Burnt Toast and Tea

Last night after watching a very satisfying hockey game in which our team came from behind to win by two goals, I was craving burnt toast and tea. Bursts of exhilaration do that to me. Probably because all celebrations, big and small, all my life have been celebrated by eating.

Fortunately, by the time I got the dishwasher emptied and sparkly clean, the craving had passed. Cataracts may have contributed to the “sparkly” part. I’m never sure these days. Anyway, I hate to immediately put dirty dishes into a clean and empty dishwasher (I have given up trying to discover why I feel so strongly about this). And also I should not be eating anything late evening if I want to have a decent glucose reading in the morning, and last but certainly not least, I was as usual just too lazy to mess up and then have to clean the kitchen yet again for the day. So I went to bed instead.

Tea is rarely something I crave, and I only like the fruity flavoured herbal ones that are red (yes, that’s weirdly specific I suppose). But when it comes to toast, any bread will do as long as it is toasted to the verge of cardboard crispness with some black charred bits around the edges. Then it soaks up butter without losing its crunch. Yum. Crusts work particularly well for this. W freaks out if I forget to turn the dial back down on the toaster after I’ve used it. When his toast burns he throws it in the compost bin. And I shake my head and roll my eyes for the umpteenth time in a day over his bizarre behaviour. I don’t have a lot to do otherwise so it keeps me busy.

Puzzles are also taking up a lot of my time. I think this latest obsessive thing started for me in November when my daughter said “Geez mom get a hobby!” for some completely inexplicable reason. She gets that eye rolling thing from me I guess. Anyway since then I have done close to 20 big 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles. This is getting a TAD expensive. I am also setting records reading Kindle Unlimited free books to balance out the puzzle hobby expenses. I’m not even kidding! Kindle told me I have set a new personal record for books read in a month and reading in consecutive days. I wasn’t aware there was an old record to break. These cataracts are not slowing me down much for close up eye straining stuff! The wait for surgery is 3 to 4 months, whatever that equals in terms of puzzle purchases and books read. I don’t even want to make an estimate.

Our house is getting a bit of a makeover. New windows were installed the beginning of January (coverings coming in 4 weeks or so) and new doors are going to be installed on the 30th. Then we can talk about bathrooms. I’m leaving the kitchen for whoever lives here next because I don’t even like kitchens. Doctor and lab testing appointments have slowed down considerably for me now, so that’s good news. I still keep the head of my bed raised when I sleep to ease my breathing and I still use my walker for things like long treks down hallways to get to a medical office so that taking three steps sideways and falling on my head will not be the reason for the appointment. Not that it has happened exactly like that but little bouts of dizziness happen and they aren’t predictable. So. Just In Case. My other go-to expression is Let’s just get this over with. I am such fun to be around.

Every few days I get a friendly reminder from Word Press that “it’s time to blog on Breathing Space” so maybe you can imagine how many prompts it takes for me to actually sit down and write something. Let’s just say it takes less time to satisfactorily burn toast and steep red tea. Or put a puzzle or three together.

I’m not around here much anymore, but I am still around somewhere! Just thought enquiring minds might like to know. Love to all my blogging friends. I will probably be back sooner or later. After being prompted an insane number of times of course.

Of Ditzes and Duvets

I have a marvellous pot belly coffee cup that holds 600 ml of fresh brewed coffee plus cream. The shape (fat at the bottom, small at the top, helps keep the coffee warm, unless you are a lollygaging type of coffee sipper who takes way too long to drink it all and then it’s no fault of the cup. Also spitting coffee back into your cup is not the cups fault, never mind how much I would like to blame something other than myself for this disgusting little episode I had this morning.

I took a big mouthful of (not even close to warm anymore) coffee and immediately needed to cough. Thankfully I didn’t find out exactly how far coffee can spew with a tickley throat because I spit most of it back into the cup before I coughed the rest of it out. I was wearing a white shirt, which as everyone who owns one knows is a coffee stain magnet. I also was wearing a zipped up hoodie so that only an average size V of white shirt was exposed. Every single drop of the coughed and spit out coffee landed on that V of white. Amazing,. Not one bit of it on the hoodie. Too much to sponge off so I changed my shirt. Normally I try to limit this kind of embarrassing scenario to crowded restaurants where there’s a bigger audience and I get lots of attention. And also where you can’t immediately whip off your spilled on clothes. Well I suppose you could, but it’s probably frowned upon.

