By Patrick York
Tom and Patrick talk with our old friend Jody Johnson, Associate Professor at Santiago Canyon College in Orange California, about her years providing childcare and educating with the mind of an engineer.
More About Our Guest
With over 25 years of experience as an early childhood educator, Jody supports the academic and professional development of early childhood educators and promotes the health, education, and welfare of children and families.
Patrick
Our special guest today is Jodi Johnson, an old friend. She’s an associate professor of child development and early childhood education in Santiago Canyon College. In addition to being a specialist in trauma and resilience and education, she’s also an advisory board member of the California Essentials for Childhood Initiative.
Patrick
Welcome, Jody.
Tom
Welcome, Judy.
Jody
Hi Tom. Hi Patrick. It’s great to talk to you again.
Patrick
Hey, so let’s start with your educational background…
Jody
Well I think I would have to go back to my interest in caring about and four children started very young in life with my dolls and I worked up from there, and when my youngest sister was born, there was a seven-year gap between us and my mother often tell stories about having to fight me to take care of her own child. I think I was a natural born nurturer, very young in life, and then I got into engineering of all things and decided I needed to buck the system, and I did wanna be a nurse or a teacher, which pretty much seemed like the options to me at the time when I was in high school. And so I decide what, I’m gonna go join that women to live movement and I’m gonna be an engineer. They’re probably the most diametrically opposite that you can get from being a teacher and a nurse…
Patrick
What kind of engineer?
Jody
I wanted to be a mechanical engineer. I’ve always been the kid who was hanging over the fender of the car with my dad asking questions, wanting to know how things worked. Liked to turn around, still do. But I just thought, Okay, that makes sense. And so I started off in engineering classes, and then I got to calculus and I went, What the heck am I gonna do with them? And that was also at the same time I had our first child and kinda got in touch, I think that really spurred back to… Took me back to my roots of wanting to care for children. So I started taking classes, early childhood education classes at the community college. I took every single class known, and I believe I’m still on record at that college, ’cause they talk about me still as doing that. I had no clear direction of what I was doing. I just knew that I wanted to raise my children and be an informed parent. At the same time, I started a family child care program in my home, took off from… I didn’t wanna work full-time when my children were young. I felt like, as a parent, it’s a parental prerogative, if you make a mistake with your own kids, that’s part of being parent… When you start taking care of other people’s children, you need to know what you’re doing, and I think that theme has kind of been in the back of my mind, I… Or how I think about education and early childhood education, you need to know what you’re doing. This isn’t just some haphazard adventure or like a bailout because, Oh the… I don’t know what else to do, I’m not good in math. I just don’t want to do. Anybody can take care of children, and that is certainly not… Certainly not the case.
Patrick
So early childhood education is not a backup plan.
Jody
It is not a back-up plan and it needs to be very… You need to be intentional about that because it requires that type of mindset to do it well, to really understand children. So then I have my children and I kinda put off my education, and my oldest son was, of all things, graduating with the degree of Mechanical Engineering, My husband and I are sitting in the auditorium and I’m like, Shoot, I was the one who was supposed to go to college. I was the one who was supposed to do this and hear my children are doing this.
Patrick
Sounds like your interest sort of rubbed off.
Jody
Yes, yeah. We have a very strong history of engineering on my husband’s side of the family, and I guess my father as well as the tactical field, so you could say that it was an electrical type, but not… Ever went to college. And so I felt like, Okay, this is a good place in my life to go back to school, and I’ve been tinkering around at the junior college long enough, it was time to get my act together, so to speak, so that’s what I did. So I went back to school, finished my associates in early childhood education in 2008. Got my bankers in 2010, got my master’s in 2012, so I was pretty much on the fast track, as you could say, and there were… Or degrees were early childhood education, and then during that time, especially in my undergrad program, I became very, very interested in the work of Bobby and aims were on attachment, and I just thought that was such… I knew my heart that that was so important, it just… That was the grounding piece, I felt like for children, the need to have…
That somebody who cared for them unconditionally, and at the same time, I learned about the work of Bruce Perry, and that also, just his idea of being… That one person can make a difference. I make a difference in the life of children. Really, really resonated with me and I began to follow him. So as I got into the… Got into to work, I decided that I really wanted to do something with trauma, and because I saw what happened, because I’d read so much about attachment issues and trauma and abuse with children, and I have a personal history of abuse growing up and so I thought, I found this program, I’ve been looking for about a year and a half, two years on and off, and found a program at Concordia that offered the Master’s in Education in Curriculum and Instruction within specialization and trauma and resilience, and it was about the closest thing at the time I could find that would match up to what I wanted to do, and so I came late to the education party, but I’m making up for lost time.
