Category Archives: When I grow up

Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl

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This morning I heard Copacabana on the way home from yoga, and it set the tone for my whole day. I have been doing the merengue and the cha-cha all day, humming about yellow feathers in my hair and a dress cut down to there. At least I know all the words to Copacabana, which makes it a little less crazy, unlike the time I had Fancy by Bobby Gentry stuck in my head. I only really knew the words Here’s your one chance, Fancy, don’t let me down so I basically had that on repeat for a few days. I would much rather sing about the hottest spot north of Havana.

My friend and I were walking our dogs and talking about the vast amount of food our sons consume each week. We joked that food preparation, in a house with pre-teen and teenage boys, is the equivalent of a part-time job. Since I have the irritating personality trait of needing to empirically quantify any such claim, I actually started noting down how much time I actually do spend grocery shopping, planning and preparing meals, baking, doing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen. The number of hours I spend doing those things per week was actually astonishing and I wish I hadn’t had the urge to do the math.

For one thing, I realize that this job is just going to get bigger and bigger for several years, and then, when the boys leave home, it is going to be gone, completely GONE, and I am going to be left in my empty kitchen, singing Landslide softly to myself while wondering what to do with all these cookies.

That, right there, is the reason I cannot wish away time, even if every single Tuesday I think to myself What? It’s only Tuesday? I don’t want to wish my life away. It’s already the end of January and life often feels like it’s a cartoon of pages flying off the calendar.

Anyway, with all the awful, terrifying, and disheartening things happening in the world, I am choosing to focus on my own backyard. There are lots of opportunities to make the world a better place, and as I said to my neighbour the other day, efforts that seem small in the grand scheme of things are actually not small at all to the people being helped. It’s a good reminder.

I am also focusing a bit on my literal backyard, because this happened:

 

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We have a huge backyard and when the kids were small they would spend hours out there, playing with Barkley and shooting water guns and running around. They are past that stage now, and I convinced my husband that a trampoline would be the cure for all that ails us.

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It arrived in pieces on Friday and my husband and I spent four hours on Saturday putting it together. FOUR HOURS. It was well worth it though, since it has been fairly mild for the past couple of weeks. We’ve all enjoyed it so much already and I’m looking forward to summer, when our house can become the neighbourhood hangout. I’m sure my kitchen time will increase substantially with a group of teen boys in my backyard, but it will be well worth it.

Be well, friends. xo

Howard/ Nicole The Duck

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One benefit of keeping an old school blog for the past eight years is that I can easily see patterns in my own life. For example, every single fall I feel like I’m careening off the rails a little bit, in terms of busyness, and yes, we are all busy and tired and whatnot, no one wants to hear about how busy we are, but it is nice to see a pattern and recognize that I feel this way every year.

In related news, October is almost over, and I feel like it should still be mid-September. But no. Sometimes I feel like I’m a duck, gracefully gliding through the water on the pond, but what is not visible to the eye is my pair of little feet-flippers going like mad, just to keep gracefully gliding.

All is good, it is, even though I have bags under my eyes that require their own postal code. Several months ago I wrote something for YMC called “Confessions of a Pulled-Together Mom” and I braced myself for the blow-back. I was expecting trolls to come out of the woodwork to criticize my vanity at the expense of neglecting my children, but I only really received one such comment. The rest were more of the “me too” variety, which was completely surprising. On discussing it with the YMC Editor-in-Chief, I realized that this generation of young moms is much more comfortable with the concept of self-care than MY generation. This is a very very good thing. When I had babies, lo those many years ago, it wasn’t the done thing to admit that you showered every day, put on makeup, and blow-dried your hair. Back when my kids were babies, many of my peers were into that martyr thing: I was so busy I didn’t brush my teeth all weekend, and I haven’t had a shower for days. Hygiene, oral and otherwise, was frequently scorned because my generation seemed to be made up of High Powered Career Girls Who Are Now Putting 100% Energy Into Child-Rearing And Have No Time To Spare On Vanities. Not everyone felt that way, of course, but motherhood did feel a bit like a Project back then. I mean, I had a book – which I have since donated – about how to raise smarter babies, and another one that was all about brain-enriching and sensory-stimulating activities to do with your baby. Such activities included making a pulley system for teddy bears, to illustrate cause-and-effect, and the concept of impermanence. And I actually did those activities. Now, thinking about how my children enjoy such things as Grand Theft Auto and jokes about farting and people getting hit in the testicles, I cannot help but smile at my younger, optimistic self.

