• Our house is apparently the 2nd to oldest in Arch Hill, built around 1870, and used to be the shepherd’s hut for King’s farm which took up most of Arch Hill across to Kingsland.
• His house was built in 1890 and there is a secret well on his property that he can’t find. His kids also think their house is haunted and often see things in mirrors and lights turn on by themselves.
• Two hare krishnas blew themselves up accidentally across the road in 1976. They were planning on blowing up the meat works but accidentally did themselves instead. Their body parts were all over Great North Road and the street, and they found an arm on a roof of one of the warehouses. The shockwave tipped over cabinets and water cylinders in houses in the neighbourhood.
• A guy who went to a party at our house in the ’80s murdered another guy at the party – slit his throat and dumped him in a skip on the corner of the street and then went back to the party.
• A girl called Emily was murdered by her baby-daddy and whose hand in marriage she declined in 1875.  She used to haunt the kindergarten down the end of the road until 6 years ago when they had a religious blessing on the site.

oooOOoooOooo!

1. Be authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.
2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.
3. Get off the computer and connect with real people and culture. Life is visceral.
4. Constantly improve your craft. Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.
5. Travel as much as you can. It is a humbling and inspiring experience to learn just how much you don’t know.
6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group-grope world.
7. Try not to work for stupid people or you’ll soon become one of them.
8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.
9. The Golden Rule actually works. Do good.
10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

Source: AIGA

I’ve been watching TV and reading the news over the past week, and the thing that has struck me is the Kiwi spirit.  We are resilient, we still have a sense of community, and we generally give a fuck about each other.  Immediately people risked their own lives to save others, people offered their houses to strangers, gave away food, had impromptu block parties and barbeques, and people rallied to find ways to assist those that needed it. It’s our spirit that makes us Kiwis, and it’s one of the things that makes me proud to be a New Zealander.

Here’s a selection of photos of Cantabrians being awesome, post-earthquake.

ANDREW GORRIE/The Dominion Post

Shirley resident Paul Stratford has a laugh as he tries to clear the sand away from his daughter’s rocking horse in his Riselaw street backyard.

CRAIG SIMCOX/The Dominion Post

Residents in New Brighton collect water from a tanker that came through their street early in the day.

CHRIS HILLOCK/Waikato Times

Chris Crishom helps clean up the streets of Christchurch.

CRAIG SIMCOX/The Dominion Post

Thomas Healey carries a full gas bottle tied to his back, back to a relief centre in New Brighton.

CHRIS HILLOCK/Waikato Times

Dave Hallfrey (from ENZED Canterbury) and Emma Gray (from Divine Cake company), have been giving away free food near the Palms Mall.

CHRIS HILLOCK/Waikato Times

HELPING HANDS: Constable David Filmer gets some tension relief from Christine Carter. Carter has been giving stress relief therapy to police and rescue workings coming back from their duties at the end of a long day.

NATASHA MARTIN/The Timaru Herald

Krutika and Neeta Patel of Opawa Discounter hand out free iceblocks.

NATASHA MARTIN/The Timaru Herald

Richard Foot has been giving out water since yesterday morning outside his house on 131 Opawa Rd.

DAVID HALLETT/The Press

Students clear mud off Barrington Street.

If you want to help Christchurch get back on its feet, you can donate directly to the New Zealand government through the Christchurch Earthquake Appeal website.

Additional comments from the last time I commented on this:

• Fringes are awesome!  However, I just now worked out that it takes me almost 61 hours a year to make my hair look that awesome and I can think of heaps of things I’d rather spend 61 hours on.
• I think brown hair makes me look older.  I’m just going to tell myself that because it costs me at least $150 every 6 weeks.  I need to justify that expense.
• I don’t think any of the photos prior to the last line are actually of me; I think I have had my memories implanted into someone else’s body.  Or, I have removed the thetans?!
• From a distance and when slightly blurry, I’m totally younger now than when I was 25. My mum is almost 70 and looks 10-years younger than a 39-year-old I know.  Thanks Mum!  I fucking love you.
• Looking at a history of myself all lined up like this is weird.  But also interesting.  Hi past me!  You were pretty funny looking at 14.

1. A pair of undies I didn’t know I’d lost;
2. Mine and Goblin’s boarding pass from when I moved to Auckland, 840 days ago.

I can’t believe I have been living in Auckland for 840 days now.  That seems like a long time when I think of it in terms of days.  I suppose it is actually a long time, being the longest I have ever lived in one city since I finished high school.  In fact, I think this might be some sort of an achievement.  Because not only have I been here for 840 days, the good majority of those days have been totally fucking awesome.

New Zealanders who don’t live in Auckland are taught to dislike Aucklanders.  They are taught that Aucklanders are snobbish, probably stupid, and don’t know what the rest of the country is all about.  While some of that may be true, most of the people I meet in Auckland are not actually from Auckland, and most people I meet are none of those things.

I travelled the world for a good portion of a decade, on a quest to find somewhere perfect for me.  Being from a strange little village called Upper Hutt, I figured that anywhere had to be better than there.  It felt like it was in the middle of nowhere, full of bogans and pregnant teenagers, and it certainly didn’t have any opportunities for someone like me who wasn’t a bogan or planning on having kids at 16.  My first step was to move to Wellington: the “big smoke” a 50-minute train ride away.  The capital of New Zealand!  It’s a city, man!  Actually, it was still a village.  I needed air!  So off I went to America.

There I spent 3 awesome/shitty/life changing/surreal years.  To this day, it is one of the best things I’ve ever done and I have zero regrets.  I really know how to throw myself out of my comfort zone.  Moving to Houston by myself where I knew 4 people from the internet and no one else was an excellent move.  Living alone for 2 years in a foreign country was definitely life changing.  While it seemed really hard at the time, I realise now that the hardest things often turn out to be the best things.  Hey, I had Goblin to talk to and that’s all a crazy cat lady needs.

