Earthquakes + Pain Meds = Interesting!

At 9.22pm tonight there was an Earthquake centered approx 90km south of Te Anau. I was catching up on some emails and felt a little 'dizzy' and thought my laptop screen was moving.... (it didn't help that I had taken some strong pain killers with dinner as my hip had been bad today!!) I looked over at our kitten (who had been fast asleep) and she was looking at me and around the room like "What the??"

I figured she hadn't been into my meds so it must be an earthquake :). This is the first earthquake since we have had this house and it's pretty solid I must say. There were only a couple of creaking sounds, nothing falling off etc. It was quite a rolling long quake and the main one was at 9.22pm hitting 7.8 with an aftershock at 9.41pm with 6.1.

For those that are interested you can go to - www.geonet.org.nz and click on the RECENT QUAKES tab for more info, I had a look and there are smaller quakes happening all the time over NZ which is hardly surprising as there is a large fault line all the way through the country!

We don't have a lot of 'big' quakes here & that is a good thing - the last significant one was quite a few years ago and I remember standing in the kitchen at my parents place and the whole house swayed from side to side and I couldn't believe there wasn't huge cracks in the walls afterwards!

Hawaii had a Tsunami warning in place for a period - this is now lifted and there has only been one report of a small wave surge hitting an area near Haast on the West Coast.