The Good Gosling News or the Bad?

In the nick of time, a new baby gosling.

Regular readers may recall that back on 10th June I posted news and a picture of a new arrival; our first and only (at the time) new-hatched gosling. On the 13th I posted pics of his first exploration out of doors, being 'minded' by his bodyguard of Mum, Aunt(s) and Dad. Those readers may be wondering why they have not heard from him since. I have neglected to mention a small tragedy that happened here, the disappearance of this first gosling.

Our 2nd 2017 gosling - we hope he fares better than the first.

I discovered the loss on the first day of shearing those Texels (20th June). I had been out all morning at the sheep, so I had left the birds all shut up for the time I was absent, ever fearful of a repeat of our day-time fox-raid back in November. Everybody, including the gosling, had all gone to bed as normal on the evening before.

I'll just build a cage round these beans then,
to stop the chickens, shall I?

Only when I got back from the shearing and let them out, did I see the three adult geese come marching out as normal with not a bother on them but no gosling. I thought at first that he might be having a lie in, still in the nest with the still-broody 4th bird. Also pointing to this was the complete lack of excitement and separation-anxiety that parent geese show when momentarily separated from their babies.

Good chard and calabrese coming off the Kitchen Garden

Well, later in the day the 4th bird came off and no sign of the gosling. I have had a good look round and can find no little carcass or fluff or any sign of him. He could not have got out of the house so my best guess is that either a predator (rat? mink?) has come in through one of the small above-ground holes) and taken him, or he has nipped out from the goose-bit into the wider coop and been either nabbed there or got himself wedged in a tight spot between tools, the wood pile or what ever. If the latter then he must have been dead by that lunchtime because all was silent; no baby goslings screaming for release. When the geese finally finish with the nest (more of that later!) I will have a complete de-clutter and deep clean in there and may find his little dried up form but I don't hold out much hope.

Tubs and Toms out front

Since the 20th, our always-chaotic goose-breeding 'system' has involved just waiting for the #4 adult, who had stayed on the nest, to get bored and decide that the ancient eggs on which she sat were never going to hatch. By last weekend we were running out of patience, Liz had started asking when I would be able to deep-clean that shed and I was thinking I would wait till the goose went out for a 'toilet break', close the door on her and clean it all out from "under her", as it were.

Stumpy and her 5 chicks.

Well, just to prove that sometimes the sitting bird knows best, I went out to shepherd them home on Sunday 9th July and behold! There was a tiny new hatched gosling out on the grass with them. A nice surprise and #4 bird has earned herself a stay of execution. I will give her another good week before the bedders move in to change the sheets and make the beds. I will also be on tenterhooks and not wanting to leave them in of a morning for a week or so, in case the "safe from foxes" jinx strikes twice.

Big Red and her 4

While I'm on birds, I was witness to a very sweet "Mother and Toddler Group" meeting a few days back, when all 3 'yard' hens and their baby chicks wandered round through the cattle race and into the kitchen garden where 'Beebs', our mint-patch hen, is still minding her 7. So I had, briefly all 4 Mums and 19 chicks milling about, mingling a bit. The three visitors were quite cool with this liaison but Beebs was chuntering a bit at the 'encroachment' onto HER territory and called for her gang to gather close. Eventually our big sex-change rooster, Herme wandered over curious as to what all the excitement was about and then all 4 Mums gathered their tribes and melted away. Meeting over.

Glut of chard leaves? Liz makes this lovely "Tourtes aux Blettes"
See text. 

Meanwhile, in the kitchen we have both been busy based on the very successful harvest of our first blackcurrants - 3 kg already from our few bushes, some good calabrese, courgettes, an armful of chard leaves and the arrival of my 'banneton'. The latter is a special ridged bowl for making your sour-dough finish its final prove in a professional shape.

A 'banneton'. A fancy proving bowl for your sour dough.

The black currants have mainly gone into the freezer as we have a great stash of jam from previous years and need no more. Some have re-appeared as a dessert tart and more as home-grown 'Ribena'. More will be re-incarnated as Creme de Cassis which we love mixing with fizz to make Kir (Royale). The calabrese just got steamed that night with our roast chicken and fresher, darker, squeakier veg you would struggle to find. Gorgeous.

Sour dough loaf ex the new banneton. 