So that was a bad thing, or annoying at the very least, but good things happen after bad I have found. I got off my coffee sipping butt and pulled the bedding off my bed and threw it in the wash with my shirt. I have been putting that off because I am still trying to make peace with caring for a duvet. Not with having one, because I absolutely love it. It is light and warm and bed making is a beautiful thing. Taking the duvet cover off is super simple. Getting it back on is just not. I am an old-school bedding type person I guess so duvets are new to me. I will learn to do this without watching three YouTube videos every time if it kills me. It’s a single, not a double or a queen, so it should be a snap. Yep. It should be. But we are talking about somebody here who chokes on coffee, so what can I say. I advise removing your hoodie before you get started duvet cover wrangling because you seriously won’t need it for this activity.

In other not really related news, I have been taking prednisone for almost 8 weeks, now on a tapering dose, should be finished with it at the end of this month. Meanwhile my x-rays and blood work results are good. Side effects have been minimal with nothing unexpected. We have had our flu shots, and W got the latest covid vaccine yesterday but I have to wait for that one until the steroids are finished or until my hematologist gives me the okay. It feels so good to feel so good.

On our latest Friday the 13th I almost wrote a post and then thought better of it. I wanted to share the fact that I have survived a whole whack of them, including my own birthdate, so about one hundred and twenty nine Friday the 13ths and counting. I have also lived through nine hundred and twenty one full moons. And apparently I have been asleep for 24.8 years of my life. So obviously I thought better of thinking better and have now shared this useless info with you all anyway. Would be sad to let my talent for imparting useless information get rusty.

I’m off to get the rest of my dry laundry now, the duvet cover is on, the air is hardly even blue anymore from all the expletives I used, and I definitely deserve a fresh cup of coffee without spit in it. So that’s where we are.

Life is good. Hope you’re having a happy November.

Gracefully Grateful

I am moved to tears by the comments you all have made on my last two posts. Moved. To. Tears.

So could you all please just cut it out, because getting choked up makes it hard for me to breathe, okay?

Of course I appreciate you all to the moon and back. It’s so amazing to me that after not posting anything for a year there are still awesome people here who remember me.

Although I would dearly love to delve into an extensively detailed account of my medical condition I will spare us all the agony. Here’s the short version. I’m doing okay. There is a diagnosis. There are meds for this. I await further instructions from the experts.

And I am gracefully (GRACEFULLY I tell you) accepting changes in my life. Like having an adjustable bed (that one wasn’t hard) and using a walker to keep me from falling over and breaking my old bones. Now I just need to learn how to stop running into things like walls and curbs and people and stuff.

I am accepting help. That’s a big one, you know. Just to shut up and let people help me and be grateful. And graceful. Little old lady full of grace. It’s a stretch but I’m sticking to that aspiration for now. Baby steps.

Good vibes everybody. Spread the love.

Baby Sister

I love you my baby sister.

I had a brother. I have a sister. I had a baby sister. Funny how we feel the need to put everything into past and present tenses. The then, the now, the beginning, the end, the in-between.

I remember the day our mom and dad brought you home, our tiny new baby sister. The love I immediately felt for you was profound and a little overwhelming, and that love has never wavered over a lifetime. You will always be baby sister to me. Thank you for not rolling your eyes when I never stopped referring to you that way. At least thank you for not letting me see you do that.

We were often a family that found it difficult to put deep feelings into words, so I didn’t say it often enough to you, but I hope you felt it always. I regret that we weren’t as close as we might have wanted to be, separated first by years – the age gap between a nineteen year old and a ten year old seems huge and insurmountable. Then we were separated by distance and by the different directions we took in life and finally by circumstances. Through everything though we were bonded by family ties and an unbreakable sisterly connection.

Writing this is hard, but if you taught me anything in the past several years, it’s that when things are hard you hunker down, you suck it up (both expressions that you likely never would have used) but however you might have phrased it, you somehow knew how to dig deep and find the strength to do the hard stuff. You made hard choices, you stood by your convictions, you were optimistic and you never gave up. You told us the hard stories about your experiences and shared your best memories and I will forever cherish the communication we had. I will miss that.

