Double digits

It's turning into a tradition -- birthdays in hotels. Fiona will be the only family member to be at home for her birthday this year. Sophie had her 'hotel birthday' this past weekend in Calgary. We were able to get our two favourite Calgary violin/viola teachers to join us for a restaurant dinner, and retired to their place afterwards for cake and silliness.

We got home last evening and today Sophie set off for her day-long aikido gasshuku. Two hours of class in the morning, lunch, an outdoor activity and two more hours of aikido in the afternoon, with belt-testing and the presentation of colour belts and certificates at the end.

Sophie was thrilled to be awarded her yellow belt. She earned it by attending forty-plus classes, having a positive attitude and strong skills mastery. She's been patient, hard-working and cheerful since she began as a student last February. I think she's in it for the long haul.

Here and There Slocan

Sophie, Fiona and I have started a Daily 'City' Blog, in case any of you who follow this blog are interested in daily glimpses of our community and environment as the seasons pass. It's called Here and There Slocan. I'll add it to the sidebar too.

Enthusiasm

Fiona has enthusiasm for everything. She's not quite the youngest at aikido, though she's the smallest by a long shot. But she is just so happy to be there. She loves that the younger kids' class now overlaps with the big kids' class for half an hour or so. She gets more aikido that way, with more people and more skills and harder work. She can't wait until she is old enough to do the all-day seminars and the three-day sleep-away aikido camp.

Singing the praises of choirs

This is part of the soprano section of Corazón, the youth choir that Erin sings in. They have guys -- broken teen male voices -- a real rarity in North American choirs. Over the past three years this choir has become a powerful draw in Nelson. It has energy, and a reputation, and teens want to be part of it. Even young men. There is very little tradition of choral singing here, so a dynamic choir director starting a youth choir is pretty much starting from scratch. When Allison started Corazón about five years ago, it was just a small handful of teenaged girls who had grown a little too old for the children's choir. I heard them back then just learning to sing in parts and thought "that's nice."

I hear them now and I think "wow!" This year they are sixty strong, and building each year on the pinnacle of the year before. They are singing complex four- and five-part traditional choral and world music arrangements. Here's a rather poor-quality YouTube sampler from their concert a year ago -- and believe me, they're bigger and better and stronger now.

Erin, who had had to give up the children's choir program in Nelson after a couple of year due to scheduling issues, heard them last spring and decided on the spot that she wanted to join. I knew it was going to be a scheduling nightmare, but I realized that I have a kid who is absolutely passionate about music who has no peer-group of similarly-afflicted teens. The couple of local teens who are also violinists are nowhere near her level. The one who is within two or three years of her level lives almost an hour away. Her experience this summer, travelling and performing with musical teens, made it clear that getting her into contact with other teens who "do music," a given for most music students anywhere else, should be a priority.

We managed to work it out by doing some pretty brutal re-arranging of piano lessons, violin lessons, my teaching schedule, orchestra and group class. It was rather a domino effect in our weekly schedule and the schedules of our local music students, but sometimes there's something pretty special going on that you know is so perfect for your family that you just have to make it work. As it turns out Erin and D. and her friend S. are all doing Corazón, so all three come out of school at noon on Tuesdays and I drive them down to Nelson for the afternoon. My girls do their piano lessons while D. and S. hang out downtown and have a lovely time, and then we all meet up at the church for rehearsal and head home together, grabbing a ritual decaf or chai on the way and arriving back at 7 pm.

So far it's been amazing. There's additional strength in the bass section now and the quality of the choir's sound is maturing as these kids gain experience. They're planning a big swanky tour in March. There are concerts next month and more in the spring. Rehearsals are hard-working affairs and they're down to the nitty-gritty now. Erin has of course learned the music very easily and feels comfortable. The girls are all having fun. We're all enjoying the carpooling.

I have no choir background. Except for the summer family choir which I do for 5 days each August with my younger kids, I haven't sung in a choir since elementary school. The local community choir has always been something I dreamed of singing in one day, but its rehearsals conflict with my work, and now my kid have claimed it as theirs.

