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| Your webmaster in quieter times |
By providing email addresses it becomes possible for groups of us at any time to organize "real-world" reunions with classmates who live in the same area, share a common interest, attended the same class, or simply feel like getting together over a glass of wine.
It was never my intention to build a "50th Reunion home page". My idea was to provide a site where we could keep in touch for the rest of our lives, not just for one weekend in June 2009.
This does not mean that I am uninterested in seeing many of you again at our 50th reunion. On the contrary, I am very much looking forward to it! But it does mean that I have not been involved in the planning for the reunion, and specifically that I did not realize that our hard-working and highly efficient organizing committee planned to use the on-line bios as the basis for a printed reunion Torch.
This is unfortunate, because I have fallen behind in getting your bios onto the web. My life during the past 6 months has been very hectic. In addition to the inevitable health problems, which acrue in a body that has been in active service for almost 70 years, I have had jack hammers in my bathroom, a port-a-pottie on my balcony, a shower in the back garden, and workmen coming and going without notice.
Just to get to my computer, I have had to run an obstacle course through boxes, bookcases, stacked-up furniture and piles of clothes. In order to save money—the workmen charge $85/hour—I have been doing whatever I could myself. This has involved late nights (to get my work finished before the workmen arrived the next day) and early mornings (since the workmen start at 7 a.m.), with too little sleep, and almost no time to spend on my computer.
However, I have taken the time to keep the various lists (Hearsay, Missing, Class, etc) up to date. I have also carefully stored the great material that you have been sending me. It is all in a queue ready for me to get stuck into when I get back to Sweden in mid July.
When I arrived in Canada a few days before the reunion and saw the fabulous job that the organizing committee has done with the reunion Torch, I was heart-broken to realize that it would have been even better if I had managed to get all the queued bios onto the web. Had I known about the Torch project in advance, I might have been able to forward copies of everything you have sent me to the Torch editor. But as it is, the material has been distributed throughout the hundreds of files and directories that make up the MRHS59 website. (Every classmate has his or her own directory containing several files, and in many cases even sub-directories.) The first email relating to each bio (minus attachments) has been saved in a special inbox, which constitutes the queue. There is simply no way that this could have been got ready in the short time remaining before the reunion.
However, to put it into perspective, when I left Sweden, about a third of the classmates attending the reunion—including some members of the organizing committee—had not yet sent in their bios, and these could not have been included in the Torch with the best will in the world.
The Torch editor has come up with an ingenious solution to this problem. Instead of a bound volume, the Torch has been produced in the form of a loose-leaf binder, to which you can add bios as they appear on the web. The good news is that this means it is still not too late for you to get in your bio.
I offer my heartfelt apologies to those of you who submitted your bios in good time before the reunion, and to the editors of the reunion Torch, who have produced nothing less than a work of art.