EARTHQUAKE!!!!

I can't really tell you what it sounded like or felt like, but it woke me up, right around 5 a.m. It was a kind of rattling, I guess is the best I can describe it. It woke Hilda up too; I looked at her and she looked at me and we were both kind of, well, rattled. She sort of shook her head and flapped her ears and tried to hog more of the bed. We listened some more but all we could hear was the rain. I decided it must have been thunder, even though it wasn't really that kind of rain. Hilda barked once, but it seemed sort of half-assed. Her heart wasn't in it.

But I'd been so startled that I couldn't go right back to sleep and I thought maybe A., who lives in the carriage house apartment, was just getting home and his bike knocked over that big piece of plywood out there, but then I thought no, it couldn't be A., because Hilda would have run out the dog door to greet him. And she was still in my bed and very fidgety. She kept standing up on the bed and walking in circles and then curling back up again. I was completely baffled. I knew it couldn't have been an earthquake though, on account of we don't get earthquakes here.

But apparently we do because the radio went on after a while and just before I went AAACKK!! Pledge Drive!!!! and slammed the snooze button, I heard the local news guy talking about an earthquake, for real, with an epicenter a few miles out of town! Only 2.6 on the Richter scale, but still.

I'm thinking it was maybe a buncha them wackjobs out in the county doing underground testing of something or other. You can't be too careful nowadays.