The Night We Felt the Earth Move

So the kids were in bed but not asleep, and Fixit and I were sitting on the loungeroom floor (old habits die hard I suppose - the new couch is perfectly comfortable) when the ground started shaking. Our brains could not make any sense of it. At all. We just sat there looking surprised for a few seconds. Vibrations, quite big ones, coming up through our floor.

Fixit at first accused the kids of rough-housing on the bunkbed, but really we knew it was a tremor. He's felt one before, years ago, but I never had. The only information that came into my completely freaked out brain was that everyone needed to stand under a door frame. So we did. I mean, the shaking had stopped by then but we still stood under the door-frames, just in case. As you do.

The kids were completely unnerved, and I think it was worse in the top bunk because Climber was fighting back a few frightened tears. We went out the front door to have a look. What were we expecting to see, crevices in the front yard? Everything was quiet and we were the only ones who came outside in our street.

The instinct in that situation is to reach out to others, so Fixit rang a friend who lives nearby, and his parents, and I came down to the computer where I watched Facebook and Twitter light up. Oddly comforting to hear about it from others.

Still haven't seen Bertie Wooster, who had been quite the psycho cat earlier that evening. Did he know? They say they do.

The kids were soothed and sent back to bed. It took a lot longer for my jumping nerves to calm. The thing is, I think, that here in Victoria, we're a little bit scared of Mother Nature right now.