Category Archives: Play

Kikipan 320

Photography

In which there’s film!

I follow a bunch of photography folk on bsky, because not only are cameras cool, posts about enjoying analog hobbies are much more nourishing than the goddamn inescapable political doomscroll. (At this point, if I could not know about DOGE or P25 or this idiotic venal disgusting fucking war, or, indeed, about 98% of anything the current administration is doing or saying, it’d fucking great, even if lacking in civic responsibility.)

So anyway, the photog group I interact with most is called Shitty Camera Challenge. (A shitty camera is one that’s instant, disposable, Soviet commie, rangefinder, fixed focus, low res digital, or in general mass produced and mediocre: basically my whole camera collection.) Every so often a challenge is announced and then people post pics that meet the parameters, which are generally along the lines of ‘use a shitty camera to shoot instant’ or ‘use a shitty camera to shoot black & white’ and it’s really very nice.

Anyway, a member—who lives in Hong Kong, and knows the Camera Film Photo people who released it—decided he wanted to help create some buzz around a film called Kikipan, so he bought a bunch and did a giveaway!

cameras on the table
Four cameras on the kitchen table.

Kikipan, named after a Kiki the cat, is a grainy black & white film that comes in a box covered in cat graphics (so naturally people take a lot of pictures of cats with this film). The only string attached was that recipients were asked to agree to post at least one photo taken with the film, and even I should be able to produce at least one good shot off of three rolls!

After chatting with another woman who received this film, I think I’ll shoot a roll through each of my 35mm cameras: the brick, the Yashica my dad repaired for me last year, and the Minolta from my uncle Gale.

Just a cool thing.

I haven’t purged my closet in so long I can’t remember, and have far too many clothes I don’t fit or wear. So far I’m about a third of the way through a thorough sort, and am looking forward to being able to find things again. I’ve already found four items I hadn’t seen in so long I’d forgotten they even existed (but which still fit and are still wanted), which is functionally like getting something new, and dumped a whole bagful of stuff I haven’t worn since we’ve lived in this house.

It will be particularly useful to get rid of all the non-viable socks and underwear stuffed into the drawers. Some socks I’ll mend, but most aren’t worth the effort, so there’s no damn reason to keep them. The last couple times I went to grab a pair of socks I couldn’t find anything because it’s all shit that needs thrown away.

Went to Home Depot today and got tomato and herb starts! Whoo!

Clotted Cream

Food

In which there’s a first time.

Okay, like basically everyone on earth, I’ve heard of scones with clotted cream, but I’ve never had it because I’m American and the only time I’ve ever set foot in a fancy tea room was as a performer and not a patron.

Last week one of my co-workers told me there was some expired heavy cream if I wanted some, so I brought home a half gallon of heavy cream and stuck it in my fridge.

It occurred to me to make clotted cream, so I read up on how and did it: a dish full of cream in a 170F oven for twelve hours.

after nine hours

It was still fully liquid when I took it out of the oven and put it in the fridge, and I thought it hadn’t worked, but it set up as it cooled. The next day there were solids floating in the top half of the dish!

I started with slightly over half the half-gallon container of heavy cream, and ended up with a pint of clotted cream.

one pint half and half, one pint clotted cream

The leftover “whey” is fine in coffee. I read so many recipes I don’t remember now where I learned that, but I’m glad I did or I might have just poured out the non-clotted stuff!

I spent my entire weekend sick in bed, which sucked, but at least leaving something in the oven and then in the fridge was the right speed.

Today I made scones. I read a bunch of recipes, finally picked one I liked, and did it. Made a big old mess of the kitchen counter, and didn’t get the height I wanted, but they taste nice.

a scone! with clotted cream!

The point, I now believe, of clotted cream is that fat is filling and keeps your otherwise completely silly tea sandwich from making you hangry in half an hour after all the sugars burn off.

It’s also delicious! I ate two!

Falafel!

Food

In which there’s hours of cooking.

First you have to soak the chickpeas and make the bread, so best be starting the day before. Because we’ve got executive function, oh yes we do, so it only took, what, three weeks of thinking about it before we did it.

