Ostensibly Specious - Ep 24

Have you ever entered a building and what you see on the outside is not what you see on the inside?  That can happen in many ways, with people, things, places.  Sometimes what glitters is not always gold. In today's episode I am an unscripted, sharing a variety of experiences which involved life lessons and discovery that what you see, isn't always what you get. I also share a recent story about a tracker, and it's a little reminder that we all get forgetful from time to time, especially me! Thanks for listening! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everyone, it's Lindy here. Welcome back to the podcast. As always, I'm super delighted to be here in my little recording zone. Yeah, I record this podcast series from a little home-based office, and I'm located in the beautiful Comox Valley, Vancouver Island, right here in Western Canada. Yeah, and my name is actually Linda Leverman, but I do go by the name Lindy. That's my nickname. And I am the creator and host of this series. I do this for fun, not in this for sensationalism or anything like that, just a creative outlet for me, and I try to keep it positive, light-hearted, do my best. And on that note, I just have to mention, and I'll touch base more on it later in the episode, but yeah, my last episode. Uh, that was a big deal for me. I went and stepped a little bit outside the box and talked a bit about something that we've been dealing with on our property. And that's not something I would normally get into in a podcast, but I I guess I was just feeling a little frustrated last week and felt like I needed to share a bit of our journey and what's happening. And I will at the end of the podcast just briefly touch base on where we're at with that and talk a bit more about it, but that's not what this is all about today. Just kind of mentioning, you know, yeah, that that was a big deal for me last week. And uh I am a person who has anxiety. Uh, and it can be tricky if you've ever had anxiety. Anxiety can be a little bit tricky. And for me to step outside the box and actually on a podcast talk about a problem that we're having having with a neighbor, that was a big deal for me to do that. Now, you're gonna notice something about today's episode. I am not scripted, okay? There is no script in front of me. I don't have a bunch of notes telling me what to talk about. So if I back up and I make a little bit of an oops when I'm speaking, well, just know that's because it is just me speaking. Um, there's nothing in writing. I'm speaking from the heart, shooting from the hip, just saying it as it is, as it comes to me. I was thinking about a lot of things this week, and and I guess number one, I'm gonna say that I'm grateful to live in Canada. I'm grateful to live on Vancouver Island. I'm grateful to have good friends around me, and grateful for the partner of my life, and just really grateful for the support network that I have. So it was a really great week for us. We were able to get away and we went camping for three days. That's a big deal. Uh we hadn't been away in quite a long time. And of course, we got these little chickens out in the backyard, and okay, they're Kate, they're really more Randy's chickens. He's the one that brought them home and wanted to have them. I just kind of fell in love with them. But they are spoiled chickens. They are very much spoiled chickens, and these chickens are used to getting a special breakfast in the morning, and then they get a special afternoon snack, and they get checked in on a couple times a day and tucked in at night. And yeah, we love those chickens. So when we went away for three days, it was kind of funny. We had a team of three people helping us out so we could go. So, number one, we had a lady that I've met um through something that I'm involved in, and she's an absolutely amazing person, completely loves animals. Uh, she walks dogs for a living, and she's now helping out with our chickens. And she's a friend of mine also. So she came over and was kind of the person that was mostly looking after our chickens while we were gone. But she did have some commitments in the day and couldn't always make it for afternoon snack. So we had another friend who lives next door. Yeah, he's a really good friend. He's somebody that does not litter on our property. He's a good neighbor. And this guy was absolutely wonderful. So he came over and he was able to put afternoon snack in there for the girls. And then there was a night when we needed a third person. So my son came along and he helped do the nighttime tuck-ins that night. So we were kind of laughing. We went away for three days. We had a team of three helping with our chickens, and it wasn't that there's so much work, it's just that there's certain things that we do for them, and people were really good about helping us out so we could go away. And I'm pretty excited. We got another trip booked again soon. We're only going to be gone a