Addendum

On a not so good note poor Christchurch has had a hell of day!!!

I was chatting with my friend Wendy on Instant Messenger and giving her a bit of a hard time for not even noticing a 4.3 earthquake when suddenly typed (badly) 'Huge one' I wasn't sure what she meant but then I realised that there was a huge earthquake hitting. She swore but kept typing, telling me what was happening. It seemed to go on for a LONG time but eventually it stopped and when it came up on the seismic drums it turned out to be a 5.5 - NOT small!!!!

A short time later there was a 4.4 and I was feeling REALLY sorry for Christchurch. Suddenly Wendy swore on the IM, said that it was a REALLY big one, that it felt like the house could come down and that she was off. Watching that one appear on the drums was just awful, it took me back to Feb 22, you could just tell it was big. Sure enough it was 6.0.Andrew felt it in Hawkes Bay!!!!

 No-one was killed, a few people were injured and some more buildings fell down but I think the mental strain is starting to show, people are fiunding it harder and harder to cope with the ongoing fear and uncertainty. I so feel for Chch.

The drums this afternoon:

June Post Plus 1

Taranaki was fab-ewe-luss!!!! I do love it down there.

I was very late leaving for Taranaki as the boys were booked to have their toenails trimmed at 10 on Saturday morning. When I got up to the paddock I called the boys, Tai looked up but I couldn't see Spyke. I walked down the paddock a bit and could see Spykie between the sheds so I called him and he called back. I thought that was very sweet but a little unusual as he would normally wander up so I figured something wasn't quite right. Sure enough the silly boy had wandered between two fences that eventually came together so it was too narrow for him to turn around. There was a tree right behind him so if he went to back out (if he even thought of that....I suspect not) it would tap him on the bum. There about 5 piles around him so he must have been there for a while, bless him. Once I got a halter on him I backed him out and he was sweet!!! However he ended up not getting his toenails done as the farrier is going away shortly and by leaving him a week he can get 2 seven week trims instead of a 6 and an 8.

So I didn't get on the road till after one but what a GREAT time to travel to New Plymouth!!!! There was almost no traffic!!! It was great!!! It was bucketing with rain when I left Auckland but it cleared up once I got over the Bombays. However as I was approaching Pirongia I saw this:

Hmmmmm I thought, methinks it's going to rain. And rain it DID!!!! I was driving along a straight and halfway along I could see a wall of water ahead of me. On went the winscreen wipers and down came the deluge. It was amazing. It was like someone opened a monsoon bucket above the car. I almost had to stop.!!!

The rest of the drive was mostly uneventful. I was on top of the world to be out on that road again. The only downer was that as I was heading out of New Plymouth there was an elderly man that had been knocked over and was lying on the road waiting for an ambulance, it made me cry. :-( However I checked the local paper today and there was no mention of it so hopefully that means he was fine.

I stayed with Barbera and Steve in Midhirst. It's so lovely there, out in the country with LOADS of berners. We had indian takeaway for dinner and Steve's yummy home made cookies for dessert and I have to say that Steve makes the BEST coffee!!!!! We watched a couple of movies while the rain poured down and then went to bed. There was a fabulous thunder storm rumbling away in the distance and it was great to lie there and listen to it.

In the morning we awoke to this:

How stunning is that?????? I LOVE Taranaki!!!!

I had a LOVELY day, with some sad bits. One of Barbera and Steve's dogs (Webster, who is Meggie's dad) was in hospital as he had suddenly lost the use of his back legs. He can still just feel someone squeezing his toes and can pee and poop so I am keeping EVERYTHING crossed that he has just twinged something and will come right. It is not looking promising though and it was heartbreaking to see him there, completely happy but dragging his back end. Please, anyone who reads this, have a quiet jingle for Webby tht he makes it through this as he is only 6 and it is just not his time. :-(

We went to visit Webby in hospital but, being a Sunday, everything was locked up so Barb left a message with the vets to see if we could make a time and we took the 'kids' for a walk along one of the new parts of the coastal walkway.

Fabulous bridge. :-)

After our walk we had lunch at Zanziba (along with the committee meeting, nuff said on that), then we shot over to see Web, which, as I said, was just heartbreaking!!!!! After giving him HUGE hugs and talking to the vet we went to East End to have a walk with all the berners.

We walked along the beach and the girls had a wonderful time.

