Zeborah

Another day, another earthquake swarm. I was trying on a tshirt in a small shop so was half naked as I grasped the hook on the wall just in case. Fortunately I didn't need to actually put any weight on it because I don't think it was designed as a safety rail. Anyway, so I bought the tshirt (phones were down but EFTPOS stayed up) and went back to my motel to sit with Twitter while Boots huddled under the couch.

Then I wandered down the road to see what traffic was like -- no gridlocks evident in my area, at least as much as I could see before we got a jolt so big I did a 180 and went back to sit with Twitter. A socially decent period of time after I heard the phones were working again, I texted my contractors to see if I should plan to stay at the motel another night. They phoned back and said they'd stayed after the quake long enough to make the place basically habitable for me. Then, having families, they scarpered; but I'm pretty impressed they hung around at all, they've been pretty fantastic. So they'll have to come back after Christmas to finish up and fix some of the damage they caused in the rush to leave, but they were going to have to come back anyway due to supply bottlenecks and other events putting them a week behind schedule. My house is therefore rather a mess, but all the utilities work (apparently we don't even need to boil water this time) and it's habitable.

Mum brought me and Boots home, and Boots promptly disappeared under the house. I located the router and hooked the wireless back up and have since been unpacking. First thing to go into its rightful place was the go-bag, by the door.

While my house is nominally being fixed (they were meant to start on the 28th; they actually started late on the 30th and did a bit more on the 1st and nothing on the 2nd; I can tell these things with my super powers of reading the sign-in sheet) Boots and I have moved into a motel.

I think Boots is actually more or less settled, though it took some time. She spent the first 30 hours hiding under furniture - no food, no water, no litterbox. Then she spent an evening hugging my ankle, and then she spent all frickin' night scritching things and jumping on things and jumping off things (onto my nose) and banging things and trying to open things and generally preventing me from getting more than an hour's sleep at a time. (The asthma attack at 4am didn't help. I ended up going outside and sitting in a deck chair which turned out to have rain in it, and then I slept on the couch for the last hour of the night, and then I went to work and blinked blearily at everyone.)

For a few more days after that she spent the day (while I was out) under the bed and then crept out to hug my ankle when I got back, and then spent the night under the bed again. Nibbling a very little food here and there. But now she's eating fairly reasonably for an outdoors cat being kept indoors and is playing a bit more normally and sleeping on the bed next to my ankles as per usual.

It's weird living out of a motel in my own city, but it's all fine: I've got everything I need (including wifi and the run of the laundry) and it's comfortably lived in (so not intimidating the way I find hotels). I'll still of course be glad to go home. The date set for that is the 22nd December, and I'm determined to believe them despite all evidence to the contrary. They sound like they're determined to give excellent customer service, and I've heard from other people who've had repairs start slow but finish on time, so it's not impossible.

The other day, a friend asked where I was and when I told them they said, "Oh, that's good, there's lots of shops there." It's more that there were lots of shops there, I pointed out. Since the quakes, the fruit-and-vege shop, the two bakeries, and the supermarket (among others) are all deaded, which as far as the necessities of life go leaves the butcher, the petrol station, and a 2nd hand bookshop. I can shop at a mall on the way home instead, but.... But as I stay longer I notice there's more than I thought, because one of the bakeries is operating out of a shipping container, and the fruit-and-vege place is operating out of a tent.

Walking down the road from the motel towards my busstop in the morning, I can see straight down to a demolition crane in the CBD. I have feelings about this but they're fairly vague and unformed. They're oddly different from the feelings I feel on my normal bus route where I see the crane pulling apart the Catholic Cathedral and the crane taking the top off the Hotel Grand Chancellor and various bulldozers painting the town pink with brickdust. I think it's because it takes time for the bus to get me that far, but here I leave my motel at 7:15 in the morning and there it is.

I seem to have started writing my When the Sky Fell story again. May or may not get much further this time around, though today I reached the Ode to the Radio scene which I've never got to before. It aches to write, and there came a point this evening doing research where I had to stop reading mid-sentence. Someone was talking about the "glassy, shell-shocked look" people had after February and. I remember that, when I was walking along Bealey Ave on the 25th February; I mentioned it in a blogpost at the time, but. Words just don't. It's like looking into a black hole where a person should be.

--However, the other thing that happened on the 25th February was my friends' son was born, and yesterday when I went to visit (as I do most weeks) he crawled! Towards me! Seeing him once a week is fantastic, I get to skip the nappies and most of the teething and "I'm hungry but won't eat, tired but won't sleep" screaming fits, while still getting all the fun of playing with him and the excitement of watching him grow up. I heartily recommend being an honorary auntie.

