Thursday November 5, 2009. 5:34 p.m. A "tremblor" (small earthquake) rocked the room. I had a mug of tea on my desk and it sloshed right onto the desktop. Funny feeling when the room begins to move from side to side... lasted about 40 seconds - just long enough for me to wonder if I should leave the building and take a walk. That's the second one in two months. This is earthquake territory.

When I first thought about it, I thought it was about five seconds in duration but when I got to school, people told me that the official record was forty seconds - my, how time flies when you're having fun... and I wasn't. I really did wonder whether everything was coming to an end within the next few seconds. It had a magnitude of 5.7 or close to that. Major quakes are more than 7. I'm told that the last major quake was about 7.3 and killed 2000 or so people - the upside is that the building I live in survived that quake just fine.l