One of the peculiarities of Southern California life is the Earthquake Wedge: I mean, the diminishing returns of everyone’s reaction to an earthquake.

This morning at 11:42, as you know unless you have been hiding under a rock for the past 12 hours, there was a magnitude 5.4 earthquake in Southern California. The epicenter was located in Chino Hills, which forms the third point of an equilateral triangle between Newport Beach and Los Angeles if you’re headed north-northeast from Orange County. I was in my office in the seventh story of a downtown Santa Ana office building, and: The fucker lasted for, like, forever. On the scary scale, I would rate that earthquake as highest in my 24 years of earthquake experience. Because it never seemed to end, is why, despite that the initial jolt was fairly brief. But then I made, received and completed two entire phone calls in the time the shaking lasted.

And the reaction by the general public followed the usual diminishing scale, like so: EARTHQUAKE!!!! AAAAHHHHH!!!!! 5.8!!!! MAJOR SHIT!!! Then: Earthquake. 5.4. Some people thought it was scary. And by now, a little over five hours later: earthquake. Small potatoes. Watch out for The Big One, you! Because this is just a wake-up call!

I do not think earthquakes are the least bit funny; in fact, they are one of the major armaments in my anti-California arsenal. But the local reaction, and its predictability, are growing somewhat funny. And here’s hoping that if the Big One hits, I will be safely snuggled down with my family watching it on TV from somewhere on the East Coast.

This morning I had an MRI study done of my lumbar spine, further to identifying the particular manner in which these babies completely blew out my back. It’ll take a while for the report to come back, but I was given a CD with the images. The damned thing wouldn’t run on my Mac (of course) so I had to bring it to the office and run it on a PC.

I saw 82 images of my lumbosacral spine. Did they enlighten me? They did not. Maybe they did. I can’t tell for sure.

I know just enough about diagnostic studies to be dangerous. I’ve been working in personal injury defense on and off for, I don’t know, 14 years, and I’ve seen a lot of films and reports and charts and diagrams over the years. But do I know how to spot a disc bulge or stenosis or disc space narrowing?

I might. I might not. I thought I saw a couple of bulges and some narrowing. Then again, I might be completely misinterpreting what I see. There are reasons why radiologists go to medical school. I didn’t go.

It’ll probably be a couple of weeks before my doctor faxes me a report. Meanwhile, I’m sort of sorry I looked at the images. Knowledge is not always power. Sometimes, knowledge is bafflement.

(I figured it out! I figured out how to put foreign special characters in a blog entry! By totally cheating, is how: I generated an ñ in Word for Mac, then I cut and pasted it into WordPress. Perhaps there is an easier way. But I am so pleased to have spelled jalapeño correctly, with the proper foreign shit and so on.)

Anyway. There has been this major to-do about salmonella for the past several months, and a number of culprits have been bandied about, with the temporary (very personally irritating to me) result that tomatoes were, for a time, pulled from restaurants. Because I was eating too many Subway $5 footlongs at the time, and breathes there a sub on earth whereon you can hold the tomatoes without causing something to seem seriously wrong? I needed tomatoes on my Subway sub, dammit. Especially if you order the BLT sub and have to go without the T. Those were dark, dark times. But eventually the FDA shrugged and said Okay, maybe we were just kidding about the tomatoes, although the salmonella origin was not so much known. Perhaps, they suggested, it was iceberg lettuce. Or cilantro. Or, we just don’t know, and aren’t you glad it’s just salmonella and not anthrax?

But now today they came out and pointed the finger at jalpeños, and it just feels right. Because I hate jalapeños. They are just not a proper food for Americans to eat.

It was one of the most confounding things, to me, about coming to California: how suddenly I was meant to eat like a Mexican and to think things like frijoles and jalapeños were normal or even desirable. At the time I left Delaware in 1984, there were two Mexican restaurants in the entire state, and one of them was a Taco Bell. I first confronted Mexican food in the University of Delaware dining hall in the late ’70s (Mexican food has the universal food-service appeal of being both cheap and filling), and what I ate was a burrito. And then, for the first and last time, I wrote out one of those little slips for the “Suggestion Box”, and dropped it in, and what it said was this: Your burritos taste like cock. I thought you should know this. And I wasn’t kidding.

I have learned after 24 years to like some Mexican food, in particular the carnitas burrito mojado (which doesn’t taste like cock). I’m still suspicious of the meat in burritos; Ben was once eating Mexican food in the Arizona desert and was served a meat described to him as desert elk, which, as it later transpired, was in fact burro. (The word “burrito” should make you suspicious, right there, as far as that goes.) I still think jalapeños are from the devil. And for once, the U.S. Government agrees with me.

