It seems that every year about the time of my birthday (I’ll be 61 on the 29th), I start this blog up again. I miss blogging and interacting with the Internet community, but family difficulties and the incredible workload I have right now make posting with any regularity impossible. So this is not Olduvai coming back, it’s just me looking at this site, getting tired of seeing that same mammoth and feeling the need to do something. So here it is.

Not that I’m unsatisfied with them, but I tend to fall out of love with my own images very quickly. I’m sure I look at them more critically than anyone else, and I’m always thinking of ways I could have improved them. This little digital piece is an exception

click here to go to my Flick’r site.

If I looked long enough, I’m sure I could find a few little things to change, but it doesn’t matter. I love the feel and atmosphere. I want to be there.

Most of the illustrations I do are for publication. You always have to bear in mind that any image you’re working on will end up being ink on paper, and whether it’s done with pigment or digitally, big areas of black will only work - if then - when done by top-end presses on very high quality paper. I started this painting knowing all that and still couldn’t bring myself to stop and paint something more “useful”. Because of the family difficulties I mentioned, I haven’t sat at a campfire in years. I will again. Until then I think I’m going to make this little digital piece my screensaver.

I can’t use this image for the original purpose, but it did bring back memories of a poem I wrote as a teenager 40+ years ago. I can’t remember it all, but the last two lines are…

“Imagination’s endless paths
My mind at peace to tire,
All past adventure known again
To sit before a fire.”

I wake up after very little sleep. It takes a couple seconds to realize that I don’t need to get out of bed and check on him. It seems he never wanted to be indoors, but I still checked on him a couple of times each night. Tito was just a dog and I tried very hard to always look at him that way, but in spite of my intentions he seemed determined to prove me wrong every day.

He was a mutt. (Malamute/Lab/?) Rescued from the pound by my friend Hank Fox all those years ago in Mammoth Lakes, California. Every day, twice a day, regardless of the weather, first with Hank, and later with me, Tito would get long runs in the High Sierra, Coconino National Forest, near Flagstaff, Arizona, and finally here in Upstate New York. He “lived” with me these last 9 years because I worked at home, but he was a shared dog for most of his life.

Some Favorites: Good Scratches and Vanilla Ice Cream

With very few exceptions, Tito was always with me, literally always. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week. I could and did take him everywhere (OFF LEASH). He was welcome at the local coffee shops, the barber shop, he was the only dog allowed off leash in our local pet and feed store where he would walk down the aisles and with deliberate delicacy pick out his own treat, and he was welcome in the homes and businesses of all my friends and relatives. He had no bad habits even from a totally human perspective. He seemed to be able to charm anyone. He never ran up to or bothered people or other dogs. He was incredibly mellow, and calmly affectionate. In the 13 years I knew him I heard him bark (maybe) a dozen times, and when he did bark it meant something.

Fox Watching Last Summer

Because he liked (read demanded) being outdoors, Hank and I built him a little “room with a view” outside the back door of my house on the hill. Before the roof was on Tito realized it was for him and was immediately at home. One time when I had to leave town to visit my son in Maryland, it was decided that Tito would stay with Hank at his apartment, which was about a mile and half away. Although not immune to having the occasional “adventure” if bored, Tito was very trustworthy and after an evening walk, Hank fed him dinner outside on the porch. Checking a little later, Hank found that Tito had disappeared. Hank searched the area frantically for nearly two hours, both on foot and in his car only to finally discover Tito sleeping peacefully in his doghouse at my place. It was simply time for bed. Conversely, if Tito ever disappeared from my house at night I could always find him 45 minutes later on Hank’s porch. He just wanted to visit his “other dad.”

Semiwaterdog, He Never Got His Head Wet

When I got a new car a few years back, I didn’t want Tito, who loved to swim, getting in the car wet. In one afternoon he learned to shake well and let me towel him off before getting in. When he was dry he’d stand with his nose to the door ready to just jump in. Whenever he got back to the car wet, he’d stand away from the car or by the trunk after shaking because that’s where the towels were. I didn’t have to say anything after the first day. He was 12 when he learned this behavior. I’ve had 8 dogs in my life and I’ve loved them all dearly, but Tito was by far the easiest, most endearing creature I’ve ever had to deal with.

