EARTHQUAKE / THE ROAD TO RECOVERY : Valley Gets a Wake-Up Call : Aftershocks: Just when you thought it was safe to live here, a trio of temblors hit in the early morning.

Oh, what a week we’d been having. The skies were sunny, the smog so thin you could almost make out the shape of the mountains. And, if only for a nanosecond, conversation turned away from the earthquake.

For a blessed 171 hours and 46 minutes (but who’s counting?) the ground under our feet didn’t buckle. It didn’t heave. It hardly even quivered. The demons of the dirt were on holiday, it seemed.

But Friday morning they were back, rattling our floors and ceilings and all the stuff in between.

And just when you thought it was safe to live in the Valley.

Did the three aftershocks early Friday come as a surprise to Valleyites who briefly had entertained thoughts about returning framed art to walls or putting away the pile of clothing on the floor--insurance that they wouldn’t have to run outside in the altogether? Hardly. These are not your average rubes.

“All my kids came out: ‘Daddy! Daddy! We’re having an earthquake!’ ” said Jack Moore of Lake View Terrace.

“No kidding,” Moore replied.

“I said to my wife a couple of days ago, ‘We haven’t had an aftershock in about a week,’ ” said Moore, 46. “I know we’re going to have more. We’re going to have plenty of them.”

The first shaker, measuring 4.0, hit at 4:59 a.m. It was centered four miles east-southeast of Newhall, according to Caltech seismologists. The second temblor, at 5:11 a.m., measured 3.2 and was centered two miles west-northwest of Granada Hills. The third, at 5:56 a.m., measured 3.6 and was located three miles north-northeast of San Fernando.

The San Fernando Valley hadn’t felt an aftershock of magnitude 3.7 or greater since 1:13 a.m. Friday, Feb. 18, according to Caltech.

“It seemed like it was calming us down, which is very comforting,” said Coral Haase, 45, of Canoga Park. “But it’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

It had been so long since a tremor, in fact, that Thursday night one Granada Hills woman had actually considered sleeping in her upstairs bedroom for the first time since Jan. 17. But at the last minute, she changed her mind and bedded down with her husband once again on the couch.

“It’s a good thing I did,” she said. “You can’t calm down. You’re always expecting an aftershock but they still rattle you.”

Her name?

“Just say a Granada Hills resident,” she said. “I don’t want people to think I’m a baby.”

While some still jump up and head for doorways at the first sign of shaking, others are more circumspect--tired of bolting for cover just to return to their beds within seconds.

“I rolled over and went back to bed,” said Dan Karlson, 31, a clerk at Oshman’s sporting goods in Northridge. “I live in Chatsworth so I’m getting used to all this.”

“I used to sit up for two hours chain-smoking cigarettes” after temblors, said Justin Crane of Granada Hills. “But by now I’m used to it.”

Though some folks slept through the shaking, others thought they’d just dreamed up an aftershock or figured their bodies woke them for more mundane but necessary reasons.

Whatever the reaction, the most recent aftershocks were the talk of the town.

“We’re all experts now,” Northridge jeweler Sherry Kaplan said of the Valley’s amateur seismologists, who can pinpoint the strength of aftershocks if not with accuracy, at least with conviction.

At Postal Preference, a mail and card shop in Northridge, the facts were being laid on the counter.

“They say it’s only coincidence that most of them happen between 4 and 6 in the morning. I don’t buy that,” Alesha Haase said from behind the counter .

“It was hot. I knew it would happen,” a customer contributed.

“You know it never happens when it rains,” Haase said.

“It happens when the moon is in the right place and the stars are in the right place,” added Coral Haase, Alesha’s mother and owner of the store.

“It’s all anybody ever talks about,” said Alesha. “If it’s not Tonya and Nancy, it’s the earthquake.”

Friday’s Aftershocks Newhall: 4.0, 4:59 a.m. San Fernando: 3.6, 5:56 a.m. Granada Hills: 3.2, 5:11 a.m.