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Can I just say, it's *slightly* upsetting to be sitting at your desk writing email when suddenly things start shaking and bouncing and banging around, and those things include not only your desk, monitor, and the chair you're sitting in, but also the walls, doors, and windows. About 45 minutes ago, we had a 4.5 centered on the north side of the Valley. (I live on the south side, and the Valley is 3-6 miles wide north and south, depending on where you are in it.) It was followed, roughly 18 minutes later, by a 1.6 we didn't even feel. I might have, had I been in bed, but I was still trying to get over the adrenaline rush and muscle cramps of the first one to notice it here at my desk. Needless to say, I will be sleeping in full jammies tonight - when I do finally calm down enough to get to sleep. There's something really disturbing about the earth jumping around underneath you, and every time it happens here, I wonder if this will be the one big enough to cause the house to slide down the hill. There's something at once terrifying and fatalistic about realizing there's absolutely nowhere you can go and nothing much you can do to protect yourself, what with it being the actual EARTH and all that's doing the bouncing and jerking around. On the one hand, it really is scary as hell. On the other, part of your brain just sits there taking inventory and monitoring the necessity of moving to a doorway and whether or not that tactic will actually be of use anyway, depending on the level of violence in the shaking...although it must be added that if you wait until you actually need to be in the doorway, odds are very good it will be too late to get to the doorway, because in a temblor that violent, you can't actually navigate the floor any better than you could a trampoline while people were bouncing on it. TB, who refers to himself as The Human Seismograph (though it must be added I'm pretty sure he's just kidding, and he's not all *that* accurate all of the time) called it exactly. I was surprised it was only a 4.5, frankly; it felt much bigger and was the loudest one I've been in, and I've been near 5's and 6's, but nothing ever higher than a 6, and I don't think anything that big was ever really close to me, but I could be wrong. I was living down in Irvine when the Northridge quake hit, and I mostly slept through it. I did wake up enough to register the bed was bouncing, assume it was Jakey scratching himself while leaning up against it (he did that on occasion and could really shake it up), tell him to "cut it out," and go right back to sleep. Next day, there were things knocked over and cracks in some of the walls, and my friend Gina laughed her ass off when my boyfriend at the time told her I'd told the dog to cut it out and turned over and gone right back to sleep. Everyone else had been wired and freaked out. And that was a good 50-60 miles from Northridge. Frankly, I don't ever need to be in an earthquake that big. EVER. If these little ones tweak me, I don't want to know how scary something that big can be. I remember watching the floor undulate and listening to the bedrock scraping across the lower stratum during the Landers quake in '92, and I really don't ever need to experience anything even remotely approximating that again. Honest. I'm good. (Tiberius got clocked with a bookshelf during the Northridge quake, which hit while he was sleeping at home, in nearby Granada Hills.) I'm not kidding about the muscle cramps, btw. Without realizing it, I apparently ultra-tightened every single muscle in my body during the 30 seconds things were rattling, and now every single muscle in my body is killing me. Ow. Okay, it's 2:00. I need to sleep. With Pete. Peace out, copyright 2002
- 2005 Katie Doyle; all rights reserved
In which Katie shares sad news - Wednesday, Apr. 01, 2015
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Pete Other Stuff Katie Digs
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