Here is a picture of them being all wooly and happy, and thinking about grain and escaping. Little do they know that they will soon be devoid of their luscious locks.

Before

Here is Fred, the sheep shearer, shearing one of this year’s lambs. Note the artistically canted camera angle.

After

And here are the shorn sheep, feeling very silly. When they’re first shorn, they can’t recognise each other, and so head-butt for a few hours until they finally realise–Yo! Aren’t you that guy who’s always stealing my grain?

Shorn

The sheep have loverly wool, which my mom used to send off to a spinnery in Wisconsin, because none of us can spin. Also, only my sister knits. And we don’t do artsy things like felting with it, either. Anyway, this year, Mom took it to a place in Greenwich, where they have all sorts of magic machines and techniques to make it wonderful. Unfortunately, one of the lamb’s fleeces was too short, so it couldn’t be spun. So Mom’s going to wash it at home, and we’re going to learn how to either hand-spin it, or felt it.

Some wool

Fridays are also my day for cooking. I invented that about a month ago, and have since cooked two dinners. Not because I’m a slacker, and didn’t make dinner. I think my brother and sister were home for one of the Fridays, and Mom wanted to make something lovely. And then I think we were away the other Friday. But anyway, I’ve made two meals. The first of which was spaghetti. And yes, I spelled that right on my first try. The second dinner was pad thai.

The pad thai

It turned out stunningly well. But I discovered that pad thai doesn’t make for very good leftovers, unless you really load it up with oil, and that’s too gross. It gets really sticky after it’s through being fresh, and then, in it’s stickyness, it doesn’t taste as wonderful.

Next on my list or normal stuff is my horse, Max. I can’t discuss why he is called Max, as that would be nerdy.

Max has a few issues. These mainly pertain to the fact that whenever I ask him to canter, he begins bucking like a wild bronco. No joke. I feel like a bandito at a rodeo. I don’t know why he does it–he doesn’t hate being ridden, his saddle fits well (and I’ve been bareback a few times when he’s bucked), and his previous owners say that he’s always done this, so it’s not that he hates me. I think the most plausible reason would be that he either got overexcited when asked to canter, and it just became a habit, or he had some bad experiences with cantering, so it became a habit to try to get rid of the rider. Anyway, I’m think that if I keep trying to ride him at a canter, and he persists in bucking, I’ll either be thrown into a tree, break all my ribs, puncture my lungs and heart, and, subsequently, die, or I’ll have a heart attack from constant stress, and die that way. (Actually, I must interject a brag–I haven’t fallen off once yet )

Anyhow, I’ve decided that we’re going to be doing some ground work, to eliminate the bucking problem on the ground, where he can’t throw me into trees, and I can reprimand him without dragging at his mouth. And the whole natural horsemanship guru meditation stuff about groundwork. Like establishing myself as the Passive Leader, etc.

Anyhow, pictures.

I would say that he looks like a certain elegant white horse, but I can’t.

And that about wraps it up for all I’m able to write today. And I just had a thought: you know the saying that nerds cannot die, because you cannot kill something which already has no life? I just realised that I am a mortal! Gah! I can die! For I realised, that lo! I have a life outside of nerdiness, as frightening as that may seem.

.

Thus ends the first Nerdless Wednesday. Please tell me if you think I was successful.

hearing sheep that have wool, will need to be done once a year to help keep the sheep cool in the hotter months.  That is one of the tasks that we had done this summer. The herd that we purchased have a fair amount of katahdin in them.  Katahdin is a type of hair-sheep.  So instead of having big woolly coats that need to be shorn off, they will shed their hair coats whenever they decide they are getting too hot.  There are many other benefits to having this be the main breed in your herd.  We are working on making our herd fully katahdin.  But for now, we still have a few sheep that are  cute and woolly and need to get a shearing each year.

In the photo below, you can see that some sheep have wool coats and others look they have already been shorn, but they haven’t, they are fully katadhin.

Blossom, per her usually style, led the pack by being first to loose her coat and to show the others that everything would be alright.  She may have been the happiest one to loose her woolly coat because she absolutely loves to rub up against you {or anything else that is somewhat stable} to get as much scratches as possible.  Immediately after loosing that thick coat, she ran over to a tree and scratched herself as much as her little body could handle.

