They come in pairs

It's been oft-observed that newborns/babies/toddlers are a lot like drunks. Either they can’t speak, refuse to speak, or speak incoherently in their loudest outside voice. They cry for no damn reason. They don’t do what you tell them to do, or even cooperate with you when you try to do something for them. They are easily distracted, prone to wandering off if left unattended. They can be surprisingly, mindlessly strong, yet they flop around bonelessly and force you to carry them. Sometimes they throw up on you!

What I haven't heard expressed as much (or at all) is that being the parent of a newborn/baby/toddler is a lot like being drunk yourself. I've found this to be the case, at any rate, especially in the newborn phase. Dealing with a very small child isn’t reminiscent of dealing with a drunk when you’re sober, it’s a lot more like dealing with someone six sheets to the wind when you are also slightly incapacitated.

This may, I admit, be a bit of experiential bias on my part. Tally up and chart the misspent nights of my youth and the tallest column would be above the heading Nights When I Was The Wrecked One Being Taken Care Of, with a much, much shorter column beside it labeled Nights When I Was Pretty Buzzed But Taking Care Of Someone Else In Worse Shape. The highly elusive Nights When People I’d Be Inclined To Take Care Of Went Out Drinking Without Me, Or I Went Along But Abstained would not necessarily register. So that’s my personal context.

Mainly it comes down to sleep deprivation, which is inescapable when you have a baby. So all you want to do is go to sleep, so much so that you have trouble holding your eyes open, and yet your drinking buddy is clamoring for another bottle. You feel punchy, and occasionally downright dizzy. Your inhibitions go down and you’re liable to lose your temper more easily. You have the munchies (like All. The. Time.)

And yet, you do feel an outsized amount of indulgent love for the person who is keeping you away from your bed and/or functional clearheadedness. You don’t want to encourage their antics, and yet you often find yourself giggling at the crazy things they do or say (or try to do or try to say while sailing wildly wide of the mark). These are not the rational actions of someone who is in a completely different state of chemical equilibrium from the bundle of chaos in their nominal stewardship. They’re more the marks of a co-conspirator, an equal offender who just happens to be the slightly more highly functioning half of the pair at the moment. That’s the way it strikes me, anyway.

(Just for the record, this is a thought that was foremost in my mind probably six to eight weeks ago. This is about the time when it has finally become funny to me.)

Collecting Movies (Iron Man 3)

A couple of Fridays ago I finally saw Iron Man 3, along with my buddy Clutch (who had also somehow not managed to make any opening weekend showings), and we both enjoyed it and our joint verdict was that it was solidly good, better than Iron Man 2, not as good as The Avengers … but then again, how could it be? But then again and again, the comparison is really inevitable, and that kicked off something like an hour long discussion outside the theatre afterwards, with (what I thought were) some interesting conclusions.

The main upshot was this: the movie franchises which Marvel Studios has direct control over (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, The Avengers as opposed to properties like X-Men and Spider-Man which are owned by other entities) now comprise their own cinematic universe, where all the stories take place in the same continuity and occasionally affect each other indirectly or cross over with one another explicitly. And that’s essentially how the comic book Marvel Universe has operated since its inception back in the early 1960’s. The theory with comic books is that you could engage with them either shallowly or deeply and be well entertained. An old saw of the industry (which admittedly is not followed so much any more) held that any issue could be someone’s first issue, and therefore a fair amount of background information and explanation should be part and parcel of every single story. This could be handled perfunctorily or elegantly in any number of ways. In the same vein, each issue should be a more or less self-contained and satisfying story, often ending in some kind of cliffhanger but still having provided a reasonable amount of resolving narrative beforehand.

If you were to read not just a single random issue but several consecutive issues, on the other hand, you would get multiple chapters of a long, ongoing story, with a deeper understanding of the recurring characters and how things got where they are. Furthermore, if you read not just one title regularly, but several, your experience would be commensurately deeper still, and when e.g. Iron Man found himself face to face with the Asgardian Destroyer, you would remember the times Thor had faced off against that enchanted armored automaton. And then every once in a while there would be a Major Event comic that involved just about every character, which would be all things to all people: a chance for the casual fan to be introduced to all the disparate elements of the fictional universe at once (hopefully hooking them in to explore some of those other titles) and a chance for the hardcore to enjoy an all-star greatest hits spectacular.

