Highs & lows

Well it's been an interesting month or so... not that much of it made it onto the blog! Real life kept getting in the way of posting but I'm pleased to say that my final essay has been completed and sent off to be marked.

If life has been a bit up-&-down lately, at least the planet has been vaguely still... it's been a while since I've felt anything really noticeable in the way of shakes. But, of course, in the back of the mind is the memory that this is what it was like in mid-Feb and early-June, you know, before we got rudely reminded that fault lines rupture any time they damn well please. So, I haven't finished looking for pieces of wood to touch every time I have a conversation about a quiet earth. (edit: heh, see - one rolled through not long after typing this. Only little tho, M 3.2)



Last month I had the opportunity to visit a different part of the CPIT campus. It wasn't the cluttered spaces that left an impression so much as the view from the windows, looking out onto High Street. I've mentioned previously the groovy (and pricey) apartments in the old High Para complex, and how I hadn't seen them since... well, I managed to snap a couple of pics:

Alice in Videoland (L) & High Para apartments (R)

High Para, a little closer

A little more indoor-outdoor flow than is desirable for a non-ground floor apartment perhaps...

I took an out-of-town visitor to this corner a couple of weeks later... it's a sobering sight... but, then again, if you take the time to look around, there's often something that makes the corner of your mouth twitch...

Traffic light poles need hats too apparently!

Appearances can be deceiving though... Looking at High St from this angle, it doesn't look so bad...

The rear view from St Asaph St isn't quite so promising however...

Things are making progress though... slowly... the Grand Chancellor is being taken down bit by bit, starting with the roof.

There is something to be said for working alongside the red zone... the skyline is changing daily. And if you're wondering what the blue thing is (in the last pic), that's the water sprayer for dampening down the dust from the demolition debris being carted out of the CBD. Tuam Street is currently the exit point for all the demo trucks... right outside C4 Coffee HQ2, to which I'm a frequent visitor ;)

Righto, off to play with my new toy... I must be doing something right, for karma decided to reward me recently with an iPad2, which I managed to win by being the (incredibly) lucky respondent to a UC survey. 

And if any of us needed reminding about how lucky we all are, even those of us living here in Shakeytown, just reading this article (& this one too) reminded me that even though we're often flippant about #1stworldproblems... they are in fact very real. These articles helped crystalise why (for me at least) it's been difficult to connect with the local variants of the Occupy movement. Even in our darkest times, with buildings being felled by earthquakes and bulldozers, with thousands of people relocating to other cities, with an almost non-event election looming... at least there's still hope. Not about the election result perhaps, but about our general future, there is hope that the light at the end of the tunnel isn't just an oncoming train (or Gerry Brownlee in a high-viz vest!).

(sorry Nick, couldn't resist...)