Life Part 1

So glad you stopped by, there has been much happening around our place since I last blogged. 

Well, we have decided to move to the country next year.  We like the area north of Christchurch in and around north Canterbury and the Waimak. River.  With this decided, we now face the task of tidying up our section and last minute painting jobs inside.  We imagine putting the house on the market end of January/ beginning of February.  So do stop by and read how we undertake this move.  We are all very excited about the chance to move to the country.  I think the day I got chickens was the moment when I really wanted to live on a small farm.  Georgia is very very excited because she will finally get her own horse and be able to ride and look after it in a safe environment, on our property.  We are not in favour of Georgia having grazing in a paddock out of the city, where she would be on her own all day and with no adults around should anything happen.  We worry about stranger danger and her being vunerable on her own.  She said all she wants to do is be able to wake up, look out the window and see her horse.

Winter has well and truly disappeared along with spring.  Our weather has warmed up and we are enjoying lovely warm weather everyday now.  Very hot days are also with us.  In the last week we had a 28.5 degree day and a 28.2 yesterday.  Hot going when you are trying to landscape your grounds in preparation for selling.  Speaking of selling, I thought I would touch on the selling with you, and also bring you up to speed on what we have been doing since June. The preparations involved in making your house presentable for selling are quite time consuming.  And as you can imagine we have a big job ahead with making our yard look "urbanised" and beautifilly landscaped.  But we think it's worth every ounce of effort to get the best price we can, that money will allow us to spend more at the other end where it matters.

The last of the rhodos in bloom

So, what have we been doing lately?  Well in general, parts of Christchurch are very slowly returning to normal.  A new normal though, 9 months after 22 February and 14 months after the initial big quake.  The aftershocks  have disapeared almost completely, and we are just getting the odd one every now and then.  People are now being forced to move out of their homes due to whole suburbs being unrepairable meaning a massive scale of home/land buy up by the government , 6000 homes so far.  Deconstruction work is still going on in the city where still more buildings are coming down.  There are lots of spaces where there once stood buildings.  Small businesses are popping up in these spots, mainly vendors selling coffee and hot food.

Well, the gardens are planted out with less vegetables this season.  Infact the gardens are being removed in a big way to make way for lawn and that landscaped look.  Once the garlic and potatoes are done that garden will go as well.  That will leave the main garden behind the picket fence.  We were just going to leave everything pretty much like it is.  But I read a really good article in Saturday's Press about not underestimating the value of a landscaped section when selling.  People want to see that that all the hard work is done so that they can just move in and enjoy what's there.  People will be unlikely to buy homes with gardens and lawns that need lots of work doing to them.

The garden beds being returned to grass & the new grass we have to grow under the clothes line where the tent sat for 6 weeks.

In September, EQC began repair work on our home.  We were given the option of moving to a motel for the duration of the work, however, with all our pets this made it difficult to do.  We compremised and moved into our tent on the lawn.  For about 6 long weeks we lived in that tent.  Our garden shed became a makeshift kitchen complete with fridge and microwave.  We had the use of our 2nd toilet in the laundry, but no showering/bathroom facilities. MMMmmm, this was hard let me tell you. Our family, neighbours and friends kindly let us use their showers for that time.  But we were all pleased when we got our bathroom back.

 The extra room on the end has been taken down, so the tent originally had 3 rooms

Life in a large tent with 2 teenagers and 2 dogs certainly made life interesting to say the least.  We had to evacuate on 2 occasions due to major storms flooding the ground.  There were times when the tent was lashed all night with gale force winds as well.  But I look back now that we have moved back into our newly decorated home and think how thankful we are that we only had small cracks that needed some plaster and paint.

Thanks for stopping by,

Blessings

Lee-Anne

Just A Little Note To You All

Just a quick little note to you all.

As you can see I am having a quiet time on my blog at the moment.  Constant stress and earthquakes do have a habit of catching up with you after a while, so I am concentrating on looking after my closest loved ones who are dear to my heart.  I still, however, enjoy reading all your blogs and finding out what other people are doing with their lives!


Talk to you all soon
Blessings,  Lee-Anne

Finally... Mothers Day Part 2

At last I have a moment to catch up with you all.  I have missed blogging about our everyday life here in Christchurch, but I have still made time during my day to read your inspiring blogs on my blogroll. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading about what YOU have all been busy doing.

The last five weeks of self-employment have gone by in a blur, we are still in the black and coping fine.  I am elbows deep in  GST receipts and invoices, but loving every minute of it.  The best part is that the income is our very own, where we can make a day to day difference in our "at the moment very frugal lifestyle" and get ahead a little.