Note that what I am describing is basically the Perfect Bronze Age of Marvel Comics, specifically (which lucky for me was happening right when I was a kid in the 70’s and 80’s). I assume a lot of people think of comic books more along the simpler model of, say, Superman in the 50’s, where not only did having read last month’s Action Comics add absolutely nothing to the experience of reading this month’s, but in fact if you stuck around long enough you’d start to see the same basic story formulas repeated ad nauseum. What Marvel really contributed to the artform was the idea that someone could be a lifelong reader of any given comic and therefore the characters should age (gradually) and evolve (sometimes erratically) and keep the same people coming back for more, rather than relying on a fresh crop of seven-year-olds rotating in and out regularly.

Anyway, movies haven’t followed this model of storytelling and audience cultivation, and that’s fair because of the vast logistical differences between making comics and making movies. But Marvel Studios somehow got people to buy into the idea that movies could at least try it. The fact that the original Iron Man movie was a surprising success certainly helped, otherwise Samuel L. Jackson showing up in the middle of the credits and dropping vague hints about a superhuman initiative might have just been a throwaway gag. But then they got Hulk back on track, and introduced Black Widow in Iron Man 2, and introduced Hawkeye in Thor and by the time they got to Captain America they were able to make it a period piece with a modern-day epilogue that teases The Avengers in no uncertain terms.

Admittedly, my analogy falls apart a little bit at this point, if you’re a stickler. Marvel Comics introduced The Avengers as an ongoing comic title fairly early on and it was just another monthly title among a couple dozen, not a Major Event. It brought together Iron Man and Thor and the Hulk (and Ant-Man and the Wasp) in one place so that every month a reader had the choice of following their adventures as a team, or any individual hero’s solo title, or any combination thereof. The Major Events with universe-wide scope would come later. In the movies, The Avengers was the Major Event, and it was a mega-blockbuster and an all-encompassing story because the cinematic universe only consists of four other franchises. Maybe someday The Avengers might be a movie franchise with its own focus while a dozen other franchises play out in their own corners and then they can pull together an overstuffed epic hyper-blockbuster combining all of them that really is the equivalent to Marvel Comics’ Infinity Gauntlet or Evolutionary War or whathaveyou. Sounds crazy, but then again, ten years ago the idea of putting together enough successful solo hero movie franchises to then merge them into an Earth’s Mightiest Heroes movie that wasn’t suffocated by backstory seemed crazy, too.

(Uber-geeky sidenote: a lot of people assumed that the teaser appearance of Thanos the Mad Titan in the credits of The Avengers signaled that he would be the big bad for Avengers 2. In the comics, Thanos was the big bad in the Infinity Gauntlet event miniseries I mentioned above. For all we know, Marvel Studios could be playing a very long, slow game here, and Avengers 2 will have nothing to do with Thanos, but he will keep making cameo appearances here and there in various Marvel movies, some of them directly related to Avengers, some of them less so, until they are finally ready to unleash the mega-hyper-blockbuster of my dreams, which would cost $400 million just in actors’ salaries alone but would gross $9 billion at the box office. We shall see.)

Anyway, whenever Marvel Comics concludes a big Major Event, the monthly comic book titles keep on coming out same as always. And that was pretty much how I felt about watching Iron Man 3 after having seen The Avengers. Iron Man 3 felt like a monthly issue of Iron Man: a good story that continued developing the characters in meaningful ways, and which even reflected what had just happened in the big Avengers event, but which felt a little scaled back. And as a lifelong comic book fan, I didn’t see that as a bad thing at all. That’s the way it’s supposed to be with these characters. They have universe-shaking adventures, and then they have quotidian adventures, and they go back and forth. And they go on and on.

Which is of course in direct contradiction to what Nolan did with the Dark Knight Trilogy (as I’ve meditated upon at some length). Iron Man 3 is not the end of Iron Man’s story, for better or for worse. We know we’ll see him again in Avengers 2 (and presumably Avengers 3) and we may very well see him in Iron Man 4. At some point Robert Downey Jr. will no longer be able to pull off Tony Stark (and that will be a damn shame, because he is the best thing about those movies and I lay almost all the credit for the existence and success of this insane Marvel cinematic universe at his feet) but maybe they will find some way around that. I still fully endorse the idea that movie trilogies are a valid method of cinematic storytelling, and that they require a definitive ending to really work. I’m glad Nolan did what he did with Batman. But I’m also glad Marvel Studios is doing what they’re doing, embracing open-ended serialization and ever-escalating scope and stakes. I am unreasonably excited about the forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy movie, simply because I have so fully bought into this cinematic universe.

