Finding Home - part 1

Thanks are due to Tweedy for prompting this series of Blips. Last week she asked me: ”How did you find this patch of land? Were you searching for ages?”
 
Her apparently simple questions resulted in days of thought!
 
On one level, I had been searching for decades – ever since 1987 when I realised that in order to live what I now know to be my genuine life, I would have to change things dramatically. 

The changes turned out to be gradual. Incrementally over the following three decades I edged closer to being truthful to myself. It transpired that the comforts, convenience and social acceptability of a ‘conventional life’ were much more difficult to shake off than I’d bargained for.
 
On another level, I looked for just under 12 months before I found Chez Mima. However, in order to provide some context I will backtrack a little, to 2015.
 
It was in the middle of that year that I gave up work (a tale for another day) and a year later I moved from North Canterbury to North Otago.
 
There were two important reasons for moving south: land was cheaper, and it is further away from the Alpine Fault.
 
Because I was no longer working my property-buying finances were limited to what was in the bank. Fortunately I had what felt to me like a good amount, but in Canterbury it was far too little for what I was hoping to buy: an acre of so of productive land and – hopefully – some kind of a house. I needed to look in a less popular area.
 
From that house in North Canterbury, the Alpine Fault runs just 40km as the tui flies. GNS Science (the Crown Research Institute) tells us:
 
“We think that the Alpine Fault fails in magnitude 8 earthquake approximately every 330 years.
 
The last event occurred, we think, in 1717 AD around 300 years ago, so we are pretty sure that the Alpine Fault is at the end of what we would call it seismic cycle.
 
It's due to have another earthquake. We have a detailed record of Alpine Fault earthquakes during the last 8000 years.
 
If you do the statistics on the recorded Alpine Fault earthquakes, the probability of an Alpine Fault earthquake occurring in the next 50 years is about 28 percent.
 
That is a very high probability by global standards.”
 
Those stats haunted me after living through the thousands of earthquakes in and around Christchurch from 2010 onwards. I have some PTSD as a result and (among other things ) I would stay awake for hours at night expecting the Alpine Fault to rupture in that instant. I was tense and exhausted as a result.
 
So I chose to move to an area which is – by NZ standards – relatively stable, with fewer active fault lines than in most of the country, and where the earthquakes as a result of the Alpine Fault rupture will feel less terrifying. I sleep like a baby as a result.
 
Fortunately my FFL (friend for life) has a crib at Moeraki, on the North Otago coast, where I’d stayed a few times. It became my base at weekends in early 2016 while I looked around the area for a short-term rental. I found another crib, in Kakanui, which was available for six months plus. It suited me perfectly and I moved in June 2016.
 
This in turn became the base for my forever property hunt, the tale of which you’ll have to wait until I’ve thought further…

Meanwhile Bean is content with the final choice of a home. 

And I am way behind with comments again!