Which brings me to the local community choir. They're a bit of a diamond in the rough. I'm not sure why our town should have such a great choir, but people drive from neighbouring towns to be part of it. Erin, Noah and D. are the three under-40's now singing in that choir -- giving Erin and D. a double repertoire of music that they're madly learning. This is Erin's third year and the other kids' first. Noah got swept up in choir euphoria this summer and I made a quiet diplomatic request of our local choir director. It's an adult choir. She had made an exception for Erin the year she was 13, and had occasionally welcomed older high school kids in the past. But asking her to take in Noah, at age 11 -- well, I knew she had once tried to develop a kids' choir and had decided she never wanted to do that again. So I asked quietly and carefully, fully expecting her to say no. But he had proven himself in the summer school choir with a bunch of adults, and our local director agreed.

So he's loving it and is doing well. He comes home from Monday evening rehearsals bubbly and energized. I wondered if it was mostly that he enjoyed being there with Erin and D., if he liked the banter and humour of the rehearsals. But then a couple of weekends ago due to illness and conflicting schedules, he ended up arriving at a first-soprano sectional rehearsal where he and a 40-something woman were the only singers there. The director was there as a coach, and she is someone he knows, sort of, as a peripheral family friend and I think he likes her -- she's a fun retired lady with a sense of humour and a knack for putting people at ease and a nice manner with my kids. So I just left Noah in the little back room of her house, assuming another soprano or two would likely show up late. I worried a little about how he'd feel being there without Erin, without D., with perhaps only three or four people to sing with. But I figured worrying wouldn't do any good, so I shrugged and headed home.

When I picked him up an hour later I asked how rehearsal had gone. It turned out there were just two sopranos, him and the other lady, plus the director. "It was good," he said. "Erin wasn't there, so I felt comfortable asking a few questions I wouldn't have otherwise. We got some good work done."

Well. Who would have guessed. My shy homebody of a little guy, comfortable as anything singing away, almost solo, in a room with two women of his mother's generation and beyond, and coming home pleased with the work they'd accomplished and not giving a thought to the demographics of the social mix.

This is what I love about choirs, that they're great social bridges, that musical cohesion can be achieved despite vast mismatches in age, musical training and social roles. They're so accessible. Under the right director an incredible amount of synergy can develop in a very short period of time with no more raw material than motivated people. Choirs have a kind of grass roots energy that is alive, that springs directly from human bodies with nothing else in the way.

I never cry at string performances, but I inevitably cry at any choir performance where young people are singing.

Knitting a cushion

Sophie decided to knit and felt a cushion. It was to be a round cushion, about 15 inches across, grey background with something else producing a pattern on the grey. At our Local Yarn Shop she settled on these colours.

At home she dithered around trying to come up with a design she liked. Finally she decided she liked the fair-isle in-the-round pattern from the fall issue of Vogue Knitting magazine, intended as a dreamcatcher motif for the side of a purse. She changed the colours, adapted it to a cushion and cast on.

She's never done anything close to this complex with her knitting, but all she required was a little bit of verbal instruction for the second row, the sort of pointers I could give while I was driving and she was knitting away in the passenger seat. Now she's finished ten rows and the pattern is really starting to show. I'm at least as excited as she is to see it evolve. She does a great job with the tension of the stranding and doesn't seem to have any difficulty reading and following the complicated irregular chart.

She's waiting for her Ravelry invite to show up in her e-mail in-box and then I suspect she'll be as addicted to the site as I am.

The larch

What an amazing tree the larch is. All summer long it behaves like any ordinary coniferous tree. It is tall and pointed with branches and needles just like its evergreen neighbours in the forest. You wouldn't be faulted for mistaking it for a pine or spruce, though the odds are that you wouldn't have noticed it at all. It blends right in.

But then as the senescence of autumn takes firm hold something startling happens. It becomes apparent that the larch is not just another conifer. All along, appearances aside, it has been something quite different. Suddenly it turns brilliant yellow and prepares to discard its needles for the winter. It is obvious that it is not like all the other trees. It never was ... but you couldn't tell before.

For most of my younger years I felt like a larch in summer. Perhaps that's why "Reviving Ophelia" resonated so much for me. As I get older my yellow shows more. Do you suppose we are really all like larches?

Math passages

Sophie finally got back to work and finished the final two review exercises in Singapore Primary Math. She's been mostly-done for a while, but we agreed that it was a good idea to do all the revision to kind of wrap it all up and make sure her retention is good. It was a long slog -- I think there are 7 long revision sections in the last workbook. But she did them, and did them well.