I do feel for those with no heating or indoor plumbing (portaloos in this weather, eek!) but it is quite lovely to have a snowday myself and be able to spend it with friends (who I stayed last night with, and would have gone to work with) and their baby and young cats. (In fact I'm basically snowed in with them, since public transport is stopped until further notice.)

The cats have been playing in the snow with adorable enthusiasm, running in it, pouncing on it, hiding in it, batting it around. The baby has been watching it fall with wide eyes, the way he likes watching screensavers or the flames in their woodburner. And we had a snowfight and made a snowman and my friend made a snow angel. And then we came inside and shook the snow off (I had to comb out my hair again) and had hot chocolate in front of the fire.

Typing from my friend's laptop, having left mine of the dodgy battery at home. Shame I can't see how my own cat is dealing with the cold stuff, but this is lovely company to be spending such a day with.

Conversations on a bus:
Three teenagers (two girls and one boy). One of the girls was rehearsing her defense for the school board of trustees about drunkenness at school. It wasn't that she got drunk at school, see, she got drunk before school and just happened to still be intoxicated when she got there. Also when she gave some drink to another student it was because said student wanted it, not because she'd peer pressured her or anything.

The conversation turned, as conversations do. In due course the boy was telling how once, when a friend had been pressuring him with "Bros before hos", the boy retorted, "Mate, chicks before dicks."

--

The Press cheerfully mentions that over 50% of the buildings in the CBD may have survived. This is a stunningly glass-half-full mode of reporting for the Press these days. Also, I shouldn't read the newspaper while waiting at the supermarket checkout: going shopping is enough of a punch to my emotional immune system as it is, and today is pouring with rain and I spent all morning looking after part of the church fair's white elephant sale so resilience has been going steadily down all day anyway.

(On the plus side, at said fair I got two skirts for a dollar, and some violets, and some feijoas in red wine which I'm planning to take to friends for a dessert with the plan that she and I can eat the feijoas and he can drink the wine. I restrained myself from going near the book stall, it seemed for the best.)

--

Boots has returned to her ordinary self, ie restive with outbreaks of annoying, and the vet's battery of tests all read back in the normal range.

--

There are all sorts of things I keep meaning to say, but I've forgotten them all. Oh! One of them was that I worked out what's been splitting my skin open when I empty my chemloo tank; I then put one bandaid on my finger and one bandaid on the jaggedy part of the tank.

--

At work I'm still bouncing between three locations, though one predominates. Unfortunately it's the one I hate the most. It's deathly quiet; we share with people we don't know that well and they complained about the beeps of our virtual reference application, so now we need to wear headsets if we want to notice our customers calling us. The only redeeming feature of this place is that it has my computer in it -- my actual computer from my actual office, with my lolcat version of the 5 laws of library science taped on and my rights to modify the software on it which IT accidentally-on-purpose left me because they trust me not to modify it too much. And on Monday we get a new manager and he's going to be sitting at that space.

Sigh. Oh well. At least I worked out how to get my desktop picture (of The Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library) onto the other computers I have to use. Why I mentioned work was really to keep on with the alcohol theme, because in one of the other locations the tiny little tearoom has, next to the coffee and tea and milo, two bottles of wine. They must have come from some function or other. No-one would ever actually open them on worktime, but I feel it's comforting just to know they're there.

Day 1: Boots gobbles the green pill on the assumption that it's the same as one of her normal pale brown palatable pills. (I'm a big fan of palatable pills.)

Day 2: Boots remembers that the green pill is not in fact palatable so I'm forced to do the ordinary pilling thing. (She gobbles the pale brown pill quite happily.)

Day 3: Boots remembers that being pilled is unpleasant so I hide the pill in some of her super nommy goop.

Day 4: Boots remembers that a pill surrounded by super nommy goop is still a pill so I'm forced to do the ordinary pilling thing and now it's sticky so sticks to my finger so this takes multiple tries.

Day 5: I resort to Google, find some videos of remarkably placid cats and the old how to pill a cat joke which I think is more documentary than humour but anyway. I attempt the margarine thing but it sticks to my finger and when I hopefully attempt to let her just nom it she just licks the margarine off it. I get the pill into her half a dozen times and she spits it out half a dozen times (once after holding it cunningly in her mouth for over half a minute until I unlock her catflap, upon which <spit, flee>) and it dissolves into a crumbly mess twice. --I speak by now of the platonic pill. By the time I succeed it's the third pill of the day. Will have to get another repeat from the vet at some point when I know how many to ask for....

Day 6: I plan to mash the pill into her super-nommy glop. But goodness knows what I'll do on days 7-14.


