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Dear friends,

I would not have thought that little changes in a daily routine would make such a big difference in my energy levels, but apparently it's the little changes which knock one on one's, erm, foundations.  On the heels of the magnificent Saturday I spent at Spin-Out at the East 54th Street Recreation Center, I found myself returning to the Rec Center, touring the weight room, the cardio room and the pool, and deciding that the days of paying $150/month for the privilege of working out at a swanky health club across the street from my office were over.  I figured that I would save some significant cash by switching to the Rec Center and only spending $75/month on my membership.  Imagine the look on my face when I asked the nice lady at the desk if they would just deduct from my bank account every month, and she told me that the $75 was an annual charge, not a monthly one.  I almost did the James Brown Celebrity Hot Tub Dance, as performed by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live, right there in the lobby.

The good news is that I am getting a fabulous workout -- with pool privileges!  Pool privileges! -- and getting it for about $1,600/year less than I did at Swanky Health Club With No Pool.  The bad news is that now that just running across the street to work out is out of the question, I have resumed my early-morning workouts.  Again, you would not think that this would be a huge change, but it has played havoc with my energy levels and writing rhythms.  (Maybe I should have waited a couple of weeks before radically changing my eating habits, too...)

All this is my way of saying that I have not forgotten my promise to share the story of the Hunza  apricots.  Considering that it is an anecdote twelve years in the making, you'd better believe I'm going to share it.    With any luck, I'll share it before I start baking energy bars all weekend long.  (Man, I wish I had an energy bar right now.  Do you have any energy bars?  Do you have any extras?)

Edit:  Not to sound like a broken record, dear friends, but if the cards and letters in my inbox are any indication, there still seems to be some confusion as to the authorship of the post below.  No, I haven't discovered a newfound sense of peace and whimsy, nor have my photography skills improved a thousandfold.  What follows comes from the pen and shutter of the beauteous McBeth, who would be on quadruple probation for jacking my blog without giving me so much as a warning, only she's just so damn funny and sweet...

Mon DIEU et voila, who will believe that I am inviting my dear readership into the luxurious bounty of my two beautiful (but natural.  nature versus neuter.  nothin' nefariously manufactured here, more along if you're all for super or subnatural, that's a different state altogether and none of the 50 really wants to discuss it publicly) scoops?  No one, that's who.  But hells bells, that has never prevented me from opening up and offering out ...

Take. Munch. This is my pinecone which is given for you.  Take.  Lick. This is my berry drop goodness shed for you.  For as often as we lay these bricks criss-crossedly or fotografically find foods in nature, you do this for the rememberance of me.

Lloyderina may have a thing or two to say (or not, it may be as insignificant as the barely visible shift of an eyebrow hair) about my two luscious and oh-so-lickable scoops.  In the rock stars sans guitar category, Lloyderina stands alone due to his general cool hang-out-ability.  But like I say, he's not afraid to go lookin for the tall grown-up glasses we only take down when company comes visiting so he can pour me another round of ShutTheHellUp when we both need a long drink.  What can I say, some phraseology just sticks with a person.

Hmm, what else might this recipe need?  Oo!  I know!  A dash of heaviness.  That's what I need to finish this off, yes!  I cannot send my lovely readers away lusting after my conages, c'est ne pas bonbon dee bon.  Bring it around, sister, you can DO this!  Loads of ennui dappled with ash sprinkles.  We could all ponder our growth processes together (please make no mistake though, I don't want to have to think about your growth.  I've got a constant battle on my hands managing my own.  Send me your Cliff Notes, I'll browse it later and can then tell you if you're onto something.  Hold hands with your neighbor now, this could get rocky ...

Kuhmmmmmm byyyyeeee aahhhhhhhhhhh mahhhhLorrrrrrrd
Kuhmmmmmm byyyyeeee aahhhhhhhhhhh

How silly of me to ever doubt my own beauty.
That's what I really just need to say.  I have a process - my process - my peculiar process (pat.pend.) but eventually, when I'm done following my peculiar process (pat.pend.) I come back to what I know is true.  Shaddap.  I DO! 

I'm not a frump.
I've never been a frump.
I sometimes wear the frump's costume, just so I can be sure to understand her perspective should I ever feel the need to defend her against rooty-tooty fresh n'fruity know-it-alls who think they do while the rest of us giggle at the holyFUCKisn'titobvious fact that they SO don't.
But I am absolutely and most definitely not a frump.

