Part A: Introduction Here we are with the solstice, Christmas and Boxing Day behind us and four days

to go to the New Year, 2012. Readers will find below the second edition of my annual email required after receiving several replies and reactions to the first edition posted here on 4 December. The solstice took place at 5:30 a.m. Coordinated Universal Time five days ago on 22 December 2011, or so I was informed at one of the myriad sites in cyberspace that provide information to all those with internet access. The official beginning of summer here in Australia, or winter back home in Canada, then, has taken place. I often find it hard to believe, to get some sense of the reality of the beginning of my life in what was, and still is, called the lunch-pail city of Hamilton Ontario with its current population of some 700,000. Hamilton was given this nickname because this steel-making city, centred on Stelco of Canada now part of U.S. Steel Corporation, was a working man's town with the men's endless lunch pails! My life began, it seems now as if in another era, another epoch, in October of 1943 in the midst of WW2, the first global war in history, a horrendous affair killing some 60 million people. Not that I knew anything about the war in the first years of my life. Such are just some opening reflections as the globe has continued to experience tempests and trials in all the decades after WW2 from the Cold War to the new wars of the late 20th and 21st centuries. The first stages of winter back in Canada this year were nothing like last year in that section of what is called the Golden Horseshoe where I grew up, so I am told by a friend who still lives there. In 2010 the weather in the first half of December was extreme and hazardous so I am also informed at a website on the subject. Of course, snow and winter's extremities have come to many, if not all, of the other parts of Canada. Frobisher Bay, part of Baffin Bay in the Canadian Arctic, where I spent one year before leaving Canada, still had open water when December opened; usually that bay near the town where I taught primary school to Inuit children in 1967/8 has been solid ice for at least two months by now. This news is yet another milestone showing that the Earth is warming-up. It took nearly two years, 100 years ago, for explorers to pick their way through the labyrinth of narrow lanes of open water & thick ice. Now it would be easy. All of us who have the internet facility can easily google the weather in my home town in Ontario, in the Arctic, or in anywhere else. If I want to know the weather where any of my friends & associations from the past and present now live, a few clicks at a search engine, and many a website with information becomes available.

Part B: Means of Communicating These Days One advantage of writing online, at least at some sites, is the freedom one has to revise one's original pieces of writing. My intention in the coming months and years is simply to keep this annual email online and up-to-date so that anyone I know, and to whom it seems appropriate, can be given the link to this site and this thread and I won't have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, every year. This annual communication will be available, then, whenever I find it useful. I am also going to keep this link at the autobiography section of my website so that readers who want a broader context for the contents of the last 12 months can read the material I have placed in this autobiography sub-section of my site at: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com/auto.html In the last 40+ years, since beginning my working life in the 1950s and 1960s, and then moving away from home in southern Ontario first in 1966 to Canada's most southerly city, Windsor Ontario; then to the Canadian Arctic in 1967, and then to Australia in 1971, my life has taken many directions. Keeping this post, this annual email, at my website will help tie-up some of the loose ends of my life, at least that is how I feel about this exercise in the first month that this annual note has been in cyberspace. In the first 3 weeks this message has been at ConceptArt.org it has received more than 600 clicks---one way of measuring how much it has been read. Maintaining communication links with people from one's teens and twenties into one's sixties and seventies is a challenge and not for everyone. Perhaps this exercise of keeping in touch is something one tries to do when one has moved around as much as I have and when one never sees anyone one knew before about the age of 30, and only a handful one has known before the age of 50! I left home in 1964 and after nearly 50 years, those years of growing up seem a little like a dream. I also write partly because I am a writer, at least since my retirement from the world of FT jobs in 1999 and PT jobs in 2001. I now write full-time among other related activities like: reading and researching, publishing and poetizing, editing with a little walking for relaxation. Some people to whom I used to write have stopped writing; they have just gone off the radar, so to speak. Some don't like writing and I rarely hear from them. Others write long emails like this one; some prefer personal contact and the telephone; some send periodic emails during the year to tell me what's happening in their lives. Some now write to me at Facebook or Twitter or at another internet site; some I never see nor do I hear from them in any way. To each their own! As I head for the age of 70 the number of those with whom I am now corresponding annually has begun to increase due to the movement of friends and associations onto the internet, to Facebook and Twitter, as well as

