Entry tags:

earthquake, moral dilemmas, sleep

I don't generally have nightmares but my metaphorical nightmare is if the Alpine Fault went off. The Alpine Fault runs about 170 kilometres from me. Scientific predictions (which are unlike bloody Ken Ring's predictions in that they're based on science and acknowledged to be highly unspecific) are that this could happen soon on the geological scale of time and could be magnitude 8. This would be unimaginably bad for us.

Add a tsunami and nuclear worries on top and I can't really talk about Japan right now.

So last night I quit TweetDeck (grr rage Ken Ring didn't predict it because it's not the moon; and it's not sunspots and it's not global warming and it's not human-induced and it's not Mother Nature and it's not 2012 (even if this was 2012 which you may have noticed is still a number of months away) and there's a whole lot of other things it's not. What then is it? It's plate tectonics FFS) and went to bed early lacking anything else exciting to do.

(I could watch Sandbaggers except a) I'm trying to ration them out and b) my most efficient method of watching DVDs at the moment consists of ripping them on Old Computer and transferring the files to an external hard drive (3-4 hours for 3 episodes) then plugging that into Current Computer to actually play them. Unless the disk has bad sectors, in which case I get the choice of either walking or catching the bus to my parents' place to watch on their machines.

(I'm also meant to be reading and reviewing a free ebook, but it's nowhere as interesting to my present state of mind as I'd hoped and I feel that ekeing "This isn't my kind of thing" out to 250 words will lead to a poor review; and I'm also reading a French book about Eleanor of Aquitaine, which (aside from unexamined Orientalism much) is much more interesting, but, well, sleep seemed more exciting yet.)

So I slept through the night (other than our regular Mag4 quake and I think a couple of low 3s, but that's all just <wake up, blearily assess threat, go back to sleep> by now) and did my best to sleep through a bunch of morning too, despite some trucks doing something heavily vibration-inducing in our street -- possibly sewerage and/or drains-related? possibly not -- which was apparently vital to do at 7am on a Saturday morning when people are trying to sleep in. Then they went away and I continued dozing for the fun of it, until I got a knock at the door and leapt up and threw on a coat and tried to pretend I wasn't in my nightie.

So that was the preliminary EQC assessor who glanced around and threw me in the 4-6 month's wait category ("minor structural damage" - probably a bit generous at that) and gallantly pretended I wasn't in my nightie.

Then I had another bit of a snooze but soon gave up, had a shower and got dressed. This was good, because then I got the Student Army knocking on the door with chemical toilets. I did say I wasn't sure I really needed one because the water seems to be fairly stable right now, but in the course of conversation ended up taking receipt of one anyway due to being rather easily swayed at present.

So now I've got a chemical toilet in a box on my floor and am thinking in retrospect that this was probably a stupid idea, unless of course they really do prefer us to use it rather than to flush even once a day into who-knows-where-but-probably-a-river; but even so there's surely people who need it way more than me (since we've apparently exhausted the world's supplies of chemical toilets), making it a question of which wastes more resources, hogging a chemical toilet or phoning up city council to come and collect it back again. <head-desk>

(Hm, sources suggest there are probably sufficient chemical toilets for everyone needing one once they're all actually distributed. And the official website says "Once your own toilet is working again, we suggest you keep your chemical toilet handy until you are advised that the sewer network has been fully restored." The official website also says you'll be told where the place to empty your tank is when you get your chemical toilet, which I wasn't except in terms that, compared to information on the official website, now seem wildly optimistic.)

To do list:
* Phone up city council, maybe. Decide whether to phone up city council and modify to-do list accordingly.
* Fill out contents claim (including photos of damaged contents. This makes sense for things that are visibly broken but is pretty useless for my TV (intact but not functioning) and laptop (intact but DVD drive not functioning). The things that actually broke, like crockery, I just tossed out on the principle that I can afford a few new plates.)
* Get around to cooking and consuming the meat in my fridge before it goes off, as part of Operation Keep Eating.

Blurgh. Hopefully by now Old Computer has finished copying another episode of Sandbaggers for me.