The chard gets split stems from leaf blades and the blades, Liz tried out in a new (to us) recipe, Tourtes aux Blettes. "Chard Pie?" I hear you squeak dubiously. Well this one is from Mediterranean cookery and was a revelation. It is quite sweet and the filling includes the chard leaves for body but also raisins soaked in brandy overnight, pine nuts, grated apple, eggs and sugar. The pastry is extra-short and includes icing sugar. Unusual but delicious. If you have a chard glut, then give it a try. Recipes are all over the Internet.

You saw that focaccia in the last post, still raw. This is the same
cooked to golden perfection. I was impressed. 

My banneton sourdough proving-bowl was a great success. It is a very lightweight thing, apparently made from paper like that used in egg boxes, so you'd never want to get it wet washing it up. You dust it well (with rice flour in this case) to stop the dough sticking, then when you tip the finished dough-ball out, give the bowl a sharp tap to shake off excess dusting flour. Mazy, I know, has a rattan/wicker one.

Finally a couple of pictures of that focaccia which I had not yet put into the oven as I went to press last time. Here it is now cooked to golden perfection. It was gorgeous and has earned it's place in our "keepers" recipe files.

Our dark buddliea. Not a butterfly in sight on these rainy
windy July days. Ah well.

Most of it disappeared as a sauce-dipping bread in a pasta I cooked a couple of days back with a bacon, mushroom, onion and tomato cream sauce. Perfect.

And that's about it for this one.

Tweet Tweet

This little mite hatches yesterday (we think) and manages to get
out of the nest. We find him cheeping frantically and waddling
round the shed floor. Fear not, all ends well. 

A Birth is Announced! Best news, I expect, for this post is that we finally have a hatch of goose eggs, this a good 2 weeks after the "due date" for the original eggs (27th May). The reason for this is that the 3 Mum/Auntie geese keep leppin' in and out of the nest after #1 goes broody and the eggs you set get trampled. These will be more recent eggs. Our goose breeding is definitely chaotic.

Curator-ing the @IrelandsFarmers Twitter account

This little mite announced his presence with frantic loud cheeping you could hear across the yard even through the excited honking of 4 adult geese, He'd got out of the nest which means a 4-5 inch "fall" out of the former concrete cattle-trough in which they nest and was a bit lost running round the floor, not trying very well to get back into the nest. It could have ended badly. We had one gander one year so annoyed by the appearance of this new, noisy, scurrying "rat" that he grabbed it by a wing and threw it across the shed, badly damaging it.

But not THESE parents. They lower their necks and chunter at him encouragingly from close range so that he stands up to his full 4 inches of height and wobbles his head proudly. The gander (Gorgeous George) has amazed all of us by being even better a dad than the ladies are mums or aunts. They get distracted, he stays focused. All 4 would protect the little fella with their lives and get very excited and angry at anyone who comes near. That was my problem. If I needed to rescue him back to the nest I knew I would need the chainsaw helmet, gloves, a coat with thick sleeves and so on. A relief then at 6 pm ish to see him back in the nest and now accompanied by a sibling. I can sleep easy and undamaged! Wish the little ones luck.

The Hubbards at Day 5 are growing a-pace. They have lost the
spherical look and already have white wing feathers.

This, though, seems to have been a week where we have both "worked" for hours without actually achieving anything around the farm, not a stroke of weeding, mowing or tidying. For Liz there has been the normal working week plus all the politics to follow, both in the US (Comey's testimony to the Senators) and in the UK (May's snap election and subsequent need to get into bed with the DUP).

Potential fruit #1 : Cherries

Liz always stays up for the results and normally takes the day after as holiday to sleep and recover. This time she was denied the holiday by boss John who suddenly had a funeral to attend, so she had to go in "even if she slept for most of it". The office must be manned and the phones answered at least from 09:30 to 13:30, Mon-Fri. In the end she gave up on the  voting coverage at 03:30, slept a while, worked the morning, then caught up by sleeping from 3 till 6 pm. There's dedication.

