Wasting Libby is beautifully written, but a tough read nonetheless, a heart-wrenching story of a small Montana town where W.R. Grace & Company ran a vermiculite mine that supplied the world with insulation, fireproofing, and gardening materials for nearly 30 years. But Grace’s vermiculite was laced with a virulent form of asbestos, and in its quest for profits the company betrayed this rural community, spreading a legacy of death and disease from northwestern Montana to the World Trade Center, through more than 35 million buildings in the United States estimated to have been insulated with Grace’s lethal ore. Decades of neglect by state and federal agencies allowed the Grace corporation to reap millions in profits, while knowingly exposing generations of Montana residents to fatal levels of asbestos-contaminated dust. The town of Libby and its inhabitants are dying. Their story, which culminates in the 2009 criminal trial of the corporation’s executives, is ultimately the tale of the families who fought Grace for justice, who refused to sacrifice their dignity even as they lost their lives.
The excerpt below is taken from Chapter 4: “Mountain of Grace.” Read it and weep…and then get pissed.
The hotel room is stuffy with recycled air from the heater, a shield against the winter weather outside. It’s my first introduction to Les Skramstad, a slight man who this evening just before Christmas 1999 wears a gray complexion that matches the season, and is clearly uncomfortable in the closed space. Yet he, his wife Norita, and their friend Gayla Benefield have insisted on this meeting late tonight. They sit facing me like a panel of judges, though I’m the one asking questions. The tape recorder chews through cassette after cassette. I’m coming down with a cold, and the evening weighs heavy on me. But Gayla and the Skramstads have come down with something much worse, a modern plague that will rob them and at least three of their collective children of a full life. They know now, maybe decades ahead of time, how their death certificates will read: pulmonary fibrosis, lung cancer or mesothelioma. The diseases of asbestos.
We get to know each other slowly. I ask about work and their kids. But this is not small talk. Les worked for two and a half years for the company mining on Vermiculite Mountain, first putting in his time sweeping the dusty, dry mill. Later, Les transferred into town where he crawled around on his hands and knees, separating impurities from the piles of pure asbestos fibers his bosses wanted to experiment with. That was forty years ago, and in the meantime, he supported his family working as an auto mechanic, playing electric bass on the weekends for a country band called the Sundowners. For the sake of those few paychecks early in his married life, he’s dying now, without insurance, unable to work. But the worst of it is, so are his wife and two of his five children. He can barely speak for the weight of his guilt, so Gayla chimes in. “What person doesn’t set out to protect his family? I mean, this man here would give his life for his family.”
The snow has turned to rain outside, and we sit listening to its drumming on the pavement. “It’s a heavy cross to bear,” Les finally says. After the three leave, I sit typing my notes late into the night. They’ve lain out a map, an outline of a mystery that calls into question the essence of human nature: Why did W.R. Grace let its workers be poisoned? What kind of people can make such decisions? There won’t be easy or pleasant answers, I suspect, maybe none at all. Still there must be some wisdom here, something to redeem guilt, settle anger, make us all better people. I decide the place to start looking is where it all began: on Grace’s mountain.
Vermiculite Mountain rises to a modest 4,200-feet, a smallish, unremarkable hill compared to the spectacular ice and rocks of nearby Glacier National Park. Many of the peaks and valleys in the surrounding Kootenai National Forest have been logged, with clearcuts lining the road for most of the 90 miles east to Kalispell, the region’s largest town. It was a fate escaped by Vermiculite while its owners were busy extracting ore. Now that the cut has declined on public lands, and the mine has closed, loggers have begun to work this hill as well.
EPA toxicologist Chris Weis agrees to be my guide to the mountain the morning after my meeting with Gayla, Les and Norita, though he is practically a tourist himself. Weis is part of the agency’s emergency response team sent from Denver, which swooped down on Libby like a SWAT team within a week of the dire reports in a Seattle newspaper breaking the story that 200 people of this town had been killed, and possibly thousands more made sick, while no one from any level of government paid any attention.
