What's shakin'?

Everything, as it turns out. We had an earthquake this morning, 5.2 on the richter scale. Around 4:37 this morning, I felt the bed shake and a clinking noise. The noise was Ken's glasses hitting a drinking glass on his bedside table (I think) and the shaking was, um, the earth. Actually, my first thought was, "Is Kahlua having a seizure?" because, well, that's basically how Bailey died in front of us, and we all know how disorienting waking up from a dead sleep can be. I looked at the foot of the bed, but Kahlua wasn't there; he was sitting in the middle of the bedroom, minding his own business. Morgan lay sleeping at my side, and Moonshine was nowhere to be found. I said, "Is it an earthquake?" and Ken said, "No, it's the glasses clinking," because he had that whole disoriented thing happening, too. I was more "WTF?" than scared. It lasted I dunno, maybe 15 or 20 seconds, then it stopped. Ken promptly fell back to sleep. I lay awake for a bit thinking about the New Madrid fault line. I grew up in the St. Louis area, and they taught us about it in school, so of course the thoughts running through my head was "Holy crap, St. Louis is in ruins" and "Hope my family's okay" and "Ken's too busy with finals to be dealing with this now." (Ken works for an agency that coordinates Illinois law enforcement in an emergency.) This is the seismic zone that caused the quake today. If I have a handle on the way these things work, if New Madrid had a big quake, this fault line would be affected, too.

Don't worry, everyone is okay here. It was a weird 20 seconds, though. Clearly, the end is near.