BRIEF UPDATE FOR INITAL 2014

A COUPLE OF MONTHS SINCE my little rant about Australia's weird stance on the 'boat people' or 'illegals'.

Now to bore you with an update or two now that 2014 is under way.

What is so good about the weather is that, when nothing else makes life a little grim, it can step in to fill the gap!  Three words sum it all up...'Damn cold here'.  Night temperatures rarely get up to 10 deg. F and twice have fallen to minus 16F.  I have this neat wireless outside sensor so that, when I get up, I can see at a glance how cold it is outside.  What a joy!  It also gives the room temperature so that the outside/inside temperature difference and be as much as 80 deg. F!  That explains why the furnace is lighting up so often.

We have a bit of snow and, until the rain of the last two days, I have had a foot or so hanging about due to repeated falls and the low temperatures preventing melting or sublimation.  I know you love to have a photo or two every so often, so...

 how do you like these apples?  We have had another three or four inches since these were taken.

This meant some great skiing on local golf courses and the park up the hill a bit from me, that has a very useful hill on which to practice downhill skills.

That nice slippery metal room means that a lot of snow can come off in a hurry once the sun warms it a bit.  What was fluffy powder turns to a wet concrete mix once it falls.  Next year...snow stoppers to keep the snow up on the roof, you bet!

It has been a real test for my heating system and I am glad to report that it, according to the gas company's data, is running very much more efficiently compared with like houses round about.  However, I definitely plan to put in sub-floor hot-water driven radiant heating for the upper floor.  Easy to put in the piping and I have a very helpful manual on how to plan and install.  What has convinced me is the excellent job the radiant heating does in the sun-room you can see lower right in the top photo.  During the winter months this is my rear entrance and it never falls below 50 deg F and the floor is ever wonderfully slightly warm.  I hang out my washing there and it drys overnight!  Think of stepping out of bed onto a warm floor.

So much for the house. 

Not much skiing to date, other than as described already but I do plan to go on a couple of trips further North, into the Adirondacks and perhaps into Quebec Province.

To while away the winter hours I have taken up learning to write in the italic style with my right hand and now have a passable style.  Very like meditation.  For my brain, I have been teaching my left hand to write.  Very weird at the outset but now feeling more normal and a passable hand, if not yet easy or stylish.

For the rest of the time, I have followed a friend's advice (he has written several books) that, if you want to understand a subject, write a book on it.  This will be followed in another blog ('beliefaccordingto') as I am writing about the 18 or so 'missing years' of the life of Jesus.  This is primarily for myself.  However, now well into it, I am finding that it does require a lot of reading and research and that the writing has quite taken over.  Hence the daily stint at the computer putting this idea into words is at the point where I am no longer in control, the plot seems to be running itself; I quite look forward to finding out what will be written each day!  The only problem with this is that I being driven crazy by the excessive typing mistakes I have been making.  So, back to improving my touch typing.  The Google 'Type Fu' happens to be just excellent for that ($4 well spent).

That's it...have a good weekend!

AUSTRALIA, AN INTERESTING PLACE BUT...

WHAT STRIKES ME FORCIBLY when I return to the Land of OZ is the amazing ethnic diversity, especially in the cities (where almost 90% of folk live).  Since arriving here in the United States almost 19 years ago, I have made the trip to my homeland almost every year.  Over this last decade, there seem to be more and more Asian and Chinese faces.  Consider that, in a population of some 23 million, folk have arrived from almost 40 countries, currently at the rate of about 350,000 per year.  Some 200 languages are spoken by people living permanently Down Under; twenty percent were born in other countries and another twenty seven per cent are the children of people born elsewhere; and almost seventy per cent of Australians acknowledge upwards of 300 different ethnic traditions.  Equally amazing is that virtually all speak and read English, a benefit of government programs to encourage and fund learning this language.  Matched to this tough line on the lingua franca is cultural encouragement to preserve ethnic language and customs.  For example, the education system allows children of immigrants to take special subjects relating to to their original language and culture at the public examinations.