The last couple years he slowed down of course. I had to help him in and out of the car. But until the very last morning, he was always ready to go, even as his body began to betray him. Friday morning however, I knew the end was finally here. Three times in the past two years I thought I was losing him, but he always came back, his big high country heart refusing to quit. The past couple weeks had seen 6 visits to the vet and I knew this was different. I helped him get to his feet once, but he collapsed and couldn’t get back up. After sitting with him a while and realizing what had to happen, I called Hank. Hank in turn called another friend and the three of us were with him when the vet, Bart Forlano (I mention his name because he’s truly one of the nicest people I’ve ever met) arrived. At the end Tito could hardly raise his head and he died with me cradling that beautiful face in my hands.

I have a hole in my heart and in my life. Thanks so much to the many people who have written, expressing their sympathy, especially Chris Clarke and PZ Myers who mentioned Tito on their weblogs. In a way, it was only fitting that they did, more folks locally knew Tito’s name than mine; I’m proudly known as “Grampa Tito” to my granddaughters. As I said, he was just a dog, the best one you ever even met.

Evolution is a simple fact of life. Every time I start drawing another animal common descent screams at me. It’s really the only thing that makes drawing and painting extinct creatures at all possible. Although we talk all the time of the incredible diversity of life on our planet, that diversity is really an amazing amount of variation on a relatively very few themes.*

We admire and envy the flight of an eagle. We are astounded by the speed and reactions of a cheetah. We see a dolphin flash through the water seemingly as fluid as the liquid surrounding it. We see perfection.

But I would argue we have no way of knowing what perfection would be. We only have what is. And what I see is a world of jerry-rigged creatures formed mindlessly by evolution on a limited number of body plans, with only the variation within each generation as raw material. As products of evolution they are astounding. Considered as the supposed result of independent creation, they are amazingly devoid of novelty, imagination or inventiveness.

Devonian Lobe-finned Fish, Eusthenopteron

1.

Before the first backboned creature ever crawled out of a Devonian swamp the basic body plan of all terrestrial vertebrates was established. Every amphibian, reptile, bird and mammal carries in their genes that morphological baggage. In mammals for instance, the same set of bones inherited from their reptilian and amphibian antecedents is responsible for (and has been warped into) the wing of a bat, the flipper of a whale, the foreleg of a horse, and my own arm. At the same time, that genetic “baggage” limits the forms vertebrates can assume and gives us the concept of convergence.

Working on any vertebrate, nothing I draw is ever completely novel. Genetic, ecological and physical restraints keep the vertebrate body coming back to a few optimally functional forms.

Thylacine and Dingo

2.
For a larger, more detailed image click on this red type

Here we have a recently extinct, marsupial Thylacine (3.) and its ecological equivalent (and replacement in Australia), the Dingo, a placental canine carnivore. These mammals have had separate evolutionary histories since at least the early Cretaceous. Both are the descendants of little insectivorous creatures that lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs. So are aardvarks and elephants, but in this case both these creatures evolved to do the same ecological task. And apparently the best functional form for a cursorial mammalian predator is “doggish”. Certainly not perfect, just good enough. Given a conscious, involved designer there’s no reason for that to be so, but evolution can’t just invent new gadgetry out of nothing.

Early Flesh-eating Ungulate, Pachyaena

For a larger, more detailed image click on this red type

This is one of the smaller, more gracile species of genus Pachyaena and it was doggish in the early Eocene long before anything that could be called a canine was around. Pachyaena was a Mesonychid, a flesh eating ungulate with small, spatulate hooves, a relative of the artiodactyls, represented today by cattle and deer, camels and antelope, hippos and pigs.

All too often I hear narrators on the National Geographic, Discovery or Animal Channel refer to one creature or another as perfectly adapted to their environment. Perhaps since a species can last a long time and fit well into an ecosystem, that statement seems close to true, but individuals are evolutionary fodder. Each animal lives on the edge of the precipice, one misstep away from disease, injury and death. All that matters is that enough members of a population reach breeding age and parent the next generation.

It can be depressing if you dwell on it, and indeed, there’s always a touch of melancholy present as I marvel at the natural world. But if anything, their imperfection makes the individual creatures I portray that much more beautiful and all that more endearing to me because I know the absolute indifference they face in their world; a world without the medical and technological insulation we surround ourselves with.
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* Since my career has overwhelmingly involved the depiction of vertebrates, I use them for my examples. I certainly mean no disrespect to other phyla, and it’s no doubt true that vertebrates are simply a very thin and showy frosting on the cake of life.

