Julia and her dad

Here's the first picture of Steve with Julia.

Charlotte and Julia both experienced their first big earthquake on Saturday evening. Charlotte was in her room getting out some puzzles and I was in the living room sitting on the couch clipping Julia's toenails. I felt the shaking and stood up, I figured it was just a tremor. Holding Julia up on my shoulder, I walked over to the doorway between our living room and bedroom and called Charlotte. The shaking wasn't too strong yet; I kept thinking it would stop (tremors last like 3-5 seconds). Steve had been working on insulating our bathroom  and was having trouble getting the door open since he was being entangled in a ladder that was in front of the door. Suddenly, things were really swaying. The house was moving from side to side and I saw stuff on the table and counters falling to the floor. I screamed for Charlotte and Steve ran and grabbed her from her room. She was crying, "Why is the house moving?!" We all ran outside and watch Steve's van rock back and forth. The ground was lifting and sinking. What an amazing feeling. Time really slowed down! So, we were all shaken up and didn't want to go back in the house right away in case there was a strong aftershock. We hung out in the backyard for awhile and then eventually went in to make dinner... Obviously, we were pretty distracted the rest of the night. I went online within an hour and the info was already available: a 6.5 magnitude and out in the ocean (25 mi?) west of Ferndale... Wow, that's big!

There's been lots of damage in the area. There are broken windows all over town, and broken merchandise at stores -I guess the grocery stores had quite a mess, especially the wine aisles. One building downtown suffered enough structural damage that Eureka City Council has decided it'll be knocked down. All in all, Humboldt county faired well -not too many people hurt, no tsunami warnings, no fires.