It was technically November 14th when the latest big earthquake hit New Zealand, but being just past midnight the date wasn’t so salient in my mind.  “Wow, that’s a rolly one, and it is lasting a long time” I thought, then turned over and went back to sleep.

Anyone who had lived through the Canterbury quakes did NOT turn over and go back to sleep.  Their fear triggers are jumpy, and those near the coast wondered about a tsunami….then packed bags and evacuated when the tsunami sirens sounded.

Those with more earthquake finesse than me recognized that the rocking-rolling nature of the shaking meant the fault that moved wasn’t under Christchurch–quakes centered nearby tend to be more jarring, more of a slap bang than a rock and roll.  A few of the more astute observes wondered if the long-overdue alpine fault had gone.

It turns out that the quake was centered about 130 kilometers north of Christchurch near the small coastal town of Kaikoura.

There’s a scenic road that runs along the east coast of the south island called Route 1. It’s a state “highway,” believe it or not, and a major trucking route. Jeremiah and I have a philosophical disagreement over the longevity of this road. I think it’ll fall into the ocean within the next few 100s of years, whereas Jeremiah has more faith in the engineering prowess of humans and thinks that we’ll keep fixing it. Optimist versus pessimist. I wonder how long it’ll take to fix it this time.

more road distruction. Amazingly, no vehicles were squished. The advantage of a midnight quake, perhaps.

The tectonic plate on the Australian side is sliding under the plate on the east side of New Zealand, uplifting the southern alps, as well as parts of the coastline. Kaikoura has had big uplifts in the past, as the various “shelves” you can see on the coastal walkway attest. This time we got another one–one report said there were areas where it popped up 6 meters! (that’s nearly 20 feet) That will certainly be a nasty surprise for resident paua.

Man-made stuff looks pretty weak in the face of geological forces.

That trucker got lucky!

Wiggle wiggle.

“And the cats came back!
Thought they were a goner,
but the cats came back
the very next day!”

Does anyone remember that kids’ song?  I don’t have any illusions about our kittens having as many lives as the adventurer of song, but nevertheless, they came back.

More precisely, they never really left.  Mommy cat just moved her brood to a different corner of the garage, to a box out of Milo’s reach.  Jeremiah noticed the mother leaving the garage one day about a week after they moved out of the bike trailer, put two and two together, and found the kittens after a little gentle rummaging.

I kept them a secret from the kids for a couple weeks, checking on them sneakily…”I’ll be right back, kids, I just need to…get some meat from the freezer.”  I didn’t trust Milo to keep his hands off of them.

The Brotherhood went hunting one weekend and came back with a fine haul, which they cut up and packaged in our garage.  Mark has a soft spot for animals (don’t even try to figure out that oxymoron—hunter AND animal lover??), and he set aside scraps for the mama cat.  She was HUNGRY.  Deer, goat, pig; she relished it all.

It wasn’t too long after that when we had a friend over and I wanted to show them the kittens, but unfortunately Milo had just returned home from school.  I had a peak at them anyway, and their cover was blown.  But it seems that the mama (whom I’ve christened Genevieve, Jenny for short) tolerates more handling of her babies now that they’re older and sturdier.

All last week the kittens were clambering over the tower of boxes, Jenny sitting by, alert but apparently unconcerned about them toppling to their harm.  In the last couple days they’ve moved their residence down one shelf to Jeremiah’s dive gear bag, where they sleep when they’re not batting leaves around the floor or swatting strings hanging off the stroller.  Kittens really are wonderfully playful, and Jenny is wonderfully serene about their antics.  Somehow they don’t stray beyond her comfort zone, but if we take one out of the invisible boundary, she stalks along, keeping vigilant watch.  Good mommy.

Now that the kittens are a bit older Jenny must be going back to her old house to eat…or so I assume because she turns up her nose to venison now, and she’s fleshed out a bit.  I’m guessing the kittens were born about the first of October, which would make them something like 6 weeks old.  I hope they stay with us yet a while.

“The Whiteheads are coming to visit,” I told Naomi and Milo.

