I was in the shower at work, right after my lunchtime jog, when suddenly I started feeling nauseous. At first, I thought I had pushed myself too hard on the track, when suddenly I noticed the other guys in the shower were running out into the yard, taking only their towels for modesty! I never felt the earthquake, but I suddenly realized what was making me sick was the vibrationof the ground, which I hadn't even noticed. My wife was a student at DeAnza college at the time, and when it hit she was eating her lunch on the lawn. She could see the ground undulating in waves, like swells on the sea.

My second quake occured at 4:37 in the morning, (I know because it woke me up and I was staring at the illuminated dial of my clock radio). It sounded like a a semi was being driven through the house, and a souvenir NY Yankees batting helmet I had on a bookshelf fell off and hit me on the head. I immediately turned on the radio to try and get some news, and finally found a station with a live DJ who was taking calls from listeners, trying to piece together a picture of the size and extent of the tremor. One listener called in from Monterey and reported he had been listening to music on a San Francisco station when he felt the quake, and about 20 seconds later he could hear the needle skipping on the record playing on the broadcast he was listening to. It took that long for the shock waves to travel from Monterey to the City.

My third big quake was the 89 quake that hit during the World Series game, knocked down the freeway in Oakland, started fires in the City and broke a span on the Bay Bridge. I was standing in the hall at work, talking to a colleague in his office, when we felt the building start shaking. He ducked under his desk and I stood in the doorway, the approved "safe" place, so I could see down the hall. The motion was exactly like standing in a moving subway car, and I could see the hallway twisting just like when you look through one rail coach into the next one, and out of the corner of my eye I could see (through the office window) a guy drive by the street on a motorcycle, totally unaware of what was happening.

There were aftershocks after each quake, always weaker, and it seemed like there was a minor tremor every month or so, just a slight vibration, like someone dropping a heavy weight in another room in the house. The sort of thing you might not even notice if you didn't live in a seismically active area. You never quite get over your first instinctive realization that "ground" is not "solid".