A big thanks goes out to Jennifer for letting you all know in the blogworld that I'm OK. It's been a strange few days.

Saturday night the power went out on campus, it seems as if the engine for the campus' (coal) power plant exploded, and it didn't go back online until Monday morning. It was strange being with out electricity for such a long time, we were totally at a loss on what to do, not fully realizing how dependent we were on the Internet until we were without it for almost 35 hours.

We got a few updates from our foreign affairs person telling us the power would be back on Sunday afternoon, well that came & went and when we talked with one of the other foreigners around 8pm that night she said that there's no way that it'll be on tonight because the workers stop working at 6pm, What?? We've not had power, at this point, for over 19 hours, doesn't this situation constitute an instance where they should be working on it until it's fixed? Another instance of China just making me shake my head in confusion.

When the power came back on Niels and I were overjoyed that we could be connected to the outside world once again. So after going to lunch we sat down to watch an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (season 7) and as we're sitting there all happy we could once again get our geek on when I turned to him and said "Do you feel that?" He was all "It's just you... no... it's an earthquake." We jumped up, stood in the doorway between the living room & dining room to figure out a game plan, which was get out of the apartment... FAST. I grabbed the keys, and we ran out and stood in the big clearing in front of our apartment, with most of our neighbors for about 15 minutes until things settled down.

It was freaky, the first (and hopefully the last) earthquake I've experienced. We realized after the fact that we probably should have made our way to the clearing in front of the library, since the way the power lines are set up near our building we were surrounded by them and had the earthquake been worse we would have been in trouble. We made a note to ourselves to remember this in case there's a next time. (I hope there's not a next time)

Things in Sichuan Province are pretty bad so if you can please send some good thoughts that way, they really could use it.