Holidailies Day 8: No Matter What (Part 3)

It's been a couple of days, so it's probably time for me to finish my story about coming out because otherwise, I will totally lose track of where I was and forget to wrap it up...

We left off in the summer of 2018 when I had finally decided that I was going to be okay if I let myself just be bisexual openly and I wouldn't restrict myself when looking at particular relationships. At that point, I had been hanging out off and on with this girl named Marie* for a little bit under a year.

Marie posted on Facebook at some point during the summer that they were planning on moving farther away from school to get out of a really horrific living situation, but would need a car to get to and from school for the first couple of weeks while they figured out bus schedules and all that. 

I saw it and messaged her about her using my old Subaru cause I had the use of my aunt's car for a few months. But it was a stick shift which she didn't know how to drive. Since she wasn't getting any other offers for cars that I knew of, I offered to teach her how to drive it over the summer. 

[Before I get into this part, a reminder that I was, in general, absolutely terrible at figuring out my own feelings for people - especially girls - and had no idea what was brewing at this point in time.]

This wasn't the first time I'd ever offered to teach someone how to drive stick, and wasn't even the first time I'd let them use my car. However, it was the first time that I did it without thinking about how *not* freaked out I was about someone else driving my car (I may have some control issues when I'm not the one driving the car...). 

If that wasn't enough evidence that something was suddenly different, I kept coming up with reasons to extend the times we hung out when we went for lessons. "Oh, there's traffic, we can hang out at this coffee shop/go to my house and watch TV for a couple of hours to wait for it to die down, totally."

I distinctly remember first getting an inkling of what was happening when I went down to the Bay Area for the day to help my little brother move to Santa Cruz for school. That year, after realizing how much I'd let basically all of my relationships fall to the wayside while I was working, I was making it a point to go down more often and be Present when I was down there. I spent the whole day messaging Marie through Facebook when we weren't actively moving things.

Soon after that, I decided to invite my friend Marie to my camp's Family Camp weekend over Labor Day. After all, I had been going there for years and had never really invited anyone up, just been content with hanging out with my camp people.

About a week before Family Camp, Marie was at my place watching Brooklyn 99 and we got to an episode with some jump scares. She *casually* cowered against me and I put my arm around her and then we sort of... stayed like that until she left a few hours later. 

At that point, my brain finally began to put all the pieces together because I knew that was definitely not in the category of "platonic friend behavior" for me, and I have been a fairly touchy person since college with people I'm close to. I texted my best friend and listed all the things that could mean that I like, "like liked" Marie. I came to the conclusion that I had actually fallen for someone who was also bisexual and had dated women and could potentially like me back. Which was a wild thing to consider like, a month and a half after I'd finally decided that God would still love me if I went that direction

So I was pretty excited and simultaneously freaking out because I couldn't figure out, "how do I even have this conversation?" 

It turns out I didn't have to worry a ton. It didn't really end up being a conversation. A few days later, Marie was over again and it got pretty late and we fell asleep on the couch together. When we woke up in the morning, the conversation went like so:

I just kinda popped out with, "well, I never thought that out of all my siblings, I'd be the last one to get a girlfriend." 

"Wait, so I'm your girlfriend?" 

"If you want to be?" 

"Well, yeah, I do."

And the rest was history. [Spoilers: We dated for about 5 months very intensely because neither of us is particularly good at doing things halfway, got engaged the day after Christmas, and then got married in early January of 2019 and have been happily married for almost two years now.]

Then came the slightly more nerve-wracking issues. See, there was a reason it had taken me over three years to process being bi and come to be okay with it. And a huge part of that was the knowledge that the chances of me losing a huge amount of my support system and chosen family were pretty high.

It started at Family Camp a few days later. Seeing as I had already invited Marie, and my parents and my younger brothers would be there, we decided she would come up with me (we had our first official date at Gus's Steakhouse in Sonora on the way up) and get to know my family for a couple of days while I slowly came out to my family. A few of my friends knew already because I'd come out to them while I was wrestling with everything. 

The positives: My family, for the most part, took it well, although I'm sure they will tell you it was a bit of a shock to get "hey, I'm bi, and also this is my girlfriend not just my good friend," all at once from their 29-year-old daughter/sister. My friends also welcomed her with open arms.