Stick that in your cone and lick it, sweethearts.

Why Fiber Is Good For You, Part One. It is a sign of either my generally poor manners or my particularly poor readjustment to damp, sea-level air that I have been home for almost four days and still have not written a blessed word about what a wonderful time I had in Colorado. Meanwhile, all of my fellow travelers at the Estes Park Wool Market managed to write witty, thoughtful, wonderful posts -- they are, after all, a witty, thoughtful, wonderful crowd -- within a day or two of their collective returns home. I could not begin to do justice to their superb accounts of our weekend, so I will encourage you to visit them and see, in words and pictures, what a grand trip it was. Despite what my post from Snowballville would indicate, I did not spend the entire weekend fretting over pie crust and scones. I also had the great good fortune to meet the brilliant women who joined Snow in making a knitter out of me, including but not limited to Margene, Mim (who designed the first lace shawl I ever knit, and who started working on a new shawl design at Estes; Mim, I cannot wait to see the finished pattern!), Kristi, Carole, Amanda, Michaele, Stephanie, Birdsong, Anne, Laurie, Bonnie, Imbrium, Taelixev, Jessamyn, Karen, Wanda, Jenifer and at least a dozen other knitters I met at the bloggers' meetup at the market, whose names are, sadly, lost in the fog of altitude readjustment.

To say it was a madcap weekend was an understatement: eleven of us slept double-bunked in a duplex cabin, and we had anywhere from 16 to 20 people at dinner. (I will confess that thanks to the steady supply of Fat Tire at my left hand, both at play and in the kitchen, I sort of lost track of the head count by dinnertime, but I was too cheerful to worry about it much.) Every one of us came to the Wool Market hungry to browse and even hungrier to buy. I had thought that fitting a dozen or so of us in the cabin was an impressive feat, but fitting a dozen of us *and* our big bags of yarn, roving and fleece was nothing short of miraculous. Fortunately, if there's one thing I've learned in 15 years of New York City living, it's how to have fun with a lot of people in a small space, but if I might be so presumptuous, it appeared that even those of us who came from more wide-open-space-places had lots of fun in our tiny noisy merry little place. Thank you, each and every one of you, for being so kind to my newbie-assed self; for gently razzing me for trying to carry on a conversation while knitting a fairly complicated lace shawl; for your very kind words about the food; for your very kind offers to help with the food prep (on which I would have taken you up if only we'd had, say, more than one cutting board and one decent knife; special thanks to Anne and Michaele for taking care of the salad and the wine at the exact moment I could feel myself beginning to wilt); for your innumerable shopping tips, pointers and advice; for your abundant senses of humor, kindness and decency; and for making me feel as if we'd all known each other all of our lives. And thanks again to Snow, who not only took me to Estes, but also let me stay in her house for a week, fed and watered me like a champion, and drove my ass everywhere from Estes to Boulder and points between. She really is the hostess with the mostest.

To anyone reading this who was not at Estes: Really, you want to be reading all these other folks' posts. They are all uniformly terrific, and really, you should see how happy Carole looks, holding that big bag of fleece.

Why Fiber Is Good For You, Part Two. After all this company, all this fellowship, all this sundrenched travel and all this yarn shopping, the trip back to reality was a tough one. I probably didn't have to wait more than ten minutes to disembark from the plane at JFK, but in that ten minutes, the humidity that dare not show its face in the Mile-High Desert settled upon my head like a mantilla, and for the first time in a week, I knew the true meaning of desolation. Lloyd eased the transition somewhat by greeting me in our air-conditioned apartment and then whisking me off to dinner at our French local, which has become the de facto place we go to eat when one of us has returned from a long out-of-town trip. The dinner was wondrous and the company even better, but any bloom still on this rose was definitively off by 3 o'clock the next afternoon, my first day back in the box factory. Fortunately, I didn't have to wait long to get it back, and I owe it all to Cara. If you are familiar with her website, you know that she is a genius knitter and spinner, possessed of a sharp wit and an immense, generous heart. In person she is all this, but even more so. Several months back, Cara set the wheels in motion for Spin Out, a day for spinners and knitters to meet at the Cherry Hill Fountain in Central Park. She organized a raffle to benefit Heifer International; people donated generously, more and more companies offered raffle prizes, and the original goal of $3,700 was easily met and surpassed. Cara has now raised over $12,000 on Heifer's behalf, and if the past weeks are any indication, she will easily hit her goal of $14,400 by the time the registry closes -- and the raffle prizes are awarded -- on June 30.

