After years of indoctrination to watch out for the Big One in Southern California, it finally hit... Mount Vernon. Julie and I were awakened last night at 3:34 a.m. by a shaking bed. It's amazing how quickly the body can get into emergency mode... Fortunately, the shaking stopped as suddenly as it started, and it didn't seem bad enough to do any damage, so we checked on the kids – who didn't wake up, of course. The frightening reality is that kids don't seem to wake up for anything – not an earthquake, not a smoke detector, not anything.

Anyway, so we checked on the kids, wandered around the house, and checked the television and the radio for news. Unfortunately, those two forms of media were not helpful for our frame of mind, since we couldn't find a channel or station that even mentioned it. I tried to sleep, but I couldn't live with the uncertainty... Where was the earthquake? Has Seattle been leveled? Or, worse yet, Bellingham? It didn't seem likely, considering the TV and radio didn't yet think it newsworthy, but... Did our furnace explode? Something else nearby? Have the Russians invaded? It's amazing what your mind will come up with in the middle of the night.

So, I finally decided to Google it. What would we do without the Internet, and what would the Internet be without Google? Anyway, I quickly found my way to the USGS Recent Earthquake Activity site and noticed a little red box in northwestern Washington that was bigger than most of the other boxes on the map, so I clicked it, and clicked it again, and clicked it again, and it became clear that the epicenter for the earthquake was right in Mount Vernon, Washington. In fact, it was about a mile from my house. I'm sure I've never been this close to an epicenter before, even growing up in California, so I'm glad it was only a 3.8. It was certainly comforting to read the details and validate our experience so that I could finally get back to sleep.

When I was a kid, I thought earthquakes were a blast, and couldn't understand why my Mom would so quickly appear at my bedroom doorway in a panic. I didn't have any kids of my own, then. Earthquakes don't seem that fun anymore.