Now that I have your attention – I started doing some homework. Remember I mentioned the Cascadia megathrust earthquake zone off the northwestern coast of the US and Canada? There’s a predictable seismological event there, something called an “episodic slip tremor”. It differs from typical quake in technical ways I am not going to pretend to understand, much less explain. (Look it up and see if you can figure it out – nearest I could understand it was more or less quakes on a different wavelength.) What it all boils down to is this: it’s during those episodes, every fourteen months like clockwork, that the area is most likely to produce a megathrust earthquake, the kind of horrendous, kill-em-all-and-let-God-sort-em-out, magnitude 9 type quake and inevitable followup tsunami.
Y’all have probably already figured out I’m mesmerized by earthquakes and other geological goodies. What you probably don’t know is that 1) I’ve never, to the best of my knowledge, felt an actual quake and 2) I’ve been fascinated by this stuff since I was old enough to pick up a rock and stick it in my pocket. It’s all interwoven to me: crystals, rock collecting, quakes, volcanoes, and all the woo-woo stuff accompanying it. I hope that these events occur with few or no casualties, and know of course nothing is so simple. Everything and everyone is altogether connected. Every rock, tree, and soul. I took geology in college and loved every second of it.
Here’s the thing: I did some digging and some very simple math. The swarm of episodic slip tremors last hit the Cascadia area in August of 2010. That makes them due around October this year – and December 2012. Where they will also coincide with another “Supermoon”, the same kind of lunar perigee event we were discussing a few days back BEFORE the quake that bitch-slapped Japan. So yeah, go ahead and cue the Twilight Zone music again. December 21, 2012, anyone? We’re definitely in the zone.
As you were.
Today was overtime day at work and bitchy night when I got home. I don’t know why I was bitchy, other than my son got fired for smoking on the empty lot across the street from where he worked, after a security guard followed him off the property. I know it happened that way, too. While I hate smoking, I also hate the Nazi approach to managing it. Oh well, from what my son said he’s already got another job. And I’m closing my ear to G’s whining and trying to find alternatives to a full time job. There are absolutely ways and I intend to make it happen, G be damned. I can and WILL retire as soon as it’s possible for me to do so and I refuse to work myself into the grave just so G can collect the life insurance. I’ve got him listed as a beneficiary, on principle – but so are my kids and my sister. I got screwed out of anything from my parents’ estate and wasn’t about to leave that to chance or the courts.
G, meanwhile, got both the new and the backup computer put together, all the new components done and we’re buzzing right along now at more reasonable Internet speeds. NICE change from the POS I’d been using for a while now. So yeah, he really didn’t deserve my bitchy streak other than the usual negativity that he exhibits now and then. I have learned by now to brush it off and get on with my life. I am the one with the responsibility to pay for everything so I’m also the one who’s making the calls. I talk to him when he’s rational about it and go on with life when he’s not.
Ah, la vie!