Free Entertainment: The Midwest Earthquake

Sylvia's sleeping patterns have been changing lately. While she now is willing to go to bed before 1 or 2 a.m., the result is that she's waking up hungry and crabby sometime between 4 and 6 a.m. Last night she woke up a little after 5 a.m.

So I feed her and change her and am quietly rocking her in her room, listening to the only sound in the house, which is Max's hamster running frantically on her hamster wheel, when a truck hits the house. The room shakes. Sylvie hardly notices; no one else wakes up. What the...?

I run into our room and whack Phil a few times. "Get up! Something weird is happening!" In the best of circumstances, Phil isn't a morning person. But I yell, "The room *shook*!" and he snaps to.

He tells me, "I'm going to get my glasses and put some pants on," which I interpret to mean, "I'm going to get my glasses and put some pants on." What he really means is, "While you take our infant downstairs to investigate, I'm going to go to the bathroom and then head right back to bed." Which is what he does. When I come back upstairs to find out what the holdup is, he says, groggily, "everything look okay?"

What does he expect? "No. A madman drove a tanker full of explosives against the house, but Sylvie and I took him on." Or, "Well, the furnace exploded, but Sylvie and I were able to make all necessary repairs."

So I guilt him into getting up and at least checking the furnace. On the way, we check the TV, and learn that West Salem, Illinois, experienced an earthquake registering 5.2 (whatever that scale actually means), and that I'd felt the reverberations from the quake. The news channel is featuring folks from around the state calling in, even more freaked out than me, telling their experiences -- most of which were as unremarkable as mine. ("I woke up, and the headboard was actually *shaking*. No, nothing else happened. But the headboard *shook*.")

Considering that the most exciting thing I had planned for the morning was getting ready to meet a friend for lunch, it did start the day with a bang.