The heading for my blog has changed YET AGAIN! I know, I know... you must think "here she goes again!" I wanted to go simple, me thinks I went too over-simple. Well I must be honest and say there was a veritable stampede from family (my lovely and terribly honest sisters that is) telling me how much they missed my animal photos, reading lists and general busyness going on in my blog.  Well, point taken ladies and I have tried for something new.  I can't seem to help myself really, I'm a self confessed change-a-holic and doomed to a life time of constantly moving around furniture and updating blogs.

I have been meaning to bring you some photos of the damaged city centre that we visited on Mothers Day, so below I have selected a few to show you.

 Bridge of Remembrance and Cashel Mall behind.  Looking east a bit further is the 26 storey Hotel Grand Chancellor which is being demolished from next week.  Demolition will take until next year and cost at least 10 million dollars alone.  500 mutli storeyed buildings are due for demolition. This is as far as we could go from here.  The mall has been tidied up considerably since the earthquake, where rubble completely covered this street.

Even the steps up to the bridge are cracked.

Lovely walking beside the river Avon

 The autumn leaves and filtered sunlight through the trees

We had a "moment" finding out about the man on this particular statue.The statue celebrates the life and death of Sergeant Henry James Nicholas, VC MM, born in Lincoln in 1891 and died in action France on 23rd October 1918.  A Victoria Cross recipient who sadly died 18 days before Armistice Day.  Those poppies were obviously a leftover from ANZAC Day

Henry Nicholas

Beautiful art deco wall on the Hereford Street bridge cracked

The old Christchurch Public Library very damaged

Liquefaction still remains on the street where it bubbled up out of the ground.  It's at least 20cm deep.  Our Police Headquarters is on the left.

The children view Clarendon Towers.  Because of the drop zone around the building, it isn't safe to get any closer.  Even businesses around this building can't get access because the risk of this building falling is too great.  Such is the danger, no one has entered it since 22 February. Imagine having your papers stuck in there!

Visitors Centre only just being held up

The beautiful Christchurch Arts Centre.  Today our newspaper mentioned that it could take up to 15 years to completely restore.

Typical scene tourists come to Christchurch for.  The river Avon meanders through the entire city, but is particularly beautiful through the inner city.

In contrast to the iconic river scenes, many people gather at this intersection to glimpse a close up view of the destruction on Colombo Street.  Autumn sunlight baths this scene in an eerie glare. That queue of traffic did not stop the whole time we were there.  In fact you could hardly get across that one lane for cars.

Destruction can clearly been seen from this vantage point.  A mainly silent crowd just stood and just watched.  In this one block of street, 13 people died.  This was the part where the 2 buses were crushed, and on the left side of the road many pedestrians perished.  This was apparently due to the buildings being made from un-reinforced masonry.  The buildings on the right, built very recently, were left unscathed.

On the ground the scale of rubble seems enormous

People's clothing and household items still sitting where they ended up 3 months on from that day

Bye for now
Blessings

Mothers Day - Part 1

Around Home
Welcome to my new look blog, hope you like it.  Am trying to go "simple" in real life and in blogland and it's taken me a wee while to find this particular heading that I 've always liked. 

We were woken abruptly yesterday morning at 3am by a large nasty earthquake, a 5.3 magnitude centred in Rolleston .  This takes our total of aftershocks and new earthquakes to nearly 6000 in the last eight months!  That seems an incredible statistic when written down.  Even more unbelievable that we Christchurch residents have suffered through it all, day in day out.

Carpe diem  -  translated as "seize the day". Carpe literally means "to pick, pluck, pluck off, cull, crop, gather", but Ovid said the word in the sense of, "To enjoy, seize, use, make use of".

The above phrase is something a lot of people in our city have embraced, and for us despite all the hardship and suffering going on around us, the events have meant an unexpected employment opportunity in our home.  Alf has finally taken a life long dream of self-employment and has made it a reality.  Three weeks ago he resigned from the drilling company he had just started work at, and has become a contractor to the City Council.  My my, I can tell you we thrashed this move out, over and over, pros and cons, do we - don't we, we prayed with our church members for the right answer.  There really isn't a right or wrong answer to a situation like this.  We are optimistic that based on Alf's qualifications and the abundant employment opportunities in the infrastructure of the city, he can earn a "decent wage".  So for the last few weeks, my time has been taken up with office jobs, phone calls and accounting.  But that's quite OK with me.  I come from an accounting/office background in my previous life before children.  So I am quite happy to play office lady to my darling husband.  We pray each day that this new direction will be successful and lasting.

