Loma Prieta. That was interesting.
This one.
I was one of the very few people to have advance notice of an earthquake. I was in S. Jersey on a multi-state/multi-country conference call. One woman in Baltimore interrupts with a shout & then apologizes that everything is shaking & she’s in the middle of an earthquake. About 10 seconds later, the floor under me is rippling & the fluorescent lights start to sway when I quite nonchalantly reply, “she’s not making it up because I feel it too!”
I’ve actually felt only one–June 2010 in Chicago. I thought it was just a truck rumbling by.
I’ve slept through two–one in the summer of 2001 in Seattle, and the 2008 one near Chicago that **HeyHomie **mentioned. For the 2008 earthquake, I was actually living in Maryland at the time, but I was here for a job interview that day. I still have that job. 
There was another small one when I lived in Peoria, IL, in 1987 or 1988. I was playing softball in our backyard and didn’t even notice it.
Oh, fuck no. Nope, nada, no way. Pure nightmare material.
:eek: Do not do that! If those bookshelves had tipped over you could have been severely injured.
Yes, often, having lived in Japan for a few years as a child, and in southern CA for a few years as an adult. The oddest one was a mild one in Virginia a couple of years ago.
What was odd about it?
2011 Virginia quake for me as well. I was on the 7th floor of an office building in suburban MD when the building started to shake. After the initial ‘WTF?’ moment, I headed for the emergency stairwell. The bizarre thing is that it was ~20 minutes before word came down to evacuate the building.
Early summer of 2009: We had just arrived in Maggie Valley, NC (just outside the Smokies); got unpacked (10 hour drive), got the K9s settled, sat down to rest and BA-BOOM!–just like that! As we were out in the woods, I figured a large tree had fallen over somewhere nearby. Nope, earthquake. Nobody in the area seemed to care.
A couple years ago, I experienced a 4.2ish quake, epicenter was approx. 50 miles away
My thought process from beginning to end, quake was less than a minute long…
Hmmm, feels like a big truck driving by the house
… That can’t be a truck, it’s going on too long…
…strange, no clouds in the sky, can’t be thunder
…no fireworks displays either…
Rumbling ends
…hmm, perhaps it was an earthquake, lets check USGS website, yep, a small quake, that’s fairly atypical for Maine, cool though, scratch “experience a quake” off the bucket list then…
Lived in Los Angeles since the 80’s so experienced quite a few. They are kind of fun once you get used to it
Technically, I was in Boston when we got the shocks from the 2011 Virginia quake. Totally failed to notice. Some friends had stuff rattle on the shelves down at MIT, they were quite excited.
I did notice the ripples from the 2012 Maine earthquake. It was very disconcerting; it felt like everything suddenly swayed about six inches to the left, and then wobbled gently back into place. My first thought was that the old Edwardian house I was living in at the time had finally started to fall over, but then thought better of it and settled back down.
My second thought was that possibly I had imagined it, so I checked the critter cage to see if they’d noticed anything amiss. If animals do have the ability to predict earthquakes, we have bred it out of domesticated fancy rats. The fur pile didn’t even twitch. Although, come to think of it, that lot also slept through Hurricane Sandy – I might have just had a defective batch of detector rodents. They were acutely attuned to anyone BBQing anywhere in the neighborhood, and followed open beer bottles around with their noses like little pointer dogs, but they were rubbish at anything else.
Same one we felt here?