to many of the other sites on the world-wide-web at which I post. I am happy with this development since most of this communication involves my writing and the writing of others in one way or another. Those who like to write to me---write; and those who don't---don't. That is no problem for me. I post this email on the internet and replying to what I write here is not intended to impose an obligation on the recipients of these posts. Just skim and scan the rest of this email , this internet post, read every line or stop reading and click off all the words which follow. In our world of print and image-glut we all have to work out what we can handle, what is meaningful to each of us, and what we want to bother to take in in our own way. Collectively, the incoming messages I now receive keep me busy communicating with friends and relatives as well as associations of various kinds accumulated: (a) over a lifetime, and (b) especially in recent years. I have begun to work out systems to simplify my now extensive correspondence, and this exercise is, on the whole, a pleasurable one. It is also an activity I prefer to many hours of: gardening and galivanting, sport and socializing, entertainment and exercise, fixing things and fishing, watching TV and working. Now on pensions, our small money supply has a limiting effect on our consumer desires and on any desired moves in the direction of tourism and travelling that Chris and I might have. Readers often suggest I read certain books in the same way I suggest they read my website. I take no offence if readers ignore or just briefly skim and scan my site; readers should take no offence if I do not read the books they suggest I read. I have not read a book in years. I read summaries, reviews, articles and a host of material virtually entirely now on the internet. Newspapers I now read online as well as journals. To each their own in this new age of print and electronic media as we all learn how to cope with our world of print and imageglut. This annual email serves, then, as a basis, as an opening note: (a) for a more extended correspondence with each person who wants to write on a more continuous basis during 2012, (b) for my reply to those who respond to this email, or (c) as the only note, as my entire annual written communication, until December 2012, for those who do not reply to this email and who do not get in touch with me in any other way during the next 12 months. I do not use cell phones or mobile phones. I do not send electronic cards, a popular form of communication at this time of year and at birthdays. I use the kind of phones that have been in my personal and/or professional life in one way or another, with their several technological changes since the 1950s, and I use them as little as possible. I leave incoming calls, for the most part, to my wife. I have no intention, at least at this stage of my retirement, to use iPods or iPads, texting or faxing. Perhaps this is the first sign of ludditism, a movement which began 200 years ago in 1811, and is still alive and well in my retirement years among

many a retiree. We can't be utilizers of all the old, as well as all the new, forms of communication. 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 which people have as a means of KiT : using chat rooms and utilizing iPads and iPods, emails and internet posts at websites, Facebook and Twitter, the old style of telephone and the new types of phones-mobiles and cell-phones. Then there are snailmails and personal contacts. Finally, there are the few, or perhaps the many, who just want to be left alone. This cornucopia of means of communicating provides each of us with our preferred means to suit our lifestyle. In the last decade each of us has been involved in working out new systems for interacting from all the available options now available. About all Im really into, then, is the email and the internet with a minimum now of social contact in the world of real, and not, cyberspace. Chris is a big user of the telephone, texting and email, and she is also much more gregarious than I am, or than I have become in recent years. My children, step-children and step-grandchildren all have their ways to KiT from texting to Facebook, from mobile phones to emails. My one grandchild, only three months old, Grace Price; and one of my step-grandchildren, now 15 months old, George Armstrong-Zaphiriadis, communicate with sounds. Neither one of them has begun to use words, although they are both learning the rules of language by watching how we adults use language to communicate. All the modern communication tools, and in all likelihood many more, await both of these babies as they move through this 21st century. Time will tell, of course, what awaits them---and us---in this new millennium. Part C: Holidays, Festivities and Celebrations