Weis picks a chunk of the ore out of the trunk of his rental car to show me. “Looks like coyote scat, doesn’t it?” And it does—remarkably so. Weis has parked half-way up the dirt road to the mine, and is pointing out landmarks. Across the ravine is the old tailings pile, where miners dumped waste rock. Practically a mountain in itself, the terraced pile supports scraggly clumps of grass and not much else. The hill slopes down to Rainy Creek, where a half-dozen ducks float on one of two ponds created by a mud dam, a system engineered to keep mine waste out of the nearby Kootenai River. The lowland is lush with cattails and willows, and an osprey nest suggests the presence of trout. “This is actually a very healthy wetland,” Weis says. “I wish all mine closures were as good looking as this one.”
But looks are deceiving. By Weis’ calculations, the amount of tremolite asbestos in that tailings pile ranges from 30 to 40 percent. Those ponds are most certainly contaminated, he allows. Asbestos washed—still washes during flood season—downstream, into the river and beyond.
“We can’t go all the way up—it’s private land,” he says pointing to the top of the hill, where the actual mine was. “But on a clear day, you can stand on top and see town.”
Pink flags line the dirt road every 1,000 feet or so down to the river marking the EPA’s sampling sites. Extra flags dot the “amphitheater,” a clearing by the side of the road where trucks hauling ore down to the river could turn off to let each other pass, used until now by high school kids for weekend keg parties. Grace stored vermiculite, graded by size, in a series of bins and silos on the west side of the river. When the time came to load the ore for shipping by rail to expansion plants across the country, an operator would pull a switch, dumping a mess of it onto an underground conveyor belt that emerged from the riverbank and crossed the water to the old Burlington Northern railroad tracks on the east side. Another set of flags mark the grounds where the old storage and loading facility sat, currently occupied by a family-owned nursery. The business, which sold houseplants to the EPA to help brighten up the agency’s spartan office, would be forced to shut down several months later, after the officials declared the grounds to be highly contaminated. On into town, the agency has flagged baseball fields that adjoin more processing facilities.
In the early months of 2000, the EPA will find that all of the mining facilities are contaminated with asbestos. Preliminary results show tremolite in the dust along the Rainy Creek road, in the tunnels at the loading facility, the old export plant downtown near the Little League baseball fields.
But that’s not all.
Vermiculite mining was a dusty business, and the workers went home filthy each night. Employees were told the asbestos-laden dirt was “nuidust,” and their wives breathed it in as they scrubbed clothing and curtains and floors. Their children inhaled it as they played on the carpet. Their neighbors got a dose when they put vermiculite in their gardens, and insulation from the mine in their attics.
When news of dead and dying townspeople with no connection to the mine finally hit the media in 1999, Grace CEO and Chairman Paul Norris responded with a press release, saying, “We were surprised to learn of the allegations since no one had raised them with us previously.” His point man, Alan Stringer, seconded and clarified Norris’ statement. “Sure, I knew that there were issues with past workers and workers’ families, this is a small town and for people to deny that they didn’t know that is a little short-sighted,” he told me. “I knew it, but I didn’t believe that there was a problem to the town in general from past or current operations.”
But Grace’s dust ignored artificial boundaries, obeyed no property lines, and corporate managers knew this. When the winds blew right, the nearly-constant dust cloud from the dry mill drifted into town. In a 1965 memo, one Grace supervisor wrote, “Butch thinks you could get a 5 count in downtown Libby on many dry days.” Former Grace manager Earl Lovick interpreted this for lawyers during a 1997 deposition: Butch was Libby manager Raymond “Butch” Bleich, and a five count translated to five million particles of dust per cubic foot. One of Grace’s own engineers put the asbestos content of the dry mill dust as ranging between 12 and 23 percent, dust which was exhaled outside the mill by huge fans, then left to the whims of the prevailing winds. Added up, this means Libby’s citizens working or shopping downtown were breathing air that contained between 600,000 and more than one million particles of asbestos fibers per cubic foot of air.
In 1967, Grace would measure the dust coming out of one stack and find that it spewed out about 12 tons of airborne particulate matter a day. While state law allowed less than one ton of such discharge per day, Lovick said he could recall no effort on the part of Montana officials to enforce the law.
Likewise, Grace and its Libby employees did nothing to discourage a long-established practice whereby Libby folks went down to the Grace export plant, or out to the loading facility, and hauled pickup truck loads of waste vermiculite—ore that wasn’t quite up to standards for commercial use—and took it home to put in between their walls as insulation, and in their gardens to break up the hard clay soil. This went on with Grace’s tacit approval, and continued until the mine closed in 1990.
