Happy New Year!

 Our calendars have all come to an end and have been chucked out, replaced with bright, new, unsullied calendars for the next cycle of days. All over the world, obsolete Gregorian calendars (the common calendar in use today) lay discarded and largely forgotten, new ones having taken their place on desks and walls everywhere. A year from now they, too, will be nothing but relics, a chart of time gone by, never to be revisited.

But because the calculators and issuers of Gregorian calendars continue to practice their trade, we have new calendars for the next year. Some include phases of the moon and the ebb and flood of the tides, even holidays important to the location of issuance…but they all have two things in common: they are a chart of days for the next 365 days, and on that 365th day they come to an end.

This has been going on for centuries—in fact, depending on where you live in the world, the Gregorian calendar has been the official time-keeping chart for anywhere from the 14th century to the 20th (Britain and her colonies adopted the calendar in the mid eighteenth century, changing from the astronomically inaccurate Julian calendar and shaving about 11 days off the calendar—the dates between 2 and 14 September, 1752, did not exist!)1

Calendars, then, are the inventions of men, a means of keeping track of the flow of day, both before and after the day we presently inhabit. They are based on time as measured by our planet’s rotations around the sun (years) and divided into relatively equal portions based on our planet’s axial rotations (days). Depending on how sophisticated our ability to read the heavens and calculate our solar and planetary revolutions, our calendars can be both crude and sophisticated, but all contain varying degrees of inaccuracy. Our own Gregorian calendar is inaccurate to the approximate tune of 6 hours per year or 24 hours in a four-year period. It is corrected by the simple expedient of adding a day (29 February) every four years.

Through the use of calendars man can appear to manipulate time by adding days (like Leap Year) or deleting days (like the Julian to Gregorian shift). You don’t really think an “extra” day comes into existence every four years do you? Or that those days in September 1752 actually disappeared? Well, they didn’t—we simply adjusted the way we are keeping track of time by adding or deleting days from our calendars in order for our calendars to stay relatively astronomically accurate. The cosmos keeps on functioning as it always has, regardless of how we choose to keep a record of it.

So, calendars are man-made and adjustable in order to keep them relatively accurate with respect to our annual circuits around the sun (each of which takes about 365.25 days according to the way we measure days). They also give us information about events that take place at given times, but these events are often dependent on location. Holidays, for example, are not universal: Thanksgiving in the US and Canada fall on different dates—even different months—and in the UK and Europe (and most of the rest of the world), Thanksgiving is not celebrated at all. The moon creates the tides and with knowledge of the moon’s phases and its rotations and around the earth, the rise and fall of the tides can be predicted.

We choose to measure time in the form years, broken down one year at a time into days and those subparts of days, hours, minutes, and seconds. We choose to number our years beginning at the time of the birth of a Middle Eastern teacher (something implemented by the Catholic Church centuries ago). And while there are other calendars that predate the Gregorian by millennia (Jewish, Chinese, Hindu, etc), they each end after a period of days and months, only to begin again with a new year, a new calendar, calculated and created by people who know how their calendar is formulated and distributed to those who follow it.

The end of one of these calendars is not perceived as cause for alarm. Nobody thinks that December 31 is the harbinger of doom because everybody knows that when December 31 comes to a close and the clock clicks over to 12:01 am, the world will not end, it will just become a new day—the first in the next new year. Why, then, do so many people take the end of the Mayan calendar later this year as the date which we will all cease to exist and the planet will disintegrate from beneath our feet?

The Mayan calendar, instead of covering a one year period of time, encompasses a 5000 year period And, between the passage of time and the virtual obliteration of the Mayan priesthood by the Conquistadors, it’s pretty safe to say that the guys who created the Mayan calendar are long dead and didn’t have much of a chance to train up some apprentices to take over the job. Would we be so convinced that the world was about to end if it was the Gregorian calendar came up to its last day and nobody around knew how to create a new one? Do we think that time has stopped when our watches stop functioning? My computer’s clock suddenly went crazy a few weeks ago when we had a lightning strike in the back yard—it kept counting the same couple of hours over and over again, never changing the date, never going later than 7 pm or earlier than 5: should I have taken this as a sign that we were repeating the same two hours of the same day ad infinitum, a la Groundhog Day?

Perhaps those who have convinced themselves that December 21, 2012 is the end of the world rather than just the end of a calendar that, sadly, cannot have a sequel as the technology for creating the next 5000 year instalment has been lost in the mists of time, could apply a little critical thinking as noted in the paragraph above. The calendar, after all, is merely a tool created by man, a tool infinitely adjustable, endlessly renewable, which ends at the time its cycle comes to an end. It is the calendar that is ending, not the cosmos or the world.


1 http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/cal_art.html

Dare I hope...

...it is over??

For the last nine months my life has been hell. I have careened from one disaster, heartbreak, disappointment and misfortune to another, all without a break in sight. But all of a sudden, in the last seven days, things seem to be turning around.

My beautiful house in Cape Town has been empty for six months. We have lowered the price and turned down two absolutely insulting offers and have started to consider renting it (at a loss) just to have some income from it. We refuse to sell it at a giveaway price, but we can’t afford for it to sit there, empty, sucking money in the form of mortgage payments and garden upkeep.

