Thanks a lot for the input, it's definitely helped to pull the splinter
out of my brain.  I appreciate the rapid response to such a trivial
question.

Most of my trouble stems from just not knowing the language well enough.
I've cobbled together bits of code from various examples without a
complete understanding of what they were doing.  Pulling the variables
out of the methods makes perfect sense but whatever example I was
looking at was defining variables that way within the class so I ran
with it.

Thanks again, and happy coding.

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