It was a lovely  walk and we met lots of lovely people. :-)

I had to race away after the walk as it was after 3 and I wanted to get the worst of the drive (Mt Messenger and Awakino) over and done with before dark. The roads were great again, almost no traffic but just before Mokau I came over the brow of a hill to see this:

I thought there must have been a bad crash as that is almost the only thing that will bring a road to a complete stop. There were people out of their cars and wandering around so they had clearly been stopped for quite a while. Before long behind me was this:

I was very lucky though as only about 15 minutes after I arrived people were getting back in their cars and we started to move. Around the corner, the reason for the hold up became VERY clear.

A whooooole lot of cliff had come down. They were only letting cars go through one at a time and between each car they would look nervously up at the cliff and then hurry us through. I don't think anyone was hurt though so everyone was just held up for a bit.

Ther rest of the journey was uneventful and I arrived back home at about 8.

It was such a lovely couple of days and I can finish up with my favourite photo from the weekend.

Me and my girls. :-)

June Post

We are into winter officially now.... it is still really warm though. Apparently temperatures are about 6 degrees above normal. Having said that it has bucketed with rain on a few occasions (one of those occasions being today). So our days are now very short. I am leaving for work (and arriving at work) in the dark and it is starting to get dark when I get home at night. It is the one thing I really find difficult about winter is the lack of sunlight ...... and the mud!!!

I have just had a weekend out of Auckland which was FAB. The girls and I went to stay with my friend Kerri and her lovely dog Walter. It was great as the girls are very relaxed around Walt and had a nice restful weekend. I drove down on the Saturday, it was one of those really, really wet days. I got there just about dinner time and had a glass of wine in my hand before I could blink. :-) Unfortunately quite a lot more glasses of wine followed. I think we were so busy talking we didn't realise how much we were drinking (that's my excuse and I am sticking to it ;-).

So we both were feeling a tad seedy the next morning and it took us a fair while to get moving. Kerri is selling her house though and there were people coming through to look at the place so that got us up and about. We took the dogs for a walk along the beach. The tide was really high and there was very little beach to walk on and the sea was really stormy. My poor girls have to put up with my complete paranoia and were not allowed to go in too deep in case they get into trouble.

 Brina looking MAGNIFICENT

 Walt giving special kisses.

 The girls swimming

 Papamoa Beach

 Sammie looking gorgeous

A monarch!!! In June!!!!

After our walk we went for brunch in Papamoa. It was blinkin' HOT for June - 23 degrees!!!! The girls tucked themselves under the tiny table to take advantage of the shade and they were much admired. :-)

Sunday evening we had NO wine but ate lots of nibbley things and watched a DVD. Monday was a public holiday so out we went for brunch again into Mt Maunganui. It was very tasty.   The girls and I had to head off pretty much straight after brunch as we wanted to miss the worst of the 'going back to Auckland' traffic. As it was there was still a whole heap of traffic even that early. It was a lovely weekend.

Tomorrow I am heading off down to Taranaki for a committee meeting. It the BMD Club. I could have attended by phone by I felt it was a great opportunity for me to get some Taranaki air back into my lungs. I am finding that I am very homesick for Taranaki at the moment and I hope that a trip down will ease that a bit (although I suspect that it will actually make it worse.)

Post Tekapo

I have just had my weekend away at Lake Tekapo. Oh how I LOVE the South Island! It is such a stunning part of the world and it was so calming to be down in the mountains again. I really know now that I am NOT a city person, I am a mountains and lakes person.

I flew down on Friday morning after getting my stitches out from the second and last surgery on my face. I was picked up at the airport by my Girls' Weekend buddies and we headed straight out of town and down to the lake. It is about a 2 1/2 hour drive. We had a brief stop for a bite to eat and quick supermarket stop in Geraldine.

The lake was lovely when we got there. It was quite overcast which made it feel quite brooding.

We had a fairly early night as we were all pretty tired. Saturday dawned as a stunning day.

We ate breakfast and started heading towards Mount Cook. We had a bit of a stop at the Mount John Observatory which overlooks Tekapo. It was beautiful.

MT Cook though was shrouded in rain clouds, but it was still spectacular. We had a coffee at the Sir Edmund Hillary centre and then went back to Tekapo.

On Sunday we awoke to fresh snow on the mountains around the lake.

We pretty much ate and headed straight back to Chch as I was quite keen to see how the city had changed after the February quake. It was interesting....... I suddenly realised that I didn't want to be standing near any tall buildings, the lean on the Hotel Chancellor was astonishing and the Chch I knew had definitely gone. I think the people that continue to live there are an incredible bunch of very strong folks. Most of them that I have talked to still don't want to live anywhere else but they do find the constant shaking terrfying.

Yes!!! They ARE leaning!!!!

Overall, it was a FANTASTIC weekend. I loved every second of it!!!!!!