As a whole, the event of our first sheep shearing went really well.  A friend came and did the shearing and some hoof trimming.  We watched and learned.  I had no idea that to trim a sheep hooves you could just use normal gardening clippers!  

We had lots of helpers that day.  It went pretty quickly and it was nice to see the sheep start feeling more comfortable.

One of our crew members, Mike, has an eager and willing four wonderful children and a beautiful wife that have been coming over and helping & learning various farm tasks. They visited for awhile to watch the sheep getting their new look.

Our wonderful neighbor, John Adair, let us sheer the sheep under a shed roof off his house.  He also wanted us to use the sheep to mow his pastures so he wouldn’t have to all summer.  John loved having the sheep {and Ed} in his pastures and he even got some chicken pullet visitors throughout the summer because they were moving around our orchard and behind his wood shop.

Ed is that little calf that was rejected by his mama so we brought him into the barn and bottle fed him.  We then put him with the sheep for a little bit while they were in the orchard.  When we tried to put Ed back with the cows, he ran through the fence and joined the herd of sheep that had recently been moved to the same pasture the cattle were in.

Ed waited patiently for his friends to finish with their spa time and then they all joined each other in green pastures.

To see all the photos of the day, click on this link from our Facebook page.

]]> http://impartart.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/to-gogh-or-not-to-gogh/ Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:12:00 +0000 melaniemarnie http://impartart.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/to-gogh-or-not-to-gogh/ The price almost turned me off entering the Van Gogh Museum, €14 euros is a steep fee by any standard. However, I didn’t know if or when I’d be back to Amsterdam so I dug deep into my student budget pockets and bought a ticket. Clearly the cost hadn’t deterred any other visitors as the place was packed. Every art lined wall was obscured by crowds, often three bodies deep, struggling to get a good look as they shuffled along from painting to painting. The painfully slow procession reminded me of a hotel buffet breakfast, where visitors were queuing to satisfy their visual hunger rather than their taste buds. What is it about Vincent Van Gogh that brings millions of people to the museum each year?

Artist. Genius. Some use the two terms interchangeably, as though the presence of one implies the other. Historically, many of the ‘great’ artists have been mythologised as geniuses and as such have gained exceptional status in both the art world and broader community. The popularity gained by particular artists often leads to a preoccupation with their biography rather than a focus on the work produced by the artist. Where Van Gogh is concerned, does his celebrity status stem purely from his exceptional skills as a painter and the profundity of his images or is interest also aroused by a myth surrounding the mad genius who cut off his ear?

Van Gogh exemplifies the correspondence between madness and art, his life story and emotional extremes, including mental breakdown, hospitalisation, self-mutilation, and suicide, have all been used as evidence to support the complex image of a tormented artist. The connection between insanity and creativity is not a new one and Van Gogh has at times been labelled by different people as schizophrenic, manic-depressive and epileptic. The question remains as to whether or not madness leads to creativity, creativity leads to madness, or if the two are even related? According to Gerard Kraus, the relationship between Van Gogh’s artistic endeavours and his mental illness is prevalent in the “irregularity of his productivity, in the choices of subject matter, and in several technical particularities”. However, what cannot be proven is the extent to which the pathological forces of his sickness influenced, inspired, and directed his hand.

His works completed whilst staying at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a mental asylum in Saint-Rémy, provide an interesting case study. At a time when he was in no state for creating original masterpieces, Van Gogh looked to the work of artists he admired, such as Millet, Rembrandt, and Delacroix, for inspiration. Utilising a collection of black and white prints he had on his personage, Van Gogh reworked well known images and created his own colour copies. Those must have been dark days for Van Gogh at Saint-Rémy and I view the reproductions as an attempt to bring light into his life. For many of these works made by Van Gogh, the museum has both the original and the copy on display and it is interesting to compare the the two. Whilst similar in size and very precisely translated, Van Gogh’s versions have a more vibrant colour palette and a lighthearted, happier feel than their original counterparts. I particularly liked The Sheep Shearer (After Millet), shown below with Jean-François Millet’s Shearing Sheep.

Funnily enough, not all are agreed on Van Gogh’s talents. I overheard an American couple comment, “he’s not even that great of a painter”. Whilst they didn’t see the merits of his work, clearly a large portion of the population do.

