Procopius

Actually did some work on the Spitfire tonight, after what in earlier years would be an awful day but which I now realise is just my exhausting forever reality. Photos later if I remember.

I'm pleased to report that despite the whimsies of a man who I can only assume is struggling to come to terms with a lack of priapic function as age withers him, my Spitfires made their way from Hannants to Chateau Hedgehog: Winston was quite impressed, and wanted to build one, which as the Germans say, was ausgeschlossen--out of the question. They look to be easier kits than IBG's 190Ds, with their photoetch landing gear bays--in fact they look almost like Eduard's Spitfire IXs in the same scale, and not just because they're the same airplane--but I know exactly how much staying power he has and I don't care to sacrifice them upon the altar of a transitory dopamine hit. At least, not for him. In the process of dissuading him, I accidentally upset Winston. I read to him a letter home from a Luftwaffe pilot named Hans-Otto Lessing that I've often quoted here, wherein he lauds the killing ability of the "experte" Horst Tietzen, praises the Spitfire's maneuverability, and calls Hurricanes, the RAF's mainstay fighter in 1940 "tired old puffers". I followed up with the fact that Tietzen and Lessing were both killed the following day by Hurricanes from 501 (County of Gloucester) Squadron, and likely dead before their aircraft even hit the ground (both of them were hit from below and astern, where the 109 had no armour protection for the pilots, and neither attempted to bail out). Winston, who like most cruel and vengeful people--I speak from experience--has a tender heart, was very upset that the Luftwaffe pilot died. I am not. This is always a difficult conversation to have with people, since there's usually little space in the middle of the spectrum between "I mourn all deaths" and "I wish I could eat Nazis raw", and my own feelings on the subject are as uninteresting to others as they're complex to me. But I feel about Lessing, who had four victory claims, and Tietzen, who had twenty-seven, as I would about someone who'd killed my father, or my children, or both. Powerless and impotent, in my helpless fury, there is nothing I wouldn't permit if it avenged them, if it punished the Germans for my grief. The late Professor Robin Lakoff, a linguist, was quoted in, of all places, a New York Times article about Al Gore attempting to butch up his image in 2000, that "We act modern, cool and sophisticated. But underneath, we want a daddy, a king, a god, a hero. We'll take the heel if we can get Achilles, a champion who will carry that lance and that sword into the field and fight for us. We're not as rational as we think." I don't even think I'm terribly rational at the best of times, and there's certainly a lot wrong with me, and the world would definitely not be a better place if more people in it were like me, but the RAF pilots of 1940 are my Achilles, my Diomedes, and even at ten, I knew, with the idiot certainty of a child five thousand miles away from the scene of their agonies, that they had done it for me, personally. They were my champions, Achilles without his heel, bearing that lance, that shield into battle and bleeding on my behalf, and I have never, ever been able to forgive anyone who harmed them. Which is absurd. But I suppose the consolation of middle age is that, amid the decline of our bodies and our minds, people can no longer realistically entertain the hope that we'll change; they must resignedly accept me (or pretend to tolerate me) as I am.

Unfortunately, it appears that my IBG Spitfire Is have run afoul of the idée fixe of a stupid old man, and are trapped in the UK with pretty much everything else that should otherwise be headed to this benighted land. Little did I realize all those years ago, when I read of Joseph Chamberlain and Imperial Preference, that a monstrous fusion of two generations of Chamberlains would dominate my middle age. Hurrah. I imagine being in one's forties in the 1970s felt as exhausting as this, and probably the 1980s as well. It's always a frustrating time to be middle-aged. It's hard to believe I was still in my twenties when I began posting on here. In other news, on Saturday Mrs P wiped out on her bicycle while going for a morning ride, wrecking her helmet, tearing up her knee and shoulder, and concussing herself (which she angrily insisted wasn't the case when I had the temerity to suggest it). Based on her fragmentary recountings of the incident, it sounds suspiciously like she was doing something incredibly stupid and paid the price, except that the price she paid was having to rest all weekend while I took care of the children and cleaned the house for my mother-in-law's impending visit, which culminated in folding laundry (which I normally do anyway, but it was imperative my M-i-L be prevented from doing it, because she makes a hash of it) until 3 AM. It also involved a lot of taking the children places, because children lack empathy and all the boys understood was that mom was too befuddled to say no to Minecraft. After my mother-in-law arrived on Sunday, I had to lock myself in my office that evening so that I didn't attack the boys on sight. I see now why human beings were meant to have children at comparatively young ages: yes, they're not really mature enough to handle it, but it's easier to mature rapidly than it is to turn back the clock on an aging and decrepit body. (in particular right now, I'm developing carpal tunnel, because Madeleine, while the best of the three, is the size of a prizewinning pig at the tender age of two and and 11 1/2 months, and my noodly little arms were never meant to lug thirty pounds of thrashing child off to bed. This is not helped by Mrs P not weaning the children until they're three -- as opposed to my proposal of ten minutes after birth -- giving her a method of ensuring compliance that is unavailable to me and psychologically addictive for them. She also likes to fob Maddie off on me at bedtime: "Oh, I'm tooooo tired to put her to bed and read to her, will you do it? Oh, by the way, I said that directly in front of her and she still needs her teeth brushed, to be bathed, and to be coaxed into pajamas. Good luck wresting with baby Hercules!" Like, at least lay the groundwork or let it be a surprise, you know?)