And that leads to the personal revelation I had outside the theatre: the movies now are what the comics once were, to me. I no longer collect Marvel comics, though they’re still cranking them out. I have many fond memories of my collecting days and don’t regret or begrudge them, but I’ve drifted away from them. I no longer feel compelled to keep up with them at all. But I do feel compelled to keep up with the Marvel Studios movies, to watch every single one and figure out how they all fit together, to go into The Avengers 2 not as a casual fan of the spectacle but as someone who knows all the backstory and will get all the inside references (which, granted, will likely include not only movie callbacks but Easter eggs from the published comics as well). And for the moment, I am all in. Maybe all the Marvel Studios franchises will run themselves into the ground after their natural ending points have come and gone in their third installments, but then again maybe they'll stay strong (Star Trek VI was pretty good) or even prove unsinkable (like James Bond). Either way, I am obviously pretty geeked about going along for the ride.

In my cups

In case I came across as a bit extra-ogre-y in yesterday’s post, let’s see what 24 hours have managed to do to lighten things up. (I know it’s rare that I write about work two days in a row, but things are really reaching maximum levels of are you kidding me.)

So the conference call yesterday was scheduled for a time when I am usually on the train, and my government boss knew that and was fine with me calling in from my cell, so I left at the usual time. I kept an eye on my timepiece and at the appointed hour I dialed in. And was immediately asked for a passcode. Which I did not have written on the scrap of paper where I had jotted down the conference call number, so I tried to avail myself of the operator, only to wind up on hold for many minutes on end. I had e-mailed my boss a run down of all the information that I could have possibly provided on the call, so I just hoped for the best and hung up and steeled myself for a bumpy morning.

But today was fairly smooth. My boss stopped by to say that the whole call took only 5 minutes, the IT director is on our side, and we should start seeing some results. So, woot woot there. I still have no idea who actually owns the systems I’m trying to get access to, but the IT director himself took responsibility for finding out or signing the authorization paperwork himself, so that’s a plus. All my boss asked me to do was e-mail the IT director a technical overview of what specific technologies the system I’m trying to migrate runs on. No problem.

So then, mid-morning or so, I was contacted by the IT director’s assistant, who had questions for me about my clearance level for classified access and whatnot. Apparently, if I were an IT employee myself, whether government or contractor, I would have gone through very specific background checks, but as I’m a contractor on a more general assignment I wouldn’t have, necessarily. I OK’ed him looking up my info, and it turns out I don’t have the special bonus investigation on record. So now that’s another hoop to be jumped through, albeit one where I only have to fill out some paperwork and then wait for the investigation to proceed. This seems to be yet another example of how this whole project has dragged on and on for so long that the floor has literally shifted beneath my feet. Back at the beginning the coordinator between my agency and IT identified what needed to be done and I’ve been doing those things, and in the mean time new policies have gone into effect and what the old coordinator originally laid out as a roadmap has now been superseded so that in some ways it’s like I’m starting from square one.

But one additional bit of good fortune (derived pretty much directly from having the IT director on our side now) is that it is possible for me to obtain a waiver and start the next phase of work on the project sooner rather than later, with the background investigation still pending. Presumably if I were to fail the background check my permissions would be immediately revoked. And I kind of would love to see that happen, if it happens after I’ve moved the damn system where it needs to be, because honestly if I’m not allowed to touch it again after it’s moved I don’t care. I just need to move it. Or have someone else move. But no one else will move it, so that’s on me. And I should be starting that move soon.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the work-play equation, I happily noticed that the brand new neighborhood brewpub within walking distance of my house, which has had an OPENING SOON! banner in the window for several months now, is in fact about to throw its grand opening bash. It is doing this a week from tomorrow, and I am very tempted to attend, even though that would mean getting home from work, paying the babysitter, and loading all the kids in strollers and/or wagon to amble back up the street to the shopping center. That’s a lot of work just to get in on the ground floor of enjoying hyperlocal beer (all the better to roll my eyes and sigh disdainfully someday about how they used to be better before they sold out) but it’s good for the kids to see Mommy and Daddy supporting local businesses, right? I might need to check the local ordinances about transporting growlers of ale and small children in the same wagon. (Considering the relative age and history of my city, I would not be surprised if there actually were statutes pertaining to those exact circumstances on the books, actually.)

