I'm happy to report that we managed to do a lot of family camping and cycling this year. We drove to homeschooler campout weekends: Hazel & I to Crater Lake, all of us to Oregon Dunes and Silver Falls. For the 3rd year we rode the Northwest Tandem Rally with Anne Paulson & her son William Lamping. This year they came here by train and we all five drove, with two tandems and Marion's single, to Corvalis. We three later took 5 days to ride 124 miles from home roundabout to Salem, staying at B&Bs. We were 2 nights at the Flying-M Ranch, riding horses and watching others get there by gravel road or grass airstrip. And I got away for a week of cycle-camping with two clubmates. I covered 404 miles, looping from home through the state's high central dessert, then paid $1.40 to ride the air-conditioned Tri-Met bus home the last 30 (hot, busy) miles!

I worked nearly full time in March & April, at home as in '97, for lawyers at the California office of Fish & Richardson. We wrote a 25-page report in a software patent-infringement case, where I'll be the expert witness if it ever goes to trial. Much of the time I was lying flat on the floor under the computer because the stress of working, after 18 months off, had put my back "out".

Marion worked full-time, Aug-Oct, and again in December. She commutes by bus or bike to Solution Logic, a small contract software development group in downtown Portland. She's been writing graphical user-interfaces for assembly-line robots.

We are continuing the homeschooling adventure, with both a daily dose of "academics" at home and mostly weekly activities with other homeschoolers. This fall we've had regular meetings of skating (bi-weekly), recorder (at our house), gymnastics-theatre (school kids too), piano, Brownies & Campfire (phew!) groups. Marion has also been taking recorder classes at the Community Music Center.

This year, I find myself in the midst of a wonderful new convergence of bikes, maps and computers. I've been a beta-tester for Bike Brain, a handlebar-mounted Palm Pilot product being developed by my friend Ron Porot. I switched my geographic-information-systems volunteering to the government agency, Metro. We are planning to put up a bike route-planning web page, for which I've been developing the cost functions. I've been using Bike Brain to record my longer rides, writing software for post-processing the data, and planning to use both the data and methodology in support of behavioral research for our route planning work.

If you've read this far, you might have time to write us (jack, marion, and/or hazel @newlevant.com) or check out some new photos of Hazel or the landscaping and exterior house painting finished last summer.