Posts by Isabel Hitchings
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Up Front: Life on Mars, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I tell those guys to come here, because I don’t trust myself around Christchurch anymore.
I’m going to have to manufacture an excuse to come up to Wellington and be drunk and disreputable again sometime soon, aren’t I? I do find the getting away thing double edged though – it’s a chance to heal and it does give me more strength to keep on here but that first day back before the coping slides back into place is so raw and brutal.
My parents were down from Nelson this weekend for my son’s birthday. This was the first time they’d visited since the February quake so we took them on a tour around the cordon and out to Sumner past Redcliffs and Shag Rock. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them so subdued – I very, nearly felt guilty for subjecting them to all of that.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Hebe,
EQR make-safe really did do the bizzo for us: heat, hot water running, safe electrics and a dangerous and difficult chimney down.
Yay! I'm so glad you're a bit more comfortable. We had Fletchers in last week taking our chimneys down. We had five blokes here for the best part of two days and they didn't seem to stop to draw breath. That was just a tiny fraction of what our (moderately damaged but basically ok) house will need to have done. Multiply that across the city and I have a new appreciation of the size of the job we have in front of us.
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Fucking fuck - I'm so sorry guys. I hope you manage to make a good sized stink and get fair treatment quickly.
And if this shit is happening to you guys then it'll happening to plenty of others who may not be as informed, articulate or connected as you are :-(
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Are there schools currently located in the red zone? If so what will happen to their pupils? Will school zones etc need to be redrawn?
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Susan Snowdon,
I thought that the interviewees pointed out simply that a lot of sexual abuse was associated with excessive alcohol consumption
Did they mainly focus on alcohol abuse by the abuser or by their victim?
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Emma Hart,
"If the bastards won't hand me a soundbite on a plate I'm gonna make some up some really juicy shit so I sound like a big man who is in the know"?
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Hard News: Christchurch: Square Two, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Oh and while there isn’t much else I can do at the moment here’s something that made me smile and also ask why?
That was awesome! Although my kids thought it was made of sausages.
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On the other thread we were making analogies about the state of our city. I'm seeing it as a beloved child with a severe behaviour disorder. It's hard to live with right now but with time and therapy the outcome is likely to be good and abandoning it would make everything worse.
One thing I keep reminding myself is that New Zealand got its cool landscape by being seismically and and volcanically active so if I'm a fan of the Southern Alps, or Banks Penninsula then I have to live with the chance of wobbles
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Yup, as others have said the good wishes do make a difference. "I'm thinking of you" and "how are you doing?" are fairly universally apprropriate things to say.
I was with my kids at their new school in Halswell for both aftershocks. The prefabs have all been placed on some kind of rolling foundations which meant that the quakes felt really, really different and the building kept moving for ages but not a single thing fell down. Not a pencil or a computer monitor or (thank all that's holy) the electric frypan that Ferdi's class were cooking noodles in.
We took my friend's kid back to where she's staying on River Road. The street was in bad condition already but is now close to unpassable and the undercarriage of the car scraped alarmingly on a few bumps.
Our place is fine apart from a bit of liquifaction on the driveway and some plaster chunks having fallen out of the larger cracks. A couple of dinner plates broke but the wine glasses are fine and the stereo survived a third fall (cheapie Philips micro-system bought as a stop gap but proving its worth). Power was off for all of 10 mins and we have phone, internet and running water though we're boiling the water and using the chemical loo in a precautionary fashion. Which is a long way of saying that we are disrupted and dispirited but basically fine.
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Nasty tummy-bug, sometime in the mid-nineties, living with a stoner flatmate who wouldn't have noticed if I died - I spent a feverish night convinced that all the separate bits of my body were sick women and I had to run around a battlefield tending to them all.