Date: January 5, 2006
Weather: -22°C and cloudy
Sunrise: Soon, boy, soon!!
Sunset: Not long after!

Work is progressing nicely on the furniture. Lorie has put in a long day today. The last of the furniture was delivered and the movers assembled those items we didn’t get to last night. There is still an awful lot of work left! Any volunteers?

The appliances were delivered to the storage location…a friend’s place. There was some minor damage to a number of pieces, but nothing major.

I suppose the main story of the day is sun-related. The sun is getting real close now. I could have sworn I saw it today, but I was cautioned to “wait until tomorrow”. The sun does rise ever so slightly tomorrow, but the official community celebration will happen on Saturday – which I suppose makes sense.

Although the sun might have remained below the horizon today it certainly had quite an effect on the sky. As the sun approached, it painted about half of the sky a grey-yellow colour. It was one of the oddest combinations of colour that I have seen - bright and dull, uplifting and depressing, life and death. But the real surprise was not in the near-sunrise, it was in the near-sunset. As the sun fell from its already-below-the-horizon position, it infused the sky with a vibrant mixture of sunburst oranges and fiery explosion reds. The colours danced and played on the clouds. The sky literally glowed with light cheated from the refraction of the hidden, teasing sun; a sun reluctant to cast its glow on a desperate land, a desperate people.

As spectacular as it was, the pseudo-sunrise of today will be eclipsed by the actual one tomorrow. All this happens about my lunch hour, so I will be watching.

That’s it for now.

Cheers!