Earthquake!

So, like many of you, I woke up around 5:40 to feel the house shaking. Our house is kind of loosely constructed, and I thought at first that it was thunder shaking it, but this was more like a rolling feeling, like being on a really windy sea. My first thought was "Earthquake!" and then my second thought was, "We don't have earthquakes here. Maybe something exploded near our house (gas tank, plane crash)." However, I heard my dad get in his car and drive off to work. For some reason that is one of the most assuring sounds to me--that and his car returning home. Just the assurance that life is going on as planned. Also, I am not at all a morning person, and I don't process anything too well at 5:40 am. I wasn't even scared by the thought of a plane crash. It was simply too early to be awake and I went back to sleep.

When I woke up this morning there was a note from my mom asking if I'd felt the earthquake. She said it happens here about every 20 years. This was interesting because one of my early childhood memories is of my Dad carrying me down the hall, wrapped in a towel because I had just finished my bath, and then the house starting to shake. It was just like this morning's, over very briefly, and as a child I wasn't even concerned, just curious. Since it was on such a small scale, I think it's kind of cool to have experiened this natural phenomenon twice!