Skyhill and garden

Playing in the sandpit!

Saturday 25th April, 2015

Last Saturday was not a day of rest.  After publishing the weekly post on the blog, I spent most of the morning levering out small stones, which are mixed with tangled roots and compacted soil, on our side of the proposed new boundary fence at the top of the garden and shifting them a few feet to our neighbour’s side.  I feel entitled to do this because our original neighbour told Tim that he dumped the stones there when he was creating his garden.  Tim came up to help me for a while but it will be a long, boring and tiring task.  After almost daily trips to move stones I got tired of repeatedly telling Tim that I was going up to the top corner of the garden and told him instead that I was going up to play in my sandpit.  He knew what I meant.

While I was in the kitchen at lunchtime, I saw a butterfly.  I rushed out with my camera.  It was my first small tortoiseshell of the year - apart from the one which I released from the passage behind the garage two weeks ago (which doesn’t really count as a sighting).

I mowed in the afternoon and then took another photo of the back lawn.  It may be weedy but viewed from a distance it is at its peak of green perfection.  It will deteriorate soon. The sun is getting hotter and a week without rain qualifies as a drought in the glen.  Soon the most vulnerable patches of grass will die back and the lawn will look patchy.   But it should cheer me up to have the photo to remind me that all will be beautifully green again next April.

In the evening, when I really needed to relax, I saw another pheasant lurking under the bird feeder.  It had a couple of damaged tail feathers and I had a suspicion that it was the same one that we captured last week and released by the river.   I had already chased it out of the garden three times and was losing patience - so I trapped it and we released it near Lezayre church.  Kirk Christ Lezayre is the largest Anglican church in the parish and hasn’t been used for a few years.  I heard that it was too large to heat in winter.  We saw a “For Sale” notice outside the building. If that pheasant comes back again we shall have to take it on a longer drive, perhaps out to the Point of Ayre.

I was wrong about the great tits finishing their nest last week.  On Sunday morning their nest building resumed and continued on and off for most of the week.  Often they do an early shift and then take the afternoon off.  A wise decision because they need to conserve energy for the frenetic couple of weeks when they are working non-stop during the long daylight hours trying to find enough food to satisfy their demanding family.  

We took bread crusts for the swans again and eight came gliding across the river when they saw us standing on the quay waiting for them.  

The swans seem to like gathering in the the "old harbour" area, part of the original river course. When we got home I wasted hours searching for information about the changes to the river mouth.  According to one source there used to be a delta at the mouth of the Sulby River with two estuaries.   In 1550 there was said to be a farm on the island on the delta between the two river mouths (Ramessy Island).  Most of this island was lost to coastal erosion which even threatened the old part of Ramsey near the shore.

One branch of the river flowed north through the old harbour and the Mooragh and entered the sea at the Vollan.  The southern outlet to the sea  wasn’t static because of shifting sandbanks.  During the early 19th century the river was diverted when a single more direct channel to the sea was excavated and the piers protecting the new harbour mouth were constructed.  

By the way another source said that “the name 'Ramsey' is derived from the Norse word 'Hramns-ey' meaning 'Raven's Isle' this is a reference to a former island at the mouth of the Sulby.”

Before lunch we walked up Skyhill.  The gorse on the hillside on the far side of the paddocks was glowing in the sunlight.

Monday would have been the fifteenth birthday of our Schipperke boys.  Alice’s sons were an unruly bunch but they are still sadly missed.

At this time of year we are very aware of the new leaves on the trees.  I half remembered an old rhyme about the oak and ash and looked it up.  The whole saying is "If the oak before the ash, then we'll only have a splash, if the ash before the oak, then we'll surely have a soak".

Apparently there is no truth in the saying but I found some interesting information in a BBC Nature blog from 2011.  “Usually oak leafs in late March-May which is about two weeks earlier than 30 years ago.  Ash usually leafs during April and May, about 7-10 days earlier than 30 years ago.”

The writer explained that oak is temperature sensitive - so above average spring temperatures cause its leaves to start to grow well ahead of the ash trees. Ash trees are much less responsive to temperature and are believed to respond more to sunshine, although this is yet to be confirmed.

I thought our ash was coming into leaf before the oak at the edge of the plantation but after examining the zoom photo of the ash buds (on the left) I realised that it was the flower buds which were opening not the black leaf buds.  The oak is shown on the right.

