Another letter from Toronto
2 May 2002

Over the past three or four weeks (I'm losing track) life has rather dissolved into a blur of coping with the news from Calgary, scheming, plotting and planning, then coping with a week's visit from my parents and a week of Maddy at home dealing with chicken pox. So there hasn't been much time to do anything useful. I've been combing real estate listings in Calgary and scouring the web for cheap cars. Obsessing about it, even.

It's a pity that Pivotal tanked so badly, this would be a good time to have $100k stashed away. But I shouldn't complain, we did well enough.

Pictures. Here is Madeleine a few weeks ago, seated beside my father in a restaurant booth in Niagara-on-the-Lake. We drove down for the day while Annette was away at a conference. We lived in Niagara in 1975/76 but this is the first time I've gone back with my parents. Mads had a perfectly good day. She's 1.5 years old now. She talks constantly. I've taught her to swear, which is still funny but slightly embarrassing. When she hears children yelling in the schoolyard behind the house she shouts "Damn kids! Damn kids!"

Here's an envelope that arrived containing a CD of archival material. I don't know why I scanned it other than I needed to test the scanner and I thought it looked cool with all those stickers. Whatever.

Here's a sticker book my mom sent to Maddy. She loves sticker books. She ripped a couple of the stickers peeling them off but I was able to use the pieces very artistically I thought. The Cessna-Concorde crash is very dramatic but the little bisected girl is macabre.

So yeah, life proceeds apace. The current plan is that we'll go out in mid-July, look for a house to buy, either something habitable or, preferably, a dive that I can spend my time fixing up while we live with Liz. There are many variables though.

Now that things appear to be settling down a bit I may try to get back to writing and thinking about what the hell to do next year. Working in the software business is not high on my list.