Back to bed: It was just an earthquake

SPRINGFIELD -- Anyone who pays attention to Illinois politics knows not much has moved at the Capitol in the last year.

So when the building starts visibly shaking, you tend to notice.

The 4:30 a.m. initial quake woke me up, but not my kids. It sent the cats scrambling and had me fearing a tornado. Car alarms sounded in the neighborhood. Somehow the image of the 1990 tremor in Carbondale crept into my mind and I realized: "Hey, it's an earthquake."

It stopped, the neighbors silenced the alarms, and my wife and I went back to bed. No damage. No harm. No foul. I'm in the midst of a basement remodeling and the drywall mud wasn't even cracked.

Later, at the Capitol, Daily Herald writer Nick Shields and I were talking about the earthquake (he thought it was a semitrailer truck going past his downtown apartment) when he pointed to the office window and said, "Do you feel that?"

It was the 4.6 aftershock.

You could feel and see the entire building vibrating slightly, an unsettling feeling in a building of this size, especially when you're a couple floors up with several more floors of concrete above you.

But the shaking went unnoticed by others, like Amber Krosel, who was in a Capitol elevator and unaware of the events.

And a reporting intern from Los Angeles largely pooh-poohed all the hubbub about a 5.2 earthquake and 4.6 aftershock.

The news images of the smashed bottles in a Mount Carmel liquor store did, however, prompt a collective groan from the press corps.

For clarification and perspective, the earthquake was centered near West Salem in southern Illinois. That's far away from the New Salem outside Springfield where Abe Lincoln once lived.

The epicenter was nearly as far away from Springfield as Springfield is from Chicago's suburbs.

Also of note, lawmakers finished their week's work on Thursday and were not at the Capitol on Friday. Neither was Gov. Rod Blagojevich.