RonPrice
RonPrice
Annual Email for 2011-2012
3 December 2011
Note and Preamble:
I posted the following annual email for the year 2011 on 3/12/'11 to family and friends as well as several other categories of potential readers. I have done a little editing of this annual email since that date since this annual email has now been in cyberspace for more than 3 years. I have also written an annual email for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015, and these four annual emails are all found at other places at this online diary, FYI.
For those who want to read any one of my other annual emails, for 2011 to 2015, you need to go to: (i) the left side of this page and (ii) move the sliding-bar down to the year of your choice, the year of my diary entries for that year, and then (iii) click on the item you want to read. Another way to access my annual letters is to: (a) click on the PAST ENTRIES box at the top of this page(if that box is accessible), click on that box and go to the annual email/letter of your choice, 2011 to 2015. Then, you can come back to this oldest of my annual letters if you want to do more reading. Anyway, I leave all this coming and going, backing-and-forthing, to you, dear reader.
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Part 1:
This annual email was written for 2011-12 & my life here in Tasmania, Australia. It was written at the beginning of the southern hemisphere's summer season in December 2011. The first stages of summer Downunder will be the first stages of winter back in Canada, and in the other countries in the northern hemisphere where some of my friends and associations from the past and present now live.
When I stopped sending out annual emails back in 2009, two years before this first of my online annual letters, and when I began to only respond to those who wrote to me first, to incoming emails and letters, phone-calls and a host of internet messages, the number of those to whom I wrote annually dropped from over 100 to less than 20. Collectively, the incoming messages of various kinds that I now receive keep me busy communicating with friends, relatives and those associations of various kinds accumulated over a lifetime. Due to my active internet writing I deal with some 200 incoming emails everyday, although 99% of them can be deleted without even reading them.
Such a new communication routine allows me to focus on the few who actually like to write, and others who want to keep in touch in some way or other, from the 100s, indeed 1000s, of people I once knew and interacted with in the two dozen communities where I once lived. It has been more than 60 years(1950-2014) since beginning my working life. I began working PT from 1950 to 1967. I moved away from home in southern Ontario first, in 1966, to Windsor Ontario then, in 1967, to the Canadian Arctic and finally, in 1971, to Australia. My epistolary life, as some call it, has taken many directions in these last five decades.
Part 2:
I’ve decided to make this annual email accessible via my website, and at one of the online diaries at which I post my writing for public consumption. In this way readers who are interested in my writing, and/or communicating annually, or on other timeline bases, can have a wider context for the content of my writing, when & if they want to write to me personally if, indeed, they want to write to me at all.
Readers can access this email at the homepage or access-page of my website at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/ My last snail-mail correspondent went over to email in 2011 so that all my communication is now done by email and various forms of internet connections. Of course, this does not include what happens in real space in my home or in other places here in Tasmania.
Each year it is now my intention to update my annual email, and each year I will add one more year to my online annual emails. This online diary will see all of my updating as long as this online diary is accessible by others in cyberspace. This particular annual email is now in its last edition and will not be updated again. The next annual email will be for the year 2012 and, as I say, readers can click on that annual message and read it, if they have the interest.
Part 2:
Everyone has their favorite means and modes of KiT, to use an acronym now employed by internet and email posters for “keeping in touch.” There is now a lengthening list of means of KiT: texting, sexting, and faxing, using chat rooms, utilizing any one of several new digital gadgets: iPads, iPods, iPhones, as well as, of course, email, telephone and cell-phone or just personal contact and snailmail. Then there are the few, indeed I am more of the opinion, that it is the many, who just want to be left alone. About all I’m ‘into’ is the email and the internet at sites where I post my writing.
My wife, Chris, is a big user of the telephone, texting, and email. My son, my two step-daughters, and 3 step-grandchildren all have their ways to KiT. My one grandchild, only three months old in December 2011, communicates with sounds and has not yet got ‘into’ words.
Angela, my youngest step-daughter is now 41(in 2011). Her son George, now 15 months old, has yet to utter his first word and so all these modern communication tools await him as well. With the traditional Christmas and the Gregorian new year on the horizon, as well as the Baha’i gift-giving and new year occasions all taking place in the coming months, this email will serve as a ‘seasons greetings’ to all those in both groups.
