Earthquake!

At 5 o'clock this morning there was a very loud noise (WHUMP) and then the whole house shook. As you might imagine, this woke me up. It woke John up too, so we conferred and then I investigated by looking out the window while he checked out the downstairs. Everything seemed fine, so we went back to bed. Seamus never even woke up, which I guess is a benefit of the fact that he's slowly losing his hearing.

I couldn't fall back asleep though. The only thing I could think of that would cause a noise like that was an explosion, which led immediately to thoughts of "Something went wrong at Ft. Detrick (home of scary bioweapons research) and now our lives are about to become something out of The Stand, Feed, or The Passage. Fuck!" Although I suppose that we're close enough to Ft. Detrick that if something did happen there, we'd probably die pretty quickly. There's a cheery thought for you. Perhaps I should lay off the post-apocalyptic fiction for a while.

Then I considered a plane crash.

Then, well, BP has a facility here in Frederick. Maybe all of their stuff has just started spontaneously exploding.

How big a car accident would it take to make a noise like that and shake the whole house? I don't think that's actually possible.

At this point it finally occurred to me to turn on the radio. I'm not kidding when I say I'm not a morning person. My brain actually moves that slowly at 5 am. Plus, I was very busy thinking up worst case scenarios. Imagine my surprise when they said it was an earthquake. You can't really blame me for not thinking of that. This is Maryland. We don't usually get earthquakes here. Based on 1970's disaster movies, I always figured there'd be more shaking, things falling over and general drama. And George Kennedy.

Anyway, by then I was full on awake, so I just gave up and got out of bed. What a weird way to start my day.