But I digress. The only negative comments I had from that Pulled-Together piece were that, in the photos, I didn’t appear to be wearing makeup at all. I had several such comments, and I was taken aback by it a little, because YOU GUYS, if you could see me without makeup. HOO BOY. In particular, today, when I have eye bags under my eye bags, well. I promised my husband I wouldn’t post any more unflattering photos of myself on this blog, but you can see a few here and here. And those are from two years ago, so as you can probably imagine, I have aged somewhat since then. Anyway, I love the thought that some people think I’m all au naturel when really, the opposite is true.

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Eyebags with a side of grey roots.

Speaking of oral hygiene, a few months back there was some kind of expose about Big Dental and the Flossing Conspiracy. Did you know we’ve all been conned into thinking that flossing is beneficial, when in fact there has been almost no empirical evidence to suggest that it prevents cavities and gum disease? Quick, everyone burn your dental floss!

Just like that, but with floss.

Fun fact: I had that fish without a bicycle poster on my office wall when I was in grad school, along with a copy of the Feminist Manifesto.

Anyway, I think I’ll keep my floss, since I’m not a fan of having decaying bits of food between my teeth, studies be damned.

There have also been a number of studies saying that vitamin supplements are essentially useless, and you may as well set your money – along with your dental floss – on fire. Well, I will say this: you will tear my bottles of vitamins out of my cold, dead hands. Especially my Vitamin D, since it has been grey and gloomy and foggy here like you wouldn’t believe. Yesterday my friend and I were walking our dogs at the off-leash, and it was so foggy we could barely see twenty feet in front of us. It was very eerie, like something in a horror film. Maybe it’s just the lead up to Halloween (YOU GUYS, HALLOWEEN IS ON MONDAY! MONDAY!) but it was really creepy.

On that note, I have things I need to cross off my to-do list, and if I start talking about my love for vitamin supplements, or how virtuous I feel because I haven’t yet bought and eaten several boxes of Halloween candy, I’ll be here until the cows (or children) come home. Signing off, xoxo.

Life is a destination. No. Wait.

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I feel like I’m in some weird time warp and also, like I’m Laura Ingalls at the beginning of the Long Winter, with a sense of foreboding about the months to come. There’s snow on the ground and it’s cold, cold, cold. I dug out my thick woolly legwarmers and enormous warm mittens today, to take Barkley for a walk. It snowed all weekend, much to my dismay.

Friday my husband loaded up the van and took the boys and dog to my in-laws’ for Thanksgiving, eight hours away. It snowed or sleeted most of the way, but was otherwise uneventful. I had teacher training until late Saturday afternoon, so the plan was for me to fly out Saturday night, and drive back home all together on Monday.

Side note to say that Friday was the first time in years – I don’t even know how long – that I was all by myself in the house, without even the dog to keep me company. It was bizarre, not having anyone else’s schedule or needs to think of. Mind you, the days prior to that were a blur of preparing and packing and getting everyone else ready, but come Friday, I realized it was just me. I didn’t have to let the dog out, I didn’t have to feed anyone except myself. All I had to do was make it to class on time, and that’s it. It was a little surreal.

Another side note: since my husband took the van, I was driving his three-quarter-ton truck. Technically I could have taken his car, but the thought of it possibly getting dinged in the parking lot of the yoga college was too much to bear. I don’t think I could stand that kind of pressure. Plus, the snow had started and the plain fact of the matter was that if I – god forbid – was to get in an accident, being in the giant truck would be much preferable than being in a little sports car, on so many different levels. One of those levels would be that my husband would be much less upset if the truck was in an accident, than his girlfriend/ car. The other was that I felt eminently safer in the truck. You can’t hurt me, motherfuckers, you can’t even try, I thought to myself from my much-higher-than-normal vantage point. This is what driving a three-quarter-ton truck will do to you. I’m not excusing my behaviour, I am just stating a fact. You try it, and tell me it’s no different from driving a minivan. You cannot. I felt like one of those guys on one of those gold mining shows, but with much lower stakes. And less gold.

I will admit I felt a little strange when I drove it to the homeopathic dispensary. I mean, it has an elk decal in the back window.