There was a vaguely voyeuristic sighting in the rose bed during the morning.  I noticed two robins.  The female was quivering her wings in a flirtatious manner.  I had seen this behaviour years ago and the male offered the female a worm.  I called Tim to watch.  The male fluttered off but came back without a present for his lady friend.  He just hopped on her back and mated with her and then disappeared leaving her still quivering hopefully.

Tuesday was a perfect morning.  I “played in the sandpit” again in the afternoon but took some time off to photograph the damson flowers with the bright blue sky behind.

On Wednesday we walked up Skyhill again.  A butterfly was flying around near the front door when we left.  It was flying fast and I couldn’t see whether it was a comma or a small tortoiseshell.  The colours looked more like a small tortoiseshell but the wings appeared to be an odd shape. Eventually it settled near the door and we could see that it was a small tortoiseshell that had survived a close encounter with a bird’s beak.

The young horse chestnut in the plantation was already showing off its new leaves.  

In the afternoon a small white butterfly flew across the back garden.  It didn’t settle and I wasn’t able to identify it - but it could have been a female orange tip.  I decided to make a list of butterfly first sightings for 2015.   So far I have:

Peacock - 4 April

Comma - 9 April

Small tortoiseshell - 18 April

Unidentified white  - 22 April

On Thursday I spent most of the day shifting stones in “the sandpit”.  It was very relaxing in the warm sun with just a couple of robins for company and the constant soothing humming of the bumblebees on the berberis flowers overhead.  But there wasn’t much to keep my mind occupied so I started thinking of nicknames for other parts of the garden.  The terraces on the south west side of the house have an obvious name.   Barry, our late neighbour, who created the next door garden (and was responsible for the pile of stones) was very amused by Tim’s work on the series of terraces and asked him if he was trying to recreate the hanging gardens of Babylon.

Starting from the bottom, the first two walls of our hanging gardens are made of large chunks of slate which were removed from a long rockery in front of the house before Tim built a retaining wall to replace it.  The slate walls had to be carefully designed to take into account the level of the coping on the wall at the side of the steps and also to preserve the azalea mollis which was growing there.

Above the slate walls are three more walls made of reconstituted yorkstone walling blocks.  Tim saw the blocks advertised in the local newspaper soon after we bought our property.  They were reclaimed and were lying in an old farmyard at Strandhall on the south coast of the Island.  We were on a tight budget at the time and didn’t want to pay for haulage so we spent days driving back and forth, loading bricks into the back of our old Golf.  Chrissie, our first Island Schipperke, came with us - riding in style in her basket on top of the stack of bricks and causing some hilarity in passing cars.

I wondered whether it would be too pretentious to call the largest terrace, outside the living room window, the rose garden.  This was a mistake because it conjured up a line from a song which then stuck in my mind - I never promised you a rose garden.  I looked up the song later and discovered that it had been a hit for Lynn Anderson in 1970.  I read the lyrics and found a quote which could become a gardener’s motto “Along with the sunshine there’s gotta be a little rain sometime”.  We could do with some rain after all these warm dry days.  My sandpit is turning into a dust bowl.

My "rose garden" contains only four rose plants which share the terrace with a number of bulbs which were planted there because I didn’t have any other place to plant them at the time.  They are still there . . . nerines, autumn crocuses and mini daffodils.

Friday started sunny but the forecast was for rain in the afternoon.  We went for a longer walk on Skyhill, climbing up above the paddocks and then crossing the stream to the northern section of the plantation.  We walked along the mountain bike path which follows the western boundary and stopped at the end so that I could take a photo of Lezayre Church, where we released the last pheasant.  If anyone is interested in buying a church . . . it has a idyllic setting below the hills and the price looks reasonable “Offers in the region of £175,000”.  But it is a registered building which might limit potential uses.

Our garden is becoming more colourful by the day.  Last week’s buds are opening already on the Kowhai . . .

. . . there is pink blossom and bronze new leaves on the flowering cherries down by the road . . .

. . . and white blossom on the flowering cherry near the front steps . . .

. . . and more white blossom on the delicate arching stems of this spiraea.

The spiraea in the photo, probably S. arguta (Bridal wreath) brings back memories of a hedge in my parents’ garden in Natal.  My mother used to call it the May hedge but I think it was a variety of spiraea.  The only similarity to the British May flowers (hawthorn blossom) was that it also had white flowers.  I tried to identify it but I don’t remember it well enough.