I’ve been involved with both these sets of festivities for nearly 60 years and wish everyone a happy and healthy time whether you start your new year on 1/1/’12 or on 21/3/’12. And may the gifts you receive and give also bring you and others pleasure and joy whether you are engaged in that activity on 25/12/’11 or 25/2/’12 to 1/3/’12 in the case of the Baha'is in my online and everyday life.
Part 3:
The major changes in the lives of Chris and I, as well as the lives of our children, here in Tasmania since I last wrote one of these partly cut-and-paste pieces, pieces to save me reinventing the wheel as one could put it, are as follows. Some of this information will be relevant to some readers and some will not, but such are the perils of the cut-and-paste method of communication and a busy life even in retirement after decades of living and writing to others as far back as the 1960s.
The situation of Chris’s daughter and my step-daughter, Vivienne, now 46, who works half-time in the renal unit and half-time in the intensive care unit at the Launceston General Hospital, is unchanged since I last wrote. Her husband, Andrew, now 44, went back to teaching in primary school a year or so ago, but the job came to an end when the demand for teachers in Tasmania in 2011 dropped at the end of 2010. With one income their family financial situation was, as they say these days, “challenged.”
In May 2011, though, he was able to get a job in the IT(information technology) industry here in George Town. He has been working for the town council as the head of the IT section. This week he got a new job in Launceston, still in the IT industry. It is a job he clearly prefers because he does not have to make the 45 minute drive every day. Their children, and my step-grandchildren, Tobias-18- and Kelsey-16---continue with their busy lives through their high school years.
Part 4:
Some who get this email may not know Vivienne, or even remember her, since she stayed in Tasmania with her father in 1982 when Chris and I moved to the NT(Northern Territory) and then to WA(Western Australia).
Chris’s second daughter, Angela, and my 2nd step-daughter, has had her first baby(George) who is now 15 months old, as I say above. Angela is currently living in Launceston. Her partner is a Brazilian and resident of the city of Florianopolis. He is a business-man into real-estate and jewellery.
Angela and her partner separated several months ago in Brazil and so Ange is now a single-parent. Her life is a work-in-progress, as they say these days. She has a part-time job in public relations and event management for the Tasmanian Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association. She, too, stayed in Tasmania in the early ‘80s, and so it is that those who got to know my wife and I after, say, 1982, will not remember Angela either. Angela did live and work in Perth while we were there; but she did not live with us and so I'm sure that there will be many who read this who will never have met Angela.
Daniel is now 34 and has been married for more than two years. He and his wife Zuriash, an Ethiopian girl/woman age 31, who was also working at the Baha’i World Center, are now living in George Town. He and Zuriash moved to Hobart after staying with Chris and I for the first 10 weeks of 2011, and after leaving Israel this time last year--2010.
Dan was offered a 3 year scholarship in oceanography at the end of which he would have been granted a PhD. After several weeks in the program he pulled out, since he did not find the course of study of sufficient interest to him. He was at the Bahá'í World Center for nearly three years first as an engineer and then as a statistical analyst: 2007 to 2010.
He and Zuriash are, as I say, now living in George Town. Daniel is working part-time in Launceston for a company called Tas-Gas. It’s a private company which retails gas here in Tasmania. He is employed as a technical writer, a position he officially started only one month ago. Zuriash had her first baby on 21/9/’11; mother, father and baby are all progressing well.
Chris and I were busy for the first 5 months of 2011 having, first, Angela, and then Daniel and his wife, living with us. But they are all ensconced in their own homes now. Our 3 children live within a one hour drive and new interaction patterns have emerged in our lives, as you can imagine, after all of us lived in different parts of Australia and the world until 2011.
Part 5:
My family back in Canada, the family of my first wife, now Judy Noack and her Australian husband Evan, as well as Chris’ extended family here in Tasmania all have lives which are filled with potential news which I could relate. But it is news which is not really of interest to the relatively small handful of people to whom I now send these periodic emails. I write these annual emails to only a few people now, not counting people at sites on the internet. There is a potential readership of 1000s, and it will be interesting to see how many hits my annual emails receive in the years ahead as I post each year's: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, et cetera.