In random earthquake news:
I turned up at choir last night and discovered our normal practice room has been taped off. Hung around for a while half-chatting with the AA greeting folk and half-trying not to get in their way, but no-one else turned up; I seem to have missed a message at some point. On the bus on the way home I listened to another passenger chatting with the bus driver about portaloos and chemical toilets. Post-earthquake smalltalk is from another world.

It's terribly thematic for Boots to get desperately sick in time for Good Friday, but once (2009, ate the netting from a roast) was quite enough. This time it seems to be some kind of infection maybe? Ridiculous fever anyway, and lethargic and severely off her food. The vet this morning plied her with injections and pills and super-nommy tinned glop, and Boots did have some of that at least, but remains lethargic and is currently hiding under the couch (whether photosensitive or just sick of me trying to get her to eat more). If she doesn't miraculously recover overnight I'll have to take her to the afterhours clinic tomorrow.

On the upside of today, while she was under the house sulking from too many injections and pills I got a tweet from keieeeye that a box had arrived for me, so I hopped on a bus waited 50 minutes for a bus (for a route where they should come every 10 minutes, seriously, wtf? some of the roads are appalling, but I've never before seen the buses running more than two iterations late) -- anyway, I went around and retrieved the box.

Inside the box was some paper padding and another box, and inside that was another box, and inside that was some cardboard padding and a bubblewrap package, and inside that was a thin-foam-stuff package, and inside that was my PocketBook 360.

Then I walked home playing with it, rather than sit at the busstop waiting 30+ minutes. (I cunningly went first to the busstop with the realtime estimate doodacky, which they've managed to get working again recently.) I was nearly home when the bus went past, and had managed to visit a couple of shops on the way too. (Though one was just poking my head in the door and seeing that they didn't have what I wanted.)

I like my PocketBook 360. I like that I can poke around their websites/forums and discover that someone's coded a Tetris for it, which I can then download and install. --For the record, an e-ink based ereader is not the best format for a Tetris. Sudoku works though. Also, um, that reading function, that works too. :-) Plus and also, it's really pretty.

--That aside, though, running low on cope at the moment so may be only spottily communicado for a bit.

Worked while my house got painted on. It's gonna be awesome especially when they start with the purple ("troubadour" though I don't think troubadours were particularly renowned for wearing purple, but anyway) and all the people who got pained expressions on their faces when I mentioned purple will be proved wrong, haHA!

More or less after work I wandered down the road a bit for three purposes:

1. to see if the corner shops whose walls used to be perpendicular to the ground but after the quake were attempting to form a funky W shape were in fact now more reminiscent of this photo:
   
   [ETA: Okay I shouldn't have tried to hotlink. Try http://twitpic.com/4cyyg5.]
   And sure enough they were.
2. to see if my wee library of books had disappeared from the busstop. Not only had they all disappeared, but someone had tagged the sign I'd made. Ah Linwood, never change! I'll make another sign and put book-protection plastic on this time.
3. to see if the updated city council map was correct that there's a place to pour one's toilet waste in the next street over. Sure enough there is. It says "Human waste only" and "Beware of splashback!" and has a bottle of hand sanitiser duct taped to it.

I'm still gearing myself up to using the actual chemical toilet. Have been reading the instructions and looking at it mistrustfully. There's a water tank and a waste tank and a bottle of chemicals, and there's levers and knobs and lots of dire warnings.

I'm slightly disappointed that no-one commented about the exploding toilets I mentioned. Seriously, exploding toilets! However this is outweighed by the amount of disappointment I contain that the newspaper didn't use the opportunity to comment on the possibility that the contents of said exploding toilets might hit the bathroom fan.

Gotta go, Boots wants food. I was thinking of starving her a while longer so she'd catch and nom more of the flies that have been bugging me, but then one of them landed on my back and she launched herself at it and caught my back with her claws. She apologised very prettily, with lots of rubbing against me and looking cute and so forth, but I have my suspicions.

Sunday afternoon I bused around town to spend the night with friends+baby. This was an excellent boost to Operation Keep Eating (though I did contribute my banana cake) plus we watched Finding Nemo on Sunday evening and How To Train Your Dragon on Monday morning. Plus baby and kittens! <3 They kept apologising for baby's 2am screaming fit, but since I was at the other end of the house this was approximately as disturbing as your average Mag4 quake, ie I woke up and registered it and went back to sleep. Since their house provides the protection of distance from said average Mag4 quakes, this really evened out quite nicely.

After lunch on Monday I went to work for a meeting, which went exactly the same as every other meeting we've ever had about that subject ever in the history of time seriously ever. (Short version: "Look at this awesome technology which can be used in highly awesome ways to support awesome pedagogy! But yeah no, in practice you're only going to be using this one boring feature, and by 'use' we mean you'll be getting other people to contact us about how to use it.") Normally this would just leave me rolling my eyes; this time I was struggling rather not to cry, until I could get outside and put my sunglasses on.

