Rock and roll!

So, I was sitting in bed, reading my nifty mystery novel, and it felt (and sounded) like a truck hit the house. My bed just bounced for a few seconds, then settled back down into its usual inertia. Earthquake! We know all about them here in California. Once, people visited me from New Hampshire, and they were twitchy the whole week, worried about the Big One (like they never have any natural disasters there, like hurricanes and ice storms, and yes, earthquakes, too). The natives know that most temblors are just little glitches in our otherwise hectic existence here on the boundary of the North American and Pacific plates. And now, thanks to Ms. Perlroth and Geology I, I know even more. Go ahead, ask me about P-waves and S-waves. And I know how to calculate the epicenter, too. Oh, I bet Ms. Perlroth is stoked right now. She just loves this stuff. Anyway, tonight's event was a weinie, just a 4.4. They don't even get interesting till they get over 5.0. And even when we had our last truly devastating one in 1989, when Dan Rather and all the other anchormen came out here and sat in front of the Cypress structure or down in the Marina district, where everything fell down, kaboom, there were only 60 some odd deaths. Our building codes are really something, you know. Maybe that's why real estate is so damned expensive. You think?