Tsunami Tsaturday

Goodness gracious, what a day. I got home from adventures Friday night at a none-too-early time, having heard a little bit about the earthquake in Chile and the chance of a tsunami coming our way. No big deal, right? Au contraire. One of my housemates was still up at one-thirty/two-ish as I was on my way to bed and she was super worried, so I stopped and talked to her for a bit. Remember the tsunami in September that hit Samoa really hard? That hit her hometown super hard and so anxiety was completely understandable. I ended up going to bed at 2ish and being woken up by a text/phone call at 3:45 saying that the on campus kids were going to be evacuating to the second story at six and that we should probably pack up and head to higher ground. Naturally, the news was a little alarming, so I wake up my roommates and we all pack up and head to campus to wait out the seven hours until this monster is supposed to hit. In the mean time, I call family to let them know what's going on and to spread some love in case I drown or am attacked by the mutant huge crabs that certainly will overtake Laie when the waves come this far in.

In case you were ever searching for a way to wake up a whole dorm of college kids, a tsunami tscare is a very effective means of doing so. This is six am on a Saturday morning. This was not fun.

The following few hours were spent seeing how many people we could fit into Rachel's room before we would get yelled at for fire code violations (eight, in case you were wondering), snacking on whatever food we had stashed away and watching the news. The last hour or so before the tsunami was supposed to hit we were glued to the live coverage that mostly showed the waves at Hilo Bay going in and out and in and out, and it was incredibly exciting. Not. Eventually, the fact that I was on my second day of approximately two hours of sleep a night caught up with me and I crashed before our fair city was destroyed. ...That didn't happen. Apparently they never really called off the warning, they just switched over to the Olympics. Also, I apparently answered a phone call from my mother that I don't remember in the least. What can I say, I was tired.

I have to admit, I was a little bugged that with all the hoopla, nothing happened, but then I think about how terribly things could have turned out and I couldn't be happier. It also makes me realize how completely unprepared I am in case anything does happen, which is a little scary. As a college kid, there really isn't a huge amount of food storage or such that I can accumulate, but the fact that the only things I grabbed were my camera, laptop, a couple of changes of clothes, my old journals, an apple and a jar of peanut butter... that's a little ridiculous. We'll see what all I can figure out so that should we actually have something happen, my arrangements are not such that I will have to eat pages out of my journals to survive.