David shearing last year

Some days – most days, actually – we sit over breakfast or lunch or dinner or a snatched cup of tea and dream together about what it’ll be like when we’ve ‘finished’ renovating the house and croft. Which we both know is a joke – on a croft, at least, there’s always something to be improved upon, rebuilt because of weather damage and general wear-and-tear, or to be designed and built from scratch because I’ve had yet another bright idea about new animals we might like to keep. (As you can possibly imagine, another ‘Oh, let’s keep pigs … or alpacas … or giraffes …’ probably isn’t going to go down well for a year or two, at least …) But right now, some – most – days it seems that creating the basic building blocks of this place will never end. Although there are only a couple more relatively small jobs to do inside the house, painting the outside is unlikely to be completed this year, and it’s one of those jobs that weighs heavily on you because you know that, every dry and not-too-windy day, you really need to paint. Whereas you’d much rather be working on making the builder’s rubble that still constitutes most of the ‘garden’ into something much more beautiful. (Or fishing, in David’s case.) Right now, the only sidelines we can manage, apart from the daily animal-keeping chores, are just about keeping up with the vegetable/ polytunnel jobs in my case, and continuing to fence the in-bye land on the croft into manageable chunks in David’s case.

David is also (in his spare time …) constructing Pig Castle, which will come into operation when Pig Palace needs a bit of a break or when someone is farrowing in it. Pig Castle had better be soundly built, as it’s right at the back of the garden area and polytunnel. Keeping two sows requires at least two decent pig houses and associated paddocks, as they’re always going to need to be separated when one is farrowing. Even if you don’t have two sows, two good places are needed so that the weaners can be separated from the sow when it’s time. Given the fact that pigs are in essence four-legged demolition machines, the building of pig areas is not to be undertaken lightly, and nor is it a quick job!

And, amidst all that, right now it’s shearing time, which takes on an added piquancy this year as I hope to be able to spin the fleeces (some of them). It didn’t take me long to discover that this spinning lark isn’t as easy as it looks (is any motor skill ever easy, at the beginning?) and that if I wanted seriously to spin anything worth knitting or weaving this year, I’d better get a bit of tuition. There’s only so much, when it comes to practical skills like this, that you can learn from books and videos. And I’m an impatient soul when it comes to learning new things. And so, in two weeks time I’ll be heading down through Harris to Leverburgh and taking the beautiful brief ferry trip across the sound to Berneray on North Uist, then driving all the way to the bottom of South Uist to spend a few hours with Denise at The Hebridean Woolshed. Denise already does everything I aspire to (dyeing and spinning their own fleeces, weaving) and so it’ll be time well spent. The first of our Hebridean sheep fleeces (of which we have more than I could use) is currently laid out on the Sheila Maid drying, so that we can practice carding the wool before I go. This one was washed only in cold water so that it retains the natural oils from the sheep – David has put in an order for a weatherproof hat, and so that perhaps will be the first project. The Jacob fleeces – which are much finer – will wait until I know what I’m doing before we tackle them.

Sharon

Meet Emily Chamelin, 20-something professional sheep shearer from Westminster - yes, you go to school for this. She was something – super strong, quick, confident, charming and fun to watch.  Here is her website – http://chamelinshearing.com

The shorn fleeces get sold, straightaway. They average between 6 and 10 pounds, and their color varies as much as each individual sheep does – this one is from an older sheep – they turn gray just like we do.

Gentle creatures, the sheep seemed to not mind the shearing at all. Perhaps it was Emily’s expert touch, but I was surprised to see how easily they dropped into her arms, submitting and looking pretty relaxed. Afterwards, there was some jumping around and head butting. You’d have to expect that this might be the most exciting day of the year for these gals. And we watched the miniature donkey watch us – awwwww….really cute. His job is security – protects the sheep from fox, coyote and dogs. How cool is that? A guard donkey!

He wanted Precious to be sheared first and he watched very intently.  Instructing the shearer the whole time…’she likes to be talked to’, ‘she doesn’t like to be held like that’, ‘she may be a little wiggly, just be patient with her’, etc.  It was very cute.  As soon as she was done, he handed his baggy of money to the shearer and told her ‘thank you’.  Once again my heart melted.

Precious was happy with the hay, but my son was very concerned about her and quickly grabbed a little bit of grain.

