Shaky

Today mother nature treated us to two more aftershocks - a 5.5 and a 6.0*. Both were located near our side of town and big enough to make my heart stop and my mouth shout impolite words. The first one hit shortly after lunch. I was here, working from home, as you do when your office is still shut down due to earlier natural disasters. There was a tremendous noise as our poor house shook and shook. When it stopped I shouted some bad words and went to get my phone to text Gareth and tell him I was ok. I tried ringing Quinn's daycare but could not get through and so I just hopped in the car and drove over there. He was completely unscathed and unaware. Oh, to be a blissfully ignorant child again!

Back at home, books had been shaken off the bookshelves. I picked them all up and went around the house righting all the picture frames for the 839th time. I swear, we should just paint some rectangles on the walls and superglue some photos to them. Our bedside lamps had been knocked over so I stood them back up too. The glassware - what's left of it after the February quake - had all shifted dangerously close to the front of the cabinet shelves, so I tucked them all safely toward the back again. Thankfully nothing had broken.

My hands were nearly steady again by this point, so I made myself a cup of coffee and settled back into my desk chair to get some more work done.

That's when the second one hit.

It is really hard to describe how scary it is when your house is shaking like that. I certainly don't have the words. It is noisy and frightening and you just don't know when it's going to stop.

It did stop, eventually, and I sort of wandered toward the kitchen, dazed and a bit dizzy. All the books were on the floor again, pictures were on the floor, the iPod was on the floor, glass was on the floor, lots of other stuff that shouldn't be on the floor was on the floor.

We're super bummed that one of our 6 gorgeous Scottish glasses was broken.

there were casualties

These are a special type of glassware native to Scotland whose name I don't remember but they were lovely and a wedding present. They had recently come into frequent use as our new wine glasses, since all of our regular wine glasses are broken, save one. If this keeps up, soon we'll be drinking wine out of martini glasses. We also lost the pestle for our mortar and pestle, which seemed like a pretty solid piece of stone, but there you have it. Busted.

We have great neighbours. Both sides were over in a flash to check on us. I could hear the little boy next door crying. The neighbour helped me pull open the garage door (the power had gone out - the electric door opener useless) and I was on my way to Quinn's daycare a second time. He was still blissfully unaware, my precious boy. All the kids were sitting outside by the sandbox having a grand old time.

The power was out for a few hours but came back on in time for us to cook dinner at the usual hour. We are still without running water, but, as diligent disaster-prepared Cantabrians, we have plenty in our Emergency Kit.

The house is still standing. We are still standing. We are shaken but not broken.

*postscript 14 June 2011 - GNS has now upgraded these shocks to a 5.7 and 6.3, respectively.