Update

Hi all,

Time for a short update – what a couple of weeks huh?

My leg is covered in bruises from the accident I had last week – (see previous post about the shit-head that drove into me and knocked me off my bike) but getting better by the day.

Pleased to report that Sonia and I are fine (or as fine as we can be given the recent events) but as you can imagine, we are both incredibly tired, stressed and a bit frustrated with the position we are in. I guess these feelings are all natural in these times we are now living.

We have power and running water BUT the city are still advising us to boil all water so as you can imagine, we are all having a great time. The biggest issue for us right now is sewerage – it’s all busted and not working. Now I don’t mind camping one bit but 2 weeks of crapping in the back yard in a hole dug in the back garden is getting pretty old!!

We do have a porta-loo at the end of our street but it seems so far away??

We went to a meeting by city officials yesterday – the mayor, representatives of the fire service, police, health service, social services and a few others were all in attendance to give our local area an update on what we can expect in our immediate future in our local area. About 500 people turned up to the local park to hear what was said and to be honest, not a lot of new info was passed on to us. The main thing we took out of this meeting was that the waste wasn’t likely to be fixed very soon – in fact, they think they are talking somewhere in the vicinity of 6 months.

Hands up anyone who has camped for 6 months?? NOT ME
I shouldn’t complain too much as we still have our house and our puppies are fine (our street is buggered though) but I do feel incredibly stressed and I “pity the fool” (see I can still use a funny reference to the A Team) that rubs me the wrong way because they might just end up wearing all the bent up stress and rage that I feel is currently just simmering under my rather cool exterior. Since the earthquake (22FEB), we have had heaps of decent aftershocks so there are plenty of people just wandering around with a kind of blank look on their faces, everyone looks stressed and tired – here’s a statistic for you, between the Tuesday (day of the quake) and the Friday, 38,000 people flew out of Christchurch. Up until yesterday, they predict that this figure is now close to 60,000 people have left town – CRAZY HUH!!!!

I am trying to stay as strong as I can but this is proving to be quite a challenge – I have responsibilities and these are to my wife and puppies and our house, we also have a business that employs 5 people so I am also responsible for these people and their families – this is tough as there are so many businesses that have ceased to be in Christchurch and there are so many that face a very uncertain future. People will hold onto their cash and this may have a huge impact on our business but we are back up and trading, we are busy which is good and as the city or the CBD is effectively closed for the foreseeable future, we may be ok – time will tell so wish us luck.