June 23rd

When I read miserable stories of earthquakes, besides feeling terrible for the people suffering from the ruthless natural disasters, I always think, living on a flat land like Ontario, Canada, there may be tornadoes.  But the chances of getting earthquakes are supposed to be almost 0.

But my first live earthquake experience was in Ontario, right at my current home.  Afternoon past 1:30pm, I got home after a nice lunch with Ron, and was surfing internet on our dining table.  Suddenly I felt the house shake.  My first reaction to this was that someone or something was in our basement and shaking our house.  The thought of some stranger hiding in our house haunts me all the time.  I got very scared.  Then before I had time to make decision if I should go to check the basement or not, the second wave came.  It was stronger than the first one and it actually made me nauseous.  I am quite anemic so I get dizzy easily sometimes.  But how come, this is the first time I feel so sick when I am sitting!! I almost concluded that I was sick enough to have a hallucination… and became even more scared.  Then I turned my head, I saw the pillar in the middle of our living room was shaking in front of my eyes.  Then I heard rattling sound from Ron’s bottle rack on the bar.  I looked at it, and saw the liquid in the bottles was jumping.  Then I realized it was not me.  Could this be an earthquake?

Seconds later, everything was calm again.  I went to pick up the phone and called Ron right away.  He sounded so convinced that it was an earthquake!  Although he himself didn’t feel it.  Wow, how numb can he be to not to feel that!!

 

 

Danny has been singing “yi ga ga di you” for months.  When he sings that, it is just that short sentence, nothing more.  We could never figure out what exactly he was singing.  We couldn’t get any clue from his lyrics but the melody didn’t ring a bell either.

Today at bath time, Danny sang that again.  Ron suddenly said, “Is it possible that it is the happy birthday song?”  Danny must have been experiencing many birthday parties in his class already and the melody and the part of the “lyrics” does match perfectly.

We went to the tub and sang “Happy birthday to you” to Danny, he looked up at us, and followed quietly, “cake?”… bingo!  We all laughed.