Mothers Day
I was given the most special attention for Mother Day this year.  I really didn't want too much fuss, but the family had other ideas.  They concluded I was the MOST important person in the house and that life would simply grind to a halt without me. BLUSH.

A lovely treat coffee - and a magazine

Spending time with my family

A healthy lunch for the weight and health conscious mother

Outside the cafe, the deck extends out over the Avon River allowing us wonderful views of the river.  Not too crowded which is great for 12.30, not many venturing into the city I think.  Notice the cafe cat, Max, alseep by the gas heater.  He curls up and stays there all day!

Punting and rowing on the Avon has been in this location 125 years and is quite a Christchurch institution, I have vivid memories of being little and rowing here in the school holidays.  Much of the land around it seems damaged, so it was good to enjoy something unchanged from before the earthquake.

They think of everything, especially when lunching on a cold day

Alex and Georgia on the statue of

James Edward Fitzgerald on Rolleston Avenue

Fitzgerald was the first Superintendent of Canterbury between 1853 to 1857

Last Bit Of Earthquake News, Now I'm Done

Last week I had planned to finish concentrating on the earthquake and its aftermath, and begin blogging again about a topic very close to my heart (and purse strings),  grocery prices, budgeting and living frugally on one wage. So more of these thoughts to come this week, you see I have been thinking again!

However, I couldn't resist putting this amazing piece of footage on here.  The footage highlights how incredibly hard it would have been to out-run a falling building, when it took mere seconds for buildings to collapse.  Watch closely in the second footage, the cars first start moving sideways, then up and down.

Lee-Anne

Weekly Roundup - Birthday Celebrations, Water Pumps And A Stroke

Around The Home
Thought I should tell you about what has been happening around here in last few days.

Birthday celebrations were held this week for Alf.  As he is a man he probably won't mind me telling you he turned 47.

Just as an aside, Alf is a very busy man at the moment.  He is putting in 12 to 14 hour days working on our battered city's water supply.  As an engineer with many talents, he has a specific history of working on the pumps for our wastewater plant for some 24 years, before sadly being made redundant.  However, in the city's hour of need, they have seconded Alf (via the new job at the drilling company) to work on the water pumps.  He has so far this week worked 9 days in a row ,and for very long hours. So, it has been an equally long week for us at home, so sorry not much blogging has been done.

Alf's job at the moment is to treat our (previously untouched) water with chlorine because of contamination from the sewerage pipes.  Through his working with the water system staff, we are able to see council-only lab results for the city water.  These emails clearly show the pumping stations around the city that have tested positive for ecoli.  There are masses of positive results, so it's still very important to boil the water after all this time.  As I recently experienced the symptoms of food poisoning, I am extra vigilant on this front.  Alf has kindly brought home some boxes of bottled water from his work, allowing me a small break from the jug.

Busy at work in one of the pumping stations

A container of chlorine being readied for our water

A map our our city, the dark green bit is the only part of the city where sewerage is working.  That's where we live, the rest of the city are using long drops, chemical toilets and porta loos.

Amazing to think contraptions like this are stopping nearly half a million residents from getting very sick.  Alf has the ability to "think outside the square" to find solutions to unusual problems

Let Them Eat Cake

The mere mention of celebrating with food sent Georgia and I into the kitchen to create yummy decadent fare.  Over the last year I have twigged my quick chocolate recipe, adding a slight coffee edge to it.  The combination of chocolate and coffee taste, mocha I suppose you could call it, gets me really excited.  To my chocolate cake recipe I added cooled coffee where the recipe called for just water. Here is my easy chocolate cake recipe.  I will often delete the cocoa, adding extra flour turning these into amazing little quick cupcakes.  I used this recipe a while back for Alf's leaving morning tea, making chocolate cupcakes.

How To Make A Big Chocolate Cake In A Hurry 

Ingredients:
2 cups self-raising flour
pinch of baking soda (bi-carbonate of soda)
4 tablespoons cocoa
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 cup water
150g melted butter

Put all ingredients into a large mixing bowl 

Beat with an electric mixer for 3 minutes
Pour mixture into large greased tin (approx. 25x30cm)
Bake at 190 deg C fan bake for 35 minutes, or for 50-69 minutes normal oven

Butter Icing

100gm butter, softened
2 cups icing sugar, sifted
1/4 teaspoon vanilla essense
1-2 tablespoons hot water

Cream butter until light and fluffy.  Add vanilla.  Gradually beat in icing sugar, beating until smooth.  Add sufficient water to give a spreading consistency.

