Shaken and a bit stirred

There was a 5.6 earthquake around 8 pm this evening.

It was centered about 10 or 12 miles from here and shook the house pretty good. Unbelievably nothing fell down or was knocked over, not even some cards on the mantel. But it shook me up pretty good. And the cats. Felix (one of our 4 cats) came running into the room during the quake with his tail frizzed. He's still on edge. As am I to be honest. This was the largest quake I've experienced and of course it had to happen when my husband is away on business! It took a few seconds for it to register what was happening and then decide what to do (nothing). The TV cabinet, bookshelves and china cabinet are bolted to the wall and I quickly assessed that nothing would fall on me so I stayed put and watched the water slosh in the fish tank and braced for anything to fall and break. Fortunately nothing did. It was very surreal though. Everything was moving as one and only the water in the fish tank was moving out of plane to everything else. And there was noise but I can't really describe it. I'm sure some of the noise was the house creaking (it is bolted to the foundation) but what does it sound like when the earth moves? After the shaking stopped I jumped up and checked the other rooms to see if anything had fallen down and then did what any smart, independent woman would do, I called my husband on his cell phone and left a panicked message. Oh well. Let's hope I never have to experience anything larger than a 5.6, ok?

I think I've felt about half a dozen earthquakes during the 14 years total I've lived in California. I was living in L.A. during Loma Prieta and I moved to Colorado just a few months before the Northridge quake so I've been lucky to have missed those. While here I've only felt small ones. They've occurred randomly, as earthquakes do, and generally because they've been small, I've only felt them while lying on the couch or in bed. Those quakes felt like a shudder or a small jolt and were over before you could say "earthquake." This one tonight lasted about 15 seconds.

I got a good laugh from the local news. Fortunately there was no real damage or any injuries (that I've heard about) from this one. The only casualties where some olive jars on the floor of a supermarket. The news report had closeup shots of the fallen fruits, lying amid shards of glass. Funny too was that both the reporter and store clerk called them pickles. Olives. Pickles. Whatever. They're both green. The news team also had a reporter standing by live in San Mateo to interview some restaurant patrons who first thought the quake was a passing Caltrain. I might add that San Mateo is about 35 miles from the epicenter. I guess the news vans couldn't get any closer to the epicenter to film more fallen jars of olives...or olive-looking pickles.

My neglected blog.

I've been neglecting this blog. That's all. I'm not sick (except for a slight cold) or buried under my work. Life is going on as usual and I just haven't been writing about it. I was on travel for work last week so my personal time took a bit of a hit. The travel didn't keep me from knitting though. I had lots of time to knit on airplanes and in my lonely hotel room...when I should have been going to bed early to rest up for the 10-12 hour days. In the last few weeks I have (almost) finished a Clapotis shawl out of oh-so-soft alpaca, knit 2/3 of a scarf in baby alpaca using a stitch pattern I found in my trusty Vogue stitch dictionary from the 80's, and started a pair of Jaywalker socks in some Socks that Rock yarn. I also have been shopping (surprise, surprise). I bought 18 skeins of wool for a sweater, 8 oz of alpaca/mohair roving, sock yarn for Penn State socks (no lion motif on them, it'll just be the colors), more wool roving for spinning, cotton for my first weaving project, two knitting books, four sewing patterns, cotton printed with silly sheep on it, and three pieces of fabric from Gorgeous Things (she had a sale and I caved).

What I haven't been doing, besides writing in this blog, is finishing to sort and caption the pictures from Paris. And I haven't been doing too much sewing. I made some cloth grocery bags a few weeks ago, but they deserve a post all themselves. The other thing I haven't been doing is taking pictures of my projects. Sigh.

So I apologize for not blogging. I just haven't been into it lately.