Earthquakes
For the past week I’ve had trouble sleeping through the night. One factor is Cleo, one of my two nine month old cats, has been attacking my feet in the middle of the night (I kick her out of the room when this happens).
Another is that early Friday morning I woke to windows rattling. About ten minutes later they rattled again and both cats (Cleo’s littermate Smokey is the other) jumped from the bed and ran for safety. Since it was 2 am I didn’t get up to check the USGS quake site, but I did it as soon as I got to work (I’m still at Bay Ship & Yacht. I don’t start at Xerox until July). I really like their “did you feel it?” feature where they track the distance and area in which it was felt by having site visitors click if they felt it.
There were three quakes, although I only felt two. They were centered about six miles from here–five miles west of Danville, three miles SW of Alamo. The one that freaked out the cats was a 3.5. The first was a 3.1. Not very big, but still sleep distruptive.
This morning I again woke to rattling windows. Today’s 3.1 quake was at 4:31 am and located in the same place as the three on Friday morning. When I moved to San Ramon in February 2007 I wanted to be east of the hills, away from the Hayward fault. Within two weeks of moving here there was a quake centered about 10 miles away, just north of Lafayette.
Nightmares
Yesterday morning at 2 am I woke screaming. I had a nightmare. I had been dreaming about lack of money. My Grandma Fannie was in my dream. I think that a cat jumped on the bed, but I screamed thinking that Fannie was at my bedside. I was so shaken that I had to get up for a couple of hours. I couldn’t fall back to sleep.
For those of you who didn’t know Fannie you’re probably wondering how and why my grandmother would make me scream. For those of you who did know her, there’s no reason to explain. She was scary. She was mean and evil and looked like the witch of the west in the Wizard of Oz.
What’s also scary is that in the photo below she is about 57 — a few years older than I am now. She looks significantly older.
Fannie resented the fact that my mother married and had four children. Her marriage ended when my mother was three. We heard that it was an arranged marriage — her father worked out an agreement with a man who had stayed at his boarding house that Fannie marry the man’s troubled son Harry Stern.
When I was four she moved in with us. She didn’t have any friends. She did have a brother, Abe who was equally mean. Fannie liked L and A, but disliked M and me. She made all of our lives miserable.
One positive thing I can say about Fannie was that she was talented at knitting and crocheting. She made crocheted tablecloths for each of us girls.
Amy inherited Fannie’s engagement ring. It was stolen after Amy died. We all felt the ring was cursed by the years of exposure to Fannie — it had terrible energy. Since none of us wanted it, we felt that whoever took it did us a favor — the curse is on them.