couple days, and again, when we go, we have a team that's gonna look after our chickens. How lucky are we for that? Hmm. Actually, everybody who's been involved in their care has actually told us that they really like them and that they find that they're easy to fall in love with. I know my son, he absolutely loves them. He thinks they're pretty cool. And I'm thinking today now I'm gonna have to go and buy him his own pair of boots for going in the coop area. Uh, right now we just leave our boots out, and if someone's covering for us, they can wear what we wear in the coop. And we're really careful about that. We don't wear our street shoes in the coop. We don't do that at all. Um, at the rule at our house, we've got a big sign up on the gate. You gotta change your footwear before you go in, and you gotta change your footwear and sanitize and wash your hands on the way out. Uh, some people might say we're a little bit on the picky side or paranoid side. I just think that we're doing our best to be proactive, to minimize any problems that could come along. You just gotta be real careful. So yeah, it's just kind of interesting. I'm sure if you've listened to this and you have chickens, uh, you may or may not do things the same way. And you may or may not be taking breakfast afternoon snack and all these things to your chickens. But I don't know. I had a dog for many years. For 30 years, I've always had a dog in the house and I always looked after my pets the best I could. And I just look at it, chickens are no different. So yeah, it's a little bit of our past week. It was really good to get away because for us, we were we were finding that being out in the backyard was actually getting upsetting for us because we've had this ongoing issue with a neighbor, and we've had a neighbor that's been allowing pollution to come to our property for, well, we're well over 10 months now. It it has caused a lot of upset for us, and uh, it's just hard to be in your backyard when you see stuff blowing over the fence and coming into your yard, and there's nothing you can do about it but pick it up because you're not getting any help from anybody with dealing with it. So it was good for us. We had to get away because we were just so frustrated with the situation. And and you know, we did come back, and of course, yesterday we're out there working in the backyard, the windstorms are up, and this crap is blowing all over back in our yard again. And yeah, it's just what it is, and all we do is lobby more complaints and do the right thing and just keep on letting our voices be heard and hoping somewhere along the way somebody that can make it stop will make it stop. Um, but we're we're doing things the right way. We're going through uh the authorities that are there, even if they're not quick to respond, we will just keep on pushing and eventually it's gotta stop. Eventually it's gotta stop because I don't think that field full of churned up plastics next door is gonna stop anytime soon. But anyway, that's not what my podcast is about today. I just wanted to explain what's been happening in our world and how it was so good for us to get away and just to get away from that. Uh there's other things I've been kind of noticing as I've been out and about riding my bike lately, and I noticed it when we were out on our camping trip. Okay, so now we went over to the West Coast. We don't go that way very often, and it's really neat. It's a real treat to go over there, the Tefino Eucluid area. Uh, rode our bikes. I went with one of my friends, she rides an e-bike as well, too. So there was one day we rode from our campground, we rode into Euclulet, rode back to our campground. It was 41 kilometers round trip that day. Of course, we did stop for a smoothie in between, but still that's pretty darn good. And for somebody who has a hip that acts up, uh, that was really amazing for me. And that speaks loudly to the e-bikes because when I start getting on heels and it might put too much pressure on my hip, I can get a bit of assistance and I don't call it cheating. I just say it's adapting. And for somebody my age, I'm turning 60 this year, it really helps. It's meant that I can keep on riding and I'm I'm so big into physical fitness. And it's not that I'm a prime athlete. Good gosh, I never have been, but I've always found that physical exercise is something that helps me with my anxiety and just makes me feel better all the way around. If I feel that my muscles have had a bit of work, if I can get my cardio going a bit, if I can get some fresh air, it just really clears my head. Uh, and so that's why biking has always been so important for me. In fact, many years ago, it used to be running. It's just that uh due to arthritis in my back and that I can't run anymore. Wish I could, I miss it. This past year I probably would have been running a lot. But instead, I'm biking the best I can. And honestly, I'm not taking this for granted. Because as I've