Equinox

 Yes, I'm writing this on the March Equinox, that magical day when everywhere day and night are supposedly each 12 hours in length. It's not really so, though, it turns out. Depending on where you are on the planet it can vary considerably. Here in Perth, Western Australia, daylight lasts 12 hours and 9 minutes while further south in Hobart in Tasmania, it ist 2 minutes longer. That wasn't a surprise but when I looked at the figures for McMurdo Base in Antarctica I was surprised to see that they have 12 hours 40 minutes of daylight. It's probably more accurate to say that day and night at the Equinox are in the vicinity of 12 hours all over the planet. Oh, and as well that day is only when the sun is above the horizon and doesn't include other periods when there's still some light such as twilight.  

This, of course, led me into wanting to find out more about twilight. If, like me, you thought twilight was just that period of the evening which we call dusk you may be surprised to learn there are several periods of twilight. There's what we call dusk and dawn for starters but there are also technical terms for different times during dusk and dawn. There's morning Civil Twilight which begins at the instant when the Sun's geometric centre is 6 degrees below the horizon and ends at sunrise while evening Civil Twilight begins at sunset and ceases when the Sun's geometric centre is 6° below the horizon. This is that time when the sun is just below the horizon and there's still enough light to be out and about to work or play. Civil Dusk and Civil Dawn it turns out aren't time spans at all but the specific moments when Civil Twilight ends and Civil Dawn begins. Then there's Nautical twilight which precedes Civil Dawn and follows Civil Dusk. It begins when the Sun's geometric centre is 12° below the horizon in the morning and ends when it reaches the 12° point in the evening. It gets its name because both the horizon and brightest stars are visible enough to allow navigation at sea. Phew!

If that's not enough there's also Astronomical Twilight which is when the geometrical centre of the Sun is 12-18 degrees below the horizon and is the earliest part of dawn and the latest period of dusk. For most of us living in cities with their light pollution there's little difference between Astronomical Twilight and night. The sky is dark and many stars are visible. Astronomical Dawn and Dusk are the moments when the sun reaches that 18° position. Astronomers can make out more stars in this period but to view fainter and more distant ones they have to wait for night.

I found this all fascinating as you can see and if you want to find out more about such things I found the Time and Date website very informative. It has lots of other interesting topics. The National Weather Service website was also helpful.

Birds Bathing

In my continuing attempt to avoid the mess the world's in - war, climate change, floods I could go on but I won't - I'm soothing my mind with birds.

 I'm lucky enough to live in a suburb of big blocks which is surrounded on three sides with ideal bird habitat. Closest to us is a golf course which was established as a country club back in the days when this whole area was bushland. The golf club has made a serious effort to keep wildlife friendly and the small lakes and bushland within its boundaries houses a resident mob of kangaroos. We don't often see a sign telling you to watch out for kangaroos in the middle of suburbia but there's one on the road behind where we live. Add to this the bushland of a large pubic recreation area, a bushland reserve and another golf course all only a short distance away as well as a park directly behind our block and we have a wealth of natural habitat.

This means wild life especially birds spills over onto the blocks in the surrounding streets. I found a Purple Swamphen grabbing a quick drink when I went out to change the sprinklers early one morning and we've had several ducks nest in and around our place. They were  probably Pacific Black ducks - though it's not easy to tell since they interbreed with other species - and they have a perilous trip to take their ducklings back to the safety of the golf course. As well in the late winter to early the shelducks arrive to graze on the new grass shoots.

To attract birds to our garden we have a birdbath much appreciated by the birds in the summer in particular. It's strategically placed so we can see it and while there are often visits over the day it's late afternoon when it really gets busy. I've been trying to identify all the visitors but that's proved impossible. I unfortunately don't have a great camera for capturing fast moving targets - and some of them are very fast - so many of the little brown birds will remain a mystery. Instead I'll give you a list of those I've managed to identify in the past few days.

The willy wagtail is around the garden most of the time. These are handsome little fantailed birds -  around 20 centimetres -with black backs and wings contrasted by their white chests. We have a nesting pair here and they are incredibly tame, to the point that we have to keep. a watchful eye when we're on the grass hanging out the washing so we don't tread on one. They aggressively claim the birdbath at times and djitty djitty furiously if any other bird however big has the temerity to want a drink or bath. They'll happily take on a raven which at around 50 centimetres is considerably bigger than the willy wagtail and more often than not the bigger bird leaves the defeated. When they bathe they really bathe and come out to sit on the side of the bath wet feathers fluffed out before they shake themselves and fly off.