Other than all those exciting things life has been fairly quiet (which is a good thing!!!!). I have picked up a bit of clipping which has been great.

Brina is up to 44kg so one more and I will be a very happy 'mum'. Spyke is pretty much still on holiday, which is a real bummer. I really want to get him fit and get him out jumping but it so hard at this time of year. The ground is no good for paddock riding, it gets too dark to do much road riding and I don't have transport to get him to an all weather arena with lights. It is pretty disheartening.......but... he is still well and happy and that is what REALLY counts.

Sick as a dog!!!! (But not as expensive ;-)

It is now a month since the quake and a sort of new normality has settled in. All my colleagues in Chch now work from home as the office is in the 'Red Zone' that is still completely out of bounds. The CBD looks like a war zone, the devastation is pretty wide spread. I'm heading down that way early in May, it will be very interesting to see it first hand (although we will be heading to Lake Tekapo for the weekend).

I have been SICK!!!! I had a gastro bug last week and was just revolting!!! I think I may have picked it up at the BMD Garden Party (Pics to follow - Garden Party, not illness). I ended up having four days off work and the weekend to recover. It was HORRIBLE!!! I also had a lesion on my face checked out and it turns out it is a melanoma but it has been caught in time so that comes out later in the week. Quite nervous about that really, it seems quite a lot of face to lose. Oh well, better off without it. Doc reckons I will lose a few wrinkles though :-)

Enough about me. Brina is doing well. I have changed her on to a new dog food and she is doing really well on it. She is bouncy and happy and full of beans. The only trouble is she seems to vomit more when she is on it so I have changed her to half and half with her old food. She weighed in last week at 42kg which is just great!!! A couple more kgs and I will be happy. She still continues to get herself in trouble. I have been giving her some vet tinned food to help get the weight on. After I bought the last lot I popped into the supermarket to grab a couple of items and came out to find that she had chewed through the tin  and had eaten half of it!!!! I had visions of the vet wanting to operate to get bits of tin out of her and me having to put her down 'cos I couldn't afford it. Fortunately I gave her a huge dinner that she promptly threw up which brought up a few bits of tin with it and she doesn't seem to have had any after effects. She also turned 6 yesterday. There have been a number fo times when I thought she wouldn't make it to 6 but that milestone has been accomplished so now I need to work on 7.

Last weekend was the Bernese Mountain Dog Garden Party in Rotorua. It was first weekend away with the dogs since Brina's 'troubles' started and it was really, REALLY nice to get out of Auckland. The girls were really good but got a bit anxious at night so I ended up sleeping in the car with them so that Brina wouldn't do one of her 'anxiety chews' on something highly unsuitable.

It was great to catch up with lots of bernese people and dogs and a good was had by all. Sammie was funny. She 'tolerated' the weekend really. She just doesn't 'do' showing but once the cart came out she was as happy as a wee sand boy. She loves to put her cart. :-) Brina was great in it too.

Spyke is still on holiday, I just keep getting waylaid from riding him so now I am just going to leave it till my face is healed up again. I am hoping we will be able to do some winter show hunter this year. Tai is looking fabulous for a nearly thirty year old and is still full of life.

I have a new flatmate, Sarah, which is really nice and my friend Kerri and her LOVELY little Walter have been staying for a couple of weeks, which was really, really nice.

I think that's everything that has happened in my world recently.We are moving into Autumn now and it is just BLISS to have cooler temperatures. The evenings and mornings are really starting to close in though, which I am a bit LESS keen on......

I will post photos soon. I am having 'technical difficulties' :-/

Devastation in Christchurch

It certainly has been a bit of a week in little old NZ. The week when Christchurch was rocked by another big earthquake. It was 'only' a 6.3 (last one was 7.1) but this one was far, far worse. It was shallower and closer to the city. I was having lunch with my Christchurch friend Kathryn (she was up working in Auckland) when someone came in and said that Chch had just had a big aftershock. We joked a bit about it and brought Geonet up to have a look. As the seismic drums started to show the earthquake we were all a bit stunned by what we saw. It was HUGE!!!! (Funnily enough, when I was chatting to Kath I thought I had felt a tiny quake).

