The Hills Are Alive

"... with the sound of something...."

Hello everyone!

First off, FYI, I'm 100% A-OK.  Nothing going on here apart from one little tremble that didn't even come from the mountain.

What am I talking about, you may ask?  Well, if you don't know, that's good news.  That means my blogging has worked, and nothing serious has happened (which was probably going to be the case whether I posted about it or not). But in case you have heard something, and are checking here for an update, everything's fine.

What's happening is this: Mauna Kea is acting a bit fussy.  A little after 2:00 pm local time,  the USGS recorded a magnitude 4.5 quake on the northwest slope.  Two minutes later there was another measured at 3.6.  Since then, at the time of this writing (five hours later), there have been 27 other smaller earthquakes in that same place.  If you wanna check out a regularly updated list, go here.  If you click on the cluster on the north end of the island, that'll give you all the info for the most recent quakes.  If you check out the south end, near Pu'u O'o, then you'll see the 3.5 magnitude quake that I felt just before writing this.

Even with all of these quakes, I haven't felt any of them other than the one by Pu'u O'o (pronounced poo-oo oh-oh).  In fact, I had no idea anything was going on until my good friend TheMatt sent me a text asking how things were going.  He's a news photog for KOMO in Seattle, and saw something about it come over the wire. 

Why is this happening?  Who knows?  All I know is that I nearly failed geology in college.  I just can't get excited about rocks and schist. *rimshot*  But what I do know is that I'm happy it's a lot of little quakes instead of one big one.  I've always heard that's a good thing.  And if there's one thing I've learned, it's always believe what you hear as long as it makes your current situation of potential volcanic eruption appear better.

One theory though, posed by Des (who likes cooking), is that I'm not preventing anything by writing, but instead manifesting a potential natural disaster just so I have something to blather on about.  Perhaps. You can form your own opinion about that.

In the meantime, I'm going to post this, cook some soup, wrap the dogs' feet in tinfoil (just in case), and watch Dante's Peak before bed.

Oh, and I'll also be drinking beer.  There's no way I'm letting the volcano take my beer.  To paraphrase Charlton Heston, that volcano can have my beer when it pries it from my hot, melted hands.