#83 🕸️ Two turtles, a #tardis, and how hard exactly HARD ought be 🪨

The Without a Hitch newsletter = hilarious true stories of failure + casual, practical tidbits for success. I make all the mistakes so you don’t have to. 🫠

Journal 📖

Shaking it up, with turtles

In the wee hours of Sunday morning our Lockwood-style wooden house bucked under the force of a magnitude-5.7 earthquake. We’re used to loud pops as the house’s warm pine skeleton cools in the evening, like a spinal adjustment before settling down. But at this sudden tectonic whip, the house cracked and shuddered.

I rushed out to check on my kids, but partway through the lounge I could see that they were already up and coming down the hallway. Neko dropped to the ground under the doorframe between the hallway and the lounge, tucked into a ball with his legs underneath, head down, hands clasped behind his neck. Ida, stuck behind Neko and short of anywhere else to go, dropped to the carpet and did the same. Those school drills have sunk into muscle memory.

By this point the shaking had stopped. I could take a moment to appreciate the rare sight of these two bare-skinned earthquake turtles, nestled into our moss-green carpet, looking newly hatched and ready to make their way down to the ocean and push out on their own.

Shock and awesome

“Wait, we’re going to walk to the train station?” my son Neko asked, as we discussed plans for him to come to work with me in Wellington for the day.

“Yeah, why not? It’s only a ten-minute walk,” I said.

“But... I’m usually morning-shocked until I’m standing on the train platform,” Neko replied. For this particular journey, since we leave the house earlier than Neko is used to, my wife Vic often gives us a lift in the car. The notion of us getting there on our own leg power at 7am: anathema.

Morning-shocked.

What a phrase. Here is a boy on the cusp of being a teenager (just turned 13), toying with various ideas of being more of an adult. Starting with the assumption that adults are sleepy creatures who must be jump-started into action in the morning, like poorly maintained old cars.

I wonder if this particular theme is a biological phenomenon or something learned, reinforced by a thousand flimsy gags (excuses) about being unable to function fully without a morning coffee pickup.

But I don’t wonder too hard.