Booming and Shaking

I was sitting at my computer Saturday night when the wall next to me suddenly shook, and the metal desk behind me made a rattling noise. "Wow," I said, "That felt different. They must really be doing something major out at the test range." Except it turns out it wasn't a boring, ordinary explosion, after all. It was in fact a much more rare and interesting phenomenon: a small earthquake. Huh. How about that.

As a co-worker of mine put it: "This is why Socorro is safe from terrorist attack. They'd never bother, because no one would notice." And then he pointed out that a house caught on fire once, and people ignored it because it happened to lie in the same direction as the Fire Training Academy, and everybody's used to smoke pouring out of there.

I honestly can't decide whether living in a place where window-rattling explosions and huge, dark plumes of smoke are considered normal enough to be unworthy of notice is kind of cool or just disturbing.