In which people are awesome

[zeborah]

My local Freecycle mailing list has someone offering: "Probably going to be no shortage of these over the next wee while but if anyone was after some broken bricks for hardfill etc, we have a small amount from our chimney top [...] probably about 3 or 4 wheelbarrows full."

The website of a restaurant closed due to damage.

Telecom has made around 300 payphones in and around Christchurch free for local, national and mobile calls. They've also waived fees for phone donations to the Red Cross. Yesterday they tweeted "Operations teams working on how best to share our emergency generation capacity with our friends @VodafoneNZ" and when congratulated on their altruism clarified, "It's all about NZers helping NZers in a time of crisis. Normal rivalries will resume once crisis is over :)"

I've heard stories of:

• a dairy [corner-store] owner giving away milk and selling batteries below cost
• a pizza place giving away pizzas

Buses aren't running so instead of going to my own church I went to the local Anglican church. Not being an Anglican I don't know whether they might have considered maybe not reading the "Jeremiah and the potter" story about God saying "If you're naughty I'll totally crush you" in the current climate. Yes, yet-another-aftershock did strike exactly then. :-)

Breaking news: Just got a phone call from my manager that everyone in our team is fine though one has been evacuated (she lives in the CBD) and another colleague hasn't been contactable (she lives in another area people have been evacuating from). The library I work in has some damage to our beautiful new ceiling tiles and apparently books are in ginormous piles; the central library on campus has entire stacks (ie bookshelves) fallen over, broken windows, and one floor is said to be "totalled". So now we're waiting to be allowed back in so we can start picking up books...

Comments

[sciamanna.livejournal.com]

Catholics have fixed readings for each day of the year, with a 3-year cycle (I think it's 3) during which the whole "lectionary" is read -- so they wouldn't have been able to change reading. Don't know about Anglicans.

(And I thought you were Anglican. Not sure why. I mean, I thought you'd said so, but obviously I was wrong.)

[zeborah]

I'm Presbyterian. We find three readings per Sunday a bit heavy going, so generally just have one gospel reading and one other reading.

(I was Anglican for the first five years of my life, but when we moved to Christchurch the local Anglican church service was at 9am and the local Presbyterian church service was at 10am, so the choice was clear.)

[(Anonymous)]

Glad to hear your library will be not too difficult to fix. (We will hope.) My first thought on hearing of the quake was "OMG Zeborah! OMG her LIBRARY!"

I'm not Anglican either, but I attended the Episcopal church regularly during college, and sporadically thereafter; it does have a lectionary, so no substitutions.

Mary Anne in Kentucky

[zeborah]

Yes, I think it's basically just mess rather than any structural damage. Very glad.