This afternoon I heard an odd noise, the kind that makes you suspect there is someone else in the room, when you know you are the only one home. I looked around, and the floor moved a bit. The curtains began to swing back and forth. An earthquake.

I couldn’t decide if it was possible for me to run down ten flights of stairs before anything disintegrated, or if it was better to be on the tenth floor (only 7 floors above me), or in the street (several large buildings to topple over), so I stayed put and called Alex. He was outside, and professed to not feel anything.

It was over in fifteen or twenty seconds; the curtains quieted.

As is my wont, I went looking for information online. (I also flipped through the channels on the tv, but didn’t find anything I could readily identify as breaking news.) The USGS’ Earthquake center page, after twenty minutes, displayed a big red mark in eastern China on their world map of recent earthquakes over magnitude 4. A 7.5 magnitude quake in eastern Sichuan province, 60 miles from Chengdu and 2:28 pm, local time. Now, two hours after the fact, there’s a second mark — a 5.4 second tremor at 3:34, 45 miles from Chengdu, 920 miles from Beijing. (I didn’t feel the second one in Beijing.)

The NY Times had thrown up a brief report, with quotes from university students (unclear if in Beijing or Chengdu) running out of their dorms. The Chinese English-language news agency, Xinhua, also had slapped something together, reporting both the Chengdu quake at 2:28, and 3.9 quake in an eastern district of Beijing 2:35. Neither reported casualties (yet). I expect there to be more information out soon, though, because the internet also turned up that NPR’s All Things Considered is reporting from Chengdu this week, which puts Robert Siegel and Melissa Block at ground zero, so to speak.

I would have been in Chengdu myself this week, except that the continued paperwork process for Alex’s work visa has kept us from going too far from Beijing, and put off the ten day or so trip we have (okay, he has) been planning in the area. With no casualties and no damage reported yet, I’m sorry we weren’t there. However, if there are continuing aftershocks (5.4 is nothing to sniff at), there may be cause to appreciate red tape and paperwork yet.