{"id":4295,"date":"2011-03-19T06:30:54","date_gmt":"2011-03-18T17:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=4295"},"modified":"2011-04-20T20:39:48","modified_gmt":"2011-04-20T08:39:48","slug":"a-much-needed-day-off","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2011\/03\/19\/a-much-needed-day-off\/","title":{"rendered":"A Much-Needed Day Off"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, as indicated in my <a href=\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2011\/03\/18\/silent-witness\/\">Silent Witness <\/a>post, I didn&#8217;t go the <strong>National Christchurch Memorial<\/strong> ceremony in Hagley Park. But in the end I did give myself the day off. March 18 was declared a special public holiday so everyone here in Christchurch had the day off, including most\/all of the people doing infrastructure and service restoration work around the city.\u00a0 Very well-deserved, too, in their case; no question about that.<\/p>\n<p>In the end I decided that calling time out for one day at least was a really good idea: no tidy up work, no books, no workshop prep. Just time out to sit in the sun and recharge the batteries&#8212;and of course as soon as I did I felt absolutely knackered, as you always do when you&#8217;ve been running simply to stand still&#8212;and then do, finally, stop. So in terms of calling a\u00a0 city-wide &#8220;time-out&#8221;, maybe yesterday was absolutely the right thing to do.<\/p>\n<p>Another question people have been asking me is whether I&#8217;ll be staying in town for Sunday 20th, given so-called &#8220;moon man&#8221; Ken Ring&#8217;s prediction that with the moon at perigee Christchurch is in line for another\/even more massive quake. So I&#8217;m nailing my colours to the mast and saying that absolutely I will be here.\u00a0 I wouldn&#8217;t dream of leaving, in fact. Firstly, because I don&#8217;t believe the moon being at perigee has an equatorial snowball&#8217;s chance of causing a major earthquake. A major earthquake may happen, but that certainly won&#8217;t be why. (Massive tectonic forces at play is my pick on that one.) Secondly, because I regard predictions of this kind as being in the realm of scaremongering, given we&#8217;ve only just suffered a second major earthquake, and scaremongering makes me very cross. It&#8217;s really <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">not<\/span> what we need right now. Thirdly, because every single millenial-style prophecy of doom that I have ever heard has come to absolutely nothing.\u00a0 So there you go. I may yet have to eat humble pie on this one, but I&#8217;ll certainly be right here in Christchurch on March 20. After all, you should never pass up an opportunity to put yourself in a position where you may have to eat humble pie! \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p><a rel=\"attachment wp-att-4296\" href=\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2011\/03\/19\/a-much-needed-day-off\/dragonfly-falling\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-4296\" title=\"Dragonfly Falling\" src=\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Dragonfly-Falling-187x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"187\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Dragonfly-Falling-187x300.jpg 187w, https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Dragonfly-Falling-93x150.jpg 93w, https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/03\/Dragonfly-Falling.jpg 250w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 187px) 100vw, 187px\" \/><\/a>So what did I do while I was sitting in the sun, doing that serious relaxing? (Or &#8216;re-raxing&#8217; as one of my Japanese aikido instrcutors used to say. And yes, I did feel sad just writing the word &#8216;Japan&#8217;.)\u00a0 I read Adrian Tchaikovsky&#8217;s <em>Dragonfly Falling, <\/em>the second in his Shadows of the Apt series.\u00a0 I liked the first book, <em>The Empire of Black and Gold<\/em> well enough, but my sister&#8212;a keen reader&#8212;has assured me that they go from strength to strength and I&#8217;ll admit that I did enjoy <em>Dragonfly Falling<\/em> a lot, so am looking forward to getting hold of the third-in-series soon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, as indicated in my Silent Witness post, I didn&#8217;t go the National Christchurch Memorial ceremony in Hagley Park. But in the end I did give myself the day off. March 18 was declared a special public holiday so everyone here in Christchurch had the day off, including most\/all of the people doing infrastructure and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-earthquakereports","category-what-im-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4295"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5009,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4295\/revisions\/5009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}