The negatives: I knew better than to come out to the camp as a whole. I knew full well that a good number of the leadership had voted multiple times against my right to exist and get married as a queer person, and if the years after 2016 taught me anything it was that even people who preach unconditional love can be really supremely unloving when it comes to certain issues. 

I did come out to the managers because I wanted to make my case for still being allowed to serve as a counselor and maintain the leadership roles I'd grown into over the years of working at the camp both as paid staff and as a volunteer. This is where it gets rough because I love the camp and had spent hours pouring my heart and soul into it especially with this particular couple because we meshed well spiritually and theologically. I considered them spiritual parents. And the one question I remember them asking me from that meeting is, "how do you know you're actually attracted to her, and it's not just like, another deep friendship." To which I replied, "because I've never really felt any particular desire to kiss any of my close female friends?" [Please, join me in imagining if we asked every straight couple "how do you know you're not just good friends?" and think about how well most people would take that.] In the end, the decision was that I could not continue in leadership or as a counselor because "they wouldn't know how to tell the parents."

[rant] Tell the parents what? That a daughter of the camp who had been going there every summer for 22+ years, who had been a counselor for multiple camps for almost 10 years - including just a couple of months earlier - was still going to be a counselor? That nothing fundamentally had changed about my abilities or my desire to mentor kids? Oh, just that I was suddenly publically out and (at that point) married to someone who was not a man. And this was somehow the most loving decision and not the one that would just help them cover their asses. [/rant]

It didn't stop there. The next step was coming out to people at my church, where I had - again - poured out my heart and soul in volunteer positions over the years though I pulled back significantly when I went back to school, and even more when the 2016 election happened and I didn't have a hard time guessing who had voted for a man who actively encourages homophobia. The only reason I'd stayed was that I found a group of younger people who were enough of a community to keep me coming back, some of whom were even queer and had come after the church started preaching an "Everyone Everywhere" motto.

The pastor who had initially told me it was possible for me to be queer and a Christian still and her husband were great, very welcoming. Some of my good friends from the school of leadership were also awesome and thrilled.

But there were those few people whose faces stilled when I introduced Marie as my girlfriend, as they tried to figure out how to respond without actively showing disappointment. Again, people I'd confided in, trusted, and taken advice from for years. It was enough to make me uncomfortable about bringing her again. 

Then we went to her church, a reconciling Methodist church and the first question the pastor asked us when Marie introduced me was, "oh, are you guys living together yet?" Which honestly, sold me on the church and community immediately. They had a great choir, and Marie had already been adopted as an honorary grandchild of a lot of them, so I gained that too. 

I cannot even begin to express how different it was to walk into a church and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that no one would challenge my faith just because I was queer. After years of freaking out about whether or not I could be faithfully LGBT, I had a community where the answer was a resounding "yes!"

In the end, I'm thankful for a lot of things on this journey. There were always individual people who were Christians and still accepted me unconditionally, even when I was unsure that it was a possibility. Chris is amazing and has been one of the only reasons I've survived this hellscape of a year. I feel way better about my life prospects with them in it.

The pain I felt was largely contained to losing my church home of 10 years and losing my camp. I went up to camp one more time the next summer to say goodbye to the managers who were leaving to take another job, just for a half-day, and that may very well be the last time I'll ever go up there. I do not feel welcome after everything that's happened with the Evangelical church in the last couple of years. Going to Methodist churches the last couple of years and seeing them actually living out Biblical charity and love instead of preaching about revolutionary love and turning on people when they step out of line has been an eye-opener for me. 

I don't really know how to end this other than to say that I do still consider myself a Christian, enough that I am incredibly grieved over the way some of my communities have gone the last few years. It's been a rough couple of years as places that were instrumental in my personal journey to acceptance of my queerness have revealed themselves to be actively homophobic and more than a little bit infested with white supremacy to boot. 

It's hard to claim that Bethel songs (including a Sean Feu*ht album) were the things that nourished my soul while I was searching when good ol' Sean-y boy goes around holding public temper tantrums about being made to care for other people in the form of "freedom of worship rallies" because it's so disgustingly selfish but I also fully understand how that theology can be twisted to behave that way. Meanwhile, Bethel starts a "Once Gay" ministry on the DL to try and pray the gay away which is just poorly veiled abusive conversion therapy. I can't in good conscience continue to worship using their songs because I had most of them on Spotify and I don't want to continue to pay them even pennies because their actions are a direct attack on my personhood. 

