15 Years

Tags

a plot for pridemore, anniversary, kansas city, marriage, sept. 11, Stephen Roth, tortola, wedding

Fifteen years ago, my wife and I got married in a little chapel in the heart of Kansas City. My uncle officiated, five of my best friends were groomsmen and, as my soon-to-be bride entered the building, the double doors swung open and the late afternoon sun embraced her in a heavenly glow.

The next day, we flew to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, went snorkeling, got sun-burned, drank rum punch, and relaxed most afternoons in a hammock below our beachfront cabana. After a week of honeymoon bliss, we flew back to the city to start real life as a newly married husband and wife.

Ten days later, two planes hit the World Trade Center. The country was paralyzed. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, it didn’t take much to see that two little people didn’t add up to a hill of beans in a crazy, frightening new world.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my wife and I had scheduled our wedding and honeymoon a little later than we did. The shut-down of U.S. airlines and airports would have forced us to spend a few extra days in the Caribbean. Would we have decided to just stay down in Tortola and never come home? It would have been tempting to do so.

Staying in the tropics would have been romantic, but not very realistic. After all, we had a house, jobs, and three cats in Kansas City. What would we do for employment? Not many people in Tortola seemed to work, so maybe we could have just fished and slept on the beach?

At any rate, we decided to put down our roots in Kansas City, and I am glad that we did. There have been many magical moments like that trip to Tortola in our 15 years of marriage. There have also been doses of cruel reality, some which I dearly wish we never had to experience.

Through it all, though, we have stuck it out together. My wife has been so much more than just someone I share a home and a bank account with. She is my friend, ally, collaborator and confidant. You need that in a marriage, I think. Just being in love is not enough. You need someone you can laugh with and suffer with, and you especially need someone who can laugh with you even when you both are suffering.

A few days before our wedding, my wife did something that I felt spoke to her commitment as a partner and companion. I mentioned it in my toast at our wedding rehearsal dinner.

My wife and I had tickets to a Kansas City Chiefs preseason game, and we were trying to find a parking space near where our friends were tailgating. The journey in our Honda Accord took us off-road and onto a grassy ridge where fans had parked and were barbecuing. At one point, to get through all the cars and tailgaters, I had to drive along what felt like a 45-degree slope. It really seemed like the car might tip over at any second as we drove through the crowd. My wife, who sat in the elevated side of the car, opened her passenger door and leaned out as far as she could, both hands clutching the roof like a windsurfer hanging onto a sail. Instead of just bailing out, she thought her quick action might help keep the car from flipping down the hill.

We and our Honda survived, of course. I knew then—if I had any doubts before—that I had found a partner who would be with me all the way, even during times of potential bodily harm.

Fifteen years on, she is still with me, and I am so grateful for that.

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Review: Drag the Darkness Down

Tags

arkansas, charles portis, Dog of the South, drag the darkness down, kansas city, matt baker, southern fiction

Want to drag the darkness down? Go on a road trip with Odom Shiloh in his Honda of the year 1997.

This 40-year-old man from Frothmouth, Arkansas, has more than his share of troubles. Odom is unemployable, his second marriage is about to go bust, and his talented but neurotic sister, Birdshit, has gone missing. Oh, and he’s also on the run from the authorities after ramming his car into a famous French cyclist in downtown Memphis.

With all this drama going on, why not hit the road? Determined to track down his little sister, Odom enlists help from his private investigator friend, Blakey Flake. The pair climbs into Odom’s vintage Honda and travels the highways of Arkansas and Missouri in search of Birdshit, who Odom believes has run off with a four-star high school football recruit. Along the way, Odom mostly listens as the chain-smoking Blakey ruminates on topics ranging from his favorite French Impressionist painters to the theory that Oprah Winfrey is, in fact, ruining our way of life. As is the case with most memorable road novels (Charles Portis’s The Dog of the South comes to mind), it is the journey – not the destination – that drives Drag the Darkness Down.

This debut novel by Kansas City author Matt Baker was published in 2009, but I only recently became familiar with it. The book is an impressive start to what looks to be a strong fiction career for Mr. Baker. His characters in Drag the Darkness Down are cold, conniving and perennially self-absorbed. The way they interact with each other while pursuing their individual agendas is often hilarious, though Baker’s characters seldom see it that way.

