Mixed; Seperated - A Story Of The Long Run And How You Get There by M. K. Dreysen

So, if you've been following along these past few weeks in my free stories, it appears that I might have had something on my mind.

Let me back up. The stories you've been reading are 'from the vault' in some sense; the one I'm posting today was actually written in October of last year. For me, this means I've regularly got a bit of textual spelunking going on: I'm revisiting where I was at a given time in the not-too distant past.

So the weekly story publishing routine has its benefits, in that I am much more readily able to just put 'em up and send 'em out. And the side benefit that I get to scratch my head and wonder 'Now what on earth was I on about this time?' on the regular.

And? That's a long-winded way of saying that for this week's free story I've got another one that deals with... those moments when you realize that Somebody has been Up To Something. Somebody not of your little world, though they are the Somebodies who might well derail your world if They Get Away With It.

Are there right or wrong answers to the question of What Do I Do? when the powers that be shit their bed? I don't know.

But I do know this dear reader: Althea Aimtree, whom you're getting ready to meet, has put in the work. She's put in the time, the energy, the love. And Althea Aimtree has reached that point in the life, reader, where it's time to ask herself... What do I do about it?

Mixed; Separated - a story of the long run and how you get there by M. K. Dreysen

"You need to be careful with this," Glen told me. "Bring it back in the same envelope."

This was, as indicated, a manila envelope. Spindled folded mutilated in that most delightful United States Postal Service way. "Glen, look at it. It's ready to fall apart now. After I spend a few hours with it..."

He chuckled. "Stan's worried. I told him I'd have it back before the new year, Althea. Giving it back in the original envelope just adds that little touch that means so much."

All this for a handful of newspapers. If Stan was worried enough to be treating this pile of ancient newsprint as a state secret... why'd he send it through the mail, then?

Other than the fact that, if the postmark was correct, Stan lived in Oregon these days. So driving to Amarillo for the ninety-year-old probably wasn't in the cards. "I'll take care of it, Glen, I promise."

He started his truck. "I appreciate it. Tomorrow, by dinner, you'll be done with it, right? And if you make copies, don't do it on the company scanner, ok?"

"Damn, Glen, what the hell did Stan give you?"

"Just read it, Althea. And take plenty of notes." He closed the window, waved, and headed out into the evening traffic.

It was the last time I saw Glen Treadle alive. But before I found out that he'd left to meet his death, I went up to my hotel room for a night of 'light' reading. And note-taking.

A normal plant trip, that's all it was. Glen had retired six months prior; bass fishing, hiking, quail hunting with the Lab that was his constant companion. That's what I'd figured he'd have on his schedule. Nothing much to do with us, his old employer.

Rick, my boss and Glen's, had kept him on the string. "A little consulting. Glen managed Amarillo for us for thirty years, Althea."

I'd seconded the ask, when Rick brought it up. Melanie, Glen's successor, she's good people, just young. Ten years from now she's going to be fantastic. My job, and Glen's while he's willing, is strictly backup. History, the little projects here and there that come up.

Which is where the pile of old newspapers came in. Stan wasn't our old plant manager. He used to work for ShadowStream Aggregate, our back fence neighbor. And the ones who own the property our own plant sits on.

We'd leased it from them, back in the foregone days, long before Glen's time. He'd put together a bible on them; thirty years and a hell of a lot of wrangling with the landlord over whether we'd met our lease terms will do that to a person. Stan's newspaper articles were, well, apocrypha, if you will. Additions to Glen's bible he'd never been able to quite lay his hands on, when he was an official Metrix employee.

Now, well, he's a consulting engineer. A private hand, digging for work. It's a story, good enough to get a few pieces of the story Glen had never quite been able to find.

If only it had made any sense to me, that night. I doubt I'd have twigged enough to save Glen.

But I can wish. Can't I?

ShadowStream started out in ye olden days as a rock and gravel outfit in Wyoming. Anywhere you needed gravel, rock, sand, they'd be there for you. Concrete plants and road work, they trucked their window-breaking stuff pretty much anywhere.

Our wheezing at the seams plant sits next to one of their old gravel pits. Buried in our lease agreement is a paragraph that's always worried me. Boiled down, that paragraph says that we're allowed to send our waste to that pit. With proper notification blah blah blah.

