The dreaded "three weeks of horror" begins sunset tonight (Friday night) though this is by no means a "magical boundary" by which bad things suddenly start happening. In reality the curses and chaotic energy start to build up through the month of Tammuz (from the June New Moon) reaching a climax in the first few days of the month of Av to the anniversary of the Temples' destruction on the 9th day of Av known as Tisha B'Av. The curses subsides through the remainder of Av to the August New Moon. Indeed in this past week I had been having problems with my computer and the internet that I don't normally have.

Nevertheless the worst of the times is the 3-week period from just after the July Full Moon to before the August Full Moon. Full Moons falls on the 15th of the lunar months. Tzom Tammuz falls on the 17th of Tammuz as this Hebrew name of the day infers. This marks the start of the three weeks, it is given as the anniversary of the siege of Jerusalem and cessation of Temple rituals which ultimately led to the destruction of the Temple. This day in 2012 falls on this Saturday beginning sundown Friday (July 6). Jews traditionally fasts on Tzom Tammuz, but when it falls on the Jewish Sabbath as it does so this year, the fast is deferred to Sunday. Jews does not fast on the Sabbath except if Yom Kippur happens to fall on a Saturday as it did last year. I personally do not fast on Tzom Tammuz, I just mark the day in other ways!!

Anyway each year I keep records of things that happens during the three weeks, and this time I will use this blog for the records. It is these records that verifies the reality of this three weeks. Every year since I have been keeping records in 2003 there has always been some calamities happening during this time. In some instances it is possible to trace back to past records, such as my 1998 trip to America, and again verify the calamities that occurred during this three weeks period. Indeed it is these past events prior to 2003 that is most valuable as it disproves any theory that the calamities are "self fulfilled prophecies" or that we somehow "create" these calamities because we expect them - I have had no knowledge whatsoever of this three weeks period nor the date of the Temples' destruction prior to 2003. The 1998 event is most compelling. I have kept a daily dairy of my America trip, and so by looking back in the diary and correlating with the Hebrew lunar dates at the time, I can establish that the car rental fiasco which ultimately led to my bankruptcy ALMOST EXACTLY coincided with "the three weeks" of 1998, my car rental being from the day after Tzom Tammuz through to the day before Tisha B'Av - as I say there is no such creature as "coincidence"!!

I record events that doesn't normally happen at any other time of the year, such as, problems with my computer. I normally have no problems with my computer, so any serious problem that crops up during this three weeks can be attributed to such a curse. I learned from a young age that there are no such creature as "coincidence", such a creature does not exist.

Of course it is not every day that something happens during this period. There are often several days when nothing happens. Indeed last year during this three week period nothing much happened except the morning when Sally woke up to discover an oozing sore on her leg. That sore would mark the start of her health problems involving two hospital stays, and what we are still grappling with today almost a year later!! Indeed her sores seems to ebb and flow but at the moment it has been slowly spreading. Anyway depending on how things pans out this time around I may give updates each day, or every few days.

Interestingly the much dreaded "Friday the 13th" occurs during the three weeks, indeed next Friday. However I have no fear of Friday the 13th, I don't consider it as being particularly unlucky. This is referring to the Roman calendar so is not relevant to the Jewish lunar calendar. Friday the 13th being Christian-based superstitions, Friday being the day traditionally believed to be when Jesus died (though in reality according to the Hebrew calendar records it was actually a Wednesday), and the number 13 referring to the Knights Templar but also often attributed to the "Last Supper" with the 12 disciples + Jesus making up 13, Jesus being the 13th hence his death the next day. There are no such superstitions with Jews.

Now a different subject.... the football. This the time to submit my tips for this weekend's round, hopefully not affected by the curse of the three weeks!! I tip both the Magpies and Essendon for their respective wins. Although I usually do well in the tipping, the office competition this year is stiff. Last week I picked 8 winners, but four others in our office competition picked all 9. It looks like for the first time ever I will go through the competition without winning any prizes. Uh well such as life........

Last week I wrote about what appears to be the inevitable eviction from our rental house. I hope this is not a bad omen of things to come but this morning at work we learned that we have been given an eviction notice from our current premises!! We have until December to find a new warehouse and new offices!! It would seem that evictions are the topic of the month for this cursed month of July, or the cursed lunar month of Tammuz!!

However while there is a housing crisis, there is  not a warehouse/office crisis. In these hard economic times with businesses going out of business and others cutting back I would imagine warehouse owners would be falling over backwards to give us leases of their warehouses!! It is just a matter of finding a suitable warehouse for our needs in a reasonable location. And I don't have to deal with the stresses and logistics of finding a warehouse/office complex and arranging for moving the huge number of items that we have stored here! The headache is left to the management and they are paid to deal with such headaches!!!! Nevertheless my workload will have increased. I have already been handed the task of doing a stock take of the contents of our warehouse - at least the area of my responsibility - the Post Compulsory Schools section, that is, Years 11 & 12.

