earthquake in bunnaland: it's all yer fault

Growing up in the West, Biff and I remember the good old days of mandatory earthquake drills. Seismologists continually warned us that the "big one" was coming and so we were periodically startled by the shrill whistle of the earthquake alarm and herded under our tiny little desks by faculty reliving memories of being crammed into plywood fallout shelters like this one, that looks like a great place to flip through a book and eat a can of Campbell's tomato soup.

I could never manage to get my entire body under the desk. I had to choose between my head and my legs - and I was one of the smaller students.

So moving to the Midwest we thought we were trading earthquake drills for tornado sirens and twister preparedness seminars. We were wrong. Apparently we live near what the USGS considers the area of highest earthquake risk in the United States outside the west coast: the New Madrid fault. What do you know?

Early Friday morning we felt the tremor. I should say Biff felt the tremor. I was groggy and dismissed it as a figment of her imagination. It wasn't until later that morning, when we assessed the damage, that I realized what had happened. Our office was almost unrecognizable; we're still alphabetizing.


And our pantry? Well, we had to enlist the help of our neighbor, Albert, to help clean up all the glass. He got right in with both hands.


We'll try to post more pictures of the clean up.