We've never used that 'option'. Glen had pointed it out to me, six years ago when I first started with the company and started coming out here to work projects for him. "Althea, Matt and Theo," the two plant managers who'd held the reins prior to Glen, "Never fell for that bait. And I'm not about to start. Do you know why?"

"Anything we send down there, and all of a sudden, who's holding the liability bag for the whole pit?"

"Damned right." Glen had made sure to tell Melanie that, and I'd reminded her of it.

No. I'd reminded the lawyers of it, using Melanie as a convenient excuse. "Liability we don't have, don't want, can't use. No thank you."

Fortunately, our corporate lawyers are scared of their own shadows. "High risk" and "unknown liability" are terms of power with Renata and Len. Rennie shut down even the thought of it. "Whatever you need, Althea, anyone asks and you send them straight to me. No way in hell are we letting the company get involved with that pit."

ShadowStream wasn't the original company. Which was a surprise. That was the first thing I found sifting through Stan's newspaper clippings. "Three Wyoming Companies To Form New Venture: ShadowStream Aggregate" the headline read.

Since Stan had gone through the work of putting his stories in some kind of order, I figured I might as well respect that. The formation of the conglomerate was the first story at the top, dated October 18, 1941. I didn't know what paper, or where in Wyoming; Stan's razor had taken that information with it. The paper had to be local. Given the way the reporter discussed the companies involved.

"Wyoming sand, gravel, and rock mining has grown by leaps and bounds," the writer told me across the decades. The bottom line, which he didn't make me work very hard to get to, was that the smaller companies saw an opportunity. "'Cooperation, given the current climate, means that we'll all be in a position to do business on a scale that none of our individual endeavors would have been able to reach', Stanley Brent, Sr. told this reporter. The other plant managers echoed his sentiments. Your correspondent believes that the European war's rumblings have made themselves felt even in our own quiet neck of the woods, though none of the plant managers would, on the record, confirm that suspicion."

On the record. I snorted at that. Whoever the reporter had been, he'd come as close as screaming what Stan's father and the others had been happy to tell him at the bar the night before he'd filed his story. But ok, so what? Who in October 1941 would have been shocked that industrial operations were moving to a war footing?

And especially, who would care now, going on eighty years later? You had to cheer on people who had the good sense to know what was likely coming down the pike. Sure, there are still a few people tilting at the windmill of "Roosevelt Knew!", but aside from the fever swamps of the internet, who cares?

The other news articles covered the war effort, and ShadowStream's part in it. Big jobs, trucks going off all over the country. Alaska, even. Exactly the kind of thing you'd expect.

The 1946 article was the last of them. That one, I expected to be a story of the end of the boom, right? The peace dividend, written in pink slips. Except it wasn't. "ShadowStream has their biggest month to date; Trucks coming in from Washington State, New Mexico, and Tennessee, every day of the week and twice on Sundays."

Ok, so they were still big business, right? And, buried down in the article: "Many of the trucks come in loaded with clay. The truckers change trailers and haul gravel back to the origin." Clay, ok, but the reporter, bird dog that he'd been over four years, never said word boo about the purpose of the clay.

Clay, we kind of have a personal interest in. We make bricks. And cement blocks, all kinds of pre-cast stonework. You're probably sitting between walls Metrix has had a brick or twenty involved in. So I figured, hey, maybe what Stan's telling me and Glen is that ShadowStream's postwar clay bonanza found its way to our plant.

Our founder started out as a bricklayer; by the time he got through the Depression, he'd bought himself a plant. That's why the Amarillo plant is a museum piece. None of old man Lebar's kids want to be the ones to shut down their grandpa's startup.

Nor do they want to break open the checkbook and modernize the dinosaur. So here we are.

"Ok, Stan, so the old man made a penny or three running cheap clay leftovers through his kilns. What's the issue?" The paper clippings sat there, giving me no more answers than what they'd already provided.

Screw it, said I, and went to bed. Melanie and I had a long day planned.

The kilns, the robots loading pallets, the operators making sure it all came together. Batch mixers, and yes they were weighing their measures this time, Glen had let the millwrights bulldoze him for too long with "When it looks right" as their method.

"I'm working on that," Melanie said, and she had.

We were sitting in her office, planning dinner and letting her maintenance supervisor, Israel Gutierrez, tell us his laundry list of complaints about the forklifts they'd been forced to lease, rather than buy. And isn't that a whole 'nother story, but it's when I tune Israel's pleas out that I remember.

