2026-08-08 21:00:00
A few days ago I took the kids to Canobie Lake amusement park. It's the closest one to Boston, and while it's not a serious roller coaster park I don't actually like roller coasters (and the kids aren't pushing for them yet). We went on a Wednesday, and going midweek was a good use of a vacation day: the lines are so much shorter.
I've done this a few times before, but this was my first time taking Nora (5y). Last year she was still highly dependent on naps, so we would have had a very short day. I did set expectations with the older two that bringing Nora might mean leaving early, but her stamina was impressive: we were there open (10:30am, though we got there ~10min earlier) to close (7pm). Very glad we brought her: she had so much fun, and her joy was infectious.
I had all three in bright colored broad brimmed hats with a strap under the chin. Normally when going out in the summer they can choose between hats or sunscreen, but for this trip I required the hats specifically because they are so much easier to pick out in a crowd.
Lily (12y) and Anna (10y) had their comm watches (which Verizon did not end up breaking after all), while Nora stayed with one of us (usually me, a few times Lily) the whole time. This sort of day, where you're repeatedly separating ("that ride is boring" / "that line is too long" / "that ride is too scary") and meeting up ("let's do the teacups together!") is a fantastic use case for the watches. Parks renting watches would make a lot of sense, but probably doesn't work because then they'd be encouraging splitting up instead of condoning it (liability issues).
We left the park to get pizza at Romanos for lunch, as in past years. The kids are much more likely to eat this than park food and it's also much cheaper ($20 with tip for the four of us). It takes a bit more time out of the day, but when you order ahead it's actually pretty close vs waiting at the park (line + prep). And a mid-day break to do something non-stimulating in an air conditioned room was great!
Nora was very thrill-seeking, similar to Lily at the same age. There was only one ride Lily wanted to go on that Nora declined. Several intense rides that Nora really wanted to go on were 48"+ and she's still 44", but she was very excited to be able to go on some 42"+ rides solo. One she did fully by herself, including the waiting in line, which she was very proud of.
Normally Lily wants to be the caretaker big sister for Nora, pushing me for more responsibility and being excited to show Nora everything. At the park, however, Lily wanted to do more things by herself, especially when we first got there, and wasn't allowed on the 48" max little kids rides (they post 48" to keep off the big kids, but all or almost all have a 6" grace window, which Anna just squeaks under). This freed up Nora for Anna, who really enjoyed getting to show Nora all her favorite rides.
Overall, it was a busy day. Here's Nora's list:
Carousel
Teacups
Wave blaster
Flower power
Over the rainbow
Skater
Mini bumper cars
Caterpillar
Mini bumper cars
Jungle bounce
Lunch at Romanos
Castaway Island water park: lazy river, messed around a bit
Kiddie canoes
Rowdy roosters
Wipeout
Haunted mine
Carousel
Carousel
Mini cars
Teacups
Obnoxious tiny boats
Mini jeeps
Mini tanks
Boston harbor patrol
Boston harbor patrol
Train
Boston harbor patrol
Watched Lily on the Boston tea party
Canobie 500
Rowdy roosters
Mini bumper cars
The way the water park fits into the rest of Canobie Lake is pretty awkward. It's mostly a dry park, with a good day's worth of options especially for younger kids. The wet portion is a set of waterslides, a lazy river, a toddler pool, and a huge play structure that sprays water everywhere. The kids like the lazy river, would love the water slide if it didn't have such a huge line (we went on a very hot day), have all outgrown the toddler pool, and mostly find the play structure overstimulating and unpleasant (as do I). We took some time at the water section after lunch; I'm not convinced it was worth the hassle of changing clothes, but Anna disagrees.
The haunted mine ride worked out strangely. I thought it might be too intense for Nora, but she assured us she was ready. Lily told her it was fine to hold hands if she needed support. Over the course of the ride, Lily got more and more freaked out while Nora remained happy and interested. By the end, Lily was shrieking and asking Nora for hugs to feel better. I think it's possible it was not a good fit for Lily, but she might have just enjoyed being scared? I don't plan to bring it up until it's next decision-relevant, in case it prompts bad dreams.
