Earthquake in New Zealand today.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/9629660/6-3-quake-rattles-lower-North-Island

We felt a slight shaking here, but the Hauraki District is a long way from where the earthquake was centred. My older sister who lives in Taihape which is a lot closer to the epicenter telephoned me to say that they were fine. They'd had a lot more shaking, but no damage.

I'm much more concerned about the approaching tropical cyclone that's supposed to reach here by tomorrow. We've had two days of stinking hot humid weather so we knew something was likely to happen. At the moment the sky is heavy with cloud and very dark and the wind is getting up. Usually we're sheltered by the Coromandel Ranges when we get an easterly storm, but it looks like we still might get a pasting.

Thank you very much for your good wishes and concern guys. Looking at the satellite weather map here at midday the storm seems to have moved away out to the east and apart from some fairly ordinary rain this morning that seems to be that. Last night though the wind was very strong with some thunder and lightning, but strangely we didn't get anything like the rain I thought we would.
For a change our cat slept inside last night and she needed no persuading to stay indoors. Normally she's very much an outdoor cat and never wants to stay indoors for very long. Last night though it was, 'Look at me I'm a housecat'.

My daughter does software development from here at home and last night she decided to shut down the dual Xeon IBM server that runs our household network because we were getting sudden periodic brown outs due to the high winds. Everything runs off a UPS, but my daughter was worried that with the sudden on again off again load the UPS's mysterious internal workings might be put under too much strain.
All is fine now though and now the the server has been booted up again I'm back on line to tell you all about it

According to the Met service New Zealand is going to get more of these storms coming to visit. Once upon a time most tropical storms tended to miss us, but with the shift in global weather patterns they will be coming right at us, This one, Tropical Cyclone June, had degraded somewhat by the time it got here, but we haven't always been so lucky. One storm, I think it might have been Wilma, totaled my brand new kitset glasshouse that I'd only just assembled. I'm not that much of a gardener anyway, but at least with my own little glasshouse i thought I could at least pretend to be one (sigh).

Looking around outside this morning there didn't seem to be much damage at all in the neighbourhood which certainly is a good thing. All the local trees were still upright which is a good thing too because I like trees and don't like seeing them uprooted and lying there awaiting the chainsaw and a short lived future as firewood.

The earthquake boffins say we're likely to get aftershocks for some weeks yet and the on-line earthquake map was showing lots of low level activity this morning. Just so long as it stays low level, because after the Christchurch earthquake in 2011 that severely damaged most of the city us Kiwis tend to be a little more nervous these days about the ground starting to shake.