Friday, April 18, 2008

I Feel the Earth Move...or Not

Apparently, there was an earthquake last night in Illinois (most specifically West Salem, near the Illinois/Indiana border) that was felt up here in Chicago.

I say "apparently" because I slept right through it.

It's the topic of the morning at work, where it seems like an even split between those who felt it (some thought their dogs had just jumped into bed or that a particularly large, noisy truck was going by) while others didn't hear about it until they got up and turned on the news. I fall into the latter category--when the first words I heard out of my radio this morning were "We'll give you an update on the earthquake in a few minutes," I thought I'd need to shoot an email to my peeps on the Left Coast to make sure they're OK. (Instead, some of them might be shooting emails to me this morning.)

Superbadfriend said the earthquake woke her up, that her kitty, Ernie, was acting weird just before it happened, that at abround 4:38 a.m. the apartment shook for about 40 seconds.

Me? I was in the middle of a pleasant-for-a-change dream in which I was a mouse locked in a warehouse full of cheese--just me and wheels of New York white cheddar and crates of grated Parmesan. For once, I was awakened by the alarm clock, and I felt like I'd gotten an actual night's sleep.

After the report on the radio, I took a quick tour of La Casa del Terror. The photos of Vampira and Bettie Page were still on the walls, all the DVDs and books on their respective shelves. Even the precarious stacks of various "things" on the coffee table were still in place, ready for my ass to knock them over as I brush by on my way in from work.

The only thing in the whole place that seemed out of place was the Mego-style Eddie Munster figure on the shelf in the dining room--he had tipped over to his right and was now resting comfortably on the ass of the Abraham Lincoln figure next to him.

Did the earthquake knock Eddie over? Or did ms. Olivia reach up and swat him in the head? Guess I'll never know.

2 comments:

JB said...

I felt the quake as I slept 39 floors above Sheridan Rd., assumed I was dreaming, and returned to a sound sleep. 40 minutes later I was awake, watching ABC-7 morning news, and tripping about having been groggy enough to think an actual earthquake--albeit quite a mild one--was a dream. At least I didn't think a demon was shaking my bed as did one news interviewee.

Someone at work told me that highrise residents were more likely to feel the quake than people on ground level. My sisters didn't feel a thing in their South Side home, but Tiny, their beagle, was bit highstrung all day afterwards.

superbadfriend said...

Ernie woke us up a minute before the earthquake, but I had no idea anything was going on even during. I heard some things fall over, but I didn't know why until much later in the morning when we found out about the miniquaker.

:-)