Hi all, I have a few spare moments so I thought I might write an update on how things are going here. I've been quiet lately but for good reasons, things have been settling down and slowly returning towards normality.
Last Monday we moved into a temporary office. The building that houses our usual office sustained a lot of water damage after the earthquake activated the sprinkler system. The boss has been trying to get out of the lease (for this and other reasons) but it looks like they'll have it ready for use soon, possibly this coming week. The temporary office space is working fairly well, except for the distractions of having everyone together in the same room. The only major annoyance is the IT situation; our main office server is still in its temporary location and it's very slow to access files over the VPN connection. We are still getting aftershocks. The biggest ones are about magnitude 4.5 and we'd be getting maybe one or two of those a day with a handful of smaller ones, mostly around 3.5. The scientists say that the aftershocks are mostly generated at each end of the main fault, and one end is uncomfortably close to the city. I don't know how accurate the location data is, but when I put the coordinates into Google Maps it sometimes shows the location directly under people's houses in the outer suburbs! The shakes don't worry me so much now but the noise that precedes them still gets the adrenalin running. The sound is hard to describe, it's a bit like thunder. We haven't heard anything from the insurers yet. They have tens of thousands of claims to process and a broken chimney isn't going to be high on the priority list so we're expecting to have to wait a while. There is a silver lining though, due to the cost of repairing or replacing chimneys we are likely to qualify for an energy efficient heat pump as a replacement. You may find the insurance situation for natural disasters to be interesting. The first $100,000 (+tax) of damage to houses is covered by the government-run Earthquake Commission (EQC), plus another $20,000 for personal effects. That wouldn't even cover half the value of most houses, so private insurance will cover any shortfall if the damage is bad enough. I don't remember the current estimate of total damage across the city, it's a few billion dollars which really isn't too bad when you consider what it could have been. I've taken tomorrow (Monday) off as it's my birthday. I also thought a four day weekend would be nice :) We've had stunning weather over the past few days, and I got to meet adventurer extraordinaire Steve Gurney at an outdoors expo. I bought a copy of his autobiography because he said he'd sign it. He's turned to coaching and motivational speaking now and the bastard has got me thinking about goals again. I mean that in the nicest possible way, I have tremendous respect for him and I do need a kick in the pants from time to time. Cheers, Dave David Mann [email protected] http://www.multisport.net.nz/ skype: multisport.net.nz -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
