Footprints on the Moon

Talk about a wake up call this morning! How does the song go (which I now have stuck in my head, by the way)? “I felt the earth move under my feet…” 5:39 a.m. an earthquake that’s been given a preliminary score of 5.4 on the Richter scale hit about 6 miles out from West Salem, Illinois. I really don’t know any more than that because that’s all the information they’d had on the news this morning before I had to leave for work.

My alarm went off at 5:30, I shut it off, laid there for a minute and turned on the light but didn’t get up. I don’t like to hit the ground running in the morning, so I lay there for a few minutes adjusting to the light and just being awake. But then the bed started shaking. At first, I thought it was Lucy scratching the foot board like she likes to do, but then it got more insistent. So I sat up a little bit, and noticed the cord of my radio on the dresser was moving back and forth as well. The word earthquake flashed through my head, but I dismissed it because NAH! We don’t get earthquakes in this part of the country! Needless to say, I got up pretty quickly after that. And I definitely felt less insane when I turned the morning news on and they were talking about an earthquake. We’re in Northern Indiana, close to the Michigan state line, approximately 5 hours from the epicenter of the earthquake, and we felt it up here. The newscasters were reporting that people were claiming to have felt it further north into Michigan, and her parents in Ohio had also felt the shake.

It’s been interesting talking to people this morning when I got into work about whether or not they felt it. A lot of people didn’t know anything happened… there were some other people who thought they might want to seek some kind of addiction treatment because they felt their chairs shake, but the person sitting right next to them in the same room didn’t notice anything. I know the guards who were on shift didn’t know anything had happened until someone told them. Crazy!! We know what to do during fires and tornadoes, but I’ll have to ask my boss if we have post orders for earthquakes!

If you haven’t already heard, you should be aware that General Mills Operations out of Ohio announced a recall of Totinos and Jenos pizza products. You can click there to get the full details, but basically, what’s involved are the Party and Crisp and Tasty pizzas with pepperoni products on them. Items affected by the recall have “EST. 7750″ in the USDA mark of inspection circle, and a best by date of on OR before “02 APR 08 WS.”
According to the CNN article, you should throw the pizza away, but you can receive a replacement by clipping the barcode from the package and mailing it with your name and address to Totino’s/Jeno’s, P.O. Box 200 — Pizza, Minneapolis, MN 55440-0200.

That’s what I’ll be doing, as there are three of these pizzas in my freezer. I JUST bought them on Tuesday too (the recall was announced on Thursday). I’m just glad that I didn’t eat one of them before I heard about the recall– I almost did, but made French toast for dinner instead.

Well, my area was one of many that had nasty storms rip through last night, resulting in tornado touch downs. I was trying to find a link for you guys to read about it for yourselves, but everything I’m finding was updated long enough ago to be mostly irrelevant. I’m sure the reports will be rapidly changing as the sun comes up anyways.
The tornadoes actually touched down probably 20-30 minutes away from where I’m at, and that whole area is shut down and under a state of emergency. So far, the reports are fairly promising, despite the damage. As of right now, they believe that everyone is accounted for, and only have minor injuries. Hopefully it stays that way!

What are you doing to remember what happened six years ago on September 11, 2001. The only community activities available to me today are Catholic masses, as everything else was during the morning hours. I received a couple of email asking me to put a flag in my windows and to drive with my headlights on all day long. I’ll do that on my drive home today, but I doubt people will know why my headlights are on in the sunshine.

I’ve just been remembering, and really that’s what I think is important today. Not who has their headlights on and who doesn’t. Not who found a flag to put in their living room window, and who didn’t have one. It’s remembering what happened… never forgetting. I think I’ll always know where I was when I found out. I think I’ll always remember being huddled around the TV, watching live as the second plane hit. I don’t think I’ll ever forget sitting in my dorm room with as many people as we could fit in there, rotating throughout the day as classes came and went, watching the news updates on the situation.

I’ll always know that we once stood strong as a country, united, and what that felt like. That’s very important. As the political debates escalate and try to divide us, remember what it felt like to stand together. Because no matter what happens this year, and next November, we’re all in this together. This is our country, and we have to fight for it.

