"Why is our room shaking?"

This morning Layne and I woke up around 4:45 a.m. when we felt our room shaking! I immediately asked him, "Why is our room shaking?" He replied, "Can you feel that?" He got out of bed and looked outside. Nothing. The pull cord on the ceiling fan above our bed was knocking against the light fixture. An earthquake? In Iowa? The "shaking" lasted only a couple minutes, at most, and eventually we fell back to sleep, only realizing that we really don't know what we're suppose to do in the event of a full-blown earthquake. Tornado, yes. In fact, just two days before we'd moved our 72-hour kits to the basement since that's where we'd be if a tornado struck. Now we're thinking we'd better move them back upstairs.

Turns out that it was an earthquake. A 5.2 magnitude in Mount Carmel, Illinois nearly 386 miles from our house. This was my first time experiencing an earthquake tremor. I was scared out of my mind. It was Layne's second experience; his first was while serving in Venezuela.

Read more at: http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/18/illinois.earthquake/index.html

I must admit that this was probably the first time since moving to Iowa that I was glad that I wasn't living in Louisville, which is only 128 miles from the epicenter.