It's hard to give props to my old church for being mostly un-sucky about queer people (to some degree at least) when the pastor just got kicked off Facebook for spreading blatant misinformation about the pandemic in the name of "freedom of religion" and a bunch of people are crying persecution and censorship. It's hard to look at the people who taught you some of your most treasured lessons about being loving and unselfish and not reactive because you know who has your back, and wonder how they're the same people. 

Part of me wants to hold out hope that something will happen that will pull the scales off their eyes, but another part of me knows that trying to keep one foot in that world just means I get stepped on a lot and I can only take so much before I'm permanently injured. 

I am trying to find a version of Christianity that lets me be myself, the part of me that's queer, and the part of me that loves working at camps and in Sunday School, and the part of me that still wants to go to seminary someday because I genuinely love studying the Bible. At the very least, I still know one thing: God will continue to love me, no matter what, and when all else fails, that will continue to be what I stand on.

Until tomorrow,

Hobbit

*Marie goes by Chris now and uses they/them pronouns. They have given me permission to refer to them by the name and pronouns they had when I met them :)

Image is mostly just for when I share this, lol

Holidailies Day 5: The Other Shoe Drops (Part 2)

A continuation of the story I posted on Day 3, picking up around 2013 when my life got turned upside down by a couple of different things and I started doing some hard-core soul searching.

To understand this period of my life, it helps to understand that I went full-in on charismatic Christianity, which at the time seemed wildly different from the church I'd grown up in. There was preaching of radical love and grace, engaging worship, and the opportunity to explore the areas of spirituality that had been downplayed in my life beforehand. I found in that space a deeper connection with God and became comfortable with distinguishing when the voice inside me was me, and when it was something deeper. 

The thing that kept me coming back to those places, again and again, was love. I was, and am, obsessed with the love of Christ. I drank up the songs about revolutionary, reckless love, and ultimate acceptance no matter what. 

As I kept pulling at the threads of purity culture in those years, that's the message I heard the most. No matter what. No matter where you land on the lesser theological minutiae. No matter how you got here, you're here, you're safe, you're loved. And since I was digging through my identity and reshaping huge swathes of what I believed about myself and my relationship to the world around me, it was very important for me to feel like I would have a soft place to land if I fell apart entirely in the process. 

Which led me to the moment in 2015, after a series of long twists and turns, and experiences with friends who "suddenly" came out as LGBTQ+, and a lot of reading of more of the progressive women in the Evangelical sphere who then were more or less excommunicated from some circles when they announced they were affirming (Rachel Held Evans was huge in this process, as were Jenn Hatmaker, and Sarah Bessey, and later Glennon Doyle). Slowly but surely I went from "God loves everyone, so I guess that means gay people too?" to "God definitely loves everyone, but He may think that gay people need to repent" to "God definitely loves everyone, regardless." 

And then finally into the moment of, "shit. I'm not straight. Can I still be a Christian?" 

That moment came when I was 26 and I finally consciously realized that I was bisexual. It was only then that I got the one clarifying moment that crystallized so much of what had confused me about my personal history. I was watching a documentary called "Give Me Sex Jesus", that more or less looks into the whole mess of Purity Culture from all angles. It has people who are still 100% on board with those teachings. It has the son of a guy prominent in Campus Crusades for Christ that came out as gay. It has a couple that is still very glad they stuck to their purity pledges.

For me, the most important set of interviews was with a F/F couple who had met as young adults and fell in love without really knowing what was happening because they had both been raised in this culture that told them it was evil. From what I remember (I still haven't watched it again, though I should) they met at a church event even. Maybe not. Whatever it was, it was the thing that hit me the hardest. Women in their mid-20s realizing something about their sexuality that had been hiding from them for years.

As I said, I wholeheartedly believe that God speaks to us, if not audibly, in an inner voice that is entirely distinct in tone from my normal thought processes. I had, at that point in my life, spent a good part of the three years prior to this moment practicing hearing God's voice and distinguishing it from other things in my life. That voice - the one I'd been learning to hear - that was the voice that spoke to me at that moment and said, "this is you."

And then my mental world erupted in a flood of existential angst.

