Updates

I was looking through my posts over the years with Tarah and came to the realization that even the most mundane posts are actually very meaningful in retrospect. For example, one of my older posts had to do with what Tarah was saying (pronouncing badly) as a toddler and what this actually meant. Seemingly silly but now, with Tarah next to me, a time machine of sorts that helps us spend meaningful time together and remember things that we would have both forgotten.

And this brings me to the reason why I have not written a single post in such a long time. Besides feeling pressed for time, I've actually been thinking that there is nothing "important" that I have to write about. But things, like photographs taken with 110 camera in 1978, become important when viewed through the tunnel of time.

So here are my seemingly mundane updates -- for the record:

1. I am undecided this year as to what will be our summer getaway. Last year we rented a positively decrepit old cottage and went camping into the interior of Algonquin Park. This year, I'm thinking, lazily, that a city holiday (Ottawa, Kingston or London) would be just the right kind of relaxation and entertaining for the kids. So, in a word: undecided.

2. I have been working, very slowly, on a series of connected vignettes, a story in moments. The main character is revealed, as is the absent son, through these short passages. I'm not sure where it's leading or if I will ever finish it. I may be borrowing my friend's cottage for a few days to try and write some more.

3. Work is still stimulating. The dearth of resources and the unrelenting stream of hard-luck stories is daunting. The system only gives the illusion of a single inter-related piece of work. Like farmer's fields seen from the window of an airplane, the illusion is of a single large quilt; the reality is each field is individually owned and used for very different purposes, with only a vaguely common purpose. There is, it seems, no one person or group of persons, who understands how the system is set up and what parts of the system are servicing their clients well and which parts are failing them.

4. Tarah is learning to swim very quickly and, Seth says, she can now ride her bike.

5. Seth attended a video game programing camp at Seneca College and is now off for two weeks. We have seen three movies this summer and this may be the summer of movies for us.

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