Just when I thought Cara couldn't impress me more with her ingenuity, doggedness and spirit even more than she already has, she raised the bar even higher. She has been tracking the weather all week, and every day the forecasts got worse and worse. Rain and high humidity. Even more rain and higher humidity. High humidity and isolated thunderstorms. High humidity and rolling thunderstorms. Rolling thunderstorms and flash flood warnings from Friday night through Sunday afternoon. Things looked more and more dire for our little party in the park, especially when Cara discovered that the Parks Dept. generally doesn't offer rain dates on summer park permits, because that necessitates blocking out two blocks of time at the height of the demand for outdoor permits. In short, it was Saturday morning or naught, and Cara did not want to shrug and say "sorry, kids" to the folks who had traveled some distance to get here. On Thursday night, she began searching for alternate venues and issuing calls to action to anyone who might be able to help us. Her excellent friend Shana (who doesn't blog, but really needs to, in my opinion), who works for the Parks Dept., managed to find us a space at the East 54th Street Recreation Center, with plenty of room for everybody to bring their spinning wheels, or, for people like me who don't know how to spin (although Ann did a champion's job at trying to teach me), our big bags of yarn. Once again, chatting, laughing, advice-giving and bonding were the order of the day. We would not be beaten by any stupid humidity. Spin Out ruled the day. So did Cara.

The haul. During our tour around the Wool Market, Margene gave me a gentle reminder (of course, that's a relative term, "gentle reminder" -- we are talking about Margene, after all that even though my blog content is about 75% foodwriting to 25% Other Things, it is still permissible to take pictures of one's knitting projects, particularly when one has teased the knitters in the audience with pictures of shawls in progress, only to welsh on showing the completed shawl. She is right, of course, but I am still shy about this whole knitblogging thing, mostly because, as I've said before, that my vocabulary and skill set is still pretty small. Give me some new fruit at the farmer's market, some new rice at Kalustyan's, or some horrible annoying new processed food, and I will go on until the cows come home, regardless of whether anyone wants to read a tantrum in print or not. With knitting, though, I'm not comfortable with going on beyond simple declarative statements, the kind I used to make when I was about three: Yarn is pretty. It feels good. I made a shawl for my mom. I like socks.

Of course, because I do love Margene so well, I agreed to find a venue for the knitting projects. I had planned to put a new photo album in my sidebar, but once again my advanced template has bested me, and while I can add stuff to existing lists, I can't seem to create new ones. Between this and Friday night's Audblog fiasco, the time for migrating to a new provider comes ever closer. In the meantime, I will let Flickr do the hard work for me, and once it's ready, I'll provide links -- and, of course, I can post a picture of what came home from the market with me:

For you knitterinas curious about the yarn specs, here they are, from left to right: Sportweight wool (in the wound ball) from Plain and Fancy, for socks; alpaca/tencel/nylon eyelash yarn from Textiles a Mano, for my mom, who makes gorgeous scarves from this sort of yarn; two hanks 100% silk from Textiles a Mano, one little scarf's worth for my mom, one little scarf's worth for me; superwash wool/silk/viscose blend from Brooks Farm Yarn, for socks; 2 skeins laceweight alpaca, from the stand whose name escapes me at the moment because I keep thinking of it as "Mim's local yarn shop" (Mim, help!); the piece de resistance, 2 skeins of qiviuk/silk/merino blend, purchased at Skaska Design's booth. I spent more on those two little skeins than on the rest of the haul, but as qiviuk is almost impossible to find in New York City, I gave up my wallet gladly for it. What will it turn into? I do not yet know.

