioned in my last blog, I was left sitting in my armchair, stunned. On a personal level, I'd just experienced my own equivalent of the Big Bang with something that I can only describe as a revelation. I've described what happened in my review of Robin's book I've just posted, so I'll just cut to the chase here:
I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD. Not "I think I might have ADHD" or "I really should get assessed to see if I have ADHD" but simply "I have ADHD". Quite frankly, now I understand what the condition involves, that fact has clearly been staring me in the face for my whole life.
How can I possibly have reached the age I am now—I'll be 65 next month—without knowing something that fundamental about myself?
I didn't get much sleep last night. This morning my sleep score was a woeful 20. I was up and about well before 8 am and I'd posted this blog before 09:30. My mind has been racing. I keep on being clobbered by thoughts which all began "So that's why..." A lot of those revelations are deeply personal, and I'm not going to discuss them here.
As you can imagine, I have a lot of things to unpack from this. Right now I feel like I've been trying to live my entire life after being given the wrong instruction manual. I don't even know where to start addressing this. But at least I have a sense that there is a start point, and that's an improvement on how things have been lately.
The artwork for my next album is ready, and I posted it on my Mastodon account yesterday evening. In doing so I made the rather rash assertion that the album itself was finished (I'd spent all of the weekend adding more guitar parts and remixing tracks). At the time I was happy with how it sounded because I'd listened to it over three separate audio systems as well as the monitors in the studio and I'd decided that it held up to scrutiny quite nicely, but of course by the time I'd gone to bed I'd decided that there was still one track that I wasn't happy with, because of course there was.
So this afternoon I'll be back in my home studio working on the THIRD version of that track and trying to beat it into submission.
I'm not going to go to the extremes that Quincy Jones and legendary recording engineer Bruce Swedien went to while working on Michael Jackson's track Billie Jean where they ended up with 91 different mixes (before they went back and picked mix number three, and that's a salutary tale in itself) but after working on this album for months, I'm rather more invested than usual in making each track sound as good as it could be. And that is a complete contrast to my previous release, where recording all fourteen tracks only took me twelve hours, and I'd mixed them all the following day...
While I was updating the blog last time, I realised that the yellow error flags that the Netbeans editor spits out were beginning to annoy me. Don't look so shocked; I know my code's all over the place, but if it makes it through the selection of browsers I check each page with without breaking too spectacularly, I've adopted the approach that trying to fix things would probably cause more problems than it solved.
But after being told repeatedly that CSS doesn't do several of the things that my code assumes it does (and they were, I believe, perfectly valid assumptions on my part) I finally decided to set about learning to write code in a way that Netbeans was happy with.
So the way that I embed images on the site will change from this point onwards (no, I'm not going to go through more than two hundred archived pages to change them). I've replaced the old HTML "width", "height" and "border" parameters of each IMG statement with a CSS "style" definition—which arguably I should have done in the first place, if only I'd known. Hey; I've always said that I'm making this stuff up as I go along, and this is a great example of that. But now there are WAY fewer little yellow triangles appearing in this Netbeans window now, so hooray.
Note: This blog post discusses mental health issues; you might want to skip it if you find such things upsetting.
Over the weekend I had a couple of nights where my sleep score hit 100. Whatever had been bugging me, I'd become too tired to stress out about it any more. My body had decided that it needed the sleep, and to hell with whatever my subconscious had planned. I wish I could say that I feel like I'm in a better frame of mind as a result, but I still feel very fragile.
But that's just who I am. I've always been neurodivergent and if you know me in real life, that's probably always been immediately obvious. If that's not the case; well, let's just say that I have had to learn to be extremely good at something that's known as masking since I was a kid, because I needed to be in order to survive school. The sad thing is that it wasn't clear to me just how neurodivergent I really was until relatively recently. I'm currently reading Robin Ince's latest book Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal. It's a fantastic book, full of Robin's compassion and empathy (and he's a friend, so I know that's just how he is in real life). But crikey, I have recognised my own traits and behaviours on every page. Robin will start a paragraph with a statement like "If you are neurodivergent, you're going to struggle with (some mundane aspect of everyday life)" and of all the things that he identifies as potentially causing problems for neurodivergent people, every single one of them is a thing that I struggle with. It's making me think that it's well past time that I got myself assessed, because finding out exactly what it is that makes me different would be (weirdly) reassuring. There might even be the remote possibility of it being helpful in dealing with life in general.
