Shaking, Salsa, and Skydiving
So this week I survived a 4.3 earthquake, my first salsa lessons,
and jumping out of a plane from 13,000 feet!

• The quake happened when we were at choir practice on Thursday evening....The ground shook, for maybe 5 or 10 sec...singing stopped... looked up to see the beams were still in place over our heads...then kept singing...

The ironic thing about the whole thing was that we were singing in a temporary room at the church where services are held while the church is being renovated for earthquake-proofness(isn't that a great non-word?)
What was really funny was that right when it happened we were singing
"there is nothing that can shake me..." How funny..and exciting...
I'm a REAL californian now:)...

• Glenn and I went to take salsa lessons on Saturday at a club/cafe called Club Monteros and learned the basics of the expressive dance of salsa! I think that for me, as the woman, it's all about the flare- in the arms, hands, and hips...I am still finding my flare, but now that we've got the basics, we'll be salsa masters in no time:)

• So to top off the week, Glenn and I took a group of international students skydiving in Acampo, CA at the Parachute Center about an hour and a half drive from Oakland East to the Central Valley. It was a last minute thing, the guy that was scheduled to do the tour cancelled, so I volunteered to lead the tour intstead!

To be honest, I was totally freaked out...I guess I have a tad fear of heights.
But with a free jump and an hourly wage, how could I resist?
I couldn't help getting Tom Petty's song in my head to get all pumped up
"And I'm free................free fallin..."

Here's the crew that went: Buckard (from Germany), Glenn, me, Jorge(from Guatemala), Lisa(France), Sebastien (Belgium), and Julia(France).

So when we finally landed it was in the grass on our bums.
We had 1 minute of free fall , then sailed through the air with our parachute above the central valley farm fields admiring the Sierra range to the East, spinning in circles, and feeling a tiny taste of what it's like to be a bird!....

This was our plane- pretty tiny! It took us up 13,000 ft, then we all filed out, squatted at the door, and jumped! I'm glad I was hooked to someone else (Rick was my buddy) cuz I don't know if I would've been able to jump out myself...we just crossed our arms and let our human appendages do the work on our backs...Luckily the guy I went with was pretty nice, there were a lot of macho guys that thought they were too cool for school....

My tandem buddy Rick and I after the jump...I was his 4091st jump or something crazy like that
( I didn't get a picture of myself with my stylish harness, nor did I pay the extra $35-$75 for a camera person to jump with me and film my crazy facial expressions during the jump down
...I screamed until my throat was dry, and smiled until my gums plastered shut in the wind...
I think my favorite part about the whole thing was gliding in the peaceful silence of the calm air and not having words to describe the freedom that I felt...Ahhhhh.

Then I remembered there was someone strapped to my back steering the whole thing and we had a nice conversation about the Sierras on the way down-
looks like this will be a better year for PCT hiking, not as much snow as last year !
woohoo!