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I am pretty spoiled, on account of my nice van with its heated seats and its sharp turning radius and its keyless entry. Despite my newfound extreme driving confidence, I found myself feeling slighted at having to actually use a key to turn on the engine, like a barbarian. And the radio stations were not tuned to my favourite Hits of the 70s and 80s. However, those inconveniences paled in comparison to my new Don’t Mess With Nicole I Am Woman Hear Me Honk The Horn of This Big Truck kind of way.

I also felt slightly ridiculous in that I left a lot of extra time, in anticipation of the roads and traffic being awful with the snow, and it turned out there were no delays at all. I ended up at class a full fifty-five minutes early, so I sat in the cab of The Truck, pressing “Like” on all the Instagram posts that had cute animals and photos of food in them.

Saturday was even gloomier than Friday; the snow kept falling intermittently and, alarmingly, a fog started to creep in. It is hardly ever foggy here, being landlocked in the middle of the Prairies, but the fog indeed rolled in. The last time it was foggy I was also due to fly out of town, if you recall. All through class on Saturday I kept glancing out the window, where it was evident the fog was getting thicker and thicker. I kept checking my flight status app and all was on time, no delays. O-kay. I rushed home after class, caught a cab to the airport, sailed through security, checked again. Flight – on time. I sighed with relief and sat at the bar to order a glass of wine. No sooner had my wine appeared than my husband called, to tell me my flight had been cancelled.

Indeed, one check of my app and I saw the truth, updated one minute prior: CANCELLED.

Cancelled, and me with a full glass of wine.

Thirty minutes and 2000 steps later, I found I had been bumped to another flight, that was going through Edmonton. Edmonton! My one hour flight was now going to take much longer, but I would still get there. I sat down at the bar – again – and ordered a glass of wine – again – only to find out, ten minutes later that the flight to Edmonton was delayed and I now had a mere ten minutes to make the connection.

At least this time I had made a dent in my wine.

I trundled back to the gate, where I was chirpily informed that the plane hadn’t even arrived yet, and if it did arrive, I would hopefully still make my connection. “Hopefully” was not the term I wanted to hear, particularly since I had sent all my luggage in the car with the guys, and all I had with me was my makeup bag, a toothbrush, a hair brush, and my blow dryer. I was extremely unequipped to be stranded in Edmonton.

Too long, didn’t read; I ended up on the 8:05 am flight Sunday morning, which meant I had to grumpily get up at five after an anxious, unrestful sleep. The good news is that everyone was happy to see me, and we had a nice visit with a lot of people. I missed seeing my friend Sam (HI SAM) and I could have done without paying for three cab fares in less than twelve hours, but it’s all about the destination, not the journey, right? No? Oh.

More magical journeys

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Strange things are happening in the neighbourhood. There was a Home Depot cart in my back alley. It’s not uncommon to see carts from Walmart and Co-Op, both of which are within walking distance, but the nearest Home Depot is at least five kilometers away. Did someone take a cart and walk all the way to my back alley with it, before abandoning it to its fate? How else would it have gotten here? What was its journey, what was it carrying? These are questions that I am seriously wondering.

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Note the Budweiser can at its wheel. I suspect there are more cans in its basket, but I didn’t actually get out of the car to investigate.

The cart was there for a few days, then it moved to someone’s front lawn. Currently it’s residing on a nearby boulevard. Just across from its original position, a different cart appeared. I think it’s from Canadian Tire. The carts are multiplying.

Maybe I find myself somewhat obsessed with the journey of these carts because of my own irritation about people not returning carts to the proper corral. Obviously these carts were used for different purposes, and that’s fine. But as we all know, the people who leave their carts in random parking spaces, or worse, mere feet away from the corral, are the worst people in the world. Okay, maybe not the worst. Maybe lazy is a better word. Or inconsiderate of other people. Or making the store employees’ lives that much worse, when the corral is RIGHT THERE JUST PUT IT AWAY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. Tomato, to-mah-to.

Anyway, enough about the fascinating journey of the Home Depot cart and its new friend or possibly rival, the Canadian Tire cart.

I just thought of something. Maybe the Home Depot cart moved because of a turf war. Maybe this is a Sharks/ Jets kind of thing. Like this, but with carts.