My 'job' was to be 'Curator' of the @IrelandsFarmers Twitter account, the voice of Twitter-using Irish farming for the week from Monday morning (5th June) to Sunday evening, tomorrow. Most of my readers, I know, have nothing to do with Twitter even if they are regulars on Facebook. It is seen as too 'ephemeral', sound-byte-ish, fleeting and short lived. You post your comment of 140 characters max and if no-one's paying attention it vanishes down the screen quickly replaced by the next Tweet. It is seen as the medium of smart, office, city types clip-clopping across marble floors in their heels, their thumbs and noses glued to the ever-on expensive smart phones and 'tablets'. It is used by vacuous, brainless celebrities and, of course, Donald Trump

Potential fruit #2 :Plums

Stick with it, though, and you can find sensible, intelligent chatter within and between groups of like-minded souls, whether your thing is politics, news, Ireland or more specialist subjects like farming or even smallholdering. When this happens, someone will generally decide that the subject "needs an account" on Twitter so they set one up and start trawling for members to join them. In this case they give the helm of the account to a different person each week, the "Curator". Friends of the blog may recall that I have curated the @smallholderIRL account 3 times now and I love having the extra following (numbering thousands of people all round the world) for the week with whom to share my news, pictures, anecdotes and banter.

Potential fruit #3 : "Irish Peach" variety of apple

All well and good. Small Holdering is the home turf and I'd know a good few people on that group through Facebook or in real life. I am happy to go on that one and strut my stuff, reasonably confident of a sympathetic reception and not too much "trolling" (idiots who are just out to argue and spoil the chat). But then I was invited to curate the 'proper' farmers' one @IrelandsFarmers. I accepted but if I'm honest I was a bit nervous. How would they accept me, this wannabee farmer, blow-in, smallholder and a Brit besides?

Potential fruit #4 : (pea sized) Peaches

I needn't have worried - it has gone really well with 95% of the stuff getting favourable comment ('Likes' and 'Re-tweets') and only the odd one completely blanked or ignored. I have covered a good range of stuff - the holding here and its stock, equipment, activities as well as what I like to do when NOT farming and some anecdotes on disasters and triumphs. One post I was very pleased with had me showing that picture of the house circa 1900 alongside one of me sitting out front on the mini-horse and cart. As I go to press I have just looked in and that one has been seen by 6713 people, 93 have said they 'like' it and 16 have shared it on ("re-tweeted" it). I seem to have done OK and I am delighted. I have to hand the tiller back at 6pm tomorrow. It is quite tiring and you are tied to the PC (no smart-phone for me!) frequently so I will not be sad to finish but I guess the 'owner' will happily have me back when the rota comes round again.... next year, maybe.

A poor blackbird gets dismantled overnight
in the new kitchen. We suspect feline
involvement. 

What else have we been at? I was out at the archery coach's place  putting the cover back on our enormous "gala tent" (mini marquee) ready for the summer activities, helped only by the lady of the house (Niamh) and a friend (Karl, an Austrian lad). Hard work in quite a brisk wind but very enjoyable and, like the curating, good to get it done.

We do get to eat out sometimes!

For Liz tonight a "Mystery night out" for the Lisacul Players, the amateur dramatics group still a-glow from their very successful performance of "Cupid Wore Skirts" a few months back. They had no idea where they were being taken, only that they had to show up at the village cross-roads by quarter past 7 a bit glammed up. One of the lads was organising it and he was keeping very tight lipped. Small huddles of actors formed (plus Liz and Director Tom C) frantically trying to work it out from the time, the need for €20 as a share of the mini-bus hire and their knowledge of 'Derek' (organiser) where they might be bound. One actor was praying that he'd not take them anywhere with Country music - she can't abide that, she said.

Well. Now they know. I have just had a text from Liz to say they are at a place called "The Oarsman" in Carrick on Shannon. She will no doubt fill us all in on the standard of the place's catering and the presence or absence of good aul' boys slapping their thighs, plucking their banjos and shouting 'Yeeee Harrr!' Y'all have the biggest time now!

Not Yellow but Primrose.

At some signal unknown to we smallholding observers, the geese suddenly decide that the time for sitting brooding on those last eggs or empty nests is over and we should all wake up one morning, stride purposefully out of the goose house and go graze the good orchard grass. This gives me a chance, at last, to nip the door shut and muck the place out. It is long overdue - so long that some of the debris underfoot is turkey feathers and we last had a turkey here on May 9th!

Marans chick.

Our final score on the goslings was just the one but we are delighted with that. Regular readers will know that we are frantically trying NOT to breed geese; we steal all the eggs we can for the kitchen and only get out-manouvred right at the end of the season when a goose goes broody on us overnight. This gosling is a possible keeper (unless he turns out to be a gander) as we have a possible problem with one of the adult birds going lame.