"Hey, Melanie, wasn't Glen supposed to be here, right after lunch?" And, like a good girl, I had my manila envelope sitting right there in my backpack, ready to go. Me and my little spy mission, I'd photographed every page, feeling like a junior CIA agent only very much happier with a cell phone camera than what the Cold War microfilm cameras could have done.

"Yeah," Melanie replied. "I asked him if he wanted to join us at Alphie's for lunch, he said he'd be here by one so he could claim his history lesson from you."

"I'll call him." And that's when the ball started rolling. No answer, so ok "I'll drop it off on my way to the hotel room. The Canadian River Cafe for dinner, Mel?"

Glen's truck sat in his driveway. The dog, Lizz, started barking at me as soon as I got out of the car. But neither the "Hey you, I know you" or the "Holy shit it's a stranger" bark. Lizz and I were buddies, she knew me. Well enough to whine, between barks.

911 isn't as far away as it used to be. The cops showed up for a welfare check.

We spotted him, well, his boot, through the bedroom window. I kept Lizz company, and out of the way, while the cops did their thing. "Ambulance needed," and immediately after, "Crime Scene Unit."

They wouldn't let me get close, neither the cops nor the dog. Lizz howled whenever I tried to leave her, or get too close to Glen's body. The best I could do was his office across the hall. Lizz sat at the end of the hall in the living room, whining, crying, then squirmed down the hall on her belly.

I patted her, tried my best to comfort her, while I scanned the stuff Glen had laid out on his desk. Printouts, of reports and letters he'd scanned from the plant archives. All of it echoes, in our own Metrix idiom, of the ShadowStream articles.

Most of it I'd seen before, when Glen had asked me to learn the history. "Most of this won't matter, day to day. But when you do need it, you'll need it bad, Althea. Read it now when nothing's hanging on it."

I'd been primed, I guess. The invoice, for twenty four tons of clay, from ShadowStream, a hundred dollars delivered to our plant, sat off to the side. Almost buried.

Almost. I wonder if Glen arranged it that way before or after he'd been shot. Lizz couldn't answer for him. I pulled out the phone and made two phone calls. The first, to Melanie.

The second, to Stan. I made that one from Glen's back porch. "What's so special about the clay, Stan?"

"What were those states again, Althea? And what year was it?"

1946. New Mexico. Tennessee. Washington State. The penny dropped. "Oh, sweet ever-loving mother of God."

"Stop there. Now you know what you're looking for. Glen's dead, you say?"

"Yeah."

"Call me when you find out the arrangements. I'm not much of a traveling man these days, so I'll have to send flowers."

"Thank you, Stan."

The cops made me wait. At least they let me keep Lizz occupied in the back yard. Melanie arrived about the time the EMT's loaded Glen into the ambulance.

"I let Rick know," she told me. "The company's taking care of it. Charlotte and the kids, all that."

Glen's wife had moved on years ago, before I'd started. "She's in Arizona?"

"Tempe. The girls all went to ASU."

Melanie had spent the last couple years as Glen's sidekick, second in command. Me, there's a limit to what I'll ask about the personal side of life. Then, my job I don't spend eight hours a day every day with anybody. "I need to get into the office, Melanie."

"You've got keys, right?" She didn't even ask why. Faith, I guessed.

Yeah, I had keys. Plant's 24/7, most of it, but the office locks up. Glen had given me a set of keys after about the fourth time he'd had to come back and lock the place behind me. I have trouble working in hotel rooms.

I stopped at the lab, first. For one of the Geiger counters Marty kept on hand.

Why a lab, for a brickworks? Self defense. Glen's predecessor had picked up a couple of contracts, years ago, that made him test the materials. Expensively test his materials. So, "Cheaper in the long run to do it in house" and a plant manager who'd started out as a geologist resulted in a lab on-site.

The Geiger counter, well mostly that was Marty's little party gag. Turn the gain up, way past Ridiculous and all the way to Are You Kidding Me? levels, and the fool thing clicks enough so you'd think you were in the middle of a fifties scifi movie. Marty, our chemist, uses it to scare the new techs. Crank up the sensitivity, turn them loose on the piles of new-mined sand or gravel, and watch them come running for a lesson in orders of magnitude.

