Well, hello everyone and welcome back to the hallway. I'm Marilyn Manin and I have an update for you today. I have been kidding, lots of kind emails and messages about, Hey, what is happening with the podcast, which is a wonderful question. So I think most of you saw my update on Instagram that just said, Hey, Ashley, and Alene, and I tried to record twice. We actually tried three times, and the third time we had some things come up with families and then we couldn't do it, and the technology didn't work. Either one of our audios went out or both went out, and it was just, I. We didn't know it until I went to edit it later because it looked like everything was fine when we were recording. And then when I went to edit it, you would hear one or two of us responding with like, you know. Mm-hmm. Oh, mm-hmm. But you couldn't hear the person who was talking. And so at that point, I just kind of took a pause there. Um, seemed to just be some. Just a lot of difficulty in kind of going forward, the three of us, and I had been so excited at the beginning of the, what was supposed to be our second season because so many of you so enjoyed Ashley and so enjoyed Aileen, and I love to be in projects with other women, so it was just very exciting to me to be like the three of us can do it together and then for us to not be able to do it together. I just got kind of. Right. Ran about it. So a little angsty. Also in my world right now, I started doing this podcast as you all listened to the first episode because I wanted to talk to people about being in the hallway and what that was like and what we experience. And I think everyone's experience is a little different, a little complex. And so. I wanted to have a space where we talked about that and shared those stories and I had so much fun doing it in season one. And so I was really exci excited about season two and then simultaneously in my life. One of the things that's come up is, you know when people say like, I don't have enough time. I have enough time. Um, I have space and breath in my schedule and we rhythm our days to the best of our ability to have time outside and time together and time reading and, um. Right now in the time that I have, I said this to Ashley the other day, there are times where I don't wanna record. I want to go outside. My mom introduced me to this app called the Merlin app. That is Bird. You can record. Record the bird noises wherever you are and it will tell you what kind of birds it is. I don't care if you think I'm a total nerd. I am. It is amazing. So sometimes I just wanna sit in my back garden and. Listen to the birds and I now know what a common ch chaff sounds like and the difference between a Eurasian Rin that's like singing and a Eurasian Rin that's like sending out a SOS call. It's amazing. And I wanna ride bikes with my kid and I wanna read books. I just finished a book called The Dictionary of Lost Words and. It made me cry and laugh and it was so beautiful. And so there are all these things that I wanna spend my time doing, and when there was difficulty recording all three of us and then trying to get schedules together in three different time zones, it just felt hard and I wanted to do the things that I enjoy. So. Yeah, there's that on one side, like it's, it's been too difficult to schedule the three of us, and so going forward, it's not gonna be the three of us, but I don't know what it's gonna look like yet because I'm in St. Andrew's, Scotland, Ashley's in Nashville, Tennessee, and Eileen's in Los Angeles, California. So that's just been a lot to navigate alongside the technical difficulties. So there's that piece. And then the other piece is, do I still want to do this? Um, is it just like, it was just supposed to be one season, Marilyn, let it go. Maybe. Um, is it that this is the reality of doing a podcast about the hallway with people who live in the hallway and so it's gonna ebb and flow. I watch other people who have, um. Careers, jobs, vocational callings that also do a podcast. And then I hear them talk about their producer or their, um, team. And I think I don't have one of those, and that's not where I am in my life. So what do I do about that? So I have a lot of questions right now about where we go from here. I'm gonna take this summer to think about that. We, our son gets out of school in two and a half weeks and maybe three weeks, and we are taking a, a short trip to Italy to see my sister who lives there and my mom's gonna meet us there. And my sister introduced me to Florence, Italy when I was a teenager, when she was living there the first time. And it was a really kind of unbelievable experience for me. And so I'm just so excited about my husband and my son getting to have that same experience. And then my mom will be here in Scotland with us for. Three and a half weeks, and that'll be amazing and we'll have, you know, good times with her. And so I just wanna enjoy our summer, but I'm gonna be thinking and praying about what to do next with this. Also Aileen is gonna come on and give an update on her. They are finding some settling finally in California. Her husband has found a permanent position as well as his adjunct position that he gets to