At this point in my life, I was just finally getting on my feet as an adult, with a steady part-time job, thinking about going to grad school. I had spent the majority of the first half of the decade learning about myself and how I functioned so I could try to move forward on steadier footing. And then this.

I prayed a lot. I studied. I came out to a couple of close friends right away and agonized over it a lot. After all, up to that point my general ethic had been, "God loves gay people, but..." Enter all the excuses. Particularly the ideas that I'd been presented in college, the idea that you could pray the gay away. And then I reasoned that it should be easy for me to just... fall in love with a guy, right? I was attracted to them. I was a hot mess socially with guys. I've still never successfully flirted with one and moved that into a romantic relationship, despite keeping my eye out and continuing in the super fun dating site cycle of looking through a bunch of profiles, realizing they all sounded boring, and moving on.

I knew that I wanted a relationship. I knew that I was very, very curious about any sort of sexual relationship, and I knew that the easiest path would be to force a relationship with a guy to be my only option. Except, I was still super drawn to the idea of a relationship with a femme person. I could run from it all I wanted, and certainly tried, but in my "weak moments" I gave in to exploring how I would even start a relationship like that. I had no idea. I was a Christian homeschooler at the core, and my changing mindset could not cover the fact that I had great social skills until I was in any encounter that could potentially lead to a date, at which point, I ceased to function.

The frustration with this vicious cycle built up more and more until I wanted to scream. In the meantime, I was very effectively distracting myself by getting my credential, surviving 2016 (how my political views changed after I realized I was queer is a whole thing), and slowly working my way through editing this novel I'd started in 2013 that had originally put me on the path to examining the whole purity culture mess. The problem was, between November 2013 when I started writing it and November 2016 when I started the full-rewrite after a few years of futile attempts to edit, so much had changed that I didn't get very far, so it got dropped again as I moved forward towards my first full-time teaching job.

[Side note, November 2016 is incidentally when I first met this interesting girl named Marie*, initially just through the SacNaNo regions IRC channel...]

In summer of 2017, I finally got to the point where I needed someone to weigh in on the arguments in my head because I could not find a way through the weeds. I went, with a great degree of nervousness, to the counseling pastor at my church, who ran the Nikao School I'd been a part of with her husband.

She did two super important things in that conversation: First, she helped me shred my "True Love Waits" pledge card and released me from a promise I made when I was 12 and had NO IDEA what I was agreeing to, and told me I was free to make that decision based on who I was as a 28-year-old adult woman. 

Second, she told me that she could definitely see why, with my history and some of my traumas, I would gravitate towards women. And she essentially gave me permission to explore it in-depth as an option, as opposed to the cautious poking at it with a stick to see how it reacted I'd been trying to live with. 

I was so relieved. One of my biggest worries at the time was, "if I come out, will I be accepted by people in the church?" And to know that there was just one person who I loved and trusted who would do it was powerful. It was no longer, "well there are affirming Christians, but I don't actually know any of them."

Except then I went and took a job at a private Christian school, which made sense for me in a lot of ways. Small community, small class load, lots of opportunities to spend time with kids outside of the classroom where I could actually get to know them. Small staff so my introverted self would hopefully be a little bit less overwhelmed. Where it didn't make sense was in the contract they made me sign that specifically prohibited all forms of sexual immorality while under contract, including extramarital sex and homosexual sex. At the time, I figured, "eh, I'm not doing it right now anyway and I'm still not sure where I'm really going to do with that, so I can handle that."

Have you ever noticed that if you've given yourself permission to consider trying something new, and then you suddenly have a wall between you and that new thing, it gets 5x harder to resist that new thing? 

[Side note #2, that November during NaNo 2017, I actually met this girl, Marie, that I'd chatted with before, in person, and we bonded over - what else - old Sunday School and camp songs, and in the course of our blooming friendship discovered that we were both bisexual. However, I was not even considering it because I was not allowed to at that point.]

The problem with the job, besides my personal frustrations with being forced back into the land of purity culture, was that I had changed so drastically from who I was just a few years before that I didn't actually fit as well as I thought I would. I loved the kids, even the ones who made my life especially difficult. But I definitely got on some shit lists by not pretending to be a conservative anymore. I was solidly centrist at that point, moving left with every day of living under our 45th President, and because they had asked me to teach a Bible class. My theology was extreme both by being very charismatic and by being a strong feminist who believed that women could preach. I am also simultaneously shy and fully willing to give my entire opinion if pressed, which has always gotten me into hot water - but especially when I was honest about how I was "one of those crazy libs," which is to say, someone who disagreed with them politically. 