I know we didn’t always agree on things, but how boring would life be if we never had passionate discussions and questions and different points of view. You were true to who you were and lived the way you wanted to. I’m glad you were loved and found happiness. It’s all we wish for anyone.

We always think we have time enough to accomplish all the things we plan and say all the things we need to say until suddenly we don’t. I truly believe you have found your peace now and are off on your next great adventure and that there is no real ending as long as there are people who remember you and will never stop loving you.

Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning, in an ever spinning reel…..

I love you my baby sister. I loved you then, I love you now, I will love you forever.

Biscuit Girl

In an early morning dream some one asks me how I’m doing, and that’s what I tell them. I’m a little bit off my biscuit. Is that the absolute dumbest thing I’ve ever said? Probably not but it makes me laugh and that wakes me up. Waking up laughing! What an incredible gift.
Just a couple of weeks ago I’d lost my biscuit altogether. Extreme fatigue. Shortness of breath. Loss of appetite, sense of smell and taste. Unable to sleep, constantly sitting up to breathe. Dry cough. Confusion. Feeling slightly better. Feeling decidedly worse. Testing negative for Covid. Finally agreeing to go to emergency late on a Saturday afternoon.
My son says if you ever need to call 911 you should be able to tell them in three words what is wrong. At emergency it was all he needed. Linda Can’t Breathe. The wait was not long.
I was put on oxygen, had blood work done, blood pressure monitored, x-rays. They tried to do a cat scan (I think) but it involved lying down on my back and an immediate panic attack. Because sitting up straight was the only way I could breathe. Not very conducive to sleep or any kind of meaningful rest. There is likely some medical rule about how long a patient can be kept in emergency. The next morning I was taken by ambulance to the Royal Alex because that’s the first hospital where they had room for me. Sitting up ram rod straight, buckled in by at least five seat belts. I lost count. Bumpiest damned ride I’ve ever been on, so all those belts were appreciated. EMT’s are incredible people. So are my son and daughter and daughter-in-law. Someone was always with me. So thankful for them being there to answer questions for me because talking was exhausting.
Sunday night, in a hospital room, on oxygen, vitals monitored all night. I guess I slept a bit. It’s all a blur. X-rays, ultra sounds, poking, prodding, more questions and then the draining of fluid from my left lung on Monday. Nothing at that point sounded particularly scary or worrisome except the possibility of not being able to sit up straight. Even the remote possibility of a collapsed lung didn’t freak me out. The drain was done from my back. Local anesthetic and a bit of a gurgling sensation and done. Honestly, that easy. A little over 3/4 of a litre of fluid drained. They showed me the jug. Most of the pressure in my chest relieved and able to take a deep breath again. Absolute magic.
I spent five more nights in the hospital being tested for everything related to fluid on the lungs and around the heart in search of a cause. The right lung was drained. I was transferred to a different floor where the shenanigans of my roomies were tolerated because I felt so much better, and then became annoying and intolerable because I felt so much better. Almost cried in relief when my doctor said I could go home. (Dr. Stethoscope because he lost his stethoscope for two days and was ecstatically happy when he found it again.) The hospital is old, there were lights and equipment that didn’t work, maybe they were short staffed and a couple of the nurses were grumpy, but I cannot fault the excellent care I received. I dont know why more of them aren’t raging lunatics with all the craziness they have to deal with.
So now I’m home and pretty solidly centred on my imaginary biscuit once again. My son was able to tell me in a place and time where he felt I could handle it that my youngest sister, who had been battling breast cancer for over two years, had passed away while I was in hospital. I’m so thankful he waited to tell me. It was not unexpected, but there is still extreme sadness mixed with the relief of knowing she is no longer suffering. Her partner chose an urn that says “Your Wings Were Ready But My Heart Was Not”.
If mine says something stupid about biscuits I am totally fine with that. It’s so easy to take life for granted but I think all this has given me a boot to appreciate every single day and every incredible person who cares about me. Keep breathing biscuit girl, that’s my new mantra.

Word of the Day: CREST

Word of the Day Challenge – Alternative haven for the Daily Post’s mourners!

I did not know I was one of the mourners of the defunct Daily Post until today when I got smacked with a blast of inspiration on seeing the word “crest”.