Anyway, I made some super high hydration dough and prepared it as if it were ciabatta, but it basically just came out like all my bread does. Which is fine, it’s still good. (I thought about making actual pita bread but by the time I did I no longer cared enough to get the flour back out.)

homemade bread

So the problem is that, aside from a food truck I once heard about five years ago and which may or may not still exist, there’s no falafel around here. None. Zero. So I have to make my own.

falafel balls!

Well, I mean, there’s a Greek place in Walla Walla, but they make a style I really don’t like, called revithokeftedes, which is basically falafel only with terrible texture.

I don’t have a food processor—well, I have a little tiny one, but I only use it for olive salad—so I have to make my falafel in the blender, which is a pain in the ass, but I pretty much have it dialed in now.

I used the old oil that’s been sitting in my fryer for God knows how long; it’s probably a little rancid but not bad enough to stink or anything. Just made the falafels taste more professional, honestly.

Here’s some tabbouleh, my favorite salad of all time:

tabbouleh

I don’t like the fine bulgur so I always use the more rustic stuff. It feels unbelievably wholesome, somehow.

The hummus is from a can and it’s fucking wonderful.

ziyad hot spicy hummus

It took me years, but I finally figured out that the best way to make tahini sauce is to use hot water. It really comes together much more easily that way, with, I think, possibly better texture somehow.

Anyway, after baking bread and getting the blender dirty and chopping all that parsley and opening a can and making tahini and deep frying all those little balls, after all that, the food was fucking wonderful!

YUM

Tahini always reminds me now of eating in a falafel place in Brooklyn (which apparently still exists); there were squeeze bottles of tahini on every table (the same style as those old mustard and ketchup ones, only bigger, and white rather than yellow or red) and how much I loved just having that much fucking tahini to pour all over my falafel and rice.

In unrelated news, I bought a necklace and emailed with my aunt. Pretty sure it’s been over a dozen days since I last showered. Later this month two other aunts will be in town visiting, and the whole family will be going out to Sunday dinner. Also I learned how to remove and replace the back wheel on my bike the month before last, which was actually pretty cool and of course much easier than I’d expected.

Amritapuri Part 2

Spiritual, Travel

In which there’s more, but not much more… because I didn’t write it.

Most nights, I slept with my windows wide open and could hear the surf. It was glorious.

the sea at sunset

If I left the hall early at night, I could hear the bhajans slightly while lying in bed, and sometimes in the early mornings I could hear the archana. There was always traffic during the day, and some at night, and everybody honks while driving in India. Sometimes the horns sound like elephants.

The last week or so I’d figured out that if I kept the windows closed, the ceiling fan on, and the bathroom door closed (it had permanent openings and was always humid), my clothes would get slightly drier. I only bathed once a week because even though it’s the tropics and there are two taps, there’s no hot water. And no towels; I used a sheet or a dupatta. It’s cold to shower and it’s impossible to get dry.

The power goes out frequently, but rarely for more than ten seconds at a time. This is why not bringing a laptop was a good decision, apparently unshielded they get fried all the time.

(I started this the day I wrote the previous post, then saved it to come back to later.)

~+~+~+~

It turns out that after coming back to this post to finish it, I don’t want to finish it! Overall, the trip was utterly transformative: I thought thoughts, I had experiences, my spirituality deepened in ways that would sound ridiculous if put into language, so I won’t try.

Everything that exists is a metaphor for finding your real self, which is closer than close, and all the effort you do to ‘become’ whatever it is that your intellect thinks is enlightenment is more or less running around in circles, and only true Love can get any of us anywhere near understanding that, and that’s what my Sadguru gave me when I went to visit Her.

Plus I drank a cocktail with ice in it at the Delhi airport, which of course gave me Delhi Belly, which I suffered after I got all the way home, and it sucked REAL bad. So bad I even tried to go to the doctor about it after about five days, but gave up when the nearest clinic wouldn’t take my insurance. Nevertheless, I survived!

Amritapuri Part 1

Seva, Spiritual, Travel

In which I use my passport! And spend eighty hours in airports and airplanes!

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for most of a month now, because I wasn’t sure how, since it wasn’t really a touristy trip. I went to see my Sadguru, an enlightened person, an avatar, for spiritual purposes, and most of what I have to observe was the ways my mind does what it does and how I reacted to that. It’s not like I went to any restaurants or shows or on any hikes or cruises.

view from the footbridge facing toward the Amritapuri ashram

The trip was Walla Walla to Seattle to Vancouver to Delhi to Trivandrum. I never left the airports, and it took a couple days each way. Absolutely exhausting. The shape of the trip was dictated primarily by politics; from what I’ve been told (by a Keralan living in Canada I met on a return flight) you’d typically rather go through Dubai.

