My late mother was a nurse. Before she was a midwife at Wellington Women’s Hospital, she was a staff nurse in wards 21 and 26 at Wellington Hospital. From what I remember, ward 21 was first, which meant she was working there some time between 1976 and 1978. This is a letter that she […]
Tag: family
The maternity ward of the early 1980s was a very different place
Virginia McMillan/Creative Commons Now the PM and her partner, Clarke Gayford, have shown off their daughter to the world (video at the end of this post), it reminded me of my own experiences in the maternity ward many years ago. I’m not a parent at the time of writing: I’m talking about the 1980s […]
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From one school shooting survivor to others
On February 14, 2008, my cousin Paul’s son Harold was shot and injured at a school shooting at Northern Illinois University. From memory, it was the fifth that week. Today, he wrote a letter to survivors and students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who endured their day of horror on February […]
Parts of Japan are decimated, and I think back to my grandfather
My grandfather, Col. Tung Wan Yan, of the Chinese Constitutional Army, had a very interesting war. He was on a Japanese hit-list and was hiding in trees when some soldiers opened fire on him with automatic weapons. By some miracle, he escaped unharmed. It’s one of the close calls he had in China […]
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My second cousin’s in Outlaw Territory
I’ve made a brief mention, in the past, about my second cousin Vivian Lee, who is quite the illustrator. Her work will be published in the second volume of Outlaw Territory, out February 1. You can order it now from Amazon and it will be dispatched after release. You may also like A year of […]
A tribute to Mission: Impossible’s nice guy
Maybe I plain did not watch the news on the 15th—goodness knows what I was doing to have missed that Peter Graves, best known for his portrayal of Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible, passed away, after suffering a heart attack. Today would have been his 84th birthday. I am a huge fan of Mission: […]