Tell her like Tony told Cleopatterer! One nice thing about coming back to LuthorCorp -- other than getting to see my friends again -- was the big, big box of Amazon.co.uk goodness waiting for me. Back in April, I had ordered the BBC Shakespeare Collection on DVD for Lloyd's birthday. These are the 37 plays produced by the BBC between 1978 and 1985, which were aired in the U.S. on PBS as The Shakespeare Plays. I was in high school when my local PBS station began airing them, and I can say without qualification that these productions were the ones that embedded in me the love of Shakespeare that continues to this day. Their production of Twelfth Night is my favorite one ever, and their production of Macbeth, with Nicol Williamson as Macbeth and Jane Lapotaire as Lady Macbeth, scared the wits out of me. (The surprising of Macduff's castle, and the slaughter of his wife and son, was so frightening that I couldn't sleep after I saw it. The following week, my English teacher screened it for my class; I was the only one who had seen it previously, and I sat with my fingers in my ears and my eyes squeezed shut, but I could still hear the gasps of my classmates all around me.) Fan though I am, Lloyd's love of Shakespeare eclipses even mine; he had never seen the BBC plays, and he has longed to see them for years. When he told me that Amazon.co.uk was selling them, and at a tenth of the price at which the American distributor was selling them (I know that the American distributor is also selling broadcast rights along with the set, but still! geez!), I knew what I wanted to give him for his birthday. We did have to wait a bit due to an out-of-stock situation, but eventually they got more, and they sent it to us in a ridiculously short time, at ridiculously cheap shipping prices. Dear friends, I know that it is bad to put too much stock in our material goods, but I just can't help myself. This set is wonderful.

Lloyd and I are watching Pericles now, watching Juliet Stevenson rule every scene in which she appears. Last night we watched John Cleese do his brilliant thing as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, and while I was at Spin Out, Lloyd spent part of his afternoon watching The Winter's Tale. As the credits for Shrew rolled last night, Lloyd announced, "I've watched five hours of Shakes today." He is hardcore, that Lloyd.

The Tale of the Hunza Apricots. It would be a cruel thing to tease the promise of an actual food story here, only to end without delivering it. Nevertheless, that is exactly what I am going to do. There are foodstuffs to prepare for the week's lunches and dinners ahead. There are trips to the bank to be made, and, if I am lucky, there will still be time for me to join the Hellgate CSA, the farm-share program that delivers boxes of locally-farmed vegetables to the coffee bar up the street from my house. I promise, though, that there is a tale of Hunza apricots, and I will share it, dear friends.

Dear friends, I have been home for two days, and I have had stories to tell, but alas, Real Life keeps intruding on my storytelling time with a vengeance.  I will not bore you with excuses, at least not yet.  I will just have to save them -- the stories, not the excuses -- for tomorrow night, after I return from Spin Out, the spinning/knitting party/Heifer International benefit at the Cherry Tree Fountain in Central Park, engineered by the beautiful and awe-inspiring Cara.  The weather forecast for tomorrow is pretty dire -- thunderstorms, flash flood warnings -- but I'll be damned if a little thunder will keep an army of spinners away. 

In my defense, I will say that I did have something nifty planned for tonight.  Originally I'd planned to post my Tales Out of Estes last night.  Merrily I skipped hither and yon about the internets, collecting the URLs of all the delightful new friends I made over the weekend.  Of course, I couldn't just collect those URLs without reading everyone's travelogues and looking at their pictures.  Oh, look, I said to myself.  That dowdy, lumpy old woman is wearing a shawl just like the one Snow knitted for me.  And look!  She's wearing a baseball shirt just like mine!

It took about seven seconds for the awful truth to descend upon my consciousness.  Let's just say that I don't respond well to photographs, and spent the better part of four hours torturing Lloyd, my mother, and no fewer than three friends with my wails and moans about what a frumpy old misery I had turned into, and how said frumpy old misery in the photos bore no resemblance whatsoever to the new wave intellectual sex pixie that ruled my soul.  It was hideous.  Sorry, Lloyd.  Sorry, Mom.  Sorry, everyone unlucky enough to talk to me in the past 24 hours.

'mouse somehow managed to convince me -- don't ask me how -- that the cure for what ailed me would be to a) sing to him, and b) post it as an Audblog post.  It only took me three hours and a strong coffee to give me the nerve to take him up on it, singing from the They Might Be Giants catalogue into the phone while Lloyd watched Scully scold Mulder in the next room.  Now if only Audblog and TypePad would play nicely with each other and get the damn thing up, then we'd be laughing.  As would you, no doubt. 

Tomorrow, dear friends, I promise.

