More guest bloggin' from Erica Ellis! (accompanied by unnecessary interjections from Mark)

Introductory note from Mark: Yep, Bob and Erica and West are still here, drinking wine and eating cheeses (or, in West's case, drinking breastmilk and eating mashed prunes) with us here in France; and Erica is proving to be an indefatigable guest-blogger. But this time I'm not just sitting back and let her spin her fanciful factual tales. I'll be interjecting occasionally, in outraged blue. But first, here's Erica...

The Island of Pork Roll

We have just returned today from a brief vacation – a break from both the gruelling sabbatical that Mark and Quincy are enduring and our little sojourn abroad. We all felt the need to escape the hustle and bustle of Cotignac and retreat to the peaceful environs of St. Tropez and surrounds. OK I’ll stop with the tongue in cheek (who am I? Mark???).

Whaddayamean "tongue in cheek"? This is a blog, dammit, a blog, and I take it dead seriously. Jeezum peezum, we provide Erica with space on our blog (precious precious space; the internet doesn't grow on trees, you know) and she uses this hallowed forum to fling insults at me and my blogging style? I'm outraged! And she does it without even once mentioning footnotes or J.D. Salinger or my parody-able penchant for reflecting back on my childhood experiences overseas? I'm speechless.

But seriously, we decided that we would all head to the beach while Bob and I were here. Quincy located a lovely little seaside "campground," about 1-hour’s drive away. Not only did this place promise easy beach access but also the famed island of Porquerolles (promptly dubbed profiterole, or pork roll for short) was just a short ferry ride away.

The only twist in our plan was that our friend Carol was also coming on this trip, which put us one person over what the excellent Renault Scenic wagon could carry. So we embarked on an ambitious plan involving a one-way car rental and return train ride back to Geneva for Carol, leaving us with the requisite 7 people for the return trip to Cotignac, and the need to pack really, really light (turns out by the time you pack the Scenic full with 7 people you’ve pretty much used up most of the room for baggage).

Okay, that's better. No more flinging of insults at poor ol' Mark. Good too that Erica is back on firmer footing here: Expressing her love for our car. Which, by the way, really did a splendid job of handling all seven of us and all our stuff. And, despite the need to pack light, it actually wasn't a small amount of stuff at all. We had to provide our own bedding at the beachside camping cabins we rented. That's a lot of pillows and blankets we had to jam into the car, including a bizarrely oversized thick duvet for Bob and Erica that ended up being about sixteen times bigger than their bed itself. Plus an entire crib for baby West. And my computer too, so that Erica could compose this litany of insults and grievances that we have so generously allowed her to post on our blog.

On the whole, I would say that this restricted luggage idea paid off for us since our "cabins" [tiny mobile homes: the “RapidHome”] at the "campground" were enchantingly small. Like living on a boat I imagine: 2-ft wide doorways, bedrooms hardly larger than the beds, etc. I particularly liked the arrangement of the two bedroom doorways at 90 degrees to each other so that no sooner had you crashed through one doorway (say at 2 AM to get a crying baby) then you had to crash right into the next one more or less within the same step. I say crash because I’m not entirely convinced that we could walk through the doorway face on, and particularly not while carrying West, so there was a fair number of impacts with the door frame. It didn’t help too much that our whole mobile home was listing slightly so that one of the doors always wanted to shut and the other always wanted to swing open.

Meanwhile, over in the Schaller/Young unit, Jasper and Maddox were sharing a room roughly the size of a coffee table. Now, when I was a kid (living in the Serengeti, traveling the Karakoram Highway, reading and re-reading "The Catcher in the Rye" that one summer in Brazil, et cetera, et cetera, et parody-able cetera), my brother Eric and I always shared a room and I was used to it. But not Jasper and Maddox. They live like royalty. In Vancouver they have their own rooms. Here in Cotignac, they not only have their own rooms, they have their own bathrooms. Maddox even has his own office! So it was a bit of an adjustment for them to sleep in such tight quarters, on beds so slim that, one night at 3 a.m., Maddox actually fell right out of bed and cut his face on the floor. Luckily, it didn't really bleed much, because we needed to save our bandages for his various cuts and scrapes on his hands and feet and knees. Happily, injuries heal. Insults, however – especially parenthetical remarks about someone else's blogging style – well, they just hurt and hurt and hurt.