We have four varieties of spiraea in the garden which all predate our life here.   As well as our Bridal wreath, which is probably more delicate and arching than it should be because it was planted in the shade of a flowering cherry tree, we have two spiraea japonicas.  There is Little princess which I like, and Goldflame which I don’t like because the colour of the attractive spring foliage clashes horribly with the pink flowers.  The fourth variety is S. billardii Triumphans.  It has pretty flowers but is a thuggish plant which sends up shoots from the roots and is always trying to annex more than its designated territory.

. . . and finally the first of many Welsh poppies.  They come up like weeds in all parts of the garden.

PS  Yesterday's rain was a disappointment.  It didn't even wet the surface of the soil.  But we woke to a wet garden and there has been a steady light soaking rain all morning.  Great for the plants but not enough to turn my sandpit/dust bowl into a mud bath!

Garden

A running commentary of my life in the garden!

Saturday 18th April, 2015.

I must start with an apology to anyone who is trying to wade through all the trivia on this blog.  I fear that I may be in danger of getting an anonymous letter like an over-enthusiastic Australian mother who posted too many photos of her baby on Facebook.  Her “friends” wrote to her and said 'We are all SO OVER your running commentary of your life,'.   I know there is far too much detail for any casual reader (not “too much information” which is a different matter!) but the blog doubles as a diary and I want to record daily sightings and work in the garden so that I can look back next spring and compare the state of play.  

By the time I started recording my week it was already Tuesday morning.  I was still battling with the top corner of the garden.  I usually prefer to use British English rather than American English but this task can only be described as opening up a can of worms.  To the disappointment of the robin, who is still supervising my efforts, the worms were figurative rather than literal.

I knew it would be tedious clearing the corner of ivy, brambles (both living and dead), bits of old larch lap fence which had been left there to rot, and the old dog-proof fencing, and sundry rubbish - but I didn’t realise that a dead holly trunk next to an old stump near the top of the steep bank needed to be taken down.  When I tugged at a bramble which was entwined with the ivy growing on the trunk, the whole trunk wobbled.  I was worried because it was close to a young holly that I wanted to use to support a new fence.  

I hoped that the trunk might topple over if I cut through the thick ivy roots but it didn’t cooperate.   So I attached a rope and pulled.  That didn’t work.  Then I got the long lopper and cut off the ivy which was getting tangled up in the damson tree below the bank.  Then I pulled on the rope again.  Still no luck.  So I climbed up the bank and pulled from a different angle.  I managed to detach the holly trunk from the damson and it sagged but the trunk was still hanging on.

Tim came up to help and cut through another thick ivy root with the saw attachment on the long lopper and then I did some mountaineering, managing to balance half way up the bank, and released the wire netting, which was entangled with the old stump.  After that I removed  the wire and most of the ivy from the trunk and manoeuvered it off the bank.  I was pleased that the old stump didn’t come down with the rotten trunk because that might have destabilised the bank.  The little live holly also survived unscathed.

It wasn’t a great start to the week for photography.  It was too cold for the butterflies to come out to play and I was too busy up in my black spot corner to spend much time watching for birds. The weather wasn’t great either.  It turned colder and windier on Saturday.  Sunday morning was very wet although it cleared up in the afternoon.  And Monday was a repetition of Saturday.  I thought of photographing some of our various primulas on Sunday afternoon but they weren’t looking very perky after the heavy rain in the morning.

Then things looked up.  Before we left for the shops, Tim called me to say that the great tits were busy taking bedding into the nest box.  I am sure they are later than usual this spring.  The tits have to time their babies to hatch at the same time that their main food source (moth caterpillars that feed on the new leaves on broadleaf trees like the oaks) is available.  It was interesting watching our pair of great tits working on their home.  The male bird was fetching the bedding, mainly moss . . .

. . . while the female waited inside the box and took the moss from him.

She must have been arranging the bedding and shaping the nest.  I took some old dog fur out and scattered it below the box and she came out to have a look but I didn’t see either bird take any fur into the box.

They finished furnishing their home very quickly.  We didn’t see the male bringing any more moss in the afternoon although they continued hanging around and going into the box occasionally.  Perhaps they have reached the egg laying phase.  

