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Woken roughly from a sound sleep, having no idea what's going on. Chris says, "What the fuck?" Shake my head. Gradually realize everything's shaking. The windows are rattling. He concludes, "It's an earthquake."

"Huh. Never been in one before."

The shaking goes on and on, seems like it will never stop. A couple of small crashing noises downstairs. Finally, it stops. I roll over and look at the clock radio. 4:47.

All the little hairs are standing up on my whole body. I feel electrical. But I try to go back to sleep, anyway.

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It is odd, that even though I spent a year in Japan and have visited California and the Pacific Coast many times, I've never felt an earthquake before. There was one in 1988 that was felt in Milwaukee, where I was at the time, but I didn't feel it. I think I was driving. My dad was in the hospital that summer; he had a room on the eighth floor and he saw the frame of his bed move.

When I first moved to St. Louis, there was a lot of talk about Iben Browning, a geologist who predicted that "The Big One" was going to happen on the New Madrid fault on Dec. 3, 1990. It didn't.

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Current official stats: Richter 5.2, centered near Belmont, Illinois on the Wabash Fault. Minor damage locally, no casualties. (According to the TV news.)

The seismograph pictures are interesting: the waves are not high, but they are very very regular and very frequent. It basically fills an area half an inch wide with ink.