Then there are the honeyeaters, the largest of which is a pair of red wattlebirds. These are some of the biggest visitors at around 33 centimetres and can feel entitled to have the bath to themselves as well while they have a thorough bath. The smaller honeyeaters usually wait until the wattlebirds are shaking themselves on the side of the bath before they begin to come in. They fly in and out so fast and often in small flocks making it very hard to recognise them. So far I've managed to identify these: New Holland honeyeaters - these are resident here and we often see them out in the garden. Then there are the singing honeyeaters - also common here and extremely fond of our grapes. We're being visited by brown honeyeaters, too, as well as occasional white cheeked honeyeaters. 

There are some other tiny birds which had been defeating all my efforts at getting a close look at them until yesterday. They come in a small flock, flying in at great speed to flit around in the water then leave just as fast which means getting a good look is all but impossible. They remind me of a flurry of little brown leaves caught up by the wind. Yesterday, though, one of them stopped for more than a second and I think I can confidently say they are weebills. This is the smallest of the Australian birds and I'm pretty chuffed at having finally being able to identify them. We've also just had another unusual visitor, a striated pardalote. I knew these were occasional visitors to the country club golf course but I have never seen one here before.

Along with these we get Australian magpies and magpie larks from time to time as well as the odd pink and grey galahs - these all live in the park we back onto - and, of course, the ubiquitous (and feral) laughing doves and spotted doves. These last two were released over a hundred years ago around the then newly established zoo and have since spread all over Perth to the point that many folk think they are natives.

Well, It's Been Interesting

That's me trying to be positive which is not easy when there's all out war between Russia and the Ukraine, we've just sweltered through the hottest summer on record and there is the worst flooding in recorded history in Queensland and northern New South Wales. All these are things I can do nothing about unfortunately any more than I can about the rapidly rising numbers of Omicron which have hit the state. We've been largely protected from COVID until now by our hard border policy but this variant is so virulent that once someone brought it in  - who knows how - it's spread like wildfire. The border restrictions are soon to go there being no point in the community being isolated when the virus is already here. It's expected to peak at the end of this month and as our vaccination rates are very high  - the majority of people like Pisces and me are triple vaccinated although there are still some holdouts - this should mean most who get it will get it mildly. Let's hope this and the mask and social media distancing mandating will work.

To add to our woes the federal government is in election mode - even though the date for the election hasn't been announced. It will have to be done soon because the election needs to be held no later than 21 May which doesn't give much time for actual electioneering. We can be sure that it's coming sooner rather than later because with the government having had a less than successful time in the final sitting week of Parliament distraction is at work. We were treated to the PM at home with his family recently during which he strummed a ukulele apparently unaware of how that reminded many of us about how he holidayed in Hawaii while Australia burned under wildfires in the 2019-2020 summer. He's not the only one giving us a glimpse into his family life with the leader of the opposition party doing a photo shoot for a popular women's magazine and there will no doubt be more of the same right up until election day.

In something even less entertaining I have spent some time looking at my poor garden. Although Pisces has tried he's not a gardener and that combined by wave after wave of temperatures in the high thirties and low forties Celsius, almost continually since the week before Christmas until now, means the garden is a disaster area. Before everything went pear shaped the garden was looking the best it had in years. I'd got a number of different heritage vegetable seeds and they were already planted out and starting to produce, various cuttings I'd nurtured had also been planted out and everything looked green and lush. Now it looks like someone took to it with a blow torch. My brother had warned me that it would be bad - burned to a crisp was how he described his garden and he and his wife had been nurturing theirs, but mine is even worse. I hardly know where to start with it but, on the bright side, now my knee has stopped folding up on me and my back and leg pain have eased I can actually, albeit slowly, start doing something out there. I've brought plants back from the brink before. There's no reason why I can't do it again, is there.

In more positive personal news I've been writing every day and since Christmas I've added two more first draft stories to those I'm writing about the women of ancient Greek mythology. I started the first story back in about September and got three stories done to first draft before I got stuck on one story I really wanted to tell. I finally finished that a couple of weeks ago which freed me to move on to the new ones and I've now started a third. Where these stories will end up I have no idea but I'm having a ball writing them.

Further News?

 Well, not really. Post hospital I've been being a good girl and doing everything my doctors and physiotherapists require of me. So far so good but the point when all could fall apart is still about three to four weeks off. 