Patrick
It sounds like it. So you are an engineer in your heart, who is a nurturing person, you’re on the fast track through education associates than bachelors, then masters, then this new program and specialization. You’ve got a lot of educational background, and you also do a lot of things with your education. Can you talk to us about some of the roles that you play?
Jody
Well, I feel like I have… It must have be an octopus and have at least eight arms because they’re all in different pots… Things and always have been a part of as I’m grown in the education, I am involved in essentials for childhood, which is a Federal program, but I work with it through the States, and I’m under California Advisory Board for Essentials for Childhood, which is part of the Health and Human Services and the violence and prevention arm of that, and then it’s the Department of Social Services and the Department of Health and Human Services, and they are the leads on this, but they also… It’s a very much a collaborative effort that brings in people from all sorts of backgrounds within the government and within local agencies, and so we have representation, I would say that from housing, from health, from Social Services, mental health, nutrition. So we have residents, we have people representing that. The one thing we don’t have is anybody really from education in there, and I am the only person who on this committee who comes directly from the field of education, and that is not just early childhood education, but it’s the entire K through higher ed I’m the only person on the committee and they sought me out for some reason, and I’m not sure why, and I keep banging the drum going, Why aren’t more people from education on this committee?
Patrick
Sure, so what is the daily activities of the committee, you had mentioned that they are involved in outreach and education and research, what are some of the programs that they’re invested in?
Jody
Well, the core goal is to ensure the child… The mission statement is to ensure that children grow up in safe, secure, nurturing relationships, and that they have that, so you can see that touch of Bruce Perry and all of that, and how we can go promote that, whether that’s helping families with making sure that they have housing, food, eliminating food insecurity, doing what we can with that, so it’s… On a daily basis, I don’t do much. I have meetings that… Of course, everything is online. Meetings where as the advisory committee, we’re actually providing direction to these agencies and saying, This is what we wanna see, there are three sub-committees within the Essentials for Childhood Organization, there’s the data sub-committee, there’s the Trauma-Informed Practices Committee, and then there’s the Data and Trauma practices and Policy Committee that’s the other, I forget. So I am on the policy and the Trauma-Informed Practices Committee. Data is interesting, but it’s not where my passion lies, but of course we all need that data to direct us.
Patrick
So you’re in a unique position because you’re sort of zooming in and out quite a bit, you day-to-day spend time at policy level, advising from these committees, different organizations that are investing programs, but you’re also both a parent and a grandparent, what’s the effect of, you know, being exposed to the policies that guide the activities of these organizations in the State of California, and then kind of unplugging from the computer and going and spending time with your grandchildren or your children, does it impact the way that you interact at all?
Jody
Absolutely, and just to kind of touch on that, moving in and out, I think that’s where my engineering and my interest in Aptitude and Engineering is very helpful because I’m able to see systems and logic very, very well, and I’m able to see how they integrate. And I can see that I can go big picture/small picture, so I’m constantly, as you say, moving in and out of these different lenses, and then kind of moving from different positions as well…
Patrick
So you are also on faculty at Santiago Canyon College, right?
Jody
Yes.
Patrick
What role do you play there and a similar question to the last one, How does your involvement on this committee impact the curriculum you’re developing for students at that college.
Jody
At the college, they called the adjunct associate professors, which I still giggle at, but when somebody can be a professor because it just seems… I just treat myself as a person who puts their pants on everybody like else, and I just think that’s… You know, I just prefer to be called Jody, but the students call you professor. Right. And I’m like, okay, the…
Tom
Although, you know, Jody, if you think about where the word professor means, it means you have something to profess, and you definitely do.
Jody
That is a great way of helping me make sense of all that, because I am very much an advocate. I think that is a huge role that I play at the college. I am advocating not just for the curriculum for the students, but also making sure that trauma is… I started out by making sure that I want trauma embedded in all of our early childhood classes. I just came in and said, This is what has to happen. We have to look at it. I have an incredibly supportive department chair who… And who is just like, Yeah, let’s go, let’s do this. And she’s very much supportive of whatever I bring to the table, so when I’m in that big picture mode and looking logistically at things, even though I’m technically I’m an adjunct professor or associate professor, I probably… Most of associate professors, they have outside interests and they teach their classes, but I’m actually in and in there talking about, Okay, what classes are we gonna offer, how are we gonna offer that and really shaping some of the courses to just bring the level of education and the student experience to, I think… Take it up to the next notch.
