Funerals and Return

Wednesday was Maria Hoehn's funeral at Bowra and O'Dea, a rather well-established body in Perth from the 19th century starting as "undertakers and carriage makers" in Goderich Street East Perth where some one hundred years later I would roam in my troubled teenage years. They clearly had close connections with a part of the local community, as evidenced by a proudly displayed letter from the Provisional Irish government dated in March 1922. It was, according to Maria's wishes a rather Catholic affair. The family saw fit that I was the allocated reader, a rather great honour, and I relished the opportunity to read Corinthians 13. I didn't mind at all doing the responsorial psalm either (the famous Psalm 23), although I was less comfortable, as a non-believer, reading the supernatural prayers to the faithful. Erica and Arnold did a magnificent job at the euology, providing an outline of Maria's life from her childhood during the war, to her young marriage (to a rather dashing husband), her youthful migration to Australia with no English skills, life in the Kalgoorlie region, the birth of her sons, and then Erica, the loss of her husband, and then having to bring up three children by herself, and guiding them into adulthood. Sophie's recital of a childhood poem to her grandmother was, of course, cute as a button. Apart from family, she had a good number of her friends present as well many of whom I was meeting for the first time; judging by remarks apparently Maria had spread tales of my cooking to them.

For my own part there was not much else to do but return home and offer my sturdy consolations to caseopaya. The cat is back from Andrew D's care and hasn't entirely snubbed us. The magpies were glad to see us again, with now more than twenty-five visiting daily for their supply of cat biscuits. I completed the PRACE supercomputing course with the exception of the final assessment, and have made more work on my paper for eResearch Australasia. On a related note on Monday will be attending a one-day conference for the Victorian University Directors of Information Technology (I'm not an IT director, but it's handy that I have a sense of the strategic direction). Spartan has undergone a rather signifcant upgrade this past week (virtual to physical machines for login and management, network upgrades and reallocation) as well, and today nearly all of it finally came together with some particularly heroic work from various staff members. Most of it is at infrastructure level immediately above my normal scope of activities but there was some necessary glue which I could contribute in a meaningful way. In other words, after the week in Perth I'm back into the swing of normality in under a day. Following last week's VCAT decision to grant me power of attorney my next activity will be sorting out Rick's finances.