The way over I was exhausted in every way: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. My relationship has its struggles, I’ve been in the same entry-level job for six years with no promotions or recent raises, I’m older and fatter than I’ve ever been, and I live a life of, essentially, laziness and dissipation. I read a lot, I sleep a lot, I drink too much, I don’t bother to have a social life, and while I know the shape of my life would be perfect for sadhana I just don’t do as much as I wish. I was unhappy in every quarter. Which is why I wanted to go see Amma so bad. Get my priorities straight. You spend a lot of your evolution believing in doing things, but then comes the realization you’re not doing anything, you’re not the doer, and yet you have to do things to achieve states, and it’s all some bullshit Buddhist koan, and you need your guru.

After determining that I wanted to go and why, with literally no effort on my part, everything just fell into place. Suddenly there was money to go, and tickets, and a month off work with zero push back, and literally everything I needed was just… provided to me. (Thanks, dad!)

~+~+~

So one morning around three AM we got in the car and went to ALW, which is my favorite airport because you can go from the door all the way through security in literally four minutes. (I hate airport security for its waste, irritation, and ineffectiveness. It’s theatre and its tedious.)

Anyway, flight to Seattle. Few hours layover, I got a coffee but I don’t think I ate. Then flight to Vancouver, which is a really well-done airport. Nice to look at, immigration was a breeze, wifi, all the kiosks worked, nice art.

Flight to Delhi was either fourteen or sixteen hours, I can’t remember which, and by then my extremities were bloated and I was miserable because the seats are for takeoff and landing, not a dozen-plus hours of actual flight, and I’m too old and fat now to get my feet underneath me or curl up. I did sleep but it was terrible quality, weird and jittery.

Airplane food

The food was pretty good, though. They fed and watered us probably four times. I had a window seat and so had to bother my row mates twice to get out, walk, stretch, and pee. The bathrooms were still familiar plane-style weird little closets with toilet paper.

Weirdest part of the whole journey was that it never got dark. You’re just flying over the lid of the world with the sun. So, so many hours of bright daylight.

Then another few hours in Delhi, to get out through immigration and back in through security. The Delhi airport is a fucking people-moving disaster, the signage is either not there or useless, and both times I went through it I had no idea where I was supposed to be going in spite of being in possession of a reasonably high intelligence and a general concept of how to get through an airport. The airport employees I asked were contemptuous (which I do understand, I work customer service too, and being asked the same fucking question over and over does get annoying) and unforthcoming and rude.

The immigration guys were bored, grumpy, gruff, and slow. Yes, I had all my documents ready: passport, boarding pass, visa. Your job sucks, whatever, at least you’re sitting down for it, you huge baby.

Security in India is segregated by sex, so you give your bags to the machine for scanning and then have to hike way over to where the women are being screened, leaving all your belongings utterly unsupervised, to be wanded in private in a cubicle by a female soldier-slash-cop. (These were friendly and pleasant, and one even complimented me on my hair.) Then at peak disorientation, tired in a strange airport where you don’t understand the majority of the languages, you have to remember which carousel has your bags and figure out how to get back sans signage. It’s a trip.

Continue reading Amritapuri Part 1 →

31 hours and counting

Seva, Spiritual, Travel

In which I’m on vacation, as of Saturday at 6:10pm when I clocked off work.

I’m pretty much packed! Had to buy new luggage, because ours were a few inches too big for the new carry-on sizes and I don’t want to check anything. New suitcase is green, within parameters for cabin luggage on Air India, and came with a cute matching extra bag I’m using in place of the shitty old backpack I was gonna bring.

I have culture-appropriate clothing, shawls and wraps, new undies, compression socks for the planes, and a sweater. I have toiletries, jewelry, bug wipes, an eye mask, ear plugs, headphones, a rain poncho, and snack bars. I’ve decided not to take my contact lenses. I probably won’t take any makeup, or if I do it’ll just be the tiniest bit to wear in the airports. Can’t find my safety pins, but won’t really need them unless I buy a petticoat and choli at the ashram and wear a sari.

