Earthquake Early Warning System

My mobile texts me about 30 seconds before my house starts shaking. This is slightly ridiculous at 5 am, a time I’m unlikely to be awakened by a scant buzz-buzz-buzz. But fear not; I seem to have my very own personal Earthquake Early Warning System in the form of animals. Pounce was going absolutely NUTS Sunday morning and afternoon. Meowing, pacing, very unsnuggly behavior, more meowing, jumping everywhere—it was starting to annoy me. Then Sunday night apparently there was an earthquake I didn’t feel over the taiko drums and trains. How is that possible? Whatev, that’s all anyone could talk about Monday and I was sorry I’d missed it. Then Monday night Pounce started acting nuts again. I figured it was because of the tropical depression raining down on the Kanto Plain. He often acts weird about storms. But no, Tuesday morning I had a dream I was in an earthquake, but then I woke up and my room was going crazy and the light over the bed was swinging and a loud rumbling was rising from all around and I thought, “This is what I get for feeling left out of the first one! YIKES!” My first earthquake! Pounce lay quietly at my feet the whole time, then he and Mouse sat straight up next to each other like bookends while I checked on things. Then after two days of beautiful weather, Pounce started going crazy AGAIN last night, and again I figured the nice weather wouldn’t last and we were in for a thunderstorm. But no, eight hours later my earthquake snooze alarm goes off: a hollow hooting sound outside the window woke me up, then cawed to give me yet another reason to hate those enormous creepy crows. The windows rattled in their panes. “That’s weird,” I thought. “That sounds like the other day when we had an earthquake, but we just had one of those, so—” my thoughts were drowned out by the rumble rumble rumble of another quake that seemed to go on foreeeeeeever but wasn’t as strong. Until the end, when it went RUMBLE RUMBLE!! shortly before it was all over. That makes three very shaky earthquakes in less than a week. Should we be worried? All anyone can talk about is how Japan is expected to get a severe quake within the next 10 or 50 years or something. But I checked my Pounce Early Warning System and the eight-hour forecast is calm, so rest easy.