No one in Drag the Darkness Down is satisfied with his or her current state: Blakey wants to be a stand-up comic, Birdshit wants to write poetry and escape small-town life, Odom isn’t sure what he wants, other than to evade the law, rescue his sister, and stick a fork in another failed marriage. We see the action through Odom’s eyes, but can we trust his view of reality? The meandering banter between Odom and the screwball detective Blakey as they follow the trail to Birdshit fuels the first half of the novel. After a while, Blakey’s outrageous pronouncements and dubious theories start making sense, and Odom’s internal broodings become more frightening. Which one of these two guys in the Honda is the crazy one? Is it both of them? Is it too late to bail on this road trip and catch a Greyhound back to Little Rock?

Finding humor and building intrigue in characters who are as forlorn and shiftless as Odom Shiloh is the writing equivalent of a magic trick, but I believe Matt Baker has pulled it off. Drag the Darkness Down is truly dark, and it is unlikely that this detective story is going to end happily, but we can at least sit back and enjoy the bumpy, tumultuous ride.

Stephen Roth is author of the humorous novel, A Plot for Pridemore. Be sure to “like” his author fan page at https://www.facebook.com/StephenRothWriter

Be Royal

Tags

humor, kansas city, kansas city royals, major league baseball, san francisco giants, sports, Stephen Roth, world series

Today I have nothing to share except this:

And this:

That will be all. Have a wonderful Thursday.

Ode to IKEA

Tags

european, furniture, humor, ikea, kansas city, midwest, retail, Stephen Roth, sweden, trendy

Today an IKEA store opened in Kansas City.

The local newspaper has been making a big deal about it for months. Apparently, some people camped out several days in advance to be among the first to walk through the new building’s glass doors.

Each morning on my way to work, I drive pass the IKEA store, which looms over the Interstate like a blue-and-yellow fortress. The towering IKEA store sign alone is imposing. It has the exact same color scheme as the CarMax dealership at the next exit.

I have heard a lot about the IKEA brand over the years. Earlier this week, we received the company’s free “Book-Book” in the mail. Skimming through it, I thought the furniture looked streamlined, cold and impersonal. I understand IKEA is the leading furniture provider of single, male apartment-dwellers in most major cities. Now I know why.

I have never been inside an IKEA store. I am sure I will visit the new one in Kansas City sometime. I could use some help organizing some shelving in our laundry room. Right now, the room suffers from an inefficient use of space.

Kansas City is usually the last metro area to get a newish retail chain store. That was the case with Crate & Barrel, Trader Joe’s, and countless other trendy merchants. It seems we are something of an afterthought here in America’s Outback.

Nevertheless, it is a big deal in Kansas City when something new opens, not unlike a Taco Bell finally arriving in a farm town. There will be big crowds at the IKEA store for several weekends to come. I think I will sneak over there during the week, when I can examine the flat, efficient furnishings with minimal disruption and leave, more than likely, without having made a purchase.

I’m Not a Big Fan of the Suburbs

Tags

kansas city, overland park, society, Stephen Roth, suburbs, united states

The suburban parks are pretty, but often under-utilized.

First off, I admit it: I live in a self-contained neighborhood with lots of cul-de-sacs and two community pools. So even though my address is technically within the limits of a major U.S. city, my environment could be considered suburban. I prefer to think of it as more of a rural area. There are two-lane routes and cow pastures on three sides of our neighborhood. On a warm, breezy day, you can open the windows of our house, hear the cows moo and sometimes inhale the faint scent of manure.

Still, some people would say I live in the suburbs, and I’m okay with that. But I certainly don’t live in The Suburbs, with its high-end shopping, beige tract housing, mega-churches, soccer complexes, and obsessive attention to zoning ordinances and the city master plan. I know I don’t live there because, currently, I work there. Each morning I drive about 40 minutes to my job in a suburb called Lenexa, Kansas. I like my company. The work is challenging and fun. The people I work with are bright and cheery, even when the temperature dips below freezing outside. I’m not so crazy about Lenexa, however. After 5 o’clock each evening, I am happy to see it in my rearview mirror.