I have movies and music on my phone, and an external battery (or two, if I take his with me). Will finish loading up the Kindle with ebooks tomorrow. Have a keyboard to use with my phone if I want to type, and a journal to write in.

I have all my tickets and visas printed and neatly organized in a binder. I have all the travel apps anybody could ever want installed on my phone.  I bought a roaming pass for my cell phone, so will hopefully have coverage outside the airport while finding my already-booked-and-confirmed ashram taxi.

Checked Kerala weather, and I don’t think it’ll be so awful—the highs are lower than here, and the lows are in the mid-70’s, which is actually cool enough to wear a sweater if you’re sitting. The things I’ve read made it sound like monsoon is sizzling, but 75-85 isn’t that bad; more like it’s the humidity travelers must be reacting to. And I love rain.

They assign you your housing when you visit Amritapuri; I can’t decide if I want a room alone or to be stuck into a dorm. As it’s monsoon and Amma’s been in residence for months, I can’t imagine the ashram will be full to the rafters, so I might get my own room. Do I want a room alone? I am pretty old and set in my ways; if I get stuck in with other devotees they’re gonna hear more farting than they probably want. I leave it to God, I guess, to stick me where I’ll be most challenged—and this is exactly why I expect to be put on kitchen duty and to spend my entire vacation doing dishes every day.

All that’s left on my to-do list is ‘get travel cash’ and a last load of laundry so I can take a clean nightgown. Then I’m out of the country for the rest of the month.

It’s an awfully long way to go to not do any sight-seeing, but really I just want to spend more than 2 days near Amma for once in my life. Three weeks will probably trigger a breakdown but hey, it’s what I’ve always wanted!

 

 

India

Spiritual, Travel

In which I’m going to use my passport!

I’ve got the month of July off work, and I’m going to Amritapuri. I complained about the tedium of shopping for flights, so my dad offered to do it for me.

Today I’ve bought some items for the trip, including a rain poncho, bug repellent, and a little laundry line to use in my room. (I don’t intend to take much in the way of clothes so it’ll be handy to be able to rinse and hang stuff.)

I read what little I could find online about actually staying there, barely a handful of blog posts, and that’s where I got the laundry line idea. (The actual ashram site lets you register to visit but has almost no information beyond the fact that they provide linens and there’s a bank onsite.) Also grabbed a couple packets of Tide specifically for sink washing, a couple travel size toiletries like toothpaste and shampoo so I don’t have to check my suitcase, some talcum powder. A Bluetooth keyboard to use with my phone, since I’m not bothering to haul a laptop. I’m assuming I’ll take a pair or two of Crocs because they’re lightweight, waterproof, and bouncy for slogging through concrete airports. I already have compression socks for the flights, a Kindle to carry a few hundred books, and a phone I’ll probably stick some music and movies on for backup entertainment.

Actually, my phone broke in half last week but the new one is supposed to arrive tomorrow. It’ll be green! I’ve never had a green phone before. Pretty exciting. Anyway, it’ll have plenty of storage for some media.

Already got a passport neck purse (gift from dad, along with an eyemask for sleeping) and a power converter.

It’ll be monsoon season, so I expect to be moist the entire time, but apparently it doesn’t get much hotter than the 80’s so I think I’ll be okay since it’ll probably be in the high 90’s here.

I’m so excited to go, but I’m nervous about the long flights. Longest flight I’ve ever been on was SEA to DCA and it was so fucking boring and tedious; that was, what? Five hours? Fourteen hours on a plane sounds worse than a brief stint in jail, honestly, but I guess people do it all the time so it should be okay.

Anyway, flights should be booked in the next couple days, then I can apply for my visa and register with the ashram. Whoo!

 

Sick Day

Life, Spiritual, Travel

In which I slept until one o’clock.

The Yeti is off at Microsoft for a week-long tech conference, and I have a cold or something.

Started out yesterday feeling tired after a good night’s sleep, swollen glands, and a vaguely sore throat. Went to work, came home. Woke up today feeling so incredibly meh I don’t even have words for it; took the day off work and went back to sleep until the afternoon.

Now I’m vertical and outside a cup of pour-over coffee with fresh creamery cream, and about to finally do my morning meditation, once I’m done writing here. Then I’m planning to eat scrambled eggs, cheese grits, and sliced tomato.

