Earthquake

    I had just made a cup of coffee and was walking down the hallway toward the small room I'm using as an office here in Lower Hutt when the house began shaking at 9:06 a.m..
    My first thought: A truck had hit the house.
    I knew that couldn't be right, however, since the driveway to our little hideaway in the hills is very steep. A truck would have lost all its momentum by the time it reached the house.
    My second thought: Somehow a brontosaurus had awakened from an eons-long sleep and was walking by.
    No, I thought, even here in Middle Earth that would be impossible.
    Hmm... must be an earthquake.
    It was. It struck (is that the right word?) near Seddon on the South Island across the Cook Strait from us and measured 5.6 on the Richter Scale. There were six aftershocks.
    Elena sent me a message minutes later saying that it had also shaken buildings in Wellington where she was working today. The Kiwis she works with took it all in stride, she said, laughing about it as they went about their business.
    I was a little more impressed than they were: I've been through six hurricanes (if I'm remembering them all), blizzards, tornadoes, a couple of floods and even a landslide in Honduras but this was my first-ever earthquake and I admit it caused me to pause for more than a second and not just because it threatened to spill my coffee all over the hallway carpet. I mean, the earth actually shifted... that's pretty awesome when you stop to think about it - and I did.
    Josep's cousin Elena was on Skype to her family in Spain when it hit and she was a little concerned, though not frightened by it.
    Josep slept through the whole thing.