Hi. How goes it?

I have been so ridiculously busy with work stuff. But I’m not complaining. It’s wonderful to have so many freelance opportunities. I basically have a day job and a night job at this point. I even took work with me while I was out on Long Island. I can rest easy for the time being knowing I’ll be able to keep kibble on the table for Duncan and I. 🙂 

After my terrible long run on Monday I  took a couple of days off. But yesterday morning I had planned to get a 3 mile “keeping myself honest to mid week short runs” run in and at 4am I woke up to the sound of the loudest thunder ever. I thought about taking my run to the gym but by 6:45am it was just a downpour without the thunder and I saw some sunlight trying to peer through so I just put on an older pair of kicks and bolted. 

This weekend I am going to be really pinched for time. I thought I was gonna try for 17 miles this Saturday but decided to swap with next weeks shorter 10 mile long run (yeah, only). I just have too much work to do and need that extra hour and a half that I would have been running those last 7 miles 🙂 I’m moving the 17 to next Saturday so it’s not a loss.

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Today is September 11th. My Facebook newsfeed is filled with posts about it. A real contrast to what it looks like on National Pancake Day that’s for sure :(. I thought I’d share with you guys how September 11th, 2001 unraveled for me.

I was commuting from Staten Island to Manhattan on the bus and we were in Brooklyn just about to enter through the tunnel that brings you into lower Manhattan. Mind you my husband had died 2 1/2 years prior. I was looking out the window of the bus and saw this wild explosion by the Towers. I literally assumed it was special effects for a movie being filmed. When you’re in NYC it’s common that there are blockbusters being filmed. All of a sudden someone on the bus screamed as they received a phone call from a loved one in that building. We never made it through the tunnel that day. We spent hours on that bus just sitting on the highway. There were papers that had blown across the water from NYC all the way to Brooklyn and they were landing on the highway. These papers were from the desks of people in the towers. That is how forceful the impact was. My bus driver started to collect them saying this was part of history. Eventually we got off the bus and walked around Brooklyn—we being me and a bunch of fellow bus commuters. We ended up at an electronics store (Like Best Buy) where we first saw that the Towers had fallen. We watched them on about 100 TVs simultaneously. I was so worried about my dear friend Susan who worked in that building. Thankfully she was running late that day and was also still on a bus in Brooklyn. But the saddest feeling I had that day was knowing there would be some many new young widows. I knew so many wives wouldn’t see their husbands again. I eventually got through to my family to let them know I was ok. By about 1pm they finally opened the Verrazano Bridge again which was locked down as soon as it was apparent this was a terrorist attack. I jumped on a bus that got me back to Staten Island and a friend picked me up and brought me home. Later in the evening my brother and his coworkers who had been running away from the towers as they fell arrived at my house because they couldn’t get home to NJ. I washed their dusty clothes and we got take-out from the diner for dinner and sat in front of the TV with our mouths wide open. We were all still in shock.

I had nightmares for months. I still get anxious every single day I commute to work.

I’m thinking of all those who perished on 9/11 and their families and all the men and women and canines, too who worked so hard for months and months as part of the recovery efforts. Let’s all remember the amazing acts of kindness that day. There were so many.

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