Earthquake!

Wow, you really *can* go home again.

I managed to drag my lazy ass out of bed in time for my last physiology small group today (at 3 PM), and had just gotten to the third floor of the library and was standing up talking to Dave.

Then I felt a rumbling...

"Nah," I thought. "They don't get earthquakes here. Must be a high wind."

More rumbling. Students starting to look concerned. One fellow obviously also from California scoffing "Oh calm down, it's like a 2.2" and my response "That's gotta be up near a 3."

(Earthquakes in California are a form of offtrack betting. Everyone does it.)

Apparently, they get earthquakes here. And apparently, the buildings can at least handle the little ones, which is nice to know. Through the grapevine, apparently Martinique got hit by a pretty significant (in the 7s) earthquake, so we got the ripple effect, thus giving students from all over the world a little taste of it.

You know... living on an island that was formed by a volcano, which is 2 miles south of the "hurricane belt", and off a country that is currently fairly politically unstable, earthquake would probably not have been on my top 10 potential phenomena I'd experience in Grenada.

To everyone's credit, no one ran around screaming "We're all gonna die!", which, when I moved to North Carolina as a teenager, everyone seemed to think is what *should* happen during an earthquake... to which my response was "Don't you guys have hurricanes?"

I've also now seen a monkey! A real one!!! Dave's neighbor apparently has one as a pet, and he told me about seeing it, and while walking to his place today, lo and behold, there was a guy across the street with a mona monkey on his balcony!

So monkeys and earthquakes. Unfortunately, both still pale in comparison to impending finals!