…And I was only 5 miles from the epicenter.

I was getting up from the couch when it started on Oct 31 at 03:04:54 UTC; Incidentally all 4 members of my family were in the room so we and our dog crammed ourselves in the door to the computer room/guest room. I’d say the largest thing moving was us - Those Gordons!

For most of the teenagers in California this was their first large earthquake. The experience itself was a little freaky. First came small tremors then it rolled and everything shook violently for a few seconds, the house creaked some, and a few seconds later it subsided and got out the flashlight in case the aftershocks proved themselves worthy of knocking out a few underground transformers. We took a minute to collect ourselves. The phone lines were overloaded at the moment and after a few tries we got through to family members. Everyone was just a little shaken up except my Great Grandmother (who’s doing fine! in case your wondering, even at 92) who lived in a Mobile home and things weren’t exactly laid out the best. Some portraits fell and cracked. Lamps, books, a bookshelf that wasn’t bolted to the desk and one of those old CRT clunky monitors fell. Fortunately it worked and everyone was fine after an hour and a half of clean-up.

The USGS site (United States Geology Service - http://usgs.gov/ ) has some nifty map services with earthquake data overlayed; Here’s a USGS image depicting the earthquakes within the last week:

The big yellow square was the big 5.6 and the smaller square right in the middle of the larger yellow square was a 3.7 aftershock just about an hour ago from the time of this post (5 PM Pacific Time)