Seasonal Affective Disorder, Goodbye!

For years I suffered from depression but didn't realize it. My body always seemed to believe that when it was light it's time to get up and when it's dark it's time to go to sleep. Now sometimes this could be a problem when I lived in the Arctic, especially in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. In the winter there, in the dead of winter, it was dusky around noon and that was as light as it got.

When I can kidd that issue goodbye! Binh Du'o'ng is about 11 degrees north of the equator, so our days and nights are of almost equal lenght most of the time. It's light from about 6 to 6, winter and summer. In the "winter " the days get a bit shorter for a while, but not much.

Ha ha did I say winter? The mean temperature is 27 degrees Celsius. THERE IS NO WINTER!!!! We have two seasons, wet and dry. The wet season is wrapping up. It runs from about december to may, and the rest of the year is wet. During wet season it rains for a time almost every afternoon and evening. the rains are usually very hard and can last from an hour or so to all night. The rest of the year we do get rain now and then, but nothing like in wet season. Because the land here is flat and everything is at sealevel, floods are common. Add to that poor infrastructure, and many more vehicles on the roads than they were ever designed for, and things can get pretty hairy for someone on a motorbike in a rainstorm. Makes the rush hour traffic on the Deerfoot Trail in calgary almost fun!

However, the thing I miss most about the change of seasons is how I use them to mark time without even ralizing it. As I'm writing this I'm thinking that fall has come to CAnada with the colourful leaves, frost in the mornings, that bite in the air. Here either it's raining or it isn't. Because There is no marked change in the seasons, time slipd by without me realizing it and all of a suddem, boom! Six months have passed.

Things grow all year round. When I look out my patio door just now, there is a lushness to the greenery that I wouldn't have anywhere in Canada at this time of year. The lawn is green, the trees and shrubs are green, and there are banks lof some kind of lilies everywhere. The flowering is pretty much done for now, but they are green.

I am in the process of starting a little garden in my little yard. I have already started som herbs from seed, and they are in pots outdoors. Next I need to clean up a spot in back and plant some veggies there. I haven't seen any seeds for sale, so off I go now to the kitchen to eat some melon so I can plant the seeds.