Speaking of journeys, I have great news for those of you following along with my Kondo journey. The charity that was supposed to pick up my donations but didn’t called back and rescheduled. Hooray! Mark and my husband lugged all the bags back out onto the step early Friday morning, to the interest of a new addition to the neighbourhood: a skunk. Eeek! Fortunately the skunk scurried down the street and – possibly unfortunately – hid underneath a neighbour’s van. This neighbour has two noisy dogs, and I imagined the worst, but so far things have been non-stinky. Possibly Pepe le Pew found his way to an uninhabited-by-pets yard to stay in.

My life lately has been yoga, yoga, yoga, which is wonderful. Things are busy and hectic in the best way possible. We went to an information and Meet the Teacher night at the junior high, and the principal mentioned the active Parent Association, and the desperate need for a Treasurer, and my husband gave me a look that needed no verbal interpretation. I did NOT attend the subsequent meeting because we all know how that would have ended, and I really just can’t anymore.

We are having a real Calgary fall, which means that yesterday the dog park looked like this:

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Whereas today is freezing cold and rainy. I have brought out my warm, lined fall coat and I dub today’s Clothing Theme to be Sith.

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Come to the Dark Side! We have cookies.

A slight blip in my magical journey

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“Things seem a lot busier with your yoga teacher training.” My husband said this to me over the weekend and it feels like A Massive Understatement. Saturday morning I got up early to bake a cake, then showered, bought groceries, took the kids to karate, and came home to frost and assemble the cake prior to heading off to the Saturday session of teacher training. Fifteen minutes after I got home in the late afternoon, the guests for Jake’s sleepover birthday party arrived. So things have been a bit hectic.

Happy hectic, though. The sleepover was a huge success; I really like the boys’ friends and we did get some sleep as well. The kids didn’t get much sleep, but I got a decent amount, so that’s all that counts, in my opinion. Everyone was in bed early last night and this morning we all felt pretty much rested for the busy week ahead.

I guess I’m not used to this level of busyness – there is something going on every night this week, except for tonight. Between karate, the Welcome Back Picnic, Meet The Teacher Night, and yoga teacher training, my evenings are all filled up. Plus, we have a very special day coming up – Jake is turning eleven!

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That’s one of my favourite photos, ever. And hey, I’m a brunette! And I have yet to develop those deep horizontal forehead lines. Please bear with me while I admire my youth for a moment, along with my super-cute Patriots fan.

So it was a busy, fun weekend, marred only by one little incident. As you know, I’ve been Kondo-ing my house, and all the bags and boxes of things to donate have been sitting in our pantry/ storage area. I gave a few boxes of my favourite things (older Lululemon, pretty sweaters, a dress) to a friend, the children’s outgrown winter coats, snowpants, hats and mitts are all going to the school for newcomers, and I had about twenty large bags and boxes that were slated for donation. My husband has been asking me every day WHEN those bags and boxes would be gone, to which I answered austerely, Saturday. Saturday they would all be gone.

A local charity, which regularly calls me for clothing/ toy/ household items had arranged to pick everything up on Saturday. I stipulated that it would be a large pickup, and they said that would be no problem, as long as I had the donations out by 8:00 am Saturday morning. For days I had been slowly bringing bags and boxes up every time I went downstairs, in preparation. Here’s a sample of what my front entry looked like, and this didn’t even include all of them:

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So when I got home on Saturday afternoon and the bags were still sitting on my front step, my husband was all sorts of unhappy. We waited…and waited…and waited…until finally, we reached a state of acceptance: the bags were not going to be picked up that day. One of my friends texted me to see if we’d had a pickup, because she was waiting for one as well.

Insert slight frowny face here.

Rain was in the forecast, and my husband was unwilling to have the tripping hazards back in our house, and so they are currently sitting in his truck, waiting to find a new home. In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo talks about wishing our possessions a happy journey as they find their way to new owners. In my case, the journey seems to be stalled. I hope my old sheets and the Ally McBeal soundtrack aren’t feeling sad that they are in limbo right now. Don’t worry, guys. Someone is going to love you again soon.

