Celeste's first earthquake

Okay, that's not entirely true. We had one a few weeks ago, or a few months ago...I can't remember...but it was MUCH smaller.

This morning I woke up to strange sounds. It sounded like an airplane, or maybe like the train that passed by us when we were sightseeing in Oregon. Anyway, I sat up in bed and suddenly my room was twisting and shaking. I ran out to the living room and all the walls were swaying. As soon as I gathered enough sense to stand in the doorway, the shaking stopped.

A few seconds later, it started up again, but this time it was STRONGER. I ran to the stairs and yelled, "Dad?! DAD!!!" because I was so scared that all I could do was yell. The walls were definitely moving dangerously and the ground under my feet was vibrating and sliding back and forth. I could hear the house straining to hold itself together. I thought the whole thing was going to fall down on top of me, so I started running back and forth between my room and the living room, trying to avoid whichever part was going to collapse first. Nothing collapsed, but I got the shit scared out of me.

A few minutes later, the noise came back and I got a sick feeling in my stomach. I yelled to my dad (who was upstairs with my brother) that it was coming back (can't mistake that noise now, and never will again) and we all took our places beneath our respective doorframes. The shaking was much more subtle, but I wasn't taking chances anymore (what I did earlier was idiotic).

My mom was at work at the gas station, and she described the liquor bottles clanging against each other, and how she shut off the power to her electric stove (she sells all kinds of food too!) before running outside with another employee.

I spent the whole day at work helping my parents sell gas. We had a backup generator and no one on the island had power. People told me that the radio stations were telling everyone to come to us for gas. That soon became obvious. The line to our station went down the street at least six blocks, so I've been told. Some people had to wait two to three hours to fill up. Eventually, they started getting angry and swearing at each other and us. Some resorted to childish insults. The police came and parked their cars in the middle of the street in front of our station. I was glad because I was starting to get really scared.

By 2 pm, all of our gas was gone and me and my brother created "NO GAS" signs that we wore on our chests (he wore "NO" and I wore "GAS"). The white bags over all of our nozzles still weren't enough to convince people that we were out of gas. They kept coming in and clogging our driveway, so we decided that body signs were necessary. People started getting it after a few minutes of us bouncing up and down and pointing to our signs. Some waved and smiled at us, which was like a pat on the back sent from heaven.

I tried siphoning by mouth-suction, and I think it's the closest I've ever come to committing suicide. After countless failed siphoning attempts, I created a shop-vac-siphon-machine out of...yep, a shop vac and a siphon. It worked beautifully.

We were trying to help people by staying open, even after all of the supermarkets had locked their doors, and some obviously appreciated it and thanked us excessively, but some were awful and treated us as if it was OUR fault that they had no ice, no batteries, and no gas.

I'm so tired of the bullshit. My mom is still working right now. She's been going for 24 hours and it makes me want to cry. I'm physically tired, my legs are really sore from standing and running all day, and my hands are sore from the gas and trying to help everyone with their car problems. I got gas in the openings on my knuckles. My clothes are covered with gas.

It was a day in hell. I feel dead.

On top of all that, my dad got into an accident in my car while driving through an intersection because the traffic lights were out. He's fine, thankfully, but I need a new front bumper and left fog light.