I don't know what to mention first: so


                                                                           family
                                                        travel                           work
                                              susanna                   labour              places
                                                                 health





(last revised June 2013)














xxx






Rowan has a little brother, Stephen and Beth have a second child, I have a second grandchild. Matthew, February 2011.  
Edith is a hard-pressed social worker in London.  She appears in Vancouver from time to time. The latest appearance, June 2013, she coordinated with Stephen so they got to see each other as well as seeing us.



























   xxx




I retired from the university of Alberta in July, and became a part-timer at UBC.  But I was doing the same amount of classroom teaching that I did at Alberta, and enjoying it.  Still, the new life was physically more demanding than the old, because of traveling from downtown to UBC two or three times a week, and to Bowen for long weekends. And because I'm getting less mobile.  So I am not teaching in 013-014, perhaps not again. Some of the time that is freed by not teaching will be taken by duties for the Canadian Philosophical Association, of which I am president for a year (and will have duties for a following year.)
  





























  xxx





November 2012: England, a conference on Evil for me and Susanna's mother's 80th birthday.  At first I thought that the travelling was going to be a nightmare - I was taken onto the plane in Vancouver in a wheelchair.  But getting across horrible Heathrow on foot the next day was alright, and the trip was definitely maageable. The birthday party was a large, successful, and happy event, organised by S and her brother Alan.  Then we drove to Bristol, London, and Essex to see people. A day with Edith in London.  I was definitely less mobile than on previous trips of this size, but with herlp managed everything. i

Summer 2011: Susanna and I travelled with our friends the Golds to Saltspring Island for four days. I hadn't seen S so relaxed for ages, and I didn't again for a while. Our travel plans for the forseeable future centre on getting to know all the islands and the twisted coast around here.

May 2011: last research-funded long trip speaking in many places.  Bristol, Manchester, Geneva, Bern, Bled. Much of this was in the company of Peter Goldie, a good man and fine philosopher who died in October.  It was wonderful to travel with Peter, engage with him at two conferences, and listen to his stories.  I spent a week in Geneva, where I had not been since I was a child, and several days in Bern, which is fascinatingly different.

February 2010: Susanna and I went to Cuba, to escape the olympics in Vancouver. Havana, Trinidad, Playa del Este, Havana again.  A very puzzling place, none of my prepared attitudes seemed to fit.    
 




























   xxx






Susanna was head/chair of her department for 18 months, temporarily ending summer 2012. Paperwork, emails, soothing or standing up to difficult people.  Why do people take these jobs? Why do universities thrown their best people down this pit?  That is over now, and she is trying to write, plus many other things.
One of her two bands has exploded, but the other is going strong.  She has bought a cabin, not far from our previous house. The plan is that she will live in this small space, and own no more than she can fit in it while I own no more than I can fit in my tiny apartment.  And she will sometimes share it with me, and always with numbers of old rescued dogs.
Old dogs. Toby and SuzyQ have been with us for yearse, but now there are new arrivals and, sadly, inevitable departures. Reno joined us for his last months, a gentle patient good-natured old gentleman, who eventually succumbed just to being very old. Then we adopted two old dachshunds, Amos and Baxter - names of sausages - and two fostered miniature dachshunds who stayed for a while before finding homes. Baxter died. He has been replaced with two unbelievably old and ugly pugs, Gramps and Junius. (We don't name them!). So that makes five as I write in the summer of 2013. I think it's too many but S loves them all.



























  xxx  

   


We're have left our interesting exotic house.  It was no place to get old in and no place for old dogs, and there's always the danger of me falling down the stairs.  So we searched for a small flat house on the island.  Susanna found it and bought it, and that leads to a peculiar plan.  Meanwhile, I sold my modern three bedroom apartment in Edmonton and bought an old one bedroom apartment in the west end of downtown Vancouver. That's the way the prices compare.  I spend almost half my time there and treat it as my base.  The building has a pool, and swimming is important to me.  I worry how long it will be possible to stay in the apartment, mostly on my own. Time will tell.  






























  xxx





The news in summer of 2013 is not encouraging. I'm becoming more lame, and the neurologists agree that the 2007 diagnosis of ADEM (MS-lite: myelin gone but no continuing process to take more) was wrong, and it is a standard progressive MS(*).  That does fit my experience of the past year. For several years I had stayed at about the same state, but beginning in late summer 2012 the decline was undeniable. I've had a new MRI, though I do not know yet what it shows. The plan now is to travel very little and to stay home, finish the logic textbook, and do what needs doing for the CPA.






(*)  There used to be an orthodoxy that people, especially men, whose first signs of MS are late in life, rarely last long.  That's one reason why I was glad of the ADEM diagnosis.  That is less of a standard view now.  My specialist has an alternative view, also controversial, that the age at which symptoms of a given degree of severity appear is relatively independent of the time of appearance of the first symptoms.  It is as if the disease has been developing invisibly, and when it decides to show itself it calculates what face it should show for someone of that age. So I am as disabled as someone who has had it since their thirties, but in five or ten years' time might be no worse off than that person.  Might be.





























  xxx







My book on adapting to one's tiny brain, Bounded thinking: intellectual virtues of limitation-management, apeared with OUP in December 012.  And by bad planning I had been working simultaneously on another book, Emotion and Imagination, which has appeared with Polity Press in May 013. In the course of it I claim to  explain why it is that too fixed a focus on morality brings characteristic vices:  hypocrisy, priggery, self-righteousness, and worse.  After that, I had thought, I would work on logic and on a line on the disunity of morality that no one else wants to defend.  But the past months I've been becoming more and more interested in why a well-designed experiment gives good reasons to believe what it suggests.  So, we'll see, perhaps it will be none of these. They are long-term projects, and my focus is now shorter. I plan to turn my logic draft into a textbook in the next year.