She was happy with his idea and the two of them shared a quiet ‘precious’ moment.

Who knew a little ewe lamb named Precious could teach him so much.

We used a new shearer this year and I am very pleased!  She handled the ewes with care and the fleeces look great.

The new chute was a very big help.  I was able to load a sheep in it while she was shearing.  When she was done shearing, she released the sheep and they exited through an open gate and I swung the gate open on the chute and she grabbed the sheep.  It worked just like I was hoping it would – I love it when that happens!

My son had 3 weeks off for Christmas break, so he was my big helper.  It was a bit chilly when we started…

but it turned into a beautiful day!

Even though the sun came out, I think these girls were talking about how lucky they were not to be on the shearing list.

Queenie is the first to lamb on the 4th of January.  For a firt time lamber, she has a pretty big belly and udder already.

Holly is next on the list and is due on the 8th of January.

Poor Azera isn’t due until the 20th of January, she is definitely the biggest of all the girls.

I love seeing how crisp and clean they look after they have been shorn!

This pile seems a little overwhelming at the moment…

but I love looking at what is inside

I was very fortunate to attend the Pagosa Fiber Festival in Pagosa Springs, CO.  There were classes, demonstrations of sheep and alpaca shearing along with yummy goodies and lots of vendors selling all things related to fiber/knitting/weaving/spinning.

Here are a few pictures I took while I was there.  More to come about the projects I’ve been working on while I was there.

Shearing Sheep

Flop the sheep over and hold ‘em down!

Have you any wool?

In addition to shearing the ewes, I decided to have the lambs sheared as well.  Their fleeces are so pretty and they are starting to get full of hay and junk from being in the barn.

Sheryl agreed to shear the sheep in groups of 15 again.  She came this morning and sheared all of the lambs and will be back in December to shear the ewes.

Here they are – waiting their turn…

You can see Magoo, the llama, in the background watching over the whole operation.

Here is Chance, looking a little confused about what happened to her!

 I love the colors in this fleece.  It belongs to this big boy…

He is a new addition to the herding group.  His name is Thatcher and he is a Jacob/Border Leicester cross.  I love all of the leicester sheep.

There are several lambs in the herding group that are too dark for the Jacob standard, but look at all of the black/brown wool I have now!  It is beautiful.

My husband was here to help and it was so nice.   He helped with the sheep and I was able to skirt the fleeces. 

No, we do not kill goats or sheep for fleece.  It’s a crop which grows every year.

Firstly, let’s make it clear which animal produces what fibre. I’ve had plenty of hits from people typing in “cashmere sheep”.  The only fibre produced by sheep is wool.  Goats produce cashmere and Angora goats ( a particular breed with long ringlets) produce mohair.

All three produce their fibre as a renewable, annual crop, or, in the case of the Angoras, a twice a year crop. Our sheep and Angora goats are shorn with electric power shears as shown below.

This picture actually shows Raymond having a “cuddle break”. The Angoras and our Bowmont sheep are absolutely comfortable with him and frequently nod off! He is so quiet and gentle with them.

The cashmere goats have to be combed, not shorn. You could shear but you take off so much of the rough outer coat which costs so much in time and effort to separate from the delicate cashmere underneath.

Combing the cashmere

The goats don’t seem to mind and we take the opportunity to give them a thorough check looking at teeth and feet to make sure all is well.

When we take goats or sheep for slaughter, which we do occasionally, we sometimes have the skins back for tanning.  One lady at IKNIT two years ago asked me if the skins grew back. I did have to go into fairly graphic detail to make her understand why not but she eventually understood. It was a sharp lesson to me in just how far apart town and country have become. This question about killing sheep and goats for their fleece is another.  It explains so much of the frustration and difficulty on both sides when issues such as hunting, badger culling and TB come up for discussion. Without at least SOME real understanding on both sides, reasoned argument is not possible.

Here is Rendezvous half way done.  When I shear the sheep myself, I put them on a stand instead of the traditional way of sitting them on their butt.  This is for several reasons – I am not very fast, I am not very strong, and I just find it easier  

Now I’m going to start on the second side.

Here he is all done except for his belly.  For the belly portion I have my husband help me tip them on their butt and he holds them while I shear the belly. 

I love how clean they look after being sheared!

