Last night Orange County finally had the earthquake I’ve been anticipating for so long. It wasn’t much as far as earthquakes go, only a 3.1 on the Richter. Small potatoes, except that the epicenter was, like, right up our asses.

In 24 years in California, that was the only time I’ve ever been right at the epicenter of a quake. It started with a sharp jolt and a loud cracking sound and generally scared the bejeebers out of everyone in the house. It was about 9:30 p.m. and I’d just gotten Boolie down to sleep and the boys settled in their beds; once the quake hit, the kids didn’t settle back in until nearly 11:00, and Ben and I were wakeful most of the night.

Because sometimes a smallish quake is a foreshock. And the idea of being at the epicenter of a large quake scared the living shit out of both of us.

It was our kids’ first earthquake; the last palpable quake was before Ben and I were married. Sam was worried sick and crying a little. Matt didn’t say much and appeared to blow it off. And Boolie was convinced it was caused by the airplanes going in and out of nearby John Wayne Airport. Took a little while to calm Sam down, but we piled all the kids into our bed and eventually got down to sleep.

I’m still a little edgy today. That sucker was a wake-up call for sure. Here’s hoping the next big quake isn’t on our piddly little local fault line.

It was Richie Sambora this time.

I really wish celebrities would go somewhere else to drink and drive. At least Britney keeps her wobbly ass up in L.A. County, safely away from my children.

Continuing on in the camel toe vein, I was explaining to my husband this morning while we were dressing for work why it’s expedient for a woman to wear a long tunic type blouse that covers her ass. In addition to covering any potential camel toe (actual or artificial), such a blouse will also cover Visible Panty Line.

VPL is not as much of a problem as camel toe, probably because it’s much more common; look around your office and I’ll bet fully half the clerical staff has it (okay, the ones NOT named Ashley; the ones who probably are wearing both panties and pubic hair). My objection to VPL is that it makes you look like you have four ass cheeks, two regular-sized ones and two little mutant ones at the bottom (representing the area beneath the elastic chokepoint). And that is just wrong.

(By the way, my grownup daughter Erika and I used to work with a girl whose ass looked like it didn’t have cheeks at all, like it had no crack. We could never figure out why it looked like that, unless she was using Crack Spackle, and we spent an inordinate amount of time staring at this woman’s ass, wondering. As far as appearing to have a strange number of ass cheeks, that was probably worse than VPL.) 

The common cure for VPL, of course, is to wear a thong, thereby eliminating the chokepoint, or at least eliminating it from your ass cheeks. And here is a problem with thongs about which most women haven’t thought, but which my husband has observed on occasion: If you have any cellulite on your ass whatsoever, and believe me this doesn’t happen only to the very overweight, wearing a thong can cause the dimples of your cellulite to be visible through the fabric of your pants. And this, again, is way scarier than Visible Panty Line.

Ah, the myriad concerns to be addressed by women dressing for the office. I’d almost rather put on a burqua and have done with it.

I have a difficult time getting out the door on weekday mornings. This is largely because not only do I have to get myself ready, I have to get three kids ready, as well as prodding my husband to stop standing around watching TV and get in the shower already. (This last bit alone can take a half-hour.) As a result, I don’t spend a lot of time fussing around with clothes, hair or makeup. The hair gets a two-minute partial blow-dry, the clothes are basically whatever I grab without having to think hard, and the makeup is the bare minimum required to avoid frightening the public.

My office has Casual Fridays and I was anticipating a nasty morning of hauling about and prepping a huge water intrusion/mold allergy file, so I went comfortable and pulled on a pair of running pants. But when I turned and looked in the mirror — No. Oh no. There it was: camel toe.

As most women know all too well, and most men fail to understand, camel toe is not exclusively the result of wearing your clothes so damned tight that your labia are clearly outlined for the world’s perusal. No, certain pants are sewn and seamed in such a manner that they create the illusion of camel toe where none exists. This is completely unfair and should, probably, be made illegal and punishable by law.

Because there is nothing which will make you the object of scorn and derision in So Cal like sporting an obvious camel toe. Even if you are young and beauteous, folks will whisper behind their hands. If you are my age, people absolutely don’t want to think about your genitalia. They would react the same way they might to a middle-aged man sporting plumber’s crack in a restaurant.

There was nothing for it but that I scrap the pants in favor of a different pair with no artificial camel toe. I SO don’t have time for this in the mornings. But you know what? Artificial Camel Toe would TOTALLY be a great name for a rock band.

Easter is this Sunday, and I am totally not ready for it, as is my holiday habit. I have to go to Target and play Easter Bunny tomorrow, and I dread the whole process for the following reasons:

1. Sam thinks all Easter baskets look gay.
2. Julia hates Peeps.
3. Both boys will want action figures, which they will not get, whereas Julia will get a new play tea set to replace the one the boys demolished. This will cheese off the boys immensely.
4. The kids’ teeth will probably rot, and I’m too much of a pussy to have the Bunny leave “healthy” treats and/or toothbrushes. Yeah, that’d be a big hit.
5. I have trouble staying up later than my boys on weekends, so will have to set an alarm for some ungodly hour to go fill the baskets, which will probably wake up my boys as well.
6. On second thought, such an event would at least dispense with the Easter Bunny bullshit once and for all.

I love watching the kids enjoy children’s holidays; I get a charge out of seeing their joy on Christmas morning, Easter morning and Halloween night. But the preparation always kills me. Shit, just two days ago I was up in the dead of night disrupting a St. Patrick’s Day “leprechaun trap” in my kitchen and leaving a mocking note from the “leprechaun” for Sam, who had set the trap. At least with Halloween you don’t have to sneak about.