Over the past year we've enjoyed little mathematical diversions in an attempt to broaden and enrich her primary math education without moving forward too fast. But now she's truly on the cusp of secondary math and we're investigating possibilities. Teaching Textbooks is too slow and repetitive. Singapore New Math Counts is too college-like in its presentation for a 9-year-old. Life of Fred is under the exclusive ownership of Noah for the time being. We've looking into some of the Canadian school textbooks, since they seem mathematically fairly robust and don't partake of the odd American practice of giving kids nothing but algebra for a year or two at a shot, and then nothing but geometry for a year after that. Now we're looking into some other more esoteric fare. I think we'll find something fun eventually that will challenge her keen mathematical mind but not overwhelm her with dryness and density.

While I wasn't looking, Fiona finished Singapore 2B. She started level 2A last February I think, and after a bit of an early summer hiatus moved to 2B in August. She finished the first half in mid-October, was feeling the mathematical wind in her sails and ran with it through the second half. She still has a revision exercise left to do, but the content is all mastered.

A couple of weeks ago we were at our friends' place for dinner. Fiona was sporting her analogue wristwatch. Our friend asked her what time it was. (It was 6:15.) Fiona glanced at her watch. I expected her to say "3 after 6" or "6 to 3." She said "six-thirty." Well, close.

The reason we'd gone to the trouble of rehabilitating the hand-me-down little watch she was wearing was that I knew the Singapore unit on time was coming up, and figured she had half a chance at getting it this time around. And it was the very next night that she turned the page in the 2B book and encountered time. And it clicked. Just like everything else at this level has clicked. She's very much ready for the learning she's been doing and that makes it a very successful, motivating experience for her. So we'll move ahead, I guess, though I'm also going to make an effort to do some less curricular math exploration with her. My other kids have enjoyed Penrose and others of Theoni Pappas' books for children, and I think Fiona is probably ready for some of these.

Shower steam math

If Fiona's the first one up she usually comes for a cuddle in bed with me. When I get up for a shower she usually likes to follow me and hang out in the bathroom, chatting. This morning was no exception.

When I came out of the shower, I discovered she'd drawn in the condensation on the window. Not a smiley face. Not her name. Nope, with this kid it's math she doodles, as often as not.

Lower line: -2 + 6 = 4
Middle line: -4 + 10 = 6
Upper line: 1 + 6 = 7

Nastier than usual

The bears are busily bulking up for their winter hibernation at this time of year and as the cold deepens they get more desperate. A year and a half ago I built what I hoped would be a predator-proof chicken enclosure. So far we haven't lost any chickens from it.

Chuck has since adopted this out-building as his smithy. It's a strong building built with proper frame construction on a robust concrete slab. But last night a bear seemed to form the misguided impression that the way to the chicken coop, attached to the back of the smithy, was through the front door of the smithy. This morning this was the scene...

Stack of boards knocked over. Five pieces of cedar siding torn off. Bottom corner of door scratched and gnawed. Flagstones dug up. Electrical cable wrenched through the particle-board sheathing on the exterior wall.

We are beginning to realize that we need a dog again.

Nuru School

One of our favourite local cafés is Nuru Design. It is a house-front workshop / gallery / café (and once a week or so there's also a hair salon in the very back). They make hand-painted clothing using Japanese-inspired motifs and styles, and sell their wares as well as a few other lines of nice artsy gift-type stuff. The coffee is excellent, the small selection of lunch things and snacks is divine, and the ambiance is great. There are three tiny tables inside, another three on the enclosed porch, and small bar counters in both locations.

This afternoon we girls were on the Nuru porch. Erin had been at school, but decided to meet us for "café school" for a break. She had worked on her writing course portfolio over lunch hour and then took off fourth block to join us. She had a mocha and worked on chemistry.

Fiona and Sophie worked on math. Both are closing in on the very end of their current level in workbooks and are keenly pursuing forward progress. They both opted for a English-toffee flavoured milk steamers, a combination Fiona came up with in Nelson a few weeks ago which is surprisingly tasty if the flavour syrup isn't overdone.

I had my usual vanilla latté and did some knitting. And browsed from one kid to another as they had questions or wanted me to check answers.

