Well, I just experienced my first earthquake. A magnitude of 3.6. I have been here for 2 and a half years and this is the first I have felt. I figure if California falls into the sea this is the last thing I want to see anyways. Has anyone else felt it? Tell me your first earthquake experience.
That’s just the recall election tremors. Pay it no mind.
hehe, They just made a joke about that on the news.
Good to see the news director has a web browser open to the SDMB so they can steal my quips.
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Humpf. You call that an earthquake?
Why, back in '87…
Actually, my first experience was pretty much just like that one: “Was that an earthquake, or did the UPS guy back into the fire escape again?”
“and we’ll sink with California when it falls into the sea”-Youth Birgade.
3.6? Bah. That’s not worth even getting up out of your chair and standing under a door for.
But welcome to the world of Earthquakes! It only gets better. 
haha, my husband was laughing 'cause I called him at work to tell him. He says that’s not a quake. Then asked me if I had been drinking today. Well, it may not have been big but it was my first. Was the quake in '87 the big one in Los Angeles?
Sorry, that was a typo. I meant 1989–the big one in Oakland/San Francisco. I guess I’m still shook up.
Stomp, I read about the earthquake on my San Diego news module. They made it sound like it was based down here. Are you in SD?
I didn’t feel a bloody thing. But it could be because I’m used to the tremors.
Two days after I moved to California in 1987, there was a good sized earthquake.
I figured they happened every other day, so I just went on about my business. It was only when I looked out the window and saw half my neighborhood in pajamas and bathrobes standing on the street that I figured maybe it wasn’t normal.
But a 3.6? That’s nothing more than sitting on Uncle Earl’s belly when he burps.
The '89 quake and the '94 quakes were pretty big. There was also one in '71 or '72 that was pretty big. (Sylmar, I think?)
There was a quake in (I think) '87, called the Whittier-Narrows quake(?). That definitely got everyone’s attention, but was not on the same level as the '89 or '94 quakes.
Hee… the '89 quake was my brother’s 21st birthday. He was just getting ready to go out with his friends. Boy did THAT ever suck.
'94 was in Northridge. I was about ten miles from the epicenter, as the crow flies, which is the only way that matters in a quake.
My FIRST quake – tremor, actually – was a couple of weeks before that. There was a 3.2 off of Santa Monica. I was playing a video game in a corner of the dining room and the floor shook and the windows rattled. So I went and asked the longtime California resident in the house if that had been what I thought it had been. Yep, it had. It was unsettling, but not scary. Little did I know what was going to happen in a couple of weeks. Talk about scary…
Anything under 5 isn’t a big deal. We had aftershocks bigger than that after Northridge!
It was '71 and it was indeed the Sylmar. Although I was born here in '57 that was the first 'quake I remember feeling. I guess I was just used to the small ones and they didn’t/don’t get my attention.
I left the state in '75 and didn’t return until '01 but I still seem to be “conditioned”. I felt the 3.something in Valencia a few months ago. Rico and I were staying with his sister and we were sitting in her gameroom. He felt the pre-quake and he has incredible reflexes and was grabbing for me before I even knew something was happening… we were sitting under the windows and he was ready to step in and be my mighty protector!
I’m truly the luckiest woman in the world! 
Other then that, I haven’t felt a thing.
1971: my first memory, vague and brief as it is (I was only 2 yrs old). My father grabbing me and carrying me toward my mother holding on in a doorway. That’s it; an image barely a fraction of a second in length.
Since then, I moved from California to Washington State, so I’ve got lots more earthquakes to talk about.
Cal State Fullerton has a David statue replica that broke at a cemetary in the 87 Whittier quake. They actually paid to have the pieces brought down and put on the lawn. I’ve seen it.
http://dailytitan.fullerton.edu/issues/fall_01/11_29/news/historyof.html
Yeah, I thought it was '71. It was the first earthquake I really remember. The most notable thing that happened in our household was that my dad cut his arm on some broken glass, and blood was everywhere.(Well, not everywhere, but there was a lot of it.) A neighbor took him to the emergency room. Scary.