In which she points and laughs

Started the day taking a piss in the lawn, ended the day being pissed off at bloody out-of-towners who sanctimoniously think it's "too soon" for people (who are, btw, primarily Cantabrians) to be taking the piss out of the earthquake. The most annoying of the concern trolls is of course not even in New Zealand at all.

Anyway, if you're not a sanctimonious git, let me point you to these #eqnz pickup lines. (Warning: some of them may be objectionable for entirely different reasons.)

Moving on to the rest of the day: washed in a litre of water, caught a bus (bus!) to work and did what work I could until I ran out of things I could do with a serious lack of concentration. Used the porcelain toilet while there and also filled up my water bottles (I'm told there's even a shower there) and caught the bus (bus!) home again. This went well until, near the end of the journey, the bus went over a new bump in the road which the driver hadn't seen in time to slow down, throwing my bottles forward, ripping the plastic bag they were in and spilling a bit of water(*). Managed to juggle things enough to get them all home anyway.

(*) Old milk bottles are utterly useless for storing water. Just don't. I got it out from my pantry and discovered the lid had cracked; I'm only still using the bottle to fetch water because it's what I've got.

Out of habit tried a tap. Water came out! Instinctively turned it off again and blinked for a bit. Then filled a bucket; considered filling a second bucket but it felt kind of greedy. But then gave into temptation and did some small washing jobs. If it stays on, I might even run a very small load in the washing machine, maybe, in a couple days' time.

Read Memory, was about to drop off to sleep when Mum and sisters arrived to

• deliver my mail (the Sandbaggers DVDs - I generally get parcels delivered to my parents' address as mine is a bit close to an intermediate school in a lower socioeconomic area and things have gone missing; I need to get around to redirecting all my mail there while NZPost don't like my street)
• drop off a rabbit cage (am looking after sister's rabbits while both sisters go up to Palmy for a week); and
• go shopping for supplies for the welfare centre at Aranui Primary school. Arrived just as they were closing so didn't indulge in much looking around but saw signs for water and laundry facilities, which is good: for a while Fisher and Paykel's "around the city" free laundrettes were handily located in the areas where everyone has power and water to run their own washing machines anyway. (And also: Kaiapoi what are you doing on that map you're not even part of Christchurch!)

Finished Memory; rabbits arrived; checked the internets and dealt a bit belatedly with a work email that had come in after I'd left. Possibly I shouldn't have - working at 9pm on a Friday sets a terrible precedent - but since I'd skived off before 2pm it technically evens out.

Should really go to bed now. But first, icecream!

In which her plot to use ALL THE WATER is foiled

The water got turned off again, alack. The supplies I have are more than I need for anything except flushing and using the washing machine, though, so no worries. However I think I shan't say no if we ever get a portaloo or chemical toilets out here. My garden may be large but it's full of clay; I can't dig much more than the depth of my spade-head deep.

No bodies were found in the Cathedral. This kind of makes the day worth while all by itself.

May or may not go to choir on Tuesday night. By some miracle, though the building had been damaged in September, we can still use it now. I'll need transport home, is all, but someone's offered that; but it'll depend on how much energy I have to deal with socialising. It took me two days to get around to just replying to the offer of transport.

It's really weird that some smaller aftershocks are more unnerving than some larger ones. There was a 4.1 this morning which was just like being rocked in the cradle of my house (yay flexi-house) and even the cat wasn't alarmed. But earlier there was a 3.4 (same location, same depth) that hit with a bang and startled me awake with serious heart-thumping and set the cat a-running. Is weird; I shall never quite understand quakes.

I have two bunnies in my backyard. They're not very sure of me but they do like the parsley and dandelion leaves I feed them. So far Boots doesn't seem overly interested in them, which is good. Last night I dreamed that for some reason my backyard didn't suit them after all so my sister had set up all eight pairs of bunnies in her backyard and I was going to have to go over every night she was away to feed all of them and the bus didn't even run in weekends. Normally my pet anxiety dreams are (as one might imagine) about discovering I have extra cats in the house and they're all starving because I thought there was only one and thus hadn't been feeding them enough.

In which she gets a new water system

It looks like my water is in fact settling into the "works at night, is turned off during the day while water folk work on faults" routine. Before I was quite certain of this, however, it started raining and I grabbed the bits of fencing that the neighbour's chimney had knocked down:



At first the rain was light but it grew heavier; I emptied one bucket a) doing some non-essential cleaning b) with the byproduct of cleaning the bucket of accumulated dirt the rain had washed off the fencing into it. I've put the bucket back out and am hopeful the resulting rainwater will be clean enough to wash dishes in (I wouldn't drink it - I don't know what's in that paint). The other bucket wasn't quite full and I had nothing to do with it right then and it was dark, so I left it there while pondering the opportunities overnight. Maybe wash my hair? kyhwana also suggests the addition of a tarp for cleanliness and greater coverage; I've got a good sheet of plastic in the garage which I'll dig out tomorrow if it's still raining.

In other news, I'm disappointed by the Sandbaggers DVDs: every time I try to convert the DVDs to my region I get told the disks have "Bad Sectors". I know, I know, I'm supposed to be playing them on my all-region DVD player which just happens to not have a working TV connected to it. I'll try them on my parents' tomorrow and see if it's a general error or some cunning new DRM technique.

This evening continued to gather data on the relative startlingness of big vs small aftershocks.