Spring Forward...Fall Off Back

There's A Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On...


As most of the people that know me in real life know, as a rule I generally try to stay off of the TV News and out of mention in the Newspapers--local and national--because I'm not good enough at anything in particular to warrant glowing, positive mention on video or in writing.

This means if you see a photo or video of me on the 6 PM TV news or I am written about by the press, generally something bad has happened.

That said, although I personally didn't make the news or the news papers in the past couple of days, since we relocated cross country this week the area here in and around TULSA, OKLAHOMA certainly did get the Headlines by having a 4.7 earthquake (third strongest on record) at around 2 AM Saturday morning...

...followed more than 70 aftershocks afterwards...

and then...

as a grand finale...

 at a little after 11 PM last night while I was soaking in my new giant bathtub after a day spent opening boxes and looking for my computer stuff...

WE HAD A RECORD, NUMBER ONE OF RECORDED HISTORY, 5.6 EARTHQUAKE WHICH ALMOST SLOSHED THE WATER OUT OF MY BATH TUB.

The good news is that the way the quake moved there was little or no damage except at the epicenter about 70 miles to our southwest (and possibly some new cracks in the corners of our sheetrock walls), but the bad news is that little Missy the Turbo Pup and Pat are looking at me wondering what the heckI have gotten them into.

I did a little digging around in the online scientific literature on quakes and found that the state of Oklahoma is actually very seismically active--averaging about 500 minor quakes a year--but the geological structure is very different from places like California and the New Madrid fault line in Illinois.

The quakes we have here are compression/extension and slip fault line quakes which happen more frequently but possess much less energy that the ones which occur in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

So I guess that in the end we'll go back to worrying about getting blown away and having our roof torn off by tornadoes rather than having our roof fall in on us from a quake.

Time to get back to unloading boxes I guess.

Regards Y'all...