We keep displays of our products in the offices. Not sales displays, it's no showroom. Just, everywhere you go, on bookshelves, as paperweights, there's always a brick or two at hand. Glen's office, Melanie's now, the conference room, they're almost museums.

Ted Lebard's monument sat square in the little foyer, an intersection between the two hallways defining our little offices. Melanie's door on the left, the conference room on the right, front end behind and the maintenance shop ahead.

And the first stack of bricks the place had made sitting right there in the middle. Well, first load of a paid order, anyway. Nobody in a brick yard counts the broken ones, the test runs. The old man hadn't hung the first dollar up, or an invoice or anything like that. No, he'd put the first pile of good paid-fors together for us all to stumble over.

I checked the counter's gain when it started clicking. No, I hadn't left it turned up to eleven. Almost eighty years later, and the bricks were still just a little hot. "What's a little radioactivity between friends?" I asked.

"Far too much for you to be involved with," said a voice from behind me.

Not a voice I recognized. Good, I told myself. At least he's not Melanie. Or anyone else from the company. I set the Geiger counter on the bricks, then turned, slowly.

The guy stood in the hallway. He'd come in the front door, same as I had. Blue jeans, dark blue windbreaker. Gun, pointed my way.

He was about ten, fifteen feet away, give or take. Close enough for the brick I sent as hard as any bowling ball I'd ever thrown.

My little passion; 204 average, there's an alley within easy driving distance of all of our plants. I may not get to the gym, but I can always find a couple hours to throw a few frames.

Funny little thing, especially for a woman: bowlers don't have an overhand windup, so the guy didn't react until it was too late. The brick hit him dead on in the center of his face.

I don't remember the gun going off, then, but it must have. Melanie found two bullet holes, later, in her office door. Just like I hadn't stopped to banter with the guy or ask why, I grabbed another brick from Lebard's monument and sent it down the lane, before he could shake off the pain of his broken face.

This one he saw coming, I guess. He turned his head, so the brick hit him in the temple. He went down like a poleaxed cow. I ran up, a brick in each hand, kicked the gun somewhere off as far as I could send it.

Somehow or another, I managed not to use the bricks in my hands to finish bashing the guy's head in. I backed off, to the brick pile to set one of them down and pull out my phone. While I talked to the 911 operator, I hunted for the gun. I kicked it over to the pile. Sure, I could have picked it up; maybe I thought I needed to keep my fingerprints clear of it.

Or maybe I just felt more secure, there and in that moment, with a brick in my hand.

"Jesus, you killed him," the first cop said, when she got there. She'd been at Glen's house, second or third car that got there. The 911 operator had recognized my voice, too, so I'd been able to give them the story before the nervous firepower showed up.

He'd quit breathing, but I didn't know it until the lady in blue took her hand away from checking his pulse. "His gun's over here, behind me."

"You're going to put down the brick, now, and step over to that door, ok? And you're going to stay right there, with your hands up where I can see them, while I find this gun. Right, ma'am?"

"You just let me know when you want me to start." I don't really know how long it took for Officer Radovich and I to work out what she needed to feel safe and secure just then.

I do remember it seemed like the earth and the stars would finish with their business before we did.

And I can promise you, the only benefit to being the principle witness to two murder scenes in one day is that, in my case, there was really only one, very long, story to tell. My saving grace was the gun. The detective read his version of the scene right from the walkthrough; he didn't have any doubts what the lab would tell him. "I hope Metrix is happy picking up your hotel tab for a while, Miss Aimtree. You're going to be our guest here in Amarillo for a couple weeks."

"In this case, Detective Tremont, I'm willing to put up with the complaints from corporate."

Melanie took me to the gravel pit the next morning. I caught her up on Glen's suspicions, and how they'd become reality the night before, while we bounced over cattle guard and caliche. She let me talk through it uninterrupted until we pulled up to the lookout.

"You believe that's the heart of it, don't you?" she asked.

The heart of it: two hundred acres or so of open water hiding a secret. The water, seventy years of steady trickling runoff into the old gravel pit. The surface of it lay fifty feet or so below the little ridge Melanie's truck sat on. "Kids in town still sneak out here to skinny dip," Melanie said.