It didn’t go down without a fight, but in the end, I think I kicked high altitude’s ass.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

Dear friends, I am still vacationing in beautiful uptown Snowballville, Colorado, being fed and watered and generally spoiled by this kind and excellent woman and her family, to a degree that I will be a right pain in the neck once I get home, and Lloyd will come over all pale and haunted, and will take to our bed, pressing cold compresses against his forehead and wondering if there is a glass of Shut the Hell Up big enough for me.

Of course I kid, but only a little.  Lloyd, you have been warned.

All cheekiness aside, I am having a delightful time at Snow’s, even though I did spend yesterday afternoon in the grip of altitude sickness.  I’m not sure whether it was caused by being 5,000 feet higher than I am in New York, being an additional 2,000 feet higher than that at Estes Park this weekend, being unused to drinking even small quantities at altitude, getting sunburned (albeit happily) at the Estes Park Wool Market, or feeling the aftereffects of a madcap weekend of woolgathering, giggling, storytelling, bonding, hot-tub-soaking and cooking breakfast and dinner for 16 people.  I do know that I’m glad that it waited until after said madcap weekend was over, for I would have hated to eschew all that glorious company in favor of lying on the bathroom floor, sweating, feeling my head pound and my tummy roll over, and begging my maker to just kill me now, please.  Instead, I was able to do all my lying-on-the-floor-et-cetera at Snow’s, where, once the worst of it was over, Snow and G and Gram plied me with fluids, analgesics and cartoons until I felt well enough to join them for dinner, and B helped me celebrate my return to the land of the living with a Wallace & Gromit film festival.  I told you I was getting spoiled rotten.

One might wonder how I could claim to kick altitude’s ass when it so clearly kicked mine.  It is a fair question, dear friends, and like so many questions I find myself asking, the answer is found in baking.  Simply put, I walked into a situation that could have killed my reputation as a bakerina once and for all, and I walked out smiling.

Even if you know your way around a kitchen, it is a daunting prospect to cook for a large group if you don’t do it on a regular basis.  It is an even more daunting prospect to cook for a large group when you do not have the safety net of a recipe, deciding at the last minute to leave your cookbooks at home, the better to avoid having to check baggage.  And we move from the realm of “daunting prospect” to “just plain barking mad prospect” to cook for a large group, without recipes, at 7,000 feet above sea level, when you have never done so before.  I still remember reading The Joy of Cooking as a kid, reading the Rombauers’ directions for how to prepare certain baked goods at high altitude, and deciding I should just skirt the whole issue by staying at sea level.  I went to one of my favorite sources of baking information, started reading about baking powder ratios, and popped another Excedrin.

I should mention that all of this was racing through my mind before Snow and I even got to our cabin at Estes, where I discovered that the mostly-fully-equipped kitchen did not have measuring spoons or liquid measuring cups, although we did have dry measuring cups.  I had already promised Snow and Margene that our menu would consist of scones for breakfast on Saturday morning, and shepherd’s pie, green salad and strawberry-peach pie for dinner on Saturday night.  Of course I would not dream of letting my dear pals down.  I would have to fly by the seat of my (comfy, roomy, wide-bottomed) pants and rely on my own good senses of sight, touch and taste to produce something good.  I would not dwell overmuch on the possibility of failure, of presenting leaden, rock-hard scones and pie with the appearance of parchment and the texture of Bazooka bubblegum to a crowd of people who I was meeting for the first time, and who had traveled considerable distances to get here.  I had nothing to fear here, nothing at all.

Note to Snow:  Yes, I know I spent the entire weekend telling you that I was worried about the pie crust, and that my hands shook as I made the scones.  Yes, I know that I was not nearly as phlegmatic as I sound here.  Please stop laughing before you blow my cover.

Friday afternoon, as people began to arrive and the atmosphere became merrier and merrier, I decided to start the pie dough.  Because I know better than to triple a two-crust pie recipe under even the best circumstances, I decided to make three batches, one right after the other.  Flour, sugar, salt, mix, mix, mix:  so far, so good.  Butter was cut in until the telltale “coarse cornmeal with a few bigger butter flakes” texture was achieved.  Egg yolks, cold water, stir, stir, stir.  In general, baking books will tell you to use a light hand with mixing liquids into pie dough, to keep it from getting too tough.  In my early pie-baking days, I took this advice way too seriously, and would underhydrate and undermix my doughs, resulting in crumbly messes that would shatter when I tried to roll them out.  It was the great Vogue foodwriter Jeffrey Steingarten who codified this as the Nasty Gluten Theory, and who discovered that while you don’t want excess gluten, you do need at least some gluten to hold your finished crust together.  Since I learned this, I have become a bit more fearless about adding liquid to pie dough, and about kneading it a little bit, just doing whatever it takes to hold that pie together.