Patrick
Sure, one thing Tom and I have learned in these conversations is that a lot of people who are involved in trauma-informed work or social-emotional learning, oftentimes are more motivated by personal experience than they are by their education, and we hear all the time… Well, I’m not a clinician, but this is the work that I’m doing. This is the contribution I can make, or I’m not a doctor, but this is the contribution I’m making. And it sounds like you have a lot of drivers for being involved in this work, creating the curriculum you do, being involved at a policy level, being involved in the planning of the courses that are offered by your department. Can you talk a little bit about where you get your energy and enthusiasm for this work? It sounds like it’s coming from a lot of different places.
Jody
I think it comes from… When it comes to trauma, it comes from my heart of saying, I don’t want children to experience what I experienced growing up, and I think part of that is that I have to accept that we were Dr. Spock babies growing up, that influenced my parents, and I don’t… I don’t be rude. My parents, necessarily, to the point that I understand that there are social norms at the time, that was all acceptable, but it wasn’t right, and it left last marks, and I think that a lot of teachers who I talk to her educators that I talked to you pick… A green level or a division of education, whether it’s pre-school teachers, whether it’s cold, they’re in there because they wanna make a difference because it wasn’t a default choice for them to go do what they’re doing. And so I think that’s where a lot of us get that, and especially when it comes to early childhood, we care about children very much, and we want to see them have a better experience than maybe what we had… We led them to be prepared for the future.
Patrick
Right, so you mentioned Dr. Spock as a sort of mid-centric influence on American parenting, and the fact that there were social norms back then, but as you say, some of those things weren’t right. What do you think, maybe this is a tough question, but what do you think are the social norms of today that we’ll look back on in the future and say, you know, that really wasn’t… Right. As parenting advice…
Jody
Gosh, that’s a deep question. It is a great question. And I think you have to look at that. Do I look at that pre-COVID post?
Patrick
That’s a great question.
Jody
I think there are a lot of distractions to parenting right now, and I think technology is one of them. When I would go to… And I think so that’s one thing I think is we’ve gotten away from the essentials of parenting, what it means to be totally in love with that child, and that sends up wonder and awe that we have for just the littlest things that they do and see that from a developmental milestone that they’ve made or that… Oh wow, that… Now it’s… Oh, oh yeah. Okay. They can walk now. Okay. Back, back to my phone. Were you distracted.
Patrick
Sure. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense.
Jody
One of the things that really got me started on that is I would be at the park with… I had a Family childcare for 17 years on my own because I couldn’t find a pre-school that that can do it right. I knew that it involved treating the children in my care is like… They’re part of my family. I told the parents in the interview, if you don’t expect me to dance at your child’s wedding, this isn’t the place for you, and the idea behind that was really that we are in a relationship. I expect it to be a long-term relationship. I’m not gonna be like a preschool classroom where the child is here for nine months and then they move on to the next grade, and you just bring in the next group of children The children in my care here for on average, five years. I never had to advertise. In fact, I had parents who would say, Can I have a baby? Will you have room if I get pregnant and… Yeah, it was pretty crazy. The youngest of the last group of children is the high school senior. That’s my last one. All of these kids went to college. All of these kids have a tremendous sense of social responsibility and the accountability. The character values and traits that they have are something they would not have gotten by going to preschool.
Patrick
And what do you attribute the difference to?
Jody
I believe it’s my passion for children, for not losing the ability to see the little things as big things, and the continuity of care, and that was really my mantra, I really believed in continuity of care. I thought That is a key.
Patrick
In other words, because they were with you for five straight years and they weren’t kind of bouncing from one place to the next today, got comfortable with the same caretaker?
Jody
Right, is that predictability that children need at this time, we talk about this a lot within our field, is that when you roam emotionally safe environment for children, what do we teach them? We have schedules in our classroom that are predictable, so the children know what to expect. But they only know what to expect for nine months, and then it all changes again.
Patrick
Interesting.
