[as of 1998]
It's hard to know what to leave out, once again. When I got the job at Washington & Lee (W&L, pronounced 'dubyuhnell') I was sure I'd fallen butter-side-up, and more than 5 years later I still feel the same way. The work I do is constantly interesting and challenging, much more fun than professoring, and with none of the jangly bits like grading and thorny relations with faculty colleagues. The students are lively and curious, the faculty and administration delightful to work with. Part of the satisfaction is that librarianship is a service profession: people come to you for help and are really happy when you can in fact help them. There's lots more about what I do accessible via links on my home page.

I've been able to take up instrument-building and other woodworking again (the avocation was in occultation for about 10 years), and the musical side of things has continued to expand though so far it's without any co-conspirators. But I have hopes...

Betsy's schedule sees her spending one fortnight in Lexington, the next in Andover MA, the next in Lexington and so on. She has amassed lots of Frequent Flyer miles, and a considerable wilyness in dealing with the vicissitudes of air travel, and she telecommutes (phone, FAX, modem...) when she's in Virginia. She works on the software for analyzing enormous health care databases. In her copious free time she's been working on interactive software with a linguistic flavor, Speech Works being a tool for non-native speakers of English who want to reduce their accents, and The Road to Citizenship (now under development) providing support for people who want to become U.S. citizens. She wishes she had time for Scrabble, but that has fallen by the wayside.

We bought a magnificent stone house shortly after we arrived:


and so we get to think about renovations and landscaping and suchlike.

Appalachian Trail hiking has been a major background activity, on weekends and during vacations. We've hiked all of the trail through Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland, and we're into Pennsylvania in the north and down toward (but not quite to) the Smokies on the Tennessee-North Carolina border in the south, plus a good bit in the White Mountains. Betsy has also done a good bit of Vermont and New Hampshire in either direction from Lebanon NH (where Codman was based until a year and a half ago) and some of Massachusetts as well. Whether we'll ever 'complete' the trail depends on taking up overnight hiking --everything we've done so far has been day hikes, many of them out-and-back, but there's a lot of trail that requires 2-3 day stretches with no intermediate access points. [n.b. that we solved that problem... and finished the Trail in 2003]