East Coast Earthquake

Yep. I felt it.

I was sitting at my desk working on HubPages.com when I felt like I was going to pass out. I was swaying and moving all around. I couldn't understand it!

Until I felt my feet move. In the part of my house where I was sitting, there are major pipes connected to the street pipes. My first thought was that the pipes had busted and shook the house. I checked the appliances. Nothing had been running, so it wasn't that. A train maybe? I lived near tracks and it wasn't uncommon for a train to shake the house. Nope. Not an engine in site.

The chandelier was shaking: the same chandelier under which my baby was sitting, playing with her toys.

That's not normal.

Grabbing the baby, I looked out my windows to see if anything was going on. My dog was lazily sleeping in his kennel. I saw my neighbors going out on the street, so I decided to join them. They had reports of shelves shaking, TV's moving, the swaying, the jolting...

Earthquake? Gas pipe explosion? Mine subsidence?

I reentered the house and jumped on good old trusty Facebook and asked if anyone else felt it. I jumped on Twitter, and holy cow! People all over the East Coast were asking the same thing: was that really an earthquake?!?

Craziness. Before I did anything else, I ran upstairs to wake a very bewildered toddler from his nap. I certainly did not want him on the second floor in case of an aftershock. After settling the kids and turning on the local news channel, I grabbed a backpack and began filling it with anything we might need if we had to leave the house.

In Case of Emergency: Being Prepared for Babies and Young Children in the Event of Natural or Man-made Disasters

Am I nuts? Certainly not. My house is quite old, and with so many mines beneath us from the coal mining days, I wasn't taking any chances.

It's now been two hours, and there hasn't been anything else (knock on wood!). I heard reports of aftershock activity in VA (2.9 kind of stuff) but that's it.

C'est la vie. I guess I'll go finish dinner.