You’d think that with the deedee in her mouth, Dollybug wouldn’t have room to scream fit to bring the house down. But she does, she does. Every bedtime.

Julia has always had a number of specific elements she requires to go to sleep. These are (1) her mom and dad flanking her in bed, (2) her deedee in her mouth, (3) her “water bottle” (actually a sippy cup) cradled in her arms, or at least within reach; and (4) whatever is her favored toy of the moment. When she was younger, if she had these things she would happily settle in and, after talking your ear off for a while about nothing in particular, fall asleep.

But now she’s going through the Howl Before Sleeping phase. I remember it well, because Sam did the same thing. Every night at bedtime, and even though she’s got all her necessities in place, she decides that she absolutely needs something we are not going to allow her to have. This could be anything: her coloring book in bed with her, another Bob the Builder cartoon on Sprout On Demand, a DVD she wants to watch, you name it. Invariably, though, we have to say no.

And then she commences to wail. She screams as though we were boiling her in oil, while we patiently tell her Boolie, you’ve very tired, honey. Lie on your pillow and go to sleep. After she screams for a few minutes, she passes out cold and sleeps through the night. This happens Every. Single. Night.

I don’t know what causes kids to go through the scream yourself to sleep phase. I only know that we will be very glad when it’s over. And it being summer, and everyone having their windows open, I’m sure the neighbors will be glad too.

I mean this:

Blue crab population diminishing in Chesapeake Bay

I am not originally from the Chesapeake area, but I went to the University of Delaware, just a little ways off (in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic coast, everywhere is close to everywhere else). I had a boatload of friends from Maryland and Virginia, and therefore I claimed the Chesapeake as a little bit mine.

I used to go eat Maryland crabs at the Crab Trap on Elkton Road in Newark, Delaware. I understand it’s closed now and the building demolished, but all-you-can-eat crab night was awesome. They’d cover the tables with newspaper and serve up pitchers of beer and mounds and mounds of crabs, and we’d eat them with lots of Old Bay Seasoning until we were ready to fall over dead. (Well, the beer probably helped, too.) To this day, I keep a can of Old Bay in my kitchen spice rack. Not necessarily to use, but sometimes to just open up and breathe in the smell, and remember.

On some rinky-dink docks on odd bits of the Chesapeake, we’d fish for crabs this way: you tie a piece of spoiled raw chicken to the end of a piece of string and dangle it in the Bay. And wait until you felt a tug on the line, whereupon you’d pull up your string and there would be a crab holding on. You didn’t get big crabs that way, true, and shelling and eating them was a hell of a lot of work. But it was so cool to do. A day spent fishing for crabs in this way, with the Bay spread out in front of you, was as restful and refreshing as a week’s vacation.

Good God, do I miss the Delmarva Peninsula. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I was still there (although Pennsylvania or New Jersey would do nicely, too). So I’m really sorry I read about the vanishing crabs and the closing of the Crab Trap. But memories are like that; reality gets way too far ahead of them, and sometimes you’re best off not trying to go back home.

URGENT CRAB UPDATE: After posting, I got a total crab up my ass and called up my husband and said idda wabba Crabs and Old Bay and I MUST IMMEDIATELY COOK OLD BAY CRAB SOUP FOR TONIGHT’S DINNER. And he’s all like Okay, honey, whatever floats your boat. This despite that it is (a) Southern California, (b) high summer and (c) 83 degrees. I love him so much.

Yesterday, after five years of searching, these shoes arrived in the mail. The style is Brilliant made by Hush Puppies, and they are the cutest shoes on earth. The photo doesn’t show the kitten heels, which are cute (although a bit of a bitch for driving, because they tend to catch on the floormat), and these shoes are way comfortable. I already owned them in a sort of dusty rose (disturbingly similar in color to the 1976 vintage carpeting in my upstairs) and a pale mossy green, but I have been coveting the black forever. And completely unable to find them in my size, despite scouring the Internet and every retail outlet I could get my hands on.

Until now, bitches. I feel positively postcoital. (Men’s eyes are glazing over, but girls know what I mean.)

I was reading a true-crime book (surprise) today that mentioned a story breaking in the morning paper, then being updated in the evening paper. Remember morning and evening newspapers? Sometimes they were competitors; sometimes they merged. In Wilmington, Delaware, where I was living in the early ’80s, the Morning News and the Evening Journal eventually combined into the Wilmington News-Journal, which the local paper is still called today. They probably don’t have morning and evening editions anymore, but they sure were fun.

