"Mother Nature, you have one job: tornadoes and humidity. Tennessee earthquakes were NOT on the list!"

I woke up, went to the bathroom, and settled back in bed.
I hadn’t been there long when the windows started rattling, and I swear the bed moved.
It went on for a minute, maybe longer.
So what do you do?
You hop on Facebook to see if the train hit the brakes, the mines were blasting, or if we’d had an earthquake.

Turns out we had a pretty large one for our area.
People felt it all the way into Georgia and North Carolina.
I talked to my cousin later this evening, and she said she felt it too.
She’s about twenty miles north of Spartanburg, South Carolina.
Unfortunately, my camera didn’t catch a thing.

They say we may feel aftershocks in the coming week, and I’m not exactly thrilled about that.
Then again, they might be so small we won’t even notice.

Cowboy, Badger, and Heron slept right through it.
I still don’t know how Heron missed it in that tin can he calls a home.
It looks like it would shimmy pretty good.

The first thing I did was grab my phone to text Uncle and ask if he felt it.
Then I remembered.

I think it took a good five years before I finally stopped reaching for the phone to call my mom with gossip.

Other than the earth shaking, it was a quiet Saturday.
Cowboy stayed outside until almost dark, doing who knows what.
Heron worked and then went to his girlfriend’s for the night.
Raven and the kids were at his former partner’s.
Badger spent the day curled up in her room with the cats.

I spent most of the day working on the computer, which helped keep my mind off things, with a few breaks to watch TV.
Overall, I enjoyed the quiet. 
I needed some time alone.

There was a bit of an unusual moment.
Cowboy was out mowing when he called me, and when I looked outside, a woman was standing there talking his ear off.
I went out, and it turned out she was from the feral cat group I had emailed about Lamont back in 2019.
She had finally made it to this area and had just returned a cat they’d trapped, spayed or neutered, and released.
She asked if I had any strays, and I told her I had about four, but not the one I originally contacted her about.
He’d died.
I told her I usually only see the cats around midnight, and of course Imp made a liar out of me.
He or she popped right out of the neighbor’s garage.
So Cat Lady and the Mailbox Blue House Neighbor set up a trap.
They caught Imp, and Cat Lady did a quick body check through the cage.
Imp has nipples, which means she may have kittens, so they’ll spay her and return her on Monday just in case.
Imp stayed unusually calm in the trap, even while being examined.
Cat Lady seemed surprisingly unconcerned about the risk of rabies.
I’m cautious about rabies, especially with raccoons everywhere around here.
Skipper may still be pregnant, and Suzy is still roaming the area.
I may ask her to leave a trap in my bushes, though the odds of catching an aggressive raccoon are high.
There’s one outside right now that looks like it’s missing a tail and is limping.
It is definitely a raccoon.

We made a Walmart run.
Cowboy said we were looking for me a Mother’s Day present, but really he wanted a tool and a burger from McDonald’s.
I did not find a present.
There is nothing I need or want.
I think I’m at that stage of life where nothing really appeals to me.

Oh, the burger.
Uh-uh, nope. 
I’m done.
They only had three people working, and the line stretched on forever.
I was getting pretty dang impatient.
When we finally got the food, Badger’s nugget box looked like it had been dunked in Crisco, and one of the burger wrappers was just as greasy.
They want you to order from the kiosk, but the kiosk never gives you a ticket, so you have no idea what number you are.
Instead of calling out “nuggets and a shake,” they call a number.
None of us knew ours.
The kiosk is supposed to spit out a ticket, but it has never once done it.
Maybe one time.
Thankfully, they slapped two macchiatos on the counter, so we assumed they were ours.
This is the same McDonald’s that gets constant complaints, including the time a customer reportedly got the snot beat out of her in the parking lot by an employee after she said her food was cold.
I wish I were kidding.
Another customer said they left out a burger, went back inside, and found an employee eating fries straight from the fry basket with his bare hands.
We’ll stick with Taco Bell from now on.

Mother’s Day is tomorrow, and I’m assuming I’ll have three of the four kids with me.
I’m not really in the mood to celebrate.
Honestly, I’m not in the mood for much of anything right now.
But it will still feel good to have my babies close.