Currently it is 4 days post quake and there is still a search going on in Chch for the living and the dead, although hope is very much fading that anyone will be found alive now. It is such a dreadful, tragic thing. Every time I saw footage of people I scanned the faces, wondering if it was someone I know or work with. The PGG building is a mess, it pancaked down but many people survived in that building. Every survivor that they pulled out said the same thing: They got out, and when they turned to look at the building, none of them could believe what they were seeing or that they survived it. By far the worst building was the CTV building, it just seemed to dissolve into a pile of burning rubble. A Macedonian man managed to reach his wife by cell phone many hours after the quake. She was trapped in the building and had lost three fingers but was OK and was with others. I waited and waited for her to be rescued...but they never found her. The saddest building was the cathedral. A group of people at work were watching events unfold on TV when they showed the spire collapsed. Everyone in the room gasped, it was like the heart had been ripped out Christchurch. When I was down there a few short weeks ago I had thought it sad that the cross had fallen off the cathedral and yet, I now wish with all my heart that that was all that was wrong with it.

Bob Harvey (the mayor) has been incredible. The man simply doesn't seem to sleep. He is compassionate, caring, focused, calm and a tower of strength for Christchurch. He is so positive and yet realistic. He brings hope but doesn't promise false hope. Jon Key has also been a true leader. He speaks so eloquently (not the official speeches that are written FOR him, they are almost unworthy) but I feel like he always 'tells it like it is'. He looks exhausted but I admire him immensly. The USAR crews all deserve medals they have all worked tirelessly alongside the Firemen, Police, Army and Navy. Then there are all the Civil Defence people, Red Cross and just the every day people trying to make a difference. I feel humbled by the international response. The USAR teams that have been sent from other countries are God sent!!!!

All my friends and colleagues in Chch are safe. I confess I cried when I finally heard from the last one, I was so relieved. They have all been lucky and their families and homes are intact.

I have found it a difficult week. Here I am tucked up safe and sound in Auckland and all I want to do is help. Watching the fear and anguish on television has been heart breaking and I have shed a tear more than once.

I don't know how Christchurch can survive this second dreadful blow but over the last few days of watching people pick themselves up and find a way forward and watching Bob Parker I believe that it will and it will be stronger and better.

I have only been to Chch a handful of times in my life but I love the city, it has a vibe, a heart and soul that is beautiful and it will rise again.

Kia Kaha Christchurch.

A Colleague's desk moments after the quake

The dome outside the window of the Chch office

The Cathedral, moments after it collapsed

Home again.

Brina is now home again. The full story is:

I got home on Thursday evening at about 6:30. I had been in Christchurch for my farewell and handover. When I walked in both girls came to meet me as usual but when I got into the living room I found raisin packets on the floor. This sent me into an immediate panic as raisins can be lethal to dogs. A quick check revealed the pantry wide open. Brina was looking like she had eaten a lot so I tried to get her to vomit with some salt water. It didn't work so I got straight onto the vets. They said to bring her in. I threw both dogs in the car and flew down the motorway (at slightly illegal speeds) to the vets. By the time we got there Brina was looking really big so I was pretty sure bloat was now an issue too.

They took both dogs out the back to induce vomiting. Sammie obliged and managed to purge about 400g of raisins. She was then put on a drip and checked in. Brina retched a lot but couldn't vomit. They took x-rays to see if she had a twisted gut and then tried to pump her stomach. This was unsuccessful too, the only way to save her now was surgery.

My friend Kristina had come down to the Emergency Centre, she used to work there so offered to scrub in if a spare pair of hands would help.  They accepted.  So Brina went for her second life saving surgery in 6 months. I was very, very lucky as one of their top surgeons just happened to be there and he performed the operation. The operation went well. Afterwards the vet said that he was 'very impressed' at how much she had managed to eat. They scooped out about 4 litres of stuff: wrappers, sugar, coconut, raisins and lord knows what else. The vet said that she would have certainly died without the surgery.

She has been in hospital for the last 2 days and has been very depressed (we will blame it on the drugs). She is home now and looking very skinny and sad. She still is not eating but we are hoping that now she is home she will soon want to eat again *crossing fingers*.

On a completely different note, PROIR to both girls trying to kill themselves this week I had a fab time in Christchurch. I really like Christchurch and I really like my old team down there. We went out for dinner to Sticky Fingers and had a beautiful meal and lot of laughs. The team gave me a beautiful Pandora bracelet with a pony charm on it.

There were two reasonable earthquakes while was down there and I never felt a thing, I am quite disappointed by the quality of SI quakes. ;-)

After visiting Brina yesterday I went in to New Lynn to get a charm for my bracelet with the gift I got from Provisioning. I was able to get two charms so I got one that was kind of 4 leaf cloverish for Brina and a really cool silver one that will remind me of my time in Prov. I will post a photo when I am able.

Spyke is now back on holiday again for a short time. We were supposed to be show huntering on Saturday morning but Brina came first.

I start my new job tomorrow so have got my friend Tina coming in to look after Brina while I am at work. Hopefully it will just be a case of being here and syringe feeding her a couple of times a day.