About 6:30 Sunday evening I was sitting in the office and suddenly I felt the sensation that I was at the top of the Sears tower. The top of the Sears tower sways back and forth from the wind, it’s a very disconcerting feeling the first time you feel it. Kind of like being on a ship for the first time. This a bit more subtle but I defiantly felt like I was shaking back and forth. We half joked it was another earthquake around Sumatra. A few minutes later Reuters (story link [reouter.com]) confirmed that in fact it was a magnitude 6.8 earthquake off the West coast of Sumatra. You can find info on it from the USGS here [usgs.gov].
Singapore is fairly safe from earthquakes, but damn, that earthquake was 500 miles away and the buildings here were shaking. I slept through the past two big ones, the 9.5 in December and 8.7 in March. Between the earthquakes and the terrorist blowing shit up in Southeast Asia it would appear to be a good time to be somewhere else. Although you can’t really get away from things like earthquakes. Even C’ville—on the East coast has a little earth shakin’ now and then.
The first earthquake I felt was when I was about 7. It was in the summer and I was in the basement of a neighbor’s house with a bunch of other kids. I was bouncing up and down on one of those oversized playground balls with the big circular handle that were (kind of) popular when I was 7. The ground shook and I bounced funny, I guess more because I was shocked than anything else, but I bounced right into one of the solid steel poles and knocked myself out. I was only out for a second or two but got a concussion.
One reply on “do you feel that?”
There is SOMETHING about you that is stopping my brain from envisioning a ‘little Beggs’. Instead I get this 20 something Beggs, sitting on a ball that is far too small for him to be bouncing on, knocking himself out on a jungle gym. Not that it doesn’t work… but I think it’s far more comical that you were going for.