1. This illustration is one of many I did in 1997-98 for Carl Zimmer’s book on two of the major transitions in the history of life, At The Water’s Edge.

2. For another look at both the similarities and differences of these two animals, read this great December post by Martin Brazeau at The Lancelet.

3. For an absolutely wonderful site full of information on Thylacines, including films of the last surviving individuals in captivity click here!

Today I’m asking all of you to visit the weblog of my new friend Carel Brest Van Kempen, Rigor Vitae: Life Unyielding. I’ve known of Carel’s work for a number of years, but he showed up recently in my comments and a mutual admiration society soon developed. His work is exquisite! Even on my best days I could never handle pigment with his sensitivity. That wouldn’t be so bad, except he’s younger than me, and damn, if he isn’t an intelligent, eloquent writer also. Take your time and go back through his posts and the links to his gallery. It will be well worth it. He even has a gorgeous coffee table book for sale showcasing 140 paintings.

For a closer look at Mr. Darwin and Geospiza magnirostris, click here.

February 12th, 1809. Born the same day as Abraham Lincoln.

As I post this I know damn well I should have painted him as an old man with a white beard, but I just couldn’t do it. No, I had to try this. I managed to find only 3 photographs of Mr. Darwin as a younger man, and none near the time of the Voyage of the Beagle. Taking 20 or 30 years off a face is not terribly hard, but understanding it enough to make that face smile is another thing. And I know people really did smile in the 19th Century, but considering the dental care of the period, and the duration of the film exposures, I guess it would have been asking a lot.

Mr. Darwin probably viewed a lot more of the finches over the sights of a shotgun than this way, it was a different time, but the wonders of life around him must have caused a lot of smiles to form. All the wildlife of the Galapagos was remarkably tame and let’s face it, if I can share a beer with an Australopithecine on this blog, Charles Darwin can share a smile with one of the finches that will bear his name.

My friend GrrlScientist over at Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) does a wonderful feature each Friday called “Birds in the News”. It got me to thinking that I haven’t drawn many birds recently (they were ALL I drew as a child), so it was about time and I was trying to decide exactly what I could do when this darted by my bedroom window…

For a closer look at this little male Accipiter cooperii click here.

…and “nailed” a Mourning Dove amid an explosion of wings. A flock of about 35 to 40 doves was on the ground below my deck and apparently this Cooper’s Hawk came around the corner of the house before the doves realized he was there. I used the phrase “an explosion of wings” and I meant it. If I had been asleep the sound would have awakened me as surely as a gunshot.

I first noticed the hawk as he came through a stand of spruce on our property line and using the house as cover made the direct and controlled gliding descent shown above. Only when within 10 yards of the house did he tuck his wings tightly and without a single flap accelerate and rocket around the corner.

By the time I stumbled to the kitchen where I could see my bird-feeding area (I actually shovel a large area near brush cover clear of snow), the “Coops” was standing on his feebly struggling victim. He adjusted his grip a number of times before finally grabbing the dove’s head with his long thin toes and starting to pluck the feathers from its neck. At this point Tito*, who I let out a few minutes earlier, came back from his morning visit to our little woodlot, and the startled hawk flew off in one direction, while the dove, to my utter amazement, flew off in the other! That same mourning dove, missing feathers and looking beat to hell, was back today feeding with her flock. One tough little bird!

We tend to think of birds of prey as incredibly efficient hunters and they are, to a degree. However, most birds and mammals die from predation in nature’s equivalent of a mugging or knife fight. Very often it’s not clean or swift. The only redeeming feature is that neither predator nor prey possess any malice or choice in the event.

Had I the time, I would have tried to paint the actual attack. But since I’ve got four posts (including the infamous mammoth piece) in progress right now and it’s seemingly taking me forever to draw anything, I wanted to get this one up as soon as possible. This is what I could do.

Again, it’s a digital piece done in Photoshop with my Wacom Graphics Tablet. I try at first not to worry too much about exact proportions, but simply rough in (and I do mean rough) an approximation of the idea. Here is the first of about 20 layers.

