Swimming in Blue Springs last summer, minding my own business, and I see a guy in a kyack. MANATEE OBSERVER was stenciled on the side of his kyack.

There was a mother and her calf just doing manatee shit around us swimmers. We didn’t touch the manatee but it was super cool swimming ten feet away.

My mom was making a phone call then the call didn’t go though…

and for context… I was always a curious kid and want to touch everything… I messed around my parents phones alot… I mean what’s a 10 year old (approximately… forgot how old exactly I was) to do when bored?..

So my mom instantly was like “oh I can’t make phone calls now, what the fuck did you do to my phone?”

…

So I was just confused… did I touch a setting I didn’t understand? I mean I was still sort of learning the English language as a child immigrant and didn’t really understand all the words… maybe I accidentally touched a wrong setting?

But anyways I felt scared and sad, I think I started crying…

But you know what actually happened?

A FUCKING EARTHQUAKE LMFAO WHAT THE FUCK?

A very small one… so its sort of undetectable… especially when we were standing in the subway station… those over-the-ground stations built on top of the street (search “NYC Subway Brooklyn 86th Street D train” and you’ll know what I’m talking about)

I think a train just passed by as that mini-earthquake was happening… so the vibrations completely masked the earthquake…

I remember my mom literally just said “the way they build this station feels kinda unsafe, vibrates/shakes too much” like moments before making that call… so she felt the shaking, just thought it was the train passing… 🙃

So then later someone called and talked about some earth quake… and because everyone was calling each other it clogged up the phone lines (there was no 5G… so I think 4G gets overwhelmed much easier) which is why it took so long to get a call through… so then hearing that through the phone call… my crying then turned into anger…

So from then on, every time I get blamed for something, I just say “OMG it’s 紐約地震 (NYC Earthquake) again”, bascially saying that I’m being framed/wrongfully blamed…

Like its just a family joke now… it’s a special moment that my mom and I share… omg wtf was that coincidence lmfao

Edit:

So I found this image… 25th Avenue Station on the D line… that’s the exact station it happened.

There’s like one “floor” below the trains that run above it… like you go in this area, pay the fare, go through turnstiles, then go up another flight of stairs… so its like 1st floor… and the trains are on top like a “2nd floor” basically…

So I was in the turnstile area… on the “first floor” of the station… Omg I can’t ever forget that day.

I watched my wife (then girlfriend) fall out of a hot air balloon at a company picnic.

She’s 5’2" and when she started to disembark, some other dude got out at the same time, making the balloon lurch upwards. So she fell about 6 inches onto a grassy lawn and was fine.

When I was in college I went on a blind date with someone who turned out to be a writer for DC comics.

I drove to NYC for the date. It was nice. We went to dinner, she gave me a tour of the DC Comics offices (I remember seeing a mannequin with the Catwoman costume that Michelle Pfeiffer wore), and we went to the movies and saw a reissue of Return of the Jedi.

It was just the one date though. We eventually lost touch.

I almost hit a whale with a tiny open boat. We were off the coast outside of brazil doing survey work, and one day I was piloting a small workboat for transferring some people and hardware between the two survey ships. After returning to my own ship I slowed down to a crawl while waiting for clearance to approach and the davit to be lowered. Suddenly a mountain surfaces right in front of me before it disappears again. Had I slowed down later than I actually did I would’ve run straight into it.

And 7 years later I almost hit a moose with a wellboat while testing a freshly installed autopilot system.

Damn it lemmy I ain’t tellin’ you that, but let’s just say it includes jumping off a moving railway car.

I accidentally invented a new fire eating trick live on stage

I once amputated a man’s leg.

My friends and I took some neighborhood Crimewatch signs and The Daily Show (I’m pretty sure Colbert was the reporter) flew out to my little town and interviewed the state trooper and the head of the Crimewatch.

If anybody can find a recording of that episode, I’ve been searching since my stepmom recorded over my copy. It was in late 98 or early 99.I think Dr. Ruth was a guest

I made the local paper when I was 8 years old. It was a cute little picture of me fixing my friend’s hair band before our may crowning. That was it.