As many of you probably already know, unless you live under a rock, an earthquake hit Los Angeles early Monday morning. This is not the first earthquake that I have ever been in. However, it is the first earthquake that I have:

1. Not slept through – my sister still gives me shit about the one I slept through in Alaska – and

2. Realized that it was an earthquake before it was over instead of just assuming that I had the shakes from too much coffee.

Therefore, I felt that it warranted a post. Especially since I seem to have my earthquake reaction all wrong. During the quake I called my dogs to me and they snuggled under my arms and stopped barking.  I guess they figured that if I wasn’t upset they could calm down. Which my number one question for them is, why doesn’t that work in normal life? They will bark and howl their fool heads off regardless of what my demeanor is or whether their under my arm on any other day, but by God during an earthquake they are monkey-see, monkey-do! Maybe the next time they start barking I’ll pick them up and shake them really hard . . . well, that’s probably not the best idea . . .

At any rate, during the quake I was totally calm.  Then after I looked around my room.  A couple of things had fallen over or fallen off their perches, but other than that, no damage. My roommate poked her head in my door and once we had ascertained that nobody had been crushed by a falling object, we both went back to bed. Yes I went back to bed, and yes I was able to fall asleep. Really my only hindrance to sleep was that Bubba was still a little skittish and wouldn’t lay down until I grabbed him in a bear hug and made him lay down with me. Then he fell asleep too. No muss, no fuss, 4.4 is not that big of a quake.

By the time that I finally drug myself out of bed I had to rush to make it to work on time, where I was met by an onslaught of social media about people freaking out about the earthquake. Freaking out and doom and gloom about “The Big One!” I didn’t get it, we live right along a major fault line. Aren’t earthquakes sort of expected? Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t sit around gleefully waiting for an earthquake to strike, but I guess I figure there are better things to get freaked out about than an earthquake that didn’t even cause any damage. Or so I thought until I got home from work to discover that the big brick planter in our courtyard now looks like this:

Crazy right! Then I went upstairs and really took a look around my apartment. In addition to the couple of things that I knew had fallen, every picture hanging on the wall was now crooked. One of them had fallen off completely and was lodged behind the bookshelf which is quite a feat since there isn’t enough room between the book case and wall for it to fit. Which means that the bookcase was rocked out from the wall far enough for the picture to slip through. How cool is that?!?! That’s when I really started to look around and discovered that everything on my desk had shifted almost half a foot. Look!

Yes, I know, I’m a horrible housekeeper. I have better things to do than dust, and quite frankly if it weren’t for my bad housekeeping we wouldn’t have this shot! And yes, I have dusted since then, so all of you in the peanut gallery can keep your comments to yourself. The point is that I am so in awe of Mother Nature right now. She is a certifiable bad ass!  Beyond bad ass!  It’s like she sits on her throne – does Mother Nature have a throne? I’d have a throne if I were her. Were gonna go with throne. – and laughs at all of our pathetic attempts to prove that we humans are greater than our surroundings.  Can outwit and humanize the natural world around us. So every now and again, she throws down something like this just to prove that she’s actually the one in charge. Now that I think about it, she kind of reminds me of my sister. How every now and then she’ll knock me to the ground and pound on me a bit just to remind me that even though I’m half a foot taller now, she’s still the big sister. It blows my mind and humbles me. She is so amazing. Mother Nature I mean, not my sister. Well my sister’s pretty amazing too . . . and has a mean shoulder throw.

http://www.murphyillustration.com/