67 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-22-16”

  1. It’s Friday!
    You know what that means?
    Not much today:
    No YMCA
    No Lions
    No nothing. We have three inches of snow on the ground. The man on the radio said about an hour ago. He says we’ll have about 15 inches by Sunday morning.
    I intend to go nowhere. I left my snow shovel behind when I left Virginia.

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  2. Good morning!

    It’s 34 in Houston this morning. It’s nothing compared to temperatures many are experiencing today, but it still seems cold to me. Last night on the news, the weatherman urged fellow Houstonians to bundle up today…He even encouraged folks to wear hats and gloves…Our forecast today calls for sunshine with a high of 54…Not exactly frigid!

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  4. Linda, it is really snowing in Hendersonville. About five inches on my deck.
    The man on the radio says there is a treacherous layer of ice under that. It started icing about midnight before the snow came.
    So far, it doesn’t matter to me. As I said, I ain’t going nowhere.

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  5. I’m staying put, too. We’re predicted for “12 – 24 inches” (I would love a tolerance of error like that in my job :-)). Son, DIL, and granddaughters have had a trip to Disney World planned for a year and were supposed fly out mid-day tomorrow. As of now, all the flights are cancelled so they are planning on going down and staying in a hotel at the airport until they can get a flight out. I do feel bad for them.

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  6. The metro Atlanta area is suppose to get hit around 3 p.m. Not looking forward to this. Truly not sure if our roof will continue to hold. I had meant to be out of here by now but Art’s health issues delayed other projects. I have to keep wearing my rose colored glasses. And I keep praying a lot, too.

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  9. Janice, I remember you asked a while back about apartment or condo living, is that something you are still thinking of doing? What about a small patio home in a 55+ community? Are there such communities in the Atlanta area? I am sure there would be. We have several near us.

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  10. Good Morning….no fresh snow here….but we still have plenty on the ground! I am in the Springs today and the high in town is supposed to be 50! I wish I was free to take a hike but I will be inside working 😦 We are getting 3-5 inches of snow on Sunday though….you know…when the Broncos are beating the Patriots in Denver 🙂

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  11. Kim, that’s what I wish I had. My Bro-in-law sold his house here and bought one. He has limited space, but that would be ok.
    Elvera wanted lots of room so we could have grandkids visit.
    That lasted about three years and we are stuck with this big house.
    It’s too late now. Our next step will be assisted living.
    If you are middle age, you need to start thinking about moving down.

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  14. Kim, I am not sure what we need to do. I had an idea to maybe turn this house into something like a duplex with the bedrooms and baths side of the split level turned into a small townhouse to rent out (it has four small bedrooms and small baths up and downstairs. The flat part of the house could be expanded and made into an area to live with the addition of a bathroom along with enclosing the carport. That way we could live in flat when we can no longer navigate stairs. I thought of this because Art wants to stay here, but we won’t be able to do stairs forever. I think we are in a great area for renting out part of the house with many colleges nearby. Art does not have the same ability to visualize such ideas as this and can’t imagine doing it. We are not on the same page on this. When I originally bought this house I rented out the lower two bedrooms and bath and shared the kitchen and dining area. Later after Art and I married, we put his office downstairs where he met with tax clients as his sideline business after hours on his day job with state gov. So I have never really felt that I have had the whole house to live in.

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  15. The house has two small bedrooms and a bath upstairs and the same downstairs, with a total of four bedrooms and two baths. Downstairs one room is an office and the other is used for storage.

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  17. With our 2-family home, we can stay here, with Emily living upstairs. She enjoys doing yard work & snow shoveling/snow-blowing, so she & Forrest could take care of all of that when we are unable. If she gets married & doesn’t want to stay here, then we could rent out the upstairs & offer a lower rent in exchange for the renters doing the yard/snow work.

    However, Emily has a plan to eventually help us sell this house & move into an “in-law” apartment in her future home. Either way, we should be okay when taking care of things becomes too difficult for us.

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  18. Janice, what are your local zoning ordinances. You may not be able to do that. Because of immigrant families who are used to living in multi-family households a lot of areas have “laws” saying how many people can reside at a certain location.

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  19. When we theoretically downsized two years ago, my husband wanted a two bedroom house with a kitchen, living room, dining room and garage; no yard.

    I asked where our grandchildren would play, where would our family (13) gather around the table to eat?