Well, Hannants got the IBG Spitfire I double boxing in stock just under the wire, and so my finances have been further strained to purchase two boxes, which will while their way across the Atlantic to me before the Poor Understanding of How Economies Work curtain drops down about the United States for the foreseeable future. Between this and the brutal procession of property tax increases (allegedly, my house has increased in value by something like 70% over what we paid for it in 2020, which would really be something, if anyone who could afford to buy it from us would even consider it habitable, let alone look twice at it), which have forced me to for the first time in my life retain legal counsel in the hopes of disputing the appraisal, life is bleak and disappointing here, and likely will be for at least three more years. Mrs P and the kids were away in Michigan from the 12th until Wednesday last, but did I do anything fun while they were gone? No, I worked like a dog, frantically sold things in an effort to ease the yaw of our financial ship, and cleaned both my office and my grotto, as the more disordered my mind, and by extension my life becomes, the more those two locales reflect this (my beautiful children often ask me why they should have to clean their rooms when mine are so messy, but mine are messy because I have to follow behind them, cleaning up the trails of filth they leave everywhere they go). My office, as clean as I can make it. Note the spartan grey concrete floors and exposed ductwork, to enable me to feel that I'm troubleshooting our organizational social media from the fuhrerbunker in Berlin. At any moment a Russian shell might take out the wi-fi. The plastic tubs are because the basement floods from time to time (which the prior owner neglected to mention when selling), and because I have a very finite amount of shelf space. There is not actual 30-caliber ammunition in the crate there, it was a gift from a friend, and its primary function is to keep those 1/48 scale kits that I should probably sell from being damaged by any of the late summer through fall monsoon rains we've been getting the last few years as Illinois's climate between July-October slowly becomes that of Louisiana; Winter remains our longest season, covering the rest of the year, and its climate is that of Hell, specifically Dante's Hell, where it gets ever colder the further down you go. I half-expect to see Judas writhing in Ghidorah's jaws* every time I go outside in January, a hateful month. The grotto is actually slightly cleaner than it was in this photo, because I assembled yet another small wheeled table that Amazon sent me to review, and the more flat surfaces I have, the better off I am. The cardboard box is not a modesty shield, but rather covers something like two gallons of photopolymeric resin-impregnated isopropyl alcohol inside the cleaning station for my 3D printer. The printer itself is out of frame inside a "grow tent" apparently much-used by marijuana-growers, but the only drugs I've ever "done", as the kids say were antidepressants and ADHD medication, and frankly both seem to do very little a lot of the time (I gather they work better if you get enough sleep, so they might as well issue the parents of young children placebos for a decade or so), though on the vanishingly rare instances where I get a full uninterrupted eight hours, I find I can focus on one thing for an entire day largely without eating; the issue is making sure it's actually my job, instead of discovering what colour a .303 ammunition belt was or something. Anyway, the tent houses the resin printer and a sort of Heath Robinson extractor of my own devising (inspired by the work of more skilled hands) of some flexible ductwork linked to an extractor fan and feeding out a vent placed in a wooden plank which replaces the window formerly there. The window was in bad shape and covered by duct-taped black plastic bags when we purchased the house, so it's arguably an improvement all 'round. * Satan in the Inferno is not a cunning gentleman in red with a spiv moustache, but a great three-headed monster, endlessly chewing on Judas, Longinius (not the fella what put the spear in Jesus, but the orchestrator of the plot to kill Julius Caesar), and Marcus Junius Brutus (of "et tu, Brute?" fame, a line I have only heard ten million times, being born on March 15), which may give you a sense of where Dante's loyalties truly lay. Ghidorah, of course, is the mortal enemy of Godzilla, and also has three heads, and while his stance on the assassination of Caesar is unknown, his recurrent feud with King Caesar probably tells you all you need to know.

