...though I realize that when this message is read it will be far away in time, probably late April or maybe even early May.

The time element in Archipelago has been of some interest to me lately. Here it is late March, early April and I am reading voice cards in Volume 12 that report on what Halloween was like in the various provinces of Archipelagoland last October. Time is a snail here. The calender slows and the days are summery long in Archipelagoland. In some ways that seems a benefit.

In other ways it means that some of us (myself included) are way late in getting our voice cards back to Canyon Creek central. I for one have at least a glimmer of a good excuse (though not as good as John's excuse of deathly illness) - I erased everything on my hard drive.

I'm embarrassed to say how it happened. Let me just say I was trying to initialize and set up an external hard disk that my university bought me. I brought the thing home so that I could download onto it all the goodies from my Mac at home. I'll leave it to your imagination to guess what happened.

After a night of sweating, screaming panic, I began to calm down and face the fact that my Mac had nada K on it. It could have been worse. Just about everything was backed up. But I wasn't smart enough to figure out why everytime I tried to hook into Archipelago I got a message that said "Where is home?"

Poor little machine. That's a question we all ask ourselves.

Anyway, John helped me out via the phone once he got back to Canyon Creek. Now all is well. I've read all the voice cards in Issue 12 and am very impressed, especially with Paul's mammoth conversations regarding the computer village of the future. Nice issue all!