Rose had been wanting to climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge ever since we
planned this trip. ("Price of Climb: $169. Big business.")
So she did so, waiting beforehand at 2:20 this Thursday. I prefer to keep
my feet on solid ground--unlike our Sydney cousin Adrienne (see
Adrienne's home page), who used to run up
the bridge illegally and for free with her college friends, without restraints,
before The Climb became a carefully overseen operation." (I enjoy
hiking the Grand Canyon and other places involving greater altitudes than the
Harbor Bridge, but I care less, let's say, for unobstructed high human girders.) After delivering
Rose to the Climb in time, I carried out my own plan: to get the hell out
of view of Rose and the Bridge as quickly as possible. (The only thing
worse than being nervous about the idea of high unobstructed girders is the idea
of watching one's own daughter scaling them.) "So I took a train
over to Central Station, walked around, and eventually came back to wait for
Rose in the Bridge Climb gift shop." I also presented a paper at the
International Association for the Study of Irish
Literatures (IASIL), which met at the University of New South Wales during
July 20-23.