Of the 20 distinct rides, 13 were circular (most motion in a small space), 6 were some other kind of tracked movement (motion in a slightly larger space), and 1 (bumper cars) was free movement. Though this isn't a perfect breakdown, since Rowdy Roosters (circular) and the Canobie 500 (other track) did allow a little free movement perpendicular to the direction of travel.
I asked the kids if they had any thoughts to add:
Nora said to ride the Kiddie Canoes. I asked if this was her favorite, and she said no, just one she happened to think of.
Anna said she was glad she went on Wipeout, but even though Nora loved it she wouldn't generally recommend it for little kids. She told me that when she was six she went on it once and didn't want to go on it again for years. For younger kids she recommends the rides where you "sit on little things and they go around in a slow circle and a lot of the times you can ring bells or do other things while you're on the ride". She was glad we brought water bottles. She was also glad we brought swim suits, and enjoyed the water stuff. She warned that the rain fortress was a little intense: "water coming from literally everywhere; wear goggles!" She really liked the reentry hand stamps, and the fried dough ("a little bit expensive, but very powdered sugary").
Lily: "Save rides with the longest lines for the end of the day, or when lots of people are at the water park. Ride Ice Jet, Zero Gravity, Turkish Twist, Psychodrome. Bring water bottles. A hat with a strap was very helpful for identification: I could easily spot Anna and Nora from a distance because no one else had hats like that."
Admission was $184.38 with fees, because I bought three $45 "Good Any Day" tickets in the December sale (saving $10/ticket) and then bought Nora's $43 day-specific "Under 48in" day-of. Driving from Somerville was ~$20 in gas and depreciation for 63mi. Overall monetary costs of $56/person counting lunch. The largest cost isn't monetary, however, but the opportunity cost of taking a day off work (now that I'm working on something I think is important). Since my deal with myself is that I take the same amount of time off I did when I was earning to give, though, it's more about the marginal day off, and I'm not sure what that would have been. Overall, very glad we went, and likely to go again next year!
2026-08-05 21:00:00
When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site:
Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly
put tabs on the side in a vertical stack. I was a heavy user of these
in Firefox, and when I switched to Chrome I used their experimental
--enable-vertical-tabs flag. When they removed it I
wrote a post about how I
love side tabs and switched back to Firefox:
I did end up switching back to Chrome as my primary browser (no post, sorry!), valuing speed and stability (relative to the Firefox of the time) more than side tabs.
When I started at Google in 2012 I asked the Chrome team if they could restore support for it, or at least make it be the kind of thing extensions could do. They told me that while they got this request a lot from Googlers, real users generally find it too confusing. And they were trying to build a "great defaults, no options" culture, to keep Chrome simple.
They've finally come around, however, and have added a "Show Tabs Vertically" option:
It does exactly what I want:
I suspect they came around on adding it because competing browsers supported it natively, and they were worried about losing users. I considered switching over this but it wasn't enough to get me to move: I trust Google's security team the most of these, and browser security is critical. Still, I'm glad others did, and now I have my favorite UI back after fifteen years!
2026-07-29 21:00:00
White noise machines are widely used for sound masking, increasing privacy in offices and helping people sleep. The classic approach is a fan in a box, though in the past ten years people have mostly switched over to electronic ones. But a fan is really a great approach; you just need to put it to better use: have the fan clean the air.
Instead of spinning a fan in free air to make noise, you can have it pull air through a filter. A small purifier sounds a lot like a classic noise machine, is only a bit larger and more expensive, and removes smoke and infectious particles from the air. For example, here's a $47 purifier with a 6.5" diameter, cleaning 34 cubic feet of air per minute ("CADR") at 45dB. For most circumstances where someone would use a white noise machine, this kind of small purifier is all-around better.
Now, 34 CFM is not very much air cleaning. I usually run an AirFanta 3Pro and it cleans ~6x more air for the same amount of noise, or ~12x more air with much more noise (~56dB). On the other hand it's more expensive ($165) and bulkier (12.6" square), and arguably uglier.
Still, even a 34 CFM purifier helps a lot with smoke. If you have a 10ft square room with an 8ft ceiling and a reasonably typical 0.5 air changes per hour through leakage from outdoors, this small purifier will cut particulate levels to 16% of the outdoor level. In AQI terms (not linear) this is like going from AQI 200 to 72 or AQI 100 to 31.
