Whole lotta shaking

At around 5:05AM this morning, my entire family was awakened by what sounded like something smashing the house.  There was kind of a boom and then a quick shake.  I got out of bed, made sure everyone was okay and then checked the house to see if a tree had fallen on it or our deck had fallen off.  I was worried about our Chinese guests, but didn’t want to barge into their room and frighten them.  So I made doubly sure that side of the house was okay.  Finding nothing, I uneasily went back to bed for another couple of hours.

It was an earthquake.

A 3.6 magnitude earthquake hit central Maryland this morning.  The epicenter was about a mile from our house.  Earthquakes happen just about everywhere, of course, but this was the first one we ever felt.  It was (literally) quite an eye-opener.