Did some more work on Win's angry little guy last night. Strictly speaking, I would have claimed to have finished it, but I made the mistake of taking a photo and examining it in the cold light of day, and there's more to do yet. In best 1980s van mural style*, I painted some not-very-convincing flames onto the powerfist. * Which, along with all the other things spotty young men with greasy hair found cool in the mid-1980s (why else would large motorbikes with machine guns be a key part of the Imperium's arsenal?), forms the beating heart of Warhammer's aesthetic milieu. Inshallah, my friend. I would never say that things cannot continue as they are right now, but it really would be much nicer if they didn't. She's a delight. Mrs P and I have often remarked we're glad we had her last, because to have her first and then the boys would have been a fatal shock. She washes her hands, hangs up her coat, and shuts the door when she comes inside, all of which elude the boys. She's also more or less toilet trained herself. Even so, like all of our children, she reveals things about us we might prefer remain unacknowledged. Maddie really likes to play "mom", where she's the eponymous mom, and she strides around imitating her mother, or at least the image of her mother that she has. Mrs P has a notably dour neutral expression, which can be quite a fraught experience from someone who like me is attuned to be hypersensitive to the mood shifts of others (n.b. this is not the same as empathy or any other positive version of caring about peoples' feelings), and so Maddie has a permanent scowl on her face when she plays "mom".

And never doubt that all of you have some positive influence on the world; I put two of the IBG Spitfire I/II double boxes on backorder at Big Yellow. Boy am I excited to test-drive our very effective and not at all brain-dead tariff regime.

It sounds very silly, but I miss you all when I'm not here posting regularly. The period when I was regularly posting on here and building models was one of the happiest of my life, with my visit to Telford being the culminating moment. Time seems so short now, and I get so tired that it's hard to work on something and write in the same evening and remain a functioning person the following day. Also, I missed your birthday, my apologies! But you are 7-8 feet tall and have fangs, right Troy? I switched to Heresy completely in part because a man can only be defeated in deployment and outfoxed while fighting around a cluster of L-shaped ruins so many times before he teeters on the brink (to say nothing of the rules changes every three months, when it takes me literal years to paint enough angry little men), and also because there's a plethora of...ah...alternative models available through 3D printing that can greatly defray the costs of making an army. The Death Guard force that big chunky lad is part of consists of a second Leviathan and a Contemptor, the three together running something like $200 rapidly-devaluing USD, and then 35 little infantry guys, ten terminators, two taller space marines who therefore must be in leadership positions, two Land Raiders, and a Rhino, all 3D-printed for the princely sum of about $45 worth of resin (if we ignore the set-up costs...), which would run about $680 if purchased retail. One can see why GW comes down on the file creators so hard, and why a man might be tempted to fiddle with toxic goop in the first place. I think they look quite convincing, myself. I spent yesterday afternoon slowly coming down with a 24-hour bug (not serious enough to keep me from working, not minor enough to be wholly ignored) and working on a surprise for Win, whose favourite Space Marines are the Salamanders, who canonically are very like him in their desire to help the weak (his brother and sister do not live in the grim darkness of the umpty-umpth millennium, or he might feel differently*), their love of inventing things, and their strong desire to burn anyone who disagrees with them alive. The idea was to create a sort of flame effect on the faceplate of this sergeant model, but of course he's ended up looking like some hellish duck. In the grim darkness of the far future, there are no pensioners with bread crumbs, you have to get them yourself. You will note the Space Marine appears to have a hypertrophic left arm, which is allegedly a power fist, a sort of weapon that uses an energy field to explode heads like pumpkins wired with gelignite (presumably there are lots of safety-related infographics in the user manual about not idly scratching one's self), but I think we all know that a single massively overdeveloped arm is a condition that many teenaged Warhammer enthusiasts will be familiar with. * Win easily bullies Grant, who is weak and squirrely, though Grant can effortlessly drive Winston to a killing rage, which he seems to enjoy doing despite thereupon being the full-blast recipient of same. Winston tries to mess with Madeleine, but she's far too mighty for him; she's large enough and he's small enough that they can wear each other's clothes with minimal difficulty, and when I play Princesses with her, I always tell her she is a strong and fast princess. The last time he was mean to her, it ended with him curled into a ball and sobbing with her standing over him, saying very calmly, "You scared me, Win. If you do it again, I will put you in the trash. The trash, Win." Madeleine learned quickly that a fierce kick to the fork can end arguments instantly, as I have learned to my own deep pain.