The reason behind our eviction notice. Departmental changes and shuffling!! We have been a part of the Department of Training and Workforce Development, and our warehouse is currently housed on the premises of this Department. However the govt in their wisdom or lack thereof decided to split the departments, and our area to be now under the Department of Education. So I have effectively been transferred to another department though my physical location remained the same as does my salary, position title, etc. The only changes up until now being my work email address and new work computer!! This happened a few months ago, and we were told initially that we would not be moving. But you know, never trust what the govt says!! We all knew instinctively that we would be moving to another premises, and our suspicions had been confirmed this very morning!!!! Ironically I am back to where I started - I first started my tenure as a govt employee at the Department of Education, this was close to 22 years ago now!!!

Football tipping, and this has  been a good weekend. Yet another win by the Magpies *yawn* hehe.... and I managed to pick 8 winners from 9. I think it was North Melbourne that threw the spanner into the works. Uh well, at least 8 is a good score!!

We have received some potentially shocking news though not totally unexpected. We have a 2-year lease on the rental which ends October this year and there has been some speculations of the intent of the owner to sell the house therefore we would be evicted. It seems our suspicions are confirmed. We often receive mail at the house addressed personally to the owner. Usually these are direct marketing mail from certain companies and are told to simply bin the letters. However a couple of days ago we received a letter from a REAL ESTATE COMPANY personally addressed to the owner. We bear in mind that we do not rent through a real estate company, this is a private rental, our rent is paid directly to the owner. So a letter from a real estate company arrives, and it seems the letter was expected, we were instructed to place the letter back in the box so it can be collected for the property owner.

This can mean only one thing - they are intending to sell the house. There is no other reason for any contacts with a real estate company. With the lease ending in just a few weeks, this seems more than coincidental.

Moving house would be traumatic enough given Sally's health condition, the fact she is housebound, and she cannot go out of the house.

However there are far more serious implications - the housing crisis in Perth. Rentals are extremely hard to find, there are always several applicants for each rental advertised, and it is often the case of the highest bidder wins as many offer to pay rents higher than advertised in an effort to secure a lease on the property. But with Sally's health conditions our means are limited. We seemed destined to be on the streets. For the first time in my life I would about to experience life living on the streets.

We often hear on the news of people with even good jobs, even whole families, living in cars on the streets cos there is simply nowhere to live. There are simply not enough dwellings to go around. Of course it is often the stories of those of young families with babies that makes it onto the media.

This is not the first time we had no house to live in. When we came back from America we had nowhere to live cos I had ended the lease on my apartment before i went to America. However we could always stay at mother's until we find a rental, and in those days there was no housing crisis, rentals were easy and relatively cheap to find. So we just stayed at mothers until we found a rental. This option is no longer available. Mother is gone. With no mother we are on own own.

And of course we have the dreaded "The Three Weeks" coming up starting July 7 this year. Being connected with the lunar anniversary of the destruction of the Jewish Temples, the Three Weeks is when disasters and calamities befalls the Jewish people. For some reason, as I shared in my stories and previous blogs, such disasters also happens to ME!!! Each year without fail, for as far back as I can remember, as far as I have records of it, disasters and calamities ALWAYS happens to me during The Three Weeks. Last year it was during The Three Weeks when Sally's current health problems first manifested - we are still dealing with those health problems nearly a year later with no end in sight.

Therefore I am predicting that our eviction notice would come during The Three Weeks. This will not be the first time this has happened. The last time we were evicted, back in 2003, was also during The Three Weeks, and was also because the owner wanted to sell the house. There was no housing crisis back then so we easily found another rental - across the road!! But other disasters happened that year. The head gasket of the car we had back then blew up costing $1500 to replace, this on top of moving expenses. And the landlord of the previous property would not return our bond cos she deemed the house to be "dirty" in spite of me spending all weekend cleaning it. This all occurred during The Three Weeks of 2003. It was only when we made it obvious we would take the landlord to court that she finally paid us back our bond.

That was 2003 when there was no housing crisis. Now 9 years later in 2012 a lot has changed. There is now a housing crisis, a serious shortage of rentals, and very high rents for properties that are available. Our rent is currently well below the market rates. That seems destined to change even if we do manage to find a rental. But most difficult is to find a rental at all.

And forget about public housing - there is a 2 - 3 year waiting list for even urgent cases!! It will still mean 2 - 3 years on the streets.

Football tipping..... I managed to pick 4 from 6 including my beloved Magpies who had a win over the Weevils - West Coast Eagles - and so now currently sitting where we belong, on top of the ladder !!!!

The football tipping last week I managed to pick every winner!!.... well there were only six games and most were pretty easy to pick even in spite of the fact that my beloved Magpies were not playing. This weekend will not be quite so simple although it will be another six-game round. The Maggies will play the Weevils - West Coast Eagles - and well they are doing ok for themselves, winning the same number of games and being on top of the ladder by virtue of percentage, so it will be hard to pick, but being at the MCG I would think indeed HOPE that home ground advantage would prevail. Then we have Essendon and Freo, Essendon won two more games than Freo but will have to make the long trek to the west coast to play Freo. Nevertheless Essendon SHOULD win, but whether they will or not is another matter..... hmmmmm......

