I grew up in Long Beach (hate to date myself, but this was in the 60's..)and I remember how much fun earthquakes were for us as kids, never scarey! (But this was around the same time we were doing air-raid drills in the auditorium, little huddles of kids with our heads tucked against the seats in front of us!) I remember one time sitting in the car in the parking lot of a market while our mom shopped inside. We felt the tremor in the car, and when she came out, Mom said some cans had fallen off the shelves. We thought it was great!

We had a decent tremor in upstate NY about 10 or 12 years ago; it rattled all the china and scared me to death because it had been such a long time in-between earthquakes!

Ahhh earthquake stories....I grew up in L.A. and remember my grandma was visiting from Detroit during the Sylmar quake back in '71. She just glared at us after it was over as if we arranged it just to ruin her visit :-) Our cat, who would hide behind the couch if she heard a rat up in the attic, just sat there wondering what all the fuss was about. No damage to our house except for a few broken knick-knacks and we got a brief vacation from school (yipee!) while they checked the buildings for damage.

The one up here in SF back in '89 was a whole different ballgame. I was on Hwy 101 at the time and thought I had hit a patch of oil or something b/c my car was sliding around a bit. I started to pull over to the side and saw everyone else doing the same thing. Then I turned on the radio and found out it was an earthquake. I managed to get to a phone to see if my roommate was OK and she said don't bother coming home b/c our apartment was trashed. She was home at the time fixing dinner when everything started flying out of the cupboards, cabinets falling etc. We spent the night with friends and went home the next day to clean up and take souvenir pictures of the mess. I found out that I should've listened to Mom when she said to bolt bookcases and such to the wall -- I always do now, even though DH sometimes thinks I'm being overly paranoid and anal about it. Then I show him the earthquake photos of my apartment and he comes around :-)

But even after all that I would still rather have earthquakes any day over hurricanes and tornadoes. The bad ones seem to come less frequently. Plus, better the devil I know...

This one barely rattled us. On the news tonight they are talking about these perhaps being the precursors of a big one. The part of the San Andreas fault which has been affected recently has not moved for over two hundred years. Have to remember to buy more batteries tomorrow.

And don't forget the furniture bolts and quake wax!

Okay people...all I can say is that I'm glad this happened AFTER I left California. I never did well on rides, if you know what I mean :D

Stay safe!

Joe - that was cute!