My first birthday present of the year. Awesome pink fluffy rubber gloves (complete with fabulously tacky ring) from Lorraine.
What on earth possessed me to wear these in the cafe where we went for lunch I have no idea. Probably the same thing that possessed me to put the bow from the present onto my head shortly after this photo was taken!
Five days after the earthquake and my life is a strange mix of normal and crazy.
My house is fine. Like I said on Sunday, we lost the top of our chimney and have a minor crack in one wall, but other than that, you can’t even tell anything out of the ordinary has happened.
We’re still having multiple significant aftershocks every few hours, and had a huge one yesterday morning that was really scary and made me worried that THIS was the Big One and Saturday’s was merely a precursor, but they’ve been noticeably less today and don’t really bother me anymore.
Some of my friends are still REALLY freaked out though. Because of where I live, at the top of a really big, old stone quarry, I think my house’s foundations (built into rock) are somewhat more stable than other parts of Christchurch, and this stops me feeling the aftershocks as strongly as I otherwise might. This is very strange, and I initially though it would be the other way around, and I would feel them MORE!
As for my school, it’s not in good shape at all. The Min. of Ed. closed ALL schools until Monday next week, and quite a few are relatively unaffected and are planning to reopen then, but I spoke to my AT on the phone before and she said that our school has been closed by OSH as opposed to just the Ministry, which means that the school buildings and grounds are a serious hazard, and nobody, not even staff members, are allowed to go there.
She said she thinks it’s unlikely it will be open for the children on Monday, even if it does pass inspection tomorrow, as we’re supposed to have two teacher-only-days to clean things up and make sure it’s in a fit state for the kids to come back to. So at the moment it looks like next Wednesday at the earliest. My placement, and the school term, finishes two weeks from tomorrow!
Obviously TColl is aware of the situation, and have emailed all students telling us not to worry about failing and to follow instructions given to us by our individual schools as to when we can go back.
Here are some more photos from around Christchurch, all from HERE…
I woke up to the loudest bang I have ever heard in my entire life. Then I heard the rumbling, and felt the room begin to move. Suddenly realising what was happening (“Oh! So this is what a really big earthquake is like! I’ve never been in an earthquake before! How interesting! Wait a minute, this is pretty long, and I can hear things falling over and breaking! I should probably move!“), I jumped out of bed, and tried to run out of the room, ignoring EVERYTHING I know about how to be safe in earthquakes! (Seriously. It’s all very well to think it’d be easy to remember what to do in an emergency, but when something like this actually happens to you…you just don’t do it!) Since it was dark, and stuff was everywhere, I ended up tripping over a pile of books on the way to the door, and then running straight into the shelf they had fallen off. Ow.
When I got upstairs, I could hear dad, who had also jumped out of bed, shouting out to me to see if I was ok. Once we established that we were, our next mission was to find Poppy, our cat. As soon as we opened the door to the laundry where she sleeps, she SHOT out and ran and hid under the bed in the spare room!
After we’d wandered around the house and checked that nothing was immediately dangerous (like fires, holes in the floor/walls or leaking water) Dad went back to bed (and to sleep!) until it got light, but I ended up staying up for the rest of the night, texting my friends to see if they were all right and trying to find out if any of them had internet/radio access, since we didn’t have either.
Brooke, who is in Franz Josef and wasn’t affected, replied and said that she’d read online that it was a 7.1 earthquake1 centered about 35km away from the center of Christchurch. It was then that I realised that this was a very big deal.
When it got light, dad and I walked around the house again, and discovered that although it looked like a bomb had gone off, we had been pretty lucky, as while we had an enormous mess, we had very little actual damage. When he went outside, he discovered that the top of our chimney had fallen off the roof, and landed on the ground right outside my bedroom window! I’m guessing that’s the bang I heard!
Amusingly, our kitchen appears to be invincible! NO cupboards were opened and no glasses or crockery was smashed! A few drawers flew open, but nothing fell out, and the drawer underneath the shelf which holds the microwave came in handy when the microwave fell down. The drawer very neatly caught it, so it only fell about 2 feet as opposed to all the way to the ground. It’s absolutely fine!
So yes. Our Saturday was a bit exciting! We didn’t get our power back on until about 11am today (Sunday) and as I’m sitting typing this we’re still waiting for our water to be reconnected, but hopefully that won’t be too far off!
As for the school I’m currently student teaching at, I’ve driven past it a couple of times and it looks fine. All Christchurch schools are closed until Wednesday though, to give staff a chance to pick up their classrooms and building inspectors the opportunity to make sure everything is safe.
Other than that, we’re fine. We were REALLY lucky. It could so easily have been SO much worse. Not an experience I want to ever have again though! Very scary and surreal.
And now. Photo time… since I know that’s why you’re really reading this! Apologies that they’re not very good, and are slightly shaky looking. We were still getting very strong aftershocks at 7am (when we took these) and I didn’t have the steadiest photo-taking hands in the whole world!
Oh! BTW! Thank you so much to everyone who emailed, FBed and Tweeted at me saying they’d seen Christchurch on the news and asking if I was ok. It made me smile logging back online to see all your messages!
Books everywhere.
This cup and saucer came off the shelf in the corner, flew right over the top of the TV and landed neatly on the floor, totally unharmed!
This bookshelf looks like it belongs in one of those crazy funhouses!
Our clothes horse, and yes, that is an (intact) Ostrich egg in the middle of the photo. That fell out of the china cabinet and rolled across the floor.
The giant pile of books I tripped over as I tried to get out of my room. I stood the bookshelf up again, obviously, so I could get past. The grey bag fell out of the cupboard under the house, which opened itself.
My desk. Only sightly messier than usual! Thank goodness my laptop is fine, one of my good friends wasn’t so lucky!
The top of our chimney lying on the ground outside. The sound of it breaking and falling off was what woke me up.
EDIT: Upon speaking to my AT this evening, my school is in fact not quite so fine as I initially thought! In fact she described the damage as “extensive”, and said that the staffroom has cracks in the walls so wide you can see through them to outside (!!), and there are holes in the playground and pathways big enough to swallow a child! ALL schools are closed until Wednesday, but she suspects ours will be closed longer. Oh dear.
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