Another huge benefit is the culinary diversity that has made no concessions to what might be 'Australian tastes'.  If one goes into a Greek restaurant, for instance, Greek food is what you get.  In Melbourne, where I lived for a decade, a favorite street of mine boasts some thirty different ethnic cuisines; you can eat in many countries just by walking up and down the street!  If there once was an 'Australian identity', it has been long since lost in ethnic diversity.

How very different from the Australia into which I was born and grew up.  Seventy years ago the population of Australia was about 7.45 million and there was hardly a 'foreigner' to be seen.  Then we had the 'White Australia' policy. In 1942, the then Prime Minister (John Curtin) laid it out very clearly,
"This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race."

When I started school, in terms of migration, rather more people were leaving Australia than arriving.  By the time I was about to attend High School, all that had begun to change and at fast and furious pace.   By then, the population had increased to 8.4 million, mainly due to immigration. Now the population is over 23 million, 60% of this increase being due to immigration.

These waves of immigrants from the Baltic states, the Mediterranean states, the Middle East, Asia Minor, Asia, China, and so many individual countries (including the United Kingdom), completely overwhelmed and obliterated the sense that Australians had of themselves when I was but a lad.  Then we thought of ourselves as British; England was our real home and many of us made our pilgrimage by ship to this homeland when we became of age, taking the long sea voyage this ancestral land.

Not that every ordinary Australian welcomed these new arrivals, these 'DPs','Baults', 'Pommies', 'Wogs', 'Wops', 'Slope Heads' and 'Slant Eyes'.  We did not like their food, their customs, their energy, or much at all about them.  We considered that they would eventually take over and diminish our opportunity.  In a way something like this did eventuate because this process radically transformed the country, absorbing much from the old and the new to produce something very much better.  Now our racial memories encompass the whole world, even North Americans migrate Down Under.  If Australians have any sense of what it is to be an 'Aussie', it surely entails a sense of being from many places and supporting one's "mates" regardless of from whence they came.

BUT...then came the Boat People.  Folk making their way across the sea from Indonesia, a way station in the long journey from places like Iran, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, all refugees seeking a better place, fleeing a home land that had become impossible for them, selling all they had and even borrowing much to make the journey the last leg of which was a perilous sea journey in small, un-seaworthy boats designed more for small scale off-shore fishing than to transport human cargo.  Many boats have sunk and at least a thousand men folk, women, children, and infants, have died making this hazardous way to freedom and what promised to be a better hope.

This exodus had begun just before I came to the US.  I was living in Darwin and occasionally one of these boats would turn up, the people on it arrested and the craft set then set to fire.  The Australian defense forces became adept at finding these boats in transit so that, over the years, the smugglers of people have come to depend on being 'rescued' at sea.  For me, and many expatriate Aussies, this unfolding drama, now drawn out over almost two decades, was off-stage.  In Australia, these folk who were refugees of various sorts became transformed into 'illegals' without rights and interned under conditions often approaching in-humane.  No one knew much of where these 'boat people' came from, the financial and physical cost or the nature of the journey, the perils they faced, and the conditions endured, or the treatment they received at journey's end, should they have survived.  If they were barely 'above the radar' for Australians they surely got little notice in other countries.

THEN...two intrepid journalists living in Afghanistan, one a writer and the other a photographer, risked their lives to insert themselves into this harrowing experience.  Eventually, they reached Christmas Island surviving to tell the story we all ought to hear.  Last month it was published, of all places, in the New York Times Sunday Supplement.  I came across the article, The Dream Boat, quite by accident and was appalled by what I read and saw.  You can enter into the journey yourself by reading the story by clicking on the highlighted title above.

Many who read this blog live in Australia.  I hope this NY Times story will stir you to serious consideration and action.  Others of you, who live elsewhere, have friends in Australia.  I hope that you will send the story on to them.

If you read the comments of my fellow expats that appear below the article, I think you will see that mostly we are shocked and chagrined at what we have discovered.  Australia is very much a melting pot filled with locals, displaced persons, refugees, and good old Brits that have come to live together to make Australia a 'Lucky Country', releasing inestimable benefits, adding quality and energy, and enriching our culture.  It almost unimaginable that with our experience of immigration, we should treat refugees in this way...except that we have.

