melair

Every time an earthquake rattles California I get a slew of texts, e-mails and phone calls curious about whether I felt the quake.  Since we’ve moved here, there have been three earthquakes occurring that I could’ve/should’ve felt, but didn’t.  The reason I know I should have felt them is that Jim felt them, and in most cases we were either in the same room or adjacent rooms.

The first one happened shortly after we moved here.  I was in the shower of our old condo, Jim was working on the computer.   I felt a little dizzy when Jim came bursting into the bathroom yelling something I could not make out.  “HUH?!?” I yelled over the sound of the water, but he had already closed the door.  He popped back in to mumble something else.  “WHAT?!?” I yelled again, and stuck my head out from the shower curtain, to which he lowered his head and said, “Never mind.  It’s over.”  When I got out of the shower he informed me that there was an earthquake and that his monitor, among other things were shaking.  “You didn’t feel it?” he asked.  To which I had to admit, I just thought I was feeling a little off balance.  This is not at all unusual for me evident by the minimum of 4 bruises/scrapes that mysteriously appear on my body with frightening frequency.

The second occasion was not that long ago, when at about 4AM, Jim woke me and said, “The house was just shaking,” excitement in his voice. “Huh?”  I said, half asleep.  “I think there was an earthquake.  The walls were just shaking.”  I roll back over, “It was probably just a muscle spasm,” I tell him and go back to sleep.  A few days later, when he actually remembered all this happened, he looked it up on the internet and indeed, at around 4AM an earthquake rattled California.

And the most recent episode on Easter.  A 7.2 shook Baja, California.  This time I was getting out of the shower, when I had the same wobbly feeling as the other earthquake shower incident.  Jim started yelling again saying that the bed and mirror were shaking.  I could see that the towels that were hanging through the bathroom were swaying back and forth.  Jim was in bed with Dizzy at the foot of the bed and he decided that Dizzy was doing something to make the mirror shake.  I guess his earthquake meter was broken yesterday or made less acute by all the strawberry cake he ate at brunch.  None the less, he still seems a little more tuned into the quakes than I am on any given day.

In short, unless a 5.0+ hits Irvine, I’m afraid I won’t ever know the difference.  We have different theories about why this is.  But, we can easily conclude that my center of gravity and balance is too far gone to even notice the earth move. So far, so good though.  We are still safe and sound and still attached to the continent.