I believed it. Hell, that age, I'd lived it, though our gravel pit out by Alexandria had been in the middle of an abandoned army base. We'd had oak trees to tie ropes to, you swung out over the edge and held your breath for the interminable drop to the water. Or, you screamed until you hit the water.

August, a hundred degrees, it didn't matter, our pit had been a hundred feet deep and the water held that icy depth through the worst of the heat.

Here, scrub cedar and mesquite did their best, a few willows and scrub oak fought the good fight, but none of them seemed to have made for a decent swing. I climbed down from the cab and walked to the edge. "I guess they don't need a swing, do they?"

"Nope," Melanie answered. "Just a good head of steam and a little lack of sense. Or a lot."

The road cut around the top of the pit; here though, a couple generations of teenagers, and observers like us, had cut the path to the miniature El Capitan that we stood on. A little nose of rock, clear and high out over the water; I heard the screams of joy, whispering out from the rocks.

Over to the left, those same kids, and likely more than a few adults, had cut a path, one muddy foot at a time, from the bare little gravel beach surviving by a thread at the water, to where I stood at the top. Erosion by drip and bare foot and more than a little piss, if the empty beer cans hiding in the scrub were any indication.

I took in the lake view. As best I could tell, this was the only clear area on the entirety of the bank. Every other square foot, the willows and the oaks were doing their work, sending their roots down for the precious water. It told me that the place was a secret, or at least, not something the whole world knew about.

Here was a boat launch, a place to get shitfaced and stupid or screw your boyfriend under the stars. And if you kept it to yourself, ShadowStream wouldn't get antsy enough to lock the gates and start a range war with the local punk brigade.

I turned, enough to get my bearings. Our plant lay a half mile or so behind me, south and downhill a couple hundred feet to the highway grade. And west, more visible because of their cement plant furnace plume than anything else, was the ShadowStream operation.

"Are they still pumping their current pits to here?" I asked. Hazard of running a pit mine. Even here, dry as it was, a couple inches of rain would put ten inches of water in the bottom of their working pits. Thus, this one, catch all for more than just the natural drainage.

"Story claims they've got Pit Twelve permitted to start whenever they need. They had it approved in 2009, if I remember right. But the drought put the need for it off a few years."

Evaporation, and nothing to replace it. "How many feet are they supposed to leave for freeboard?"

"Originally, it was supposed to be twenty. But that slide," the access ramp cut into the bank, "That has everyone happy to let it stay at fifty or so. I expect, if we have a good winter and a couple of heavy snow storms, they'll put Twelve into operation next year. That's the noise they've been making, anyway." Melanie met with the ShadowStream plant managers every couple of months; she was on their mailing list for the environmental conversations, at least the ones that the permitting authorities were involved with, as well.

That was the history of it, and the view. Since I'd made such a big deal of the fact that we weren't ever going to use the pit for disposing any of our garbage, I'd also made visiting the place a part of my regular schedule. So we didn't get any surprises. I had a couple of additional purposes this time.

The first one was easy enough. I'd brought the Geiger counter with me. Not that I expected much, and the counter didn't surprise me. "Too much water, too much wind and time." I slid down to the water, just to be certain.

Melanie waited until I'd moved away from the bottom of the slide to follow me. I appreciated that, since it meant I didn't have the sand and gravel she stirred up coming down around me. "You expected something more dramatic?"

"Not really. That much water covers a lot of sins." But the counter wasn't my real weapon. That was the packet of quart sample bottles, half a dozen pristine plastic screwtop lab bottles sitting in my backpack. "On the other hand, water reveals more than it conceals, if you know how to ask it."

And Marty was very, very good at asking the kind of questions I needed the answers to.

Melanie's phone started ringing as soon as we climbed back into the truck. While she answered it, I labeled my samples.

"Althea," she said. "It's for you."

Which explained the phone that had suddenly come into view. The screen had gone dark, so I had no idea who was on the other end. "Yeah?"

"Miss Aimtree, we finally get to speak to you. Did last night's events leave an impression on you?"

More than a few. "If there's a message there, I'm afraid it's a little obscure."

"Keep testing the boundaries, Miss Aimtree, and I'd be astonished if you didn't find a much greater degree of clarity."

In other words, they'd be more than willing to send enough killers to find the one that got it right. I felt a chill, brief cold seizing my nerves. I'd jumped into a lake I never knew existed. "And, so?"