I put in five tomato plants this year. Two are struggling and look pitiful, but one of them has given me three very nice and dearly won tomatoes. The other three plants are absolutely jubilant about their situation, and in a week I’ma have way too fucking many tomatoes.

I’ll probably freeze a bunch for cooking. (A thousand years ago, I stayed with a woman who was too busy to can one summer, so she just quartered her tomatoes, froze them on a sheet pan, and then stuck them in ziplocks. I cooked tons of chilis, soups, and curries with those frozen tomatoes over that winter, they were so handy and much more wonderful than canned tomatoes! [That woman later went on to move into my ex-house, bed my ex-husband, and hate me—there was some online bitchiness at some point—idk really, but they never returned any of my Christmas cards.] Point is, everybody has something to teach you, even if they later choose to weirdly betray you for mediocre dick.)

Just logged into my main credit card—the one with the awesome points that I use for absolutely everything—and there were two $16 charges from something called Maya Mobile, so I reported them as fraud… and now I’m cardless for five days, waiting for a replacement. All over barely thirty bucks. WTF.

Aaaaand I have to quit smoking again. About a year ago, I picked up a pack just to have one or two, for fun and nostalgia; of course that slowly, slowly escalated, until last week I was very nearly up to a pack a day again. So I very deliberately did not smoke one day, charged up my vape batteries, and am getting my head set to Quit Smoking yet again. Fucking pain in the ass, I dunno why I decided to do this to myself. Heh.

The Yeti bought himself a new computer, finally, after eight years, and I got the old one! It’s finicky, but to sweeten the deal he also bought me a second monitor, so it looks really cool and is far more computer than I need, considering I never compute and only use the browser these days.

After deciding I had to go to India to see my Sadguru because the inside of my head was totally full of shit, it was announced that She was coming here. (!!!) There were barely three weeks between the announcement and the Seattle programs, so I guess it was a fairly sudden decision. I went, and it was the cleansing, nourishing wonder I so desperately needed it to be. Five years without darshan fucking sucked.

I volunteered for greeter seva for the first program, and heard that we were only allowed one darshan per tour stop (I have no idea now if that was true or just a rumor), so I didn’t get a token the first day. After satsang I served lunch and then went to the kitchen and made a ton of puris.

My darshan was during Devi Bhava, and there’s no point in attempting to describe the interiority of it, but Her sari was gold, She said “My daughter, my daughter” in my ear, it was of typical length, and otherwise, externally, a completely average darshan. It was not like the time I got to be there in Her arms while she had a very long conversation with another devotee and some swamis; it was not like the time I was doing lap seva and suddenly the stage was mysteriously, impossibly, and incredibly empty for what felt like minutes while She made fun of Puffer’s awesome sari-fabric suit. It was just a normal darshan. And perfect. And seared into my mind for eternity. To know and be known, to love and be loved, to be grounded in That.

I kinda wish I’d just abandoned my job and my home and my life and just… gone on the rest of the U.S. tour, like so many others do, but I didn’t. I never do. I’m too shy of God to just blurt out “Let me COME WITH YOU, You’re the only thing that matters!” She’d probably send me home anyway. Go home and meditate, do your sadhana, silly.

I know most religion is political bullshit, that most people can’t tell the difference between politics and religion because of it, and that the majority of humans have yet to be able to want what it really is, but I no longer care. Most of my favorite people are atheist or agnostic, and that’s okay. I know an Avatar, I have seen God born into a human body and experienced what that is, and my gratitude is abject. Nobody else needs to care.

Shit, I haven’t posted in months!

Life, Spiritual, Travel

In which there’s an update.

I used to find it much easier to post regularly when I both had things to bitch about and felt fine about bitching about things. But now I think it’s not that great a habit, and also whatever I might have to complain about is less a problem and more an incredibly trivial nothingburger. I mean, my habit is to login and complain (see my last few posts) and it’s a boring and dumb habit I’d like to break.

These days I don’t have much to bitch about. We have a house, we have each other, our jobs are nice, the weather’s comparatively mild (compared to Minneapolis). I finally bought myself a nice bicycle last year. Neither of us are unwell. All our bills are paid.