It rained most of the morning on Wednesday but cleared up in the afternoon and  I returned to my top corner to continue clearing the brambles and ivy - a tedious occupation and painful because of the thorns.  One of our previous neighbours dumped some old metal poles and trellis up there and it was quite a battle to liberate them.  There is also a pile of small stones which will have to be shifted if I decide to plant a hedge.  The process is also complicated by an enormous old ivy-covered sycamore trunk which blew over a few years ago and is resting on the plantation boundary fence.

It was a sunny afternoon and a peacock butterfly was back on the wild flower bank.  It was the first I have seen for a couple of days.  They are definitely fair weather friends.  We saw four goldfinches on the feeder . . .  a record!  (PS The record didn’t last long because there were five on Thursday morning.)

In the late afternoon I took some primula photos.  Our garden must be ideal for primulas because they thrive here even though they are neglected.  As you can see from the well-nibbled flowers, pests also thrive in this garden because I don’t use any spray.   There are masses of lovely native primroses.

But we also have some gaudy garden varieties which were here before we moved in.  The old plants must have died off but their descendants remain.  I should have been ruthless and weeded them out because they have cross-pollinated with the wild primroses and we now have quite a variation of colours.  

I tried moving any hybrid seedlings out of the back garden but the bees don’t recognise boundaries, didn’t cooperate, and continued their experiments in cross-pollination.  Eventually I gave up. but I still remove an occasional eyesore from the wild flower bank.

Another member of the primula family, which I bought a couple of years ago, is the cowslip.  I hoped it would self-seed but no babies have appeared.  The thick moss may be inhibiting seedlings.  Perhaps I should move it to a sunnier position.

On Thursday morning the five day forecast had another series of zero rainfall predictions - and news that the weather should warm up a bit too . . . with maximums of 14 C expected.

I think we may have a hedgehog visiting the garden again.  I haven’t seen one for years  but this week I have noticed some unusual droppings near the wildflower bank and they look exactly like hedgehog droppings.  I don’t expect to see the hedgehog because they are mainly nocturnal and we no longer have any dogs to warn us of weird trespassers in the garden.

I spotted one more butterfly flying past - fast..  Judging by the speed at which it was flying and glimpses of colour, it was probably a comma.

Work on the top corner continues. I used the electric saw to cut some smallish hollies down to hedge height and Tim came up to help me dispose of the branches.  It didn’t take long with two of us working at it.  

Friday was much like Thursday apart from a trip to Ramsey after lunch.  I spent part of the morning cutting down a medium-sized dead holly which I discovered under the living hollies and the ivy.

I have been enjoying the blossom on the damson trees below the bank while I am working.

And I have also been wandering  around the garden with my camera collecting pocketsful of small weeds which catch my eye, thinking about the flowers and taking some photos.

This is the time of year when the back garden is at its tidiest.  The sun hasn’t been hot enough for patches of grass to die back, the daffodil leaves are still green and healthy too, and the taller plants on the wildflower bank haven’t shot up to overshadow the primroses, violets, and wood sorrel.

There are still spring bulbs around including the tiny grape hyacinths and the snakeshead fritillary.  I planted a couple of fritillary bulbs in a pot a few years ago and they have self-seeded.  I was disappointed to see that so many are the alba variety.  I wouldn’t go as far as saying that they are “hideously white”, as someone famously described the BBC, but I don’t think they are as attractive as the chequered ones.

During a hike a few years ago, I saw a plant with pretty yellow flowers growing on a brambly verge and picked a spindly little twig to take home so that I could try to identify the plant.  It turned out to be Kerria japonica (the single type).  I can’t remember whether I put the twig in water on the windowsill - or whether I stuck it into some compost - but I was amazed when it decided to grow.

The birds on the feeder will soon have the company of a lot of bumblebees when the Kowhai buds open.  The smaller male and worker bees crawl into the tube shaped flowers but the queens miss out because they are too large.

And in the front garden . . .  a Skimmia japonica rubella.  It is an ideal shrub.  It needs no pruning, grows into a neat shape, has pretty flowers, a lovely delicate fragrance and provides pollen for the bees in early spring.  The dark pink buds open into starry white flowers

The only problem with our Skimmia rubella is that it has grown larger than I expected and is encroaching on the path.  I don’t want to prune the plant and spoil the shape and it would be too much work to move the path.  I suppose we shall just have to walk on the grass.