I keep meaning to post, but I've accomplished nothing on the model, so feel quite sheepish. I'm still alive, and--unlike about half of my colleagues at work--remain employed as well, but it was a close-run thing; nobody at the association is getting a cost of living increase, which means that in real terms I make about 10% less now than I did at the start of 2020. My employer has been badly hammered by the current administration, in ways both substantive and so childishly petty as to beggar the imagination. The kids have gotten older as well, something I had been informed they did when I first had them, but which has become terribly real, as a combination of laissez-faire "Summer Mrs P" and the simple progression of time, that destroyer, has resulted in bedtimes approaching eight at night for Madeleine and sometimes as late as ten for the boys. The boys have many fine qualities and I hope to see them for myself some day, but when unsupervised, they're inventively, crushingly, and amazingly destructively stupid; to look away even for an instant is to risk a western movie style fistfight, complete with someone flying through a plate glass window and a whinnying horse. They're also very big into Warhammer, which I stupidly introduced to them, and if you think it's expensive in isolation, just imagine when there are two little boys clamoring for it and evaluating, with beady little eyes, the love their parents feel for them based on whether or not they got exactly what their brother did. It's exhausting. Win found an old Space Marine codex from 1999 (which seems much more recent than it is) and was quite taken with their two-photo spread of scratchbuilding an outpost. Despite my protestations that now we just 3D-print such things, my future Butlerian jihadist decided he would make one himself, using my materials, of course. All of my remaining stock of plasticard later: He asked me to help him prime and apply texture paint, but I foolishly assumed that he wanted the benefit of my expertise, rather than for someone else to apply it according to his directions, and after I artfully added some gravel and grass tufts he had a screaming fit until I suggested (quite loudly, in what was far from my finest hour as a parent) that if he spoke to me again that evening, it would be his final action on this planet prior to entering a stable low-earth orbit. His stone-faced mother informed me he would be using my materials to complete the rest of it, and so I bid adieu to the rest of my stupidly expensive tiny rocks as they were inexpertly dumped wholesale onto the model. Huzzah. I also entered a Space Marine robot I'd painted in some sort of contest, which will surely end in tears, as there's a weirdly large number of people who paint angry little men from the future professionally. I'm excited at the prospect of the new IBG Spitfire I, but also wonder if I'll ever end up building one, given my current time availability.

...and then silence. Sorry for the lapse, they keep happening. My employer is heavily funded by grants from the federal government, particularly the State Department; we use the money for civil society programs in other countries (e.g. sending young women to law school in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; anticorruption workshops for the judiciary in the Caribbean; and helping former Soviet bloc countries establish judicial codes based on the rule of law), operating on the theory that for the global hegemon, a more just and stable world is a net benefit. Obviously, if you follow the news, there are people in the USA who disagree right now, and the organization I work for one is one of several currently suing the federal government for the release of monies already allocated to us by congress. As I run our social media channels, this has obviously taken a lot of my time. I'm sure reasonable men might differ about the need for such things, but right now I feel far from reasonable on the subject. As such I've been under a certain amount of stress between rushing stuff out the door and moderating social media comments, and haven't had the fine motor skills necessary for modelling. Additionally, I've found myself roped into becoming the event runner for a large game of Battletech's Alpha Strike in the indeterminate near term and have to paint a lot of little metal robots, which mercifully do not require much small motor work, but do need a lot of bench space. Right now the words of the German anti-Nazi and monarchist diarist Friedrich Percyval Reck-Malleczewen are much in my mind: “But now it begins to appear that a number of things which were supposed to have been finished are coming to life again, as such things do, on occasion: good and evil, the gods and the evil spirits of greed and bestiality. I do not know if the end of the world is at hand, as Dostoyevsky said. But this I do know, that these are years of a turning in human affairs…” I've felt for a while that the 2020s are my generation's 1970s, full of uncertainty, turmoil, fear, and the slow and disruptive changing over of the old order. British and American political life both were never the same again after them, and I wonder how this will play out. I have to remind myself that every decade births the world anew, and that what is certain and settled now will not always be so, inshallah. But I'm old, and tired. I just want to raise my children and do my job and eke out some joy from my life without interference from people intent on destroying everything and promising to rebuild the world anew and better but only fulfilling the first half of their promises, as is invariably the case.

