It's Halloween!

...and I have to work until late in the evening. Rats. Just doesn't seem right. Furthermore, I did not win the Kelly Clarkson badge contest, as predicted. Oh well.

I should mention the decent rumbler we had last night at 8 p.m., which measured 5.6 on the Richter scale - strong enough to generally knock light things off the walls and make all the pets in town jittery for the evening. (Also, apparently, strong enough to make the national news in Iowa, judging by an early morning phone call from mother Bonnie.) It was lengthier than most moderate jolts, from my perspective; kind of a whap, and then a little shimmy. I was in church with the band rehearsing for Sunday, and you could hear all the walls creak and see the lights sway. A nice little pre-Halloween scare. Just last week, new teacher (and pizza-tosser) Jackie was telling us how much she wanted to experience her first California trembler (despite my trying to talk her out of it, having experienced both Loma Prieta and Northridge first-hand.) Well, this was a nice introduction to seismic activity. It's like she ordered it up.

Richter is calculated on a logarithmic basis, with each whole step being 10 times greater (which is roughly, according to the USGS, 31 times the energy.) So Loma Prieta, at 7.1, and Northridge, at 6.7, had like 35 times the energy of last night's shaker, which makes them both completely different animals. I was in a hotel room in Burbank, with my band on a trip for a recording session, about 12 stories up during the Northridge quake in January 1994 when it struck at 4:30 a.m., and it was literally like riding a roller coaster. Our TV fell off the table, and much of the water sloshed out of the toilet. We were trapped in our room briefly, as were most of the people on our floor; the frames of the doors had shifted to the extent that it was impossible to push the doors open. Immediately after the quake, we all stood in the room without knowing what to say, surfing over the sizable aftershocks pulsing through every minute or two, and since all the power went out and the city was dark, all you could hear was the faint, strangely soothing sound of car alarms from all across the valley, like a chorus of robot crickets. Someone eventually came by with a crowbar and wrenched the door open, and we made our way out.

To this day, I get a jolt of adrenalaine when I hear the sound of walls or a ceiling creaking when, say, large trucks drive by.

Anyway, Jen plans to take Camille out tonight in her fine new Snow White costume for a little tricking and treating, so we hope to have some photos to share soon. Until then - Happy Halloween!