And another problem - the aftereffects of the mast year.  Unless we do  a lot of weeding out of tree seedlings we shall end up living in a dense forest.  The ash and sycamore seeds have long narrow cotyledons and are difficult to tell apart until the true leaves appear.  This is a beech seedling with its distinctive little green butterfly wings.  

Writing about problems reminds me of the dreaded pheasants.  I haven’t seen one in the garden all week!  They are still around though because I have heard a male nearby.  But now the mallard ducks are trying to move in instead - we have had to chase them out of the garden nearly every day.

Garden and Ramsey

A warm, dry week with a bit of fog.

Saturday 11th April, 2015.

Last Saturday, the first thing that I did after publishing the last post was to release a small tortoiseshell butterfly which had hibernated in the passage between the garage and the laundry.  The garage door is kept closed most of the time and it was trapped inside.  I thought it might be the right time to take it outside because the first peacock butterfly had just emerged from hibernation.   It sat on the warm step for a few minutes while I took its photo and then spread its wings, flew away and hasn’t been seen since.

I have never been comfortable with the idea that Sunday is the first day of the week.  It always seems to me that it is the last day of the weekend.  But it is usually the first day of my blogging week and on this first morning I saw a very unusual sight . . .  every day of the five day weather forecast shows zero rainfall.  It will be interesting to see whether this prediction comes true.

On the subject of weather, I took one photo of this rather different “cloud”, when the sun was rising, but didn’t understand its significance for a few hours.  The morning started with bright sunshine and blue skies but they didn’t last.  Soon the Island was blanketed by a combination of sea mist and hill fog . . . Manannan’s cloak . . . and I realised that early “cloud” was a bank of sea mist approaching the north of the Island.

The first outing was our usual trip to feed the swans.  There were only two swans in the harbour and they took their time crossing the river to join us.  I amused myself photographing the reflections on the water.  The swing bridge . . .

. . . and the approaching swans swimming through the reflections of ships moored by the far bank.

The first birds to reach us were a group of about half a dozen mallard ducks which were eventually joined by the rather tardy swans.  For once, the herring gulls did not get the lion’s share of the crusts. The reason for this appeared to be that the gulls were frightened of the ducks!  They looked very demure but the gulls treated them with great respect and kept at a safe distance until this “thuggish gang” departed.

Tim was pleased that the swans finally got their fair share.  

We walked back through one of the quaint old lanes that run from the quay to Parliament Street.  The Old Post Office Lane is further east and this one is called Collins Lane.  

I wondered who it had been named for and tried Google.  The only possible clue that I found was a reference in Brown’s Directory of 1881 to an Edward Collins, a boat builder.  He was the only Collins living in Ramsey at the time.  His address was given as Ivy Lane.   (In an earlier publication his occupation is given as “marine store dealer” of King Street.)

There were a couple of other references to Ivy Lane in early publications but nothing since.   As far as I know there is no Ivy Lane in Ramsey today.  It may have been lost when a large area of central Ramsey was demolished due to the South Ramsey Redevelopment Scheme in the 1960’s but perhaps the name changed and the old Ivy Lane is now Collins Lane.

On the way home we stopped so that I could photograph a misty Skyhill.

And record another sign of spring - the first catkins opening on a willow by the river.

Monday couldn’t decided whether to be misty again.  There was a light mist in the glen when we woke but it got much thicker during the morning.  We could hardly see the houses across the road and the other side of the glen was completely hidden.

There was a good side effect though.  The very soft light filtering through the mist was ideal for photographing pale flowers like this patch of wood sorrel under the hawthorns.

The marsh marigolds are covered with buds and the first flower is almost fully open.

Later the mist retreated from the glen.  When we walked in Brookdale after lunch we saw that it hadn’t gone far.  The edge of the dense bank of sea mist was just north of the Sulby River.  

While we were walking down the Fern Glen road we saw two male pheasants fighting.  A pheasant fight seems to involve mainly crouching down and glaring at each other, then posturing with tails in the air, plus the occasional jump in the air.  I tried to take photos but couldn’t focus on the birds because of vegetation in the foreground.

