The transition from Ridgehaven Circuit in Leanyer, to Giuseppe Court in Sunset Cove did not go as well as I had planned. There continued to be ongoing problems in relation to the charitable work that I was doing through my company. A box of candy canes that were part of the kid's Christmas hampers flew off the kitchen bench and smashed all over the floor. The bags for the hampers had still not arrived from Perth after several months of being delayed and we were days away from Christmas Eve.
The woman doing the ordering said that she could not understand what was going wrong, that the bags had been ordered four times and each time everything else had arrived on a pallet except for them. When the bags finally did arrive, I rushed into the store to pick them up. Then, just as I was about to enter the store, a security guard walked in front of me, taping it off from access. The roof had collapsed at the entrance, sealing the staff inside and me outside for several more hours.
The move away from the comfortable residence of Ridgehaven Circuit had also been emotionally difficult. The unit backed onto mangroves facing west to the sea. It had been built on a walkway used by the local indigenous people. As a result they now had no other alternative but to jump the back fence. No one had bothered to build them a gate or leave a space for them to get through. The owner was now refusing to have blinds installed, so everyone who used the walkway could see straight into the main living area of the unit. This meant that if I desired privacy at night, the interior lights could not be used.
Living with CFIDS meant that I relied on a 'temperature controlled environment' since, for me, even a small change in the temperature could result in a relapse. The Darwin wet season sunsets were glaring through the unit and the owner was now delaying having an aircon installed in the main living area. When he finally did give the approval, the aircon people installed it in the wrong wall. There were also problems with the plumbing. The water was full of white flakes with the kitchen tap water a cloudy grey-white. The water was not drinkable which meant purchasing bottled water. While all this was going on, over a dozen different people had come in and out of the unit, in an attempt to complete unfinished work, or to rectify previous damage done to the property by the local builders. As an escape from this chaos, I took the dogs on little walks while I waited to get my laptop back. It had been lost in the post, only later to turn up at Adelaide airport on its way back from Sydney, which delayed its return by sixteen days.
Once I got the laptop back seven programs shut themselves down one after the other in front of me, without me touching anything. After talking to my mother on the phone I found out that my younger brother and his partner were sleeping in my old room in the granny flat, where the tenant had suicided in the built-in wardrobe. Within the first five days of them being there, the hot water service, also inside the wardrobe, broke and leaked all over hundreds of dollars worth of clothes, ruining them. The water heater was replaced on 31st January in 2005.
In early February the dogs had to be taken to the vet again, since Binda had started coughing. As it turned out, he had a small infection in his lungs. That afternoon I struggled with thoughts about the dogs dying. I was awfully worried about Binda's cough. I took them both back to the Parap Veterinary Hospital, arriving there in tears. Then, while I was sitting in the waiting room, an 'angelic consciousness' came down into the psyche to offer comfort. The fluorescent light in the waiting area flickered overhead. It did it a second time and then a third. Then three lights started flickering. I asked the girl at reception, "Does this happen all the time?" She said, "There must be storm on the way." Meanwhile the sky outside was clear and blue.
A vet came out and I followed her into a consulting room with the dogs. As I went to sit down the fluorescent light flickered overhead. I asked her, "Do the ceiling lights flicker here at all?" She said that while she hadn't been in that room all day, they had generally not flickered while she was in there. But she said that they did have black outs when the wet season storms arrived. A few minutes later the light overhead flickered again and then there was a blinding flash of white and golden light throughout the room. I turned to the vet, "Did you see that?" "Yes," she said. She thought that the flash had come out of the refrigerator behind her. The conversation ended there. It was not the refrigerator. The door to the refrigerator was closed.