With the traditional Christmas taking place today and the Gregorian New Year on the horizon in the next 5 days, as well as the Bahai gift-giving and new year occasions taking place in the next 3 months, by the 21st of March, this email will serve as a seasons greetings and happy new year' to all those celebrating either or both of these sets of events. Ive been involved with these two sets of annual festivities for nearly 60 years and I wish whoever celebrates either of these occasions---a happy, healthy, and prosperous time. To those of you who do not celebrate either of these annual events, or who observe some other festival like: the Chinese new year or Hanukkah(Jewish), Ashura or AlHijra(Islamic), or any one of the many Buddhist, Hindu or even pagan/animistic occasions of celebration----happy travelling to you in 2012. May the gifts you receive and give bring you and others pleasure and joy whether you are engaged

in that activity on 25/12/11 or from 25/2/12 to 1/3/12, as the case may be. If your occasions of celebration do not involve gift-giving, or if you are only into birthdays, weddings or funerals or all three---good luck to you all and I look forward to hearing from you, if you desire to write. Part D: News About Family and Self

Some of the following information will be relevant to some readers and some will not. These annual emails are written to scatter the recipient net wide, so to speak; some of the fish, the recipients, get caught in the net and enjoy the read; some swim away from the net to avoid getting caught in its mesh of information, I have little doubt. To each their own when reading, when doing just about anything, or so it seems to me as I now go through these middle years, 65 to 75, of late adulthood, as some human development psychologists call the years from 60 to 80 in the lifespan---and as I hope to go through the years of old age, 80+, if I last that long. 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: The situation of Chriss 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, the major hospital in the north of Tasmania, is unchanged since I last wrote a year ago. Her husband, Andrew, also born in Tasmania and now 44, went back to teaching in primary school two years ago, but his job came to an end when the demand for teachers in Tasmania in 2011 dropped. 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 this town's council as the head of the IT section. This month he begins yet another new job in Launceston, still in the IT industry, with a company called IT Solutions. It is a job he clearly prefers for several reasons, not the least of which is that he does not have to make the 45 to 60 minute drive each way every day. Their children, and my step-grandchildren, Tobias 18 and Kelsey 16, continue with their busy lives through their high school years with more activities in addition to their studies than you can shake-a-stick at: dancing and singing(Kelsey), part-time work and--recently--career selection(Tobias), family functions and partying(both). They always seem to be coming or going, doing something or other as reports continue to flow in to me here in this little town some 60 kms away from where they live at a rural property outside Launceston.

If you want more details on all their lives and the lives of the following family members just let me know. Some who get this email may not know Vivienne or even remember her since she stayed in Tasmania with her father, my wife's first husband, in 1982 when Chris and I moved from Tasmania to Australia's Northern Territory and then, in 1986, to Western Australia. Indeed, some who get this email may not know anyone whom I mention and, although they may remember some of what I have written about these family members in recent years, they may not ever meet some of the people whose lives I am surveying here. Don't feel any obligation to read any or all of what I write. I get long letters from people whose lives have slipped to the periphery of my life and these letters often tell me about the details of their family's lives. I skim and scan them to save me getting print-glut. I must add, though, that long annual emails are getting rarer in the last decade, in part I'm sure, due to the many other means of communicating that have come into our lives due to the seeming miracles of modern technology. Chriss second daughter, Angela, and the younger of my two step-daughters, had her first baby, George. He is now 15 months old. Angela is 41 and lives in Launceston. Her partner, Connie, is a Brazillian and a resident in Florianopolis, the capital city of Santa Catarina State in southern Brazil. He is a businessman engaged in selling wholesale jewellery. Ange and Connie separated in 2011 in Brazil, but they still have a positive relationship and Connie is, at present, visiting Ange and George for one month here in Tasmania. They don't live together, though, and so Ange has the demanding role of being a singleworking-parent. She has a part-time job centred in Launceston in the field of public relations and event management for Tasbreeders. This organization represents Tasmanias breeding interests at national and local breeders' meetings through representation on a range of committees. Both my stepdaughters, Angela and Vivienne, seem to be able to work in the fast lane managing: their families, their jobs and whatever personal lives they have for themselves in the remaining time left to them. They both have their tests in life as we all do and, in this the decade of their 40s, their lives are a tapestry of enterprize and industry, trials and tribulations, joys and sorrows--as are the lives of most of us. Angela, like Vivienne, also stayed in Tasmania in the early 80s with her father, and those who got to know my wife and I after, say, 1982 may not remember Angela, although she did live in Perth on her own while we were there. Daniel is now 34 and has been married for more than two years. Daniel's wife Zuriash is an Ethiopian from Addis Ababa and she is 31. She has a degree in economics from the university of Addis Ababa, and is as far removed as is possible from the image people in the West having of starving people in the Horn of Africa. She, like Dan, was working at the Bahai World Centre until