Lenexa is in the middle of Johnson County, Kansas, which is the most affluent, fastest-growing part of the Kansas City metro. Most people who live in Johnson County seem to love it. The area has lots of trees, well-maintained lakes and parks, and all the retail and restaurant franchises you could possibly want. The highways are newly paved and there is a QuikTrip on every corner. There is even a natural history museum and a playhouse that employs sitcom stars from the 1960s and 70s.

Johnson County is nuts about youth soccer. Nearby Overland Park is home to U.S. National Soccer Team star Matt Besler. There is a soccer complex near where Matt grew up that is roughly the size of Belgium, and it accommodates thousands of little soccer players and their minivan-driving parents every single Saturday morning. All of these people are bright-eyed, blonde and lightly tanned. They are all trim and athletic-looking, and most of them wear something with the University of Kansas Jayhawk emblazoned on it. It is almost like there is some kind of social experiment going on in the Johnson County suburbs.

Suburbanites seem breezy and beautiful when you pass them in the soccer complex parking lot, but beneath that placid exterior lurks an angry beast just waiting to pounce at the first mention of the word “rezoning.” Just contemplate building a charter school, health clinic or even a Panera’s near a neighborhood entrance, and watch the stylishly dressed men and women of suburbia descend upon the city council public hearing armed with their legal pads, photocopied blueprints and prepared speeches. When I was a reporter I covered these hearings, some that were longer and filled with more pomposity than a Third World dictator’s speech. I once watched one well-heeled woman break down in tears when contemplating the impact that a planned auto mall might have on her home’s market value. Her husband walked the woman slowly back to her seat, where she dissolved into a sobbing mass of blonde highlights and Ralph Lauren apparel.

The people are not what bother me about the suburbs, however. What I dislike is how the suburbs are laid out. Years ago, I interviewed the city planner for Overland Park, and he was one of the most somber, boring individuals I have ever met. The rigid grids of Overland Park and surrounding communities mirror his lack of passion and personality. In fact, they seem to be the work of a deeply depressed control freak. Every single four-lane thoroughfare in the suburbs is split by a big, concrete median, as if people could not possibly be trusted to keep their cars from swerving across the center line. The medians can be frustrating when you are trying to navigate you way across one of the boulevards to pull into a McDonald’s drive-thru and get your ambitiously named Southern Style Chicken Sandwich. If you don’t know exactly what you are doing, it could take you three right turns and two lefts just to work your way around all those infernal medians.

Of course, all suburbs were planned for the automobile. Some of the nicer suburbs, like the I one work in, designate areas for foot traffic as well. Most of the streets of Lenexa are lined with sidewalks that are wide enough to drive a golf cart on. There are some lovely parks, including one with a man-made pond that I visit sometimes over my lunch hour. The sad thing is, you rarely see folks walking around and enjoying the natural beauty. There always are a handful of parked cars. These cars are occupied with people staring at their phones, getting some sleep, or enjoying a stolen moment with a co-worker or, possibly, a spouse. No one emerges from the cars. They pull into the park, hang out for a while, then return to their desk jobs.

That’s the irony of The Suburbs: walk just a few paces from the noise and commotion of the four-lane thoroughfares, and you’ll find yourself completely alone. You can hear the birds chirp and, sometimes, from a distant soon-to-be-developed field, you can hear a cow’s plaintive moo.

Stephen Roth is author of the humorous novel, A Plot for Pridemore. Be sure to “like” his author fan page at https://www.facebook.com/StephenRothWriter

A Dog Named Keiko

Tags

birthday, children, dogs, english shepherd, family, free willy, kansas city, keiko, marriage

On July 31, 2005, my wife and I adopted a dog. It was not an easy decision. We had two cats at the time, and adding a dog to the mix was certain to cause some domestic unrest.

“I’ve had dogs before,” I told my wife. “They need a lot of attention and can be a lot of trouble.”

We were not planning on getting a dog in the summer of 2005. One evening after work, we got a phone call from my wife’s cousin. He told us about this dog he had rescued from a co-worker who could no longer care for it. The dog’s name was D.J., and it was some kind of a border collie mix.

“You should come look at her,” he suggested. “She’s really pretty.”

The cousin lived near our house, so we went over that night. It had been raining earlier in the day, and we found D.J. running around the backyard with our cousin’s Siberian Husky. Both dogs were covered in mud but were friendly and wanted to put their paws all over us. The dog we came to see looked to be a tri-color, but it was hard to tell because of the muck on her coat. Our cousin told us he thought that D.J. was about six months old, and had been chained to a tree most of her life.