Crest! Toothpaste! That delightful standing up thing on a bird’s head! The ridiculous looking standing up thing on top of a knight’s helmet! The top of a hill. The frothy high edge of a wave. A mountain ridge or a roof peak. The high point of an action or a process. Like, my excitement crested when I read the first chapter and it was all downhill from there.

On my desk I have a coaster depicting my old high school crest. It was a gift of a little souvenir from my sister who helped organize and then attended our high school reunion earlier this summer. That was either incredibly brave of her, or insanely stupid, I haven’t decided yet, it could go either way. But I got this coaster, so YAY!

The leafy border represents peace. The torch is for knowledge. Crown, Aladin’s lamp (?) school motto in Latin. My research fell a little short. I studied Latin in high school and I remember translating “Labor Omnia Vincit” as “work will kill us all” but apparently it means “work conquers all”. So slightly more upbeat than my interpretation. SDHS stands for Saugeen District High School, but the name and the building have since changed. High was replaced with Secondary and now the crest banner is SDSS. So my coaster is vintage, hey?

For the picture I propped it up on one of my current classy coasters to show you how my sister attempts in small ways to make me appear more grown up. This is known as amissa causa, or a lost cause.

Summer here has been busy and eventful in spurts with teen grand daughters staying and a visit from my sister, one her daughters and her grand daughter. We haven’t seen much of our respective families through covid, but hopefully that’s changing now. After busyness comes supreme relaxation and I take my down time very seriously. The blog as usual takes a back seat (rursus sedes?) I missed my calling as a latin teacher obviously.

W comes home tomorrow so either I will not write another word until Christmas or he will provide me with endless subject matter. Another situation that could go either way.

Light and love.

Letters to WYA 14

Hiya WYA. This is what happens when you shove the biggest walnut to the back of your beak and then try to pick up smaller ones with a beak that can’t close. So maybe not ALL crows are super smart.

I like to spend time outside in the sunshine, especially when this little guy drops by, but not messing about with plants. For the record (are we keeping records?) I would like everyone to know exactly how much I dislike gardening. Gardening does not like me much either. The only plants I have ever felt inclined to nurture are tomato plants and orange Tiger Lillies. Coincidentally those are also the only plants not inclined to drop dead on me for no good reason other than being choked to death by weeds I ignore, or by a severe lack of water. This is why I cannot ever be a Green Witch. Good thing I never thought seriously about becoming one because it would have been a disastrous career choice.

Before W heads east for the summer he plants a bunch of stuff that he expects me to look after. Then he tells our adult son and daughter who do not live here to look after his garden because “your mother won’t”. Then I baby my tomato plants and admire my independent little lilies and mostly ignore all the other stuff. The kids sometimes drop over and show pretty much no interest at all in what’s growing except maybe for the grass if I’ve been lazier than normal about cutting it. Later in the summer they will harvest a few of the survivors if there are any, like radishes and yellow beans and I will force them to take home about 10 times as many tomatoes as they want or need. Since my one granddaughter no longer has a Guinea Pig I don’t think anyone will want lettuce this time around although I’m not sure where it is yet.

I’m telling you all this partly because I have nothing much going on in my head at the moment, but mostly to brag that I actually went outside today and pulled some weeds. I don’t know what the hell came over me. I also trimmed a scraggly looking bush and pulled some rhubarb. I don’t seem to be able to kill rhubarb either, but I don’t know of anyone who can so I’m not surprised by its crazy will to live. Anyway I quickly got tired and sweaty and started cursing so I had to quit and come inside because no one should subject their neighbours to that kind of negative crap.

W planted about three thousand hills of potatoes behind the garage and I noticed they are thriving so I won’t be disturbing them. I don’t think he left any spaces there at all for weeds. There’s definitely no room to step into that jungle to look. So that’s another job done, right? Perfect. My kind of plant maintenance. I hope we continue to get lovely rain showers as the season progresses. And not just because it means I don’t have to water anything. The air just feels so fresh and clean after a good rain.

My kind of bugs.

Okay that’s all she wrote! After being so industrious I can now sit around with a coffee or two and read without guilt. Just like on the days when I’m not industrious at all.

Letters to WYA 13

Good Morning Sunshine!

I’ve been gone so long I got logged out of this place! How rude. Just a lazy-ass streak, and there’s nothing new about that. So let’s reconnect and carry on, shall we?