    “You didn’t tell me I was buying a house for my grandchildren!”

    Not the first time we haven’t been on the same page . . .

    Since we bought this house, we’ve had three different people live with us, hosted a number of grandchildren birthday parties, created plenty of work for young people who don’t have jobs, made a lovely yard and put in a drought-tolerant garden which produces terrific organic (!) food.

    I walk to the library all the time, occasionally to work and we have the grocery store, mechanic and even ice cream within walking distance. I have a room of my own to write in for the first time. Our housing costs were cut in half for a beautiful home and he loves how manageable the yard is.

    This is not the final spot for us, we know it, but it’s fine for the interim. We just wish it was all one floor, not that we’re having trouble yet, but I’m a generation younger than Chas and Elvera.

    And I will probably be weeding out possessions forever. We’ve finally made a decision about the 17 boxes of my father-in-law’s Shakespeare research and we will have some storage room again!

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  20. The bird in the header is of course a hawk. It has caught one of the freeloaders that come to our bird feeders (a house sparrow) and landed on our back lawn to pluck and eat it. Snow is scattered around the grass, but if you look behind the bird, you’ll see a lot of gray feathers, too. That red eye is intense. (The downy woodpecker shot was taken at the same time as the previous downy header; apparently it had a hard time actually grabbing hold of the suet feeder, since it didn’t land immediately. I have a third shot–taken in sequence after these two–where it’s farther away from the feeder.)

    The hawk is either a Cooper’s or sharp-shinned–probably Cooper’s. The species are nearly identical to each other both as juveniles and as adults, but the Cooper’s is bigger and has a more rounded tail, and on both counts I think this is a Cooper’s but I wouldn’t take it to the bank. (The juvenile has a very different plumage: shown in flight in a beautiful photo here: https://www.audubon.org/field-guide/bird/coopers-hawk )This one was on our lawn about 15 minutes. I took photos of it from the library window, and then I moved to the kitchen window to see if by chance I could see it from there, and I could (this picture is taken from the kitchen). I actually got better photos from the kitchen–but I only got about three and then it flew off, because I think it could see me and when I was in the library it couldn’t (or couldn’t see me clearly enough to get concerned and fly). But it was pretty cool to watch such a beautiful bird for that long.

    Cooper’s and sharp-shinned, both adults and juveniles, are well known for raiding bird feeders in the winter months. They didn’t discover ours until last year, but we had a juvenile Cooper’s last year (this could be the same bird as an adult), and we’ve also seen a juvenile of one of the species this year, and an adult sharp-shinned last year, plus a few months ago a sub-adult (partially in adult plumage) that might have been either of the two species. So we have definitely had at least three different hawks in the last 12 months between those two species, possibly several more. (In the field behind us, and occasionally flying over or into our yard, we also have a mated pair of red-tailed hawks, turkey vultures, kestrels, and recently one or more harriers. So that is six species of raptor I’ve seen from my back window. Possibly I’ve seen more, since one can’t always identify a raptor on the wing, but for sure I’ve seen those.)

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  21. Kim—I was thinking of the movie “Fargo” not the television show. I watched the first series and decided that was not something I wanted in my mind. I liked much of it, but it was ruined with the unnecessary garbage, IMO.

    After dealing with my folks’ stuff, I told my children I know we will need to downsize. I was emphatically told that was not a good idea. We have a three bedroom ranch house. It is way to small when all the children and grandchildren come. None of them live close enough to not stay overnight or longer. That is not often, but I do want them to come when they can. I now understand why my mom and dad added on several times after we left home. Although, all their children and grandchildren lived close to them except for us.

    For now we will try to get rid of some of the extra paperwork etc. It is a difficult thing to decide what to keep and what to give or get rid of. None of us know how much time we have.

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  22. My advice to anyone is go through your things. Decide what you LOVE and absolutely MUST keep because it makes you HAPPY. Everything else? Call your children, ask them if they want any of it that the charity of your choice will be there to get anything not picked up in the next 7 days. If they REALLY want it they will come and get it. If they don’t, you are not their personal storage unit and they probably didn’t want it that much anyway.
    (Says the woman whose husband still has military uniforms that will never go on his body again, a pair of boots from San Antonio and a Members Only jacket circa 1980’s and furniture from his mother)

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  23. My parent built their house with a bedroom on the ground floor so that when they got older and couldn’t climb stairs, they could use that bedroom. Until that time, it is a guest room, and has housed many, many different visitors.

