Another decent-size earthquake in the vicinity just a little while ago — a 4.2 on the Richter, about 126 miles from me, northwest in the Pacific Ocean, due west of the Oregon/California border.

I hadn’t felt a thing — just spied it on one of my paranoidal-periodical checks at the USGS site for all worldwide, but especially close to home, earthquakes and other related-scary movements.

And in the ocean — a drought-fraught inland, though, more earthquakes.

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

The ground around my local area, here north of Eureka, has been quiet of late, and hope it continues in that vein. Although no shakers today, we’ve had at least four in the past week, 20 in the past month, all dinky. A 6.8 in March near Eureka is our biggest so far.

Further on down in California’s Central Valley — I lived way-too-many-years in Fresno — is feeling the rattle of dry, dry soil.
A piece on the subject last May at Mother Jones keynoted:

Amos and his collaborators found something that goes deeper than that — something that could look to a paranoid environmentalist like a grand unified theory of California problems: drought, water use, and earthquake risk.
“We found a link between what humans are doing on the ground and the rate of earthquakes,” Amos said.

No shit, Sherlock.
You want quaker with your oats?