I am currently immersed in glorious me time since W drove off across the country to his northern Ontario Island. He got there on the first of June and has already started with long texts and phone calls to me, not because he misses me (although maybe he does a bit, who knows why) but because he is an incredibly social person who hates being alone, loves to talk, extroverted in the extreme. Exhausting, in other words. We are very different. Time apart is very good for us. Especially me.

I have befriended a big black crow who is surprisingly silent. At least I’ve never heard him say anything. If he does start talking to me I will get on some meds right away I promise. I put out some walnuts, peanuts and black currants for him every couple of days and we are now quite comfortable with each other. There is another crow that sits in the nearby trees or on our fence and squawks his little brains out but never comes close when I’m outside. Zen crow swoops down onto the upper back lawn while I sit in my lawn chair drinking coffee, hops over to the steps and down to the driveway and over to the food. He eats some stuff, has a drink of water, and then stuffs his beak full of as many walnuts as he can carry and takes off to stash them somewhere. Or share them with his noisy friends. I don’t know what he does next. Then he comes back and repeats the process, more or less. Inserting this video was a mind boggling process which I may never repeat exactly either.

I’m still not convinced it’s going to work, so here’s a picture of Zen crow as well.

And now I am all crowed out for today. Except to tell you he doesn’t really like the peanuts and often leaves them for the squirrel and the magpies to fight over.

Only a couple more lengthening days to come before they start getting shorter again! All this daylight is lovely. I stay up way too late and get up much too early. And I eat whatever damned thing I want. Like guacamole on veggie burgers. And cut the grass whenever I feel like it and NOT the way I have been instructed ad nauseam by the wandering lawn ranger who would not be impressed if he knew. Whatever disastrous thing it looks like when he returns I will just blame on the weather.

Hope you are enjoying the long lazy days of summer and that all is well. Peace and love WYA.

Letters to WYA 12

Imagine getting vaccinated in one of those skinny little arms and still smiling and waving a wine glass about.

Hello WYA! Just when you think I must have nothing to tell you, here I am again! Making nothing much into many many words. I’ve been writing about this less-than-an-hour-long experience for over a week! Then I thought it’s too bloody boring to publish, and THEN I changed my mind. Not about the boring part, but about the sharing part. Because minds are made to be changed. If you choose to skip to the end now I completely understand.

On Saturday, the very last day of April, W and I had two appointments booked at 10:50 and 11:10 a.m. for our second covid vaccination booster shots. All our other shots were done at a busy health care center and they were super strict there about arrival times and identification and appointment confirmations and new masks which they supplied, even if you had just put on a brand new mask in your car less than five minutes ago. There was a long winding queue with arrows and social distancing lines on the floor, with 3 check-in desks to report to before you finally got to an injection station where you roll up your sleeve and they give you your needle. It’s also the spot where someone has to tell me to take a deep breath and relax because apparently by that point my muscles are all ridiculously tense without me being aware of it. And the needle could bounce right off my arm or break or something. No one has adequately explained to me why relaxing is mandatory but I do my best. After the shot you are directed to the waiting room where they trust you to sit for 20 minutes before you leave the building. If you’re going to faint and knock yourself out they would like you to do it there and not in the parking lot or halfway home. I have never made it past 15 minutes because I’m totally done with the whole procedure by then and no one is paying any attention to me so what the hell. I get up and leave.

I told you all this so it can be added to my incredibly exciting life story, but mostly so it will be super easy for you to appreciate how very different Saturday’s experience was. When you book these appointments on line you are wise to take the first ones they offer, so that’s what I did. They are good to book you as close to where you live as possible. So on the appointment day we drove to a little pharmacy we’d both never heard of before, tucked away in a little strip mall I’ve never noticed, 5 minutes from our house. The store was about the size of our living room/kitchen, including the pharmacy area and the little tiny procedure room. The waiting area was three joined chairs against a wall, the middle chair occupied by the only other customer there when we arrived, five minutes before our first appointment. The pharmacist said hello, please to wait, I will be several many minutes. This was after I said who we were and why we were there and tried to show him my confirmation e-mail on my phone but he really wasn’t too interested. He nodded politely and I’m pretty sure he smiled behind his mask, and then he went back to putting a prescription order together. So, about (several many) (ten or so) minutes later, having taken care of his customer, he gave us clip boards with paper work to complete. Our personal info was already on them so we just needed to check all the boxes and sign them. We sat in two of the waiting area chairs which had just been vacated to do this. Meanwhile he prepared the vaccines. He collected the papers, told us both to come in. He asked us if we had any bad reactions to any of our previous vaccinations and we both said no. There was just his chair and one patient chair, so I sat down and got my shot, then W. sat down and got his shot. Then we all said thank you and have a nice day and we left.