Tuesday morning was devoted to changing library books, banking, paying accounts and shopping in Ramsey.  Not my favourite occupation.  The weather was good though.  It is warming up at last and the garden is bursting into life - but the downside is that the grass and weeds are growing faster. I thought of mowing in the afternoon but couldn’t summon up enough enthusiasm so I decided to do some weeding instead.  I settled down in the sun to dig out grass that was trying to spread from the lawn into the wildflower bank.

I miss the company of the dogs in the garden but I did have some friends to keep me company.  First, I was joined by a pair of mallard ducks who came waddling up to see what I was doing.  I chased them out of the garden because ducks tend to become persistent.  If you give them an inch they take the proverbial mile.  Then Saturday’s peacock butterfly joined me and sunbathed on the warm steps.  And then I spotted a ladybird . . . a seven-spotted ladybird.  It was sitting on a sprig of stitchwort minding its own business until I fetched my camera and irritated it by trying to bend the stitchwort into a better position for a close-focus photo.  Later I saw a second ladybird so I annoyed that one too.  They didn’t seem to mind much - just moved around slowly.

I am gradually educating myself about the inhabitants of our garden, thanks mainly to my camera and Google.  When I saw the ladybirds I assumed that they had six spots - three on each wing case - but after reading about ladybirds I realised that the larger black mark just behind the head is also counted as a spot.

Wednesday was a busy day.  We saw a thrush hopping around in the early morning dew on the back lawn searching for food.  It had a beak full of small bugs so it must be feeding babies already.  

Then we took a load of garden refuse and old newspapers out to the tip for recycling. The view from the tip.  In the foreground is Grest Farm on the northern plain.  On the right, the wooded slopes of Skyhill with Snaefell behind.  To the left of is Clagh Ouyr and then the North Barrule ridge.  

Another male pheasant had been lurking in the garden since Tuesday evening.  We didn’t manage to trap it before we left for the tip because I was busy writing about Monday’s pheasant fight in Fern Glen and wasn’t watching the trap for approaching pheasants.  Tim saw it and called me but we had missed our chance because it had already eaten all the bait.  I prepared some more bait but shut the door of the trap to stop the greedy bird from stealing another meal while we were out.

We intended to walk when we got home so that I could mow the grass in the afternoon but there wasn’t enough time for a walk before lunch so I did some weeding instead and the walk was put off until Thursday.  While I was in the garden I heard a loud pheasant squawk.  The pheasant was back and was apparently complaining because the trap was shut and it couldn’t reach the food!  We caught it after I finished mowing.

Thursday was another lovely warm day.  We walked up to the Brookdale top gate in the morning and then had another short walk down to the postbox on Lezayre Road in the afternoon.  Between walks I kept a watch out of the back window for butterflies.  There were at least two peacock butterflies in the back garden but I had glimpsed something different and more orange.  It kept appearing briefly and then disappearing but finally settled on a stone and I managed to get a photo - not of the colourful upper side of the wings but of the under side with the strange mark that gives the comma butterfly its name.

Friday was yet another warm day until the wind came up suddenly in the afternoon.  I started clearing the last really overgrown part of the garden which is up in the top south west corner above the steep bank behind the ditch.  There has never been a proper boundary fence there.  Just a combination of chicken wire and the sides of an old compost bin that I wired together to stop the dogs escaping - and a thicket of brambles.  There was one memorable escape when little Alice got through a gap in the brambles.  Leo, the largest of her boys, tried to follow her and got stuck with a strand of bramble wrapped around his tummy.  Luckily he plugged the gap very effectively and his two brothers were unable to escape and I retrieved Alice, shut Danny and Alex in the house and then rescued Leo without too much difficulty.

A little robin kept me company while I was working.  He kept inspecting my efforts hoping for worms.  He must have been disappointed that I was just cutting back Ivy and brambles.  After a while he perched on a bramble and sang to me.  I imagine the message was that I should please get out of his territory but it sounded like a sweet friendly little song.

This is the time of year when so much is happening in the garden that I end up with too many photos for the blog instead of too few.  But I couldn’t resist the first snakeshead fritillary which opened in the morning.

PS  The forecasters were right about the dry spell.  There was no rain until Friday night.   And more rain is expected on Sunday morning so our mini-drought is over.

PPS Another male pheasant was transported to the Sulby River on Friday.  Only two this week.  The invasion seems to be slowing down (fingers crossed)!