In the ’80s, before many people watched CNN and definitely before the Internet, the newspapers, combined with the 6 o’clock newscasts, were the news source for everyone. You would get the morning paper and read it over coffee; the evening paper was for some kid to deliver on his bike after school and for Dad to disappear behind at dinner, or if Mom intervened, afterward. If there was a big story, like the Kennedy assassination, they broke through the network shows, or you learned it from someone else by phone. News wasn’t instantaneous like it is now, and I sort of miss that.

We still take the Orange County Register, mostly because Ben likes the opinion page and their website blows chunks. (The L.A. Times, which is a well-known leftist rag, is out of the question.) But apart from that, we get all our news from the Internet and CNN. So why would we read the newspaper? It’s yesterday’s news, the stuff you read on the Internet the previous day.

The day Heath Ledger was found dead, Erika called me on my cellphone while I was driving. Heath Ledger’s dead, she reported. Quick, go on CNN. I wailed, I can’t! I’m in the car! I was going completely apeshit without access to instantaneous news. Finally I turned on the Los Angeles all-news A.M. radio station, KNX, and consoled myself with that. It was all I could get. But I will never forget that, the frustration at NOT HAVING IMMEDIATE NEWS, GODDAMMIT. The world has moved on since the days when you’d have just read it in the paper the next morning.

I miss coffee and the newspaper in the mornings. It was my daily ritual, as sacred as Mass. These days? I tumble out of bed, pull an espresso and sit down at the computer while the kids have their cereal. Not so sacred. But at least it’s immediate.

I had lunch with Ben today, but he didn’t bring the newspaper. I asked WTF, and he said Well, we could actually talk instead. And I said God, how can we do that? Because most couples married as long as we have been just read the paper at each other.

Anyway, we got to talking about a personal injury case in which a New Jersey lawyer we know is involved, which deals with a boating accident with horrific severed-limb type injuries. The plaintiff is a married woman who was out on a date with another man, who apparently fell overboard and got entangled in the propellor, with gruesome results, while the plaintiff was slightly physically hurt and, understandably, quite jarred by what she’d seen. She apparently got around quite a lot, despite the “married” thing, and after the boating accident she modified her personal ad in the local newspaper to stipulate “no boaters”.

This sent us into hysterics, like so:

Yeah, because God, what if it happened again? That would RUIN THE WHOLE DATE!

Yeah, because she’d be like “Shit, I went to all this trouble to cheat on my husband and get my NAILS done and everything, and NOW look!”

We laughed until we cried. The personal injury business is not a pretty one for anyone involved, but if you know what you’re doing, you can find humor in everything.

Ever since summer vacation started, the kids and I have been sleeping in on weekdays. Since my hours are flexible and I sometimes work from home, I don’t have to be anywhere at any particular time, so I wait until the kids wake themselves up instead of prying them out of bed at 7:15 like I do during the school year. It is SO nice, and it will be SO hard to get used to keeping regular hours when school starts again.

This morning, though, I had to get up early; I had to be at the courthouse by 9 a.m. to sit in on a hearing and take notes. Which meant that I had to have the kids up and at ‘em at the usual schoolday time, and boy, did they not like it.

Sam and Matt had been up half the night. Ben and I have a recurring problem with keeping them in bed, their lights turned off, and their door open. They wait until we fall asleep, then shut the door, turn the light back on, turn up the T.V., and proceed to stay up till all hours watching Cartoon Network. We catch them sometimes and make them stop, but in the morning we often find the door shut again and the light on, and them sound asleep. We have trouble staying up later than they do.

Last night was the worst. I came in at half past midnight and told them to get their asses to sleep, then went back to bed. Again, they outlasted me. I think they probably stayed up until 2 a.m. judging by their general sleepiness and crankiness this morning.

This was a tougher Monday than most. They probably napped all morning at day care, and here I am yawning and reviewing medical records. Little boogers.

Despite my relatively young age, I take an astonishing array of prescription medications. My standard roster includes:

• Wellbutrin, for depression.
• Restoril, for insomnia.
• Lo-Estrin birth control pills, to avoid additional Boolies.
• Soma, a muscle relaxant, to stave off chronic low back pain.
• Vicodin, because I always have the low back pain anyway.
• Whatever random medication I might be picking up for Ben or one of the kids.

I’m such a regular at the local CVS drugstore that generally the clerks don’t even have to ask my name when I step up to the counter. Not surprisingly, we are the only Crumpackers who patronize the store. My bouquet of meds has become business as usual, but today my Wellbutrin bottle contained a new and interesting warning label:

Call doctor if you experience mood changes, sadness, depression or fear.

Well, shit, doesn’t that about sum up the human condition over the course of any given day (especially if you’re at work and/or caught in traffic)? Those aren’t side effects, that is life.