Over the long weekend, we went to Quebec to attend MeKaRo, Mez-Kanada Renkontiĝo de Esperanto. It was a blast. We stayed with Normando Fleury and Zdravka Metz. They’ve been speaking Esperanto longer than I’ve been alive; their eldest kid, Mira1, is a bit older than me. It was wonderful to participate in an Esperanto family. Next year, Toronto will host MeKaRo in Peterborough. We look forward to it.
Taking the girls to Quebec is an experience. The drive is about six hours long without kids. Taking the kids along makes for a ten hour drive. On the way there, we made a stop at the Trenton ONRoute. When we took Mabel out of the car, it turned out that she had taken off her shoes. Where were they? Under the seat? No, they were back in Scarborough. She’d taken them off just before we left and no one had noticed.
A major reason for attending MeKaRo was to immerse ourselves in Esperanto. I wanted to expose the kids to other speakers and meet the community. Mira definitely started speaking more spontaneously. She would say complete sentences to Meg and me from time-to-time. She was eager to help Zdravka with various tasks and took direction well. She learned a game from Normando.
Le Guin, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea. 1968.
An awesome young-adult high fantasy read; a real page turner. We’ve had it on the shelf for years and I never took it down. It’s a good enough read that I kept telling Megan about it until we spent twenty hours in a car together and I read a fair chunk of it to her.
I like the anthropological stance that Le Guin brings to her world-crafting. She describes a rich and complex world. The central struggle of the book feels quite novel; the main character, Ged, wrestles with his shadow. I’ve loaded up the rest of the books on my Kobo and I look forward to seeing where they go.
I continue to work on my continuing status dossier. That’s the highest priority writing task at the moment. It isn’t fun or exciting but it has to get written. A couple exciting projects are “on hiatus” and I look forward to getting back to them. One morning, I went on a bit of a sidequest and wrote-up How to Build Spot It.
Except for the trip to Quebec, I’ve been juggling very consistently for about an hour per day. It feels good; I’m making slow progess on five balls. Sometimes, it magically clicks and I can achieve ~30 catches.
I regard the computing community as a collective victim of the computer salesmen. Take, for example, the word processor.
Mira is a lovely name in Esperanto. It means “marvellous.” Zdravka named her daughter Mira after the Croatian word for peace. ↩︎
Published: May 26, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: May 26, 2026 @ 20:54.
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