12 Degrees F...MUST BE ALMOST WINTER!!!

IT HAS BEEN COLD...All of a sudden, the sun gets up just before 8 AM and sets around 5 PM.  Here in Corning, we sort of had two "Indian Summers", periods of several days when the day temperatures reached the mid-70s.  Now we have the cold weather in earnest, overnight lows of 15 to 20 degrees F.  I wonder if today was a taste of life to come.  As the sun rose today (Sunday) I noted 11 degrees on my deck, where I have an outside thermometer wirelessly transmitting the data so that I do not have to step out to see how cold it really is.  As I set off to walk to church around 9 AM...20 degrees.  With the wind at 20 mph whistling down the river at 20 mph, my ears fairly froze as I crossed the bridge. Note to me: get a hat that covers your ears, Robert.

I had some jobs to complete over at my dear friend Uma's home.  'Better get these done before Winter sets in", I have been saying to myself for weeks.  Just as I was finishing these up yesterday, in swept a swirling fall of light snow, demonstrating remarkable timing.  Today the temperature never got above 24 and, as I write, is back to the low of this morning.  What can one say but..."Brrrr".  I managed to get outside to dig three holes for planting my new trees (I have six to plant) before retreating.  These arrived in the post from Arbor Day Foundation.  They are all certified 'dormant' so can be planted in this cold weather in order to get a good start in Spring.

This is Thanksgiving week and I will spend the afternoon before Turkey Day peeling potatoes for the free Thanksgiving Dinner the church hosts.  Not sure what I will do on the day, maybe go over for the dinner to help out and have some turkey and whatnot.  Maybe dig three more holes for planting; it will be a little warmer.

I managed to get myself out of that 'corner' (A Christian Atheist: an Oxymoron?).  The talk was well received.  The gist of it is in the last two postings in the other blog (BeliefAccording...).  I was also to read a book to the children and chose 'The Little Engine that Could'.  A modern version of the story we know as The Good Samaritan, and between the lines, 'When the going gets tough, the tough get going'.  I admit to having a great time with them!  Would you believe, they have invited me back to do a short series so another 'corner' is in the offing, this time along the lines of inquiring into a modern basis for spirituality and morality.

The shortening daylight hours and standard time surely bring a change to the ordering of the day.  A case of getting the work done while you can; 'work for the night is coming', as an old song reminds.  Not much room for procrastination either.  This Winter, my focus will be bringing the downstairs area up to guest accommodation standard and making the entire house 'shipshape'.

Soon enough the snow will be covering the ground.  I have the snow tyres (tires) on now and even got my skis out the other day.  Three times a week I have taken to quick walks including the local park that has a nice slope at the northern when where I can do my 'hill bounding' and other skiing related training.  Will there be snow, I wonder?  Never mind, I am very happy to go exploring for snow trails and plan a trip up into Quebec Province to Mont Tremblant National Park, and some other trips into the Adirondacks.

If you are in the US...happy Turkey Day and safe travels.
If elsewhere, have a great week.

BACK TO THE QUOTIDIUM

YES...THE HUMDRUM.
Two weeks from returning after the Great Rockies Ride.  I do admit that I was a bit tired over the first weekend.  Nice to see that I had lost the anticipated eight pounds over the ten days of riding and wonderful to catch up with all my local friends.  After all those miles/kilometres and the many grueling hills along the way, it was no surprise to see that my aerobic levels had improved quite a bit.  Brian made great haste with the video and, in case you missed it, here is the URL:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5sPHF-Zvgw

Around the house, three weeks of growth by the lawn awaited to be taken care of, first a light cut followed a few days later with another to take the blade length back to 3 1/2 inches, along with some edge trimming, seeing as how the earth was still damp from the heavy rains.  Then to the task of getting the house and surrounds ready for the coming Winter.  I am laying a path from the back stairs to the slab on which the garden shed sits and also extending a path past the stairs that lead down to the lower stairs into the sun-room.  This is very tiring work (I must be getting old) so it is a case of here a little, there a little, as weather permits.  I am quite proud of the running form-work I have set up to manage the main path progress.