The main point, I suppose, is that things at work are not yet all sunshine and lollipops but they are not quite so bleak as to have me quitting in a rage. I can hang in there and continue to allow them to keep me flush with beer money, and that is on balance a good thing.

Resistant if not impervious to change

My main problem at work right now is that I have a major project which has been hanging over my head for months and is coming due early next month, with of course a great deal of it still left undone. Except really my main problem is that said project is not entirely under my control, (in fact very little of it is) and therefore no amount of extra effort on my part can push things any closer to the finish line; I am at the mercy of others who evidently could not care less about the project. Except really, REALLY, my main problem is that this whole project, and the means I am pursuing to complete it, apparently represent something the likes of which have never been seen before in my agency, if not the entire Army.

It’s not the technical requirements that are the hang-up, as far as I can tell. It simply seems to be the case that never, ever in the history of the DoD, has a computer system, even as minor as a humble workflow-management web application, been the responsibility of a contractor who is not directly assigned to the Information Technology infrastructure. So basically, by appealing to the powers that be who have direct physical control over the servers and requesting that they give me the access and permissions I would need to set up my app on a new server, I am breaking new ground and smashing into unexplored frontiers.

I should note that this was not exactly my idea. When the whole project got started I was more than happy to let other people take responsibility and do the heavy lifting, if that was what established protocol demanded. I was willing to relinquish control in the name of getting done what I need to get done (which is really stuff that other people who do the primary work on my contract need to get done). But I was told in no uncertain terms that nobody else would do the work for me, and yet I was not qualified to do the work myself. But then again, I was also told, if I got myself qualified, then I could go ahead and do the work as the doors in my way would be unbarred and opened.

Except it turns out that was all in theory only, and as I keep trying to make things happen I find myself on the outside looking not in but at a completely opaque bubble. Because I don’t work for IT, but rather for a specific agency, I don’t know the first thing about making any inroads into their world. And apparently it’s a fairly decentralized world, which means of the very few people I know from previous work I’ve done, none of them know what I need to be doing now or whom I need to be speaking to. I don’t know exactly what I need to do and I further don’t know whom to ask what it is I need to do. I don’t even know how to find out whom I need to ask. It’s not as though there’s an internal IT yellow pages I can look services up in, or a front door I can knock on. I am far from too proud to admit I don’t know what I’m doing and I could use a hand. But I have no access to making that known to someone in a meaningful way. There are no processes for me to follow, no standards to adhere to. And of course gigantic bureaucracies like the one I work for are not known for rapid responsiveness to unbridled innovation. If you're trying to do something that's never been done before, you're 90% likely to fall well short of rousing success. And right now my head is spinning just from running in circles looking for a starting point.

This afternoon my government boss and I have a conference call scheduled with the Executive Director of IT. So hopefully that will be enough to open a crack in the black bubble for me to wriggle through. I’m sure there will be other obstacles, hindrances and annoyances after that, as well. Right now we’re at that perilous juncture where it seems like the deadline is far off, because it’s next month, but it’s getting closer every day and will be here before we know it and we’re already troublingly far behind. If we at least get back on track this afternoon, that would be a good thing. But I suspect the next few Mondays may be largely range between dark mutterings and furious curses. You have been warned.

Saturday Grab Bag Cheers and Jeers

So it’s been just about a week since the internet flipped its collective chamberpots over the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones (Season Three). As I knew they would! I still recall how everyone blew it up in the aftermath of Season One’s penultimate, and since then the audience for the show has only grown. Including, of course, my wife and myself, though we are a season behind. I think my wife was impervious to spoilers about Season One’s big shocker at the time because the show was at the beginning of its rise and not on her radar at all. But now, it’s all but inescapable. So I was keeping an eye on the entertainment news as best I could, trying to figure out when the bomb would be dropped in Season Three. When I heard a preview of last week’s broadcast episode, I knew what was coming, and I warned my wife accordingly: GoT is about to infuriate everyone again. Steer clear of spoiler-y links online and whatnot. My wife appreciated the heads up and tuned the furor out.