The EPA tested 52 homes in the first months of 2000, taking soil and insulation samples, and pumping air through a high-tech vacuum system. The results: More than half of those, 27 homes, had asbestos in the air or dirt, with four of those registering tremolite at dangerous levels. Test results were still pending for Libby’s schools, with more aggressive sampling scheduled for the summer months. Eventually, EPA technicians would find still more asbestos under the high school and middle school running tracks, in the grade school skating rink, and hear rumors of it—gossip that would thankfully turn out to be false—lying in the corner of a pre-school playground. But by the summer of 2000, the conclusions were clear: Ten years after the mine closed, Libby residents were still being poisoned by asbestos from Vermiculite Mountain. Members of at least four generations of Libby residents, maybe more, could expect to die from the mine’s airborne dust.
Media madman, Glenn Beck, has finally smoked us out! Yeah, he confused communism and anarchism. Yeah, the “news story” he shared was a string of bizarre associations designed to befuddle the viewer into a state of absolute confusion. I swear, I really tried to make sense of it—and what any of it had to do with the books he discussed—but I couldn’t.
AK Press is dedicated to saving you money! This month I’ve selected another seven titles that you can get at 50% off the regular list price. That’s a whopping savings! And that’s not all! (This sounds like Let’s Make a Deal!) All through May everything we sell on our website (with the exception of the aforementioned seven items) will be 25% off!! You heard me: EVERYTHING. But without further ado, here’s what’s half price!
After serving as editor for Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, Alexander Berkman moved to San Francisco and started his own newspaper. This historical facsimile reprint of the complete 29 issues in their entirety (typos, ads, and all!) features articles, letters, news, and editorials by Berkman and his revolutionarily-minded contemporaries. Topics include the political trial of labor activists Mooney-Billings, a profile of Pancho Villa, the imprisonment of the Magon brothers, the arrests of Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger for birth control agitation, and anti-conscription actions. Complete with the original powerful political artwork and photos, this new edition includes an introduction by Emma Goldman Papers archivist Barry Pateman, who provides a lengthy contextual essay Now just $11.00!
In How the Irish Invented Slang, Daniel Cassidy cuts through 200 years worth of Anglo academic “baloney” and reveals the massive, hidden influence of the Irish language on the American language. Irish words and phrases are scattered all across the American language, regional and class dialects, colloquialisms, slang, and specialized jargons (like gambling), in the same way that Irish-Americans have been scattered across the crossroads of North America for five hundred years. Cassidy traces the hidden history of how Ireland fashioned America, not just linguistically, but through the gambling underworld, urban street gangs, and the powerful political machines that grew out of them. Now just $9.50!
An enormous chronological collection of over 50 interviews conducted with Chomsky beginning with his 1968 discussion of the US war on Vietnam and ending soon after the appearance of his best-selling book, 9-11, and the start of America’s “War On Terror.” Many of the pieces have never appeared in any other collection, some have never appeared in English, and more than one has been suppressed. The interviews add a personal dimension to the full breadth of Chomsky’s impressive written canon in linguistics, philosophy, and politics. The discussions of the ideas and conclusions of Plato, Galileo, Descartes, Marx, Rocker, Freud, Skinner, and Keynes, among others, are balanced with insightful, principled critiques of the small cadre of international madmen who attempt to wrestle freedom and power away from us. This expanded edition contains fifty pages of brand new interviews. Now just $14!
The Black Panther Party and the Brown Berets live on in our historical memory, but what of the revolutionary groups which came out of Asian America in the late 60s and early 70s? Compiled by veteran and younger Asian Pacific American activist-fighters, from across the US and ideological and political spectrum, Legacy to Liberation is a groundbreaking anthology that documents and analyzes three decades of radical and revolutionary movement building. Penetrating essays are interwoven with archival photos, artwork, poetry, and an appendix of rare manifestos, position papers, and other documents. Over 30 contributors are featured, including: Ninotchka Rosca, Helen Toribio, Richard Aoki, Yuri Kochiyama, Merle Woo, Nellie Wong, Fred Ho, Steve Yip, Diane Fujino, Dolly Veale, and Kent Wong. Now just $11.50!
