Registrations have opened for the BC in DC convention, and I’m so tempted. I’ve been investigating costs, and I reckon it would be about NZ$3000 for flights and the cost of the actual convention (registration plus hotel), and I’d probably have to allow the same again if I wanted to stay a bit longer and…

We actually had a whole day without an aftershock yesterday! According to geonet here was a 3.4 at 10.32 on Saturday night, then nothing significant until 12.30 this morning, when we had a 4.6 (which actually woke me up – normally I’ve been sleeping through everything less than a 5, but it was quite shallow…

I liked this depiction of the number of aftershocks from The Press this afternoon: Or there’s the animated version.

They let staff back onto campus today to start the cleanup now that all the buildings have been certified safe. But first we had to attend a safety briefing, and we all had to sign in and sign out so they knew exactly who was in which building in case of aftershocks. All very dramatic,…

The stress and lack of sleep is really starting to hit. Yesterday was probably my worst day – we had a couple of really big aftershocks at about midnight which really spooked me, so another night of very little sleep, and despite there being only a handful of aftershocks during the day, I was on…

As predicted, we didn’t get a lot of sleep. There were only 3 or 4 aftershocks big enough to wake us, but they were also big enough to make it hard to go back to sleep afterwards. I didn’t really sleep properly until about 6 am, when it started to get light outside, which somehow…

We were rudely awoken this morning at 4.35 am by violent shaking. H was already leaping out of bed and heading for the safety of the doorway (all those stories I told him about the last big earthquake I was in obviously stuck), and I was right behind him. The shaking was strong enough that…

7.1 earthquake in Christchurch this morning, and some major damage in some areas, but we were really lucky – we got shaken up a lot, and a few minor breakages (2 plates and one ornament is all we’ve found so far), but no real damage, and the house seems ok structurally. The cats slept through…

Ok, I don’t normally talk politics here, but this is kind of important, so I’m cross-posting it, in the hope that some of my NZ friends see it: This weekend there will be rallies in the four main centres protesting the changes the government wants to make to employment law. There are a whole raft…

Those little red circles making up the raspberries took forever to appliqué on!