| 36 Years - Present In June 2000 Angela and I returned to our home and native land of Canada. More specifically we moved to Toronto, Ontario. We purchased our first house at 576 Clinton St in an area called Seaton Village. The house is a duplex with three bedrooms. The location is great. For example, we are within a three minute walk of two separate supermarkets! About a five minute walk due south gets one to Koreatown on Bloor street. Bloor street has a wide variety of restaurants and stores. Upon arriving at Toronto I took up a research position at the University of Toronto Astronomy Dept working with Ray Carlberg. While at UofT I had an office next to John Dubinski. I noticed that hanging on his office wall was an uncut sheet of Wacky Packs. I mentioned that I used to collect them as a kid and, in fact, I still had some from that time. He got quite excited and encouraged me to bring them in. It turned out that I had a fairly rare set which he claimed could fetch quite a lot of money. I, of course, was skeptical but John did indeed sell the setfor me for a considerable (ridiculous) sum to some American. We also auctioned off some other cards on Ebay.Those Wacky Packs remain my best investment to date. However, I only worked there until December 2000. In January 2001 I finally left academia to work in industry at Bioscrypt Inc. where I am a Staff Scientist in the Algorithm Development Dept. I develop software for matching fingerprints. My departure from academia coincided with the news that Angela was pregnant. This was not a great surprise as we had been trying to get pregnant for some time. In fact Angela had had a miscarriage the previous May(?). Her estimated due date was Sept 1. 2001. At around week 30 Angela was admitted to Women's College hospital for premature labor. Her cervix was 90% effaced. She was put on bedrest for one month during which she narrowly averted insanity. She did manage to learn to crochet during that time. After about a month they let her go home, still on bedrest. A week later at 5 in the morning on Aug 2 her water broke and we went to the hospital. Ten and half hours later Avi Alexander Fischer was born weighing six pounds and five ounces. Despite being five weeks premature he only stayed in the neonatal intensive care unit for about two hours until his breathing smoothed out. Angela and Avi remained in the hospital for five days. Initially we had to supplement his breastfeeding with finger feeding. First Avi would feed ten minutes on each breast, then Angela would pump for about ten minutes. The pumped milk was put into a syringe, a long plastic tube was attached and the tube was taped to a finger. The finger was inserted into Avi's mouth and milk was squirted in while he swallowed. The idea was to avoid overtiring Avi while making sure he was getting sufficient nutrition. After a couple of weeks we noticed that there was very little left over milk to be pumped and that Avi was feeding much more strongly so we stopped. Return to Biography Index Back to Philippe's Home |