Earthquake!

What an EXCITING morning!!!!! And funny that things went down the way they did... otherwise I might have missed the earthquake!!

Martin woke up around 5:30 I guess to get ready for work. But I woke up when he came into the room and handed me the car keys and said I needed to get Anja and we needed to get out of the house. There was some weird alarm going off in our basement--one we'd never heard before. He was pretty calm until the house started shaking. We thought it was related to the alarm going off! We thought our house was going to explode!! So we ran down the stairs half-dressed and got into the car and drove across the street to the library lot and called 911. He only told them that an alarm was going off and the person said there'd been an earthquake. Wow! So that made us feel a lot better about the shaking house (evidently no one had planted a bomb under our house and timed it for today) but we still wondered if the alarm was a carbon monoxide alarm or something. He went back in to be sure the alarm was still going off. It was, so he called 911 again and the lady told him to get out and that the fire department would be there. The general thought was that a line to the heater had broken/come loose and that there was some gas leaking. So he got Karenin, couldn't find Theodore, and sat on the porch till the firemen came (immediately! Such prompt service!) They went down and checked it out, expecting it to be a broken gas line, but surprise! It was just a malfunctioning smoke alarm! It was making the most horrible noise. And we think it was completely unrelated to the earthquake, unless there was some kind of little jiggle before the real quake that got some dust in it or something, I dunno. Anyway, so we came back home and made a pot of coffee and Martin went off to work and that was about the end of our exciting morning. But Anja loved the lights on all the firetrucks, and it woke up the Cooks who came out on their porch.

My sister just told me that Mike Prangley has blogged about it too, so I'd better go check what he says! Such an exciting start to the day!