We certainly live in interesting times….

I’ve written a couple of times before about the weirdness of cougar (a.k.a. mountain lion) sightings where I live. Last week a cougar was cornered and killed by Chicago police on the North Side. Yesterday everyone was abuzz about the news that another cougar had been sighted early in the morning by a security guard at a large business, as well as by a few other people. Although the Chicago Tribune didn’t specify which large business, I can tell you that it was MPOW. Freaky. No cougar could be found when people went looking for signs of it based on the report, but many people are certain there’s another one out there. I don’t know what to believe. I mean, who would have ever thought one cougar would be found here? Well, that turned out to be true, so it’s not hard to believe there is more than one. But the weirdness doesn’t end there…

Early this a.m. I get an email from my brother who lives near Indianapolis, asking me and another brother who lives in central Illinois if we felt an earthquake. I didn’t but my family in central Illinois sure did. It was the biggest earthquake in the area in 40 years, a 5.2 on the Richter scale. Weird. Now I’ve been in a few earthquakes before, one of which was when living in central Illinois and another time when I was visiting Los Angeles (that was the Northridge quake). But still it is a little weird to have it happen and on such a scale. Later there was a fairly significant aftershock felt throughout the region.

When on a conference call with a colleague in Germany this morning, I was telling him about these strange events. He marvelled about it and then mentioned that something similar had occurred in southern Germany last year, when a wild bear started frequenting urban areas and had to be shot eventually.