So I was thinking on the drive home (during which time neither one of us passed out or fainted) wow, have we been taking ourselves way too seriously or what? That was as simple as getting a flu shot. We were back home by 11:30. I didn’t even have time to get freaked out and tense. Neither of us had any adverse reaction that day or the next, but on Monday we were both complaining of aching muscles – shoulders, knees, wrists, necks, eyeballs – anywhere muscles exist. It didn’t last long. So for whatever good it does us, we are well and truly vaccinated and boosted to the max.

Family came over today and bought us lunch after they reminded me it’s Mother’s day. I love a laid back relaxing day with no fuss and appreciate so much that they know that. We couldn’t sit outside because the wind is brisk and cold, but the sun is shining and the grass is mostly green. I will probably not have any more vaccination stories to tell you in the future. So all of us have something to be grateful for.

Love and sunshine wherever you may be.

Oh, and this. THIS is worth sharing.

XXOO

Letters to WYA 11

Holy Thursday WYA! And Holy whatever late date in April it’s suddenly become!

I almost posted a picture of a blackberry mandarin salad (with spinach and bits of feta cheese and other awesome stuff but I don’t remember where I copied it from so you will have to wait for me to make one myself and take my own pic to see that delightful dish. The bunny wins at cute anyway.

Way back in my elementary school days when letter writing was popular (writing with a pen on paper and mailing things in envelopes that didn’t yet require postal codes) I had a teacher who gave us a letter writing assignment. Easy peasy I thought, because I loved to write letters. The only stipulation was that for this letter to a random friend we could not start off with “Dear So and So, How are you? I am fine.” I was stumped. That’s exactly how all my letters began. It was as carved in stone for me as the fact that all good stories began with ”Once upon a time”. Why was she making us change things? I don’t know what I finally came up with, but I know my brain hurt trying to think of something and it definitely wasn’t “Holy Thursday!”

Anyway, I do hope you are well and it is perfectly fine for you to assume that I am also well. All is not necessarily well with the world, but hopefully there are people smarter than us working on that. I’m not sure my letter writing skills have progressed much over the years, but no teacher will scribble all over this effort with a red pen so I don’t care.

Today we got some new outdoor solar lights for the front walkway and whatever other surprising places W decides to put them. There’s just eight of them so he can’t go too crazy.

I got the best news a few days ago about our farm house where we grew up! The sister who lives the closest to it shared with the other two of us that the house is being restored, and she and her family were lucky enough to have the current owner give them a tour of the house to show them what he has done. It sounds absolutely delightful! I think all of us had resigned ourselves to the probability of it going to ruin. The property was put up for sale this last time with the house as a tear-down. We are so happy that someone saw the possibilities and decided to save it. It’s hard to imagine the amount of work it needed right down to the bare bones. The plumbing and heating and wiring would all have had to be modernized. What a huge undertaking. Anyone who takes on this kind of project to preserve a bit of history deserves all the accolades. It’s a lovely quiet spot in the country, surrounded by land that is still farmed but owned by someone else, and the place is no doubt still filled with happy memories. No one can renovate those away, can they? I wish him nothing but the best.

Speaking of bunnies, which we really haven’t been but whatever, we are now, there’s a jack rabbit in our neighbourhood who runs across our front lawn several times a day, both directions, no set schedule that I can discern. On his own bunny time doing rabbity stuff.

I don’t think I retained many of the letter writing rules from that long ago class. Unless one of them was to flit around from subject to subject for no apparent reason.

So I don’t know where this week went or why the month disappeared in such a hurry, but here we are. Salads, solar lights, farm houses, jack rabbits and letters to a friend, all taken care of for this Thursday. Quite possibly forever if we’re lucky. That’s how you sum up all the random unrelated things so it sounds like you had a plan. I hope you’ve been taking notes, although I promise there will be no test later.

Have a good one WYA.