“What do you think?” the cousin asked. “You want her?”

“We’re going to have to think about it,” I said.

The cousin stroked his Van Dyke beard and nodded. “You’ve got ‘til tomorrow. After that, she goes to the pound.”

Later that night, my wife and I talked about the dog. One thing we agreed on was that D.J. was a horrible name. We couldn’t agree on anything else, however. My wife wanted the dog. I said I didn’t think that this would be a good time to add another pet. “Dogs take a lot of work,” I said.

The next day around lunchtime, I got a call at work. It was my wife.

“I had a dream last night about that dog,” she said. “I really don’t want her to go to the pound. I think we should take her.”

“Your cousin isn’t going to take her to the pound. That’s just a bluff,” I said. I have to admit now that I did not know my wife’s cousin as well as she did.

“Can we please get her?” she said. “I just can’t stop thinking about that dog.”

I agreed. How could I say no? That night after work, we took the dog, gave her a bath and bought all the necessary dog things–two bowls, a leash, dog food, squeaky toys, and a big rubber ball that we tied to a low-hanging branch in our backyard. As it turned out, the dog’s coat was a beautiful white, black and tan mix. She also had different-colored eyes–one brown and one very light blue.

“Isn’t that unusual? Is she blind in one eye?” we asked the veterinarian a few days later.

“I don’t really know,” he said.

“She’s really pretty, isn’t she? What kind of dog is she?” we asked.

“I’m not really sure,” the vet replied.

We soon learned that she was not blind in her blue eye, and we eventually discovered that she was an English Shepherd, which is a fancy name for a border collie/Australian Shepherd mix. After a few days of trying out names, we decided on “Keiko,” which means “blessed child” in Japanese and was also the name of the whale in the movie, Free Willy. My wife picked Keiko, however, because she liked how it sounded. The dog seemed to respond to the name as well. At the very least, she liked it better than being called “D.J.”

Nine years later, Keiko is still going strong. The photos above were taken earlier this month after a recent grooming appointment. Keiko has been everything we could have wanted in a dog: smart, happy, fun, energetic, sometimes mischievous, always hungry for a treat. We worried about having a high-energy dog around little kids, but Keiko turned out to be a wonderful companion for our children–always gentle and patient, and very often protective.

July 31 is not the date of Keiko’s birth, but we remember it as the day her life began with us. She has brought us so much joy and helped us to navigate life’s ups and downs. She has always been there for our family. For me, she has been a regular walking companion, a reliable playmate, and the only dog I could ever teach to catch a Frisbee.

So, happy 9th birthday, Keiko! We love you so very much.

A Night to Remember

Tags

a plot for pridemore, barnes & noble, fiction, kansas city, Stephen Roth, the kansas city star, the writers place, writing, zona rosa

The line was long at times.

On Saturday, we hosted our much-anticipated book launch party for A Plot for Pridemore at a venerable Kansas City mansion called The Writers Place. Attendance was around 70 people, we sold 31 books and I signed even more copies than that. We had two chocolate fountains, lots of wine and beer, and a wonderful, oversized projection of the book cover looming over the event. It was an exhilarating, exhausting night, one my wife and I will never forget. We also got to take home two coolers of beer and several Tupperware containers of strawberries, pineapple and melted chocolate. I guess we will be having a pool party soon just to get rid of the stuff.

To everyone who has purchased my book or attended any of the Pridemore events in the past three weeks, thank you so much for your love and support. It is amazing to me the range of people who have taken the time to tell me how excited they are about my novel. I am truly humbled and blessed to have such wonderful friends.

One thing I have learned in the past few weeks is that almost everyone who approaches me about the book asks the same question: “When is your next one coming out?” The answer is, I don’t know. I have completed about 80 pages of a new book, and I hope to concentrate more on it this fall. I’ll post more about this work in the future as I become more certain about its potential.

I have one more book signing scheduled in the very near future:  1 p.m. this Saturday at the Barnes & Noble in Kansas City’s Zona Rosa shopping center. After that, I have a few weeks off before the next event. My book continues to sell as a sporadic pace, according to the numbers I am seeing on Amazon.com. On Sunday, The Kansas City Star featured this little review about Pridemore and several other new books by area authors. It is always nice to get some positive local press.