Why are Lindsay Lohan and her drug rehab escapades all over my internet? It’s bad enough that stories about her life are everywhere, and I couldn’t care less about where she was partying last night. But it’s gotten to a really bad point when you can’t read an article about ANYthing in the entertainment industry without them devoting a whole paragraph to omgLindsay! I was reading articles online this morning, and I came across no less than three separate ones that felt the need to mention Lindsay Lohan despite having nothing to do with her at all. Make. It. Stop.

I found the video of the space shuttle landing over at my friend Julie’s, Atlantis Returns Safely to Earth… she watched the landing live, but I couldn’t. I definitely understand what she means when she says that things like that make her feel proud to be an American. Mostly, though, things like that just make me sooo grateful that it happened safely. With the past tragedies, and the huge risk involved, you just breathe easier when they are safely on the ground. You can see the video for yourself below!

I think by now most people have heard about the furniture store fire in Charleston on Monday that killed 9 firefighters. I have to admit– this story terrifies me! It was just last week that I was wondering about whether Steve and Erica had child life insurance, or more if they personally had life insurance in case anything happened to them, to take care of Aiden after they were gone. By the end of last week, there was a large fire at the recycling plant, which required fire fighters for two days… Their fire department was called out there. That made me nervous enough… then the fire in Charleston is just a heavy reminder of what could have happened, and what could happen every time they get called out. It’s always sad when people die in the line of duty, but with so many people I care about on the fire department, news stories like this are always very distressing for me to read.

It was an interesting morning this morning… I was a little bit late leaving home, and I still had to run by the ATM machine to get money for lunch. I knew I’d be cutting it close by the time I got to work, and that was before I turned on the street leading to our facility. I live in an area where being stopped by a train is a legitimate excuse for being late for work… this is especially true as our facility sits just on the other side of a set of tracks. This morning it was the train that was stopped. When I got to the intersection closest to the tracks, I saw lots of police cars and at least one ambulance. I had to backtrack quite a way to find a crossing that the train wasn’t blocking. I did finally make it to work, and got all my stuff done, and only landed at my desk 2 minutes late. I found out later that apparently it was a pedestrian that was hit. It was about two and a half hours later that someone came in and told me the train was starting to move. I’ve been looking on all the local news websites for information but haven’t found anything. I called the radio station, but they hadn’t even heard about it yet. They said they’d call the police station, but I never did hear anything else. I guess I’ll have to watch the news when I get off work this afternoon.

I did end up going to bed early last night, though not as early as I thought about. I woke up this morning to disheartening stories splashed all over the news.
The first was that an apartment complex just down the street from me caught fire last night… it was a huge fire that destroyed an entire apartment building. The people living in those apartments lost everything. This scares me because this is one of my big concerns about living in an apartment. Fires that start spontaneously are pretty rare… they are usually caused by someone who did something. The more people you have a in a building, the more likely this becomes. I’m scared that someone in my building will set the thing on fire when I’m not there to rescue my cats. Losing the stuff would suck, but if I couldn’t save my cats, I would be completely devastated.

The other news story was even more sad. Last night there was a candle-light vigil to remember a fallen police officer who was shot to death a year ago. Early this morning, two officers from the same police department were involved in a shootout. One has already died, and the other is in stable condition at the local hospital. That’s really all the press release has said so far. They’ll be setting up the fallen officer’s car in front of the police station for a make-shift memorial. The officers were responding to reports of gun fire… since it happened in the middle of the night, they were waiting for daylight to gather evidence, and further their investigation. The police department is keeping the street closed for at least another two hours. It’s really sad, and very senseless… I’ve been finding myself praying for everyone involved all morning.

Now that I’m up at *whispers painfully* 5:30 a.m. every morning, I have the opportunity to watch a little bit of the morning news before I leave for work. I mainly turn it on for the forecast, but I catch some of the local news in the process. When I get to work, and get settled at my desk, I’ve been logging onto CNN.com to read the news. Over and over again I find myself shaking my head at the world we find ourselves living in these days. Rape, murder, beating and mugging the elderly. If I didn’t want to keep up on current events, it would almost be enough to make me stop reading the news altogether. It’s depressing!