What's Shakin?

The whole east coast, if you haven't heard! There was a 5.9 magnitude earthquake on the east coast yesterday, centered in south western VA. So while everyone is sharing their earthquake stories, I figured why not throw ours out there as well! In fact, because earthquakes are so rare on the east coast, the very (very) minor effects of it have caused ridiculous levels of news coverage and dominated Facebook for the past 24 hours. I have yet to hear a report of anyone being injured or any significant damage being done. Though, the federal government did shut down D.C. today (you know, the day after, why not?). It's really kind of hilarious. So here's our goofy earthquake story...

First of all, this cute little thing sits on the window in our kitchen. It used to belong to my husband's grandparents. When he was younger and his grandparents lived in California he used to look at it to tell when there was an earthquake because the heart would move and shake in that case. His grandmother kindly passed it on for him to have in his house when he shared a story about it a few years ago. So when, a rare earthquake happened here yesterday I must say that I failed to check the heart. I was sitting at our kitchen table eating my lunch. I heard a little bit of rattling, but thought it could be a plane going over or a big truck outside. When it continued and grew louder, I looked around and noticed that pretty much everything was shaking. There was no time to figure out what was going on, for all I knew the house was falling down, I just needed to get upstairs to get my baby (she had been napping)! By the time I got her back downstairs with me the shaking had almost stopped.

I personally was still shaking, but the house and ground had stopped. It took me some time to determine that there actually had been an earthquake. The news didn't break in right away and our internet had gone down. I also had a hard time getting through to anyone on my cell phone since everyone on the east coast was suddenly making calls at the same time. Finally a call came through from my husband and he was able to tell me that it was in fact an earthquake before the call cut off. Neat!

Looking around the house everything seemed fine. Nothing fell from shelves or off the walls. Nothing looked cracked or broken in any way. Later last night when I went upstairs I did notice some minor "damage" in our bedroom. And it seems that this is the extent of it....

Whew! Dodged a bullet this time :)