Last Friday, people in the Northeast of the United States experienced the effects of an Earthquake. Though not as common as other parts of the world, the Northeast does get earthquakes, and tornados, but not enough to end the debate as if the words earthquake and tornado should be capitalized (I just knew you were wondering the same!).

In my own lifetime, I have experienced the effects of a “quake” several times; once in Italy as my shipmates and I played softball in a hollowed out caldera of a dormant volcano, (being Sailors, alcohol was initially blamed for the “disturbance”), and 4 other times living in New England. It wasn’t like the Anchorage, Alaska “Good Friday Earthquake” in 1964 that lasted 4.5 minutes and registered 9.2 on the Richter Scale, but they were significant; especially for someone not born or bred in what is considered an “active earthquake zone.”

The last time I felt an earthquake, there was a side effect (yes, I had to look up effect vs. affect again) that I had never experienced or even heard of before; nausea. Vertigo, dizziness, sick, or anything similar you want to call it. It was violent! I was in a warehouse with steel vertical corrugated walls. That seemed to only make it worse as it was like almost throwing up while staring at a Zebra. My eyes crossed, my head spun, my toes tingled, and my earlier lunch almost magically re-appeared. If I wasn’t sitting down, I think I would have fallen down.

I had never heard anybody have similar conditions before, or since until Friday when long time reader Anno Domani mentioned having the same feelings during the quake, 5 hours away from the epicenter. I’ll leave a link below if you want to read more about people having the same symptoms.

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/people-are-reporting-vertigo-dizziness-and-nausea-after-fridays-48-magnitude-east-coast-earthquake-heres-why-223203153.html

Of course, though the symptoms I mentioned might be new to me, exaggerating the size of the quake on the Richter Scale goes back a long way. Seeing that the earthquake was so close to Brooklyn, New York, I can hear my old friends now telling tales;

New Yorker number 1-“Kid…..that thing was like 4.7 on the Richter Scale.”

New Yorker number 2- “Dude ….not even! It was like 15 or 15.375 scales!”

New Yorker number 3-“Hey Stupidos……you’ze are both morons, it was like 9 or 10 Celsius on the scale!”

Number One Shaking his head “Science is dead……let’s go get a slice (Pizza of course)!

Well, it turns out other things make me sick as well………….

Anno Domani in the middle of a conference call when he felt the Earthquake!