Here in the US yesterday was Father’s Day. While trying to study (as a student) and prepare for lectures (as a professor), I could not help but think of Patrick–and John–throughout the day. However, I could not get myself to write.

Patrick would appreciate the irony in the fact that for practically my whole life, neither of us were particularly close–geographically or emotionally–for Father’s Day, yet here I am missing him on this Hallmark-brand occasion.

As I said before, I could not get myself to write. Indeed, it has been hard for me to revisit this website and add more material for a while now, though there are many hundreds or thousands of pages still to be processed.

Some of the delays are merely scheduling issues, between an active racing season, teaching responsibilities, and my entry into the doctorate program. However, you might consider these factors as excuses or justifications. There’s an old saying that says, “If you want something done, give it to a busy man.” I do many things, and despite an official retirement from my technical job almost 4 years ago, I remain busy, busy, busy today.

In short, there is more to my delays than relate to my scheduling challenges, difficulties not worth sharing with you here.

…

These difficulties manifest themselves in the way I have slowed down my efforts here on this site. For that I beg your forgiveness, or at least indulgence.

I will revisit, expand, and improve this website in time. I am proud of what I have done so far, with the help of so many other people providing material and feedback, but I know that there is still much more to do.

Some tasks are mundane yet time-consuming, such as scanning many pages of documents and in some cases, performing minor cleanup on them. (For example, when I posted the letter from Harlan Ellison, I felt it appropriate to mask his address and phone number, even though it was 50 years old.)

Other tasks require I convert electronic documents from one format to another, from Open Office or Word or PDF into well-formatted for WordPress text, thus providing you the reader with greater readability (and the Google translation tool better fidelity.)

If anyone wishes to help me with these mechanical aspects of manipulating these data, I welcome your assistance.

In closing, I promise you to continue to update this site, to provide additional insight into Patrick’s life, his passions, his art, along with those beautiful aspects of Stephanie endeared her to him for the remainder of his life, even as he welcomed others into his life as well after she passed away.

Now, once again, I must return to my schoolbooks and prepare for tonight’s lecture, but I promise to give you something more than an apology in my next posting.

Happy Father’s Day, Patrick. I wish you were here to celebrate it with us in the flesh, and not just in our memories.