I have managed to get one French drain done, to ensure proper removal of water from off the roof and have four smaller ones to install to prevent any further ingress into the lower level when we get really severe rains that overwhelm the capacity of the present drains.  It really can rain here at times!

This work is nearing completion, say in two more weeks.  I have some interior carpentry to complete that will seal up the house as much as I can expect to be able to accomplish, involving a false wall and some dry walling, in the space above the stairs.  This will be wet-weather work as I must press on with the work on the paths while the weather is fine.  A posting to the "HouseAccording..." blog will have some pics of this work.

As you can see from the recent posting to "BeliefAccording...", I seem not to have painted myself inescapably into a corner in respect to the upcoming talk to the Universal Unitarian fellowship (A Christian Atheist...An Oxymoron?).  I should be able to manage a third posting on this topic in the next week or so.

The garden calls for attention.  I have trees to buy and plant and need to pot some cuttings for planting out in the Spring.  My mulberry trees are doing well and I am looking forward to planting a couple of dogwoods, a red bud, and two more fruit trees.  I have dreams of a pond and a willow down at the end of the yard, but all in good time.

With a new coat of exterior paint all round and some flowers in beds at the front, the house is looking quite pretty, as well as feeling nice and snug as the weather cools.  Eventually the front area will have more of an 'English Garden" look to it, should I endure to get it all done.

I will do a more complete 'bringing-you-up-to-date' job in the next two blog postings.

Here in Corning, with the Fall Equinox a week or so past, the trees are changing color and the leaves beginning to fall.  As ever, lacking trees of my own, I am begging friends and neighbors for leaves so that I can get on with composting.

If you are 'Down Under', enjoy the Spring and all the wonder that it brings.  Here, the North, we advance toward Halloween and then Thanksgiving, after which we can expect snow.

LIFE AT THE EDGE?

BLAIRMORE, ALBERTA: Nothing new about the GRR in this posting, as you have been receivng small bulletins along the way,  Not even a photo or two as the full photographic/videographic presentation will appear later and is in Brian's hands at this stage.

This is about being at an edge.  In's  my last posting I was remarking that the country around Corning, having lots of steepish hills, was offering the opportunity to get prepared for this trip.  In a way, two hour ride of maybe 20 miles and with an elevation gain of about 1000 feet over nine miles did the trick.  However there was little preparation there for coming to a gradually increasing incline after five hours of ups and downs with a final pitch of half a kilometer that reduces one to just above walking pace, even forcing a dismount and having to walk the shoulder of the hill, and then having to do the same another ten km further along the way, and not knowing that there may be two or three more pitches like this awaiting before the end of the day's riding.

No, this stuff that we are doing takes one to the edge.  I have done route marches with full pack, run a marathon and skied three or four cross-country marathons in hilly terrain, along with some five day hikes and reasonably serious hut-to-hut skiing,but and nothing has been like the exhaustion and mental challenge of keeping on to the end we have experienced on this ride.  As Brian remarked, 'This yields a new level of respect for the Tour de France riders!'

In an earlier posting on the business of ageing, I offered the metaphor of a farm at the edge of the bush.  The bush is constantly seeking to regain the land the farmer has wrested and the farmer must not give up the wresting. Of course, I mean by the encroachment of the bush the process of ageing.  If you give in to the aches and pains, the diminution of strength, you will be quickly done for.

Not quite an aside here: I regularly go to the 'Y' and closely follow fitness research.  At the gym, one may spend much time repetitiusly lifting weights of running on the treadmill.  However, what produces fitness is brief encounters with exhaustion, followed by reduced effort and then back to near exhaustion.  For example, on three days in the week, I have found that, using the rower for 15 minutes or so and then moving on to the stepper for a similar time, great benefit arises from one minute of 90% plus heart rate followed by two at easy pace produces the best training effect.  How I dread each of those one minute intense efforts!  But then, I am out of the gym in half an hour and free to do less boring things. I have a short strength routine called 'Slow Burn' that I need to do only once a week to increase muscle mass and strength, then I am off to better things. As a minimalist, this is perfect for me.

