Woke up at 7:15 AM after hitting snooze on my alarm for a while. I forgot to put my faucets on dripping, but they didn’t freeze. Apparently, I slept through a minor earthquake (3.5).

I want Oliver corralled when I try to get the dogs in. Oliver and Lily took the bait and went down in the basement. The dogs don’t want to come in yet even though it’s freaking cold. They still don’t want to come in. So much for my shower this morning. They finally came in. Silly dogs. They don't appear to have icicles hanging off of them :) It's cold upstairs, so I'm blasting my space heater.

I'm thinking that I want a nap over lunch, so I guess that I'll take a quick shower after work.

My Dad's response about whether we are heading into a recession:

Based on what I'm seeing about the economy it's quite likely. Recessions/Depressions are caused by economic sector imbalances. New upcoming sectors need to do a lot of hiring. To get the manpower they bid up what people are being paid, this causes a migration from "old" sectors to "new" sectors (and inflation). Companies in old sectors which are marginal (not very profitable) tend to fail because losing employees pushes them over the edge. Things begin to settle down, and the new sectors find that they overhired and lay off the extra people, which causes unemployment to spike more. The unemployed default on loans, adding to defaults of the old failing companies. This causes problems in the financial sector, resulting in failures. The failures result in not enough financing being available, which causes interest rates to rise. That in turn causes additional failures in various economic sectors.

The magnitude of the out of balances determines whether the result is a recession (mild) or a depression (severe).

I have found a set of cheaper skin care that might be good: Clinique. I'll give it a try. I ordered their cleanser and eye cream. I have a lot of moisturizer to use up before ordering theirs.

The dogs understand the word “nap”. I told Oliver that I was going to take a nap, and the dogs headed to the bedroom. Had a nice nap.

Off of work. Showered, but it’s 6:30 PM, and I just let the dogs out, and I need to feed everyone. Instead of getting the Kia jump-started, I’m going to get up early and get the registration tag for the Honda, and stop at the Post Office to mail my check.

When I think about earthquakes, I think of the “Pretty Big One,” the Loma Prieta quake when I was living in California. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and it led to some national broadcasts about it at the time. Art Agnos was the mayor of San Francisco then, and I looked him up. That led to a 30-year retrospective of the quake that I want to watch.

That also reminded me that I didn’t realize that the quake was national news when it happened. I guess that I was in shock. When I got home, our cable was out, so I was listening to the radio. I got a station out of Santa Cruz, and it made the damage sound pretty bad (as it was there). Then the national news came on, and they made it sound like the entire Bay Area was in ruins, and it was only then that I started to call my parents to let them know that I was okay. I couldn’t get through to them for a couple of days.

I did watch the 30-year retrospective of the quake. It was quite good. P.S. I'm glad that Bookshop Santa Cruz is still going strong. That's a great store.

Somehow my phone's USB port got water in it, and it's telling me to let it dry before charging it. That's a problem because I use it as an alarm. I just set up my Sharper Image travel alarm to use. I hope that it will wake me up.

I need to get up early to get the car's registration renewed and my check mailed. So I'm going to go to bed soon.