Our rental house is a disaster in itself. Not only is it substantially smaller than our house in Cape Town (despite being advertised as bigger) we have battled hordes of mosquitoes, stinging wasps, arrogant cock roaches, swarms of flies, horrid rats, and the house being overrun by biting spiders…plus 8 water cut offs, countless power failures, a hot water heater periodically overflowing and sending water cascading down the chandelier in the stairwell and making a cataract of the stairs (not to mention pouring out the eaves and cooking the plants in the flower bed below), repeated failures of the driveway security gate, a brush fire right behind the house, two garbage strikes and a landlord who doesn’t give a sh!t as long as his rent is paid. We want out of this house so bad be can taste it, and the keys to the house we have purchased should be in our hands no later than 1 September. But, true to his self-serving nature, our landlord has little interest in allowing us to terminate our lease early…have you ever wondered about people who are willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces??

This guy…I’ll call him Dave…did not call out exterminators for 3 months, despite my being eaten alive by the bugs. When we found a rat, however, that was the final straw. We sent him a letter threatening to break our lease if he didn’t get someone out to control the vermin and that seemed to motivate him. When the thermostat on the hot water heater went bad and overflowed water half a dozen or so times in the matter of a few days, he refused to return our calls after his father came out and looked at it (while the tank was not actively overflowing) and said it was ok. Um…we pay the water bill here, and for the electricity to heat that 200 litres of scalding water that is making steamed hydrangeas in the front yard…but, Mr. Penny-wise and Pound-foolish Dave couldn’t seem to see that although it was our money pouring out the eaves, it was his ceiling and rafters that were getting soaked and risking dry rot.

So finally, we find a house and get our move-in date. We tell Dave we will find him a replacement tenant to take over the house when we move out. Mr. Dave, without a second’s though, knee-jerks to “Your lease is until the end of December.”

We are experienced landlords…we’ve had rental property for five years…Dave is not. What part of “replacement tenants” does he not understand? What part of “nobody house hunts over Christmas, Dave…if we don’t start looking for a tenant now, you’re gonna have an empty house and no rental income starting 1 January” has not registered in his brain?”

The man does not do subtle. I finally had to write him a letter, carefully couched in terms a 10 year old could understand, explaining why it would be to his advantage to 1) allow us to move out in September, 2) advertise and show the house for him (he lives 1000 miles away) and 3) screen the prospective tenants and send him the details on the good ones so he can check their credit and references and interview them by phone. I cannot believe someone had to explain to him that it is easier for him for us to show the house since we are actually living in it (and we have lots of experience with this). I cannot believe he had to be told that a 12 month lease with new tenants (at a higher rent!), beginning 1 September is better than making us stay on for four months and leave him with an empty house in the middle of the holiday season.

Well, it worked. He reluctantly agreed for us to advertise and show the house and refer tenants to him, and so last Friday I put two ads up on the internet. Within a hour I had a hit and the couple turned out to be perfect! Talk about luck! They are even willing to pay a higher rent than we are currently paying, they love the house, and eagerly sent in their documentation for credit and reference checks. It’s been a week. The landlord’s wife “forgot” to set up the interview between the tenant and her father-in-law who lives in town here. They have told me the prospective tenants are acceptable “in principle” but I have to wonder just what they want…they’ll pay more rent, they have excellent credit, she liked them on the phone interview…why do they seem to want to hold us to a lease that now disadvantages us both?

But, the good news is, there are more people eager to see this house and we got ideal tenants instantly, instead the extended periods of malaise we have experienced in the property markets recently.

So, next, one of our tenants calls from Cape Town and wants to break her lease. Hubby tells her “No. You must pay until the end of your lease or find us an acceptable tenant as a replacement.” The very next day I get an email from a woman wanting to rent the cottage, responding to an old, old ad she found on the internet!

My poor, beautiful house in Cape Town languishes. We have had half a dozen agents showing it. Finally we cancelled them all and went with a guy who is the 7th highest booking salesman in his international real estate firm…and he’s having no luck. Everybody says it needs maintenance (it doesn’t) or the garden is too big (so why are they viewing a place advertised with a 1400sq m garden?) or it is too expensive (it is worth R2.1M and we are listing at under R1.8…there’s R100K worth of imported French oak floors!!)

So, today my friend Sally’s newsletter goes out…we have put an ad in her newsletter. In the course of three hours we get an email from the agent saying he has shown the house to a couple who love it, and I get two calls from people who saw the ad in the newspaper and are eager to see the house! So from six months of disinterest to three interested parties in a single day!

My foot isn’t fully healed, but I am able to cook now (it was agony to stand in one place, like you have to do to chop veggies and work at the stove…I just couldn’t do it without making my foot worse), and even get around without my cane, unless we are going to walk a lot. I am still wearing the hideous arch-support Nikes (why can’t they make sleek, elegant, feminine athletic shoes? Why do they have to look like something one of the Transformers might wear??) but the last two nights I got a decent night’s sleep without taking pain meds at bedtime. It is still swollen and tender, but obviously on the mend.

So, with all these positive events coming together in a mere seven day period, dare I hope my curse has been broken and my life will resume its relatively quiet, sedate, satisfying pace?

Or is this just the lull before the storm?