2026-07-26 21:00:00
Leading up to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival the organizers asked Dudley Laufman to put together a band. He got together some folks he'd been playing for, and this was the start of the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra. They quickly became one of the leading bands of the contra dance revival, and in 1972 released a self-titled album (F-72-FW-3). I found a picture of the liner notes:
I couldn't find the text of these anywhere, so I had an LLM convert them to text and manually cleaned up the output:
"For lack of a better name, let's call ourselves The Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra. Dudley is the only one from Canterbury, but how many of the Budapest String Quartet are from Budapest?" said Newt Tolman when we were looking for a title prior to a Club 47 appearance. Of the thirty or so Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra musicians who play for dances or concerts at one time or another, we arranged for ten to make this record.Jack Sloanaker, bass (also plays fiddle, banjo, guitar, and piano), published the Square Dance Chord book, has trained several topnotch square dance pianists, produced the F&W String Band records, played with us at the Newport Folk Festival ('65) and at all our Club 47 shows. He lives in Cambridge, is a psychologist, and a director of the Farm and Wilderness Camps in Plymouth, Vermont.
Pete Colby, banjo and autoharp, lives in Brookline, Mass. He is a draftsman and licensed gunsmith, having built a replica of a Kentucky rifle with which he won the Colorado Open. He makes fine musical instruments, including the two he plays on this record, the autoharp being the only gasoline operated rig of its kind.
Ted Levin (alias Ichabod Crane), fiddle, piano, bass, penny whistle. A student at Amherst College, he is one of those musical geniuses who can play anything he picks up. He has had a ragtime band at Amherst, recorded with them and with a rock band also. Owns land in Windsor, N. H. and plans to build there soon.,
Nicholas S. Howe, fiddle, locked himself in his office at Franconia College in the White Mountains, where he is a professor, and for two weeks worked on these tunes until he had them down right. He rides down to the dances on the back of his Newfoundland dog.
Allan Block, fiddle, lives on a farm in Francestown, N. H. He is a leather craftsman (Allan Block Sandals) and poet, and has been with us for three years. Recently made a record with Ralph Lee Smith on the Meadowland label.
Bob McQuillen, piano and accordion, is from Dublin, N. H., where he lives in the blue house at Bonds Corner with his wife Prissy Jean, and their family. He teaches shop at Peterboro High School, and has been playing for Ralph Page, Duke Miller, and me for almost thirty years. In fact it was he who inspired me to learn the accordion. Jerry Werhner, fiddle, mandolin (piano, guitar, viola, cello ...) runs a stringed instrument repair shop in Amherst, Mass., The Ballade, ... gets things together when we have dances in the Pioneer Valley.
Dave Fuller, accordion, lives with his family in Harvard, Mass., where he is a carpenter. He played with us at Newport, at the Fox Hollow Festivals, at the Club 47, and for many of the dances in Nelson and elsewhere. He is also a caller and is on the F&W String Band records. Larry Delorier, flute, piccolo, and penny whistle, appeared at a party one night in 1968, played three tunes, and disappeared for a year. Showed up again at a dance and has been with us since. He recently graduated from New England College in Henniker, N. H. ... carries his flute in an old tomato basket.
I live in Canterbury, N. H., with Patty, five children, and two horses. I called my first dance in Walpole, Mass. in 1948, and was into the accordion and harmonica a year or so later. Since have fooled with the fiddle and piano, and have recently been trying a cornet. Took some musicians and dancers to Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and thence to Fox Hollow and the Club 47. Patty and I went to Ireland recently and we are publishing a collection of photos and prose poems hanging on that trip.
Other musicians who sometimes play with us are Newt Tolman, flute, from Nelson, N. H. Newt is a writer, dog trainer, guide, and inspiration for us all. He and Kay Gilbert (piano and flute) have collaborated on the Nelson Music Collection, a great book of jigs, reels and hornpipes.
Jack O'Connor, fiddle, bass, accordion, whistle, banjo, from Carlisle, Mass. Jack is a technical writer, and leader of the Cambridge Folk Dance Orchestra. Other members of that group who sometimes play for us are Allan Chertok, Calvin Howard, Dave Freeman, and Risa Goldberg. They are really into Balkan music. We do an excerpt from a Balkan kolo on this record, with Ted Levin at piano, Larry on flute, Allan, fiddle, Jerry, mandolin, and myself accordion. We just fool around. Jack's group does the real thing.
