Hippie Hippie shake

[Tiassa]

Groovy, I'll take strawberry. 6.2-7.0 ... final number undetermined, but the shaking ground has trashed one of our cooler clubs (which reminds me of a Robin Williams joke about earthquakes and condos).

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I have no real thoughts to reflect on yet, but I noticed a couple of vague things about fear today. Apparently, I deny it, for starters.

What else is odd about the earthquake is that families started calling in to the building to find out if everyone is ok before any of us had a chance to regroup and start calling out. This includes a friend of mine's mother in West Virginia; thank heavens, I suppose, for CNN

Anyway, I'm rambling because I feel like it. The three feet of horizontal sway in the building was cool, too, but after listening to people freak out for the last little while, I felt the need to babble some.

thanx,
Tiassa

 

[Bowser]

The quake rattled out some random thoughts. The damage doesn't look too bad...

It's big news in Portland. I don't know why. I didn't feel it. It's big news, however.

 

[Porfiry]

Holy crap. We felt it up here in Vancouver. I thought it was just a local tremor. I guess I should actually read the news once in a while.

 

[Nuttyfish]

YAY!! I have revived this thread from the netherworld of page 372!

 

[cosmictraveler]

YAY!! I have revived this thread from the netherworld of page 372!

WHY? Are you that bored with what's happening today that you have to revive something that far back?

 

[Dudish dude]

What was this thread about anyway (sorry i cant be bothered to read about it)

 

[Fraggle Rocker]

I'll still take the West Coast over the East Coast every time. I've had the misfortune to be working in D.C. for two years while my wife is home in California, and this place really sucks.

They've spent the past month cowering in fear of about five hurricanes. Even way up here they have spawned tornadoes and flooding. "It never snows in Washington," everyone assures me of that. It's snowed during the last two years I was here, starting in bloody November and finishing in bloody April. The city is utterly paralyzed by snow because it doesn't have an infrastructure to deal with it. After living in the Southwest for most of my life, I thought our new home way up north in Humboldt County was pretty rainy. But the annual rainfall here in D.C. is double that at home, there aren't more than twenty days a year when you can safely go off to work without a raincoat. If you walk to work you're screwed because even when it rains it's still about 82 degrees and it's simply too hot to wear a raincoat. That's something to laugh about when you're on vacation in Hawaii, but it's a hell of a way to show up at the office.

Earthquakes come with no warning. You don't sit around for two days cowering in fear or evacuating your home. They hit, they last for ten or twenty seconds, and they're over. Half the time you haven't even figured it out, you think that a big heavy truck just drove down the street and made the building shake. I slept through the Sylmar Big One in 1971. During the Whittier Big One in 1987 (88?), I was driving my car and I thought I'd just hit a really big bump. Unless you have the rare bad luck to live in one of the handful of houses that gets hit, earthquakes do virtually no damage. Maybe a couple of glass bowls get knocked to the floor. (We collect teddy bears instead, they bounce.) Maybe your chimney got crunkled, so you get it reinforced (with generous government help) and it will never happen again. Once every decade or so a really bad earthquake hits and a few dozen people die. They've had four deadly hurricanes in two months! People as far north as Maryland have been killed by hurricane-spawned weather.

I'll take four earthquakes over one hurricane any year. And in fact the ratio is just the other way!

I'll even take that volcano a couple of hundred miles to the north! The rain will wash the soot away in a few days.

 

[Athelwulf]

I'll even take that volcano a couple of hundred miles to the north!

Oh God! I'd be scared to death of that volcano! I'd be like, "Oh holy SHIT IT'S ERUPTING!!!!!".

But a couple hundred of miles away? I'm, like, 300 miles south of Mt. St. Helens. I'm not afraid of it.