Living on the faults…experiencing earthquakes

Who would have thought that our first earthquake would be so big and so soon after we moved in? I had spent the morning at the Ford dealership having my transmission looked at, and when I came home I crawled into bed for an awesome afternoon nap. After all, I am unemployed and done with the semester, so I might as well take advantage of it. AJ and I were curled up in a pretty deep rest when all of a sudden our entire bed starts shaking! I woke up and thought I was dreaming, though AJ had jumped into my arms. He was pretty needy afterwards and didn’t want me to leave his side, the poor thing. Since we live on the third floor, we felt it quite a bit. I was half asleep and confused, but jumped on the computer to see if we had just had an earthquake or if I had been dreaming. I found this site and saw that there had been an earthquake south of L.A. and that it was pretty big. http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Maps/117-33.html
Earthquakes are common, but they are usually fairly small, but this one was 5.4, the largest in the area in 14 years. Thankfully, there was no damage, which is a testament to sound earthquake construction, which I can appreciate now that we live in Southern California. I remember in school we used to have earthquake drills where we would crunch under our desks with our hands over our necks. I realized that probably wouldn’t be very helpful for me now. As I was doing research, I found this awesome visual of the earthquake provided by the seismological center at CAL Tech. You can see how the shake moved into San Diego. http://www.shakemovie.caltech.edu/ James was on the ship and didn’t feel it at all. In fact, he didn’t even know that there was an earthquake until I picked him up from work!