Joe Ryan, fiddle, clarinet, banjo, mandolin, bass, guitar, and musical saw, lives in Northfield, N. H. where he is a wood and leather craftsman, bone handle knife maker, and bee keeper.
Walter Lob, fiddler from Newton, Mass., is a physics professor at Northeastern. He has recorded with Ralph Page's Boston Orchestra, and is one of the original Old Joe Clarkers.
Gene Murrow, oboe, accordion, concertina, pipe and tabor, from California at present, has recorded with Judy Collins, and Peter, Paul and Mary. (Newt says of him, "I can play the Stars & Stripes Forever on a limp dandelion stem, but I'll be damned if I can play the oboe.")
Sylvia Sawyer Miskoe, accordion and piano, has played for me since 1956. She is from Concord, N. H.; her husband Bill is our stage manager.
Don Braley and Omer Marcoux, fiddles, from Concord, N. H. Mark Hanson and David Raitt, guitar and bass, from Northfield, N. H. where they build yurts.
Doug Cox, fiddle, flute, mandolin, from Plaistow, N. H. One of the original yurt builders ... spent a year in Germany learning to make violins ... presently studying in Wisconsin.
And many musicians who sometimes "sit in" with us wherever we play ... Ann Gary, Sarah Gregory, Stu Coffin, Betsy Northrup, Allan McIntyre, Ray McIntyre, Jack Perron, Roddy Miller, Randy Miller, Judy Hough, Dick Gross, Jenny Robinson, Harvey Tolman, Paul Spaulding, to name a few ...
Many of us have played together at the New England Folk Festivals for years before the Club 47 debut, and all of us play in various combinations for dances around and beyond New England, including dances for other callers besides me . . . Ted Sannella, Ralph Page, Duke Miller, Charlie Webster, Dave Fuller, Johnny Trafton, Jim Morrison, Bronson Schonk. Mostly we work in small units of three or four, using musicians who live closest to the job. Others join us on a volunteer basis, so that even the smallest dances sometimes find us with a core of two hired and eight guest musicians.
With the exception of Newt Tolman, none of us have had the advantage of a musical tradition passed on to us through our families and communities. Being urban oriented, we just sort of happened onto it. The first time I really heard this kind of music was at the 1948 New England Folk Festival on the fifth floor of the Boston YWCA.
6/Eight
Yes, it was a mixture
of pine trees & hayfields
honey & woodsmoke,
a strange combination for a jig,
but dammit, if a girl
hangs her sweater in the woodshed
& her father is a farmer,
you have the makings for
a country dance,
& that describes it.
We have our favorite tunes. Like Yarmouth Reel for instance. Larry and I discovered it in the Fiddler's Tune Book while we were playing for a wedding and waiting for the bride to cut the cake. It became the top tune on our list for a while. I use it mostly for the contra dance French Four ... it fits nicely and I can sort of sing right along with it. Nick says, "A great many of the melodies that we use can be found intact in baroque music, particularly that of Handel, who lived most of his career in England and lifted thematic material very freely from the countryside musicians that he would have heard at almost any crossroad. Even Beethoven seems to have done this on occasion; the Yarmouth Reel appears in his suite 'Twelve Contratanzes.'"
Since then, Yarmouth Reel has been supplanted by Prince William and Auretti's Dutch Skipper, two tunes I picked up recently from a book of English dances with references to Holland in them. Other tunes in their turn have been number one with us. Money Musk ... in 1949 I first heard it, in Boston ... fast and uninteresting. But when I went to a Ralph Page dance at the Bell Studio in Peterboro, N. H., and danced it there to the slow pulsating New Hampshire music, on a spring floor and with the Williams twins clogging it out with taps on their shoes, it became my national anthem for a long time. More recently Jack O'Connor and I have had fun calling it in duet and syncopation. Even more recently we have been using other tunes with it for contrast, as on this recording. Chorus Jig ... originally an Irish dance, is actually not a jig at all, but a reel in 2/4 time. Pop Upton was dancing this in Nelson one night, and on his last time as active couple, he went down the outside of the set, motioned his wife to her seat, and kept right on out the door to his car for a drink. That reminds me of the Finnish wedding I played for in Ludlow, Vermont ... an old man wandered in off the street and without even removing his hat, staring glassy eyed ahead, he got in on a grand right and left, somehow wove his way into all the sets around the hall, and right out the door again.
