Earthquakes and Zero our Hero?

We are making the final preparations for setting sail and none too soon as far as I'm concerned because the longer we stay, the more intense my irrational fear of earthquakes develops. I don't know why, living on a boat you don't feel the earthquakes, and our home moves around quite a bit with the wind and waves anyway. The one earthquake that I did feel here, was while I was at work and it shook hard enough to move the biological safety cabinet which is heavy enough that one could not even budge it with all their effort. Anyway, I don't want to be here when the next big one hits.

We were watching Nature on KQED last night and they had a show on about how animals may have the ability to detect electromagnetic impulses prior to an actual earthquake. There are accounts of animals behaving strangely prior to an earthquake and if we could learn to recognize this strange behavior we could be forewarned of the impending doom. One researcher has shown that there is a dramatic increase in the number of missing pet adds just prior to a major quake. Of course most of these accounts are in hind site, people look back on how their pet was acting in the days and hours before the earthquake and make some sort of correlation. At the time, they had no idea why their pets were acting weird. Which brings me to our cat Zero, would we be able to tell that he was behaving strangely? He's a strange cat and does weird things all the time, like today when I observed him hanging from his back legs from the side of the dock so he could put his front paws in the water. We think this is how he manages to catch fish (wouldn't that be cool to get on film). He brings fish home all the time and has finally figured out that they are edible, which is good because we don't like stepping on cold, wet, dead fish first thing in the morning. And if he did try to warn us, would we know why? Up until now, the only thing his 'wake up, come quickly, Timmy has fallen in the well' routine has yielded was an empty or only half full food dish, except for the one time when he alerted me to the raccoon that was trying to break into his cat food canister.

So hopefully, there won't be a major quake anytime between now and early Wednesday morning when we plan to finally sail out of the bay by the light of the full moon.