But even without a formal diagnosis, I think that in recent years I've become a lot more aware of how much my own strangeness sets me apart from other people. I don't really have any close relationships with anyone any more. If there was one part of my life that I wish I could change, that would be it. Now I understand one of the principal reasons for that, because as a result of reading Robin's book I now know about something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) and I really wish that wasn't a thing. But while I have a pretty good idea of why I'm the way I am (thanks, Dad—and while we're at it, hello there, protracted childhood trauma), I feel like there's not an awful lot I can do about fixing it on my own; I don't even know if it can be fixed any more. Perhaps it's time I started to look for some sort of therapy? At the moment, I'm going through a grieving process that seems to be associated with finally accepting that things are never going to be "normal" for me. Even though the way I am gives me a lot of advantages in doing the things I love doing, it makes it very hard to achieve a balanced, fulfilling life as part of wider society and that's a tough thing to face, so if I'm coming across as being a bit of a misery guts at the moment, this is why. I know I should see this realisation as the big step forward in my personal development which it undoubtedly is, but living through it still sucks.
I expected this blog post to take me half an hour to write; it turns out to have taken me more than two hours. I guess I was a lot more invested in setting out where my thoughts are on the subject than I thought I would be...
In case you were worried about my frame of mind in that last blog post (and I certainly was; I felt terrible) you will be pleased to know that I've been trying to improve my mental wellbeing over the last couple of days. Mostly this has involved sorting out a number of administrative things that I'd been putting off for weeks or months, but I've also realised that the only person I ought to be relying on to make me feel good about myself is me. My happiness is my responsibility and nobody else's. So yesterday I went out and did a "proper" shop at the supermarket and while I made sure that I could have a healthy breakfast of strawberries and blueberries with my cornflakes this morning, I also bought myself some chocolate and a tub of ice cream. And I regret nothing.
One saying about living in the UK that rings true for me is the old chestnut that if you don't like the weather at the moment, just wait five minutes and it'll be doing something else. Last night the heatwave didn't just break; the overnight minumum in my back garden was just 7°C (45°F). I hadn't realised exactly how run down I was after the past couple of weeks, but I completely crashed out when I got into bed last night. I can't remember anything after that until I woke up at about half-past nine this morning. My watch gave me a sleep score of 100 and it hadn't done that since June the ninth.
The result of all of the above is that I don't feel quite as dismal today as I have done in recent weeks. I've lost a bit of weight, too. I'll be doing my best to preserve that trend.
As soon as the heatwave broke I was back in my home studio working on music. After listening to it all on headphones, I'd decided that two of the album's tracks finished just as they were beginning to get going, so I went back and let them off the reins. They're much more satisfying to listen to now, and it gave me an opportunity to add some harmony guitar parts as well as a bit of a lead solo, which is always satisfying to do. And the album now clocks in at just under 55 minutes. That's much more my kind of style.
I've also figured out how to get the new MOTU828 to talk to the Chase Bliss Mood Mk2 so that what the Mood does synchronises with the bpm of the Ableton set, so that meant going back and re-recording a piano part which opens the album. But in the process, I started experimenting with what was going on and pushing things in different directions, and that led to me using three new takes of the piano part rather than just the original, single take.
But the best thing about how it turned out is that you can't really tell that's what I did at all. It just sounds cool and atmospheric.
I'll give the new version of the album another listen through on my headphones before I finally commit to uploading and releasing it, but I think I'm getting close to finishing it now.
It's so hot here that I can't think straight. The weather sensor in my back garden reckoned that yesterday afternoon the temperature got up to 36°C (97°F) out there. When I woke up this morning, it was still 27°C (80°F) in my bedroom and I'd had the windows open and a fan running all night. Right now, it's 26°C (79°F) outside but the humidity's at 62% and I'm sitting at the keyboard here with sweat running down my face. The heat seems to have got the better of the local hedgehogs, too. When I checked the trail cam this morning it hadn't recorded anything at all.
Working in my home studio is out of the question when the weather's like this. I learned my lesson a few years ago, when I managed to get the temperature in there up to 38°C (100°F) during a session of working on music for the Fifty/Ninety challenge.
I'm seriously considering buying an air-conditioning unit.
Fifty/Ninety would normally be starting on Friday but it's not happening this year. Various issues to do with moderation, participants taking the idea of self-promotion to relentless extremes, a decline in engagement (particularly in commenting), and the general rise of people passing off AI slop as their own work became so challenging last summer that it turned out to be not just me who needed to step away from it all; the whole admin team were burned out.
And if I'm honest about it, I still feel that way. Provided that it's been made by a real human being rather than a computer-driven plagiarism machine, I love listening to the music that other participants post there just as much as I love making my own music and sharing it, but I will not miss all of the bad behaviour, spam, and other crap that has increasingly come along with the good stuff in recent years.
So this summer's blog is going to be rather different to those from the last twelve years or so (the first time I attempted to write fifty songs in ninety days—successfully, as it turned out—was way back in 2013). I'm sure I'll still find something to write about.
Yes, this month's blog banner is autobiographical. And yes, I have mental health issues to go with all of the physical ones; thanks for asking.
Thirty years after it happened, I still have dreams about my divorce that are so traumatic that when I wake up, all I want to do is die. And these don't just happen occasionally, when I'm feeling at a particularly low ebb, but regularly. It's happened twice so far this week, and it's only Tuesday.
Thanks for that, Heather.