Amy decided she wanted pink hair- so now she had pink hair! What can I say.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Amy's Cake Making
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Work Coast Retreat at Durras Beach
Friday afternoon we headed down to Durras South for a weekend retreat with my work Southside Physiotherapy. It was a lovely weekend and the weather was just wonderful. We had a walk to the beach Friday afternoon and some team photos, then a wonderful dinner with plenty of food- way too much to eat, followed by some dancing - Chicken Dance, Nutbush and Macarina to name a few, then some sing star which did not seem to appreciate my singing- I barely scored any points and got awful and bad as some of my comments from the machine!
Saturday morning was yoga on the beach to start the morning and then breakfast and then a 3 hour team meeting. After lunch we were finished with the work stuff and partners and families were able to join us. Bill came down so we had a very relaxing afternoon and evening, more food, time on the beach and then some card playing to end the night. I had two late nights in a row- around midnight- I am rather tired but it was nice just to sit around and relax and spend time doing nothing!
Monday, March 10, 2014
Family Gathering in Adelaide for Jim's Funeral
Amy and Lachlan holding Jim's ashes in front of his favorite tree which he planted.
Amy and Lachlan
Amy, Bill and Lachlan
Sue, Bill, Amy and Lachlan Frost
Bill with his Dad's ashes
The memorial service was held in Adelaide on Saturday 8th March 2014. All Jim's children, partners and grandchildren where there to celebrate the wonderful life he had lead. I said to the kids as we traveled home that it was one of the happiest funerals I have been to. There were moments of sadness but it really was about celebrating his life and that is what we did. It was fairly informal, in a funeral home and we just gathered around together, some standing, some sitting. Bill was the MC, there were several pieces of live music performed by Mary and Hilary ( his daughters) and Josephine and Tom- his grandchildren. Marian, Bill and Thela spoke briefly, someone from the Richard Wagner Society, Geological Society and his work spoke, all briefly, it was lovely. There was a lovely afternoon tea and we had a nice time sharing some wonderful memories. Amy and Lachlan were lucky to have had childhood, teenage and young adult memories of their grandfather. Afterwards we went back to the family home and sat around and reminisced and told various stories about Jim and other members of the family.
Sunday morning we all gathered again for a lovely breakfast, some family photos and more story telling before everyone had to depart in various directions.
James Murray Rennell Frost
Jim
Jim and his big sister Thela
Jim, Amy, Lachlan and Bill a couple of years back at our house with a piece of the Red Baron's plane
Bill's dad passed away on Thursday 27th February 2014 aged 90. We were so lucky that Bill had been over in Adelaide barely three weeks before and had spent a lovely weekend with him, before he had a stroke and was then unconscious for 2 weeks before he finally passed away, and the kids had been over in late 2013 with Bill for his 90th birthday so we all have wonderful memories of Jim and he lead a very rich and fulfilling life.
The following is the obituary that Bill wrote about his father that shows what a wonderful man he was:
James Frost, a rocket scientist from the days of the major
launches at Woomera and frequent guest on Rocket Range documentaries, has died
aged 90 in Adelaide.
Jim Frost was born in 1923 at Swan Hill. As a boy he moved
frequently due to father's poor health (a WW1 veteran whose lungs were affected
by exposure to mustard gas and phosgene). Jim moved with the family to
Hamilton, Rochester, Dunedoo and finally Sydney where at 15, his father died
and his mother sold their furniture to make ends meet.
He was a good student at Sydney Boys High School and went on to
earn an Engineering Degree at Sydney University. Many times the curious
young student watched the man chalking the word 'Eternity' on the pavements of
Sydney. He heard the desperate fire of the guns as they tried to stop the
Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour and once watched the Army shell a
Japanese submarine, with one shell falling short into a unit in Bondi.
His occupation was classed as 'exempt from war service', so he designed landing
craft for the Americans. Explosives were in ready supply and an
occasional prank for the student engineers was to place a tiny quantity on the
tramline and lift the wheels 1 cm off the tracks, but he only ever would admit
that 'some of his friends' might have participated.
Post war he joined the Long Range Weapons Establishment at
Salisbury in South Australia where he was in the new and exciting field of
rocketry. In a war-ravaged economy, where regular overseas travel by air
was undreamed of, he set off on his first overseas work trip aged just 24, to
England on a flying boat. This took 9 days and each night involved
landing on a major river such as the Ganges, the Nile and finally the
Thames. A charming couple he met on the flying boat were 'Black Jack'
Galleghan and his wife. Galleghan had only been freed three years before
from the horrors of the responsibility of Allied Commandant of the infamous
Japanese prisoner of war camp in Changi, Singapore. In England, Jim
studied the lessons being learned from the German V2 program, specifically
techniques for tracking and controlling rockets in flight. When
Australia's first satellite was launched in 1967, it was powered by what was
essentially a modified V2 rocket.
