Wakey Wakey Eggs and Shakey

So, uhm...the midwest has had two earthquakes this morning, centered 130 miles east of St. Louis and 240 miles south of chicago.

Side question: Why do the news organizations all label the quakes as being south of chicago? St. Louis is closer, and we ARE a major city still. Major enough, anyway (more on this later).

Well, technically one quake and an aftershock.

I live in St. Louis now, and there are always quiet whispers about The Big Quake of 1812, the New Madrid Earthquake that toppled chimneys in louisville and reversed the direction of the mississippi river, but I always just sorta figured I'd be long dead and buried before we had one here.

For the record, I'm not concerned or anything - these are all centered in Illinois, and anyone who knows missourians know how much we hate chicago and by extension everything in Illinois (males over the legal drinking age make a few exceptions for specific establishments) but, by and large, it's a totally new experience.

The first quake happened at 4:37 this morning Central time and while I was awake, I didn't notice - I was just seeing my wife out the door to go to work, I'd guess (like I said, I didn't notice the thing), but I guess that's one advantage to having a house built on deep bedrock. I went right back to sleep, and I don't know if my anxiety-attack cats really noticed.

But we just had a pretty solid aftershock, and my office shook like jell-o on a woofer for about 10 seconds.

I'm one of the mandarin oranges, for the record.

All in all...weird.