Trees.....here we come.

It’s the end of Easter weekend and for us it’s been a nice weekend. Most families have other families that are lifelong friends and Sue and Steve are one of those. Our family friendship goes back nearly 40 years. Our children grew up together, we had family holidays together, and as we got a bit older the four of us travelled a lot together. Now that we and they are in our early retirement with no children at home, they like us do house sitting, and at other times live in their caravan travelling the country, or being ‘on the wallaby’ as the saying goes in Australia.

We are inclined to drink a bit much coffee, indulge in a nice drop of red, and the men like a rum and coke as we play long winded games of cards.

This couple comes into the category of ‘true friends’. They are kind, loyal, helpful, generous and always on hand if they are needed. So we really enjoy our time with them.

This weekend Peter had a little job to do. We are in this house sit until the house sells or until the owners decide to do something different with the house. And this house has a very good fireplace. Last winter we used it most nights.

 

Queensland is tropical, but we have been very surprised to find that over the past 13 years we have lived here we have acclimatised and we, like the locals find the winter evenings cold so we like to have some heating. We need some firewood for this winter, and Peter had arranged with one of our sons to come and help cut a couple of trees down.

The home owner has a Stihl chain saw, but Peter had never had it going. With Steve’s help they got it working fine.

When the home owner was here last, he pointed out a couple of trees that needed to come down, they were dead and would make good firewood. So today Peter and Steve decided to get the chain saw going.

 

Not sure if there is a spark plug in there.

Maybe we need to check it out first.

Lets find the tools

It's a Stihl....it should go okay.

What do you reckon? Give it a go?

Yes works a treat. Firewood on the way.

Wellington earthquake recovery plans.

After the Christchurch earthquake, New Zealand seems to have had a knee jerk reaction. They are now inspecting every building in the country and marking many for demolition, worried that they  may not withstand a really severe earthquake.

  

Of course, when you have been through of few of these earthquakes you know how scary they are. I find them very frightening. You never know when an earthquake will come and how long it will last and how big it will be. It is one of the things you have no control or power over.

Most of the buildings in New Zealand are built to withstand earthquakes. I worked in a nine floor building in the CBD and had two 6.3 quakes while I was there. The building is on huge rubber rollers so swayed with the movement. There was no damage and nothing fell even though the whole place was doing the cha cha.

The whole of New Zealand is earthquake prone, although Auckland and north Auckland get few of them, however in the last couple of weeks Auckland did get a couple of shakes.  The main concern is Wellington. By all accounts it is overdue for a whopper, either sometime within the next fifty years or five hundred…who knows? Wellington is a city built on steep hills, surrounding a harbour, and I don’t know how much chance there is of a tsunami because of the narrow opening of the harbour, but the steep hills could easily slip along with many of the houses.  Access also is tricky with most of the main roads out to the outer suburbs along the foreshore with hills on the other side.

One road from the Kapiti Coast over to Lower Hutt is the Paekakariki Hill Road. Here is a video of a motorbike ride to the top. Notice how high the top of the hill is. You can see the beach below. 

There are so many people who commute into the city from outside the main city basin. Commuter trains go all the time, and to get through the hills there is a 5 km tunnel, a place not to be caught during a big quake.

All the access roads are through the hills and around the northern sea shore around Plimmerton up to Kapiti Coast. In a decent earthquake it is expected that all those roads would be impassable.

To get access in case of an earthquake will cost a fortune.  There has been a motor way proposed through an area called Transmission Gully, but no government seems to want to spend the money to get it going.

Peter found this article about a new plan Wellington is putting together in case of a large earthquake. They are obviously putting things in place.

How to make parents lives difficult! A little rant.

While Peter stays on at our house-sit, I have come up to Brisbane just 45 minutes away to stay with our youngest son and his family. They have had a new baby, and his wife had a caesarian, so she is supposed to be a bit careful with lifting and housework for the first few weeks. I am on hand to do bits and pieces round the house. They only have a small place, and there is not a lot to do, so it’s not a big job.

Baby is a tummy sleeper and loves this little bear rug.

One of the things I do is take their oldest son to school in the mornings and pick him up in the afternoons. He is a really good boy, well behaved and easy to look after, so that makes life quite easy. However, I am amazed at how difficult it is to get kids to school these days.

At the moment he lives too far away to walk. It seems the ‘in thing’ these days to molly coddle kids far too much, so that most children are taken to school by car and picked up again. In this case, he needs to go by car. However this particular school seems to have gone out of its way to make life difficult for parents.

He goes to Thornlands State Primary school. He is six years old, so it is still early days for him, but he knows his way around very well.

This amused me...trying to do the bright thing...I don't think so..
not when it comes to parking around the school.

This school has a policy of absolutely no preschool or after-school supervision. School starts at 8.50 am. And if you let your child go at 8.30 there is no teacher to watch them. I guess no one would dare to let them go earlier than that! If your child goes at 8.40, there is no supervision for the ten minutes prior to school starting. This means that your child has to roll up within a few minutes of 8.50 am. Every child. All of the little darlings. Of course you can go earlier than that, but you must sit with them until 8.50 am. And your children are not allowed to use the playground equipment before or after the start/stop of class times. Apparently this was instigated because some parents were dropping their kids off much too early....the perennial problem, give someone an inch they'll take ten miles and spoil it for everyone else.

