About an hour ago, I was making coffee in the kitchen when the house was rocked by a large concussion, followed by a shorter one. I ran to find Josh, thinking a transformer had blown or something. Josh ran to find me, thinking it was an earthquake. In five years living in California, he’s only experienced one earthquake, three weeks ago, and wouldn’t believe me when I told him that what we’d just heard wasn’t anything like an earthquake.
I knew our local community website would have a post up within an hour giving all the details, so I finished making my coffee and stopped looking out of the windows for smoke. After growing up here and spending many sleepless nights trying to figure out what this or that “boom” was, I LOVE that I can just hop online and find out, instead of hearing it through the grapevine the next day. One of those sleepless nights was after a local restaurant exploded into flames a block away from my grandparents’ house, another was when an ancient pine fell outside my window during a thunderstorm. While I was watching Night of the Living Dead. At home by myself. My mom walked in an hour later gasping in horror and asking me if I had known the tree had fallen, to which I could only reply, “Woman, are you nuts? I wasn’t going to open the door to find out!”
Ah, all that exposition aside, turns out the noise we heard this afternoon was the space shuttle Atlantis.
We were watching the landing in the cafeteria at Caltech. I had more fun watching a room full of geeks all turned towards the television set…
wait, so what did you hear? it re-entering the atmosphere?