This has been a wetter than normal June but we had a couple of fine days allowing me to do the lawns and other gardening last Sunday. Now the rains have returned. A wet June but not terribly cold indeed almost balmy......

This is about it on my mundane existence with no change to Sally's condition......

Storm update as promised..... we survived unscathed with no property damage and no power outages!! The neighbor's metal awnings just ended up in our back yard but fortunately our awnings and everything else on our house remained intact. So hopefully no more storms for a while!!

Storm update.... well the storm has already hit the south west as I write this. Only question is whether it will reach as far north as here in Perth. The forecast is that it will reach here later tonight, about 10pm, with winds up to 125 kmh which is basically category 2 hurricane force and perhaps even a tornado or two, well more like mini-tornados or cock-eye-bobs, not like the ones in America thanks goodness!! Just hoping we won't get any power outages here as there are still a lot of homes without power from the last storm on Sunday. So far we escaped unscathed...... I guess we shall see what happens tonight.... it is times like these when we realise we are truly at the mercy of these atmospheric phenomena and there is really nothing we can do about them..... just batten down and hope it won't be too much of an impact here!! Meanwhile keeping my eye on the radar, and just fixin to go change Sally's bandages while things are still relatively calm......

It was good to hear from Dad last night..... so i guess its about time i updated this blog. It has been a hell of a week last week, the added stresses of my job due to the govt's obsession of budgets and saving money in the middle of a mining boom!!!... this on top of the increasingly hopeless situation of Sally's health. She is off the antibiotics and her sores are getting worse, the antibiotics are no longer effective, at best they kept the sores at bay but there has been no more improvements even while she was on the antibiotics. So with the antibiotics option no longer viable one wonders what is left to do. I see no end to this ordeal. I am now needing to changing bandages twice per day rather than just once per day, that alone is proof positive that things are getting worse. It makes me wonder where this will all end.

This month marks a year since this ordeal started. Sally's health conditions first became evident in July last years, during the dreaded "The Three Weeks" - a period of time when bad things happens to Jews. This was when both the 1st and 2nd Temples were destroyed, both amazing on the same day on the lunar calendar. The Three Weeks represents events leading up to the destruction of the Temples. Calamities involving Jews through the ages including that of the Holocaust all started during The Three Weeks. And every year without fail something bad always happens to me during this The Three Weeks, and where I was able to keep records, events in the past many years before I have known of this phenomenon can be traced back to this period. A case in point, the car rental fiasco back in 1998 during my trip to America. At that time I have had no knowledge nor awareness whatsoever of this Three Weeks period nor the date of the Temples' destruction. However the car rental fiasco occurred almost exactly during this Three Weeks, the start of the rental being just a day after the start of The Three Weeks, and the car being finally dropped off at the depot just a day before the end of The Three Weeks. It was this fiasco that ultimately led to my bankruptcy, the consequences of I am still living with to this day. This is proof positive that The Three Weeks is not a matter of psychological suggestibility nor is it a case of "self fulfilling prophecy". I have learned from an early age that there is no such creature as "coincidence", there is always a reason behind things happening. This also means that if I am not physically Jewish, my soul must be Jewish - I have always been drawn to the Jews since an early age, always fascinated by them, indeed I have always loved them.

And so Sally's current health conditions began during The Three Weeks in July last year, and this ordeal have changed me forever, and not for the better. Even if things were to improve tomorrow, indeed if I was to be set free from this tomorrow, I will never be the same again. Suffering can either make or break a soul, it depends on how we are wired. Some have the ability to rise above such suffering and become better people, others have no ability to rise above this and so the soul is broken forever - more cynical, less trusting, perpetually depressed, suicidal, and with no hope of ever being happy again. I am of the latter. And I am utterly petrified of what The Three Weeks beginning July 7 this year will bring this time around, especially with no improvements in Sally's conditions, indeed worsening conditions.

Now on a slightly happier note.... the Magpies had another win and are on top of the ladder. I didn't think my Maggies would do as well this year, but it seems that they currently are doing so. My tipping doing ok, managed 4 points from 6 this time. According to the stats I have at least average to above average results in the tipping compared to the rest of the State - or whoever are on the newspaper's tipping comp.

The storms over the weekend were said to be the worst in ten years. There has been widespread power outages, with some expected to be without power for a week. This time we escaped unscathed, with no property damage and no power outages. However the forecast is for another storm of at least equal intensity to come in tonight, this will mean more damage and more power outages. It will remain to be seen whether we will escape this time around. This has been a very stormy start to the winter, and we usually don't get such severe weather here in Perth!!

Tomorrow I will try to remember to do a quick report on whether we survive the storms tonight or even whether the storms will come at all, as sometimes the storms does not come as forecast, sometimes it just fizzle out and all we get is a bit of rain. Let's hope this is so...........