Earthquake!

Cool. An earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale hit about 20 miles west of me this afternoon. It announced itself with a drawn-out whummp - not too dissimilar to the accident I was in coming back from Florida, except the sound lasted about 5 seconds instead of a tenth of a second, followed by a low-frequency rumbling like there was a diesel truck idling in my driveway or something very peculiar was going on with my furnace, and that lasted about 25 or 30 seconds. Long enough to get the cat upset, and to cause the squirrels outside to run around in an even more manic frenzy than normal.

It's back to normal, though. The local TV stations are covering it from their studios with people phoning in, waiting for their crews to get out to the epicenter, and some of the phone reports are funny: Someone allowed as how they had a broken window, and that this was "far worse than Hurricane Isabel!" Right - tell me that after you've been without power for ten days, not after you have a cracked window and no other damage. And Dial-a-Quote got quoted in the Washington Post.