However, much as we may have felt that the quarters were perhaps on the tight side, West was a big, big fan of the "RapidHome": lots of smooth faux-bamboo flooring to worm around on, built-in doorstops to chew on, and easy access to the outdoor deck with its rubber doormat (yum). And the campground was delightfully quiet. Or at least it was until they started into three solid days of continuous chain-sawing of the trees at the front.

There was also that pesky seagull that kept hanging around, hoping to steal some of the food we were eating at our outdoor tables. Carol especially seemed leery of the lingering bird. At one point I jokingly threatened to toss some cheese rinds on the roof of Carol's cabin, and she in return happily threatened to sneak out at midnight and slather peanut butter all over the roof of ours. "How would you like that?" she warned. I told her that I'd like it very much – that, in fact, I'd actually pay money to have her spend her night smearing peanut butter all over our roof, because it would be one helluva funny thing to blog about. Although, of course, Erica would probably just make fun of it later, leaving me deeply, deeply hurt.

Bob and I had scoped out the beach on Google Earth and were pretty excited about our second trip to the Mediterranean. We had previously hiked the Cinque Terra in 2004 and had really loved that deep blue colour, so different from our local ocean in Vancouver. As we walked down to the beach on the first day, we exited the seaside forest and took in the vista and were taken aback by what looked like endless drifts of brown garbage. Blech! The stuff formed spongy piles as much as 3 ft high all up and down the beach, and getting into the ocean required a trip both on top of the dried portion and then through the sludgy mass at the water’s edge. The source of the drifts was a bit of a mystery until we read an informative sign: meet Posidonia oceanica, a sea grass. It probably goes without saying that the kids looooved it – kind of like playing in piles of dead leaves in the fall. The weirdest thing about this stuff is that in addition to drifts of dead biomass, it forms these little balls of fibre, some as big as baseballs, that also line the beaches. If the berms of dead and rotting seaweed hadn’t put us off the local beach, the realization that West + sandy beach = non-stop parental management kind of extinguished our remaining desire/ability to hang out peacefully a la plage. Luckily, the peninsula was encircled almost entirely by a hiking path (le Sentier Littoral), which we availed ourselves of and much fun was had by all…

It was fun. I think Erica was finding it especially delightful because, while hiking the trail, she was also thinking about how she would blog enthusiastically about it later and how she would use that blog to make parenthetical remarks strategically designed to insult – indeed to wound – one famously small-headed and thin-skinned friend.

Our daytrip to the island of Porquerolles was also hectically fun – nothing like carting around a nap-deprived baby to put some extra "verve" into your sightseeing! However, West was generally quite a good sport and survived his first bike trip (sans helmet bien sur). There are very few cars on the island so the only way to get to the various gorgeous beaches is to hoof it or rent bikes. I didn’t expect that the roads would be quite as rustic as they were, but then without cars I’m guessing there’s not much impetus to do a whole lot of paving and upkeep. West’s bike seat had springs underneath it, and he spent much of his time in the seat chewing on the safety bar. We spent the afternoon at the Plage de Notre Dame, which was beautiful, although the name struck me as somewhat sacrilegious. And it turns out that a rocky beach is a much better bet with a baby – then all you have to do is to monitor the rock intake, direct him to relatively large stones, ply him with palm fronds and sticks, etc. Sand sucks. Carol and I were both struck with the feeling that we had been dropped into a James Bond movie: hot sun and sailboats anchored in turquoise water with good-looking tanned women sunning themselves on the decks (the Bond girls). We all agreed that we would be happy to come back and stay a lot longer – but never, ever any later in the summer than June. The Island of Pork Roll was already plenty hot in April, and it apparently gets a staggering 6,000 visitors A DAY in July and August. Gah.

Okay, I'm over it. Yes, of course, my mock-outrage was all tongue in cheek. Besides, from my perspective, there is no higher compliment than to be made fun of.

Anyway, I’ve barely scraped the surface of our escapades but I’m tired of typing. Got to save my reserves for another exhausting day in Provence tomorrow – wine-tasting, market, etc. You know how it is…

Oh yes, I know how it is. I know all too well. Meanwhile, let's all give a big hearty "thank you" to Erica, for keeping our blog lively and up to date, and for keeping it (mostly) clean.