Information about these extended parts of my families of birth and two marriages does not seem relevant in any way to most of the others who read this. Those who have developed an interest in my life due to my writing can always Google my autobiography in cyberspace.
Chris is a gad-about and is active in three major activity areas: (a) a local arts-society group, (b) her family: (i) her mother, sister and brother and their families; and (ii) her two daughters and one son and their families--as well as (c) a range of Baha’i comings and goings here in northern Tasmania and (d) friends and associations she has come to know while living in this old town, the oldest in Australia. Chris is as active as ever, even more so in recent months due to improvements in her health and with her three children being within cooee, to use an Australian term for ‘short calling-contact distance.’
Part 6:
I visit, in addition to family, in about a dozen homes on a regular basis of some kind with people I have got to know in the first dozen years of life in this small town of about 5000. I maintain, therefore, an element of my previously extensive social existence.
I have a far-less active social life than I had in Perth Western Australia with its Baha’i community of over 2000, and before retiring after 32 years in classrooms as a teacher and tutor, lecturer and adult educator, and another 18 years as a student. After that half-century in various aspects of the educational enterprize I was more than a little happy more to take an early retirement and a sea-change in Tasmania at the age of 55 in 1999.
I trust your life is a comfortable one for you now even if busy and demanding in its various ways as most people’s lives seem to be these days. Tasmania has just begun to enjoy its summer season with Chris often away from home engaged as she is, and as I say above, with her several interests. I am at home writing and reading as I have been for the most part since my retirement a dozen years or so ago. I have a new website which you can Google, if interested, at: Pioneering Over Five Epochs or http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/
Part 7:
The days and the nights are still cold, although not compared to Canada where I lived until the age of 27. The temperatures go down to about 8 to 10 degrees most nights as summer makes its entry. George Town on the central-north coast of this Apple-Isle is sometimes called by locals ‘the French Riviera of Tasmania'. At 50 kms away Launceston is now “the big smoke” for us in George Town with Launceston’s population of 100,000. I arrived in Launceston the first time back in 1973 nearly 40 years ago to begin a job as a tutor in education studies at what is now the University of Tasmania.
If you are not inclined to write in any detail in the busy tournament that is life---in the second decade of this new millennium which did not begin, surprisingly, until 1/1/’11---not to worry. I collected an assorted bag of folks to write to annually from all those towns, cities, places of employment, groups and Bahá'í communities where I lived, and had my being, during my adolescence as well as my young, middle and late adulthood: 20-40, 40-60 and 60-80,respectively. If I live into old-age, the years over 80 according to one model of human development used by psychologists, the year will be 2024.
Fewer and fewer people are inclined to write annually in any detail any more, as I say. “Such is life,” as the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly is reported to have said on his way to the gallows in NSW in 1880! Nearly everyone to whom I write is now at sites on the internet. I don’t use Facebook except to promote my writing. People write to me there and, although I don’t respond to the extensive writing of many others at Facebook, I always respond to the few incoming messages that come directly to me at that site and at all the other sites at which I am registered.
Part 8:
I just woke up from one of my many sleeps and will now finish this email. I sleep during the day and evening for about two hours which, with the night sleep of about six, gives me a total of 8 hours/day---so I’m not complaining. In the last four years, 2007-2011, I've been sleeping much more in the day and less at night and I have assumed a lower social-profile due to the new meds for my bipolar I disorder but, again, I can’t complain. I don’t suffer from any physical problems of any significance or bother, but I have to limit my social interaction to short periods of time. No more talk fests in my life these days.
I trust your world is a harmonious one. Chris and I battle along with life’s slings and arrows, and enjoy its joys and pleasures which are all part of life as is the weather, I often say. I wish you well in the weeks and months ahead. I look forward to hearing from you when, and if, time and the inclination permit.
Seeya....lateRon….as they say Downunder
6 Reece Street
Pipe Clay Bay
South George Town
George Town Tasmania Australia 7253
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