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  24. Downsizing. We are well into middle age and creeping up, but we still have six children at home. We are downsizing stuff. We are also looking at getting back into foster care. We currently expect to see ten more years of child rearing. This is what we do. Most people don’t retire at fifty eight. And we built the place up for children…..

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  25. My house was 45 degrees this morning after I got up and built a fire. The snow is finally melting, but now it is all a mud bog when not frozen. I should not be complaining, as it will grow green grass in the spring.

    Hubby and I are drawing plans for our new home. We would like room for all of the children to come at once. Upstairs is definitely out, as I have already had surgery on both of my knees. The best thing about my house now is that it is paid for, and the roof only leaks when it rains.

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  26. I knew on 9/11 that the Muslims must have learned that Elvera made me leave my Air Force uniform behind. The fact that I could no longer get into it was not a factor. It scared them to know that I was ready.
    😆

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  27. Around here most people won’t buy a two story house and if they do the master suite MUST be ground level. If all the bedrooms are upstairs it is a white elephant and you just about can’t give it away.
    Our lot slopes slightly so there are two steps down to the patio in the back yard. Everything else is ground level. This is a house we could stay in well into retirement. The lot is on the smallish side so a lawn service woulldn’t be expensive

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  28. Well, we won’t be downsizing in older middle age, as our house is kind of snug for four adults (though with the library it is larger than the house I grew up in as one child in a large family) and we can’t easily entertain guests as it is. (We can technically fit five at our table, but three or four work better.) Having a guest room would be great–my parents just booted us girls into the living room and used our room–but each of the girls has a smallish bedroom with a twin bed, so hosting overnight guests would be limited even when they move out. But I’ve never lived in a house with stairs except that in Chicago three times I rented a bedroom or the whole unit in the bottom of a two-flat. So except for apartment or dorm living, I’ve never had to negotiate stairs, and wouldn’t want to start now. But if we were to move right now, and the girls didn’t move with us, I’d want a house of about the same size except with a dining room or a larger kitchen.

    My mother had seven children and so far (including adopted and step) 30 grandchildren and greats. (Two of my brothers have yet to have children, but probably will have some in their near-retirement years, which isn’t unusual for my family.) Mom’s first child was born exactly 9 1/2 months after she married; when she was widowed after 31 years of marriage, three teens were still at home. It took her five more years to have an empty nest . . . and then she sold the three-bedroom home and moved into a one-bedroom apartment (at the top of stairs)!

    Meanwhile my in-laws (who only had two children) still live in their own two-story, four-bedroom (master on the bottom level) house. But they have used that large house greatly for hospitality through the years. Each of their children has moved back (with children) at one point during family crisis, and at one point they had four generations living in the house (including Dad’s stepmother). Mom still hosts a weekly Bible study for neighborhood ladies, getting weekly use of their large dining room, and also uses the large dining room for holiday family meals.

    But more and more my brother- and sister-in-law help them take care of the home and the grounds (Mom still handles much of it herself, including most of the inside), and we expect that when my father-in-law dies, she is not going to want to hang onto what has become bigger than they need. But realistically it didn’t become “too big” until after they were 75, and they still use most of it. But within the last year Dad can’t get up the stairs to use his exercise room any more, and they don’t really need guest rooms much anymore. (They did host me twice when I was courting my husband.)

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  29. K, my parents are facing similar questions as they try to rewrite their will (it hasn’t been revised since we were all minors). They want to make one of us co-owner of the house, in order to cut down on inheritance taxes, as the house is basically our inheritance. The sibling who lives farthest away doesn’t want the house to be sold (too many memories) but her spouse’s work would not allow them to live here. The other two married siblings both live in apartments, but have good reasons for being where they are (one is helping the church, the other needs to be close to work) and their spouses are independent enough to be reluctant to take a house with strings attached. That leaves me, who am actually living in the house with my parents. My dilemma is that without an income, I would not be able to keep the house, because even though it is mortgage free, there is the monthly utility bills and yearly insurance and taxes to pay.

