Not a note of happiness or ease-of-mind:

A shallow magnitude 4.4 earthquake was reported Saturday morning 17 miles from Rio Dell, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The temblor occurred at 6:46 a.m. PDT at a depth of 11.8 miles.
According to the USGS, the epicenter was 21 miles from Fortuna, 34 miles from Eureka and 39 miles from Bayside.
In the past 10 days, there have been two earthquakes magnitude 3 and greater centered nearby (LA Times).

(Illustration: ‘Earthquake,’ by Jakara Art, found here).

The epicenter of that one is about 44 miles south/southwest from where I’m sitting on my ass right now. And just a short while after the 4.4, a 3.8 quake struck in the near vicinity — Ferndale, a few miles north of Rio Dell. Both are on the coast and deep in the land of the shakers.
This whole area up here is shakesville — the area around Ferndale and just south are prime spots for quakes:

This area of northern California is known for its frequent earthquakes as it is near the convergence of three geographical features.
The San Andreas Fault meets the Mendocino Fault and the Cascadia Subduction zone just offshore of Cape Mendocino; locals know it as Triple Junction.
Three tectonic plates meet in this location; the Pacific Plate, the North American Plate and the Gorda plate. Residents of Humboldt County are used to being awakened by movement of these plates.

We don’t feel way-most of them at all. A shitload of 2.0s aren’t going to knock you off your feet — I didn’t feel the 4.4 this morning and didn’t know about until I surfed the news sites.
However, I’m practically sitting on top of what’s called Mad River Fault Zone — a short, but fat little sonofabitch, which has the potential to stir up some nasty shit.
The USGS used to have some neat earthquake maps of the area with little colored circles — red, that day; blue, yesterday; and yellow, last week — to show the latest shakers. However, the USGS streamlined the maps recently and now there’s just this one.
After residing all over the US, California has some weird shit, and the worse is earthquakes. Terrifying as a tornado, but with zero advance warning. In those twisters, at least you have the weather to foretell what could happen, and having been born and raised in south Alabama, tornadoes are fairly easy to handle next to earthquakes.
Three years ago we had a 6.5 just south of Eureka (about 10 miles south of me) and it scared the livin’ crap outta me. I posted about the experience here.
Earthquakes are mind blowers.
Even the noted French writer, historian and philosopher Voltaire got rattled after experiencing the huge earthquake that nearly destroyed Lisbon, Portugal, in 1755:

Approach in crowds, and meditate awhile
Yon shattered walls and view each ruined pile.
Women and children heaped up mountains high,
Limbs crushed which under ponderous marble lie…

And the craziness of a shaker lingers.
Mike Horn, director of the Imperial County Behavioral Health, commenting after a 7.2 quake struck Baja California on Easter Sunday 2010: “If you were in a 7.2 earthquake, and you’re not anxious for a couple days, there’s something wrong with you,” he said. “Nature put anxiety into us to get us thinking about what our contingency plans are.”
You betcha!
After that 6.5 three years ago, I dashed out and got a big water container, flashlights with plenty of batteries and a short-wave radio. And for days after, felt great anxiety and near-terror in taking a shower — I became near obsessed about a huge earthquake striking while in the shower.  Nearly started taking a ‘whore’s bath.’
Now, I don’t try to think about it.

And on top of the normal ground-shaking patterns, the surging climate change will make it worse — yes, the environment impacts the geology of our earth.
Global warning don’t mean just crazy weather and sea-level rise, but also earthquakes.
Bill McGuire, author of ‘Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes,’ in a piece in the UK’s Guardian in February 2012:

The idea that a changing climate can persuade the ground to shake, volcanoes to rumble and tsunamis to crash on to unsuspecting coastlines seems, at first, to be bordering on the insane.
How can what happens in the thin envelope of gas that shrouds and protects our world possibly influence the potentially Earth-shattering processes that operate deep beneath the surface?
The fact that it does reflects a failure of our imagination and a limited understanding of the manner in which the different physical components of our planet – the atmosphere, the oceans, and the solid Earth, or geosphere – intertwine and interact.
…
The huge environmental changes that accompanied the rapid post-glacial warming of our world were not confined to the top and bottom of the planet.
All that meltwater had to go somewhere, and as the ice sheets dwindled, so the oceans grew.
An astounding 52m cubic kilometres of water was sucked from the oceans to form the ice sheets, causing sea levels to plummet by about 130 metres – the height of the Wembley stadium arch.
As the ice sheets melted so this gigantic volume of water was returned, bending the crust around the margins of the ocean basins under the enormous added weight, and provoking volcanoes in the vicinity to erupt and faults to rupture, bringing geological mayhem to regions remote from the ice’s polar fastnesses.
…
The signs are that this is already happening.
In the detached US state of Alaska, where climate change has propelled temperatures upwards by more than 3C in the last half century, the glaciers are melting at a staggering rate, some losing up to 1km in thickness in the last 100 years.
The reduction in weight on the crust beneath is allowing faults contained therein to slide more easily, promoting increased earthquake activity in recent decades.
The permafrost that helps hold the state’s mountain peaks together is also thawing rapidly, leading to a rise in the number of giant rock and ice avalanches.
In fact, in mountainous areas around the world, landslide activity is on the up; a reaction both to a general ramping-up of global temperatures and to the increasingly frequent summer heatwaves.
…
The bottom line is that through our climate-changing activities we are loading the dice in favour of escalating geological havoc at a time when we can most do without it.
Unless there is a dramatic and completely unexpected turnaround in the way in which the human race manages itself and the planet, then long-term prospects for our civilisation look increasingly grim.

All this earthquake talk makes me nervous — at least it’s the weekend and I really don’t need a bath until Monday.