I do get annoyed by trivial shit, of course; I do have a mind, and it does decide to fixate on stupid shit from time to time. (Lately it tells me it’s unfair that my feet should hurt so much, that I hate hearing the neighborhood dogs bark, that my partner is stupid for not being able to read my mind, that I have to do so many dishes, and that work is exactly as it has always been which is suddenly somehow intolerable.

Minds are, if you really listen to them, quite stupidly invested in keeping you unhappy about shit.)

I’m excited about spring. Can’t wait to see the dogwoods in bloom! Somehow the tulips survived the landscaping and graveling of the backyard and came up through the rocks?! The first one has just bloomed, even! How the fuck did that even happen?

My aunt gave me two saplings, little ones that volunteered at her place, which I had planted last fall, a hardwood and a fast-growing shade tree, and I’m hoping they survived the winter. Those two extremely cold weeks last winter have me worried about them.

Looking forward to getting herbs and tomato starts out, too.

Not looking forward to the dog days, but they’re still months and months away. (I prefer the cold now, because you can layer up against it. But the heat in the desert at the end of summer is just relentless.)

Am so glad about the return of the light!

I think it might be time for me to finally go to India. Part of me feels like somehow I should have already been, and all of me feels like I’m certainly not getting any younger and travel’s certainly only going to get less comfortable as time goes by. And Amma doesn’t seem to be returning to world tours. And my job would almost certainly take me back after even a whole month’s absence. And I just got my passport renewed. So I’m really thinking about it, in earnest. And not thinking about how planes have begun to fall out the sky after decades of immoral stock buy-backs bullshit.

In unrelated, weird news, when I logged in to write this post I found three comments of the “go kill yourself you stupid fat bitch” variety waiting to be moderated, left on some old Covid-era posts. Some internet-poisoned, scientifically illiterate Rogan fanboi stranger has come back after literal years to follow up on his shitty comments on my blog!

Oh, well, I guess it’s my own fault for being a woman on the internet. My bad.

Happy Holidays!

Domestic Goddess, Holiday

In which it’s been grey, overcast, and foggy for a few days but it FEELS like it’s been MONTHS.

We had T-day alone, just the two of us. Which is how we normally do it, because we spent so much time so far away from family. This year most of the family had mild medical reasons for not gathering together, and that suited us fine. I do the relish plate and the spinach & artichoke dip on t-day eve, for dinner, and then we eat the leftovers on Thanksgiving morning for brunch, and eat dinner in the evening.

Regular Thanksgiving dinner menu for us this year, except for meat I made him chicken thighs rather than ham steak, because they were already in the freezer.

Christmas decor is up! Used the tiny tree again because it’d be more hassle than it’s worth to get the Yeti to go and get a tree. Plus real trees drop needles everywhere.

Yesterday I did a fuckton of chores. Huge list. Domestic as fuck. House looks great.

Today I slept in, did my spiritual practices, and had a latte. Ate some leftover Indian food. Fucked around online.

The Yeti’s dinner is on the stove, and I have laundry to fold. I’m probably going to watch Star Wars shows all evening because I just signed up for Disney+ (It was $2 a month on Cyber Monday). I have tomorrow off again.

A few months ago, I asked work if I could temporarily take a break from closing. (After closing for four years straight, I just needed a break.) Cleaning the grill and closing the dipping cabinet and in general putting the place to bed every single night was getting on my nerves.

Well, they said yes, switched me to mid-shift, and… promptly cut my hours by 25%. I keep asking for more hours, but last week I got nine, and this week, nineteen.

While I do like my job, a lot, I do actually go there primarily for the money. I’m about to demand I get my old schedule back, because I’m a little broke. I think they think they’re being nice to me, and taking care of me with this new schedule, but what I need is more hours and fewer long shifts during which I never get to sit down. (My old legs and feet can’t do seven hours straight of walking and standing on concrete floors anymore. It fucking hurts, A LOT, and takes multiple painful hours—three or four after I get home—to recover from. I may think of myself as 43, but my leg veins? Are closer to 60.)

I’ve ordered the Yeti’s Christmas gifts, and will give local family the same cheese & crackers snack bags I always do. I personally don’t really need or want anything for Christmas, of course. I’m just glad we have a festival this time of year, when it’s so fucking dark all the time, at which it’s appropriate to hang fairy lights everywhere. I love Christmas lights!

Don’t forget you can run fireplace screensavers on your TV all winter if you like! It’s your house, you’re the boss!