Take a large mixing bowl and add half a dozen newly hatched
eggs......

Since her turn at brooding she struggles to get back onto her feet but we are giving her the benefit of the doubt. Every time we get worried about her and start thinking we may need to make the tough decision, we then see all the adult birds wandering about the orchard with the gosling and not a bother on them. Maybe she is just "a bit stiff in the morning". Geese are a poor shape to be suffering from aching ankles and knees - all the weight of the breast, neck and head is well forward of the legs. Watch this space.

We love the monochrome effect of the black, grey and white
fluff on these guys.

A lot more success, fortunately, where we did want it, in the incubator hatch of the Marans eggs. Here we ended up with 6 babies in a lovely range of blacks, greys and whites. The remaining 6 eggs were infertile - just yolk and white like the day we bought them. We have passed the results to our supplier. It is not a complaint. These things happen. We just know that people would rather know that their rooster is maybe under performing. 50% is not bad in the scheme of things.

A screen-grab of the Lisacul website

Meanwhile, Liz has been having a load of fun setting up and running the village website ( www.LisaculInfo.ie ). She does this as part of her work and you will know that the '365' photographic project was born out of it and continues to supply most of the pictures which are used on the site. I am not just saying this out of loyalty - go check for yourselves - but it is a fine, bright and fresh site, always with something new to look at. It is currently being very well received by the village's on-line community but also, we know, the Lisacul diaspora all around the world. It is a website to be proud of and we both are.

Happy farmer in a recent 365 picture.

The most recent bit of fun on it was a tease around the support of Roscommon's GAA team which made the Connacht final, drew the game with Galway and must now play the replay on Sunday. I came up with the idea of taking a load of yellow and blue pics of every day objects (yellow bucket on blue trailer, coffee mugs, a WD40 can, yellow and blue flowers etc) which Liz then used in a jokey "we are being impartial in our support, honest" web-page. Incidentally, I stand corrected on this. I have been rattling on about 'yellow and blue' and I now know that we are technically 'primrose and blue'. Get back in yer box, lens-man.

Other than that, I have got over my cold and I am a picture of health again (yeah, OK). I have been out to the buildering and got involved with a fascinating 'new' technique (new to me, anyway), that of using a rough and tough version of a cake icing syringe to fire wet mortar into the gaps between the stones of an old wall.

Little Chip

This wall had been left with very fluffy 'mortar' or just dirt with a tiny bit of lime in it (and lots of rat's nest debris) between the stones, so that it looked more like a dry stone wall than a house wall. K-Dub had then made it 'worse' by raking out all the loose debris, so that the pointing cracks were 3-4 inches deep. The icing syringe, which is actually like a 3 times normal size mastic-gun, forces mortar right down into these cracks and fills them from the 'back'. If you tried to use a trowel you might get the outside filled but you would likely have great air gaps and cavities behind your pointing.

I didn't have the camera, sadly, but it is a technique I am definitely going to use on the end of my goose house, where the wall has that same 'dry stone wall' effect. I gather that the 'pros' even use a pump version to fire in a continuous tooth-paste bead from a bucket of mortar without all the business of having to refill the syringe.

Out-Foxed

Hubbard chicks at Day 21

Either our bushy tailed red 'friend' got wind of our evil intentions for him or he's way too cunning and wise to return to the same place the morning after when you might be waiting for him. He has failed to show on the last 2 mornings and the dogs have had neither scent nor sound of him and none of us have seen him. Nor did Mike the Cows who came to check on his cattle with a shot gun (broken) under his arm see anything.

All cleaned up, his fighting days done.
Our current alpha-male, Buffers.

Mike tells me that strolling around at 06:30 is no way to 'get' your fox anyway. You never see the chap, never mind get time to un-break, aim and fire. 'Round here' they would tend to go out as a gun club of a night 'lamping'; using powerful searchlights mounted on 4 x 4 trucks and shooting the yellow reflective pairs of eyes. It is unpopular though and many residents object to the engines and gun shot noise in the fields at night, so the more common method is to set snares (they say 'shnares' here). Mike happily explained this all to me, telling me where I could get good 'shnares' for 'a fiver' and how to set them in the little nip-through holes that Mr Fox uses in the hedgelines; preferably where there is a drop down so that the fox, having caught his neck in your wire, then hangs by his neck on your shnare over the drop with his feet unable to touch the ground. Nice.