mentioned in other podcasts, I do have a hip that flares up. And one of the things that does flare it up for me is excessively squatting down and bending down because it has to do with how my hip is bending forward. It has to do with the physical issue that I have. So that is one of the things with this constant pollution in our backyard. It actually was causing me grief because if I had to squat down and bend over, you know, four or five hundred times in a day to keep picking something up, it was getting hard on my hip. Um, but getting away from that and back on the bike ride thing again, my goodness, it just felt so good to come back and say, wow, we did 40 kilometers that day. And it's kind of funny because I had taken a script with me on the camping trip. Okay, so I had this script and it was something I had missed my acting class that week because I'd gone camping. Uh, and it was hard for me to miss the acting class. But, you know, when we haven't been away anywhere for 10 months, we really needed just to get away for a couple of days. And so here I am, I've got my acting script. And after we did this big, long 42K bike ride, we went down to the beach with our friends. They got a great big huge dog, and it's a German Shepherd husky dog. He's a beautiful dog, uh, light blue eyes. And we get out on the beach, and the beach there is just absolutely incredible. So we went for a long, long walk, and towards the end, I'm going, uh-oh, I'm starting to feel it a little bit in the hip. I need to sit. So we went and we sat down. They continued back up to camp, and my partner and I went and found a log. It was, I don't know what the temperature was. It was like maybe 18 degrees out. It was t-shirt weather, not necessarily shorts weather, but it was t-shirt weather. So we go and we lay down on a log, put it underneath our heads, and I was really lucky there weren't a lot of bugs out at all. There just seemed to be no ants, no bugs. There was nothing out that day. And I think it was partly the season because we were doing this in May and we weren't doing this like when it was super hot out. There just weren't a bunch of ants climbing around. So yeah, lay my head down on the log, put a magazine under my head, and uh yeah, my partner lays down beside me, puts a hoodie underneath his head. We both lay on the log and I pick up the script and I'm looking at it, and I start trying to quietly rehearse the lines in my head. Then all of a sudden I open my eyes and it was an hour and five minutes later. I hadn't even got through reading the first three lines, and I was out snoring on that log. Like, oh my goodness, my poor partner is like I am a snorer, and the older I get, the worse I get. And I can't imagine it was very exciting for him to lay there for an hour with me sawing logs beside him. But I did. Anyway, so I didn't even look at the script till I got back home and I had to get up early this morning, do my recording on it. Since I'd missed the class, I did it as a tape at home where I record it and send it to my instructor. And I wish that I had uh did a bit more memorizing on the camping trip, but I I just hadn't been able to focus. And I think part of that is because we've been involved in this property battle with a neighbor, it took a lot away from me emotionally. It just drained me. And I again I go back to biking and getting out and getting fresh air, and I think uh if I can give any advice, although I say I'm not qualified to, is that if physically you are able to get outside and get fresh air, um, no matter what it is, whether you can walk, whether you can ride a bike, or even if you can just get outside and be with nature, depending on what you're able to physically do, just getting outside with nature is so good for you. It's so much therapy. And I think it's really important uh in life if you ever find yourself with something that's really getting to you, frustrating you, getting you down or upsetting you. And I can't speak to all circumstances because I know we all have different things going on in our lives, but if you can just find time to take a breather sometimes, pull yourself away from negativity, because negativity breeds negativity. And it's so important to put yourself in a positive environment. And they often say if you're looking for positive, hang around people who are positive. Because if you're hanging around people who are being negative all the time, negative is going to bring you down. And we're all dealing with stuff in our lives. We all have crap that's happening, but sometimes you have to know, okay, today I'm gonna focus on dealing with the crap, and now I'm going to put it aside because for my emotional well-being, I need to be positive. And I need to focus on things that are gonna make me happy. I need to focus on things that are gonna make me smile. And it's so important to do that. And I'm finding as I get older, I'm finding different outlets for those kinds of things that make me smile. And