Earthquake Report Day 15 (March 8)
March 8 was International Women's Day, but noting that was about the limits of what I felt able to do to celebrate it this year. Normally Suffrage Day, September 19, is the day the Women on Air programme, Plains 96.9 FM, organises an event—so fingers crossed the city and the programme will be in a state to do something by that time this year. At present the Plains 96.9 FM building is still inside the central city cordon (ie the off-limits zone) so who knows when we will be back on air—or what condition the building is in. (The station manager's latest advisory was still an "unable to even access the site to ascertain the level of damage." That cordon the Civil Defence folk have in place is definitely serious business and to be fair, probably still needs to be at this stage.)
Yesterday, March 8, I mostly just felt tired and it was a real struggle to get anything done, even though I've been doing so much up until now. I suspect this may be the aftermath of the initial, post February 22 adrenaline rush kicking in. Adrenaline is good stuff and helps you get through a lot that needs to get done—but sooner or later you have to signal 'time out' or pay the price. So I think I will be trying to take things a little more slowly over the next few days, despite all those things on the "still really need to make happen" list.
Getting back into the writing as of Monday definitely felt good, although just a little like dealing to the weight of Sisyphus's boulder. That was not just because of the immense, post February 22 tiredness, but also because I had to shift my head back into a completely different space from earthquake recovery. Like the rest of the city, everything in my study pretty much got thrown everywhere by the earthquake and although I had found the annotated manuscript and my editor's notes as a priority on the 22nd, securing it in my 'evacuation kit' (in the event evacuation was required, which fortunately it wasn't), the pages weren't necessarily in pristine order. So getting everything back to the point it was at as of 12.51 pm on February 22nd was the essential first step. The second was dealing with the weirdness of going back to doing what I had been doing then, as though none of the previous two weeks had happened—which engendered it's own strange sense of dislocation.
Although as I said in Monday's post, very much a step that needed to be taken. And despite the tiredness, one that has felt good as I slowly get back into the rhythm of the story that is The Gathering of the Lost, The Wall of Night Book Two.
Just as I scheduled this to post, a really good, solid, 4.3 aftershock came through, with a prolonged rumble and shake up of that same study—just to remind me that it's not over yet, not by a long chalk.
