I just woke up. I was hoping the news about the deaths would be better. When I went to bed last night, they were only reporting about 45 being killed in the quake/tsunami. Sad to hear that hundreds were killed and the death toll is still going up. I was really hoping that it would stay low.

I was on Twitter last night when the quake happened, and I was getting real time updates on what was happening from people in Japan. I watch a late night talk show and tweet with other fans of the show on Fox News. The show was preempted last night because of the quake, but all the Twitter people that I talk with stayed up and watched the news reports with me.

I'd never watched a disaster happen on live (streaming on the internet from Japan) tv before. Everything was in Japanese, but the video I was seeing was fairly horrific. They were showing ships, not just little boats that had been in the harbor (probably in Sendai...maybe?) and they'd been tossed up onto docks on their sides. Saw one ship that looked like it'd just been picked up and placed gently on the ground, but the other two next to it were on their sides. They werent huge ships, but they were big enough that they were about equal in size to some of the buildings they were leaning against.

I think the worst video I saw was this huge wave full of buildings, cars, and buildings and cars that were ON FIRE, washing over what looked like a farming town. The water was turning black, I think because it was farmland. The dirty water looked the same color as good topsoil. You could see a few cars on a road or highway that were trying to outrun the wave. They didnt outrun it. (reporters said the wave was moving at 500mph!) It was really horrific to see. Like watching 9-11, made me cry to see it happen. I dont know if that video was live or not when I watched it.

I'm really glad I'm in land-locked Nebraska. We get an occasional quake here, but at least I never have to worry about tsunami's washing away my house. A flood maybe, or a tornado knocking it down, but never something scary like a tsunami.