one of the things that's really added to being an outlet for me is finding people who are like-minded, finding people who are creative like me, people who enjoy doing the same things. And that doesn't take it all away from the friendships that I currently have. I have some really good friends, but some of us have some different interests, and that's okay. I mean, my friend that I camped with, she's an avid pickleball player. He wouldn't get me on the pickleball courts. My back couldn't handle it. I'm not good at that kind of thing, and it's just not my cup of tea. But hey, you know what? I'm really proud of my friend for doing it. In fact, I went out yesterday. I was gonna try to watch her at the courts a bit yesterday, but I missed catching her. She had just finished up when I got there and was already gone. But I had never really watched anybody play pickleball. And I'm going, huh, I always thought pickleball was an old person sport. And I'm out there looking at it and going, there's people of all ages playing it, and that's not an old fogey sport. Uh-uh-uh. No way. I mean, you're busy. It's just like playing badminton or tennis. It's it's a great sport. So yeah, kudos to the pickleball players out there. I I wish I could do it. I couldn't. I just wouldn't be able to take the jolting. But yeah, so it's kind of neat. So my friend's really into pickleball. She's also very musical. Um, but I understand what she does, and I try to be supportive of what she does, and she tries really hard to be supportive of what I do. And she's always been that way with me. When it came to my book, when I first um released my first self-published book, a short story, she was super helpful and super supportive. And yes, I had some blunders along the way, and she helped me work through those blunders, and she helped me see the positives and things, even when I was having a hard time struggling with being hard on myself over a few little mistakes and things. So it is so important when you're hanging out with people, find the right people who are going to support you, people who are gonna build you up, people who are going to um make you leave the room smiling, don't have you leave the room with anxiety, your head down, frowning, upset. Uh, and I think it's so important when you're hanging around with people, it's great to be with people when they're also able to shut down from this digital world. Because, I mean, here I am, I'm recording on a digital platform right now, but I have to get away from scrolling and I have to get away from this endless ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, because it really can overtake your life when you've always got this ding, ding, ding, ding, ding going on your phone. I didn't answer this one, I didn't answer that one, or I got to text this one back, I gotta text that one back. And sometimes it's just easier to just pick up the phone and call. And instead of sitting and texting, you know, for 20 minutes straight, I'll just call you and we can talk like we used to do. Huh. That's how we used to do things. Sometimes going backwards is going forwards. We just don't always see that in the moment. Hey, I got a funny story I can share with you. Okay, this is actually kind of funny. So we were packing up the car, getting ready to go camping, and I'd gone out and I bought some groceries, and I always have like a bag of reusable bags in my car. Like where I live in British Columbia, they don't have plastic bags in the stores anymore. I don't know where you live, but where I live, they that's just not allowed anymore. Um, so I have these reusable bags in my car, and I try to take them in the grocery store when I go for groceries, and when I come home and they come in, I often run them through the wash with my laundry. Just try to keep things clean and then I put them back in the trunk of my car. Anyway, Randy's helping me load the groceries in after I came back from shopping, and he comes in the house, he's got this little round thing. I don't know, it's like just the size of you know those little round batteries. I think they're like 2032s or whatever. Uh it's like a just a little round, flat silver battery, and this thing's not much bigger than he goes, what's this thing in the trunk of your car? I'm looking, I don't know, beats me. And he's going, well, I don't know what it is. I found this in the trunk of your car. I'm like, well, I don't know. Must have fallen off something. I'm kinda I'm busy and I'm ignoring it. All of a sudden he comes back in the room and he goes, It's a tracker. I'm like, what do you mean it's a tracker? You got a tracker in the trunk of your car. What do you mean there's a tracker in the trunk of my car? Well, who's tracking you? I'm like, okay, are you serious? Let me see that thing. I'm like, put it under Google lens, find out what it is. And he's going, it is a tracker. I did that. I Googled it. It's a tracker. Look, I looked it up and he shows me the site. