THE BIG EVENTS

Over the past few weeks, we've lived through/experienced several BIG events.

First, on July 5th, my trusty little car - a gift from my parents after college graduation - crossed the 100,000 mile threshold. It was a big moment in my life - watching her odometer go from 5 digits to 6. Thankfully, I was in the passenger seat during the big event and was able to capture it on film (I'll spare you the video).

In early August, I discovered that I do in fact have a Y in my left eye. For those of you who don't remember, my aunt in Texas has a client who claims to have a no-fail way of determining the sex of an unborn child. In short if the blood vessels of the mother's left eye form a Y, then the baby will be girl. Back in September 2008, I had a distinct Y in my left eye. As you can see from the picture below, I do AT THIS VERY MOMENT have a Y in my eye. What do others think?!?! Is "Joel" in fact a girl?

August was also full of natural disasters. On the 23rd, DC was rocked by a 5.8 magnitude earthquake. I was at home with K at the time - trying to get her to sleep. We felt two distinct movements during the quake. First, it really did feel like the house was shaking. It also felt like the floors were rolling - like we were standing on top of water. The noise from the earthquake was loud. K was laying on her bed with her hands over her ears S-C-R-E-A-M-I-N-G.

After the shaking stopped, K and I went outside to talk to our neighbors and did a walk through of our house to see if there was any damage. Pictures fell off of the wall in our bathroom and our shoe cubby in our sunroom moved away from the wall. In our front bedroom, the wall/ceiling cracked. You can see from the picture below that it does look like there were waves/rolls. The crack moves/rolls from wall to ceiling back to wall again. It is pretty magnificent to see the strength of plate tectonics in our bedroom.

Also during the earthquake, we heard a terrible crashing noise on our roof. Turns out our neighbor's chimney crumbled and crashed onto our roof. As you can see the quake did a number on the 100 year old chimney.

Prior to the hurricane, Irene, that rocked DC five days after the earthquake, D went up on the roof, took some pictures and removed/stacked all the loose bricks. We didn't want the hurricane strength winds to cause damage to our roof or our neighbors. Thankfully there was no damage.