I've a few concerns. I still have numbness and altered sensation in my bad leg (it feels as if someone has applied an elastic bandage too tightly over a thick pad on the sole of my foot - I've actually woken up trying to take this non-existent bandage off a few times.) This, combined with my numb leg, makes walking somewhat difficult because I can't get any normal rhythm going. As well walking without the walker is also hard although I am persevering with hands free walking in safe places where I have easily accessible things I can grab if it all goes sideways. Sigh.

So life is not a bowl of cherries at the moment - but since it's cherry season in Tasmania there is actually a bowl of these delicious goodies in the fridge right now. I'm going to savour every bite of these luscious imports because in the wider world Western Australia is in the middle of shortages and consequent rationing of some food and grocery items. This is because we import many consumables from the eastern states by road and more importantly by rail and currently unprecedented rain has caused serious flooding and both road and rail links have been damaged. The road is now open but it will take some time before all the trucks backed up in South Australia will reach the Western Australian distribution centres. While this will help it's expected the rail line, which has been most badly damaged and brings the bulk of supplies, will be unusable for several weeks - and this means cherries are unlikely to be available since the local season has finished.

We're not going to starve, of course. We have local sources of fruit, vegetables and meat and there are still local suppliers of dairy products but to see how the shelves have been stripped in panic buying you'd think we'll never see food again. Of course we can't always get our favourite items but Pisces and I are largely enjoying the substitutes we're being sent - we mostly do our grocery shopping online and if they don't have what we want we get given something different. Apart from that some of the shortages have encouraged me to pull out my old yoghurt maker and start making my own again and when I can manage to stand long enough to knead some dough I just might make bread.

Catching Up

 I don't know if you've noticed but I've been away for a while. I have to say it hasn't been much fun. For a few months I'd been having increasingly severe levels of what I was told was sciatica due to a back injury I sustained many years ago and which has been an ongoing problem ever since. It flares up and after rest and/or an injection it subsides and I go back to normal. This time though it hadn't responded to a couple of injections and was getting steadily worse. While I waited for an MRI and my GP threw ever more painkillers at me I was getting more and more disabled. Walking was slow and painful and I was having to use a walking  stick all the time. Then I woke up on Saturday 9 December and couldn't even shuffle into my bathroom which is only a few steps away. I rang the bell - my husband and I have one each in case of emergencies and this was definitely one. Even before he arrived from his room - he snores like a train these days - I'd realised this warranted an ambulance ride to the Emergency Department. 

Ambulance services are somewhat stretched here at the moment and this was obviously not life threatening - excruciating maybe but even severe pain does not qualify - so it was close to two hours before it arrived. The paramedics - usually called ambos in Australia - were great. They quickly got me into a wheelchair and up our very steep driveway and onto a stretcher in the ambulance. It turns out that ambulance stretchers aren't all that comfortable for someone with severe back pain that all their strong painkillers weren't even touching. Sigh. 

All but one of the hospitals north of the Swan River (this pretty much cuts the city in half) had their EDs closed and ambulances ramped outside so I was taken to one some distance away in central Perth where I was triaged and taken in fairly quickly. The ambulance ramping problem has been on-going for some time and while you will get immediate treatment if it's life threatening you might otherwise have quite a wait in an ambulance so I was very grateful I got in so fast. 

A succession of doctors came to assess me over the next couple of hours and it was decided to admit me and book me in for the next available MRI which was on Monday. At last - I already had an appointment for one outside the hospital system but it was at the end of January so this was a great improvement. While I was in the ED I'd started to get numbness in my foot and by the time I got to the ward it had progressed up to my thigh. Along with all this my knee kept giving away whenever I put ant weight on it. As a result I spent the next ten days wheelchair bound  before advancing to the walking frame I'm still using. I do have exercises to do that I'm assured will eventually kick in - the time frame is ten to twelve weeks and I have to say they had better work. I have no desire to stay like this. 

I had my MRI on the Monday and it exposed several lower spine issues - one is the joint damaged so many years ago and as a result now seizing up in multiple ways, the other is a bulging disc in the next joint down. How I damaged this joint is a mystery - although I have a few suspicions. I'm a keen gardener and had dug over the veggie patch which might have had something to do with it. At this point I was transferred to a private hospital to be put under a physician who specialises in spinal injuries. She arranged for me to see a neurosurgeon who offered me the choice of a specialised injection or surgery. Unsurprisingly I chose the injection. For now it's wait and see - apparently it can take some weeks to work so wish me luck.