Guest blogger! (Erica Ellis)

Introductory note from Mark: Quincy and I are delighted, once again, to avail ourselves of the lazy way of maintaining a blog. We convinced Erica to spend a precious chunk of her holiday time sitting in front of a computer, in order to write something for our blog. Quincy expressed the opinion that Erica's observations are far more factually accurate and informative than anything that I've posted in the last three months, and she's probably right. Nevertheless, I'm allowing it to appear here (mostly) unedited, and without footnotes. Now, here's Erica...

Have Baby, Will Travel

I must confess that the title of this blog is slightly misleading, as though we were jet-setting parents of a 9-month old baby. In fact, this is West’s second time ever leaving the Metro Vancouver area: go big or go home we figured… You know that old saying about how you either have money or time but not both? Right now we have time (or at least West and I do), so here we are.

I promised Mark that we would do some guest-blogging and I thought I would write a post about my first impressions of Cotignac and surrounds, before I’m so used to being here that it’s all old hat and I feel like a local (I wish).

We arrived here after what felt like about 24 hours of continuous travel and Mark did indeed greet us in the airport with the offer of delightful local cheeses and bread, and was wonderfully chipper considering that we had kept him waiting for about an extra 5 hours due to our flight being delayed (see Icelandic volcano…). We rounded out our arrival by changing West’s diaper on the front lawn of the Nice airport, attempting some breastfeeding on the side of what turned out to be the main exit from the airport parking lot (not very successful – very distractable baby), and then peeled out of the parking lot with me frantically pumping milk in the back seat – vive la France! I’m sure they were glad to see the last of us…

It’s about 1 ½ hours from Nice to Cotignac by car. And what a car! I was struck again how compact and efficient European cars are – M&Q’s is smaller than a Mazda 5 but can carry 7 people, is a (quiet and speedy) diesel and has all sorts of nifty built-ins from double sunroofs to window shades. We’re in love… ;-) But I digress. We arrived in Cotignac just as it was getting very dark, driving through the main square where the bars and restaurants were still lit up and then pulling into this little tiny alley in front of their house to unload our gear (we are travelling with a baby after all, so not the definition of travelling light).

As we entered the house to go say hello to Quincy, I had the impression of endless stairs, landings and dark doorways – somehow it seemed ridiculous to have the main living area three floors up! (I have since gotten fairly used to this idea). I have to say that despite following their blog, I was unprepared for the ‘house’. It’s really more of a compound, which is also not the right word I think since that has a negative connotation, but I can’t think of how else to describe it. It’s a combination of one 3 ½-floor townhouse bounding a large, multi-tiered and tiled/gravelled exterior garden area, with a 2-floor townhouse on the other side. The garden is a combination of exterior patios (many), planted areas, and pool. And it’s big! And the ‘plants’ in the garden are big! Like 50-60 foot trees big… It’s really, really lovely. There are birds tweeting and cooing pretty much always during the day, and at night there are frogs (we presume in the nearby river canyon and not, say, in the pool). The weather has been pretty warm lately so we spend a lot of time outside reading, eating, playing ping pong (Bob and Mark mostly, multiple times a day), and watching West play with gravel and drag himself around on the ground. Not quite warm enough for the unheated pool but we’re getting there.

The other main surprise for me is how bucolic and rural it is. I’m not sure exactly why this is a surprise to me, but it is. The town of Cotignac is nearly continuous stone, tile and bits of asphalt but it takes about 10 minutes (walking, with a baby) to get out of the town and into the surrounding countryside which is very, very green right now. I guess that’s the real surprise – I pictured this hot, arid landscape with nary a spare drop of water and bits of vegetation clinging to life, but instead it’s grassy and treed and there are little streams and waterfalls all over the place. Which probably explains why this region is called La Provence Verte. There are wildflowers aplenty and gardens in bloom, and even some of the vineyards are starting to sprout. It’s beautiful (and pollen-y).

Anyway, West is napping and I am going to take advantage of the remaining nap for some breakfast and downtime.

Ash cloud

I drove to Nice last Thursday, to pick up our friends Erica and Bob (and their baby) at the airport. I figured they'd be tired after their long flight from Vancouver, via Frankfurt; and, as I know from sad experience, traveling with an infant is rarely conducive to fine dining in transit; so when they emerged from customs, I planned to welcome them to the south of France with some of my favorite fresh olive bread and an assortment of cheeses – including an amazing Comté that I'd discovered the week before. But – spoiler alert! – they didn't arrive on schedule. They were late!

