"9-11" 5 Year Anniversary

Oh my gosh, 5 years already. It seems like forever ago but at the same time seems like just yesterday. I looked back to see if I had posted anything about 9-11 last year, and was surprised to see I didn't. So since I hope to use this blog in the future as a journal to look back on, I think its a good place to write about what we were doing 5 years ago today. Michael and I were both 21 and I was in my last year of college and him in his first year of grad school. I was working at the Tech library at the time. I usually worked at 7:30AM so I would park and walk about a mile across campus at about 7. It was the perfect time to see the sunrise and I remember that on that morning, the sunrise was particularly beautiful. The weather was perfect with a hint of fall. This is usually the highlight of the year for me...When I can sense that subtle hint of fall in the air. Put that together with a lovely sunrise and I felt like this was going to be just a wonderful day. I only remember those details because all day long, I kept recalling walking to work that morning thinking what a perfect start to what I was hoping was going to be a perfect day.

I was sitting behind an information desk when one of the other workers at the library came up to me and said that a plane had hit the WTC. The people in my office and I had thought that it was just a bad plane accident then the same guy came back again a very short time later to say a second one hit and we realized, this was planned. It seemed like we kept getting information about other planes crashing (pentagon and the open field) and it was, to say the least a bit scary. I worked until I believe about 11:30 and no one got much done. We spent most of the morning in front of a big TV watching the news. When I went to my first class, our instructor came out and said, we have to have class and not think about this and can't put our day's on hold just because of this. No one in the class took that well. There were several people with friends/relatives in NYC or working in NYC that were just as nervous as could be. But we had class. My other 3 classes were fine though, the teachers said that they wouldn't teach material but if we wanted to talk about what was going on, we could have a big group discussion or we could leave. All of my classes stayed and talked. When I saw Michael for the first time that morning after leaving home we were outside the engineering building, gave each other a hug and were both almost speechless. We didn't have cell phones at the time and so we couldn't get ahold of each other before then. We sat outside for a bit not saying much but, shaking our heads and saying that we couldn't believe all this had happened. For he next week I remember we sat in front of the TV every night, watching nothing but the news (because that's the only thing that was on). So that's that...It is absolutely amazing that 5 years has passed.