…a very long while since I came here. The last thing I posted here was the horoscopes for December 2010. I skipped January, I can’t remember why. Something about the summer holidays. I was writing the column for March. I remember this very clearly. It was a Tuesday. Normally I would have gone in to town to edit and podcast my radio show. I was getting ready to do that when Cathy txt me. She published my horoscopes in her newsletter and she was giving me a hurry up. “Have you done them yet” something like that. So I changed my plans and sat down to write. I was halfway done by lunchtime. By then my girlfriend Cherie had called in. We hung out for a bit. Chatted, shared our troubles. She vetted what I had done and gave me the thumbs up. She was getting ready to leave, her hand bag over her shoulder, when we felt it. The first wave, an earthquake, THE earthquake. We had been through so many aftershocks since September that it took us a moment to register that this one was something else. The shaking hadn’t stopped but had developed into waves, we were heading for the doorway for shelter when the floor literally picked us up and dumped us there, locked together in a clinch so intimate our friendship has never been quite the same since. She was laughing, I was crying, we were terrified. My whole house was heaving and shuddering, cupboards and shelves emptying their contents on to the floors…anyway it stopped eventually and my wee house had survived and so had we. My kids and husband were safe and sound, our side of town came out relatively unscathed…but our city was broken, nearly 200 people had been killed, the heart of the city had been devestated. The eastern suburbs had been ravaged, no power, no water, no sewerage and many many families made homeless.
It rocked my world, shifted my attention…so I stopped writing here…it might be time to come back though…we’ll see.