Posts by Susannah Shepherd
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Whoever was responsible for that setup needs a bit of a talking to, those shelves should have been anchored but unfortunately they rarely are.
I'm not sure why the university library, by the look of the photos, only braced some of the shelving and not all of it? The shelves that have shed their books but are still upright are the ones that had rods fixed across the top after the Arthur's Pass earthquake back in the 90s. I had the distinctly unpleasant experience of being in the uni library during the biggest aftershock then and seeing the laden shelves sway. Seeing the photos of the collapsed shelves has made me feel a bit queasy but not at all surprised.
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Wellington City Council has driven a massive project to identify and strengthen earthquake-prone buildings. Including just about all blocks of flats/apartments.
Do you know whether your building has been through that?
We're in Hutt City but, yeah, the place has been strengthened. That's why I'm morbidly curious to see over the next few days (a) how effective those strengthening standards have been, and (b) whether the handful of builders who contributed to leaky apartment buildings by cutting corners were doing likewise on any earthquake strengthening work.
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@Craig
Here's something I thought of. Yesterday, I managed to find out that all my Canterbury friends and rellies were OK in a matter of hours.
Atfer the Edgecumbe Quake in 1987, it was five days before I was able to talk to my parents.
Absolutely. Thanks to a bit of triangulation via the much-maligned Facebook and a few txts to the older family members who didn't automatically think to update their profiles from their mobile phones :-) we were able to account for almost all the whanau and friends by lunchtime, and figure out who we could call on in Chch to do some door-to-door for us if we weren't able to get in touch with others by later in the day. We only had to make one actual phone call.
The geology of this fascinates me - it looks like the NW of the city has got off lightly, but anything that used to be swamp or landfill is in trouble. I was amazed to hear of a colleague's 3 year old sleeping through the whole thing in Bryndwr while I was lying in bed in Wellington contemplating whether I should head for the doorframe as the floor kept going round and round for a very long time.
I'm also now slightly less sanguine about sleeping three feet from a 19th century brick wall which is the only thing between me and a 5 metre drop to the street... I'm going to be quite interested to find out how many facades have collapsed in heritage buildings which have been strengthened in recent years.
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You'd think this depressing and horrifying story - even if the numbers are a bit ropey - would give those here some pause for thought re special ed:
Early death concern for drop-outs -
P.S. I once saved the taxpayer about $4M as the result of a dream.
Well, I did try to come up with a complicated sporting metaphor (involving Duckworth-Lewis, a horrendous run-chase and the Marshall twins) but failed miserably.
The boring and prosaic truth is that we were given a big project to get up and running fast - which meant the costings were a bit, um, back of envelope. I had a nagging feeling we'd got something wrong, and my brain helpfully explained exactly how at 4 am on a Saturday - it was a fairly lucid dream, apart from the dancing trees. So I piled out of bed, chucked it into a spreadsheet before I could forget the whole lot, emailed my colleagues at 4.30 am to demonstrate my martyrdom to the cause :-) and went back to bed. End result: we managed to avoid procuring a whole big bunch of stuff we didn't need.
Not all public servants believe that underspends are evil...
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Fond as I am of a bit 'o slash occasionally, production and consumption thereof, the concept of sporty slash just isn't doing it for me - and I don't think it's just because of the RPF squick factor. (The Marshall twins: that's just wrong wrong wrong in too many ways to count.)
Perhaps it's the anti-intellectualism in the way sport and sportsmen are presented to us in the media - when I think of good slash pairings, it's usually men who *think*. Who does that leave us with? Please Lord, not Anton Oliver...
P.S. I once saved the taxpayer about $4M as the result of a dream. I doubt I've ever done anything so useful in a day at work while awake. :-)
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Marlborough Girls', 1980s, wagging or skiving. I didn't wag much at high school, just the occasional day or extended (liquid) lunch-break here or there.
I was however a persistent truant at primary and intermediate, with my parents' full knowledge - for reasons not unconnected with an item in today's news. Being moved from one class to another a week into the year, because my original teacher refused to teach me on the grounds I was too clever (and let that be known around the school), didn't exactly inspire me to spend much time there...
After that, high school was a relief - at least if you got beaten up there, you weren't made to believe that was *your* fault.
Emma said:
I thought we might discover a fair number of high-achieving trouble-makers here.
Not just here. We were discussing this at work amongst the grey Wellington bureaucrats, and a fair proportion of us had a history of extensive truancy.
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On the few occasions you see bisexuals depicted, they're almost always shown as promiscuous, untrustworthy, and not interested in real intimacy.
Unfortunately John Barrowman's Captain Jack hasn't exactly helped on at least some of those prejudices, though long may he carry on...
A bisexual friend once explained to me that he was simply attracted to certain people, rather than men or women - and that makes sense to me.
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Also, did anyone notice the sheer insanity of the cycling commentary for Hayden Roulston's silver-medal race?
Oh yes. Made even weirder by the Kiwi commentator's complete inability to pronounce his surname correctly...
So what happens when she stops for a toilet break during the Olympic marathon? We get a replay of the event.
Pity the poor director, Hadyn - the marathon must be easily the most boring event for which they have to put together coverage.
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And by the way how much of a fool was Pete Montgomery
I s'pose it's too much to hope we'll see the last of him now? I thought he was going to have a Quinn/Lomu moment at one point there.