Then on Wednesday night we managed to stay up to watch The Soup, which almost always amuses us. And we did in fact get some good giggles out of this week’s show. But R'hllor-dammit! They spoiled Game of Thrones! TO MAKE AN O.J. SIMPSON JOKE. I know it’s extremely petty, but man that stuck in my craw. Grrr.

(Technically, The Soup only partly spoiled the future (to my wife) developments. So if you happen to be talking to her, please continue to avoid the topic of GoT S3, kthx?)

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I know I’m already at risk of driving this into the ground, but I can’t help but continually find it amusing: the little guy continues to tell anyone who will listen that Toy Story is his favorite thing in the world. (Although he did admit to me that he doesn’t particularly like Toy Story 2 as much as 1 or 3, because he finds Emperor Zurg a bit too scary.) And lately the person most likely to listen (read: least likely to be able to change the subject or get away from him) is his little sister. So he’s been roping her into his re-enactments of scenes from the movie. And that in and of itself would be super-cute, but which scene is he re-enacting? The cowboy adventure of Sheriff Woody thwarting the bank robbery? The thrilling escape from Sid’s yard? The desperate chase after the moving truck?

Nah. The little guy’s favorite scene is the staff meeting in Andy’s bedroom. Which makes perfect sense, honestly. The little guy loves rules, not so much following them of course, but he loves handing them down and/or pointing out when other people aren’t abiding by them. He’s a Virgo. So he gets his sister to sit on the floor with a bunch of toys sitting around her and he stands in front of all of them and pretends to be Woody, methodically working his way through the meeting agenda, telling everyone that they need a moving buddy and so on. It is hilariously and adorably weird.

To be fair, he also is a big fan of the tea party scene. He snagged some of the fancy dress up clothes belonging to the little girl’s Minnie Mouse doll and held them on to his Buzz Lightyear action figure and said “I’m Mrs. Nesbitt!” about a hundred times the other day, cracking himself up uncontrollably every time.

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So now we’re like a little more than a third of the way through the baseball season, which continues to be the anticipated dogfight in the AL East. The Yankees went on a bit of a tear this week, but that came after a doozy of a slump, so they’re now playing catch-up to the Red Sox and the Orioles are nipping (pecking?) at their heels. If the season ended today the Yankees would be the lower-seeded wildcard team, and the O’s would miss the cutoff despite having a better record than just about any team in the AL Central (or the NL West, for that matter). But fortunately there’s a hundred more games to go!

Which is plenty of time for the Yanks to get back to being the "real" Yankees, as the franchise starters who were out with injuries on Opening Day are still slowly being brought back from the DL. I'm pleased of course with the way they've managed to hold together a winning record despite the health issues (of their decrepit roster of golden oldies) but I still have been moderately disengaged from the baseball season thus far because it feels like it hasn't truly started. (OK, having three kids including a twelve-week-old has been a bit of a distraction as well.) But hopefully it will be all good soon.

Non-random non-anecdote

This is actually a somewhat boring tidbit of information, but it’s significant and important (to me). After about six months of waiting, endless paperwork, and no small amount of simply wishing I had been born, raised and lived out my life on an anarcho-syndicalist commune, my request to short-sell my townhouse has finally been officially approved. Just before I turned 30 (which coincided with the swollest part of the housing bubble, wheeee) I bought a skinny little three-floor two-bedroom unit of my very own, my first foray into property ownership. Since then the following things have happened, approximately in this order:

- my wife and I started dating
- she moved in
- we got engaged
- she changed jobs
- we got married
- I changed jobs
- she changed jobs again
- we had a baby
- I changed contracts at my job
- we bought a much bigger house together
- I became a landlord by renting out the townhouse
- we had another baby
- she changed jobs again
(- and again)
- I stopped renting out the townhouse and put it on the market
- we had yet another baby

And now, finally, for the first time ever I am going to go through the closing process on the seller’s side, some time in the next six weeks. And lucky me, I don’t have to bother with any of the messy complications of actually making any money from the sale. Seriously, though, even when we were renting the townhouse we were losing money on it every month, between the gap between rent and the mortgage, the condo association fees, and while it’s been on the market, the power and water bills. At this point I could not care less about the absence of capital gains in the transaction. (It’s not like I need to roll the equity into a new house, not this year anyway.) I will be quite happy to be rid of the albatross around my neck.

