The big excitement today was the 5.9 magnitude earthquake that struck - just miles away from my town in Virginia. Luckily there was no damage in our area. But it was disconcerting, since I've never experienced an earthquake before! They are pretty unheard of in this part of the country most of the time so it was quite unexpected.When the rumbling started, I looked outside to see if there was some big construction vehicle or something that was causing it. But it was soon apparent that it was more than construction traffic, as the building continued to shake. My officemate, who is from Iceland (where earthquakes are more common), was quicker to recognized it as an earthquake and pointed out that we should head outside. I followed him out amidst the shaking building along with the rest of my coworkers. Outside, we looked at each other in disbelief while the trembling subsided. But it was apparent that there was no damage or anything, so after a couple of minutes we went back in to return to work.
Of course I first checked to see if Steve had felt it - he was at the dentist, which could have been tricky (drilling mishap??), but luckily he was on his way out and was fine. Next, after an experience like that, one gets the impulse to immediately update friends via Facebook.... so I logged in, and was surprised to see friends in Ohio, PA, and NY posting about feeling an earthquake too. So crazy that it was felt at such a wide range! Even crazier was discovering the news reports that the epicenter was just ~35 miles from us.
The flurry of Facebook activity was pretty funny. Ah, the wonders of social media! I'd feel bad about a bit of lost productivity, except it seems that many other work places evacuated for up to an hour, and some even sent people home! At my small engineering company, it was back to work as usual, except for a bit of Facebook and checking the news. There really wasn't any reason not to, as aluded to by this picture that's been circulating. Of course I am very glad there was no serious damage!
I did also enjoy this photo, in response to the west coasters making fun of us ~
[source found via Geek in Heels]
:-)
Did you feel the quake?? Were you freaked out at all?
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I *did* feel the quake, but I didn't realize that it was an earthquake until I saw other people talking about it on Facebook and Twitter! (I thought it was the baby moving inside my belly. Yeah, that just goes to show how much she moves around!)
ReplyDeleteP.S. — Thanks for the linkage!
ha, that's kind of crazy (that an earthquake can be mistaken for in utero baby moves)! Though I'm guessing if you were in VA you would have known it was something bigger :)
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