You maybe haven't heard because it's probably been buried in the back pages of your local paper that you don't even read anymore and is going out of business anyway, but apparently there was some volcano in Iceland that erupted last week, spilling ash into the sky, and causing problems for flights in and out of European airports. Yeah, it was news to me too. So, anyway, they missed their connection in Frankfurt. What a pain. Sure, Luftansa found room for them on the very next flight to Nice that afternoon, but that was, like, three hours later. Three hours! That's three hours I was forced to spend hanging out on the Côte d'Azur, munching on olive bread and aged cheeses under the palm trees and Mediterranean sunshine. That's three hours of my life I'm never gonna get back. Freakin' volcano. Talk about inconvenience!

Wait. What? You'd already heard about the volcano? And what's that? You don't think that my faux-outraged tale of minor delays and fine cheeses registers – not even a tiny bit – on the ash-related tale-o'-woe-o-meter? Oh. Okay, fine. I'll stop fishing fruitlessly for sympathy. I'll go back to tolerating your envy instead.

Given that almost all European airspace has been off-limits to airplanes for the past week, and that a hundred thousand people have been spending days and days becoming all the more depressing familiar with the bright un-cozy corridors of FRA or LHR or CDG, with no exit in sight, it's really quite amazing that Erica and Bob and their baby made it here at all. When you're traveling overseas with a squalling infant, it's hard to remain chipper in the face of airline inconvenience; but it maybe helps just a bit when, for days on end, the news stories remind you that, in fact, you are about the least inconvenienced air travelers in all of Europe.

So, anyway, instead of spending their week surreally trapped in transit, Erica and Bob have been doing exactly the kinds of things that you'd envision our visitors doing – and which you'd be doing yourselves if you were hanging out with us: Drinking rosé and eating leisurely lunches on our terrace, going for sunny walks where the rosemary grows wild and abundant on the hillsides, spending ever more money on ever more vast quantities of olives and cheeses at the Tuesday morning market. Playing a lot of ping-pong. Oh, also, Erica and Bob have been wiping copious amounts of baby slobber off of their baby's chin, their own clothes, and pretty much every surface of our house. You know, it's not been so very long since Jasper and Maddox were that age, but I'd totally forgotten how much drool an infant can produce. Like a spaniel or something. Anyway, wine and cheese and drool. That's life here in France these days. That and an eager interest in the volcano and its consequences.

Speaking of which: Quincy's brother Galen has been staying here with us as well. He arrived way back when the airplanes were still flying regular schedules, but his stay here has gone on longer than originally planned. He was ticketed to leave last Sunday, from Marseilles to Frankfurt and then onward. So, obviously, that didn't happen. He's been on his laptop a lot, monitoring the ash cloud chaos with some amusement, and working out a plausible exit strategy. His latest plan involves taking advantage of our relative proximity to the open-airspace promised-land that is Spain: A series of trains from Aix to Marseilles to Montpelier to Barcelona, and then to Madrid, and then an alleged flight out of Madrid. We'll see.

In which we visit awesome castles, ruined and not

The real shocker is that all four of us were in upbeat moods throughout the morning that we explored Carcassonne. That was quite a change from the two previous days, at Pont du Gard and Peyrepertuse – both which I now know to be among the most visually awesome places for any parent to spend his time wishing that he could legally thrash the hell out of his determinedly grouchy daughter.

Yes, Jasper is precocious. She's still only 8 years old, but increasingly she acts like she's 12 or 13. And I mean that, obviously, in the least positive way possible.

Of course, if you asked her, she'd assure you that the cause of her sullen displeasure can be traced to me and my Draconian parenting practices. Regardless, it was irritating. And aesthetically frustrating: Jasper's been regularly wearing a red sweater that just happens to look dynamite in photos – a great wet splash of color to punctuate the monolithic earth-tones of all these ancient ruins – but she vigorously refused to be photographed. When she'd see me with my finger on the shutter, she'd bolt immediately from wherever she'd been so picture-perfectly posed and flee, as fast as she could, up some flight of stone steps.