We were probably there for an hour. People came and went. We chatted with each other and with the proprietors and other patrons. A bit of math and science got done. A few rows of a mitten got knitted. And then we headed out to watch bald eagles and take photos, and Erin headed over to the school for a bit before going to her grandmother's to practice violin.

Opting out of Hallowe'en

About four years ago I realized we were "doing Hallowe'en" entirely out of a sense of obligation. I felt obligated to create unique costumes for the kids, they felt obligated to wear them and wander around in the typical almost-freezing drizzle of November's eve, and we all disliked our obligations. When I had one or two children and was much less busy costumes were fun to make. But since our fall now usually means being away during September and returning home in October to a full roster of activities and organizational obligations, while we try to work the kinks out of the schedule and get it all smoothly running, October 31st loomed far too big far too soon. I'd rather be making jelly and knitting mittens and transcribing Violin 3 parts for the community orchestra than trying to cobble together costumes for four. The kids ... well, being outside after dark in the freezing rain isn't something that appeals to them. They're up late all the time, and outside whenever they feel like it. And they are certainly not kids who relish dressing up in order to drive to town and spend 34 minutes walking around the streets there asserting themselves at the doors of relative strangers. They've also disliked the candy-crazed energy of other children's trick-or-treating when they're gone out with friends.

And so I offered my kids a deal. I would spend twenty bucks or so on costume-making supplies so that they could go out trick-or-treating, or else I would spend twenty bucks or so on candy and just give it to them. And they could sit on the living room floor and eat their hoard and watch a video and we could all be done with it.

They took the candy.

Right now they're scarfing Nerds and watching Princess Bride.

Our piano beginner

Fiona has now had four piano lessons. Her first two were with her 'regular teacher,' who has been Erin's piano teacher for the past 6 years, whom Fiona knows quite well. But her regular teacher travels a lot, and after two lessons she was to be overseas for 5 weeks. Fortunately (and it is unusual that it works out this way) there was a substitute teacher available, a fellow whom we all know a little bit because he teaches one of the advanced classes at the VSSM each summer. He is known for his flamboyant, scatter-brained personality and performing style and his passion for the piano. Some students find his quirkiness intimidating, but both Erin and Fiona find him funny and endearing. Erin has worked with him before at the VSSM, and for her working with him is a brilliant opportunity to work with a teacher who has taught and played a lot at and beyond her level. For Fiona the fit was less obvious. I'd only ever seen him work with advanced teens, and Fiona was so new to piano, it might have been the more logical choice to just skip her lessons for the month and get her back on track when her teacher returned. But I figured she's an easy-going kid -- and we'd give it a shot.

Well, she is thriving. Two lessons with one teacher, and two lessons with another with a rather different approach, and she is well on her way to building a strong foundation. She can easily go with the flow and fill in the gaps opened up by different teaching styles. The photo above is a random shot of her hands, in the middle of playing some little hands-together piece she taught herself yesterday. A month ago her wrists were down and all her distal finger joints were all collapsed. While she is loving rollicking through repertoire and teaching herself piece after piece ahead in her primer book (she finished her first primer in 2 weeks), she is also happy to do focused repetitive technique training. Her hand position and balance has improved so much in just a month. The photo above has nice neutral wrists and mosty curved fingers, even if they still sometimes collapse with lots of weight. She's about 90% of the way there.

The substitute teacher is wonderful in working with her strengths. When she came in and showed him how she could play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in C with an Alberti bass accompaniment, he was impressed and appreciative. But then, rather than turning back to the current unit in the primer book, he challenged her to polish it up so that she could do it without any stumbles, and when he heard she'd been transposing into other keys, he suggested a couple of new keys to challenge herself with -- and incorporated this challenge into some of her primer pieces too.

And when she came back doing that well, he showed her how to work on sustaining a legato touch in the Alberti bass while lifting the other hand for repeated notes and suggested she try to master that, and try to play some of her finger exercises hands together with one hand legato and the other staccato. Erin was a very precocious beginner on piano too, but her teachers have never strayed far from the standard pedagogical sequence, and she'd been at piano for almost a year before being challenged to do "staccato against legato." Our substitute teacher's willingness to go with the flow and notch up the challenge for Fiona is amazing. She has three more lessons with him before returning to her regular teacher.

She really is anyone's dream piano student -- cute and smiley, keen, diligent, flexible, highly focused and driven, with incredible ability to lateralize (send different signals to left and right hands) , good note reading ability and phenemonal by-ear skills. Look out, piano world!

