Earthquake!!

Today I was sitting at my desk, working away, minding my own business. I was listening to music with headphone because one of my office-mates was discussing his project with a coworker. All of a sudden my desk started to move around. I thought that the office-mate was kicking my desk, and I thought that this was very rude. But then I realized that the whole room was moving back and forth, side to side. It took me a good ten seconds to realized that I was in an earthquake.

The lights were swinging back and forth and the building was kind of groaning. I am on the 13th floor (lucky). I had never been in an earthquake before and it was very interesting to feel how everything moves, first up and down and then side to side. It felt as if I got up out of my chair too fast and got really dizzy. It went on for about a minuter or so and then everything was back to normal. My first instinct was to run to the window to 'see the earthquake,' like it was a tornado or something. Obviously, there was nothing to see.

The USGS later said that it was a 5.4 size earthquake on the Richter Scale, which is the largest one that Anchorage has had this year. The epicenter was 50 miles away. Luckily, it wasn't so large that we had to dive under our desks or anything like that. Evidently, the ConocoPhillips building is designed to withstand pretty sizable earthquakes without damage.