The storm seems to have passed us by now - although it was a total doozy while it lasted. I'm going to get up on the kitchen roof today and check where the water was coming in. Nothing much came through - not even enough to put a centimetre in an ice cream container - but I want to get that sorted out before the autumn and winter arrive. I suspect that some of the flashing has deteriorated, allowing water running off the original villa roof to get under the corrugated iron on the sloping kitchen roof. Once it's under, it just runs down the joists until it can go no further, and so comes through the ceiling into my kitchen floor. Looking on the bright side, I have a nice clean kitchen floor now!
I've got time to go up on the roof today because we have a public holiday from work. It is the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, which is a pivotal document in the history of New Zealand. There are lots of mixed opinions on the Treaty, and whether or not it is a fair document.
For me, as a relatively recent import to the country, it is a meaningless bit of paper. Stephen Covey suggested that we should live from our imaginations not our past, and I think he has a point. We, as taxpayers, are paying out millions of dollars to fix wrongs (real or imagined - again depending on your point of view) that happened well over a hundred years ago. It is difficult to see how we are going to move forward while we have our eyes so firmly fixed on the past. In the UK we have been invaded and overrun so many times over the course of our history that it has become part of our rich tapestry rather than a bugbear to be "fixed". Should I hate my Norwegian secretary at school because the vikings once invaded our country, raping and pillaging as they went? I think not.
The biggest bugbear for me is that indigenous means "originating in a place". So how can you be indigenous when you freely celebrate arriving in a waka?
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