She's a mover and a shaker

I've known lots of movers and shakers in my life, but Mother Nature takes the cake this past week! In PA, we really don't have a lot of natural disasters to worry about. Sure, we get blizzards, but we pray for them in this household. We're snow birds. This week was a little different as you all know.

Let's start with the earthquake. We lived in CA for 5 years and never felt one. I'm sitting at home on Tuesday working and I notice the house is starting to sway back and forth. Here's what goes though my head:

1. Oh no, I'm having some type of weird pregnancy complication, maybe vertigo.
2. That's not it, maybe ghosts, paranormal activity, really??
3. Oh, it must be the house is settling/sinking because of the rain we just had.

All things that ran through my head in the 2 seconds before I realized we were having an earthquake. Now, don't get me wrong, I wasn't thrown of my chair and things didn't fall off the walls, but the fact that I was watching my house move back and forth, watching the wine glasses that were hanging clank together and watching my chandelier swing...that-was-enough-for-me. I picked up the phone to call Dave and thought how am I going to explain this to him (since most of the time he thinks I'm crazy anyway). When he answered the phone said "Did you feel that!" I knew it wasn't me. When I walked out the front door and saw all of my neighbors walking outside too - I was relieved and I wasn't the only one thinking it was ghosts people! I can't imagine going through a huge earthquake like people go through - being thankful is all I can say!

Next up was Hurricane Irene. Yet another rare event that never happens here. Thunderstorms in the summer are great. Hurricane = not so great. We ended up not having any damage from it though. At one point water started coming up from the foundation in our laundry room and we were just soaking it up with towels, but then it just stopped coming in. We never lost power so our sump pumps were able to keep up and keep us dry. On Saturday night, we ended up under tornado warnings also. Another rare event. Way too close for comfort when they're saying the tornado is going to be in your town in the next 5 minutes. After 7 inches of rain and some crazy wind that lasted in to Sunday even when the storm was gone we came out with no damage or water problems. The other side of our street just got their power back an hour ago it's been out since since Sunday morning and all the flooding is going down. Thankful one more time.

Here's what our little Picasso has been up to. There's never a shortage of art projects coming home from school and our art bin is already overflowing. I just can't seem to throw any of them away - I love them. Especially the dinosaur with nilla wafer eggs. I've been waiting for that one to make it's way home :)