We had quite an earthquake today. It felt like it lasted forever, the floor pitching and rolling beneath us. We woke up to an earthquake on Sunday, too, but that was more of a jolt; this was more of a ride. The biggest one we've felt in years, even though it wasn't that dramatic on the Richter scale--4.9. I yelled to my daughter to "Stand in the driveway!" even though I meant "Stand in the doorway!" This is the first quake she can remember; she's slept through all the other major ones. She was only a couple of weeks old when the huge Northridge quake hit in '94--I remember standing in the doorway, holding my sleeping newborn, while my husband held our sleeping 3 year old son. This time, she came running out of the bathroom, trembling--both nervous and excited. "Feel my neck," she said, and I could feel her pulse there, hummingbird fast.

We didn't have any damage, although the book I mentioned a couple of days ago, Stop the Next War Now, fell off a shelf onto my desk. And the drawer of my dancing clown music box, which I've had since I was about 10 (I can't believe I found a picture of it online), slid open, making the clown dance, filling the shaking room with jaunty mechanical carnival music. Quite surreal.