I meant to save more, but I have to admit that I got into it late on Wednesday evening, and simply forgot to duplicate and save what I should have. I do have these two close-ups of the head.

The top is the refined sketch with 3 layers beneath it showing through, and below it is the completed face. This is an adult male at least three years old. Immature birds have yellow eyes and it takes three seasons before the iris deepens to red. When I saw the hawk standing over the dove I realized it was a male because of its small size. In hawks and owls, the female birds are larger than males. In the three North American Accipiter* species, this is markedly so.

I’ve got all three species on my “yard list” by the way (71 species at this point that have been seen in or from my yard), Sharp-shinned, Cooper’s and Goshawk in order of increasing size. Sharpies and Coopers are not uncommon, and last year I had a first year immature Goshawk take a gray squirrel right at the lawn edge. About twice a week I’ll find a small scattering of feathers or a little blood on the snow. It seems I’m feeding the birds on a two-tiered system.

*Tito…The dog that won’t die…16…and after yet another close call doing very well thank you.

*Accipiters are “bird hawks” with short rounded wings and long tails for acceleration, agility and control in tight situations. Other birds make up much of their diet. Apparently they are immigrants from Eurasia. I can find no fossil NA record before the Pleistocene. Hawks and eagles in general go back to the early Eocene (45+ million years ago) in Europe (England), but are absent as fossils before the Oligocene (33 million years ago) here in the Americas.

Life took yet another little detour this weekend as Tito once again worked through a crisis. His gums and tongue were pale, he refused food and water, and he was listless and could hardly stand. The vet said he was bleeding internally somewhere, but since he didn’t show distress at all, just weakness, I thought I’d give him just one more day for all the great doggy dreams he seemed to be having. And damn if he didn’t start drinking Sunday night. Monday he took solid food, and today we walked a good half-mile together in a local park. He was slow of course, but really enjoyed himself, rolling in and eating the snow, peeing on every bush in sight, and even trying to solicit play from another dog a mere 12 years old. As hard as he is on my sleep and work, he’s inspiring.

Last week, see here and here and here, there was a paper published about a new and bizarre species of early crocodile relative (poposaur) that was found in a plaster-jacketed slab of fossilized bone from New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch quarry. It had been at the American Museum of Natural History in New York for decades. Named Effigia, this little (6-foot) late Triassic animal was toothless and a biped!

Since I was up much of the night anyway Friday and Saturday, I thought that even though Effigia lived well outside the time-frame that Olduvai was dedicated to, I’d try a little reconstruction based on the bone and skull drawings available on-line. Here’s the result.

For a closer look click here

That reminded me of an early Cretaceous vegetarian crocodile from Mongolia’s Gobi desert that I painted for Discover magazine back in 1997. Here’s that little acrylic piece.

For a closer look click here

The animal is called Chimerosuchus, and was small (3-foot), terrestrial, and long-legged. It also sported four spatulate “buck” teeth. I was lucky with this painting in that I had one of the world’s experts on fossil crocodiles as my guide. In fact it was Han-Dieter Sues who had solved the question of exactly what group the little creature belonged to. As with Effigia, it was the unique structure of the ankle that was the first clue.

Today, crocodilians fill only a small amount of the ecological space that they occupied at various times in the past. All are ambush predators, scavengers, or fish eaters today. Two of the most unusual are the gavial or gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) and the false gavial (Tomistoma schlegelii). As the common names indicate, the long and narrow jaws of these two crocodiles were thought to be the result of convergent evolution. Genetic and new morphological studies however show them to have a common narrow-snouted ancestor.

For a closer look click here

This digital illustration was the cover of the June 2003 issue of the journal Systematic Biology. A detail of the gavial’s head shows that it was one of my earlier attempts with Photoshop.

For a closer look click here

The original was done at 600 dpi and was an enormous file. It needed to be as I actually counted thousands of scales from about 30 different photos and scientific drawings to make sure my animals were accurate. I also had to change my layout rather late in the process, because the initial measurements I had for the cover were wrong (my fault). Tomistoma was rising to take a small animal from the surface of the water and I had to leave the victim off.

For a brief but well-written look at Croc evolution and that unique ankle joint, take this link to Tim McDonald’s (afarensis) ” Transitions” site.

