Doctor Quake Chronicles

Vol 6, Issue 13

Saturday 2 October 2010

Greetings from Wellington.

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon. A bit of a shock after a truly sodden September. The past week in particular has been an absolute shocker: landslips, flooding, train derailments, you name it. We have all the downstairs doors open and most of the upstairs windows. It is a little bracing inside I am finding but is great to swap staleness for oxygen.

The aftermath of the Christchurch earthquake will linger for some time. After shocks seemed to have subsided but the rebuilding will take over a year probably. People in the worst affected suburbs are still using portaloos in the streets for instance as infrastructure is only very slowly re-established. Crumble and I had a bar-b-q sausage at the shops this morning – a Christchurch fundraiser. It has stirred troops into action around the country really. Although I do realise that two snaggers may be a far cry from a major rebuilding contribution!

The last Dr Quake was sent the afternoon of the Sports Dinner which went remarkably quickly really. I am still smirking about having met the school magazine deadline ahead of time. I am quite motivated to get going on speeches for the valedictory dinner and the three prize giving but I have been diverted on to other tasks in this first week of term holiday. I have caught up with correspondence and a back log of meetings. Such fun.

I have been using the more relaxed timeframe of the holidays to play around with IT a bit. I have got onto a web technology blog called ReadWriteWeb, the RSS feeds from which I am trying to keep up with. I have also been making a conscious effort to keep up with feeds from the ABC and SBS along with a variety of education sources. I think I am only close to being a success because of the term break. I’ll see how I manage all the information during term time. There is certainly an avalanche of it. Potentially overwhelming. In the exercise I have started a Twitter account but not learned what to do with it yet and rediscovered a blog I began in 2006 and haven’t visited since 2007. Oops. I’ve decided that I will play with making Dr Q’s C into a blog and see how that goes. Then I could probably just send the link to it by email – maybe. More playing while I find out. Stay tuned.

I’ve been getting a daily feed from a guy called Ian Yorston (The Unreasonable Man if you are interested) who was a fantastic speaker at the recent ISNZ conference. He is Director of Digital Strategy at some posh school in the UK. His website feed contains links to quite interesting titbits. I have been sending them on to the relevant members of my teaching staff where I can. I have been intrigued by the discovery that it has been like dropping stones down a very deep well – mostly never heard of again. In the space of about four weeks I have had only three responses to what I have sent. I find this apparent dearth of curiosity/interest somewhat curious. Hmm. Anyway it has probably been Ian Yorston who has spurred my recent activity.

I read a couple of books last weekend. Celebrating the end of term I guess. I considered going out to buy a Labrador on Monday... I was driven to try my “new” glasses (which I have actually had for probably two years but which I don’t like – there is something very odd about how they make me see, I feel cross eyed) to discover that they are still no good, even when I am desperate as is the case now. I dug out the glasses which I had made even further ago than that and which are straight reading only. I haven’t worn them until now because they made me feel like I was looking down a pair of toilet rolls (only magnifying toilet rolls - just imagine). To my joy they are now fantastic so I will perhaps be able to read again. Apart from the time thing, it has been just too much like hard work for me to read a book for ages.

Dr Crumble is working on L’s thesis – again / still. He is up to chapter 3 this weekend. He is being driven crazy by her somewhat obtuse approach. I need to tiptoe around a little bit! The Retail Institute seems to be keeping him very busy indeed. He hasn’t travelled for a while but is off to Auckland this week. They are shifting office in the middle of the month which promises to be fairly disruptive. The new location is more spacious apparently but much further from the station so he is contemplating driving to work. He bought a month’s train ticket yesterday and will test walk for two weeks in October to see how it goes. Ah – here’s a good one. GST went up from 10% to 12.5% on 1 October here. In the wet weather Neil has been catching the bus a bit. With the GST change the bus fare went from $1 to $2 – now that is a very big 2.5% dont you think?!

Moneypenny seems to be chirpier and with a glossy coat again. Goodness knows what was going on there. James Bond continues to be his dignified self.

Well that’s it for news.

Good bye for now.

Dr Quake (Jill) & Dr Crumble (Neil)