Goldie's kittens are now exploring the grass. 

Well, I am sorry, but I am not about to start snaring (or even shnaring) any kind of animal. I do not mind despatching them in a quick and clean way, but the thought of a fox being slowly throttled from 8pm or so when I set the snare, to 6 am when I check them does not sit well with me. I suspect even Mike may be spinning me a yarn about how frequently they use these deadly methods. He has told me on another occasion that he bought his gun (which looks like a good one, though I've no idea really) 8-9 years ago for €2200 and has only fired it about 10 times in that period. Also that unless your cows with calves are well used to the gun noise (and he suggested that very few are) then they get really upset by the noisy intrusion. No over-loaded gibbet of corpses dripping fresh blood there then!

These later quince flowers only got a little wind-burned

So 'our' fox remains at large and seems to be staying away, at least during daylight hours. I did see him today, however, nipping across our lane at 4pm in front of my dog-walk, so we are not complacent and we are being very careful to lock everybody down as early as we can get away with it. We wonder whether he might be able to explain the disappearance of 'Blondie' but he's not coming forward to volunteer his testimony.

'Goz-1' on his hot water bottle before we rigged the heat lamp.

Meanwhile, I left you at the previous post (in a comment, anyway) with our first hatch of a gosling. This should be an exciting and happy time but sometimes these things do not go quite to plan. I had a dream of a little row of a dozen goslings following Mum to the pond for a sunny photo-shoot. Sadly we have only had the one so far (despite Black Feather and her original 12 eggs now being 8 days overdue; of which more in a later post) and that one has been ignored by the Mum and Aunt.

It floats!

We did not see them actually eject it from the nest, but they were definitely not helping it back in, so twice on its 2nd day we had to rescue it and try to return it (which got us soundly hissed at and pecked by the sitters, though they did 'allow' the baby back in to the nest edge but did not draw it back into their warm skirts). The third time it was shivering in a corner, so we rescued it and Liz had the idea of sneaking it under the broody Buff hen. That seemed to work.

Cuckoo Marans 'hin' strolls on the lawn.

We fancied we could see a new contented look come over her face as the unaccustomed warm wriggling form moved under her breast. I sat and watched for half an hour and then all seemed to be well; we left them to get to know one another. Half an hour later though, he was out on his ear again and this time Mrs Buff was not letting him back, and she tried to peck him. Well, now we were out of birdy options, so to cut a long story short he is in the brooder box under a heat lamp and we are trying to hand rear him. Thank you to Anne for the advice on this one - there is plenty to worry about.

Evening, 3 Westie romp in the orchard

If your 'chick crumb' feed is medicated for coccidiosis (many brands are) then it can be lethal to waterfowl. (Ours isn't, luckily). You need to worry about the baby 'imprinting' on you the human, thinking you are parent and then not being able to socialise properly with geese. We seem to have got away with that one - this baby spent the vital first day and a half in the goose house and met both females and George the gander. Today we showed him to George while safe inside his crate and the pair bonded gently through the bars - George seeming to be 'showing' Goz-1 how to pull and eat grass and chuntering at him, Goz-1 trying to touch beaks with 'Dad' through the wire. No-one tried to kill anyone else. It was a touching scene.

The old apple tree almost swamped by the beech and ash.

We are hoping that if more goslings hatch we might be able to sneak him back into the clutch. It can also help to suspend a mop head over the pen so he can sneak under and feel like he is being mothered. Ah well. He is drinking plenty of water and from today (his day 3) taking plenty of food from a tea spoon and from the ground, so there is more hope currently than there was when we rescued the little mite, his pathetic body wracked with spasms of shivering, while still wobbling in that half-co-ordinated way baby birds have who are still too young to have left the nest-bowl yet and should be just flopping around between the unhatched eggs, all warm under their Mum.

Hairpin bend in the apple tree trunk, the 'elbow' leaning
on the big ash. Bottom arrow shows main trunk. 

