Earthquake!?!

So this is my 700th post on my blog that I've had for nearly four years... and I knew that this post was coming up, but I was unsure what could possibly be meaningful enough to do it justice... and then it happened: an earthquake in the Midwest.

Old hat for a Californian, right? Wrong... and here are the things that were very different this time that make it worth a 700th blog post:

1. It was a 5.2 earthquake 128 miles away that felt more like a 3 or 4 at 4:30am... which means I was sleeping and it woke me up... I've never been woken up by an earthquake before. The big ones happened while I was awake and the ones while I was asleep were too small for me to wake (or remember).

2. I'm in the Midwest, and as a strange rattling of the windows brought me to consciousness, I began to ponder. As my bed shook, I was very perplexed... "Is this what a nearby tornado feels like?" I thought. Next thing I knew, my roommate was heading down the stairs to talk to me. Even she thought it was an earthquake, but that just didn't really compute in my head... I live in St Louis... its the Midwest!

3. I sleep in a basement... basements don't exist in California and thus I have never experienced or pondered the effects of an earthquake in a basement... scary, yet intriguing.

4. This is not the land of earthquakes where all construction is done with them in mind. In my experience, things only fall apart in a big way or not at all in response to earthquakes. So this morning, when the news crew continuously discussed and showed footage of a tiny amount of crumbled cement that had fallen, I had to stifle a laugh. There are obviously different concerns about structure stability here, but its still just too weird to have so much coverage of a couple pieces of broken cement leading to the shut-down of a bridge.

P.S. I'm going to a baseball game tonight: San Francisco vs. St Louis... and I believe the Giants just came into town last night so they must have brought it with them... ;)