"hey Mum, my high-brows are burnt off!"

Lucy is having a very weird conversation about "my eyes were going all silly and I thought the high-brows was burnt off". Eh? She takes after her father...

Today was the most beautiful spring day. Glorious weather and blossoms everywhere. Only a couple of aftershocks and we had hot water today :) Ah, the little blessings of life!

I've been meaning to write about the Structural Engineer that came to our house this week. She (very kindly) comes to Christchurch to help out for 3 days a week, until all this is over. I dare say she will be coming for a while. She said she went to Uni here so when she saw what happened she called her boss then got on a plane. He was not impressed, but too bad. In any case, she gave the house a good going-over and said that overall the HOUSE held up pretty well. The cracks in the walls etc were all due to one side of the house subsiding (due to the liquifaction = sand that came up from the bowels of the earth). Due to our house being made of wood she said it had a lot of "give" and the house itself is all repairable. However...
* there are cracks in the beams that support the roof
* the foundations all around the house are cracked
* the house will have to be repiled. Easy, she says, because the house is wood and they can just lift it, repile, and then set the house back down. However, we have to have a geo tech (??) soil person come and check out the land to decide what kind and how deep the piles have to go. (For those that don't live in NZ, our houses are like wooden doll houses... complete structures in and of themselves and they are sat upon concrete "piles" (like short posts) that are set in the ground. If you were to lift up the house and take it away you would see a lot of teeth like posts sticking out of the ground. Every 3 feet or so is a pile for the floor joists to rest on. I'll try to take a picture for you. So, if you look down the manhole in Lucy's wardrobe you will see dirt. Cobwebs and dirt, aka the ground - about a foot and a half from the floor. We do not have a concrete foundation. And yes, if you live in a house with no carpet the floorboards are quite cold in winter... but it isn't that cold here so it is fine.)
* the chimney firewall will have to be removed as it is cracked in the middle and might just give way and fall out onto the driveway in an aftershock. I'm not too sad about this - the fireplace is boarded up and plastered over... We only use the brick firewall to bounce balls on
* the doors don't shut and this will have to be fixed. NO JOKE! Amazingly the only door that does shut is the bathroom door, but it is squwiff so you can't lock it... The front door can't be opened or closed, the bedroom doors can't shut at all and neither can the living room door. As you can imagine we are all getting up and going to sleep at the same time.

She didn't comment on the other damage as she was only there to check the house structurally. So the plumbing, broken windows, cracks etc will have to be looked at by the insurance assessor if/when they ever get to us. Our road and footpath is still a mess. Some of the gaps closed back up and ended up overlapping themselves (how weird is that) and the manholes in the roads near us are all like molehills. The City Council has come and build up the asphalt around them, but driving down Manchester Street is like driving on an obstacle course. You can't really drive over them so you have to weave around them every 60m. It is so weird!

We drove thru Sydenham this arvo on the way home from church (our chapel is still out of action, and we don't know when it can be used again) and I was surprised at how many of the little old shops are red stickered. Colombo St, pretty much from Morehouse Ave to Cashmere is devoid of shops. Yikes! Only a few new ones are still there...

And the church were Nana got married... well I really don't know. They are trying to prop one side up (so it won't crumble into the road) but the opposite side is mostly rubble. As she would say "I'm glad I'm not there to see it."

Right well I am boring myself senseless again thinking/talking about earthquake stuff. It's like being pregnant - you can't get away from it and as much as you are over it you are stuck with it. And since I have some sort of weird mental block about writing about it in my journal I feel I have to write it here or there will be no record of it for when the kids get older and they want to know what happened... (Why do you think that is? Why has it not had a mention in my journal? I'm sure a shrink would have a field day with me)

Okay so I'll try to find some pictures to post. Maybe pictures will spice things up a bit xxx