Butter icing with coffee added for extra taste

Ready for icing by Georgia

Handy Icing for when time is short, thoroughly recommend this product

With a little help from mum, Georgia got the cake decorated

Butterfly Cakes

Using the 3 minute sponge from the iconic Edmond's Cookbook, I placed small spoonfuls of sponge mixture into pretty little patty cases.  Once they had cooled, I cut out a cone in the centre, cutting that in half.

Cream was piped into the centre (at this point some lemon curd could be added) and the butterfly wings placed into the cream.  Icing sugar dusted on top. Serve.

These dainty cakes were made in less than an hour

On My Mind

Lastly, my lovely Dad, Jim, suffered an unexpected stroke early this week.  He is a  fit and healthy man, so this has totally come out of the blue for my mother and two other sisters.  They are calling it a min-stroke, luckily the symptoms lasted only about 24 hours. He blacked out while reading the morning paper at the dining table, falling from his chair and hitting the wall.  The only indication something was not quite right was the partial paralysis on one side of his face.  None this less,  it has been upsetting for us all.  Dad came out of hospital yesterday afternoon, and is resting at home.  The stroke has meant he cannot drive for quite some time, and is now taking quite a few medications to prevent any more strokes happening.  We are all cautiously hopeful that everything is behind us, but the doctors did call it a warning sign.  So I am praying that his health remains as good as it is at the moment.

Blessings

Lee-Anne

Christchurch Memorial Day In Photos

Another week where our lives seemed like they were getting back on track, moving on from lack of sleep and aftershocks.  However, just to remind us to keep on our toes, a nasty 5.1 aftershock at 9.47pm on Sunday night.  Here is a rough update on the main parts of life in Christchurch at the moment;

• We are still boiling our water, this has now officially been happening for 1 month.  I know exactly how much water we all drink in our house because I have to boil all the stuff everyday.
• Our city library is still closed.
• We are busy preparing in earnest our emergency kits for 2 cars, 2 cats (thanks Leanne at Cottagetails), a front door (get out now, you're being evacuated) kit and a stay at home kit.  An expense I'm some how trying to squeeze out of the household/grocery budget.  Lucky for us baked beans and spaghetti are .99 cents each at Countdown this week. 
• We are still limiting all unnecessary travel around the city, no going into any older buildings and malls and no parking beside any buildings. Definitely no parking buildings ever again!
• We are banned from watering the garden or washing the car.  Luckily it's raining today to water my new seedlings.
• The odd sleeping arrangements in the house still continuing, everyone back in bedrooms, in most cases not their own though.  However, the family are all sleeping through the night.
•  

Christchurch Memorial
Georgia and I attended the memorial as planned.  The day was very hot and sunny, without a cloud in the sky.  I agree with what has been said about the day, that it was a wonderful tribute the ones who died, and to the people of Chirstchurch.  We watched a 14 minute montage before the event started, which showed the extent of damage in the streets of the CBD.  This previously unseen footage was heart breaking. All the buildings we have been to in the past, or shop at, or visit for very specific reasons are gone.  If you can imagine 80% of your favourite places to visit suddenly disappearing one day, you might get the picture.  It dawned on me while watching that montage, that our lives have truly been altered, and that life has changed for good.  In a sense, we are all mourning the "death" of those buildings as well as the people who perished in them.

Georgia had the most amazing opportunity to meet Prince William.  She shook his hand and spoke quickly with him.  She says she will never wash her hand again! Georgia also shook hands with Bob Parker (our mayor) and with Dave Dobbyn (famous New Zealand singer).  I only managed to get some quick photos as Prince William and John Key walked past where I was standing.

Prince William of Wales

Our Prime Minister, John Key

 Willie Apiata, our Victoria Cross recipient.  Unfortunately, he turned around just as I was taking this shot.

The USAR dogs, very cute.  Georgia was really keen to find out more about them.  The USAR men were very welcoming with her, and patiently answered her questions.

The council had gone to alot of trouble with lovely touches around the park.

Looking down 3 blocks to the damaged Christchurch Cathedral and CBD

This is the reason business owners are not being allowed back into their buildings, because each minor aftershock brings down more masonry

The repair bill for our beautiful Arts Centre Complex alone will cost $100 million