So I managed to sneak some work in here and there over the weekend. Of course, as soon as the kids got in the tub for an early bath and Mrs P was off to watch them, and I really had a chance to get a head of steam going, my sister, who's finally moved out of my parents' house at 38, stopped by for a visit. I would be more annoyed, but she brought Key Lime pie with her. It was exquisite, and tart enough to cut glass. Mrs P, who's a bit of an ascetic, liked it so much she had another slice for breakfast. Now, I had meant to do a leisurely, methodical job on the cockpit, but in some (most, some might uncharitably say) ways, I still suffer from the problems of a teenaged boy, and with a fumble and an abrupt spasm, I assembled the cockpit tub. It does not benefit from close inspection. Very, very stupidly, I had waited until then to try to do the harness straps, only to realize I was out of photoetch ones, and that I had forgotten, if I even knew, how to use those little gummy Eduard ones. Eventually, after destroying the main harness for both of my last two, I resorted to a mixture of the lap belts from Eduard and the ABS plastic Fine Molds harnesses, which really, really benefit from being glued to the seat before it's painted. It also meant I never applied a wash or did any other cool things that would result in sexy cockpit photos. I console myself with the knowledge that barely anything can be seen when it's closed up. It really is extraordinary. Winston is currently banned from my grotto, because every time he enters it, he's told to not touch anything, especially if he doesn't know what it does. Unfortunately, he's apparently an experiential learner, because I not that long ago turned around to find him using my little razor saw to cut a groove into the concrete floor, which not incidentally removed every tooth on that side of the blade. Or I'll be working and suddenly hear a crash, as a precariously balanced pile of likely-never-to-be-painted 3d prints crashes to the floor. It just keeps happening. Or the dreaded "I wish I had that," as he points to one kit or another. I did buy him a 1/48 Trumpeter Wyvern a while ago, because he was obsessed with the working contraprops on my 1/72 one (which he loved to death as a smaller boy) and wanted my replacement kit. Once he built the props, he was saddened to discover that yet again, his imagination outpaced reality, for there was no way to motorise them (that I was willing to entertain), and it lies, incomplete, in the craft supplies closet.

Go on then, what did you get before she twigged?