It's not all worry, mind. We have made a rather nice discovery. An old apple tree dating from TK Max's day, right down on our North border by a collapsed corrugated iron toilet-shed, is in bloom! This tree was first remembered by John Deere Bob is a gnarly old bent and ancient thing. Only about 8 feet 'tall' it actually has a main trunk perhaps 15 feet long but it grows from a bank almost horizontally till it leans an 'elbow' on a big ash tree and turns back droopily to get its branches and foliage almost back into our new pig-patch. This tree was so bent and broken looking that we assumed it was lost in the hedge, 'buried' under beech and ash growth and well over-topped by the black spruce. But today Liz found blossom on it, so we wonder whether it might bear fruit and, even if we can't rescue this tree, we might be able to take a scion and graft it onto a root-stock to save the DNA and the potentially old variety. Perhaps this old fellow has out-foxed its historic, neglectful human keepers?

(Not So) Lucky.

As promised some pictures of our first gosling 'Lucky' now warm and dry, safe and sound after his scary start. If you've not read yesterday's post you will not know that this little guy (we have no idea of sex yet, so he's a 'guy' till proven otherwise - it saves all that clumsy him/her, he/she nonsense) did not have a very promising start. His parents are all young birds, not even a year old and have (not surprisingly) not apparently developed a good parent instinct yet.

This baby hatched at about 5 pm yesterday and we only found out because of a sudden cacophony of hissing and honking in the goose house. When we went to look we at first thought the 2 geese might be fighting over the chick but it seems that, rather, the three grown ups were shocked and horrified at this wet wriggling, cheeping 'monster' arriving in their nest without warning. The Gander raced in at the noise and everyone was suddenly charging out of the goose house and off for a shout around the garden.

Nobody wanted to go back in 'THERE' and face the thing, so there was a risk he'd get cold. Eventually they all did go back in but would not get back on his nest. They stood back at full neck range and hissed at him and looked as if they were going to try a few tentative pecks. The next time I looked he was 4 feet from the nests (which now had the Mums sitting on them looking a bit breathless and ruffled but at least they were on). He looked a bit bruised and still wet, as if he'd been flung there, maybe by the Gander, perhaps mistaking him for a rat.

Thank God then for our helpful friends, Mentor Anne with lots of advice and Carolyn who already had an incubator running with duck eggs and a brooder-box with an Infra Red heat lamp shining on a group of ducklings. He was rescued and rushed down there where he is now doing OK and starting to get some strength in his legs. This takes a couple of days in geese, by all accounts, possibly as a result of them being so scrunched up in the egg and is helped, in nature, by them being close enough to water to go for some physio-therapy swimming. Meanwhile they flop about on their bellies on land building up their strength. Lucky is in with the ducklings but protected from getting trampled by the comparatively active ducklings by being mainly in his own plastic tub. We went down to visit him this morning and take these pics, and he's already starting to rear up on his legs and climb out of the tub. He has had a swim in the (bathroom) bath for his physio. Nurses Carolyn and Charlotte are very happy with him.

Meanwhile, what of the other eggs and those disastrous parents? Well, we have offers of incubation for all the remaining eggs if it comes to that (They are nearly 'cooked' anyway being on Day 32, so this would only have to be for a couple of days) or of just any that start to pip and look like they might also get rejected. There is a chance that after the first horror-struck rejection, any 2nd and third babies might be better accepted but we are under strict instructions to keep a close eye and intervene if that is not the run of things. Any more rescues can be whizzed down to Carolyn's to go stay with Lucky. They see this as fair enough given that we are looking after their 3 mini-horses. Thank you very much, C, C and M-A. It's all quiet at the moment. No more hatches as far as we can tell (as at 13:30 on Sunday) so the Mums are sitting quietly as they have done for 32 days, and the Gander is mooching about quietly just staying in range and keeping an eye. We have no idea whether we will even get any more babies hatching.

Meanwhile I couldn't resist another picture of the Disastrous Dad enjoying his bath yesterday before all this kicked off.

Oh and the 'Lucky'? I commented to Liz that it was lucky she'd chosen to take a break in the back yard just at that moment of the honking and shouting, otherwise the baby would have been lying there on the concrete till morning, presumably chilled to death. "We'd better call him 'Lucky' then!" said Liz. Then, to cap it all, the song playing on the radio as I drove to 'A&E' was that catchy "Up all night to get Lucky" by Daft Punk and Pharrel. Not sure if those boys are thinking of the same kind of 'luck' but we'll gloss over that!