this time last year. They are now living in George Town. Daniel & Zuriash moved to Hobart after staying with Chris & I for the first 10 weeks of 2011, & after leaving Israel when their years of service came to an end in that major port city of Israel. Dan was offered a 3 year scholarship in early 2010 in oceanography. At the end of that three year scholarship he would have been granted a PhD. After more than two months in the program, though, he pulled out since he did not find the contents of the study of sufficient interest for him to devote three years of his life to its pursuit. He was at the Bah' World Centre for nearly three years first as an engineer and then as a statistical analyst. Daniel is currently working part-time, three days a week, in Launceston for Tas-Gas, a private company which retails gas in Tasmania. He is employed as a technical writer, a position he officially started six weeks 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 her son George, and then Daniel and his wife, living with us. But they are now ensconced in their own rental properties: Dan a flat and Ange a house. 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 were living in different parts of Australia and the world until 2011. I keep in touch with several members of my family back in Canada and my first wife, now Judy Noack. She and her Australian husband had three children and now have one grandchild just entering primary school. The many people both in these families in Canada and in Chriss extended family here in Tasmania have lives which are filled with potential news which I could relate. But the news of the people in these three families and their extensions is not really of interest to the people outside the family relations to whom I now send these periodic emails. I write to many people now in the evening of my life: (i) mostly at sites on the internet, and (ii) some among those I have got to know in the last several decades in the two dozen towns and cities where I have lived. Such information about these extended parts of my families of birth and two marriages, my consanguineal and affinal families as they call these two types of families in sociology, does not seem relevant in any way to others. Anyone who once knew, or still knows, any of these people to whom I refer in this annual email, and who wants more information about them, can always ask when, and if, they respond to this email. Chris is a gad-about and is busy with three major areas of activity: (a) a local arts-society, (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 Bahai events here in northern Tasmania and, finally, (d) with friends and associations she has come to know while living in this old town, the oldest in

Australia, or with people she once knew while growing-up in northern Tasmania. Chris is as active as ever, even more so in recent months due to some improvements in her health and with her three children being within cooee, to use an Australian term for short calling-contact distance. Her health is still not that good, though, and her doctors do not know the cause of her fatigue and muscular problems. I visit, in addition to some family members, in about a dozen homes on a regular basis with people I have got to know in the first decade or so of life in this small town of about 5000 at the end of the Tamar River in northern Tasmania. I maintain, therefore, an element of my previously extensive social existence. I have a far-less active social life than I had in the 1990s in Perth Western Australia with its Bahai community of over 2000, and with my fulltime job---before retiring after 35 years of teaching more than a decade ago for this sea-change to Tasmania. The new medication I take for my bipolar disorder(BPD) limits the extent of my socializing. My medications and my disinclination to socialize beyond an hour here and there, keep my social life to a minimum but, after a lifetime of 8 to 10 hours a day of talking and listening, I do not mind this new lifestyle with its limited social engagement. Most of my service, social activism and group interaction now takes place on the worldwide-web. I trust your life is a comfortable one even if busy and demanding in its various ways as most peoples lives seem to be these days. If you enjoy a more leisurely life now in your retirement, as some who receive this email do, may such a leisurely pace continue and with it good health and plenty of energy to enjoy what some call the declining/reclining years of the evening of life. Tasmania has just completed the first official days of its summer season(21/12 to 26/12). Chris is often away from home engaged as she is, and as I say above, with her several interests and social activities, family responsibilities and community involvements. I am at home writing and reading, editing and researching, as well as posting and publishing on the internet. I have been doing this since my retirement from FT work in 1999, PT work in 2003 and most casual-volunteer work in 2005. The first edition of my website went online, as they say, as far back as 1997 in my last two years as a teacher. This new, this 4th edition of my website, has dozens of sections and sub-sections and parts of it can now be found all over the internet at 100s of sites on the world-wide-web. At this site, ConceptArt.org , I have several dozen comments on art which you can access by clicking on my photo, then clicking on the word Statistics, and then on the words Find All Posts by RonPrice. Read any of this, all of it or none of it as is your wish. To each their own.