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's so creepy. I'm creeped right out. Oh my goodness. Then I'm trying to think, who would have put a tracker in the trunk of my car? Okay. I'm a nearly 60-year-old grandma, uh retired, living on Vancouver Island. I'm no big star or anything like that. There's nothing special about me. I'm just Lindy. Why would there be a tracker in the trunk of my car? And I'm like, oh, this is just creeping me right out. So I start thinking, where has my car been? Okay, well, I can tell you right now, uh, the people that worked on my car in the shop would not have put a tracker in my car. And that was done last January. Believe me, I know the people at that shop. There's no way those guys would have done that. Okay, so next thought. Who else has had access to the trunk of my car? Okay, there is a guy that put a bag of chicken feed in there. No, the guy that has a bag of chicken feed did not put a tracker in my car. I can guarantee that. I'm yeah, like I'm gonna drive into a warehouse, pull up, hand the guy's slip, and he's gonna drop a bag of feed in a tracker. No, it was not that guy. Okay, I'm trying to think who else. Okay, I had somebody that had caught a ride with me a couple weeks ago and they'd had a laptop. And so I'd actually given this person a drive. So I contact that person, I say, Do you think there was a tracker on your laptop? This person's going, What are you talking about? And I'm saying, Well, I found this trunk. There's this tracker found in the trunk of my car. And the only thing I've had now that didn't belong to me was your laptop. That day that I gave you the ride and we put it in the trunk of the car and we stopped at the store. And this person says to me, No, I can't see anybody tracking me. And I'm like, Well, you better be careful, pay attention, because it's really odd. Oh boy. Okay. So, all right, we go camping. We sit down with our friends at the campfire, and I'm going, you guys get this. There was a tracker in my car. Oh my goodness, eyebrows are raised. Well, who would do that? And we're all kind of thinking, this is so creepy. This whole day and age thing is just getting creepy. Things are getting creepy. I come home and I'm going through my cell phone, I'm looking at some apps, and I'm going, what's this app doing on my phone? And I'm looking down at the little tracker that we've got on the table. And I'm gonna note that when we found this tracker, we took the battery out of it because it just seemed like the thing to do, take the battery out right away. So we're looking at this and I'm going, it's the same brand as the tracker that's on the table. Why is there an app on my phone for it? And then all of a sudden I tell it to my partner and he goes, Your keys. I'm like, What? Your keys. Remember I bought you that tracker thing to go on your keyring because you're always losing your keys. Oh no. And that's what it was. I look at my keyring. I have this little circle on it that I never paid attention to, and the bottom of it's fallen out. Yeah. That's the thing that's sitting on my table in the dining room. It fell out of my keys. It was a Christmas present he gave to me about four years ago. I remember we downloaded the app and then I never did anything with it. I never even used it. I've carried this thing on my keyring for the last four years, but I've never activated it in the app. So anyway, it's still sitting in two pieces on my table. I guess if I never activated the app, I might as well not keep it. I deleted the app. I have not put the tracker back together, and I have now concluded that nobody was putting a tracker in my car. I've also concluded that when you're turning 60, sometimes you forget about things and it happens. Anyway, just kind of laughing about it. I guess the last thing that I'll just kind of mention here is here's something that was interesting. Okay, when I was out and about and uh we were on our camping trip, I noticed how beautiful it looked on the roadways. Okay, so Vancouver Island is always really pretty in the spring, and that is something that I noticed when I first moved to the island. I I couldn't get over how beautiful it is in the springtime here. You get lots of pink blossoms on the trees, everything's green, it's lush, it's just absolutely beautiful. But something that's really cropping up right now are these yellow plants and these yellow bushes, and they're all along the roadside. And they're stunningly beautiful. I mean, it's just like bright yellow everywhere. And I've noticed it a lot. I took pictures of it a few weeks ago when I was down here in the Comox area. There was lots of it, and now here we are on the west coast, and I'm noticing, gosh. Even in the eclipse area, these yellow bushes are there too. They're beautiful to look at. Remember the old saying what glitters is not always gold? Well, that's the case with these bushes that I was looking at. It's called broom. I think it's called Scotch broom or