random thoughts – Day 1,777 – (Monday) – unusual usual day

Cool sun effect.

As I poured another cup of coffee around 8:00 this morning, the sun rose over the backyard shed. It was bright and I decided to take a picture. There were some cool colored flares in the camera and I spent the next few minutes taking a bunch of pictures of this flare effect.

Logging in for work was normal, regular, and routine. No surprises, no aggravation. Later, there was our regular Monday morning online meeting. 

During the Zoom meeting, there was a rumbling vibration in the office floor beneath my feet and the glass jars on a shelving unit in the office were all rattling. The meeting on the screen seemed to move in normal time while the rumbling under my feet felt like it was running at a slower speed. My best guess was there was a big truck idling outside, but there was no truck.

I almost interrupted a colleague to ask if they felt anything weird, but I’ve been trying to be more mindful and not do that. When they were done speaking, I had forgotten about the rumble thing, which is why the interrupting thing happens.

Earthquake!

After the call, I learned the rumbling was an earthquake around the New Hampshire-Maine border. And I thought the cool sun flare thing would be the remarkable thing of the day. This was an unusual usual day.

Many years ago, while I was in San Francisco for a conference there was an earthquake. The hotel I was in had put notices under the door alerting guests about high winds that were expected and that the building might feel like it was swaying and that was normal. When I felt the building moving later that night, I figured it was the wind, but the next morning I learned it had been an earthquake. 

Today, sitting on a ground floor level in a different part of the country during an earthquake was a different sensation than that time on a high floor of a San Francisco hotel.

I checked the basement for any fresh weirdness and was glad to find nothing unusual. The rest of the day was much calmer than the suspended animation time warp of the earthquake event. The afternoon felt like the morning was a million years earlier.