There has always been a close relationship between aesthetics and politics in anti-authoritarian social movements. And those movements have in turn influenced many of the last century’s most important art movements, including cubism, Dada, post-impressionism, abstract expressionism, surrealism, Fluxus, Situationism, and punk. Today, the movement against corporate globalization, with its creative acts of resistance, colorful puppets and posters, inflammatory actions and interventions, has brought anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics into the forefront of the global consciousness. This book explores this vibrant history. Now just $12!
Albert Meltzer (1920–1996) was involved actively in class struggles since the age of fifteen; exceptional for his generation in having been a convinced anarchist from the start, without any family background in such activity. A lively, witty account of sixty years in anarchist activism, and a unique recounting of many struggles otherwise distorted or unrecorded, including the history of the contemporary development of anarchism in Britain and other countries where he was involved, notably Spain. His story tells of many struggles, including for the first time, the Anglo-Spanish cooperation in the postwar anti-Franco resistance and provides interesting sidelights on, amongst others, the printers’ and miners’ strikes, fighting Blackshirts and the battle of Cable Street, the so-called Angry Brigade activities, the Anarchist Black Cross, the Cairo Mutiny and wartime German anti-Nazi resistance, the New Left of the 60s, the rise of squatting, and more! Now just $10.00!
This expertly-chosen collection features the most important writings from the turbulent last four years of Emma Goldman’s life. Vision on Fire is the perfect complement to her celebrated autobiography, Living My Life, and for those readers inspired by her powerful collection, Anarchism and Other Essays. David Porter reveals Goldman’s struggles with the contradictions of the Spanish Revolution and her efforts to maintain integrity and vision in the heat of political activism. Contemporary readers will find Vision on Fire a high-caliber history book as well as an honest depiction of the complex world of libertarian revolution. Now just $9.50!
Hope you all had a the May Day of your dreams (whether relaxing or getting active in our various struggles).
AK Press wants to dress you up. We’re sick of your tired old, conformist, internet uniform.
For those who browse with Firefox (and who wouldn’t, now that AK is styling you out?) you can easily go to their Personas link to grab your free new outfit. Feel confident and self-assured surfing in the AK “Pen and Sword” pattern.
I (was) volunteered to write a post about May Day. I’ve been having a mental block about it. I figure that everyone who reads this blog probably knows all about May Day already. It’s a holiday in just about every country on Earth except for here in the good old USA. Even at AK we don’t close for May Day. That doesn’t seem right. Anyway.
I was hanging out with Jerry the Faerie last night and I mentioned my looming May Day blog-post deadline. Jerry took the opportunity to tell me all about the pagan origins of May Day.
“They would have these huge orgies! Everyone would be fucking in the fields!”
This is Beltane. So the fucking was supposed to “fertilize” the fields for the coming crop and harvest. Also the whole village was doing this, so presumably a lot of the women got “fertilized” as well. These pregnancies were timed perfectly with the harvest. These moms could work through the Fall harvest and have babies in February. They’d be ready to go back to work in the fields again for the next harvest season. Anyway that’s the theory. When the Christians invaded they saw this and proclaimed, “You Can’t Fuck in the Fields! That’s Disgusting!” So the whole thing got turned into some village dance thing. You know, Maypoles.
Anyway. Jerry didn’t think that would be appropriate for a serious anarchist blog like this. He thought I should just put the history of International Worker’s Day out there. I pretty much agree. Of course he would love it for anarchists to take note of this liberating pagan ceremony, though he cautioned specifically against replicating the old rituals in a public place like Dolores Park.
May Day is actually one of my favorite holidays. I wish that it were an acknowledged and celebrated one in the United States. May Day as the celebration of Labour Day or International Worker’s Day is the holiday I’m talking about. While the idea of fucking in the fields appeals to an adolescent me, today I’m more interested in celebrating and commemorating the lives of the workers who were fighting for the eight-hour workday. Those are the folks we can thank for the weekend. I’m talking about the workers involved in the events leading up to and surrounding the Haymarket Tragedy. Those guys are my heroes. I’ve visited their graves twice now on the anniversary of the executions. I guess, that will be another post.
Do you like Canadians? Who doesn’t right? (They’re who you can thank for delicious Molson Canadian beer!!*) I ask because a very special group of Winnipegers are having a big twenty-four-hour fundraising campaign starting this Saturday, May 1, right after their local May Day march.