I suppose that the point of all this, writing at five in the morning, is that life has to be lived occasionally at what seems to be the edge, an edge the turns out to be the point of growth instead of retreat. Jesus is reported as remarking that the way down to destruction and death is easy, wide and steep while that to life is 'strait' and demanding.  It seems that at every point in life one has to engage the edge.  Why is it that bad habits are so easy to maintain while those that are good are hard to acquire and keep up?

In reality, life can only occur in the presence of entropy, the inevitable process of winding down.  We must, at every stage of it, set ourselves to grow, to struggle, to win.  Entropy will win in the end, of course, the bush will resume our little farms.  Roberto will surrender to the dust from which he came and disappear back into the stuff of the Universe...but not quite yet.

TWO MONTHS (OR SO) LATER!!!

IN THE LAST POSTING, I WAS GOING ON about my 76th birthday and some of the wisdom collected over all those years.

I hope you were bored out of your minds.  We oldies do tend to go on at times.

Just about all my energies have been directed into the painting of the external walls of the house and being around for the remodel of the upper bathroom.  We have had some beastly hot, humid weather around the time I chose to paint the outside walls (good choice, Robert!), all of which I found extremely enervating or, in plain terms, very capable of producing a 'whacked out' state.  Of course, I had to become accustomed to being up and down a 24 foot extension ladder and this occasioned some interesting moments of very active anxiety management.

Still and all, I was reasonable faithful in gym attendance and kept up with my aerobic routines but I do admit to letting go my strength stuff for a week or two. Working that ladder almost made up for this.  Thankfully, the weather has eased off, cooler and dryer (hooray!) so that I have had the energy to get back on my cycle for increasingly longer rides and more hills.  This is in preparation for The Great Northern Rockies Bike Ride early next month.

If you have not had any sense of my occasional bouts of insanity, this will bring you up to date on my state of mind.  The plan is to ride from Midway BC eastwards over the Rockies and then turn South to reach the eastern entrance of Glacier National Park in Montana.  The last day will take us through the Park and, with luck, we will catch the train late evening down to Seattle from the Western Entrance to the Park, via Amtrak

The route has proved to be concertina-like, alternately longer and shorter.  Right now it looks like ten days of cycling over approximately 550 miles, which might sound horrific but resolves into some longer rides along flat terrain with other days of 45 to 55 miles over climbs that might be a grunt at times.

Who are 'us'?  Well just the two of us, Brian and me.  Brian is an old friend, first met in 1978, when I was a Lecturer in Psychology at what is now the University of South Australian, then the South Australian Institute of Technology.  He was, sort of, as student of mine then.  Nowadays he is a significant administrator in the the BC services for disadvantaged folk.  More importantly, he is an avid and talented video movie maker and excellent photographer.  What this means is that, via the Internet, you will have the chance to see what we are up to.  Most days we will be able to use the Internet so expect a bulletin every so often to keep you up to date on our adventures, if any.  We do not expect to see many grizzly bears, as we will be mainly on Highway 3, or Crowsnest Pass Highway that is part of the Trans-Canada Highway and bears prefer to keep away from traffic, or so we hope.

The first couple of legs we will stay with friends; after that, it is the friendless wild where we may meet new friends and ride endless miles, discovering the Zen of cycling.  The first two weeks in September...watch this space!

When I get back, I have the task of re-inventing myself, metamorphosing from the fellow who thought, dreamed, lived and breathed work on The House and little else.  I do not have much interest in "rediscovering Robert".  With maybe 20 years left to me, there remains much to discover and learn in life so, no doubt, Ulysses-like, I will set sail to seek that 'far margin that fades forever as I move'.

Sorry...no pictures this time.  More on The Ride next posting. Adieu!

WHOOPEE! 76 COMING UP.

LONG, LONG AGO, IN THE LITTLE TOWN OF CLARE, in South Australia, around 4:30 AM, on Saturday, May 29, 1937, I began my journey.