Last night I watched the first installment of John Adams on HBO, and found myself wondering, at the opening credits, what it had done to earn a TV-14 rating. (That’s the same rating as Family Guy, which is replete with off-color jokes and frequent uses of the word penis.) The viewer was warned of brief nudity, as well as violence. Brief nudity? I wondered. Is Laura Linney as Abigail Adams going to do a topless scene? Are we going to have to look at Paul Giamatti’s ass?

Near the end of the episode, I got my answer: a brief glimpse of actual penis. This comes during a depiction of the stripping down, tarring and feathering of a treacherous Briton, and does absolutely nothing to move the plot along. So, you know, HBO, was that really necessary? Because I personally do not want to see much in the way of penis, and specifically I do not want to see British penis or actor penis. I have quite enough American penis to contend with at home, thank you.

It’s not often that I take an interest in mainstream entertainment, but if you have access to HBO, may I recommend the miniseries culled from David McCullough’s John Adams which begins Sunday, March 16? I know whereof I speak, because for the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading the book, and although I’m hardly a devoted scholar of history, it’s a fascinating study of the times.

Having been born in Philadelphia, I grew up rather steeped in Colonial America and the Revolutionary War. The Liberty Bell was as familiar and common as mud to me; I knew John Hancock’s signature almost as well as my father’s; Washington’s Crossing and Valley Forge were common, almost obligatory, school field trip destinations; and I knew Betsy Ross’ house from doorsill to attic. But I saw those places through a schoolgirl’s eyes, and the Revolution and early America seemed magical and innocent. The Adams book was most revealing.

You think America is partisan today? You should have seen it in 1800, when public figures were slamming each other with a fervor that make today’s Dems and Repubs look like lilies of the field. The press was so vitriolic as to make today’s news outlets seem beatific. The U.S. hasn’t gone to hell in a handbasket at all — well, it has. Of course it has. But not in the sense of everyone being divisive, suspicious and libelous. That is simply business as usual.

Anyway, check out John Adams if you get a chance. Oh, come on, do you really give a shit about Idol anyway? I promise you this is entertainment of a higher order, AND equally as scandalous and contentious.

Oh shit, enough about rain. In other news:

Yesterday I brought the boys home in my van when Matt announced he urgently had to pee. As we’ve allowed him to do this in the past, he ran over to a nearby streetside tree and proceeded to pee on that. Sam must’ve thought it looked like fun, because the next thing I knew he had run over and was also peeing on the tree. So here I am in the middle of the street with my arms full of packages and my two male offspring marking their territory like dogs.

Did I punish them? I did not. What I did was tell them You know, if you pee on a tree, you might accidentally pee on a BEE, and then the bee will fly over and sting you on the peepee.

Without further ado, they agreed that peeing was better done indoors. Psychology: It really works.

There had been rain in the forecast for this weekend, but the current models are backing off with respect to the intensity of the system, and the predicted rainfall totals for Newport Beach are now running at less than a tenth of an inch. And I don’t reasonably expect any more appreciable rainfall until the next rainy season starts up in November or so. Damn, damn, damn.

Because I am a great believer in God’s car wash; I leave my van out in the rain, and thus have managed to avoid washing it since last autumn. It’s true that God doesn’t scrub, but I’m willing to forgive Him for this; He doesn’t charge money for raining on my van, I don’t have to tip Him, and I don’t (perish the thought) have to stir my lazy Polish ass to wash the damned thing myself.

But the rain’s been scarce for a while, and the storm I was counting on has petered out. I don’t require that my van be sparkling clean — it’s not a fucking Rolls Royce, for God’s sake — but things are starting to get out of hand. I don’t think even a torrential microburst would help at this point.

Therefore, there is actual washing of the van in my future. The only question that remains is whether I will bite the bullet and pay someone else to do it (and they always give me the stinkeye if the thing is REALLY dirty), or rally my husband and sons to do it as a family. I’m voting for the latter. Because why, apart from garbage disposal, lawn care and vehicle maintenance, do we keep men around the house?

Daylight Saving Time (ahem) started Sunday morning, and our family is suffering the fallout from the time shift, big time. The switch from Daylight Time to Standard Time is always pretty relaxing; you feel like going to bed early and getting up early. It’s the reverse process that leaves everyone shredded. Now, we are having trouble getting our boys down to sleep before midnight (they are notorious night owls anyway), and prying them out of bed in the mornings is an undertaking of Herculean proportions.

Our usual morning routine is that I go into the boys’ room as soon as I’m dressed and roust them into my room, so the whole family is in one place and it’s easier for me to oversee everyone. I dress Julia, usually waking her up in the process; I even dress 5-year-old Matt, simply because it’s easier than trying to prod him into doing it himself. Sam, who at nearly seven is too old to have someone dress him, gets his clothes placed next to him, whereafter I warn him approximately 25 times to get his ass up and get dressed or he’ll be late for breakfast (he eats breakfast at school, and hates to be late).

You think it’s hard getting your ass out of bed and out the door in the mornings? Try getting your ass plus four other asses out the door (I count Ben among my charges, because I always have to tell him to stop standing around watching TV and get dressed already). The upside is that it’s made me extremely efficient. I can now complete the whole process in 50 minutes.

It’s nice having the extra daylight in the early evenings, and I do appreciate not having the birds singing me out of bed at 5 a.m. Still, the shift is excruciating, and I’ll be glad when everyone adjusts.