As I type this, I am surrounded by both boxes and stuff destined to go in boxes. I am in the middle of a move. --A big one this time. I'm moving across two provinces and and one time zone. I'm going to be living on the East Coast of Canada. Nova Scotia, where the air is fresh and the salt of the Atlantic Ocean fills the wind with cool savor.

Now, I originally thought that I would be buying a van or a truck for the move rather than pay the couple thousand required to rent a move-it-yourself truck for the week. I was stunned to learn all about the insurance game! Holy crow! (Yes, being a pedestrian/cyclist for all these many years has afforded me the luxury of ignoring the boring and annoying subject of automobile insurance. I was doomed to learn.)

I'm a guy in his early thirties, (just turned 33 yesterday.), I've clocked hundreds of hours of driving time over the last decade, I've never crashed into anything nor has anybody ever crashed into me. The cost to insure yours truly? $3000! --And that's the minimum legal package with no collision insurance. (Meaning, if somebody benders my fender, I'd be out of luck, and if somebody ends up in the hospital, they'd better not need more than a million dollars worth of medical attention.)

Apparently, if you let your insurance lapse for a few years, you have to start your driving record all over again from square one as though you were a sixteen year old drunken idiot behind the wheel of one of those exploding Pintos from the seventies. Good system. I'll be renting, thanks.

So I have a big truck all lined up. I pick it up early Monday and spend the day loading her up! Then I hit the road and drive for between 25-30 hours. That ought to be quite strange, but man! Am I ever looking forward to it!

I'm going to be living in a place called the Annapolis Valley. --A very old mountain range which has survived several ice-ages has left a valley between these two long arms of two very stumpy piles of million year old rock. --Low and rounded enough that with a good pair of hiking boots, you can climb over them, but high enough that they create a sort of barrier to the rest of the world. The Annapolis valley is just beautiful; I saw it first in the winter, and it was amazing. All the people there told me, "Just wait! Oooh, the summer. . !) With the ocean so close and the air moving the way it does, it has some of the cleanest air in all of North America. It struck me very recently that the valley was somewhat reminiscent of Miyazaki's "Valley of the Wind," a unique geographical formation which swept the poisons in the air away from the people living within the valley, allowing them to grow fruit trees in a world all-but destroyed by industry. --Which is interesting, indeed!

One of the many reasons I'm moving to the edge of the world is that Halifax, (the coastal city and hub of civilization sitting an hour's drive from where I'll be living), is a surprisingly close geographical replica of Oceansend, the city featured in Rubel's world. When I realized this, looking around for myself, all the people who I've known from there slapped their foreheads and cried, "Yeah that's what we've been telling you for years now! Jeez! Don't you listen?" Apparently not. --The city is even built around a small central mountain called, appropriately enough, 'The Citidal.'

Of course, as I said, the valley lies between worn down mountains; nothing like the young landscape Miyazaki drew, and in my case, the Citidal in the city is barely a stump of what it once was. --The huge structure built upon it which at one time overlooked the bay was destroyed over a hundred years ago when a fuel ship and a munitions ship struck one another in Halifax harbor and blew up the whole city. One could supposedly see the bottom of the harbor when the two ships exploded, although I don't know how this could be accurate reporting because anybody close enough to have witnessed would have been pretty much vaporized. Gunpowder and fuel oil in enough quantity is pretty fierce stuff! --The anchor from one of the two ships flew 60 miles from ground zero and lodged itself in a field. It's still there today, solid iron standing sixteen feet tall. So much for historical architecture.

Anyway, I should get back to the job of moving. I've still got a lot of stuff to put in boxes, and I want to collapse all of my furniture into planks. Plus I need to pack up this computer!

The next issue, I'm afraid, will be a little late. I just wasn't able to get it all done in time. --But it will be done, and it will be an interesting issue! (Spring time in Oceansend, and a new beginning for all. How appropriate!)

As well, I still plan to sell pages and paintings, but that will also have to wait a couple more weeks until I get myself all set up. (It's not like the wait hasn't been a few years long already. Another couple of weeks won't kill anybody!)

Okay! I'm gone. Goodbye to all my wonderful friends here in Toronto. I won't forget you!

Wish me luck, and I'll write more when I can!

-Mark Oakley
June 1st, 2003,
A bright afternoon,
Toronto

(My new company address is, P.O. Box 2414, Wolfville, NS, B4P 2S3, Canada)