something like that. It's broom. Anyway, uh broom is an invasive plant. And I believe it came on the island like a long, long, long, long time ago. It's not a plant that was originally from Vancouver Island. Somebody came and brought some seeds, and uh it's kind of like gossip, you know, it's like something nasty that just keeps on spreading. Only this is an invasive plant. And you look at it on the roadside, you see all this yellow, you think it's beautiful, but it's not beautiful. It's a problem because it's crowding out a bunch of other plants, and that's why they call it an invasive plant. And I I was doing a lot of reading on it. There's a site called Broombusters, actually, it's broombusters.org. And there's a bunch of other sites that talk about it as well, too. If you go on some of your local government sites or if you're in an area where they have broom, they explain a little bit more about it, but it's just scary because when this stuff gets out there, it can choke out trees and stop new trees from coming in. And we all know that we need trees, we can't be without trees. And this stuff, yeah, it just takes over for us, it takes over, it stops regrowth, it stops regeneration of new trees, and it reseeds really, really easy. And apparently how you decide to get rid of it can have a huge impact on how much it regenerates. And I think I was reading online there was something about you're supposed to do it in the spring before it goes to seed, you're supposed to clip it right down towards the ground. And I know when I was reading up on our regional district site in our landfill, you have to be really careful with how you dispose of it. If you put it in bags, you've got to make sure it's not poking out through the bags, don't mix it in with other materials. And when you go to your landfill, you're actually supposed to tell them that you have an invasive weed in those bags because they might have special places where you have to drop it off or they have special handling for it. And they realize like it's just so important that you follow that. You can't just say, oh hell, I'm just gonna throw one in a bag. Who's gonna notice? The problem is who's gonna notice is everyone if those seeds spread and it keeps on making a mess because it is making a mess. And there's lots of invasive plants out there. If I go in our local area guide, I can read on all kinds of them. And and I know when I first came from the Yukon, I used to see all this ivy that was growing, like, oh, wow, look at that ivy. That's so pretty. You know, I used to feel like we would buy that and put it in plants in our houses. Well, this there's a certain type of ivy that grows here that also chokes out your plants. I got some on one of our rotos in the backyard one year and it was horrendous. This stuff will just choke out your trees and have once it starts knotting around trees and cutting it, yeah, it's pretty wild. So yeah, I just thought I'd bring this up. All that's gold or all that glitters is not always gold, and it's definitely that way with broom. Um, we actually found a few pieces of it in our backyard. This was over in the past year, and my hubby was super careful with how he dealt with it, very careful and how he dug it up. And we're paying close attention. If we see it back there, we're getting it out of there. We don't want it in the back at all. And it's hard for it not to spread. We go out on the roadway, it's all along the roadway, like probably less than a kilometer from my house. I can see it down the roadway. So those seeds are blown in the wind, birds are gonna pick them up, they're gonna drop them, it's gonna happen. But I I just view it that when you find out about this stuff and you learn more about it, it's kind of our responsibility too, to do our best to not allow it to spread or do our best to try to clear it from our own areas so that we aren't part of the problem. Yeah. All these things that I was thinking about. Um I think that's probably about it. I just thought, yeah, I'm just gonna have a little bit of this, a little bit of that for this week. Just touch base on a few things. And I just also want to touch base quickly before I go on gratitude and just finding things that make you happy. I had to remind myself of this this week. I found myself getting a little uptight. Um, yeah, I was getting uptight, and again, I'm gonna go back to the situation that we've been dealing with. I am not good with confrontations, and I find it really hard when somebody's doing something that they know is causing you harm or causing harm to your property. I don't understand the rationale behind people doing something when they know it's causing harm to someone, but there are people out there that will do those things, and it's so important to stand up for what is right. And I just, I don't know, I think about the raccoons that go through our backyard. I see some tracks from them again today. They've been through, well, I shouldn't say tracks, I