Yes! I am in fact still here! A giant hole has not opened up in the ground to swallow me…yet.

In the last week or so I’ve been trying to distract myself from aftershocks and other earthquake related sh*t…by making cards!

Blog readers who are also FB friends will probably have seen these already, but here are some photos of what I’ve been making…

Hope everyone is having a nice weekend!

If you know me in person, you will probably be aware that I have a great deal of love for the INTERESTING thoughts of EDWARD MONKTON.

Totally the best style of blank greeting cards IN THE WORLD! I love the quirky little poems, and the drawings! Old school Edward Monkton used to be completely black and white, but in the last year or so they’ve started to be produced in colour. At first I didn’t like the colours, and thought they detracted from the awesomeness of the cartoons, but now they’ve grown on me somewhat.

Obviously I couldn’t copy and paste EVERY Edward Monkton card design into this post, but here are a few I found on Google Images If you want to see more, visit the website and search under Gallery.

Seriously. Completely and totally awesome.

Do you have a favourite?

All in all, yesterday was a pretty crappy day.

I can’t write about ALL of it yet, since Crappy Incident #1 involves something a friend of mine is doing. This friend hasn’t told other, mutual friends of ours what she’s doing yet, so I don’t want to write about it on a public blog before she’s had the chance to tell people in person.

Crappy Incident #2 was, perhaps unsurprisingly by now, another day of big aftershocks. SERIOUSLY big aftershocks. One was a 5.7, and the other was a 6.3.

To put them into perspective, the first, very big earthquake, all the way back in September last year (Yes, more than NINE MONTHS AGO!) was a 7.1, and the second very big earthquake which killed almost 200 people, in February this year, was also a 6.3.

Yeah. Yesterday was no little shake! In the house I was at, LOTS of things fell over and broke, and it was the first time I remember actually feeling unsafe, and like something might fall on me.

To be really honest I’m getting pretty sick and tired of writing about earthquakes and aftershocks and broken items now, but not as sick as I am of, you know, BEING IN THEM. It sucks. It really really sucks.

It’s strange, feeling like this, because I know I could be SO much worse off than I am. My house is fine. Everyone I know is fine (physically at least), and I can, for the most part, go about my daily life pretty normally. A lot of people can’t.

All things considered, I’m really lucky, I just don’t feel it most of the time. :(

For those of you who are fascinated by earthquakes and want to see what it was *really like*, this is a video of the first quake taken by someone living in the suburb I was visiting yesterday – the amount of shaking etc is pretty similar to what we experienced. Minor offensive language at the very end, but nothing too bad.