The Things You Learn

 I don't often talk about my health issues here but I'm making an exception today. I have macular degeneration which means I am slowly losing my vision. I'm lucky that in my case it has been very slow but over the past year I've been beginning to really notice deficiencies in what I can see. Macular degeneration is when the macula, which is the part of the retina that gives you clear vision through your line of sight, disintegrates meaning you lose the central part of your vision. In my case at the moment this means I have blurred bits in the middle of whatever I'm focussing on and other things are distorted. So far it's not too bad because my peripheral vision in my better eye is compensating to some degree but this isn't always the case so sometimes I can see with only slight blurring but on a bad day I might not be able see the face of someone who is only a a relatively short distance away from me. This can change quite fast so at one time I can see relatively well but within minutes it can change so much of the world is a blur. Because it's so erratic I've had to give up driving because I can't be certain that I'll be able to see consistently enough to drive safely. 

All this makes life more complicated and I'm having to find ways to live with this condition. These are things like making sure that everything is put away in the same place in the pantry for instance so that on a bad day I can still find it and insisting that nothing is left out where it can be tripped over. I'm not yet at the point where I need much assistance but things like reading can be problematic if the font is small for instance. My laptop and Kindle are a great help here because I can enlarge the font and I've put magnifying glasses strategically around the house, even carrying a small one in my handbag, to make this easier.

Largely I've been working out these things for myself but now I've had a visit from an occupational therapist who works with those who have mobility and vision problems and I can see  a whole new world opening up. One thing she suggested was to upgrade our lighting and she made her point by bringing in a lamp with a much stronger whiter light than we've generally got around here. I'm still in shock as to how much difference this made. I had thought the lighting around here was perfectly adequate but it seems I was wrong The reading sheet she had me do at the beginning of the session where I struggled to read the last lines became clear enough for me to read them, not perfectly clear but good enough. This was only part of what she suggested and we now have a list of changes to work through. Some are expensive but most are relatively cheap. Who'd have thought there was so much we could do to live with this condition.

The OT was also very helpful with regard to my back problems which have morphed over the last few months from somewhat painful which is inconvenient but manageable to very painful and debilitating. It turns out there are things out there which she thinks will help and I have to say I hope she's right. One of these is a new bed. Apparently mattresses only last seven years.  I've no intention of telling you how old mine is but let's say it's quite a lot older than that. There's also a stool that I could use in the kitchen for less standing and she says I need a new office chair (that last is not a surprise but I realise now I cannot put it off any longer). There was much other food for thought and I'm actually looking forward to my next appointment which is to be at a speciality shop aptly named The Back Shop.

Modern Warfare

Remembrance Day got me thinking. This day always seems especially poignant for me because it marks the end of the war where, apart from the tragic loss of life, everything related to warfare changed. For the first time war involved large scale mechanisation. There had been the beginnings of this back in the smaller wars of the later part of the nineteenth century but the Great War (as it was known at the time but which we now know as World War One) was when machine guns had been refined to be even greater mass killing weapons, tanks were first used, enormous ships brought soldiers in huge numbers in from all over the world to the battle fields of Europe and the Middle East, trains were used extensively for transport with temporary lines being laid and taken up and aerial warfare began. As well there was the first large scale chemical warfare with the use of gases such as chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas as weapons. It was a long way from poisoning water sources or tossing contaminated items at the enemy to infect them with disease. While it's now forbidden under the bizarrely named Rules of War quite recently the president of Syria used gas against his own people in the on-going civil war in that country and I'd be very surprised that this would be the last time.

This war was when modern warfare really changed. Although war had always been horrific in the numbers of dead and injured and disrupted lives caused by actual fighting as well as all the other problems which civilian populations endure - looting, destruction of crops and homes leading to mass starvation and murder and rape by rampaging troops full of blood lust to name only a few - the distancing that mechanisation provides makes it even easier to lose sight of the actual people involved. I'm not saying there aren't times when we have to fight to defend ourselves - obviously that can and does happen - but there's been a great change in the way we fight wars. It's no longer men armed with a spear or a sword face to face or even canon fire and arrows where there are limits to how far they can reach. Mechanisation has changed that and now we have drone strikes and autonomous weapons that put war at an even greater distance from those waging it. Even worse are the rockets which can travel half way around the globe carrying hugely destructive weapons that can wipe out entire cities. 

I grew up during the Cold War where even in as isolated part of the world as Western Australia we lived in fear of nuclear war. That these weapons and the technology to make them still exist is scary because while they do they may fall into the hands of despotic leaders or other extremists. When they're combined with weapons that are autonomous it's a frightening prospect for the future. Artificial intelligence is only as good as its programming and I for one am not convinced that we are as good at doing that as we like to think we are.