Next it was Reno’s turn.

Here I am with my little helper.

They both had lovely fleeces and Rendezvous’ was nicer than I expected – always a fun surprise!

Lucky boys get to spend a few more days in the barn. 

If you’re sick of hearing about the sheep’s wool…. imagine how we’re feeling!  We’ve come a long way, baby, from the stinking fleece on the back lawn Monday night.  I realized at approximately 11:32 p.m. on fleece washing night that I had a book titled Back to Basics from the library with a detailed explanation and colored photos of the sheep-to-sweater process.  Whew.  So, the top picture is the semi-washed wool that only semi-stinks, but some of it is semi-ruined because either I agitated it too much or the water temperature changed too much during it’s 17 baths.  So it felted its way out of getting cleaned any further.  And I’m kind of glad… less IS more.  Another discovery was the hole in the bottom of the red tub.  Good grief, you should have seen the puddle on the kitchen floor.

This is not a new pet or a fur trim for a Bag for Zaza.  It’s a strip of curly wool that got felted into a row that is a semi-smelly neck wrap or a fantastic dog toy.  Trixie LOVES it.

This is my TA-DA picture.  The puffs of wool in the Walmart bag have been separated individually so the debris has fallen out.  The fluffs on the counter still contain vegetable matter and require separating over the kitchen sink until junk-free.  When you separate the fibers the ball of wool doubles in size… at least doubles!  The farm smell is still lingering in there just under the surface of the clean soapy smell.  I’m hoping that Friday’s dying in boiling water will cure the end of the stink.  Can’t you hardly wait to see the results?????  Me either.  Christy, I wish you were here to help me….. sigh.

From Gene Logsdon
Garden Farm Skills

Some days I dare to believe what I hopefully predict in my writing: that the best days of farming are yet to come.

Every February we have a family sheep shearing day, usually attended by three generations of my family who show up to watch if not to help. Three flocks of sheep are involved: ours, our son’s, and our brother-in-law’s. Sheep were once as common as houseflies around here, going back to the middle 1800s. But the flocks of my great grandfather Charles Rall, and his brother, Joseph, and the flocks of my grandfather Henry Rall and his brothers and cousins, and the flocks of my father and mother and her brothers and sisters, and the flocks of their children, had dwindled to only a few by 1970. Tractors, corn, and soybeans chased the sheep away, and seemingly most of the Rall family too. Not the keenest agricultural economist nor the most optimistic supporter of environmentally-sane family farming could have predicted that a revival might occur.

First of all, the wise men of agribusiness did not predict that pasture farming— raising animals on pasture with little or no grain, would become the trend that it is today. Pasture farming more than anything else allows for a return of small scale agriculture because it is a low-cost way to get started in farming. But to make it happen for us, it was just as important that many members of our family decided to stay put on home grounds or to return to them.

What happened seems like a miracle to me. As a boy, I often woke up to the plaintive cries of my cousin Adrian calling his sheep early in the morning on the farm next to ours. I thought those days were long gone. But now these same pastures echo a new generation of sheep callers. How astounding. In an age where population shift and constant mobility are supposed to be the norm, here we stand, grazing sheep on the very same land that our ancestors grazed sheep nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. I have just published a novel I called The Last of the Husbandmen, but as we were shearing our sheep this year, I was thinking that I should write another called The First of the New Husbandmen.

If I would ever do that, Brad, my brother-in-law and his wife, Ann, my sister, would be good models for the hero and heroine. Brad is not farm-born or raised. His day job is in telecommunications maintenance. But, as he puts it, something in him just took to farming after Ann introduced him to husbandry. They also raise beef and pork for themselves and to sell to neighbors. They keep hens for eggs. Their vegetable gardens are awesomely neat and productive. They have an orchard for fruit and a woodlot provides logs for the fireplace and emergency heat. They grow alfalfa for their own hay and some to sell. They even have a draft horse now which Brad trained himself. There is only a little need for power equipment on his farm because no annually cultivated crops are grown except in the garden. A neighbor cuts and bales the hay on shares. They have expanded their operation, buying some of Adrian’s old pasture lands while continuing to rent some pasture from another brother-in-law and sister who kept a flock in their younger years before Brad took over. Brad and Ann, like all true husbandmen, would rather be at home than anywhere else. Their pastures are as smooth and comely as a golf course. To realize that this land has been in grasses and clovers, that is, never plowed, for well over a hundred years, is just awesome in corn belt country.