Jody
But if you have a predictable environment with a very close parent-caregiver relationship, then you’ve got it, and as much as you can give me the wildest child in the world, but if I didn’t have a parent who was going in the same direction, and we weren’t… In a partnership then, it wasn’t gonna work. So while the children were important and most of them came to me somewhere between six weeks, and I’d say the oldest one came to me at age 2, but most of them came to me in infancy, and so I had that perfect stage for really being that bonding. We go back to attachment to body, and all that resonated, and it just shows through, comes up and was in my life now as we’re talking about this and now what I thought about that, about the importance of bonding, about being that predictable environment, about being the caregiver being that one person that cares, and I was so touched and, I’m in contact with a lot of these kids still and they’re in 20s. They’re in college. I see them, I see their parents still.
Patrick
What would you say to… ’cause I’ve heard people say things like this, but what would you say to those who say, all of that attention, all of that doting on these kids, that just is contributing to the next generation’s sense of entitlement and laziness, and that they have to receive award for everything that they do.
Jody
I would say no. I would say you could think that because they received a lot of attention but they didn’t get rewards, that what they got was… You were really hard on that. Look what you created, it was the… You sense, because when you say… Because I felt strongly… And the research shows that when you use, I like the way you’re doing something, I like this. What you end up creating is people pleasers, people who I have to do this because somebody else… This will make somebody else happy, whether it’s what I wanna do or not. Children want to please. And so what I feel like is it was just the opposite, these children had so much freedom to be… We had school insight, we had school outside read, we do things, we did, we had educational experiences that they didn’t even know that it was intentional or educational. It just happened. Based on what I saw the children’s interests were done have a curriculum per se. Other than it was that emergent curriculum, I suppose if we had to pick a curriculum. It evolved around what the childrens’ interests were… I’m sorry, go ahead.
Patrick
So to go back a little bit, I thought something you said was significant, which is the language that you use in drawing attention to somebody and something they’ve done is really important.
Jody
Incredible.
Patrick
Saying that you like something they’ve done a finger panning, they’ve done it. Saying I really like that creates a people pleaser. I did have a question about that. If you used that term, people pleaser in a positive sense? Is that something that we’re after as caregivers or not?
Jody
We shouldn’t be.
Patrick
We shouldn’t be. Okay, Okay, I asked because I kind of see myself in that way. I think I’m from a long line of people pleasers and sometimes to my own detriment. So I’m always sensitive to the use of that, that term, but it sounds like your recommendation, both from your experience and the literature is not, I like what you do, but a recognition of the effort that went into creating what they’ve accomplished?
Jody
Absolutely, and even if they feel, Look, you try, you tried this and next time… Here’s a classic example, and I had three girls within this last group. One of them was a year younger than the other two, three is… First of all, three is not a great number interactions because somebody’s always left out, and in this case, it probably was… It was a lot of times the younger child of the three. She wanted to draw, like the older girls could draw, and this was… They were about five and she was five and a half issues about four and half, she did not… She could not reconcile that she could not draw as well as the other, and she actually refused to even draw anything for six months, and these are things that I document, not just mentally, but I still have pictures of the kids that they do for me, and I can go back and look at things… And we’ve since weeded it out quite a bit, but… Because you never know when you’re gonna use me that in teaching. I guess that’s a teacher pack rat mentality, but one of the things is that she just would not draw. She would not do anything because she felt like she couldn’t do it as well as another child could do it. Even though I did my best to say, Look what you’re doing, it just wasn’t enough for her, you were making this… But I took a lot of that, a lot of that to build her self-confidence to the point where she was like, Okay, you know, Okay, I’m ready to do this on my terms and at my ability. Yes, people can get caught in that people pleasing or that… Wanting to be like somebody else. Yes, it’s a huge trap.
Patrick
I’m also hearing that from your experience, honesty plays a big role to recognizing when someone has succeeded and also when they failed at something, is that accurate?
Jody
Oh, children are… Yes, children are very astute to being patronized. They’re very aware. They know when they deserve praise and when they don’t, they know when hey did a good job and when they didn’t.
Patrick.
We in a previous conversation and also talked about creating an environment of safety, and safety could be defined in many ways, How would you define safety in that context?
Jody
In the context of…
Patrick
Of creating an environment for safety.
