Rachel Harris

I’m the youngest of four – two sisters and a brother.  Originally from Te Puke in the Bay of Plenty, the family shifted south to Dunedin when I was a young’un.  My sisters and brother stayed in Dunedin when Mum, Dad and I shifted up to Canterbury just as I was about to start my intermediate schooling at Ellesmere College.  Rural Canterbury schooling and life didn’t really cut the mustard for me, so apart from a stint back in Dunedin for some tertiary study, I shifted to Christchurch when I was old enough to!  While Canterbury is home now, I still have a strong bond to Dunedin, and I’m still loyal to the blue and gold over the red and black!

My sister Melissa is a Psychiatric Nurse in Dunedin.  She has two girls, Charlotte and Poppy.  My other sister Debbie used to work for TVNZ in Dunedin but moved to Sydney back in the 1990s where she began working for Channel 9.  There she met and married Brady, a television journalist, and they have a son and daughter.  My brother Shannon was just 32 when he passed away suddenly of a heart attack while living in Melbourne, three months before Graham and I married.

Graham and I married in 1993 – Ella was born in 1998, Louis in 2001.  I work as an HR Manager for Medlab South in Christchuch – I reduced to part-time when I started this role back in 2004, which was the best thing I have ever done.  I can now spend more time with the kids in their after school activities (although I always seem to bring work home with me each night!).

Over more recent years, we’ve moved from spending every spare hour of the day renovating and selling houses (orbital sanding or polyurethaning at 3am was commonplace!), to fitness and general wellbeing.  Graham was an electrician in a former life, and was very good at basically everything trade-related when it came to alterations, but we’ve vowed that our next house will be a brand spanking new one - we’re not going back to renovations ever again!

To read my blog entries prior to 16 June, visit my (now largely defunct) Bebo site.