Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Family movements

Daughter number two has departed this morning for a three day high school science camp at Mundaring. It's famous for its weir, designed by the Victorian era Irish Engineer C.Y. O'Connor to provide a reliable water supply to the Kalgoorlie goldfields. I wrote about a family picnic to the weir last year on 4 January 2007.

This time our daughter will be sleeping under canvas. She took her own tent and magnanimously offered another one we had to a couple of her friends. This peeved me a bit. I reckoned their parents should have gone to Ranger Camping and bought their own, because small ones only cost about twenty bucks. I'm expecting to see our tent, which was in pristine condition, returned with broken zips and no apology or offer of a replacement. It's happened before.

We had another family member taken to Fremantle Hospital last weekend. My wife's father, who is living in a North Fremantle nursing home, needed an emergency checkup and some tests. My wife has been visiting him each day.

Today sometime he's being released to go back to the nursing home. From what I can gather he was treated well at the hospital. No complaints from us. He's still pretty sprightly at 88.

The staff at the nursing home deserve a bouquet too. One of the workers in her own time took another resident to Fremantle Hospital to visit my father-in-law. It's great to hear of such kindness. There has been quite a bit of adverse publicity nationally about public hospitals and nursing homes.

Son number four who had an emergency appendectomy at Narrogin almost two weeks ago has just rocked up here. He's looking terrific, and feeling good too. That's because he's getting so much rest. He has a tidy scar about two inches long just where you'd expect it. I'm sure he's keen to get back to work next week.

We had an SMS yesterday saying son number two has departed Dublin - a case of having been there done that. He was heading to Kilkenny to check out where his convict ancestor was born. The ancestor got seven years for stealing a sheep in 1849, the peak year of the famine. He was packed off to Fremantle by the British with a shipload of other Irish convicts in 1853.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

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