Blog - You know you're tired when... (Chaz Harris)

You know you're tired when...

Last updated 13:42 02/03/2011

 

One week on, it's grown clearer how much work there is to do in the Christchurch earthquake response and recovery effort. Many people are working peripherally to get things done so that things are easier for core workers to recover bodies or keep people safe.

Last week I did several long days at work and also spent half of my weekend working, then attended wedding celebrations and topped it off with an 11-hour day on Monday. It wasn't until I stopped and sat down with a cup of tea that I realised how tired I really was. Please don't think I'm complaining about the long hours when I know people like Moata and many others down south are going through all this in a much bigger and more brutal way.

To put this in perspective for you, though, when I got home on Sunday night I put my car keys in the fridge and didn't realise I had done so until I went back to get milk for a cup of tea. I've done a few other peculiar things over the past few days: on Monday morning I put my underwear on after putting my trousers on, and no, I wasn't going to a fancy dress party as Superman. How I didn't notice that until I had both items of clothing on is a mystery to me. This experience highlighted to me the importance of looking after yourself when doing long hours and not burn yourself out. Does anyone else find themselves doing odd things when they are tired?

Last night Wellington got a little taste of an earthquake with a 4.5 located 20km away and 40km deep that shook my house briefly and sent me flying to the kitchen archway off the lounge. Did you feel it? This was the first time I've been awake and felt a tremor like that and even though it was tiny in comparison it certainly gave us a taste of the kind of thing they're going through down south. The first thing that came in to my head was whether this was a quake of our own or if it was us feeling another big one down in Christchurch - thankfully it wasn't Christchurch but within the hour they did have a much more shallow aftershock in Lyttelton.

The strong winds combined with post-earthquake jitters meant a lot of folk in Wellington had trouble sleeping last night, and I was one of them. A friend of mine out in Miramar kept waking up when planes were taking off, thinking it was an earthquake. So it really shows that even though we didn't go through anything as bad as Christchurch did, we're all a bit on edge these days.