Petronella ... 250 pound Larry Collins was dancing this in Nelson one winter night, performing a Scottish pas de basque step all the way down the set, much to the door faced disapproval of the bench warming woodchoppers. At the bottom by the wood burning heater, Larry switched to a Boston stamp balance, whereupon he slipped on some melted snow and down he went, bringing the stovepipe and ashes on top of him, and grins to the farmers' faces.
Irish American Reel . . . first time I heard this was in 1950 at Ted Sannella's place in Revere. He had it on a Starr Label French Canadian record. It was called Reel des Moissonneurs, played by Tommy Duchesne et ses Chevaliers du Folklore. For a long time we went without using it at dances for lack of sheet music for the tune, until I found it under the title we use here in Cole's 1000 Jigs, Reels, and Hornpipes.
With the exception of the kolo, we use most of this music for the contra dance, a form found frequently in southwestern New Hampshire. The figures are derived from the original English, Irish and Scottish. Most of these tunes are also adaptable to the quadrille and progressive circle mixers, although we seldom use them that way. Today, the youth culture, the kids from the communes, are frequenting the dances (invading is a better word) by the hundreds, filling the halls to overflowing almost every Friday and Saturday night. They are innovating a dance style all their own, enlarging and enhancing on the clogging and scuffing shuffle step, dancing all the time, interspersing rock steps with traditional.
They arrive, spilling into the hall like a tipped over basket of many colored balls of heavy yarn, waving college pennants, and start to unravel, spinning around like parenthesis. Some go down the center like Slinkies - some turn like a brace & bit, others like a dime on edge.
The fiddler rubs rosin along his bow and a fine dust rises out over the hall. He breaks off small pieces, doling them out to the orchestra like ginger. The prompter drinks his down with one swill of flute water, the piano player tapes hers to the bottom of her sandal, the accordion player holds his between his teeth, the banjo player smiles like Jack Palance, and the flute players pass as they take joy in mercury. — DUDLEY LAUFMAN
Notes:
Newt Tolman (ex-husband of Beth Tolman, who wrote the 1937 Country Dance Book with Ralph Page) is the only one who grew up in the tradition. Makes sense given that this is a revival album, but it's still a more lopsided ratio than I'd have guessed.
Lots of people turning up to play for free as guests. People doing this part time because they love it.
Looking at the full-time occupations, it's all over the map. Psychologist and Summer Camp Director; draftsman and gunsmith; college student; two professors; leather craftsman and poet; shop teacher; carpenter; writer and dog trainer; technical writer; wood and leather craftsman, bone handle knife maker, and bee keeper. Dance musicians still have a wide variety of day jobs, but these days a list this long without a programmer (or where the only teachers are professors and a shop teacher) would be surprising.
Neat to see Laufman's contemporaneous description of the youth influx.
2026-07-25 21:00:00
Someone submitted my musical multitasking post to Hacker News, where Rochus Keller saw it and left some fascinating comments. He's developed a method of foot drumming, using midi organ pedals:
Here's another one:
Additional, audio-only, examples: 1, 2.
I find this fascinating. The physical feel of organ pedals is very different from the kick drum pedals I play, much more keyboard-like, which means the technique is totally different. But it clearly works well, and Keller is able to play something musical, coherent, and (despite having only two feet!) very full. When I imagine playing this interface I expect I'd miss the rebound of my pedals (which feels a lot like stamping my foot on the floor, where all of this came from), and needing to move around horizontally would take some getting used to. On the other hand, it would be amazing to have the broader palette, with 17 different (virtual) drums to choose from!
I've previously written about how musicians massively underuse their mouths, and it seems clear to me that feet are similarly undervalued. Two different videos, to give more of a taste of what's possible here, both acoustic:
youtube
(Noah VanNorstrand in Buddy System)
EDIT 2026-08-04: Rochus made a recording with a much better view of his feet, demonstrating the pedals both individually and in action:
2026-07-22 21:00:00
Dudley Laufman passed away last week at the age of 95. He's best known for his extensive contribution to the 1970s contra dance revival, and especially for fostering live music. Twenty years ago [1] I attended one of the "Wind in the Timothy" dances that he and his partner Jacqueline would host at their house in NH on fifth Saturdays, and it was clear he really enjoyed what he was doing.