That’s all the news I can think of regarding the book. I promise my next post will be about something different!

A Promo for Pridemore

Tags

a plot for pridemore, amazon, author, barnes & noble, fiction, georgia, humor, kansas city, literary, mercer university press, missouri, novel, satire, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

As has already been exhaustively reported in these pages, my novel, A Plot for Pridemore, will be released in a few weeks. The book went to press on April 9, so we are right on schedule for publication at the end of May.

If you want to read my book but you aren’t too keen on buying a copy, you can enter a “giveaway” contest right here on GoodReads.com. Just click “Enter to Win” and you will be part of a digital raffle that will determine the winners of six copies of my book, which I will ship out along with a thank you note on June 14.

If you ARE interested in buying my book, you can pre-order it on any of the following websites: Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and MUPress.org. Once the book is published, you can order it in digital form as a Kindle book or a Nook book.

If you happen to live in the Kansas City area or you plan to travel here soon, I am lining up a few book signings and readings over the course of the summer. I’m having a book launch party on June 14 at The Writers Place in midtown Kansas City. On June 21, I’ll be signing books at the Barnes & Noble in the Zona Rose shopping center. And on Aug. 15, I will do a 20-minute (gulp!) reading from my book at a special evening event at The Writers Place.

I am hoping to schedule more events soon to help promote the book, including a few gigs in the South this fall. I’ll keep y’all posted. Let me know if you have any thoughts on booksellers that might welcome A Plot for Pridemore to their stacks. I am willing to try anyone and anything (as long as it doesn’t cost too much).

Remembering The Paper

Tags

journalism, kansas city, kansas city star, memoir, mexico ledger, michael keaton, newspapers, reporting, ron howard, the paper

I saw the above movie by myself in a multiplex theater in Columbia, Missouri in 1994. I was less than a year removed from journalism school and working as a general assignment reporter for The Mexico (Mo.) Ledger. I remember The Paper as a good, not great, Ron Howard movie that aptly portrayed a big-city newsroom during the pre-Internet 1990s. There were a few inspiring scenes about scrappy newspapermen and women making a difference, including one moment in which Michael Keaton, who plays the managing editor, actually has to stop the presses to keep an errant story from running. “Should I say it?” he asks a colleague on the press room floor, slyly acknowledging that shouting “Stop the presses!” is one of the most hackneyed lines in movie history.

Of course, Michael Keaton does say it, and I left the theater reassured that the trade I had chosen had some value and honor, and that I could, in fact, make a difference myself. I also left with the nagging desire to get the hell out of Mexico, Missouri.

In the fall of 1994, I got my chance. I interviewed with The Kansas City Star for a position as a community reporter. The job entailed covering suburban city council meetings and writing features about things like 120-year-old oak trees and high school valedictorians. Still, it was a chance to work for a big newspaper in a city of 2 million people. “Well, you want the job?” the gregarious bureau chief asked me on the second day of my interview. I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough. I practically flew down the Interstate back to Mexico (Mo.) to collect my things and cram them into a one-bedroom apartment in suburban Kansas City.

Like most metro dailies at that time, The Star was the only game in town when it came to news coverage. It had merged a few years earlier with the morning Kansas City Times, and the combined papers were owned by media powerhouse ABC Capital Cities. The Star was in the process of launching “community newspaper” inserts for different parts of the metro area to essentially run the suburban papers out of business.

Even though there had been rumblings for years about the decline of the big daily newspaper, The Star was a well-financed, profitable, regional force. It steered the flow of information in the city. Stories that appeared on local news stations were usually lifted from the pages of that morning’s Star. Occasionally, I would cover a city council meeting where a big zoning issue was being debated, and a TV reporter would slide up next to me and whisper, “Are you with The Star? So what’s going on here?”

Was the pace at The Star as frenetic, unbalanced and exciting as Michael Keaton’s newsroom in The Paper? Not really. But there was still a sense that what I did for the newspaper was important, even when it was just writing up school notes from the Shawnee-Mission District. Once in a very long while, I might see my byline on page A1. Then for a whole day I got to hear radio DJs and news anchors talk about my story. It was pretty exhilarating stuff.