    Also, although I am hoping to take care of my parents as they need it, I’m reluctant to make their house my own, as I’ve seen too many well intentioned children come into their parent’s place and then make the parents feel like the house isn’t theirs anymore. We’ve already had some clashes over that, because although my parents do want to cut down on the amount of stuff they have, what they perceive as useless and what I perceive as useless are two different things. Both of them came from even lower income backgrounds than I was raised in, and tend to want to keep things ‘just in case’. So, making their will isn’t proving a simple task, but I tell them they could well have another 15 or 20 years left (their health is good, even with my mother’s arthritis), in which case everything will have changed again – the sibling who wants to keep the house will probably have grandchildren by that time and it may not be so important to keep the house.

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  30. I’m not downsizing, but I am trying the reduce the amount of stuff that I faithfully pack up and store every furlough! Just yesterday I took a big box of books to the bookstore I’ve been going to for years. First time I’ve ever walked in with more money than I went in with. (We were in a hurry. That’s the only reason!) I got about $85 or so. Nice bonus for paring down the books! Other books I’m giving away to kids who have finished school and others who might like them.

    Today I had lunch with the new American ambassador to The Gambia. They had a town meeting for all US citizens living in a The Gambia and then lunch for the wardens. It was a smaller group than I expected at lunch. Only 11 of us including the ambassador and consular. Everyone was hesitant to sit at the same small table as the ambassador, so I sat there with her and just one other person. I guess I’m not intimidated by her position. She is a nice lady and just a person. I hate it as a missionary when no one wants to sit with the missionary at the fellowship dinner. They make you go through the line first, then you sit down at a table and no one sits with you because you are ‘the missionary’. Hate that!!!

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  32. My house (built in the 1920s) is small (1200+ square feet) by today’s standards, anyway. Someone in the 1970s apparently added on to it, so it once was even smaller than that. And the house I grew up in was under 800 square feet, so there was that.

    One level except … 2 sets of front steps to climb to the front porch from the sidewalk, so that may be an issue (it’s already an issue for my neighbors who have the same set up and are several years older than I am and in need of knee replacements. 😦 )

    Houses.

    And stuff.

    I had to get to work early (7:30 a.m.) this morning. Traffic was worse. But the parking in the office parking structure was sweet. Actually got to park on the 2nd level instead of the 4th level or roof).

    And one of 2 articles already done for the weekend.

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  33. My parent’s house is built along similar lines as most of the century old (or older) farm houses around here. When one lives in a cold climate, one learns to take advantage of the fact that heat rises. Our wood stove, which supplements the oil furnace, is placed close to the basement stairs, and the stairs rise run from the basement through the ground floor to the top floor. There are houses built all on one floor these days, but having the bedrooms above the main floor really does seem to have been for the purposes of heating – it certainly wasn’t for lack of landspace 🙂

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  34. I was raised in the upstairs, with no heat but what came up from downstairs. It was quite comfortable. But as my mom’s cancer progressed, they had to move her downstairs. And my dad now wishes he and his wife had chosen a single story, but with daughter there, things are working out well for them. Ninety four year old step mom is back to racing up and down the stairs, daughter just has to be watching….

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  35. Roscuro, please check with a competent tax person before putting the house in your name – *especially* if you’ll end up selling it. Taxes in Canada may be different, but here in the US, if they do that and you sell it, your tax basis on the profit will be what they paid for it. OTOH, if they kept it in their names and willed it to you, the tax basis would be the value at the time of their death. But that’s here – may be different there, and worth checking.

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  37. I really like the exercise provided by a split level.

    We have duplexes down and across the street from us, maybe six houses down. I do not know if this property could have such a structure as I described as a separate unit. It might have to be done like those hotel rooms/adjoining suites. We probably just need to move, but I don’t think we could afford to stay in this vicinity.

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  38. Thanks for the tip, Linda. It will certainly have to be investigated. My father’s mother sold their family house many years ago, after her husband’s death, so my father has never had to deal with that question. My mother’s parents put their house in the name of the son who was living with them. He has not sold it yet, so the tax issue hasn’t come up.

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  39. It’s like rush hour on our street with people trying to get home before the ice comes. The grocery store was packed with people. It was nice to leave groceries in the trunk while doing other errands and knowing they would stay cold.

    I am trying to make some dressing to go with some chicken I cooked yesterday. Miss Bosley was fascinated while I was kneading the biscuit dough. (The phone tried to make that bicep but I caught the Smarty.)