Jody
I think it has that sense of predictability, because that really, I think, helps a lot, especially as we’re dealing with covid where there’s so much out of our control right now. We really have that sense of unease because we don’t know what’s coming next. We don’t know, just look at in California, three days ago, we were locked down and with literally the flip of a light switch, all of a sudden everything opens back up again with limitations. Well, what heck, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I couldn’t go get a haircut four days ago, and now it’s okay? Wait a minute. I am struggling with the sense of like, I don’t feel safe right now, I don’t feel that…
Tom
We’re not exactly safe right now, but what we have to do is figure out how to accept and go on in the spite of that, in spite of that.
Jody
Absolutely. But there are those people who are gonna say, Whoopee! I can go do what I want. When’s Disney Land gonna open? That’s the mentality. I feel like there’s an extreme, but they’re still in between, there is a sense of, Wait a minute, we’ve been… I just don’t see that in my heart that I’m not feeling safe right now. Just like what has happened in California. I’m not feeling sick, and I just continue to do. And I think people who have a sense of understanding that this is just a temporary thing, okay, now everything’s gonna go back to normal, or it will never be normal again.
Patrick
This is an interesting topic because there are a lot of people for whom that’s a reality, like they’re never really safe or they feel that they’re never really safe.
Jody
Especially those people who are affected by trauma…
Patrick
That’s right. And people who are still in the environment in which they were traumatized, so what… There’s obviously no easy answers, and trauma and worker generally, especially in early childhood education. So what’s the answer? Is there an answer for people whose environment is not safe when they come into the classroom? How do you create a sense of safety even though the rest of their life may feel like chaos?
Jody
That’s… That’s… I think that’s an answer… That a question I’ve been asking myself for a long, long time. I started coaching for the Orange in Department of Education under the Race To The Top Early Learning Challenge. So I was an instructional coach, I’d be in the preschool classrooms, and I see these children. And it was in San Ana where most of my schools were, which is a low-income, high-minority city. A lot of families do not have residency. They’re not recognized as legal residents in the United States, so there’s a lot of uncertainty in their lives already, and there’s that sense I’m always… I think maybe looking… Not the kids, but the parents, they have looking over their shoulder a little bit. And so they have that sense at home, and then they come to school. And they just wanna be kids. And that part wins, if you have a teacher who can just be that one person. Bruce Perry something that really struck me, he said, even met your parenting is good enough. I was shocked actually, when he said that. It’s like if you don’t have to be the very, very, very best parent, you don’t have to be that person, but just being okay, is better.
Patrick
Sometimes you’re good. Sometimes you’re bad.
Jody
Well, yeah, we all have moments. I called a time out one day and shocked the heck out of my kids like… I have three children, they’re all like three years apart-ish kind of… It was one of those days, they’re like two, five and eight or something like that. And I can tell you, it was during baseball season where you’re going to three baseball games times two a week. And husband was working a lot of hours at the time, and I just kinda was like, I’m done. I just was stressed out to the max, and the only thing I could do is I just sat in the time out chair, which I now, do I would… Don’t necessarily advocate for… And my kids looked at me were like, What are you doing? I said, I’m putting myself on time out. And they said, Well, why? Because I’m just not feeling good. I don’t feel like I can… Yeah, I just need to take a break. And they went, how long you’re gonna stay there? I don’t know, you know. And just their look of like, Wow, this is a real table turning event. They didn’t know how to handle that. And it was kinda… It was like you’re trying not to kind of giggle out of one side of your hand go, Wow, this worked well, I got what I wanted, but it wasn’t, you know, I got them to stop doing what they were doing, but… That wasn’t necessarily my intent. My intent was to… Now I would be taking some breaths and just kinda been doing the same thing, I guess, taking that time out, but it was just kind of funny and I like… So it’s like you have to check in and check out, check in with yourself. Know where you’re out of what you’re feeling and when you need to check out, check out for a few minutes and get that perspective back so that you can go and be the best for your children. Whether it’s your own children, or whether it’s… Whether it’s the children in your classroom. As the family childcare provider is me with six or eight kids, I’m out-numbered in the preschool classrooms, a lot of times, especially in the state funding classrooms, they have one, sometimes two aides. I didn’t have any things, I was doing this by myself. So I didn’t have a choice, I had to do some checking out.
Patrick
So we sometimes talk about the sort of tool box that people can reach into when they’re trying to figure out what to do in a stressful situation, or how to respond to kids who are affected by trauma or just kids having a tough time. And it sounds like your tool box is very broad. You have your experience providing care for very young children, you’ve got this education, you’ve got your policy perspective, you’ve got your own children and grandchildren to pull from, so I suppose my penultimate question for you is… I’m trying to figure out how to articulate it. How do you know which voice to listen to? Is there ever any contradiction between what the literature says and what you know to be true from your experience?