“White Head?” Naomi crinkled her nose.  She thought it was a funny name.  I guess I probably thought the same, when I first heard it, but that was so long ago I can’t remember.  You see, Mrs. Whitehead was my first grade teacher.  AGES ago, I know.  And her oldest daughter, Kirsten, babysat us when we were little, changing my sister’s diapers if not my own.

The Whiteheads are in NZ visiting their daughter who married a Kiwi and lives in Auckland with their two grandsons, close to our kids’ ages.  They were to be in Christchurch for one day before heading out on a whirlwind south island tour, so we snaffled them up for the afternoon, trotting them up and down the Harry Ell trail in the port hills before bringing them home for hard-earned dinner.

They’re veteran parents, veteran GRANDparents, and both former elementary school teachers.  We entered our house and the first thing they wanted to do, even before using the toilet, was to have the kids show them their rooms.  They admired everything, the chaos, the wall decor, even the animal heads.

“What’s this?” they asked, stroking the tahr’s mane.

“It’s a tahr, a kind of Himalayan mountain goat,” I said, a little apologetically.  I’m never sure how people are going to feel about the dead animals on our walls.

“It doesn’t have any penis!” Naomi announced.

“No, its penis got cut off!” Milo added, just to make sure Mrs. Whitehead understood what his little sister had said.

I started mentally scrambling for responses I might use to diffuse the situation (“That’s right, we leave the guts in the mountains”… OR  “Nope, it doesn’t have any meat on it anymore…”) while in my mind I wondered exactly what a tahr penis looks like…I suppose it does come off with the skin???

Mrs. Whitehead didn’t bat an eye.

After 45 years of kids, I don’t think a thing they can say would ruffle their feathers.

Last New Years we were up in Nelson and it BUCKETED rain for days. We were doing our typical cheap holiday tenting, and our backpacking tents weren’t up to the task of keeping two active kids happy for 14 waking hours.  So we went to the “World of Wearable Arts and Classic Cars Museum” in Nelson.  At first it seems a strange juxtaposition–fashion/art along side vintage cars….but after I saw the males and females segregating at the door I completely understood.  If she’s going to be dragged to a car museum, it gives her something else to do.  If he’s going to be cajoled into a fashion show, it gives him something to see.

“Wearable” is a term used quite loosely in the World of Wearable Art show.  It just means the art hangs on a human body for display.  It’s NOT your typical fashion show.  It’s like a fusion of outlandish fashion with techno lighting, modern dance, music, spastic colours, and….complete impracticality.

“How was the show?” my friend’s husband asked when we returned to her house in Wellington.

“Amazing!  There was this lion, whose voice was done by Jemaine Clements, with a kind of sexy joking commentary backdrop to the bra parade….the lights!…Oh my gosh…There was this golden shimmering tree, and an angel with wings that was lifted onto a rock, and other actors dressed like marble statues, and hoop skirts, and this crazy thing that looked like a piece of intestine…”  The exuberant descriptions are disjointed.  The show seemed at the time to fit together better than that.

I think it’s precisely the show’s impracticality that’s so attractive.  WHY would I buy a plane ticket and a show ticket and travel to Wellington to see opulent never-to-be-worn costumes paraded around a stage with a backdrop of sensual dancers and music?  Because it’s so NOT sensible.  Not responsible, not practical, just plain jaw-dropping gorgeous.

Have a look at a couple of these montague films from years past–and remember that the actual real-deal show was 2 hours long with no intermission.

A few pictures from this year:

In my more insane moments I think it’d be fun to enter an exhibit–it’s a competition after all, anyone can enter, although not everyone who enters gets their costume paraded around the show.  In my even more insane moments I think it’d be fun to be a model and WEAR all those fantastical creations, strutting around the stage in high heels….

But then I remember that I need to make the kids’ lunches for tomorrow, and the rug needs vacuuming, and I’ve forgotten to text the childminder about tomorrow, and I’m 34 and not a design student and will look at fungus under the microscope tomorrow at work.  And all that’s good.  But not gorgeous.

Hey, want to come with me to WOW next year?

Have you ever felt that the whole world was conspiring against your moment of solitude?

Sunday morning.  Breakfast was made.  Kitchen was cleared.  Kids were playing happily, so flopped on my stomach in my bedroom to read the last chapter of my book, “Don’t Let the Goats Eat the Loquat Trees.”