Also it was hot and the bus was packed (it's still free and not yet as frequent as normal) and the traffic was horrid (the roads are either munted, especially in the east, or full of the traffic fleeing the munted roads, especially in the west) so I felt nauseous for the 1.5 hours it took to get home from there.

This is not -- to reassure people -- so much a desperate plea for help and/or sympathy, as an educatory narrative. I cry easily anyway; situations like this it's just a signal. Dry mouth signals thirsty; teary eyes signal stressed. The only reason I don't like crying in public is that the public is apt to consider it as signalling a worse emotional state than it really does. So I kept my eyes mostly dry while out and when I got home I phoned up a colleague and shamelessly whined to her for sympathy (which she duly gave) and then, having cooked dinner and scooped myself a bowl of jellytip icecream, watched three episodes of Sandbaggers in a row.

On the last few minutes of my trip home I caught a glimpse of the "cannabus". Apparently the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws have decided Christchurch is in need of medicinal marijuana. This so annoyed me I believe I actually dreamed about it last night. I have serious qualms about advocating self-medication in times of stress. (I'm not dissing self-medication by someone who knows themself. But advocating it willy-nilly to people whose reactions you don't know seems wildly irresponsible.) Plus, though the word "politicalise" is getting thrown around a lot, I think this really does qualify.

Today I worked entirely from home again, and have actually managed to achieve various work-ish things, in between the painters coming to work on my porch while it rained, and a visit from the Salvation Army, and the sun coming out so I luxuriously put on a load of washing! in the washing machine, with water and electricity!, and eating lunch, and watching a fanvid, and a phonecall from Dad, and cuddling Boots between her disappearances. She keeps going outside and then not being able to get back in because the painters have the powercord going through her catdoor and she doesn't know how to open the flap towards herself.

<ponders> This actually seems like a useful skill for a cat to have. I think I'll try to teach her someday. I shall of course report back on progress.

Two nights ago I was getting ready for bed and suddenly thought, "Hey, I think I'll wear my nightie tonight instead of sleeping in my clothes," and I did.

Then at 00:44 I woke up. There was a light. I heard voices. I thought, "There shouldn't be light and voices there, the tenants moved out due to earthquake damage." So I grabbed my cellphone, in case the dialing of 111 should be required, and went outside in my nightie and got a torch shone in my face, which I had thought everyone knew wasn't polite, but then there's all sorts of things one thinks people know. For example, one thinks that people know that if your tenants move out of your property due to serious earthquake damage, 00:44 might not be the best time to be poking around among the bricks even if you have just flown down from Auckland right that moment.

They did at least apologise, and even popped over next morning (once they saw me drawing my curtains) to apologise again. Then they set to fixing the house, with its tumble-down chimney, shifted foundations, dips in the roof, and abrupt reception of the other neighbour's firewall, and all. At the rate they're working, I reckon we could set them loose in the CBD and the whole place'd be sorted by Easter.

Alas, in the meantime it's a tad noisy (though at least so far they're confining these exercises to daylight). So Boots, who as per normal for cats would rather like to spend her day having a quiet series of snoozes, is instead spending all her time running to hide under the bed, couch, other bed, or house, every time:
* there's an aftershock above 4;
* any large truck drives past, or any car parks within view of the bedroom window;
* anyone (such as an Aussie cop, Red Cross, various other officials or neighbours) comes to the door;
* or the bloody construction noises go bang bang or grind grind or whatever.

And I thought working from home would at least be quiet.

Also, Boots isn't technically allowed under the house. I've got grills where I can fit them and bricks where I can't. But the painters moved one of the bricks and then after the quake one of the old grills fell out and a brick in another spot either fell or was pushed. So now even when Boots is quietly on my lap (this sometimes lasts as long as two minutes at a time) I can hear the crinkle crinkle of a neighbourhood stray padding softly about on polyurethane beneath me.

Boots continues, as far as I can tell, to have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the rabbits I'm hosting on behalf of my sister.

I attempted a catnap myself this evening, but forgot to turn my computer sound off, so got woken up first by a cheery "You've got mail!" (EQC plans to visit everyone in a quick triage of "If your house is falling down, we'll be back within 4 months; if bits of your house are falling down we'll be back within 6 months; if your house isn't falling down then wtf are you complaining, we'll get back to you in 9 months.") and secondly by the insistent beep of a student IMing the library because I forgot to log out of our helpdesk chat service.

--Ow. I think Boots just tried to catch a fly on the back of my leg. She caught my leg.

Must go; she seems to want to communicate to me that it's her dinner time.