Day 1 of the three weeks of horror. The waning July moon heralds a time of darkness and calamities, the 17th day of the lunar month Tammuz.

This has been a chaotic start. First the stuff-up with Silver Chains. What SHOULD happen is the home carer first comes, she gives Sally her wash, then the nurse comes and checks her sores and change the bandages. However on this occasion this did not happen. The home carer was late. This was not the first time the carer was late but she always manages to get there before the nurse and so Sally still gets her wash. But for the first time, this did not happen. The nurse arrived BEFORE the home carer, and she was already changing the bandages before the carer came. So Sally missed out on her wash for the first time. This marked a fine start to this three weeks period.

Then my football team! The Magpies!! Don't even talk about it! It's not that they lost that is the issue, afterall, our beloved teams do lose on occasion regardless of any 3-weeks curses. It is just the nature of sports. But it is HOW they lost and the CIRCUMSTANCES. The Magpies were EXPECTED to win, almost a universal opinion of our newspaper's tipsters, it would just be a matter of how much they would win by. They won 8 matches in a row and were looking good. Carlton were way down the ladder, barely top 8. And being a Friday night match it really messed up my tipping. It's the Friday night matches where we also predict the winning margins, and the difference between our prediction and the actual margin is added to our total for the season. So where there is two or more people in the tipping competition with equal scores, it is this total margin "variance" that decides the winner. It's very rare to jag the margin on any given week but as long as the team still wins the variance is not that large. But when the team loses, the variance goes through the roof - I need not explain any further!! So it looks like my tipping will be diabolical for this first week of the 3 weeks, and it will certainly cost me any chance of winning any prizes.