Berlin, 11.06.01 Okay, what's it been, six weeks? That's embarrassing. But life just sort of flows along when you have a baby in the house. Get up, do baby stuff, go to work, come home, do baby stuff, go to bed. It's not unpleasant, but time does pass, and there isn't much to differentiate the days. Maddy is wonderful, of course. She's now 7.5 months old, crawls like a little water beetle, is ridiculously happy most of the time. Not the best sleeper, granted, but an excellent baby in most every other respect. Very content. I love her to bits. I'm really planning to write again, or at least try, honestly. I could rattle on quite a bit about parenting. I could try to remember some of the awful, awful songs I make up and sing to her (Rudolf with your ass so tight/Won't you be my bitch tonight etc.) when she's going to sleep. Or how I'd like to become the anti-Anne Geddes and take weird, disturbing photographs of babies in strange and uncomfortable situations (Annette bought Mads a little orange short-sleeve coverall thing that looked like a prison uniform, so I thought it would be cool to make a little gurney and pose her as baby Timothy McVeigh getting the needle). The list is endless. But time, time, time is my enemy. What else is new? Skating isn't going so well, mostly because Annette and I have been sick almost continuously since I last wrote. Cold/flu things. I've had SIX colds in 2001. Fuck. Partly it's the baby, partly it's a bad year for colds. So the training is fucked and my races have been painful and disappointing. But I'm still hoping I can turn it around in a month and finish the season strongly. Between Annette's writing deadlines and applications and general physical malaise, it's been a shitty period for training. As for the rest of our, uh, future, it looks like something is going to happen with Toronto. Not 100% yet, and we're not sure if it's September or January, but I think it's going to happen. We should know soon. I'm not thrilled about leaving Berlin but I am thrilled about (a) Annette finally earning some money and getting her career back on track, and (b) our not having to live in the U.S. I'll probably work part-time and do more child care. Hopefully the dot-com implosion and impending recession means I won't have to do any more web shit, I can just work in a bike shop or a café or something — I am just so not into doing the 9-to-5 office thing, ever again. In a day or two I'll gather up some emails written over the past few weeks and pound together an ersatz entry. Promise. [Actually at this point I abandoned U9 entirely and began Leaving Berlin.]