But at Carcassonne, Jasper was all smiles as she cheerfully characterized the legendarily well-preserved medieval city to be "kind of boring." I didn't find it boring. With its turrets and portcullises and throngs of camera-toting tourists, Carcassonne is like some sort of derelict Disneyland. And even though the castle is a UNESCO World Heritage site, it's still part of the living urban landscape, full of retail shops and restaurants and motorcycles zooming over historic drawbridges and diesel trucks rumbling down medieval alleyways barely big enough for a bicycle. As a pedestrian and parent to two distractable children, I didn't find that boring at all.

That's something that I really get a kick out of here in France: the way that deeply historical stuff is taken for granted; the way it's just part of the ordinary landscape.

Traveling around France, or even just walking around Cotignac, I'm reminded of the phrase that V. S. Naipaul famously used to characterize the American south: "a landscape of small ruins." During the times that I've traveled around North Carolina and other southern states, I've really resonated to those regular bits of ordinary wreckage – old barns overgrown with kudzu, uneven porches being slowly shattered by wisteria, that sort of thing. But, if anything, "a landscape of small ruins" is an even more apt description of southern France. I mean, sure, there are plenty of impressive huge ruins here too – immense displays of ancient architecture like the Pont du Gard and all, blah blah blah. But it's the countless little ruins – the ones we see everywhere – that I dig so much on a daily basis: The crumbling mill at the edge of a village; the half-collapsed hilltop chapel; the cylindrical remnants of abandoned wells amidst the rocks and rangy weeds of almost every orchard. At an intellectual level, it's humbling to encounter these constant casual reminders that, no matter how sturdy we might try to make the things we make, our things are ultimately no match for the rain and the wind and the sun. And there's also something so aesthetically pleasing in these juxtapositions of engineering and entropy: I just like the way they look.

The big ruins look pretty great too, and even Jasper's headstrong grumpiness was no match for the dilapidated awesomeness of Peyrepertuse – which, with its dizzying mountaintop location and sharp geometries, has an almost Machu Picchu-like quality about it. Hours later, after we'd returned to the cramped little "camping" cabin where we spent the night, Jasper snuggled up to me as I downloaded that day's photos onto my laptop, and she giggled in amusement at the pictures that I had taken of her attempts to avoid being in the pictures I was taking. And then we looked at them again, and she laughed out loud all over again, and so did I.

But why, mama?

The circus came to town. Helen was in town and she and I took the kids. We opted to spend the few extra euros for ring-side seats. Sounded worth it just to avoid the discomfort of the bleachers. It was a very cute mom-and-pop kind of an organization. It featured a goat. Only in the south of France would a goat be considered a legitimate act for a circus. It was pretty cute and did some very goat-like balancing. In addition to the goat there were a number of other barnyard animals plus a few exotics like horses, llamas, an anaconda. You know, the usual. There were 4 human performers: a clown (who was introduced as an American. Ha ha), two women both of whom did acrobatics of sorts, and another guy who was the master of ceremonies/jugglar/animal trainer. The whole thing was surprisingly entertaining. The kids loved it, of course. But I think if you asked them they would say their favourite thing was the caramel-corn (popcorn sucre, en français).

We celebrated Easter here in our usual way. We had our annual egg-hunt. Can it still be annual if the location has changed so entirely and none of our usual neighborhood children were here? I don’t know. But, I still like to think of it as our annual event, no matter where we are. Jasper, for some reason did NOT want to invite any of her friends to it. I think she might be embarrassed at our French, but that is just my guess. It worked out okay though. We had plenty of people. Some friends from Switzerland were here for the weekend, and they have 9 year-old twins who joined in the activities. And we invited a couple of Maddox’s friends: Hannah (of course!), & Amalie and her sister Ellie. We did it in the later afternoon, which meant the adults were standing around drinking wine rather than coffee, which was a decided improvement. As usual we had lots of little chocolate eggs, plus the “grand prize” (a giant egg filled with Easter bunny snacks – carrots etc). Maddox wants me to tell you that he found the giant egg.