"I'd also be astonished if your handheld counter showed you anything actionable. It's a funny thing, isn't it?"

Yeah. Half-lives march along without care; the Geiger counter had been noisy, but the absolute levels in Lebard's Pile weren't enough, now, to cause more than an eight-day sensation. A house's worth of the bricks would amount to a daily exposure on the level of a dental assistant.

I'd done the math. Even back when the bricks had been made, the radiation levels would have been nervewracking, but on the order of living above seven thousand feet. Not even Three Mile Island. My best guess? The clays had been runoff from a mining operation, some uranium source where they'd been in a hurry and didn't have the time to put in a proper sluice pit.

Truck it somewhere else, and hope. And we, Ted Lebard at least, had grabbed a discount without asking too many questions.

The guy on the other end of the phone, and I could assume he was watching us from the ShadowStream plant barely visible through the scrub, was daring us to sue him. Sue him and lose.

"I believe there are seventy-three souls working for Metrix Amarillo, yes?" the guy continued. "Most of them have what, twenty years in?"

Seventy eight, asshole, I didn't say. And yeah. A couple more years and Israel would make fifty; he'd started loading bricks when he was sixteen. "You expect me to just let you..."

"I expect you to consider where you're going to employ a good crew who've made their lives around this out-of-date plant. That is your company's reputation, after all."

Boy howdy. Our Detroit plant had burned down, back in the eighties. Took a little more than a year to rebuild.

The owners didn't lay a single soul off. Every one of the Detroit crew got paid for their forty, every week, and they started back up as soon as the kilns lit up. We looked after our people. And asshole knew it.

Knew there wasn't any current risk, either. "So long as no one in your organization is foolish enough to go swimming in lakes that belong to others, Miss Aimtree. Or any other water-related activities."

Huh. It sounded like the view from the ShadowStream plant didn't include the water's surface, not the part we could access. I wonder if the smug bastard even knew of the kids who'd made stories here. I looked at the sample bottles between my feet, then back to Melanie.

She had a lot of people depending on her. I had suspicions and allegations that, at best, added up to a nuisance. Even a brand-new public health crusader would be hard-pressed to tackle this one.

"Another parameter for your mental calculations, Miss Aimtree. Federal agencies take some matters very seriously. Relationships of accord have a tendency to evolve and grow close over decades."

Another brick, excuse me, of shit to worry over. In other words, at least one branch of the alphabets would be happy to stomp on us and make it all go away. "There's an implied level of reciprocity on your part. Considering some of the risks, how am I to believe you speak for so many unknown participants? You're just someone on the other end of a phone call."

"Just so, Miss Aimtree. Our company's long term interests here are, shall we say, best served by keeping our heads down and insuring that we are good citizens to all interested observers. Your own similar approach will, all things considered, suit admirably."

I stared out at the water; several hundred million gallons called burying the past. "I... just remember your part in this."

The guy chuckled, and let the line go dead.

What the hell had I done? What could I do?

****

Some years later, an older woman, dressed similarly enough to campus casual for most of those who saw her to assume she was a professor, made her way to a cubbyhole of an office in Stanford's engineering department.

"Ah, Miss Aimtree, welcome." Professor Heizen gestured at the stacks of books and papers filling the office. "I apologize for the mess. Do please come in." Professor Heizen's specialty, the environmental legacy of the early atomic weapons projects, was most evident from the book titles, and the ancient blueprints peaking out of the piles.

"Unresolved Issues at the Hanford Site". "Projecting The Church Rock Aquifer Evolution". Althea read the titles, with Heizen's name tastefully lined up in the author's positions, and hoped she'd picked the right place.

The two women were, as near as made no difference, of similar age, and demeanor. Passers-by would have assumed they were colleagues, chatting over the coming semester's duties. "Thank you for taking the time to meet with me, Professor. You're the reason I've come to Stanford."

"Of course, of course." The professor took the compliment in stride, as only her due. "Now, Miss Aimtree, I understand you've chosen to pursue a Ph.D. as part of your retirement. A hobby? I'll warn you, in my experience, those without a passion have a much harder time finishing their dissertation."

Althea smiled, remembering a conversation on a cell phone and the bitter taste in her mouth that had followed it. "I have a story you might appreciate, Professor. It all started about twenty years ago. I'd flown out to our Amarillo plant for one of my regular site visits..."