Okay! I've been busy this week being exhausted by my bestial children, revising one piece of paid writing (and being invited to add 200 words to it, a whole twelve extra dollars!), finishing up the first draft of another (which, because the universe seeks to balance itself, I can't seem to get above 200 words below word count; no gain without a loss), forgetting to run the dishwasher multiple nights in a row, and sitting in the living room after the boys go to bed so I can periodically charge upstairs and tell them that their baby sister is sleeping, and could they maybe fight over a colored pencil with slightly less ardor than the Spartans at Thermopylae? Sometimes I even turn on the TV, only to find the grinning jackals I've fathered creeping downstairs, their highly selective children's hearing-- which cannot detect someone begging them to just put their god damned socks on so we can go PLEASE at two hundred decibels and two paces-- having picked up the faint whine of roused electrons as they flit across the screen. "We need some water." "I need to find a book." No you don't, you don't even drink the water, you just lob the thermos behind your bed. (Mrs P used to insist on sending them off to bed with a thermos of it each, but finally desisted after I found eight(!!!) of them under the bunk bed, each breeding exciting new forms of life that couldn't have been more insensate to reason than the boys.) However, over this week, I did get some work done: The cannon bay panels are about as sanded down and blended as I care to make them before the next round of priming inevitably shows my hideous failures on that front. The wheel wells and multiple other areas were also sprayed interior grey green. Predictably, though the wheel wells were probably just the underside colour by this time, I forgot to spray several parts of the model that should be grey green, the curse of modelling only after you've gotten everyone in bed and washed all the dishes and swept up the seeds from the bloody bird which refuses to die. Mrs P was THIS CLOSE to buying a cat for the kids for Christmas, but then remembered that cats eat birds. I hadn't forgotten, but was opting to keep schtum, as a thought experiment. It fell to me to break it to the kids. ("I feel like everyone's against me on this," she complained to me. "They are!" I cheerfully replied.) "Kids," I said, "I'm sorry. We were going to get a cat, but mom was worried it could hurt her bird." General exclamations of dismay, etc, followed by Winston asking "How long do birds live?" "Great question! In the wild, doves live three or four years," --because god hates them as much as I do-- "but in captivity, they can live ten, or even twenty. Beck's nine now, so it might not be for another ten years." Grant and Win wobbled a little unsteadily, like men with the taste of ashes in their mouths. "You'd be in college, Win, and Grant, you'd be seventeen, almost there," I helpfully informed them, in a manner that suggested that whatever happened to the bird, it couldn't come back to me. But so far he is still with us. I'll be 57 when Madeleine goes off to college, assuming we aren't all foraging for rats in the irradiated rubble of our home by then, of course, and every day I think to myself that I am far, far too old to be doing this. I don't think I could survive being a stay at home dad (I mean, I am in a technical sense, but only because I work from home); on Thursdays, Mrs P has a late meeting, so I have to driver her and the kids to school in our sole car, drive home (invariably starting work late because as soon as my children get ready to leave after hounding them for what feels like a geological era in the mornings, Mrs P retreats to the bathroom to have herself a little phone time and everything falls apart again), and then leave work early to get them at 1530 and watch them until Mrs P gets home around 1830, by which time I'm exhausted. Unfortunately Mrs P has a curious wasting disease that strikes at times like these, where nobody can be more tired or feeling worse than her, so she usually then has me make her dinner and retreats to the shower, leaving me with our children once more, the youngest of whom is not yet weaned (because Mrs P believes children should be weaned only after they're old enough to write a book about how traumatic it was for them, apparently) and regards the return and subsequent departure of Mommy as a catastrophe on par with an eschatological event. As Madeleine is the size (and density) of a truly spectacular Christmas ham, this can get quite painful for daddy if she decides to careen angrily into him. That's why there's pictures, to distract from the words, old bean. Mrs P has proven to be in the past less than amused by my writing about our domestic idyll; Mrs P has what is generally an excellent sense of humour, except where she herself is concerned, as Winston learned last year, when he attempted to imitate her in an obnoxious manner while she (who like Grant is also dyslexic) was reading to Grant. Much like Obi-Wan sensing the destruction of Alderaan, I heard a voice cry out in terror, then go suddenly silent.

Since I've managed to get two whole steps into a model, it was clearly time to buy more. From the Hornby US 50% off sale, I ordered a 1/72 Meteor F.8 and a Wellington II, and from elsewhere, a 1/72 Buccaneer S.2B Desert Storm boxing. Also a 1/72 Eduard Spitfire Vc mask, only to then discover I already had one, so let's just forget about that, shall we?

Steven! How dare you demonstrate superior knowledge to me, and in my own thread! I had to look that up. Could be! Heaven knows that I have enough problems with play-doh becoming embedded in the carpet as it is.

Oh, it's just a Byzantine-style tile portrait of a hedgehog, trying to fancify myself. I used my lunch break to do some more work on the model. Many people seem to think that those of us who work from home do nothing but have fun all day and are lazy excess baggage. Needless to say, anyone who thinks this should be put to death. As it happens, I find I work far more at home, both because I have no commute, and because I'm not routinely distracted by all the wonders of an open-plan office, a benefit of in-person employment of which our leaders do not partake, no doubt due to their own personal senses of ascetism. However, my lunch, though infrequently taken, is my own, and I got out the ol' Gunze Mr Primer Surfacer and primed the cannon blisters to see where we were on them. I had to crank the brightness down to make it more viewable on my elderly monitor, so if the photo seems like it was taken in a cavern somewhere, now you know why. I reckon some further filling will be needed (hence the tape, to shield my precious panel lines from undue violence). I also primed the inside bits, but was too lazy to take a picture, so you'll simply have to take my word for it.