The Florida Museum of Natural History has a wonderful site on all the living Crocodilian species. I’ve linked the pages of the two featured in my painting, but here is a link to the introduction page. Lots of information.

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade! At least that’s what the old saying tells us to try to do. But sometimes life gives you other things; including substances that you can only hope will one day make great fertilizer. I apologize for the long absence, especially since I barely got started before this interruption. Blogging isn’t done in a vacuum however, and sometimes, well, protofertilizer happens.

I’d rather not get into (or bore you with) my own private little hell, I’ll say only that some of the problems included, but were not limited to, an 87-year-old mother with Alzheimer’s, a 16-year-old “best animal I ever even met” dog with dementia, the Internal Revenue Service, my late father’s insurance company, and another company who’s name rhymes with “tears”.

At least the dog is getting better. Tito’s now on Anipryl (Selegiline hydrochloride) and the dementia that manifested itself as night terrors is gone. He’s remarkably old for a big dog, but has dodged death yet again, and is back to his wonderful calm ancient self.

Everything I talked about in my earlier posts is still going to happen, I just have to be more realistic about timing. Hopefully, those of you I lost with my absence will return as time passes and the entries continue.

Click here for a larger, more detailed image.

Like last month’s mammoth “how-I-did-it”, this is another digital painting done in Photoshop. This book illustration is a Sierra Nevada landscape and the major feature in it is the Thunderhead in the distance. Layering is perfect for “painting” clouds. Unfortunately, I don’t have any in-progress images, but there are at least 9 layers in yonder cloud. All were done at 100% opacity, but made into transparent layers of differing values (a couple at the edges are only 5%) before being merged.

Because I had to do it in black and white, I thought of Ansel Adams‘ photographic prints as I worked. You have to be more careful than when working in color, as only value separates the elements in the image. The white fir and the foreground beneath it I drew as a silhouette as if shadowed by unseen trees behind the viewer to brighten the granite and the cloud by contrast.

Actually do try it! If you have any artistic talent at all, a Wacom Graphics Tablet and a layered art or retouching program like Photoshop can make you better quicker than drawing with pencil and paper.

It’s a matter of what you’re after, but I use Photoshop because I like the setup, I like the tool selection, and mostly because it’s what I had to learn on. The Wacom Graphics Tablet is an unbelievably wonderful bit of technology. The tablet is pressure-sensitive and the feel of the stylus on it is very much like the feel of a felt-pen on vellum.

I was worried at first, but it took me all of about 10 minutes to get used to drawing on the Tablet while looking at the computer screen. It’s so much a part of the way I work now; I actually have more problems looking at the paper when I use a pencil.

About 3 weeks ago I said I wanted to have as my first real Olduvai post a mini-mural of Proboscideans in America. Because of problems with Tito, lack of sleep, and a sudden influx of “paying” jobs, I’m more than a bit late. Sorry about that. But I am working on it and I’d thought you might be interested in seeing just how I’m going to create the animals for the “mini-mural” post. There will be 7 species portrayed and more than 1 individual of most of them.

Welcome to my world. I’m lucky this time, because I’ve drawn so many mammoths over the past 15 years that their proportions are burned into my brain. Most have been the late Pleistocene Mammuthus columbi/jeffersoni, (We’ll get into the actual taxonomy later) from the population of the northern plains represented at the Mammoth Site at Hot Springs, South Dakota (dated 26,000 years BP). Strange as it may sound, I know some of the animals there as individuals, complete with photos of skulls and charts of bone length and mass and tusk diameter.

Setting up the Photoshop Screen

Working for the computer I don’t need to be as detailed as I am for publication, but I still like to work large enough so that I can get a decent image from my home printer. For the proboscideans post I decided to work on a panel 6 inches high at 300dpi. That will give me great prints, and at the same time have more than enough detail to fill a computer screen. The “mini-mural” will be as long as it turns out to be in order to give everything room. On screen it will be about 8.5 inches high and, by the time I’m done, about 40 inches wide. While the scene will be continuous, each species will be highlighted in an area easily within a single screen viewing.

I NEVER draw on the background, but keep it white or a neutral gray. Open layer 1 and start as you would with a pencil or marker. Here’s my layer 1.

