Art Goldstein Since my last Sabbatical in Fall 1996 I've been very busy teaching overloads and still getting some research done, although not nearly as much as I would like. Sabbatical was great! I spent most of my time here at Colgate getting my Taconic research wrapped up. One paper, co-authored with Jon Knight ('96) and Kari Kimball ('97), has appeared in the Journal of Structural Geology on the use of deformed graptolites as strain markers and some others remain still to be written. Last Fall (1998) I lead an NEIGC field trip to my old stomping grounds along the Lake Char Fault in eastern Massachusetts and Connecticut and the Fall before (1997) I lead an NEIGC field trip to the Taconics and had about the best field trip experience of my career (except, of course, every single OC!!!). Taconic research continues but on a different tack from work I've done before. Bruce Selleck and I have begun a collaborative effort to assess the nature, source and flow paths of fluids which moved through basement, cover and allochthon prior to, during and after an orogenic event. Eastern New York, western Vermont and western Massachusetts are one of the best places to do this and we have great hopes of success. I spent a month of my sabbatical and one frantic week this summer working in the stable isotope lab at the University of Wisconsin measuring the 18O of quartz and calcite veins from the Taconic slate belt. John Valley, a great friend of both Chief and Colgate, has set up one of the best oxygen isotope facilities in the world and has given me access to both his lab and technician. If he only knew what a "bull in a china shop" I am he would never have let me handle all that custom glassware! However, I managed to collect a lot of data without breaking anything. Bruce, John and I will be presenting our results at the GSA in Denver this October. Last Spring I took the Wales study group, following in the footsteps of Chief, Bruce and Paul Pinet. Melanie came with me and my daughter, Kate (who is a student at Hobart and William Smith Colleges), was on a study group in Edinburgh, so the whole damn family was in the UK. We had an absolutely fantastic time. I had about the best group of students Colgate could offer, even if not a single one of them was a geology concentrator. Melanie and I traveled all over the UK visiting sites of geological and historical significance. The most thrilling for me was the visit to Hutton's unconformity in eastern Scotland and Lapworth's famous exposure of the Arnabol thrust (a member of the Moine thrust system) in the Scottish Highlands. I also had the opportunity to visit southeastern Spain with the Cardiff University faculty and students. This also was a great thrill and I am looking forward to returning there with Wes Gibbons, Tere Moreno, Karen Harpp and a gaggle of Colgatoids this January.