I worked almost two years as a community reporter for The Star,  then left for a health care reporting job in Florida. Many of my Kansas City friends remained with the newspaper and were promoted to other beats. When I returned to Kansas City, I attended a few parties with my old friends. You could spot the Star people at these gatherings because they were always huddled together in a corner of the kitchen, talking about the latest office gossip. Sometimes, an older Star employee would chime in with some gripes about meager pay and incompetent managers. After a while, I stopped going to the parties because I didn’t have much to contribute about the inner politics and machinations at the big newspaper.

Today, all but a couple of my newspaper friends have left that business for new careers, mostly in communications and public relations. The Star, like almost every other major daily newspaper in the United States, is a thinned down version of itself.  The pages are shorter and there are fewer of them, all in the interest of saving money on ink and paper. There are periodic layoffs and constant speculation about when the newspaper will stop printing in favor of an all-digital product. The people who remain in the newsroom spend a good deal of their time posting story updates on Twitter because that is the new medium for instant, breaking news. The Star has to compete in social media because today’s consumers don’t want to wait until tomorrow morning to read the news.

A friend of mine mentioned The Paper in a Facebook thread the other day. I hadn’t thought about the movie in years, but I suddenly have the urge to see it again. In my mind The Paper seems quaint, almost antiquated, about a faraway time when big city newspapers were as burly, complex and industrious as the cities themselves, when a paper’s influence and power went far beyond ink on a page.

What a difference 20 years makes.

 

 

A Few Words About Ice

Tags

2002, atlanta, ice storm, kansas city, Super Bowl, winter

Fears of widespread power outages came to fruition as the ice and snow storm that forecasters have been warning about for days pounded metro Atlanta and the northern half of the state.

More than 168,000 Georgia Power customers had lost electricity by 1 p.m., with service already being restored to some 48,000 of those customers. At 4 p.m., Georgia Power reported about 131,000 customers currently without power.

– The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (or AJC.com, or whatever else they’re calling it these days)

My home state of Georgia is getting slugged with its second winter storm in three weeks, and this one looks to be even worse than the last. Ice storms are unusual even in the frigid Midwest. I remember the last big ice storm we had in Kansas City, and I hope the one this week in Atlanta doesn’t have the same resounding effects as the one we endured.

It was late January 2002. My wife and I had been married for five months, and were still getting used to living together. Then, The Storm happened, starting innocently enough on a Tuesday morning with a little sleet and ice, nothing to get too excited about. Except that it kept coming down, all through the day and into the night, until the tree branches outside our home sagged painfully low, each limb perfectly encased in a full inch of crystal.

We woke up the next morning without power. The house was freezing, and the bathroom filled up with steam when we turned on the hot water. The streets were pretty slick, but my wife and I went to work. When we got home, there was still no power. It was still freezing, and the branches that sagged under the weight of all that accumulated ice were starting to snap. We huddled together under all the blankets we could pile on the bed that night, listening to the occasional cracks of branches collapsing all through our neighborhood. Then, a loud pop and a white flash right outside our window. A tree branch had hit a transformer, turning it into a sparkler from the Fourth of July. A few minutes later, we heard another blast. Then another one. The whole town was falling apart.

Long story short, we went without power for seven long days and nights. Our neighborhood looked like a war zone: power lines sagging almost to the ground, tree branches scattered everywhere. Utility workers and tree trimmers were disbursed throughout the city, and many workers came from out-of-town to help clean up and restore the power grid. When one of their trucks came through our area, my neighbors and I gathered around, peppering the poor workers with questions about when the streets would be cleared, when the power would be restored.

After three nights without light and heat, my wife and I stayed at a friend’s apartment across town. Then we got a nice, warm hotel room and watched Tom Brady and New England upset the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl (warning: beware of hotels that will price-gouge you during an ice storm). Then, we spent a night at a relative’s place. Finally, the power returned on a Tuesday. It was perhaps the happiest day for my wife and I since we came back from our honeymoon.

The storm lasted only 24 hours, but left its mark on our city for years to come. Thousands of trees collapsed or had to be cut down. Our leafy neighborhood looked almost bare the following spring, so many of its stately oaks were nothing more than foot-high stumps. It’s been 12 years since that ice storm. Unfortunately, it seems we are past due for another one.