It seems that I am a country lad at heart.  My folks had a small farm some 12 miles north of Clare and I lived on that farm for the next four years, long enough for me to have some memories of my humble beginnings.  My folks were what we, in Australia, call 'little Aussie battlers'.  When I was born Australia was still in the grip of the Great Depression, farming was hard, and there was little cash.  Two years after the Second World War began, my father gave up the battle and rejoined the Army. He moved his family (my mother and two sisters) into Clare where, I am glad to say, I had a generally happy childhood.  This despite that we were at war and everything was in short supply, with petrol and food rationing well to the fore.  In fact, a polite form of swearing when things went wrong, was to burst out with, 'Well, wouldn't that rip your ration cards!'

The enduring lessons of my childhood were to save, rather than spend; waste not, want not; that it is possible to be happy with very little.  My father was away for seemingly long periods and I cannot recall seeing him more than three or four times for the duration of the war.  The second time I now recall with tongue in cheek.  I had returned home from school to find my mother speaking with a strange man in uniform in the front garden.  Who could this man be, I wondered.  Gradually, the thought crept over me that he was, in fact, my father!

I think that folk of my generation grew up in the best of times.  There was little about which to worry, once the war ended and friends and relatives returned home from active service.  One of our family friends who had worked from time to time on the farm had been for three years a prisoner of war in Germany (he missed the last boat out of Greece).  Through the Red Cross, we knew he was alive.  When he returned he had lots of stories, many told in a droll fashion as only Aussies can affect, of life in the Stalags. But the great thing was, he was now home.  My father got de-mobbed and my brothers returned from service in the Navy and Air Force and then there was a new 'normal'.  My father never returned to farming.  Eventually, the farm was sold to a more prosperous neighbor.  My folks went into a series of small business, general grocery stores and we seemed to move about every two years or so.  No longer a country lad, I now lived in the suburbs of Adelaide, the state capitol and center of population.

Despite so  much change, I went to excellent schools and had very good teachers whom I greatly admired. Soon I was in High School, then University and Theological College.  I got an excellent grounding in the basic sciences, then in history and philosophy. I was, and remain, an extremely curious person and it might be said that it was not quite the best choice to enter a theological college.  However, it also has to be said that I really enjoyed the work of a pastor. Until, that is, I was overtaken by a serious attack of atheism!  I eventually solved my vocational problems by taking a further degree in Psychology.

It may be that psychologists, despite their formal training and knowledge of human nature, do not make the best of fathers. Perhaps, though, the constant change of my first two decades did not really fit me out for a settled life. Of that I have had two marriages (both to very nice and admirable women) and lived with two other women, equally good and admirable, my first wife recently aptly remarked, 'Perhaps you are not suited to marriage!'

I have been fortunate to have, in my mid-life, to have done quite frivolous things (examples, flying various sorts of aeroplanes, learned aerobatics, skied and cycled a good bit, sailed a bit, and traveled to interesting places.) I have managed not a few distinct careers (five of six at last count).  Despite a somewhat mercurial existence, I have managed to acquire good friends who seem to endure me and even to appear glad when I come by.  My children, bless them, manage to love me, or seem to and six beautiful grandchild carry some of the genes that ride about in me.  Well done, genes!

Nowadays my atheism appears to be in remission but I am not quite sure what has replaced it.  Certainly, despite appearances (I attend the local Episcopal Church with faithful regularity), it has not be a case of revival of orthodoxy.  I think it has to do with the search for what it is to be a 'good person' and a conviction that this beautiful universe is also spiritual and that there is great joy in contemplating seriously its regularity and perfection.  And, since I am made of the same stuff, it must be that there is a spirituality to be found within.

On his 70th birthday, my father drew me aside and said, 'I have had a full life and I am well pleased with it.'  I thought, 'What a thing to be able to say that of oneself!'  As it turned out, he was to be dead less than a year thence.  I suppose that, if not in my last days, I must nonetheless concede that the longer one lives, the closer is the end of it.  I have settled a bit but I sense there is lots more in store.  My father's words continue as a beacon to me, an invitation to live as best I may.

And so may it be for you who read this little bit of autobiography!