milestones

I felt my first earthquake last night.

Don’t be confused – this is not the first earthquake I’ve experienced. We actually have earthquakes all the time in Okinawa. Somehow I just never seem to notice them. I even managed to sleep through the quake that hit NY shortly before Yoni and I moved out here.

So, as strange as this sounds, I was almost excited when, at 10:30 last night, the apartment started to shake. I was sitting alone in the living room (Yoni had gone to bed at 9:30 like an old man) when, all of a sudden, something wasn’t right. And then it clicked – oh, I thought, this must be what an earthquake feels like. Our apartment building is made of reinforced something-or-other due to this island’s propensity towards typhoons, so the shaking feeling wasn’t scary in any way. I didn’t even feel the need to lie down on the couch and cover my head with a pillow (as we are instructed to do in earthquake preparedness commercials on military tv). Instead, I sat back, watched the picture frames reverberate against the walls, and reveled in the first-time-iness of the experience. After it was over, I said the appropriate bracha, turned off the lights, and went to bed, happy to have checked another item off of my proverbial Okinawa bucket list.

(By the way, Yoni would never forgive me if I forgot to include the official earthquake specs – so here they are. It measured a 5.6 on the Richter scale, and the epicenter was off the eastern coast of Okinawa, in the Pacific Ocean, about 63 miles from where we live, at a depth of 5.3 miles. For more information, he says, you can go to earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map)

Speaking of first time experiences – tomorrow night I’m going out to a line dancing bar for a friend’s birthday. Don’t know what that’s going to be like. I’m too busy bemoaning the fact that I don’t have any cowboy boots to wear to really think about it. I am, however, relatively certain they won’t be playing Yoya or Neshikah Turkit. If only…