All shook up

Last night I was peacefully sitting at my desk in front of my computer, waiting for my dinner to finish nuking cooking, trying to download something to watch on the plane trip to New York. All of a sudden I felt a little gentle shake to the right, then to the left, another to the right, then RATTLE RATTLE RATTLE RATTLE SHAKE SHAKE ROLL SHAKE RATTLE and I saw that the wind devas hanging from the curtain rod in front of me were swaying wildly and the race medals on the little stand were clanking back and forth and the good glassware was making sounds of tinkling together and holy crap batman! I realized that if it was going to continue it would be a good idea to remove my ass from directly beneath the heavy ceiling fan so I scooted away. The earthquake stopped after what was probably only a couple of seconds (and felt like about 20 minutes) but everything in my view continued swaying and making noise. Wow, that was a big one!

When that happens there's no way of knowing whether you've just felt a big earthquake on your local faultline or whether it's a humongous quake on a different fault. It turned out to be on the Calaveras Fault which runs along Highway 680, a couple of blocks from my house. Niiiice! It was centered in the South Bay, and a 5.6 on the Richter Scale, the biggest we've had in the Bay Area since 1989. There have been a couple dozen aftershocks in the same area, mostly in the 1-2 range. They've been predicting and warning and cautioning very loudly that the Calaveras or Hayward were going to let go soon, and this was a big fat warning to all of us to be prepared. Ok, as soon as I'm back from New York I'll get right on putting together an earthquake survival package. Really.

Chaos continues at my office where we're expanding into more space and reconfiguring some of our old space. We had no warning that construction would start when it did so we've had to scurry around trying to get things out of the way, making decisions that we probably should have made weeks ago but didn't. I'm incredibly happy that I'll be out of here for three working days. What a mess.

After the shaking last night I knit a few rows on the Opera Scarf and realized that I must have dropped a stitch somewhere. So I unknit back a few rows, knowing that if I just ripped it off the needles I'd never recover; I can never figure out how to pick up yarnovers and usually just drop more stitches that way. I think my net progress last night was minus three rows. Good job!

Tomorrow we'll meet my newest bear, but in honor of Halloween the Gratuitous Bear of the Day is a group photo. I'm hoping tonight that I get some little trick-or-treaters at my door that are as cute as this group!