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  40. We had those issues, roscuro. My parents were sure my brother and his wife would end up in the house. However, they are now retired and did not want to take on the added expense it would be compared to their current home. The younger generation did not want it or could not afford it either. Nothing was as easy as my folks hoped.

    Our home is 1200 sq. feet, but that does not include the basement.

    Kim, curious as to why two story or upper bedrooms are so hated there.

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  42. Art just got home. I surprised him with a biscuit fresh out of the toaster oven. 🙂

    I forgot I had no eggs to make cornbread but remembered I could use mayo as a substitute. We will see how that works. Mayo (real kind) is mostly eggs and oil. I started buying real mayo when I learned the light kind uses potato starch that gives me pains. Glad to have the real mayo today. 🙂

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  44. It could be because we are coastal and our land is flat, or our water table is high so we don’t have basements, a lot of it is because people retire here, I really don’t know. I only know what I do because of selling real estate, otherwise I wouldn’t have given it much thought.

    Perhaps it is because of the fact that heat does rise. Older homes had high ceilings and cross drafted windows. Doors had transom window to let the breeze blow through.

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  45. Roscuro, I kind of figured that at least part of the reason for two-story houses is that you have a private area upstairs. In other words, you can throw a dinner party or have people over, and unless you specifically invite them upstairs, they won’t go up. So the upstairs can be messy, or children can go up and go to bed, etc.–it’s private. I thought of that when at my previous church, my pastor’s wife would have big, elaborate parties, 30 or 40 or more people, and we’d wander the whole downstairs freely, if we wished, but no one would think of going upstairs unless asked. So her husband and sons could go out somewhere or they could just stay upstairs, no one is going to use their private bathrooms, no one is going to put their coats on her bed, etc. The stairs create a natural barrier unless you are close enough to have the “make yourself at home” run of the house.

    But I’ve never lived in a house where I had access to two stories, so I don’t really know.

    I knew someone once who stayed single and lived with her parents, and as they grew older that meant she became a bit of a live-in caregiver, and also the one who took care of the home. When it needed some extensive work on it at one point, she even took out a second mortgage to get the work done. (She had only one sibling, a brother, who was married and in another state.) Naturally, the home was left to her. But she insisted that her brother be part-owner because it made her feel guilty that it just came to her. But it was the right choice for her parents–she was single, in state, living in it, had invested in the home, and had invested in her parents’ care. Furthermore, property taxes were as much as a medium-sized mortgage, so if she was going to pay the property taxes, realistically the home should be fully hers. And most likely her nephews and nieces would be her heirs, so her brother’s family would “get it back” anyway. But for parents to give more to the single daughter who lives at home than to sons or married daughters is not inappropriate. It isn’t necessarily “essential,” but it isn’t improper.

    Roscuro, one option might be to rent out a bedroom or two (depending on if that’s feasible where you live) and pay for house expenses that way. In fact, if family is agreeable it might even make sense to rent out the house itself and live somewhere else. But definitely look into it first and see whether it’s the best choice.

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  48. My Dad and his parents had a trust to avoid those pesky tax issues and ownership transfers. You have to pay for it of course, and a lawyer to do it, and there’s a wait period, but after that Dad’s name was on everything as a co-owner. It also reduced the stress for my dad when my grandparents passed away because it covered a lot of those issues years before. By doing so he paid no penalty/inheritance tax when he sold it to Cheryl and I. Eventually, we’ll do the same with “Liz.

    Waitin’ on the snow…. 🙂

    Should be here later tonight.

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  49. I remember sleeping upstairs in my grandfather’s house in Iowa where we used heated stones at the foot of the bed for warmth. 🙂

    He also had an outhouse. 😦

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  52. I received an email from eighteen year old daughter. She asked me to send five hundred dollars to her friend in Florida and provided the way to do it through Western Union. The wording of the email was strange. Daughter is very precise in her writing, very attuned to detail. And this was like it was from an English as a second language person. Could her email have been hacked? I am trying to verify it through eldest daughter and don’t plan to send five hundred dollars to anybody right now.