Then came PROPER TRAVEL.  Three months mincing about Europe with my mincing Belgian boyfriend, who sadly was so awesome at speaking eleventy languages that I didn’t push myself out of my comfort zone as much as I should have.  But, it’s not really a bad thing to actually be able to communicate with people when the time calls for it.  I saw so many amazing sights and then ended up in Manchester.  Manchester!

My awesome friends from school Mischa and Lance somehow convinced me to move to Manchester.  They said, “Manchester to London is like Wellington to Auckland”, and at that moment I realised that WOW! Manchester must be awesome and London must suck to live in.  So Manchester it was.  However, Manchester did not really agree with me.  I found it a rather depressing city, except for those glorious 2 weeks (maximum) in the middle of summer when you can play frisbee in the park and sit outside.  Too much crime, too much grey, too many scallies.  But on the plus side, awesome apartment, private pool/spa/sauna/games room/gym, and two awesome friends living in the apartment building across the lane who had a sweet flat-screen TV and every episode of Lost ever. After a Christmas holiday to New Zealand, my mincing Belgian boyfriend convinced me that Manchester wasn’t the best place to be, and that we should move to New Zealand.  And that we did, but not before spending an amazing three months bumming around Antwerp.  Literally bumming.  We rented a studio and lived off our savings for three months.  It was absolutely fantastic.  Would recommend. Will do again.

And thusly, I was back where I started: Wellington, New Zealand.  I spent two years trying to get back into the swing of things and it almost happened but just not quite.  I left Wellington for a reason and 5 years hadn’t changed that reason.  It was still too small, too villagey, and by jove they really don’t joke about that wind.

Two years later, almost to the day, I was on a plane with Goblin to Auckland.  While my reasons for moving were motivated elsewhere, the outcome is clear: I made the right decision, and I love Auckland.  There, I said it.  I love Auckland!  There are so many great things about this city that every time I sit on my back deck in the sun, or walk down any road in Ponsonby or Grey Lynn and appreciate the lovely cottages, or walk down the street and bump into no one I know, or go out for cheap Asian food anywhere and everywhere, or drive to a new part of town that I don’t know, or just walk down Great North Road and look over the hill as I cross Sussex Street at the sea, I get a warm little happy feeling of awesomeness.  I have finally found what I was looking for and it wasn’t that far away after all.

I had started a personal website in about 1997, back when you could say pretty much whatever you wanted without fear of getting dooced (only because it hadn’t happened to anyone yet).  I started writing random articles and putting up pictures and generally fiddling around with HTML and teaching myself “the internet”.  In 1999, around the same time that Blogger started serving the angst-ridden Gen X/Y generation, I started a journal which didn’t get me dooced but did get me called into the HR manager’s office at my then-job.  I learned it is best to not talk about annoying co-workers and their hairy cheek moles.  And on 16 August 2000, I bought this domain.

I was talking about this with a friend the other week; about how I have been doing this for so long.  I remember the time where there were only a small number of bloggers in New Zealand (namely Robyn Gallagher, Dean Gray (where did he go?), Starla Jo, Ryan Wataki, and of course Olivia).  It really was a pretty tight-knit and small community, and looking back over the past 9 years, it seems weird how mainstream both blogging and the internet in general has become.  It seems weird to have been there pretty much right at the start and that for some unknown reason I haven’t really stopped.  That is probably my obsessive-compulsive tendencies, if I stop now what does that mean?  Perhaps I like continuity.  I also think it will be interesting to look back in 20 years and see what I was doing, what I liked, what inspired me.

Over the years, I have noticed I write less about my personal life.  I think that comes with the internet becoming so mainstream, and also when you go through major life changes you don’t really want to document the hardships quite so openly.  This isn’t LiveJournal or 1999 after all.  I have gone from a (relatively and comparatively) naive  19-year-old girl, to a confident and self-assured 29-year-old woman.  (Eek, woman!  I suppose I can’t really call myself a girl any more.)  I moved to Austin Texas, got married to the fantastic Ben Brown, sadly got divorced, slept on couches for a few months in Houston Texas, sorted my shit out and stayed in Houston for a couple of years, travelled around Europe, moved to Manchester England, and in 2006 came home.  This is a record of my life.

In a year from now I will do a recap of what I’ve loved about this past decade, the things I am proud of.  Ten bloody years.  I look forward to it.

Until then, happy birthday!

1 x bottle Chardon: $6.45
1 x bottle Marquevue: $5.95
Total: real classy

• I herniated a disc.
• I found out I had some bone disease when I was a teenager.
• I also found out I have some nodie things on my vertebrae.
• I got my first cold sore which turned me into a hideous monster.
• I got a trachea infection.
• I got ill from the trachea infection antibiotics.
• I got the flu.
• I moved flats while I had the flu.
• I coughed for so long I cracked a rib.^*^

In short, in the past few months my body stopped caring about me and I have been rather sick. It all started with a little stress from moving to Auckland, and then a wee little disc herniation to cause stabbing voodoo knives and the inability to walk. I am since able to walk, and can for the most part function again with some limitations.

But to look on the good side of life: I am enjoying Auckland; I am loving my new flat; my social life is excellent, and my BFF from forever will be in Auckland in less than two weeks. Goblin is also as cute as ever, even if she continues to shit on the floor because she poos with her ass hanging off the side of her dirt box. There is nothing more I love than to clean up warm, sloppy cat shit.

So anyway, hi. I am alive. They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?

^*^ This is unconfirmed, but I am convinced this is what I have. With everything else, what’s one more thing? Next up, EBOLA!