Back To Promotion Again

After a worrying couple of weeks I’m home and able to get back to promotion again.  While it might take me a day or two to get my motivation and writing ethics back, I need to get busy sharing the upcoming release of “Worlds Collide” with my readers.

My mother’s health has gone from needing urgent hospitalisation gradually back to normal, thank God. We discovered she had developed hypothermia and dehydration after a bout of gastric flu and this had affected her badly. But with the wonderful care she received from the staff at Southland’s Kew Hospital and a couple of weeks with me pampering her like she deserved, she’s now feeling more resilient.

Why do things happen when they do? Mum’s illness occurred during a public outcry about government housing conditions in some areas of New Zealand. The day after she was released from hospital the local newspaper ran an article which I had great delight in reading portions to her – she was blaming herself for being “so silly”. The article suggested getting hypothermia in one’s home is very possible during cold winters and that the illness often ‘sneaked up’ on a person without their awareness. I used another quote from the article to reinforce my argument that she needed a stead source of heat in her home, rather than electric heaters which she set very low and turned off at night.

I’ve decided it was a good thing Mum was taken ill. Sometimes good comes from bad or upsetting happenings and this is one such case. I’ve been able to return to Auckland knowing Mum will not be cold again (we had a heat pump installed) and knowing she is getting some home help which she has previously refused. She is laughing about how stubbornly she had refused help over the last decade or so and I think she is actually enjoying the extra social contact she now has. She’s still refusing to have anyone help do her housework though.

For me, once I saw the gradual improvement in her health, I’ve had another great holiday in Southland. The weather might not have been so great, but it was a lot better than many centres further north. The assumption that Southland has terrible weather is such a fallacy. Most of the province is tucked into an area where bad weather appears to float over it. While we were ‘suffering’ from 0 degree nighttime temperatures, Dunedin, Christchurch, even Hamilton were well into the minuses. One day Invercargill was even warmer than Napier. There’s nothing wrong with Southland weather…there speaks an honest Southlander…

While I never managed to catch some of the true magnificence of the Southern Lights captured by media during my stay, I did manage to see some mind blowing night skies. I don’t remember ever seeing the sky look like this while I was growing up. I’m not sure if I may have taken such beauty for granted, or could these sights be enhanced with the changing climate? Flying out of Queenstown late on Friday afternoon, the sky remained this bright shade of pink for some time before darkness took over.

Its a bit of a let down to come home. Gone are the days of doing very little but hanging out with my mum, enjoying the laziness and forgetting all the work piling up on me at home. Getting back into the groove and actually producing something readable will take a day or two I reckon. But at least I’ve made a start. I’ve updated my blog!