In March of 2018, the hammer dropped, and I was unceremoniously "asked to resign" and handed my final check on the last day of school before Spring Break. It was simultaneously super devastating and kinda freeing, but it took me a few months to get through the devastating part before I could try to deal with any of the freedom that came from being released from that morality clause.

During that period of time, I started hanging out more and more with Marie. We had stayed in touch after November this time, and I knew she didn't have a lot of friends in the area, so I made it a point to invite her to events with my church's 20s and 30s group and to outings with mutual friends. Also, she didn't drive, so I offered rides to our year-round write-ins, all nice and friendly-like. Honestly, it wasn't anything distinct from what I'd done for other friends or even just for acquaintances, so I didn't think anything of it.

As I went into another round of soul-searching in the spring and summer of 2018, as a result of getting dropped from a job where I had thought that I was doing okay. Not great, by any means, but not like, horrific. I was dealing (or so I thought). I was up at my camp a ton, basically whenever I could be since I had not found a new job. It was at camp that I finally decided I was going to figure out this whole bisexual thing once and for all. Could I accept and love myself and be sure of God's love and acceptance no matter which way I chose to go?

At Bethel (of all places), I finally got my answer. I remember cause I wasn't even supposed to be at the evening service. I'd gone up with the staff in my own car, and was planning on going home that afternoon, but it was July in the Central Valley and my old car does this fun thing where it freaks out and overheats when the temperature hits triple digets. So after being rescued from the gas station where I'd been marooned, I went back to Redding to hang out with the staff members who were still up there and went to the evening service since I'd gotten the advice to just try to drive back after the temperature dropped.

I was there, deep in worship up at the front, looking around the room and realizing that if I got up to testify that I was bisexual and okay with it, most of the people there probably would not accept me, despite their worship team pumping out all these songs about unconditional love. As I was thinking it, I once again heard God clearly when he said, "they don't matter. I love you no matter what, no matter where you go."

And so I went home after that service, thinking, huh, maybe this is a thing I can start to consider.

The story of the rest of the summer will have to be a different post because I do need to get back to sorting through All The Books eventually. 

Until tomorrow,

Hobbit

*Marie, who I am now married to, goes by Chris now and uses they/them pronouns. They have given me permission to refer to them by the name and pronouns they had when I met them :)

Holidailies Day 3: The Good Old Days?

 I started on a post over a year ago, in response to a question a friend asked me: How did you go from a conservative Evangelical to a progressive bisexual woman married to a non-binary person. How did I decide to come out at 29, and marry my then-girlfriend less than 6 months later?

The short answer is: Very painfully. 

The long answer is really long and will probably take more than one post because there are so many different pieces that all covered into one moment when I was 26 that totally threw me for a loop and set me on three years of soul-searching and study.

I'm going to start with my childhood and adolescence, mostly because we're packing up our office today and I just had to go through a bunch of old notebooks, so I'm reminded of some key points.

First of all, I was always a really spectacularly terrible girl, at least the type of girl that's valued in conservative Christian circles. I was the quintessential tomboy of the 90s, baseball caps, t-shirts and jeans 100% of the time if I could help it, and deeply offended by any instance where I had to wear a fancy dress. I would just be uncomfortable and get it dirty.

This was the mid-90s, early 2000s, the era of "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" in its heydey, "True Love Waits" conferences and purity balls, Rebecca St. James singing "Wait For Me", and the beautifully terrible lyrics of "all the boys in the band want a valentine from a Barlow Girl. Boys think they're the bomb, cause they remind them of their moms." [Seriously, all love to Superchick because a lot of their other music was hugely pivotal in my life, but that one didn't age so well]

But I mean, I grew up in the Bay Area, and I had basically unfettered access to the local library, where I read widely about people who were different than me. The most I ever thought about it was when I had a massive crush on one of my guy friends, and wondered if we ever were together in public, whether people would think we were a gay couple because I was consistently mistaken for a boy with my baggy t-shirts, cargo shorts, and backwards baseball cap (God Bless the early 2000s). So I knew that gay people existed. I even knew, in whispers, that a few of my mom's relatives were gay. I just didn't think it was an option for myself. 

