Earthquake!!!!

Thursday and Friday turned out to be very interesting days because out of nowhere Berkeley was rattled by earthquakes.  Now, by California standards they were small quakes, but for the unsuspecting New Englander they were pretty cool.

For the past four days I have been house/cat sitting for my adviser and OT professor Donn.  He and his wife left Wednesday morning for Oregon to visit one of their children and their family.  On Thursday afternoon I was laying on the futon in an upstairs room, half watching TV and half asleep when all of a sudden the whole house started shaking violently.  The pictures were bouncing off the wall, the bookshelves were shaking, and I was looking about to make sure that nothing was going to fall on my head.  As quickly as it began, it was all over like nothing had happened.  The cats had scampered off and were hiding somewhere.  I looked around the house and nothing was damaged.  Now that was cool.

I went back to campus for Community Night Eucharist and Staff Meeting and everyone was talking about the quake.  Officially it as a 4.2 in magnitude and was centered 9 miles beneath the Cal campus.  It could not have been any closer.  While we were at Staff Meeting another quake struck at around 8:30PM.  we were all sitting around the outside tables and everything started shaking again.  It was not as intense as the one earlier in the afternoon, but it was 3. something in magnitude and was considered an aftershock.  Just when I thought that everything had settled down, on Friday afternoon another small quake shook the house.  This one wasn't close to either of them but again I was on the futon and I started shaking.  I never thought that I would experience three quakes in the span of twenty-four hours, but it was pretty freaking cool.