Part E: Who Reads This Email and Replies In the first three weeks that this email has been online, as I said above, it has had more than 600 clicks. This is just one measure of the extent to which it has been read, and confirming to me the value of this new form of communicating my annual email. There is little point of writing to many people and putting this email at my website, if what I write is not read. Writers like to have readers in similar ways that talkers like to have listeners. This one link at my website provides an outline of a very personal part of my life, a personal part that I am happy to make public. To each their own, though, for readers who click on this link. Each reader should read what he wants to read. What I write would not be what others would write; my placing this email at my website is not something everyone would do, but then I am a writer and poet and have literally millions of words in cyberspace and I am comfortable with having this personal aspect of my life at an internet site and accessible via my website. This method of communicating preserves for readers total confidentiality. I do not know who reads this email. Given the concern some, if not millions, of people have with privacy issues, I have sent copies of this email, this post, to all the significant, and even those who are peripheral, people in my life--anyone who gets a direct or indirect mention. If any individual I mention in this somewhat long annual email is in any way concerned that I should mention him or her, I will happily delete that reference or alter it to suit their tastes when I next update this post. Such people need only let me know. I receive a great number of emails and internet posts which I never read. If anyone has incorrect information about me, I correct it in an email to them. In addition, deleting incoming emails only involves a simple click of my mouse. Never has a mouse been more useful in life after decades of trying to get rid of the little pest! Part F: Concluding Words The nights are still cold, although not compared to Canada where I lived until the age of 27. The temperatures go down to about 10 degrees most nights and up to as high as 20 as summer makes its entry down here at what many who get this email I'm sure see as "the ends of the Earth." The heat of summer does not really arrive here, generally, until January, as I have found in the 15 years I have lived on this island state of Australia. The hottest months are January and February as they are the coldest months back home in Canada. At 50 kms away, Launceston has been the big smoke for us in George Town for the last dozen years. Launceston now has a population of 100,000, at least so I am told at a local internet site. I arrived in Launceston the first time back in 1973 to be interviewed for a job as a senior tutor of trainee teachers in human relations.

The 40 years since then seem to have gone by swifter than the twinkling of an eye. If you are not inclined to write in any detail in the busy tournament that is life not to worry. Fewer and fewer 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! We all have our own likes and dislikes, tastes and tendencies when it comes to what we do with our time. So whatever you do with your time, may your activities give you pleasure and meaning. Nearly everyone to whom I write now with any regularity and to any significant extent, except for a small handful of people, is at sites on the internet as I mentioned above. I dont use Facebook much, but people write to me there and, although I dont respond to the extensive writing, the posts, of others at Facebook, I always respond to the few incoming messages that come my way at that most popular of social media sites. I write at a multitude of other sites, like this one, more extensively and with longer posts than the short messaging that exists at Facebook and Twitter. I now have millions of words, as I say above, in cyberspace but I am neither famous nor rich. There are no signs on the horizon that I will be either of these things as I head through these middle years, 65-75, of late adulthood as some human development psychologists call the years from 60 to 80. I just woke up from one of my many sleeps to finish this email. I sleep during the day and evening for about two hours in total which, with my night sleep of about six, gives me a total of 8 hours/day---so Im 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 BPD, as I said above but, again, I cant complain. I dont suffer from any physical problems of any significance or bother. I do 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 lifes slings and arrows, and enjoy its joys and pleasures which are all as much a part of life as is the weather, I often say. I wish you well in the weeks, months and in the year ahead. I look forward to hearing from you when, and if, time and the inclination permit. Seeya....lateRon.as they say Downunder __________________ married for 44 years, a teacher for 35, a writer and editor for 12 and a Baha'i for 52 years(in 2011).