No offense.

All aboard

This past Saturday was the day of our local Train Day (technically the 19th Annual Manassas Heritage Railway Festival, but always Train Day to us) and this year the whole five man band that is my family trekked on down to Old Town to check it out. My wife strapped the baby to her chest and I took charge of showing the little guy and little girl around, but since the little girl basically insisted on being carried all day, that meant doing the best I could to kind of verbally herd my son through the crowds. Honestly, he did pretty well at that. And we luckily bumped into some of our neighbors, who have a son around the little guy’s age, and somehow we co-opted the additional set of parents into helping us wrangle our little trio in addition to their only child.

Even with some neighborly assistance, I wouldn’t call it easy bringing the whole brood out for an event, but I do feel like we’re finally learning a thing or two. We slathered the kids in SPF 75 Million before we left the house, and despite the blazing sun none of them got burned. We got there right when things started so that we could see everything before we’d need to leave to get the little ones home for lunch and naps. We completely avoided the vendors section of the festival, to circumvent any potential buy-me-that meltdowns. We got sno-cones, but not until close to the end, so that we could kind of keep using the promise of them as a motivator for as long as possible. So that all worked out all right, and the main objective was accomplished: the kids sure did get to see a lot of trains.

You may not be aware of it, but Lego has made some serious inroads into the train enthusiasts’ realm of late. The centerpiece attractions of Train Day are classic model train sets, with separate tables displaying the works of various model railroad clubs (I was going to make a joke about “and support groups” but I do live in a very geeky glass house of my own) but there is an official Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area Lego Train Club and a couple of amateur Lego train modelers who display as well. And of course the Lego tables are a bit more interesting to small children, with the bright-colored blocks and people and whatnot. For what it’s worth, they’re more amusing to me as well; I can appreciate the amount of work that goes into carving a flocking foamcore so that it looks just like a real miniature hillside or layering blue-tinted polyurethane so that it resembles an actual lake, but it does get to the point where if you’ve seen one O-scale countryside you’ve seen them all.

Honestly, one of these years I should bring a notebook to Train Day and make some kind of tally of how many of the model train display tables are fully (boringly) dedicated to pastoral realism and how many throw some fantastical Easter-egg type elements in. I know there was at least one table this year that had a Godzilla action figure stomping through a downtown diorama, and another had the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile waiting at a crossing gate. But what I took for a surprising number just had tracks running over grass.

The WamaLTC table had different sections along each side, with a business district full of Lego skyscrapers, a downtown full of Lego shops and restaurants, a fairground full of Lego carnival rides and a waterfront with Lego boats and bridges. The fairground had a moving ferris wheel with different pairs of Lego people riding in each car including, as my wife pointed out, “a gorilla and a centurion … for some reason”. (I also overheard another dad pointing out to his son, while looking at the downtown scene, “Look, a zombie! No … wait … I think that’s a mime.” Which was good for a hearty internal chuckle from me.) The table had a fair amount of random wackiness, but overall I guess it was what you might call Lego-realistic.

As opposed to one of the Lego tables not in the main pavillion, which was a patchwork of pop culture properties: one corner with city buildings swarming with superhero Lego characters, another corner with Star Wars, another with Lord of the Rings, and yet another with Harry Potter Lego castles and, of course, the Lego Hogwarts Express. Oh, and Disney characters, including the Lego versions of various Toy Story characters. And since Toy Story continues to be the little guy’s obsession of the moment, that uber-whimsical table was not only the first table we stopped at, it was the last one as well, as the little guy insisted we check it out again before we left.

I tend to think of Train Day as an indulgence on the little guy’s behalf, but I was surprised by how taken with it the little girl was, too. She ate it right the heck up and could not get enough of the model trains, giving me a constant refrain of “more choo-choo?” all morning. Even the sets I considered visually dull were fascinating to her. I suppose it’s got a lot to do with the magic of objects which move under their own power, even if all they do is go around and around in a circle (and sometimes into and out of tunnels). Still, it’s good to know that the train table I cobbled together for the little guy should continue to get a fair amount of use for years to come.