KEY POINTS:
This is the time of the year when the clay beneath my house tends to shrink a little and I end up with a piece of sandpaper in the toilet to rub along the bottom of the seasonally sticking door.
So it was something of a relief to
discover the unnerving shudder that shook my house on Wednesday evening was the result of an earthquake and not something worse. Like the death rattles of my 100-year-old brick pile.
The silence that accompanied the shake was enough to confirm it wasn't a large truck bouncing through the "slow point" out in the street - though I did have a look outside for external causes, and for cracks in the walls. But it took a call to friends to discover I wasn't alone.
It was then on to the Government's GeoNet website to pinpoint what had happened. A quake just off Orewa. What a great service GeoNet provides. By the time I checked - about 20 minutes after the shake - the basic details, complete with map, were there, with information on an earlier shake I'd missed. There was also reassuring advice that it was not volcanic.
Stupid perhaps, but knowing it was a random grating of continental plates was more reassuring than being left to fret whether it was a case of my front wall deciding it was about time it let go of the rest of the house.
I'm sure one particular predecessor of mine on this organ would have appreciated GeoNet being up and running in 1886 when Mt Tarawera, 230km to the south of Auckland, blew its stack.
If it had been, he might have avoided the subsequent embarrassment of announcing to frightened Aucklanders that the previous night's celestial light show, accompanied by cracks of artillery-like sound that had roused them from their beds, had been the opening salvoes of the much feared Russian invasion fleet.
It had, of course, been something even more dramatic: the most spectacular volcanic explosion in New Zealand since the eruption of Rangitoto.
But getting back to the present, can we ever satisfy those outlanders from the rest of these Shaky Isles who are now mocking our attempts on Wednesday night to get into the spirit of the moment?
All year they bleat on about how Aucklanders look down our noses at the rest of the country, but the moment we try to bond and to experience a part of their dreary lives, what do they do? They belittle our efforts.
People running into the streets? Well we only did that because we heard that's what Wellingtonians do when the earth moves and were trying to be inclusive.
Truth is, we're bored by earthquakes already. If we don't have another one for 100 years, there'll be no tears up here.
The rest of the country can keep their sneaky little thrill-makers. What we're holding out for is something exclusive to Auckland, something our southern cousins can only dream about - a nice cute little volcano.
This week Auckland University scientists predicted Mt Taranaki could erupt soon and suffocate Auckland with a layer of ash, possibly several centimetres deep. Of course we could get in first and do it to them. As the volcano capital of the Pacific - make that the world - the chances of a son of Rangitoto popping up any day are, from all accounts, good. The risk is, it's still a rather unpredictable science, and we could end up as the main victims.
Which is why I was greatly encouraged by last week's call by New Zealand and international experts for a New Zealand earthquake and volcano forecasting centre.
Speaking after a three-day GNS Science workshop on the matter, Californian scientist Professor Tom Jordan said a centre for studying "time-varying" earthquakes and volcanic hazards would allow scientists here to mirror practices overseas.
Professor Jordan has been predicting earthquakes for two decades at his research centre in southern California.
Living where we do, atop a hot volcanic field, such a venture can at worst do no harm.
And how better to keep the scientists on their toes than to site their volcano crystal ball tent here in Volcano City.