This is not a huge school, and I don’t know how many children go to this school, but can you imagine the mayhem at 8.45 and 8.50 as all the kids roll up at once? It’s a crazy time. There are lots of parking spaces, but many of them are way way down the road. If you want to get there early and park close to the gates, you need to be there really early. It is okay to drop the child off, which is okay for a child who knows their way around but for a new child, until they are really settled you need to take them into the classroom…we all did that anyway…but to get a park and do that you need to be there far too early.

Picking up the child in the afternoon is worse. School finishes at 3 pm. To pick him up, I must go to the classroom and the teacher must see me and release the child from the class. So I have to park and go in. This means that every child has a parent or grandparent waiting for him/her outside the classroom at 3 pm sharp, and there is resulting mayhem with children parents or grandparents trying to find bags and drinking bottles etc.

To get a park for this little trip you need to be parked outside the school about 2.15 or all the close parks are gone. In this summer heat, sitting in the car for 30 minutes or more is no good.  It’s far too hot.

The worst part, in my view, is not for people like me, but for young mothers with other toddlers. There are mothers there sitting waiting with 3 or 4 year olds that have been plucked out of their comfy beds where they were enjoying a necessary afternoon sleep, put upright into a car seat, then carried into the seats by the class and have to try and stay asleep on their mother’s laps waiting for the 3 o’clock exodus. Then the mother must take the school child and the trying-to-stay-asleep  toddler and get them home via car seats back to their beds to continue the necessary afternoon sleep. 

What sort of craziness is this? Other mothers are sitting there rocking sleeping toddlers in pushchairs etc,  more toddlers who are having their afternoon sleep interrupted.

Poor toddlers getting their afternoon sleeps interrupted. I have cropped it so the mother
is not visible, but you can see a sleeping toddler on her knee.

Now if this was an occasional thing I wouldn’t even comment. We all do things from time to time to fit in with schedules. But this is an everyday affair. And in my book, it’s no fun.

I have had similar hassles in the past, when my youngest was a baby I had a two year old and a four year old and a nine year old and a fourteen year old. The older ones rode bikes to school or walked. And when the three younger ones got to school age, they walked unless it was raining when it was a matter of loading up the car and depositing them at different schools. But they were allowed to come out the front and wait for me.

I’m told that at Thornlands school they are allowed to leave the classroom without a parent showing up at the classroom when they are in grade two.

This routine is not the same for all schools.

My eldest granddaughter went to a primary school in Wynnum and they had a terrific arrangement. This school was on a busy road, so they had a drive way off the road with a roundabout so you could drop off and go. A teacher was there to keep an eye on things. There was also a parking area if you wanted to go into the school. When it came to pick up time, each parent had a big name sign in the inside of their windscreen visor, and the teacher could see who was coming up in the queue so they got the children ready so that the parent could pull up, pick up the child and go. It worked a treat.

I understand the problems of security for young children….but honestly if a school wants to impose such tight time restrictions on drop off and pick up they need to make some provisions so that the poor parents are not spending between one and two hours a day doing it.

Slip slop slap and sleepy?

I have found this very interesting website called thisisveryinteresting.com.  It covers all sorts of interesting topics. I was reading this morning about daytime sleepiness and vitamin D.

The cheapest and easiest source of vitamin D is a few minutes in the sunshine a few times a week. For adults in Australia it seems we are not getting enough either.  A different website says...."Still, we do need some exposure to sunlight. And in fact, many of us are not getting enough. Studies reveal that there are widespread deficiencies in levels of Vitamin D in many Australians. And lack of exposure to sun is thought to be the cause"........See this study. It continues to say " Professor Rebecca Mason, an expert on vitamin D and calcium metabolism and Professor of Physiology at the University of Sydney, says the recommended levels of sunlight exposure won't put anyone at risk of skin cancer."

Those levels are: in summer, six to eight minutes a day on most days. In winter, it should be half an hour most days. You need to have only 15 per cent of your body exposed - arms, hands and face - to get this exposure.

So from what we are told, many people are vitamin D deficient. I wonder why? Our kids hardly ever play outside now. They don’t walk to school, they don’t play outside after school because they are doing homework or glued to their tv sets or computers. When we take them out we drive from the front door of the house to the front door of the shops or into under cover parking lots in malls.

So how much sunshine do our children get?  And then when they do get outside, the rules are that you cover them up. They must wear hats, sunscreen, and cover up their skin in case they get burnt. The scare of skin cancer means that we might be inclined to go to the other extreme where they are so covered up they hardly get an vitamin D.

The correlation here is that daytime sleepiness could be related to vitamin D deficiency.  They also make the point that skin colour can also affect it, those with black skin don't absorb so much.  I thought it was a very interesting article.

You might too.