It is a difficult thing to remain fearless when you add water to the dough, then more water, then more water, then even more water, only to see your dough remain a crumbly, powdery, stubborn mass.  I added more water.  kneaded a bit, noticed that the dough had gone from crumbly and powdery to very, very, very well-hydrated—and am I imagining things, or is the dough springing back a bit, the way you want it to spring for bread dough, but is absolutely anathema to pie crust?  Yikes!  Wrap that sucker up in plastic, shape it into a disk and get it in the fridge right now!

Dear friends, this happened three times, with every damn batch of pie crust.  It happened again later that night, as I took all the dough from the fridge, rolled out three sheets of dough for the bottom crusts and three sheets which would be cut into lattices for the top crusts.  I was not a happy bakerina.  I had visions of all my new friends trying to cut themselves a slice of pie, only to have the pie plate ricochet off the knife and against the kitchen wall.  I could see them now, thinking to themselves, “but I thought she was supposed to be a baker or something?  She’s not a baker!  She’s an idiot!  I know cats who can make better pie than this!” I did not get a restful night’s sleep, and I was thankful that the other four people sharing our cabin were awake by 6 a.m., so I wouldn’t have to lie in bed for another hour or two, dreaming up disaster scenarios.

If it’s Saturday morning, it must be time for scones, and for a fresh round of nerves involving baking powder.  I turned on the oven, assembled my mise en place, took a deep breath and reminded myself that generations of bakers turned out bread and cake without written recipes.  You have spent your entire sentient life with your hands in dough.  You feel it.  You know it. I started much as I did with the pie dough:  flour and salt into the bowl; just enough sugar to make it a little sweet, but not too much; baking powder—now, you know how much you usually use, and you know what it looks like in the bowl, so just put in about 3/4 of that, and you should be in the right range, but cross those fingers anyway; butter, and plenty of it; enough buttermilk to moisten it all through.  Need a little more buttermilk?  Glug—that’s enough.  I floured the counter, patted out the dough, cut it into wedges, put it on the baking sheet, banged it into the oven, and sat at the oven door, peering through the window, waiting for the scones to rise and then collapse from what was surely too much baking powder, or to remain unrisen from what was surely too little baking powder.

Dear friends, they rose, but they did not collapse.  They stayed put, they took on a little light color at the top and a beautiful deep gold color on the bottoms, they worked. With a little adjustment to the amount of buttermilk, the second batch worked even better, and the last batch was the gold standard, the perfect balance of ingredients, handling and timing.  I would not have to serve hockey pucks to the knitterinas.  We would have scones with butter and jam (including some truly gorgeous apricot-canteloupe jam made by Miriam).  We would be well-fed for the trip to Wool Market.  Life would be good.  It was, too.

Of course, this startling display of competency did nothing to reassure me that the pies would turn out edible.  It would take more fretting, more reassurance from Snow and Kristi that the pie crust scraps did not chew like bubblegum and were tasty to boot, the actual assembly (including the mixing of fruit and sugar and thickener, which is, truthfully, the most relaxing part of putting it all together) and baking of the pies, and the assurance of all at dinner that they really, really liked the pie, to convince me that maybe, just maybe, I could bake at altitude after all.

In hindsight, three hours of altitude sickness seems like a small price to pay for such deep satisfaction.

Note:  If you are wondering how I could spend a weekend in the company of so many new friends, only to drop a few thousand words on nothing but my own personal baking neuroses, I promise that it’s not because I’m a loathsome solipsist (even though I’m sure plenty of you would confirm that I am, and I would thank you for it .  It’s just that I had the pleasure of meeting a lot of people, but I did not have the foresight to unpack my notebook and get everybody’s URLs and email addresses.  I am crossing my fingers that at least one of my traveling companions was more scrupulous about getting the list of attendees than I was, so that I may shamelessly crib from their notes and give proper shoutouts to everybody without accidentally leaving anybody out.  Said proper shoutouts will probably occur upon my return to New York on Wednesday night.  Until then, dear friends.