I grew up in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

This picture is not actually the lake and cottage where I spent my formative years, but it's so much like it that I've long cherished this 'gif - that I only happened to stumble upon and know nothing else about - as the place where I grew up.

I was born in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, and lived there full time until I finished my 12^th grade of highschool. That was 1969, the year I skipped out for a pre-Waterloo year in Mexico City at La Universidad de Las Américas, Puebla, Mexico. (That's a subburb of D.F. - Districto Federal - the way that Mexicans refer to their national capital, much like we say D.C. for Washington). At UdlA I studied Spanish, French, and Mathematics during this "preparatory year" in place of my "grade 13" (last year of high school in Canada) year. In Ontario they are still vowing to get rid of this 13^th year in highschool, but when I was there it was institutionalized; there was "no way" out of it.

During my summer years we lived in a cottage, very much like the one in the picture, and whenever I wasn't waterskiing or looking for someone to drive the boat, I would be off making campfires on the Big Island, called Boyd Island, which was about a 10-minute ride in the boat from our cottage. That's the only thing not quite right about this picture; the Big Island is much closer than it was in real life. But that's OK; how much more could you expect from a random screen-background 'gif!?

Another memory that quickly comes to mind during my living-at-the-cottage era was riding my unicycle, there. My Dad surprised me with a unicycle for Christmas not long after my 12^th birthday. I mastered it quite quickly, and was well known for riding it just about everywhere from then on right thru my university years. Too bad all of that was before we had the technology to capture me (digitally) riding it; the animation, obviously more up-to-date, is from these good folks. The best I can do wrt me riding it is this picture which was actually taken on my 30^th birthday but then used to create the cake that surprised me on a subsequent birthday. As the story goes... (it's true, really!) Lynn had to draw in the 2 frisbees I caught simultaneously while riding it because someone snapped the picture just a little too early. And while I'm fessing up... a reminder: I should put this picture and the collection it comes from into one of my WebShots collections — something I had thought I'd done long before I started writing / linking any of this! Unfortunately, it appears that I haven't gotten around to that yet, either.

Of course, there's a whole lot more that I could say about the first "twenty years" of my life, and I will, when I have a little extra time to put into it.

Written: July 25, 1998; slightly updated: Feb 18, 2002.