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Having lived in southern California for much of my life, I’m used to the ground not always entirely being steady under my feet.

After moving to the Bay Area, not so much. The steady stream of small single-jolt earthquakes I grew up with doesn’t really happen around here. But there are occasional more notable ones.

Like last night. Just about eight o’clock the house started swaying about, and continued to do so for some time, it took us a while to be sure it had stopped. Not too bad, but definitely long, and the power never flickered. I’d say by feel it’s the second most powerful earthquake I’ve felt (the biggest being Northridge).

Modern communications is a wonderful thing. Blondiewood popped onto WoW right afterwards, and we talked about the quake. Dave got a call on his cell phone from where some friends were at a restaurant and said everything was all right. The USGS site took maybe a quarter hour to come up with all the details: it was a 5.6 centered near Alum Rock, and there were a number of magnitude-1 aftershocks in the area.