Jody
That’s a great question. Yes, it is tough. And I think at the heart of it is you’re gonna make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect, you’re never gonna be the perfect parent. I kept saying to my kids like, somebody’s gonna write a book that says, My life is deprived, ’cause I didn’t get Captain Crunch. My mom wouldn’t do this or something. I’m gonna have… And I think I kept that in the back of my mind is kind of a joke to just set me… Get me facing back to reality, but I think of what I hold in most dear is that you’re gonna make mistakes, it’s having a sense of self-compassion and being able to say, That’s okay. Okay, to Make Mistakes. And it’s even… And when you do make mistakes, reconcile those with your child. It’s okay to say your child I wasn’t the best I could have been. Today, I could have made different choices. And it wasn’t about you, because children are very quick to assume that it was their fault. If I had only been a better child, my parents wouldn’t have divorced. Going into the literature on that, but there’s a lot about that, children and divorce. And some of that I carried with me for a long time because my parents did divorce, and I thought about that, I thought, Oh, I had only done this, if I’d only done that. That’s a child’s mind thinking like a child. There’s nothing inappropriate about that, but what is needed is an adult to say many times over, not just one, it wasn’t your fault. That grown-ups. We make mistakes. It’s okay to make mistakes. And when we make a mistake with another adult, I would say that healthy people go rectify and they fix that. They apologize. How many times I wonder, do parents apologize to their children and say, I made a mistake. I could have done that a different way, and you know what it humanized is as a parent, and if I had a parent who had said that to me, I would have trusted them. I would have created that secure environment because I would have known it wasn’t me, it was okay to make mistakes, which our children… We put a lot of pressure on our kids these days to be the soccer star, to be the whatever, to be the perfect that because it’s… I think an embodiment of something parents may have lacked in their life or wanted in their life. So I think it’s really important. My kid said something to me, they said, you know, we never saw you and and dad fight, which we don’t… But we never learned how to make up… Wow, that’s… That’s really interesting. If we had a disagreement, two engineer brains talk about it. We kind of found some logical solution. It went into logic, it didn’t always go and do emotions, but if we could logic way out of it. But they said We never learned how to make up how to do that, and I thought, Wow, that was really profound. And I still wonder about that a lot, and I think… I think if kids know that it’s okay for grown-ups to make mistakes, they get that, but they don’t understand that other piece that has to go with it or have self-compassion to say It’s okay to make a mistake and it’s okay to… It’s okay to be wrong. Because we learn from that. That’s how we learn.
Patrick
I think that’s a really great place to leave it. I only have one more question for you, and I’ve asked it to you before in another interview, but I wonder if your answer has changed. What is the first thing that you’re going to do when we get the for real all call? That everything’s okay and covid is over?
Jody
That’s… Gosh, that’s a tough question. Covid is over, what am I going to do? I’m gonna get on an airplane and go see my daughter and my granddaughter in Minnesota, and my granddaughter and soon to be another grandchild in San Francisco.
Patrick
Sounds like a great day.
Jody
I haven’t seen my granddaughter in San Francisco in over a year, and we FaceTime frequently, and for children to think, these kids that are growing up now to think that’s the normal way to have a relationship with adults and grandparents breaks my heart. Because the physical piece of that is so important, that physical contact is so important that I wanna wrap… We have a motor home, so I’m able to… We’re able to get in the motor home drive to Minnesota, and we did that twice this summer and spent probably 10 weeks back there in between the two trips. You can’t take a motor home to San Francisco. It’s just a city not meant for a big motor.
Patrick
That’s right.
Jody
And I can’t fly up there, and so consequently, we haven’t really been able to go up there and see them.
Patrick
Yeah, well, I can see it now, and you’re taking your motor home up there parking out at Ocean Beach and just take the Judah line in town.
Jody
Yeah, we did that one time and we got covered with a spray and… The motor home was parked. You kinda walk between the motor homes in San Francisco, it was just like parked on a concrete parking lot, and we said never again, but you have to get desperate to…
Patrick
Well, Jody, thanks so much for…
Jody
Always great to talk to you. And you make me think with hard sometimes, and I enjoy that.
Tom
Thanks very much for speaking with us.