saw some raccoon poo. I don't like raccoon poo. But what I don't like even more is knowing that there's plastics right beside where those raccoons were digging because I don't want them picking up those plastics. So that's why we have fought so hard uh to try to have this stuff stopped from coming over. And so, yeah, whatever you do in life, there's gonna be things, there's gonna be challenges, but you also have to try to find the positives in every day. And there's so many things that we have that are positive. I mean, I know I get out of bed in the morning and think, oh boy, one foot in front of the other, and my hip is not acting up the way it was even two months ago. Um, and I'm just being really careful, I'm not bending down to pick a lot of stuff up right now. And when I do that, I rest my hip and I can get out and bike ride more. So then I'm really grateful for that. And I'm just grateful for the opportunities I'm getting right now to do different things. I mean, last night, okay, I went to a movie night, and uh this is a movie night that was held down at the studio where I've been taking the acting lessons, and a group of people who are from all different ages, all different walks of life, they're all people that have one thing in common. We're all taking acting, or some of them are seasoned actors, and some of them are people like me who are just kind of getting started on their journey. But we all kind of get together, we watched a movie the week prior. Um there's popcorn, there's snacks, we talk about the movie, we learn a little bit more about what went on behind the scenes. And I have to say, it's been so educational for me. I mean, we talked about a movie that we'd watched where there was one scene that took nine hours to film, and I think, oh my goodness, you know, I mean, I complain sometimes if I've had a podcast and had to redo it once, or I complain if I have to redo my lines a couple times. Why is it taking me that long? Well, imagine this. These are professional actors on a set and they took nine hours to do one scene. So it's funny when people are out there and they're watching movies, good gosh, never underestimate how much work goes in behind the scenes on those movies. And I learned all about the people that do the sound effects and how they time them out to match up with the people who are on the screen. There's just so much I didn't know about before. And I'm really glad that at this point in my life I can still have my eyes open, uh, still be open to learning new things because there's just so many things in life that if you don't get involved in it, you don't know what people really do behind the scenes. And that probably goes for so many things. So yeah, it doesn't matter what age you are, always be open to new learning opportunities. Um I was open to new learning opportunities here, decided to learn to podcast. So yeah, a lot of people say, Oh yeah, you just grab a mic, you record, yeah, yeah, whatever, blah blah blah. But it isn't just that way. You gotta find out what program you're gonna use for your auto audio recording. And then you're in the middle of recording and a big plane goes overhead or somebody shows up outside my window with a tractor, hand to hand, uh, sometimes you have to adjust sounds on it so that you don't have all those sounds coming through. In my case, I learned to do that, I learned to add music tracks, had to source out all the different softwares that I was gonna use to be able to allow me to do this. Yeah, there is a lot of learning to it, and I just look at it and I go, no matter what it is in life, don't ever be afraid to step outside the box and take on something new. And if you decide you can't do it, okay, fair enough, but nothing wrong with giving it a try. And as long as you're staying safe and you're having fun, yeah, it never hurts to learn something new. But anyway, on that note, I better go. I got lots of things I gotta do today. And uh my yard is calling me. I've got some more chores, got some more plants I need to get out there. I got some more ants I need to get out of my garden. But we're not gonna talk about that one either. Anyway, have a great week, everybody. Uh, and again, remember what always glistens is not always gold. And if you meet somebody and maybe they look like a diamond in the rough, remember that you can't judge people always by how they look on the outside. Um, yeah, but we all come from all different walks of life, but whether you wear a suit or a tie or have a title a mile long or no title at all, we are all still people, and everybody has something really important and valid that they can offer this world, and the most important and valid thing that we can bring to this world is kindness. Absolutely. Um, all right, and speaking of that, I do think it's time to get going. Have a great week, everybody, and remember what I always say smiles come in all languages and in all colors. Take care, have a great week, everyone.