We just got back from a 3-day trip to Cathar country, also known as the “country of countries” because the south of France in the middle ages was a bunch of independent city-states. There are many cool castle-like sights to see, from crumbling ruins (Peyrepertuse) to still-lived-in cities (Carcasonne). Mark will be blogging about this too. I mostly want to say that I loved this trip. My favorite day was the day we drove to Peyrepertuse and back. We (accidentally) had no paper map with us at all and were relying entirely on our GPS (have I mentioned how much I loooove my GPS?). it was really kind of fun to have no idea where we were, where we were going, or how we were going to get there, but still being totally relaxed about it. I realized it was like having a local in the car telling us which way to go. We were on lots of tiny roads and the country was varied and gorgeous. For her own mysterious reasons, Madamoiselle TomTom (what we call our GPS) took us on one route on the way there and a different route on the way home. It was great. It was like we toggled a “take us on a scenic round trip” button on accident.

It was amusing to me, some of the discussion we got into with Jasper and Maddox on this trip. Some of them I could have predicted (who were the Cathar’s?, what is religious persecution? why?) others were a bit of a surprise (what is a dungeon?, what is torture? why?). It is always interesting to me how hard it is to explain some of these things to kids. Especially the why questions. As we sat at the top of Peyrepertuse, I explained to Maddox why it was a good strategic place for a castle. It was built at the top of a steep hill, to keep invading armies out, etc. But I was hard-pressed to explain they why of it. Why did armies come along and try to invade a castle? The answer to, ‘to take it over’, was of course immediately followed by another (and really unanswerable) ‘why?’. Why, indeed? Just like the why’s about religious persecution. Why did the medieval catholic church feel the need to engage in crusades against the Cathar’s? The sorts of answers I could come up with that might satisfy an adult (political power, greed etc) just don’t cut it with a kid. Being unable to answer these questions satisfactorily for the kids ended up making the experience of being in these places that much more powerful for me. It forced me to just sit with it: Why?

Poissons d'Avril

We're deep into April now and I've had a run of dreams I which I'm trying to dispose of a dead body, and only semi-successfully. One night, frustrated by my accomplices' half-assed efforts, I grabbed a shovel myself and proceeded to dig an enormous burial pit in the soft yielding dirt underneath a neighbor's vegetable garden. A few nights later, I was in a hotel room and the dead body was crammed into a backpack. I hefted the heavy pack onto my back and proceeded to walk out into the hotel hallway, down the stairs, and through a lobby full of policemen, counting on my practiced nonchalance to keep me out of custody. Weird dreams because, really, when you think about it, of all the people you know, I'm about the last person who'd ever need to surreptitiously divest himself of a freshly killed corpse.

(This raises an interesting question: Of all the of all the people you know, who's the first person who you'd think might someday need to surreptitiously divest himself of a freshly killed corpse? I don't want to know the answer. But it is a fun ice-breaker kind of question. Feel free to trot it out the next time you need to dent one of those awkward silences that crops up around the communal breakfast table at a Bed & Breakfast somewhere.)

As I write this, I'm in Carcassonne. But despite it's name, there are no dead bodies here. (Get it: Carcassonne; carcasses. Ah never mind.) It's vacation time again. Not for me, of course (I'm on sabbatical, remember, not on holiday), but for the kids. Their latest two-week holiday started just over a week ago, after April Fish day.

It turns out that April 1 is a very hilarious big deal here in France, with lots of highjinks and tomfoolery. But it's not called April Fools day here. It's April Fish day: Poissons d'Avril. When I picked up Maddox from preschool that afternoon, he was brandishing a whole fistful of paper fishes that he'd apparently spent all day cutting out and coloring in. Jasper had eaten lunch at home that day (because the cantine menu simply read "aioli" which seemed just so mysteriously weird – a lunch of upmarket mayonnaise and nothing else? – that even she didn't want to take a chance on it) and she too had her pockets stuffed with crudely-made paper fishes and bits of tape. At her school, apparently, kids spent their recess time trying to stick these fish facsimiles onto other kids' backs without them noticing. Kind of like a "Kick Me" sign, only without any apparent consequences.

As for me, Poissons d'Avril passed without finding myself the sad patsy of any piscine pranks – at least as far as I know. I did briefly toy with the idea that maybe the cryptically mononymic cantine menu ("ailoi") was some sort of unfunny joke, but then I learned that, in fact, aioli is actually a sort of culinary shorthand referring to a completely legitimate lunchtime offering (a plate consisting of fish and vegetables in an aioli sauce) and everyone knows it. Well, everyone except the small-headed rube who, until last week, didn't even know the first thing about April Fish Day.

As for Carcassonne, more about that soon.