I felt pretty good

I felted my first knitting project ever. Fiona found herself this lovely winter jacket at a thrift shop a couple of weeks ago, and I decided to knit some mittens to match. I wanted to try felting, so I knitted oversized mitts out of wool and then threw them in a hot wash. It was just magical how they came out smoothly felted and about 80% of the size they used to be.

The only thing I wish I'd known was that ribbed cuffs don't shrink. They lose their elasticity, which I'd anticipated, but I expected them to tighten up as they felted. So the mittens have pretty wide cuffs. If I get ambitious I'll pick up stitches inside the felted wristband area and knit a second, longer, wrist-hugging cuff on each one. But she likes them as-is.

I needle felted a little flower and heart to match the jacket on each mitten, and then added the stitched squares around. I'm really pleased -- can you tell?

Fall colour

My window-sill in the kitchen. Rose-hip and apple jelly, and a few maple leaves, and some sunshine.

Origami brilliance and learning styles

Sophie really enjoys origami. It's been an on-and-off interest, but when it's on she's self-taught and self-motivated. For her birthday last year we gave her some really nice origami paper and a fantastic (though very challenging!) book of instructions. She hasn't done a whole lot with it, but she's tried a few. And lately she's been experimenting.

Today she showed me the creations in this photo. "Neat!" I said. A hollow square-pyramidal base and a cap to match. Pretty nifty. I figured she'd followed instructions out of that book.

Then she explained that she made up these folded shapes herself. My jaw dropped. From what? I asked. Out of her head, she said. I told her I was especially impressed with the base. She said that actually it was the top that had taken her the most time to work out. So that's what she'd been doing quietly in a corner of the living room for an hour or more.

I have such a hard time figuring out learning styles. Neither I nor my kids seem to fit neatly into any particular category. I did a long, involved right-brain/left-brain quiz on-line a few years ago and came out totally evenly matched. Maybe my kids take after me somewhat. Gradually I've figured that Erin is a strong visual learner (even though she lagged for a long long time in her music reading ability, learns music incredibly easily by ear and loved readalouds well into the tween years). And Noah is on balance a visual-spatial guy (even though he claims to dislike higher math and has an incredible ear for music). But Sophie is especially puzzling. So much about her seems auditory-sequential ... but then she blows me away with something like this, or with her amazing facility with understanding diagrammatic instructions for string figures or figuring out how knitting instructions create a 3-dimensional product.

So I give up. Maybe my family defies organization into categorical boxes of any sort. Oh well, we get along okay anyway.

First orchestra rehearsal

Fiona played in her first orchestra rehearsal tonight. She's been coming to rehearsals since she was an infant. At first she came because she was far too attached to me to be left without me. Then for a year or two she came because her dad was on call and he couldn't guarantee being at home to care for her. And then for the last two years she's come to rehearsals even when her dad is not on call because she loves being there -- listening to the music, being amongst people making music, enjoying the social contact, being with her siblings.

I conduct. Erin, Noah and Sophie play in the orchestra along with half a dozen other kids and a dozen or so adults, everyone from teachers and semi-competent amateurs to recent beginners. It's a great group and there are no real egos. We're just there to make music together, striving for the best performance we can manage. I made my little announcement tonight about how the orchestra was not competitive, and how I had not placed the strongest players at the front of the sections. Instead I'd striven to place younger members with watching/listening issues closer to the front and every inexperienced player with a strong experienced player.

"And so," I said, "if you have trouble counting rests, or figuring out where '4 before D' is, you'll have someone beside you who can help."

Fiona was thrilled to be playing. She's only doing the two easiest pieces, but that's a great starting point for her. She learns music easily, can sight-read a bit, and these pieces are very easy from a technical standpoint. I knew she'd be able to play the music well. What I figured she'd struggle a bit with was counting bars and rests, figuring out starting points from verbal directions and all the specifically orchestral skills.

She shares a stand with my mom / her grandma / her violin teacher. At one point about twenty minutes into the rehearsal I said "okay everyone, let's start at the pick-up before letter-F." In the shuffling as people got ready to play my mom could be heard muttering "F, F, where's letter F... ?" All of a sudden there was a small quick movement from Fiona and a tiny thwack of a sound. She had matter-of-factly pointed out letter-F for her grandma. We all started laughing. My mom quipped "well, it's a good thing I'm sitting beside an experienced player!"

