boom
Ok - about five minutes ago, the house rattled and my bed shook, and woke me up, and there wasn't any crash, just an earth tremor for a brief moment. It couldn't have been anything in our apt. otherwise I would have heard a crash, but it was just an earthy rumble, so my first thought was the boiler, so I looked out the window to see if there was some indication of fire, but there was none - except for some smoke over the horizon to the west, which was kind of weird, but anyway, i checked the basement and our boiler and everything were fine.

I was outside anyway and I was hearing sirens, and i thought they were coming our way, until I saw them head on down Rantoul toward Bank Of America, and I was expecting some sort of building collapse, to register that kind of seismic activity, but actually the response vehicles were just responding to an alarm on the bank - the boom had set off the bank alarm. That makes sense; everybody I talked to on the street - and there were a half dozen people or so on my section of Cabot - they were all curious what this boom was.

So i'm gonna head for the black smoke.