A few months ago in my bio, I told you (as if you didn’t already know!) about the Old Market Autonomous Zone (the A-Zone!) in Winnipeg. That’s the building that houses wonderful Mondragon Bookstore and Coffee House, Natural Cycle, G7 Welcoming Committee Records, Winnipeg Copwatch, Anarchist Black Cross, the Rudolf Rocker Cultural Centre, Junto Local 91 (the library), CanPalNet, and more! Wonderful, wonderful. They’re banding together to buy their building, and as part of that effort, they’re having a twenty-four-hour telethon beginning this Saturday at 3 PM CST. Now, while I think you should all call in and donate (number below), we all know that nothing in this life comes for free. So for your internet pleasure—and in return for your donation—they will be your performing monkeys, streaming the fundraiser live! Music (for example, “Smash Mahkno Smash!” for godsakes!!) and poetry performances, comedians, DJs, readings, singalongs, a puppet show, Emma Goldman (2:30 Sunday!), probably some extremely tired people saying some silly things… Something for everyone!
The building houses a lot of great projects and their efforts to buy it and run it more collectively should be supported! To find out more about what they’re doing go here.
I’m sure any and all donations will be appreciated, so consider giving them a call as you’re enjoying your third Molson Canadian on May Day.
Telethon runs 3PM CST Saturday to 3 PM Sunday.
Broadcast live at http://www.a-zone.org
Donations can be called in at (204)942-6994
Or cheques made out to Winnipeg Parecon Worker Council can be mailed to:
Old Market Autonomous Zone Co-op
2D – 91 Albert Street
Winnipeg, Manitoba
R3B 1G5
Canada
* No one at the A-Zone is responsible for unleashing Molson Canadian upon the world. They should not be penalized.
Los Angeles: home to the rich, the famous, the elegant, and the elite. That is, until the evening of April 23rd, 2010 when AK Press rode into town. Never fear! Our visit was temporary and we came with a purpose: to offer attendees of the annual LA Times Book Festival anarchist, alternative, radical, and leftist propaganda. For fourteen years the festival has existed to “bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them.” An array of vendors came to show off their goods: from professional cooks, children book’s publishers, fellow radical publishers, and nonprofits like Reading to Kids… to the religious right, the religious left, and those who admit to being confused altogether when it comes to religion. The event takes place on the UCLA campus, providing ample enough space for the hundred thousand or so attendees. AK found itself a neat little tent and set up shop for the weekend.
Saturday started us off just right! Customers were coming left and right with sizable stacks of books to purchase. People were not intimidated by our somewhat cramped booth. Instead, folks navigated their way around each other to find their heart’s desire. Our books, I mean! Aside from AK Press titles and the latest distro stock we also had a display of new titles from our comrades at New Press and South End Press. For those who were not familiar with the titles it was oh so satisfying to see their eyes light up with joy and excitement. We also enjoyed the oldies but goodies and their continued support. When tabling at out of town events it’s always a pleasure to see old friends, fans, and authors of AK Press. This weekend we ran into folks from Feral House, friends from Book Soup in LA, New Press author Peter Richardson (luckily we had a good stack of his book, A Bomb in Every Issue, on display).
Sunday, LA graced us with another glorious day of sun and good weather. We could hardly resist the smell of freshly cooked kettle corn and Suzanne finally found some decent vegan options for lunch! People were especially hungry today. We sold a good amount of vegan cookbooks including Vegan Soul Kitchen, Sistah Vegan, and Vegan Brunch. Additionally, LA was thirsty for some graffiti photos. We ran out of Banksy’s Wall and Piece, Outsiders, and Protest Graffiti Mexico: Oaxaca. Of course, our own titles sold like crackerjacks at a baseball game. One of our favorite moments: a young boy, no more than 9 years of age approaches us. As he stares down at the books he is lightly fiddling with he asks, “Why do books have covers if we’re not allowed to judge them” and walks away! Not sure if he wanted an answer. A little food for thought nonetheless.
Well, as our adventure came to an end we were still peddling literature! If the event organizers had not been so strict about closing time we would have been there until nightfall. Thank you Los Angeles and we’ll see you next time. For all of our lovely readers be sure to stay tuned for when AK Press is heading to your town. Next stops: Montreal, Maryland, Detroit, and Harlem!