Getting our sheep sheared in this supposedly Post-Sheep era was a somewhat daunting challenge in the beginning. Shearers are few and far between today. It hardly pays to travel, sometimes from relatively far away, to shear just a few sheep on a small farm. The first years, Carol and I, and then our son Jerry and I, sheared our first four sheep by hand. I used a hand sheep shears; Carol used her sewing scissors. There’s nothing like that experience to convince a person to hire a professional shearer. I was fortunate to have two neighbors who still sheared commercially and because they lived close by, and because they were very nice, they did shear our tiny flock, charging a little more per sheep than they normally would on a larger flock. When they passed away, I was worried. But a strange thing happened— this whole story is strange. A visitor from Michigan, Dave Owens, stopped by one day with some books of mine he wanted me to sign. After we talked awhile, it came out that he was a professional sheep shearer, a good one as we would learn. By then my son had sheep, and my brother-in-law and sister had sheep. Yes, we were looking for a shearer. Yes, he would come from his farm in Michigan and shear, since we now had a good day’s work for him. Because it meant setting up at three different farms, we were willing to pay more than the usual fee.

Dave has been shearing for us now for quite a few years. Getting to my son’s barn requires fording a creek and climbing a hill that is either snow-covered or muddy in February. Not many shearers would put up with that. Getting to know Dave, I think he shears sheep for the same reason we raise them. Not for money, really, but for love of farming. He has his own flock too.

Grandson Evan upending a sheep for shearing, Dave Owens in back

By dawn’s early light, he arrives with his brother Phil who comes along as a sort of assistant. After shearing our sheep, we move to Jerry’s place. Jerry’s day job is building and remodeling houses but he also has an innate skill at handling animals. By about mid-afternoon, we are headed to Brad’s nearby farm, which is the home farm where I and my eight siblings grew up.

There are do’s and don’ts of shearing. The sheep must be kept indoors beforehand if snow or rain is falling. It is very difficult to try to shear a snow-covered fleece or a very wet one. The sheep need to be bunched together close to the shearer’s platform so that the animals can be more easily caught and tipped on their butts handy to the shearer. Having the sheep bunched together keeps them calmer too.

We like to have children handy on shearing day. The wool, fleece by fleece, goes into a large wool sack, and a small, agile child is the perfect kind of manpower to pack the wool down.

Granddaughter Rebecca packs wool down in the wool sack

Brad had emailed all the neighborhood kinfolks and invited them to the shearing this year. Quite a few showed up, letting their children take turns bouncing in the wool sack. For me and my siblings there was a special feeling of both joy and sorrow in the air. Next to the shearing barn stands the old milking parlor and milk house where once we worked our hearts out, fancying that we would have a successful dairy, and in fact nearly breaking my heart when the venture did not succeed as well as expected. But even more poignant, at the very epicenter of the barn where now so many family members clustered and talked and joked and bounced in the wool sack, our mother many years ago fell from the hay loft, broke her neck, and died.

Surveying the scene as the family elder now, I felt an exhilarating sense of having risen above both the lost joys of the past and the bitter ashes of failure. And my grandson, Evan, showed that he was old enough to handle the sheep even as I am getting too old to do it. If I can continue to con him into helping out on sheep shearing day, I can keep on raising sheep for, well, who knows for how many more years.
~~
Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio.
Gene is author of The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse (Culture of the Land)
and The Last of the Husbandmen: A Novel of Farming Life
Images Credit: Jennifer Cartellone
OrganicToBe.org OrganicToGo.com
Gene’s Posts
[Permanent Link][Top]

I just got around to scanning these, they are from the sheep shearing day I wrote about earlier. Those photos are digital and these are from the beloved Rollei.

Look at the detail in the ringlets…. I love it. But as you can see, I still need to work on how to use the Rollei because…..

….. you look through the top lens, but photograph through the one below, so you don’t get exactly what you see in the viewfinder and therefore I don’t have the sheep’s feet. I guess that means I have to practice. That word practice used to make me cringe when it was said by my childhood piano teacher or my basketball coach but now it makes me excited, so I think that is a good sign.