Spoiled children and first seven jobs

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In my last post, I promised a photo of me looking disapproving at the amusement park, and today was supposed to be that day. Except that the sky is grey, again, and threatening to thunderstorm, AGAIN, and so I am just looking disapproving in my kitchen:

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The thought of packing up snacks, bug spray, and the children, and then driving twenty-five minutes, only to get rained on or electrocuted is disheartening to say the least, and so it looks like another somewhat indoorsy day.

I read a piece in the New Yorker called Spoiled Rotten, in which an anthropologist studied families in Los Angeles and in an Amazonian tribe, to see the difference in the role children played in the family structure. Predictably, the children in LA were complete spoiled brats who refused to tie their own shoes or fetch their own silverware from the drawer, whereas the Amazonian children were significantly contributing to the household, and society in general. In the natural order of things, of course, the LA children turn into thirtysomethings whose moms are still doing their laundry while they make YouTube videos in the basement, and the Amazonian children turn into functioning adults who go out in the world to seek their fortune, just like fairy tale heroes of yore.

It really made me think, being that it was a think-piece and all. Of course, for narrative purposes, the author would have chosen to write about the absolutely worst LA children and the most self-sufficient Amazonian tribe in order to get the starkest contrasts. However. It had me wondering if my kids could be doing more, if I expect too little of them.

Don’t get me wrong, I feel like I expect a lot. I expect excellent behaviour wherever we go. I expect them to get good grades and work very hard year-long, including summer worksheets and writing projects. I expect them to look people in the eye when they are speaking, to shake hands when meeting someone for the first time – and to put some meat into those handshakes, no dead fish hands please – I expect them to introduce themselves and say “Nice to meet you.” I expect them to make their beds, put away laundry, help with yard work and household chores, set the table, clear the table, load the dishwasher, and feed the dog. They often help chop vegetables and they help my husband put up and take down exterior decorations for Christmas and Halloween, Jake knows how to change a tire and jack up the car and Mark helps with the pre-winter maintenance of the air conditioner and shovels the sidewalk.

So they aren’t like the LA kids in the essay, and – PLEASE GOD – they won’t be living in my basement in 20 years. But there are a lot of things that I knew how to do at their age that they don’t. For example, I used to babysit a lot, and I would cook lunch for my little charges all the time, mostly Kraft Dinner or Zoodles, but I knew how to do it. Only yesterday did I show the boys how to turn on the stove. They have never cleaned a bathroom and their ability to sweep the floor leaves much to be desired. Also, much to be picked up by Roomba.

Speaking of Roomba, he continues to be the naughty little pet that we all love. We love his industry, and we laugh when he bumps into a side table and ends up with a piece of paper jauntily riding atop his little body. Roomba is wearing a hat! we say joyfully. A few times Roomba somehow got tangled up in the toilet paper, leading to a giant shredded mess all over the basement. Oh, Roomba! we shake our heads at his well-meaning but disastrous attempt. Just a few days ago, the boys ran upstairs in a state of excitement. Roomba, they said, had tried to eat the laces on my husband’s trainers, and had dragged the shoe all over the basement.

I feel like this could be the start of a very exciting reality show, or maybe even a sitcom. It would be at least as entertaining as any of the ones currently on air. The Adventures of Roomba! Roomba would surely be a contributing member of society, not like those spoiled children in LA.

Speaking of (semi) spoiled children, I must now send them to the Co-Op by themselves to buy a loaf of bread since we have, inexplicably, ran out. Never mind that we all were buying cigarettes for our parents at the corner store at age seven, and the six-year-old Amazonian children are catching and cleaning all the shellfish for the tribe to have for dinner, I am PROUD that my children can go to the Co-Op by themselves, armed only with a fiver, my Co-Op number, and a reusable bag. And then – AND THEN – they can take that damn loaf of bread and make sandwiches from it for their lunches because I am raising my children to be competent adults, and also they don’t eat Zoodles or Kraft Dinner.