Over the years, we here at AK have been consistently on the forefront of technology and social media, doing our utmost to stay connected to you, our friends, comrades, authors, and customers by any means available to us. Er, that’s not 100% true. We have been trying, though! I mean, we have close to 4,700 fans on Facebook, and that’s pretty good, right?
But maybe it’s not enough. Say you want to know about each new snack pack as it is dreamt up, each new title as it arrives at our warehouse, every event you can find us tabling at in a given week, and subscribing to our email list and reading our ‘wall’ just isn’t enough AK Press for you. Well, to those ends, I’d like to present to you the brand new AK Press Twitter account, @AKPressDistro.
Sounds pretty intense when I put it that way, but I promise that in reality following us on Twitter will prove fun, exciting, educational and ultimately totally manageable! It’s been off to a modest start so far, but just you wait until I get our other fabulous collective members hooked in and tweeting the hell out of all the latest in their lives. I mean work. Work-lives, really. It’s going to be nothing if not interesting. And the more people we’re connected to, the more we’ll be able to serve as a hub of information for all the folks out there interested in the books we sell, the events we attend, the authors we support, and the great network of stores, infoshops, publishers and media that surrounds us.
So follow us, to the frontiers of social media! And, while you’re at it, tell your friends!
We said we’d put together an excellent new package deal for you every month. Sure, this one’s a teensy little bit late. But it’s so good that we think you’ll forgive us. So now, with no further ado, we bring you (drum roll, please…) the “Girls with Guns” snack pack! This package deal brings together histories of the remarkable women who overcame the gender norms and discrimination that were stacked up against them and rose up to fight in the Spanish, Mexican, and Russian Revolutions. Buy them as a set and get all three books for $27.50—that’s less than the price of two!
Titles included in the “Girls with Guns” snack pack are:
Free Women of Spain: Anarchism And The Struggle For The Emancipation Of Women by Martha Ackelsberg (AK Press)
The Mujeres Libres mobilized over 20,000 women into an organized network during the Spanish Revolution, to strive for community, education, and equality for women and the emancipation of all. Free Women of Spain is a comprehensive study of the Mujeres Libres, intertwining interviews with the women themselves and analysis connecting them with modern feminist movements.
Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution by Elena Poniatowska (Cinco Puntos Press)
The photographs and commentary in Las Soldaderas rescue the women of the Mexican Revolution from the dust and oblivion of history. These are the Adelitas and Valentinas celebrated in famous corridos mexicanos, but whose destiny was much more profound and tragic than the idealistic words of ballads. Without the soldaderas there is no Mexican Revolution.
Atamansha: The Story of Maria Nikiforova, the Anarchist Joan of Arc by Malcolm Archibald (Black Cat Press)
The Ukrainian anarchist Maria Nikiforova (1885–1919) rose from the slums of industrial Alexandrovsk to become a ferocious terrorist and military commander who sacrificed everything for the cause of the Russian Revolution. Her exploits became the stuff of folklore, but she was “blacklisted” by official historians and her story was lost for generations. Now her story is finally available again!
Our next release is at the printer now: Wasting Libby: The True Story of How the WR Grace Corporation Left a Montana Town to Die. It’s by Montana-journalist Andrea Peacock, with a short introduction by Jeff “Big Lebowski” Bridges.
This is 
May Day is actually one of my favorite holidays. I wish that it were an acknowledged and celebrated one in the United States. May Day as the celebration of 
Do you like Canadians? Who doesn’t right? (They’re who you can thank for delicious 
Los Angeles: home to the rich, the famous, the elegant, and the elite. That is, until the evening of April 23rd, 2010 when AK Press rode into town. Never fear! Our visit was temporary and we came with a purpose: to offer attendees of the annual LA Times Book Festival anarchist, alternative, radical, and leftist propaganda. For fourteen years the festival has existed to “bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them.” An array of vendors came to show off their goods: from professional cooks, children book’s publishers, fellow radical publishers, and nonprofits like Reading to Kids… to the religious right, the religious left, and those who admit to being confused altogether when it comes to religion. The event takes place on the UCLA campus, providing ample enough space for the hundred thousand or so attendees. AK found itself a neat little tent and set up shop for the weekend.