And the earth moves under my feet

With apologies to Carole King for the horrible misuse of song lyrics ...

As most of you are aware, the East Coast just got hit by a pretty hefty earthquake.  5.9 on the Richter Scale, it was located just outside of the Charlottesville, VA area.  That's about an hour away from where I'm sitting (as the crow follows the road).  It got interesting.

I work in a nice, secure building that's entirely made out of concrete and rebar.  No windows.  When a quake can make this building move ... the occupants scatter like ants out of a smashed anthill. 

Now, today's been one of those days where I've been fighting dizzy spells.  A couple of them were rather nasty.  When the building started shaking, I was trying to figure out why my dizzy spells were getting so bad, suddenly.  Now, they DO get that bad, but they usually work their way up to that point, and they hadn't yet.  When the soda machine started trying to dance with me ... well, I figured at that point it wasn't just my head acting up.  Of course, my next thought was, "What did the contractors hit the building with this time?"  They'd already taken several good chunks out of one corner with a bucket lift, so it was possible.

Oh, well.  Family's all safe - even though my mom slept through it until her dachshund started going bonkers over the quake and my mother-in-law needs to learn to turn her cell phone on while babysitting ... Other than that and an overloaded phone system, it looks like we've managed to avoid major damage.

Now, if we could only keep that trend when Irene pays us a visit this coming weekend.

As one of my coworkers said, "We've had forest fires (Great Dismal Swamp), earthquake and a hurricane this coming weekend.  Any other natural disasters want to come join in the fun?"

Oh, well.  Time to get back to work.  Time to cut of the stream of conciousness ramble.

-- Sham