You can’t see the tiny dots, but I measured approximate bone length and proportions. Sometimes I think I don’t really draw well at all, I just edit well. This is going to be a fairly static pose, so I immediately open layer 2 and start refining. I’m using the airbrush tool at a fairly large size (20 pixels or so). Notice that I’ve gone back to layer 1 and moved the opacity bar to about 20% so the new lines don’t get mixed up with the old ones. Here’s my layer 2.

Layers 3 and 4 are more refining. 3 the work is primarily on the head, and 4 the legs. Notice I’ve moved the trunk and flexed the left front leg. Elephants give the impression of being loose-jointed and yet when the weight is being borne by the leg it’s locked into a column.

With layer 4 I was satisfied enough to start the coloring process. Layer 5 is opened UNDER layer 4 and a flat (slightly brownish) gray is used as fill. On layer 4 the black lines are made about 60% transparent and merged down on layer 5.

It’s may sound funny, but from here on the work is as much tenacity as talent. Paint wrinkles, adjust, merge down. Paint wrinkles, adjust, paint shadows (on a layer above the main image, never use black, but very dark blues thru reds), adjust, merge down. Paint wrinkles, adjust, paint shadows, merge down (always doing the “new” work on a new layer). If at any point something starts looking strange you can always undo everything back to last time you hit “save”. Sometimes I’ll do as little as a half dozen lines on a layer before I merge it. The trick is to know when to save. Another way to experiment is after saving, duplicate the entire piece as an alternate. Change the contrast or color pallet. Photoshop gives you a hundred ways to experiment with your art.

Layers 6 and 7 show the beginning detail of the head. I always work on the head first, because I don’t want to waste too much time on anything else if I can’t get that right.
Because of the scale here I don’t have to worry about the eye too much, but in any smaller creature or in a close-up of the elephant’s head with its 4 inch eye-lashes, another great feature of digital art comes into play. I don’t have to wear a magnifier or more powerful glasses and paint with a one bristle brush. Ctrl/Alt + and I can get close enough to work on individual pixels. My old eyes love it!

Layer 8 shows the work on the other end. The four little buttons of color are my highlight pallet and touching one with the cursor as you hit Alt immediately gives you that color to work with. In the good old days I’d be gone to the sink for the fourth time by now to get clean water.

In layer 9 I’ve traced the outlines of the far side limbs on to a new superimposed layer, and begin working on those limbs on yet another layer below the main image. Yes, I can draw and paint behind the main image, that’s the reason you never want to work on the “background” of your Photoshop “canvas”.

On layer 10 I’m getting close. In about an hour I can cover this Columbian Mammoth with sparse but noticeable hair. Throughout the entire process, I’ve experimented, I’ve molded, I’ve moved and resized. The lasso tool and the blending tool are my particular friends. So here we are about 7 hours after beginning. At this point I don’t want to do anything more until all the animals are done and integrated into the landscape background. I’ll be changing things until the very moment the mini-mural is posted.

And oh yeah, I can flip this guy too. In fact, I’ve flipped him horizontally a dozen times during the process. It gives you a whole new look at things you might have missed.

For a closer look click here

When the mural is up (and yes, I’ve learned not to open my mouth only to insert my foot) we’ll talk about mammoth hair and tusk curves and I’ll answer any questions about why I portrayed something the way I did. I hope I haven’t bored too many of you that don’t know Photoshop, but if enough people like this post, I’m thinking about putting up a how-it-was-done on the painting of the background too. Think clone tool!

It Was A Mouse

The past few nights with Tito have been tough. Not much sleep again but it’s slowly getting better. I sat with him a long time last night just petting him as he finally went to sleep. There were no lights on, just a candle on the shelf next to the window. It happened very quickly, just a fleeting moment’s pause on a run back to the wall’s protection.

Every winter a couple of deer mice find their way into the old house for warmth, and remembering how low on the food chain I’ve been a few times in my life, I just haven’t got the heart to kick them out. It’s probably not a good idea to share too much of your living space with mice, but there’s never been a case of hantavirus in New York and all my cupboards are well sealed.

I wasn’t going to do anything for the “war on Christmas” this year, but that image stuck with me and this evening I thought why not. Why not share that instant in time when the world consisted of a man, his old dog and a mouse. It’s not much; I only had a couple hours, but please know that I appreciate all of you who have visited the site. Tito, the mouse and I, warmly wish you all…