Jim was literally a rocket scientist - there were 30,000 parts
on these rockets and his speciality was making sense of those parts used for
flight tracking. Highly skilled operators used a kinetheodolite, a
converted two-seater anti-aircraft platform now equipped with a theodolite and
camera to track the flight path. The role of the instrumentation team was
to ensure that the primitive computers of the day could interpret, plan and predict
rocket paths - reconciling the onboard instrumentation data with the observed
data in the new and exciting discipline of telemetry. These days, your
Android or Apple phone can do most of this, but in Jim's day it required an
engineering degree, slide rule, logarithmic tables and knowledge of spherical
trigonometry. Sophisticated timing was the key and Jim & a colleague
designed the Frost-Moran chronograph, still used 30 years later.
In 1953 he married his wife Marian, who he first met at the
Weapons Research Establishment, his companion for the rest of his life.
In 1957, when the Soviets literally shocked the world by
launching a satellite into orbit, Jim was the Adelaide team leader of the small
group of volunteers, part of a worldwide science program called
Moonwatch. Millions of people watched in awe as the rocket that carried
the satellite circled the earth, but only a tiny handful including Jim and his
group ever saw the tiny little satellite itself, not much larger than a
grapefruit. Australian Moonwatch groups were the first to see and report
Sputnik and Jim's group, perched on the roof of the Physics building at the
University of Adelaide, recorded their observations with a cine camera, a
Doppler graph and a line of small telescopes originally built for WW2 tanks.
It wasn't too long before the secretive desert town of Woomera
beckoned and Jim, Marian and two children moved to the distant desert town,
then at its peak in the halcyon days of a major expansion. Frequent
rocket firings, pilotless aircraft and numerous scientific and military tests
kept his interest high. Woomera was a very isolated town at the end of a
180 kilometre dirt road, where Commonwealth police permanently on duty stopped
anyone who was not on official business. Jim and Marian threw themselves
into the life of the town, with music, theatrical performances, desert
photography and natural history excursions. A third child was born and
some lifelong friends made. Trips to destinations such as Alice Springs could
be taken, travelling (with permission) straight up the centre of the rocket
range where few passenger cars ever ventured and a breakdown would lead to a
wait of several days for assistance.
After five years in Woomera, the family returned to Adelaide and
Jim and Marian bought their house in Toorak Gardens, now in debt to the bank
for several thousand pounds. This was to be his home for the rest of his
life and as the use of Woomera for rocket firing waned after 1970, Jim
continued to work for the Defence Research Centre Salisbury until his
retirement. His final role was to project manage and input a lifetime of
knowledge on behalf of the department into Dr. Peter Morton's wonderful book
'Fire Across the Desert', an official government publication launched in 1989.
On Jim's last day before his final admission to hospital, Jim's son showed him
some pages in the book where his photographs of Sturt Desert Peas and other
wild-flowers feature. "Yes, I took those on a Saturday
morning", was the instant response.
With retirement, his interest in music, growing Australian
native plants and geology flourished and right until the end, he was a frequent
concert-goer.
He is survived by his sister Thela, wife Marian, three adult
children and five grand children, who appreciated his insight, wide ranging
interests and the love he had for his extended family.
Jim Frost, Defence Scientist, 1923 - 2014.
Fancy Power Points For My Splashback
Having electrical apprentices in the house means they are up with all the latest trends. Lachlan and Amy knew about these coloured Clipsal Power Points, so we got some put in to contrast with the splashback and I must say I am very pleased with the outcome- better than the plain old white ones- we just will not tell Bill how much they cost!
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Fudge Making With the Missionaires
We had the missionaries over from church on Saturday night and got Elder Howse to make some more of his fudge. He was excited to try it out in my new kitchen. We made Rum and Craisins with pistachios and almonds and it was very yuumy! It was great fun, Elder Howse was not completely happy with the result, but we were- we told him he will just have to come back again to perfect his fudge making!
Kitchen Splash Back
Now just waiting for a bit of painting, the lights to go in and the dishwasher to be fixed. It is a great kitchen to work in and has been worth all the effort!
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