Posts by Isabel Hitchings
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I've been swearing at the shaking ground.
Mr 8 spent a chunk of yesterday afternoon stamping round the garden yelling "bad earthquake" and giving Mother Nature a good telling-off.
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It's not as if people have been thrown to the wolves - they had the option of buying insurance and chose to take the risk not to do so.
In my experience, when things are tight (like during a recession maybe?) insurance is one of the household expenses that gets shunted right to the bottom of the priority pile because spending money on something that will probably never happen is far less pressing that eating and keeping warm.
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Re the damage - there's more than what most people would think. If a chimney or verandah falls off then that's easily noticeable. The main problem comes with the internal damage to structural walls, foundations. And of course, the pipes underground.
I think most Cantabrians are very well aware that until knowledgeable people have poked around our roofs, walls and piles we can only say our houses appear to be largely undamaged.
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On reflection I'm quite glad our chimneys sheared off at roof level. Many of our neighbours spent Saturday demolishing chimneys that had become unstable which looked like miserable job.
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I'd imagine that the CHCH Women's stats are largely due to women who would have birthed at Lincoln, Burwood or home going where there was water and power instead.
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Or, is there a cumulative desensitising effect?
I'm low enough on sleep and high enough on emotion that unless it's big enough to make the windows rattle I can't really tell if it's me or the world doing the shaking and even the bigger shocks have to be pretty big before I react with anything other than annoyance. It is tedious though.
We just wandered round the corner to our local cafe (http://www.ristretto.co.nz/cafe.html) to find it bustling and doing a roaring lunch trade. it was heartening to see so many people being cheerful and normal.
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Fire in the central city now... and no water.
Looks like it's the massage parlour two doors down from where we buy our Indian takeaways.
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Jolisa: There are a lot of logburners installed where the old open fire used to be with metal flues threaded through the brick chimney many of which (our included) are now gleaming nakedly. I'm not at all sure where the silt comes from except that it's mostly where there are also broken drains or mains.
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My five year old is in a cardboard box rolling around and yelling "earthquake, earthquake" cheerfully so I think he's not too traumatised. Both kids were absolute troopers last night.
We're all fine though even more of our possessions than usual are strewn across the floor and both our chimneys fell off (though thankfully not through the roof). The brandy bottle smashed but the gin and the whisky are OK (though somewhat covered in jam and lentils). Power came on about an hour ago so coffee is occurring. We had breakfast cocoa on the camping stove but had no pre-ground coffee.
A walk around the neighbourhood (St Albans around Westmister and Barbadoes Sts) reveals very few chimneys still standing and a lot of silt and water on the ground. Quite a lot of shops on Barbadoes and Cranford streets are in states of collapse .
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Who saw tonight's episode of QI (Yes I know all the cool kids had if from friends in the UK years ago) where they mentioned John Lennon's disappearing ciggie on the cover of Abby Road? (also the image of David Tennant in red velvet is going to linger behind my eyelids for a while)
I see a world of difference between asking today's film makers to consider carefully how they depict smoking (probably a good thing) and revising images from a time when smoking was regarded rather differently. Doctoring either artworks or images of real people is just dishonest and really doesn't sit well with me.