continue to do, and she's continuing to do coaching work and they're gonna settle into their new home. So once we can get time together, where, kids are not in the background and we can have an update. She and I are gonna do that and I promise she will give you the good, the bad and the ugly of what it's been like for her in the hallway over the last year and what it's like to start to settle now. And once we have time to do that, I will absolutely update it for you and we will put that on. you know, we will upload that. So that is coming. The one thing I wanted to talk about though, going forward, is if, if you have a story that you wanna share, if you, are a hallway dweller or a hallway visitor and you wanna share with us your story, I would love to hear it. So why don't you just email me and say, Marilyn, this is the story I would like to share. This is what it's been like for me to be in the hallway. I would just love to hear that. There's a story I told when I was in college, to my friends there, we were talking about like, why, what, what about the stuff that we do? Does it matter? Especially if your audience is small or your impact is small, or the, the way you're doing it is small. Like, does that matter? Especially now I think about the world that we live in. Everything feels like it has to be like. Bigger, faster, more, money, power, all of the things. So like, does the little things matter? And so I had been home in April to have a belated celebration for my mom's birthday, and I was talking to one of my aunts and I remembered the starfish story story. So this is the thing that I've been thinking about and the thing that I wanted to share with you, wherever you are in your story today and where you are in the hallway like. Does the stuff I do matter. And so the thing I would say is the Starfish story always encourages me, and if you know it, I hope this is the correct telling of it or a correct version of it. It's a story about a family that was at the, at the sea on holiday, and their little boy had gotten this. They had had a big storm and it was like a, it was like a big, big, big storm. Like big waves, big thunder, big lightning, lots of rain. And it had happened like all the night before. He'd gotten to see it before he went to bed, and then it. Went all night. And then when he woke up in the morning and his parents were awake, the sun was out. But you know, tree limbs were down and a little bit of flooding in town and all of those things. And he was old enough to go out on the beach on his own. And so his parents said, yeah, you can go out and, you know, kind of look on the beach. And when he got out on the beach, because of the big waves, there were all these starfish that had been beached. And the waves, you know, this, the, the tide had gone out. And so there were all these starfish just stranded. Starting to bake in the morning sun. And so the little boy did what his dad had showed him how to do, and he picked up a starfish and he threw it into the ocean. And I mean, there are, you know, thousands of starfish stuck on, on the beach. And he just starts going one by one, picks one up, walks to the edge. Throws it in, goes back, gets another one, walks to the edge, throws it in. And this old kind of curmudgeony old man had been walking down the beach and he looked at him, he's like, what are you doing? And the kid looked at him like, what do you think I'm doing? He's like, I'm throwing him back in. And he's like, why would you do that? It there're too many of them. It's not gonna matter. It's not gonna make a difference. And the kid kind of walked and threw, went in and looked at the old man and said, well, it made a difference to that one. But then what happened over time is people did what the little boy did and the curmudgeony old man did. And they came out and they started looking at the, the sea and all of the starfish, and they started seeing what the little boy was doing and they started throwing starfish back too, because his little act of tenderness inspired them to do the same. And so while that applies to me right now in my work and in my family and in whether or not I continue to do this. I think it also really applies right now to where we are in the world. Who are the starfish around you? Who are the people that need your love and care and attention that aren't close to the water, and how do you help throw them back in? How do you support the communities and the people around you? What does that look like for you right now? If you wanna tell me a story about that. Oh, I would love it. But I just hope that today that we're all looking around us to see what are the starfish we need to throw back in, and how do we do it well? So. I'll let you know when we know it'll probably be the end of the summer, what's gonna happen with the podcast. I may have a couple more things that I share on here if I have some time before our sun gets out of school. And so I'll upload those and season two will be a hallway season with a couple of episodes that were hodgepodge and that's my throwing the starfish in for this season. So I hope you have a really lovely day. Thanks for coming along this journey with us. I'm grateful for all of you.