There was an earthquake last night!! I was watching a film on my laptop, sitting in an armchair in my little bedroom (think the calm and tranquil pre-quake scene in the earthquake simulator in the Natural History Museum in London) and suddenly there was rumbling and my room sarted shaking, it was really noticeable! I was like WHAT THE f***??? So I paused the film and jumped up, by which point it had stopped.

I stood for a moment, entirely freaked out, I didn't know what to do! I expected my flatmates to come running out of their rooms but no-one stirred, so then I went into the lounge and looked out of the window into gouger street and all the people in the cafes were just carrying on eating and drinking like nothing happened. I couldn't see anyone acting freaked out, it seemed like they had not felt a thing. So then I was even more like WHAT THE f*** (excuse the language, but this is actually what was in my head, word for word). So of course I updated my facebook status (partly thinking if the building DID collapse, then someone would know what time it happened).

I started getting scared that perhaps my room had a structural fault and it had shaken when they closed a door or dropped something in the restaurant below (my room is a little extension room sticking out from the rest of the flat on its own, over a flat tin roof of the restaurant below). I got a bit afraid that the floor was about to collapse and my bedroom cave into the building below. I started noticing unevenness in the floor like where some floorboards were lower that others, I stepped on creaky bits that I didn't remember creaking before and my brain was all like "that's a sign of the weakness in the structure".

I started thinking I should pack all my stuff into my backpack and sleep in the lounge tonight incase my room collapsed. I went to the bathroom to clean my teeth and kept looking over my sholder and up at the airvent (idk what for, I was just SPOOKED!), I took my mobile phone with me to the bathroom so I could ring someone if the building collapsed.

Since no-one else was up, I managed to get a hold of myself and to convinve myself to believe that I had imagined the shaking. Sometimes when my potassium is very low, it feels like the ground is shaking underneath me, bumping up and down. So I decided it must either be an electrolyte imbalance that lead me to feel the ground moving. I also thought perhaps I was hallucinating (I had one quite disturbing experience of hallucinating before, back when I was 18, which was so REAL I thought everything that was happening really was, it was only afterwards that I realised it wasn't true). It was hard to imagine being able to hallucinate that shaking that I felt, but I thought it was a possibility.

So after sitting on the edge of my bed, these thoughts whirling in my brain and feeling scared for about half an hour, I made myself go to sleep inspite of the fear... I thought "wake up in the morning and you will feel better"; I'm surprised I could sleep but I could!

Then I woke up this morning and looked on the recent earthquakes website and was mightly releived to see that here is my earthquake: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2010vdbn.php

The quake happened at 11.27pm local time, 35km SE of Adelaide. It was 3.3 on the richter scale.. Friends in California have since informed me that they "don't even FEEL anything below a magnitude of 5.0 any more" but to me it was immense!

I still feel a bit shakey today. I keep feeling little judders and I feel a bit like things are swaying but I'm sure that this is just my imagination running riot with my experience of last night and the recent knowledge that the shaking WAS real! So I was freaked out at the time but in retrospect I'm kindof excited; my first ever earthquake experience!