Shake, Rattle and Roll!

It has been my goal this year to post at least once a month, I realize April is over and May will be over in a few short days..so to redeem myself, I will tell you about my crazy April...... Easter started out as the perfect day, Mark played his trumpet with the worship team in church, I played a duet with our church pianist, Lindsay, for the offertory. It was a beautiful day, I made a nice Easter lunch, and the birds were singing, the weather was perfect.....suddenly, a 7.2 earthquake hit and everything was turned upside down!!! I can honestly say without even the slightest amount of exaggeration, that earthquake was the scariest thing I have ever been through. Mark even admitted that the earthquake was the scariest thing he has been through while in the United States (and he lives for dangerous excitement). When the initial rolling feeling started I was in the kitchen cleaning up from lunch. Then, the rolling feeling suddenly turned to violent shaking and the noise of our house shaking, dishes rattling, and things falling was deafening. Mark ran to hold up his 1,000 pound 125 gallon fish aquarium that was shaking back and forth, I ran over to our other 40 gallon aquarium and tried to keep it from falling. The whole earthquake lasted for about 35 seconds and seemed like it would never end. Mark finally shouted at me to grab Mollie and get out. I found Mollie and ran outside until the shaking finally stopped. I could barely walk, my whole body was shaking.

After I went back inside, Mark and I surveyed the damage..

As we picked out way through the house, there was water everywhere, our pool was making huge noisy waves and we lost about a 1,000 gallons of water. Upside? I didn't have to water the lawn that week! The only serious damage was a 20 gallon aquarium in Mark's office that fell over and broke. Shards of glass and gallons of water covered the floor. We were able to recover the fish and they are OK! The power was out for only a couple of hours, and I am so thankful for that! I spent the next couple of days with a shop vac cleaning up water and shards of glass. Our life is almost back to normal. We had over 500 small earthquakes in the first 48 hours since the initial 7.2. It is quite unnerving not being able to count on the ground to be solid. So, that was April, and although May is almost over we are still having earthquakes! It seems that everyday we have small 1 -3 earthquakes that we don't even pay attention to. Saturday morning we had a 5.3 followed by a 4.8 with only three minutes in between! It always gets my heart pounding, and I am not sure I will ever get used to the ground moving! You know you have had too many earthquakes lately when you can accurately guess how strong the quake was by the sound it makes when the shaking hits your house! When ever I get scared though, I am reminded of the old hymn "My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' and righteousness, when all around my soul gives way He then is all my hope and stay, on Christ the solid rock I stand all other ground is sinking sand"!! Nothing could be more relevant to me at this point!!