We had an earthquake recently at work. We all felt it - and even talked about it. But at the time we agreed that what we felt could not have possibly been an earthquake.
The shake that we felt was quick. It felt like someone, Paul Bunyan for example, took something massive and dropped it on the entire building. One solid SHAKE. And that was it. A wind gust? Someone moving in upstairs? Anything but an earthquake.
About an hour after I left work a coworker called to say that she heard on NPR that it was in fact a 3.6 off the nearby coast. 3.6? No biggie. I live in San Francisco, I sleep through 3.6's daily.
But whenever I hear about or feel a nearby earthquake, I go through this brief period of time wherein I am obsessed with earthquakes. I check the USGS site like it's my Gmail. Seriously people LOOK at all of those earthquakes along California. And did you know that last week a series of four earthquakes over 7.0 hit off the coast of the Philippines within an hour?
Sigh.
It's stressful. Seriously. Because then I got crazy and started googling earthquake prediction. And yeah, I know it's not an exact science, but we've had a lot of little earthquakes here recently - more than I ever recall in my 26 years as a Californian, and if I were to predict a massive quake hitting ummmm it would be any day now.
So I googled quake prediction and conveniently found quakeprediction.com AND LO AND BEHOLD this dude was saying that a pretty big one was going to hit basically right near my house. Granted his website was not the most legit thing I have ever seen, but! he had the domain name. It is early enough in Internetdom that I feel like I can trust anyone with a super legit domain name.
And people, I kind of stressed for a few days about this, but it goes without saying (duh, I would have told you) - that the "big one" did not hit.
As the days progressed Mr Quake Prediction shifted his focus to other parts of California as though he had never predicted the apocalypse that never came.
And I woke up thinking about my earthquake preparedness kit a little less each day.
Living right on top of the San Andreas fault line is awesome though. Seriously.