As part of my project on understanding attitudes towards live music I thought I would read some of his own words. Most of his words were poems, though, and I generally prefer something more concrete and direct. He did co-write a 2009 book with Jacqueline, however, Traditional Barn Dances with Calls and Fiddling, which seemed more promising.
As with my notes on Tony Parkes' book, I'm more interested in what it tells us about its authors and its context than in its primary purpose as a dance instruction book.
The feel of the book is formal and institutional, a bit stilted, with sentences like "Be certain to ask the caller if he or she is able to...". Passive voice, very structured prose, avoiding contractions. A bit like real advice coming from a wooden puppet: "Do not worry about calling the dances on the phrase", "Request that the caller not do contra dances of the "duple proper" variety", and "Emphasize to the caller that folks are coming to a dance party for a social good time. They are not paying their way in to attend a workshop or listen to lengthy explanations and walk-throughs of complicated figures." The content is folk but the presentation is not folky. I'd speculate Dudley didn't draft (Jacqueline wrote many educational books), the publisher had a strong house style, or both.
Here's what they have to say on hiring musicians:
Live music is better than recorded music, even if it is only a harmonica. The caller you hire may prefer to select a band whose repertoire coincides with the dances and tunes he or she uses.If you expect a small dance (i.e., fewer than 40 people), it may be plenty to have just one musician (fiddler or accordionist) and a caller. This is a reasonable approach if there is not much money available to pay for more musicians.
A larger dance should have at least one fiddler and a guitar, standup bass, or piano player, as well as a small sound system. Anything over 120 attendees should have at least three musicians. Other instruments that make up traditional barn dance bands include mandolin, banjo, accordion, pennywhistle, flute, and cello. Brass instrument players must be very good in order to play in the keys that fiddlers tend to use.
A sound system for a big crowd will cost an additional amount, though it may be included in the band's fee if they bring a system. Sometimes, however, if the hall's acoustics are good, only the caller needs a microphone.
In the 1800s and 1900s, dance orchestras from New England typically included fiddles, coronet [sic], and string bass. Today, a nice full sound is provided by two fiddles, string bass, piano, and accordion.
The opening preference against recorded music is very strong, and is consistent with a vague memory I have of Dudley saying something along the lines of that he'd rather dance to an out of tune fiddle played by someone who only knew one tune than any recording. This is the kind of "live music above all else" push that Enid Cocke was reacting to.
At the same time, the context here is a book that has "With Calls & Fiddling" right in the title. It ships with "Two CDs of authentic fiddle tunes for many of the dances with the calls on one track followed by the music track without calls." So there's still some pragmatism: in practice most of the teachers this book is aimed at will be facilitating dancing to recorded music. And the authors accept this:
Eventually, the day will come when you simply pick up one of the CDs, hit "Play," and, without even opening the book, see everyone start dancing, regardless of whether it's you doing the calls, or Dudley, or no one calling—which is the way it always was, because everyone knew the dances.
I was glad to see them push, though, for getting students playing for dancing:
Older orchestra students, especially those in middle school and above, can learn to play music for a dance. In fact, string students and their teachers can meet national standards of the American String Teacher Association by playing fiddle tunes and learning the dances in a mainstream classroom setting. It is crucial to keep the music at dance tempo, as heard on the CDs that accompany this book, since a slow tempo drags the dancing down and thus tends not to work. (For this reason, younger students, who struggle to play the tunes up to tempo, may need to wait a few years before playing music for a dance.)You may find students eager to play for your dance or to hold a dance for themselves and take turns playing the music. Having older students play while younger ones dance can inspire the young ones to practice their fiddle tunes and learn to play for a dance like the big kids. Let them experience being part of living history as the fiddling tradition continues and is passed down to the next generation—themselves!
Overall this wasn't really the book for me, nor was I the intended audience. But Dudley and Jacqueline's extensive experience with barn dance crowds did come through the overly formal prose, and I do now have a citable source for something close to my memory of Dudley's very strong preference for live music.
[1] Very nearly to the day. If I were a more patient blogger I would
have waited a week to be able to make it an even twenty.