Good afternoon from Vancouver International Airport. I am at Gate D70, about to board the plane. Yes, I just got back to Canada 3 weeks ago, but things… have been happening.

In last month’s newsletter I explained why we had to change our Spring Break destination from a drive to Squamish to an emergency flight to Kyoto. The long and the short of it is my father-in-law’s health has been deteriorating. Thus, we decided that we should relocate to Kyoto to spend the remainder of his life with him.

Two main factors led us to this decision: responsibility and ability.

As an only child, my wife feels the full weight of taking on elder care. This is also one of the many different responsibilities that weigh heavily on an international marriage. She supported me fully in taking an emergency flight to Canada when my dad got sick. I will absolutely support her in this.

Secondly is ability, which is entirely due to the awesome team at my company. I joined Fission to help execute their vision of growing a globally distributed network of internet industrial researchers. We already have team members in North and South America, Europe, and Africa. Now I get to be the first in Asia. They have been fully supportive of this move — for which I am very grateful — and it demonstrates again the benefits of designing a company as distributed and async. So, my job gave me the ability to support my wife in supporting her father. I am one of the lucky few to be in this position.

For the forseeable future I will be posting from Kyoto, a place where I lived from 1999 to 2004, and have been visiting ever since. I am not sure what our lives are going to look like for the next few months. But considering how it has been for the last few years, I am not making any solid plans, and am just going to go where nature leads us.

See you from the other side of the Pacific!