Bought a V-8 Ford Fairlane in Elyria, and we drove to California for a short summer visit with Dad and Clarice in San Mateo. Drove back to Oberlin along a northern route, angling through many Indian reservations and delightfully passing near enough to Dagmar, Montana, to see a highway sign pointing in that direction. Then to the Trans-Canada (Queen's Highway) through Medicine Hat, Winnipeg, and Thunder Bay, to Sault Ste. Marie, with a southbound crossing of the 26,372 foot long Mackinac suspension bridge connecting upper and lower Michigan in the USA. It was somewhere around Piapot, Canada, I think, that Dagmar and I were treated to an act of genuine kindness.

Poem for Christmas, 1985

Jennifer:
New paths open before me as I step into the future.

Todd:
Paths which have merged in a forest glen, and the shadows grow long.

Richard:
But I see a light and I hear a sound and will, like my sister, journey forward.

Karen:
Risky I thought, but I took a chance too, and the shadows have melted away.

Clarice:
I have been there before in the backwards; but forward is clear and I know the light well. And I pilot a course safe and sure.

Warren:
It was I who landscaped the valley and built the paths with help from family and kin. Was I created the thought and the light, the notion of forward and back.

Tay:
And is I who today welcomes your light to this house and who celebrates with you, all my family, the brightness and grace of the paths not yet chosen. And who wishes you all the very spice of success in the year and the years to come.

From a Christmas Letter:

Lizzie made the honor roll her first term at Camden Hills Regional High School - no small feat as she adjusts to the demands of secondary schooling and learns to budget her time. Already, the comfortable wrappings of her childhood are molting away as she accepts more and more responsibility and broadens her horizons. She has become a sure-footed and self-reliant young lady, and in Appleton continues with her violin, voice, and piano lessons and with her battles with algebra. At fourteen, she drives the stick-shift 4-wheel-drive Subaru "skidder" I built for woodcutting in the forest, drives it like a pro, though she has yet to understand the greasier mechanicking part (like changing a tire or checking oil). Seems she's often joy-riding but is occasionally unluckily faultless like when the battery runs dead or the water pump quits, times when she and her friends trek back across our 26 acres in the dark to get Dad (oh, oh!). She's a faultless driver, except for the vestigial right and left rear view mirrors, that is, but such broken trifles are consumable within the cost of a girl's education. She's become quite adept and worthy as she transitions into grown-up life!

Karen and I were divorced this year. During the summer of 2000 I quite accidentally discovered secret non-accidental things about Karen that were of such spectacular enormity and span that, even after attempting to work them through in counseling and with a lot of heart-to-heart talks with my friends and trying to understand this complex \'93thing\'94 for half a year, I could not find a way to continue what was then left of the marriage. It has been a very bitter time since February, 2001, while the lawyers fought it out in a no-fault court system where legal guilt is not the same as moral guilt. In the end, I was awarded the home, office, and property; Karen has taken a job at a local bank and has moved to an apartment on the seacoast. Lizzie transits between these places as she chooses. The whole thing was like falling on an icy sidewalk: one moment you are vertical and in balance, then in a split second you are sprawled flat while you listen to the riot of pain and attempt to separate serious broken bones from equally painful bruises and skinned knees. The accident is fast and powerful, and getting on one's feet again is not trivial...

I wrote a new fifth edition of my book about multimedia which was published this summer by Osborne/McGraw-Hill along with a companion 200+ page teaching manual. This edition is aimed more into education channels and is selling quite well; I am counting on it to help get me through a financially tough two or three years while my life settles into new patterns post divorce. A dozen or so clients in Maine and elsewhere are keeping me busy as a consultant in the multimedia and Internet arena.

Fixing up the farm began as a two-year project, it metamorphosed into a ten-year project, and now it has become a forever project. On the bright side, after three years, the living spaces are tight, the infrastructure of water, electricity, and heat is in place, and this 200-year-old farm has become comfortable and safe. Now each new project can be isolated and treated as non-critical: the sauna is ready for electrical wiring and interior walls; the center posts of the barn need nine inches of jacking up; the ceiling in the cow stalls is collapsing and must be demolished and taken out to the burn pile; the upstairs bathroom could use a shower - but no single task is pressing. There are a lot of construction and renovation pictures linked from  http://www.vaughan.org/appleton/ for those of you interested in details.

The guest quarters are finished and ready for your visit. Winter-wise, we have a chairlift about ten minutes drive and plenty of cross-country skiing, the snowmobile is tuned up, and there are snowshoes in the garage. Summer-wise, check out the beaver dams on our river, take out the canoe or sail on Penobscot Bay, and visit nearby Acadia National Park\'85 We'd love to see you here!

Until then, I wish you the very best for the new year!