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The past week was spent in Perth with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
caseopaya and her mother who, as mentioned, has been diagnosed with T-cell lymphomic cancer. The comments posted in the last 'blog post and on Facebook etc are deeply appreciated. It was mainly a case of cleaning, running errands, and preparing a small mountain of meals (it was grossly unfair that one could live their entire life without trying coq au vin). All of this occured in her modest home in Medina. It is a poor suburb, the average household income being only 60% of the state's average, with most of the houses are hardwood or asbestos cement. Many show the typical signs of this culture; frontyards with multiple muscle cars on blocks co-exist with pensioner neighbours with their trimmed lawns and flower beds. In its favour, the suburb does have some rather pleasant parkland apparently a far-sighted feature of its original town planner.
We left on the midnight flight in the early hours of Saturday morning, following an obviously tearful farewell at the Kwinana train station. As we passed Murdoch University and its own station, my thoughts turned to 1989 when I was briefly employed by the University to survey and improved the public transport options to the university; the Vice-Chancellor, many years later, would remark on how that report completely changed the public transport commission's approach to dealing with the university. It is was very pleasing to see how that work snowballed. Reaching the city, we stumbled upon the Winterland festival at the Culture Centre, a rather surreal experience; one does not expect to see outdoor ice-skating in Perth. Afterwards, we had the opportunity to catch up with Bruce T., for dinner with a long conversation that was typically wide-ranging and deep.
Life is back to some semblance of normality for the time being. Mac the Cat expressed his pleasure at our return by bringing home a live young dove. Saturday was a meeting of Linux Users Victoria which had a "ask the experts" theme, allowing us to deal with various problems that people had with this preferred operating system. Today's big event was playing another session of GURPS Middle-Earth (the old ICE Mirkwood-Erebor TA 1640 setting using GURPS rules), where we're engaged in what I have described as "The Battle of the Four Armies at Almost Helm's Deep", where the cliffhanger is my character about to ride out to confront a goblin army coaxing a cave bear. 'Overconfidence' can be a hell of a disadvantage at times. On a related topic however, a few weeks ago I was approached by a chap in the Ukraine who has been running one my favourite old-school games, Swordbearer. The meeting of minds has spurred me into writing a new edition for this classic under the name 'Spirit and Sword', of which several thousand words has been written a small Google Plus group assisting (I hate how slow Google+ is and personally prefer the mailing list where work is being replicated).
caseopaya and her mother who, as mentioned, has been diagnosed with T-cell lymphomic cancer. The comments posted in the last 'blog post and on Facebook etc are deeply appreciated. It was mainly a case of cleaning, running errands, and preparing a small mountain of meals (it was grossly unfair that one could live their entire life without trying coq au vin). All of this occured in her modest home in Medina. It is a poor suburb, the average household income being only 60% of the state's average, with most of the houses are hardwood or asbestos cement. Many show the typical signs of this culture; frontyards with multiple muscle cars on blocks co-exist with pensioner neighbours with their trimmed lawns and flower beds. In its favour, the suburb does have some rather pleasant parkland apparently a far-sighted feature of its original town planner.We left on the midnight flight in the early hours of Saturday morning, following an obviously tearful farewell at the Kwinana train station. As we passed Murdoch University and its own station, my thoughts turned to 1989 when I was briefly employed by the University to survey and improved the public transport options to the university; the Vice-Chancellor, many years later, would remark on how that report completely changed the public transport commission's approach to dealing with the university. It is was very pleasing to see how that work snowballed. Reaching the city, we stumbled upon the Winterland festival at the Culture Centre, a rather surreal experience; one does not expect to see outdoor ice-skating in Perth. Afterwards, we had the opportunity to catch up with Bruce T., for dinner with a long conversation that was typically wide-ranging and deep.
Life is back to some semblance of normality for the time being. Mac the Cat expressed his pleasure at our return by bringing home a live young dove. Saturday was a meeting of Linux Users Victoria which had a "ask the experts" theme, allowing us to deal with various problems that people had with this preferred operating system. Today's big event was playing another session of GURPS Middle-Earth (the old ICE Mirkwood-Erebor TA 1640 setting using GURPS rules), where we're engaged in what I have described as "The Battle of the Four Armies at Almost Helm's Deep", where the cliffhanger is my character about to ride out to confront a goblin army coaxing a cave bear. 'Overconfidence' can be a hell of a disadvantage at times. On a related topic however, a few weeks ago I was approached by a chap in the Ukraine who has been running one my favourite old-school games, Swordbearer. The meeting of minds has spurred me into writing a new edition for this classic under the name 'Spirit and Sword', of which several thousand words has been written a small Google Plus group assisting (I hate how slow Google+ is and personally prefer the mailing list where work is being replicated).
