...the path of totality will travel across the northern parts of Australia tomorrow morning, but most of the rest of Australia will be able to see at least a partial eclipse. More info here....
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/05/08/3750833.htm
...here in the west it begins just before sunrise, and due to trees and hills being in the way I probably won't be able to see it. But it will probably be darker than usual tomorrow morning. I leave for work at just first light when the sun still below the horizon begins to light up the sky. It may not be so light tomorrow as I head off to work.
It has actually been raining on and off the past couple of days. Indeed very stormy at times, lightning and high winds. There has been power outages but fortunately my house seemed to have dodged that bullet!! Probably be a little more rain tonight but no more high winds. However the winter chill has not set in, it is still relatively mild, certainly not the cold of winter. It will be sunny again over the weekend.
With Mother's Day being on Sunday I am reminded once again of my mother not being here. No more going to the shops for mothers day gifts, no more trips to mother's house to celebrate the day with a barbecue that Sunday afternoon. The torment never really goes away, it just stay somewhat underneath for most of the time, but significant times such as Mothers Day serves to bring it to the surface. Indeed Sally's health has gone downhill since the year of mother's death, and this is what ultimately took Sally away from this planet. Sally lost her own mother to heart disease when Sally was just at the tender age of 13, so she basically adopted my mother as her 2nd mother, they got on well together, and Sally looked forward to our visits to mother probably more than I did. It really affected Sally when mother was diagnosed with the disease, and things just went downhill for her after mother finally passed away. Sally's downhill run manifested as a sudden turn for the worse in her health during the Tisha B'Av period of 2011 just a few months after mother's death. Sally first noticed a leaking sore on her leg on Tzom Tammuz the first day of "the three weeks" in July, and as it happened as per "chance" her doctor's appt was on Tisha B'Av, the anniversary of the Temples' destruction, and that was when she was diagnosed with lymphodema. The resultant hospital admission a couple of weeks later led to the staph infections, she rapidly became housebound, and after the 18 months of hell, the combined conditions finally led to her passing away. Sally did find out that she was indeed part-Jewish, it was one of the last things she did just prior to her death. The calamities of "the three weeks" happens only to Jews or at least partly Jewish.
The words of Sally's friend Sylvia haunts me, when just a week prior to her death Sally told Sylvia to make sure I am looked after. Considering I normally don't have anything much to do with Sylvia, it was a highly unusual statement. The only time I ever had anything to do with Sylvia was when she had computer problems, Sally always had me to go fix her computer!! The more I think about it, the conclusion seems inescapable, Sally EXPECTED to die in the near future. She had been too weak to get up from her chair so I could not clean her properly, the pain from her sores so intense that she wouldn't let me touch some of them with the changing of the bandages, and yet the Silver Chains nurse stopped coming to visit simply cos Sally wouldn't get up from her chair, and the nurse wouldn't change bandages while Sally was seated cos it involved lifting her legs. I guess it all starting to make sense now, but it simply did not occur to me at the time!! Perhaps I should have known better. But I always thought Sally would make it through and recover from all this. But in hindsight I guess she had simply become too weak and too vulnerable to infections, that which ultimately killed her.
So here to another night alone......
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