Oh! But I had forgotten what I had been actually planning to write this post about, and no, it wasn’t actually the New Yorker piece. What can I say, I digress easily. There has been a meme going around about Your First Seven Jobs and I thought it would be fun if you could play along too. What were yours? Here are mine:

  1. Babysitter (this should be obvious from the entire post)
  2. Page at the public library, where I shelved books and impressed the interviewers with my knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System and my volunteer work as a candy striper at a nursing home.
  3. Pizza Hut employee, where I did all jobs from bussing tables to answering phones to making pizza to being a cashier. It was a fun job in that I had a lot of friends there, but it was also a terrible job because people LOVE to scream at the teenage employees when their pizza does not arrive in a timely fashion.
  4. Salesgirl at a ladies’ clothing store, where I discovered I did not want to sell anything, ever again.
  5. Waitress at Moxies’ – another fun job where I also discovered that working in customer service is very hard. This job made me empathetic every single time I had a meal out that went awry for any reason.
  6. Beer sample girl. If you want a job where you get hit on by disgusting, much older alcoholics, and everyone treats you like a brainless idiot, this is the job for you! I finally quit in a fit of rage when the company got a contract with Busch, and I would have been required to wear a Busch bathing suit to hand out samples. In a freezing cold liquor store. NO THANK YOU, YOU MAY KEEP YOUR SEVEN DOLLARS AN HOUR.
  7. Summer student at a petroleum company. This was my first taste of corporate life, and I got to use my linear programming skills, so it was great. It ended up leading to my first “real” job that didn’t involve food, customer service, or bathing suits.

Please play along! What were your first seven jobs? All of these jobs took place within the span of a decade, which seems amazing for some reason.

Bundle up, it’s summer!

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It seems our unbelievably mild winter and early, hot spring has melted into a typical Calgary summer: cool, rainy, grey, and windy, topped off with inexplicable daily thunderstorms. How can we get so many thunderstorms without daytime heat? I don’t know. In any case, looking on the bright side, I don’t have to worry about watering my garden. Yesterday we went for a family bike ride and the wind was so cold that I actually wished I had earmuffs on my bike helmet.

I’m taking this as a sign to take things easy today, to just spend some quiet indoor time with the kids. Well, “quiet.” I keep seeing recipes that are “beat the heat” this and “no-bake” that, and meanwhile I’m considering a marathon baking session today, wearing an apron over my wool sweater. Last week I faced my pastry fears and baked my very first pie.

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I don’t eat pie, but by all accounts it was excellent, despite being very, very ugly. Facing my fears via pie crust is the topic for a whole post in itself, however, so I shall not bore you with the details at the moment. I’ll bore you with them later!

One benefit of kind-of-crappy weather is that outdoor attractions are not at all busy, so the boys and I bundled up to go to the zoo last week. We even got to see the new baby gorilla, nursing and riding on her mother’s back. It’s very heartening to see babies in captivity doing well, and I laughed to see one of the males beating his chest to no one in particular and getting in the mother’s space, only to have her scamper away with the baby on her back. Every time the male came near her, she left, and if she could speak English I’m sure she would be saying Get away from me, you loser, and rolling her eyes. Finally he gave up and went to munch on some lettuce.

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Pants, sweater, a jacket…the perfect summer outfit!

In other exciting news, my husband and I are going to a concert on Thursday night. I haven’t been to a concert in over two decades, so it should be very fun. The kids are going to Camp Grandma for a couple of days, so the going will be very tough for them, I’m sure. It’s going to be non-stop goodies and marathon sessions of Simpsons’ Clue.

Remember when concert tickets were less than $20 apiece? I sure do, and I’m not one to lament times gone by but those were the days, were they not? My girlfriends and I saw tons of great shows all for the price of a few hours’ babysitting. Actually, now that I think of it, I made about $2/hour babysitting, so I guess those concert tickets were pretty hard-earned after all. But I am looking very much forward to this concert, and it is during Stampede so I’m contemplating what to wear. Will it be hot with all the people and (presumably) dancing? Or should I dress for the chilly weather outside? Should I put on layers, or will that be too risky in terms of losing clothing articles? I mean, there probably isn’t going to be a mosh pit or crowd surfing or anything at Zak Brown Band, but the fewer things to keep track of, the better.

Many years ago, I was at a concert at the university, when my friend’s boyfriend did some drunken crowd surfing, and ended up with one shoe, in the middle of winter. We looked and looked, to no avail. We even went back to the Economics Undergraduates Society office, where I was the president, and made drawings of shoes on pieces of foolscap, captioned “Have You Seen Me?” but we never did find that shoe. The guy had to walk/ hop through the snow to the designated driver’s car, with his soggy foot. I wonder if that was the last time I was at a concert.

What was the last concert you went to? What was the first? I don’t remember my last one but my first was INXS in 1988. Good times.