2 minutes in I hear a swish as the door is pushed open.  “Mommy, what you doing??”  Naomi came around to the far side of the bed to look me in the face.

“Reading, honey.”  I kept the answer short in the vain hope that she’d get bored and go away.  Instead she grabbed hold of the comforter, found a toe hold, and hauled herself up onto the bed.  I carried on reading.  She bounced over to the shelves at the headboard, pulled down my paua shell filled with little stones, and tipped it onto the bedspread.

“Naomi!  Stop that.  Go away.  Get off the bed and go out of my room!”  I collected the stones from in and around the blankets, plopped her on the floor, shepherded her quickly through the door and closed it firmly behind her.  She can’t read the handle when it’s latched.

I had been back to my book for three minutes when I heard the latch again.  “Mom, what are you doing?”  It was Milo’s turn to enquired.

“Just reading for a minute, can you go play?”  He started the ascent of the bedclothes, and I abruptly cut him off.  “I don’t want you in my room, go play!” I commanded, pointing towards the door.  “One….Two….Threeeeee!  Close that door behind you!”

I pondered how heavy a dead bolt would have to be to keep the kids out of the room and made a mental note to peruse Mitre 10’s hardware section sometime soon.   Hardly a minute had elapsed before I heard the door again. 

“Hey, what are you doing?” Jeremiah asked.

“I’ve got half a page left to my book, and I just want to finish it!” I flung back in frustration.  “I need a hidey hole!  Or perhaps a second floor room accessed by a trap door with a pull-up ladder!”  He grinned.  He’s used to my eccentric outbursts.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.  It’s not a bad policy, really.  Complaining isn’t beautiful.

But sometimes it becomes just a little artificial.  Sometimes if you say nothing negative, you deny life’s experiences.  That’s not very helpful.  If I only see other’s smilies, then by comparison I feel lousier because it looks like I’m the only miserable sod on the planet.  I’m fully aware of my own bad moments but no one else’s.

In that spirit, let me post a downer.  It’s to make you all feel better about your lives, really.

Prepare for the whinge.

Here it is: Somehow I have a “bulging disk” in my back pushing on a nerve, causing pain from my hip to my toes. See that black thing between the vertebrae? It’s supposed to be a tidy little balloon staying neatly between the bones, not a jelly-filled donut with the jelly squeezed out.

It sounds so minor, eh?  “Bulging disk.”  Like “saggy biceps” or a “pot belly” or other creeping signs of age. But it’s not minor.  It has escaped its normal boundaries and moved into territory formerly occupied by a big fat nerve.  Nerves protest as they get shoved into small-than-normal spaces, and by “protest” I mean that all the nervy bits connected downstream send pain signals screaming back up to the brain.   What’s more, there seems to be nothing I can do about it.  It’s probably been progressing for the last 5 months, which is how long it’s taken to navigate the Molasses-in-February pace of the New Zealand health system and get an MRI.  It’s been five months since I’ve gone on a run.  Two months since I’ve escaped to the hills.  Five months since I’ve stood at the kitchen sink without pain.  Minimal signs of improvement.  All this just after I ran a marathon, and a good one!  Oh how the mighty have fallen.

A crisis really makes you think.  “What is happiness made of?”

Is happiness made of one’s body feeling good?  The physical activity and strength I always had is gone, and in my more pessimistic moments I wonder if it’ll ever return.  I can’t reach the wilder parts of nature that I love.  Solitude, too, which I used to get while running and hiking, is a thing of the past.  I’ve even given up on rollerblading.  If happiness is made by feeling good, then I’m sunk.

Can happiness be made of friendship?  Solidarity?  Yes, but close friends living nearby are few and far between these days.

Does God give us happiness just because?  Maybe, but He hasn’t been particularly communicative to me lately.

Can happiness be made of creativity?  Yes, and thank God I still have that.  I can still solve plant mysteries at work, I can still make Naomi a quilt, I can still write stories for Milo.

Here’s another question:  Do humans get happier as we improve our situation in life?  Or do humans get happier when we stop striving, when we resign ourselves to the limitations our lives, when we consciously start focusing attention on what we do have rather than what we do not?

I’m not sure, but having tried and failed with the first philosophy, perhaps it’s time to try the second.