Her orchestral career got off to an auspicious start.

Christmas dinner

Our neighbours have (okay, had, until recently -- he's in the freezer now) a turkey named "Christmas Dinner." We were there when he was plucked and dressed but that's not what this post is about. Our Christmas Dinner was harvested on the ground beneath a tree.

There's a property in town owned by some non-residents that has two grand black walnut trees and a chestnut tree on it. We don't know who the people are who own the place, so we wait until they've had every reasonable chance to show up and harvest their nuts. And then we move in before the squirrels get every last one and take a bag of our own home to roast, peel and put in the freezer for use in a Christmas loaf.

Chestnuts really are the most beautiful things. And they're easier to catch than a turkey.

Dead soldiers

Over the past couple of weeks my desk has gradually accumulated this addition to its usual mess. They're the rings, labels and wrappings for all the yarn I've knit up. Time to tidy things up, now that I've got all my yarns, projects and dye lots entered on Ravelry for future reference. But I'm one of those people who, when making to-do lists, is apt to put on the list things she's already done, just for the pleasure of seeing them crossed off. So before tidying this testament to work done away into the recycling bin, I felt the need to take a photo.

Rose hips

My mom is hosting a rose hip epidemic. She has a wild rose bush that has taken over a corner of her yard which produced a profusion of hips this year. I took my younger two down to help pick. We'd had a couple of hard frosts, even down in town, and the time was right. First we made a stop at our favourite chestnut tree in town and bagged enough chestnuts for a Christmas loaf. Then it was on to the rose hips. Wow ... blue sky, green and yellow leaves, bright orange-red rosehips, warm sun! Who could have asked for anything better.

We picked and picked. Fiona and Sophie kept throwing out guesses (and critiqueing each others' guesses) as to how much we had picked, estimating numbers of rose hips and overall weight. We had decided to go for five pounds, with a bit of a cushion to make sure.

When we got home, we naturally had to measure our harvest. We had almost exactly six pounds, so we were pretty pleased. But the girls also had to know how many we had picked. So we counted out a hundred, weighed them, and then divided that weight into the total to find that we had picked about 1040 rose hips.

We washed and cleaned them, simmered them in some water and then mashed them and pressed the juice from them. It was a lot of work, but I had a lot of help. For now the juice is in the fridge. In a couple of days we'll make jelly, likely by combining the rose hip juice with apple cider. It's extra yummy that way.

We all enjoy the 'something from nothing' aspect of wild harvesting. Rose hips are everywhere around here. A person could pick for days down by the lupine garden and not make a dent in the rose hips there.

It was an elderly Japanese man who moved to our town as a WWII internee who first introduced me to the wild rose pathway by the lupine garden and told me what a great tea hips make and what a great source of Vitamin C they are. I really wish that more people would make use of the natural bounty beneath their noses. There is certainly some sharing of local / traditional wisdom that happens in our town ... but we could sure use a lot more of it!

Wordfest 2008

This is where Erin is this week. The Banff Writers' festival. She went with her writing class (seven students). They'll be attending plays, readings and lectures. Kind of neat, and not something she would ever have had the opportunity to do, nor would she have chosen to partake, if it hadn't been offered and somewhat expected as a result of taking the writing class she's enrolled in at school.

The brilliant part about it is that they'll be spending a day in Calgary first. Partly in order to attend a play, but partly so that the rural teens can spend a day at a big-city mall shopping and hanging out. I guess that city kids get bused to the country for a hike or to visit a farm, so apparently this is the reciprocal sort of trip. Erin was less than enthusiastic, which turned out to be fine. She'll go to the play, but tomorrow morning when the rest of the class heads to the mall, Erin will be picked up at her hotel by her wonderful Calgary violin teacher, and taken to her house for a day of violin-ing and hanging out. Then, when the mall adventure is over, her writing teacher will zip up to her violin teacher's place and pick her up so that they can all head out to Banff for the remainder of the trip.

How neat is that? Erin gets a trip to the Writers' Festival, manages to avoid a gross day at them mall, and gets bonus violin lessons to boot! Without her mom having to leave home and drag her siblings across the continental divide for three days. Best $150 I've spent in a long time!