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  54. Emailed was hacked. I would never send an email to someone asking them to send money to someone else out of their own account. If I needed $500 from anyone I would CALL them to explain why I needed it….even if I had to call collect

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  55. Mumsee, it sounds like a hack, but check if it really is her email address. Most emails show up in inboxes under the sender’s name, not the email address, e.g. Jane Doe, rather than janedoe@example.com. My email has a feature that shows that actual email address if I hover over the name with my cursor. I once received an email that looked like it came from our Kim, but when I hovered over with the cursor, it was a completely different email address. So it wasn’t that she’d been hacked, but rather they were just using her name. Spammers often work with partial information, especially those which are actually just computer bots, and so they might get hold of your email address, and the names of people you know, but not actually be able to get in and hijack the account; so then they just make the email titles look legitimate, but in reality they come from fake email accounts when you look at the address.

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  56. Linda, thank you for the estate advice, again. I did some initial research, and found that if I became a joint owner with my parents, depending on the method – either joint tenancy or tenant-in-common – I would a) own the house after my parents’ death with my siblings having no rights or b) have to pay capital gains tax when I sold it to a potentially hefty price. By contrast, probate fees are much lower. Since there is no inheritance tax in Canada (the probate fees aren’t really a tax), it would be much wiser for my parents to keep their title to themselves and just will the property to be divided among the four of us.

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  57. Yep, Mumsee, e-mail was hacked.

    Several years ago I got an e-mail from a sister-in-law telling me she was in London and had had her purse stolen, and could I send money? There were a whole bunch of red flags in that otherwise innocent e-mail. One was simply that she would not be traveling without my brother, her husband, and thus would not say “I.” Two is that my older brother, pastor of a church, with three older brothers himself, would not be contacting his single, self-employed sister for funds!! London is also not one of the more likely travel places for this particular brother and sister-in-law, and it’s likely the wording didn’t sound correct, either.

    Knowing that it was not from her, but someone else had used her e-mail address, I e-mailed her and said, “So sorry about your being stuck in London! Actually, I thought you should know someone just e-mailed me using your account . . .”

    I got back a response, “No, it really is me!” And so forth. Of course it was not. (And I hadn’t said anything like, “I notice they didn’t mention your husband, B—, in the e-mail.”) It somehow never even occurred to me that e-mailing my sister-in-law–not replying to that e-mail, but e-mailing a separate e-mail–my e-mail would get intercepted by the person. It was rather creepy, actually. Could the person read all the e-mails sent to her that day? I’ve always known e-mail is less than totally secure, which is why I won’t send something like my social security number over it, and why I personally won’t file taxes online or do banking online (though my husband is fine with both), but that one was creepy.

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  58. I sent an email to eldest daughter, she called and texted eighteen, who said she did not send it and would change her password. But it did have the correct email address on it.

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  59. Mumsee- the email is a scam. Forward it to your email provider as sometimes they can go after the sender legally. Of course, a lot of the scammers are overseas and cannot be prosecuted here.

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  60. So does this mean you’re not sending me $500, mumsee?

    Finally got my hair cut, long overdue — and found out my stylist is pregnant — with twin girls, just like my friend’s daughter. She’s due in May and is thrilled, guess she and her husband have tried for a long time to get pregnant and finally went with in vitro which worked (double worked). 🙂 They’re very excited.

    I did a story ages ago — when in vitro was still kind of new — on a local family who went that route and had quadruplets. They were famous in our town for a while. We followed up later on a story when the kids were a few years old (by then the family had moved to the San Diego area).

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  62. We could sure use about 6 to 12 inches of that snow! We barely have enough to make our tube slide run well. And there’s a school group coming to camp next week and they want to build Quinzees (snow caves). We have snow, but it’s just not very deep.

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  66. The snow started here around 9. There’s an inch plus already. It’s supposed to snow for at least the next 26 hours. We’re on the forecast map in the 10-16 inch range, but the line for 18-24 is only about 15 miles south of us. Hopefully it stays there. 🙂

    We’re looking forward to being snowed in. 🙂

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  67. We don’t have much snow, either. We have a couple of drifts a few inches high, but you can still see the grass in most places, since basically two or three inches of snow just blew around a bit. So far we had more snow in November than in either December or January! Now, we aren’t complaining about the lack of January snow. Our totals two years ago were enough to last a lifetime. We’re more than happy not to be in the areas affected by this storm. If we can get through the whole winter without having to snowblow the driveway, we will be very happy. Plus, no one among my in-laws should be shoveling snow right now (my brother-in-law did too many people’s driveways in the last snow, when it was single digits, and paid for it).

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