Lots of things surprise me, I remember how shocked I was in December of 1974 when I came to the realisation that I was at that point over thirty. Being forty, fifty or sixty were not as traumatic but time has a nasty habit of just moving right along and its always a journey that reveals how much things change and equally as noteworthy is the staggering realisation that so many things stay just the same.

When I look back on the changes and things that have remained the same since May 20, 1998 some things really stand out. The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 changed so many things in all of our lives. This month you have to have a passport to cross the United States border. While none of those who carried out the assault on New York and Washington came from Canada most Americans think that is the case, including the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Making sense of a changing world is the responsibility of those of us who are engaged in education. Though I left teaching in 1995 I still consider my work on this web site as a form of teaching. I also think that is what journalists who work in what ever media they are in should be doing. Yet we live in a time where the numbers of reporters and editorial writers is shrinking at an appalling rate. Though there has been a growth in the spread of information on the Internet, this medium relies to much on cheap opinion and not enough on scholarly and nose to the grindstone research.

Thanks for dropping each day or what ever the frequency of your visits. I know that readers of this site are finding ways to make the stuff they find here useful to them. I truly am grateful for every e-mail and phone call I get from the readers of Ensign.

I am even grateful to get calls from people who think they have just found a web site selling cars, grain stoves, provincial parks or what ever it is they have Googled and then not bothered to read the story but just called me up thinking they had found the web site they were looking for. I have gotten pretty used to those kind of calls and understand how hungry the world is for information and at the same time how unwilling most seekers of information are about reading what they find.

At the end of June 2009 my wife and I are turning the page in our lives and I am not just sure how that is going to work out for this project. Only time will tell if I will post May 20th 2010, I certainly hope that I will, but we all live these days one at a time and sometimes we have to make adjustments. In the mean time tell me what you like and dislike and if you have some pictures to share send them along.