Today, I would call this being somewhere in the middle of the gender spectrum and still call myself a woman, but with like, an asterisk for now. Back then, I just called myself weird and moved on with my life. Like many other queer people, as a teenager, I would develop very intense friendships that would eventually fizz as one or the other of us moved on. When it happened with boys, I recognized it as a crush. When it happened with girls at the same level, I repressed the hell out of it.

I am not one of those people that takes my beliefs halfway. So once I got the first "make a list of the qualities you want your future husband to have and don't even consider a guy until you're an adult and he matches ALL the items on that list!" talk and went to my first "True Love Waits" rally and signed the little pink pledge card they gave girls (boys got a different one that was not as flowery), I was fully dedicated to this lifestyle. Still insatiably curious about sex, but it was approved curiosity somehow if I was just "researching" to make sure that I could head any and all such inclinations off at the pass if they were to dare come into my life. I even dated Jesus for most of my high school years, and then proudly declared that I was not going to a Christian university to get my MRS, I was going to learn about GOD.

Cue the journal entry I just found from a poor "freshman in college" version of myself, who was feeling some sort of way about one of the girls in my wing that I wasn't even that good of friends with. I was freaked out to no end, and I think I even wrote about it in one of my papers about dreams because it popped up there. My prof at that time assured me that it was just some issues with my upbringing (cringe) popping up in weird ways. 

On top of all this, despite being undeniably butch for most of my life and mostly hating the fact that I'd been born female, I was absolutely and totally against any sort of rights for LGBTQ+ people because I thought that was what good Christians did. I voted against Prop 8 in California when I was in college. Every time I had an inkling of deeper feelings for a girl, I went to great pains to be Very Into Guys so I might one day fulfill God's plan for my life. This never happened because I was also really spectacularly good at pushing away any sort of relationship like that with guys, but there were a couple that I secretly longed to break up with Jesus for.

You know. As any good Christian girl does at that age. Hang on to Jesus until a guy comes along to dedicate your time to. Totally solid plan for life-long faith.

But I digress. I never did date any guys. At first, I reasoned that it was because I wasn't even looking. Then I was actively looking (on and off dating sites for years) and I reasoned that it was because I wasn't "traditionally" feminine, that it would take a really understanding guy who wasn't super attached to gender roles to work with me. Then I just worried it was because I gained weight right as I hit puberty and just shot all my chances at finding love out the airlock with my trauma and mental health fueled eating habits (gotta love patriarchal fatphobia bullshit).

I was confused, I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with many other core tenants of the system I'd been raised in, and I was frustrated that no direction I turned seemed to have an open path. There was no way to be sexual and still be a Christian in my mind and I couldn't fathom how others could reconcile the two, so I just went on "exploring" in the shadows, and in shame-filled romance novel binging until I "got convicted" and tried to stop. And round and round the vicious circle went until something else drastic happened.

In 2013 my sister and her two boys died in a car crash. I've written about this in detail in other places, so I'll just stick to how it relates to this story. In my desire to find something, anything, concrete to hold onto while I was spinning out I threw myself into the life and teachings preached at my home church at the time. Suddenly I was there for every women's Bible study, actually dragging myself on their retreats despite being allergic to cutesy crafts, and signing up for the Nikao School of Leadership which was more or less the church's take on a ministry school at the time (ala Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry) but with more of a focus on skills that were transferrable between the sacred and the secular realms. The thing that drew me to it was the desperate need for a community that could help me hold my head above water and the focus of the first year on the idea of finding your true identity in Christ.

How did this tie into my sexuality? (Besides the idea of identity, in all of its facets.) Sometime before this happened, I'd already begun to doubt that the ideas of the Purity Movement were all that. This was largely due to the general lack of boyfriends that God was miraculously providing, as I had been told that He would if I kept myself totally pure and unsullied by another man's touch.

So in 2013, in the midst of all this other emotional upheaval, I distracted myself by obsessively researching all the little facets of purity culture and the harm it could do and how it messed with people who had been raised in it and gotten to adulthood only to find that reality didn't really actually work that way for a whole variety of reasons.

The journey of that period of my life will have to be for the next post because I have to get back to my extensive chores list. 

Until tomorrow,

Hobbit