Question: What were you doing this day two years ago?

10 Sept 03 | Mr. Silverback

[Mr. Silverback]

The last few days I've been thinking about the guys at Pearl Harbor, and a section of a National Geographic documentary that talked about what most of them were doing the day and night before. So I'm wondering: What was that last day of the old, sleeping America like for you all? You can post your remembrances (and any other events that you remember from that day, see post #1 for an example) in this thread.

I'll start:

I couldn't tell you which deals I signed or anything like that, but I was pounding the pavement to get newspaper ads that day, picking up copy, etc. I remember sitting down near the end of the business day and wrtiting a list of new business for the 8am sales meeting on Tuesday. I don't think we ever covered them...

Then I went home. My wife took the keys and headed out to nursing school, I rolled around on the living room carpet with the kids, read the newspaper, watched Brit Hume and O'Reilly. I only know I did these things because they were my routine; the day doesn't stick out, though it should. I'll bet there are a lot of Pearl Harbor survivors who remember vividly what they were doing on the night of 6 December.

[Mr. Silverback]

Here's an example of what I mean by "other events." I can tell you what someone at the New York Times was doing: editing and layout for a big interview that was printed in the September 11th edition. The interview was with Bill Ayers, a completely unrepentant Weatherman terrorist who recently wrote a book about his experiences and got the usual media butt-kissing. In the interview, Ayers talked (in phrases eerily reminiscent of the Dennis Hopper character in Speed) about the beauty (from a distance) of the pattern of the bomb becoming chaos. Mona Charen pointed out in Useful Idiots how appropo it was that thousands of copies of that feature interview were blasted into ash when the Trade Towers were struck.

The following Sunday, I went to a Blood Drive, opened a copy of the Sunday Chicago Tribune that was lying in the waiting area, and there, on the cover of the Sunday Trib Magazine big as life, was Bill Ayer's arrogant face. I said something out loud, I don't remember what, but it was not pretty, whatever it was. I still have the magazine. I want a reminder that we live in a culture where a professional journalist will sit down with a guy who wanted to blow up a dance at Fort Dix and write him up as if he were a member of the freakin' French Resistance.

Never Forget

[Larry Lucido]

Question: What were you doing this day two years ago?

Reading news on FR, as always.

[11th Earl of Mar]

How am I supposed to remember what I was doing the day BEFORE?

I guess I will FreeperMail John Robinson and have him look in the archives for me to see what I was doing that day. lol

[Snowy]

Reading news on FR, as always.

Me too.

[discostu]

I was at work, which was a startup company desperate for cash (sept 15th payroll was uncertain and only got made at the last possible minute). And looking forward to the first Monday Night Football game of the year. Then I watched the game and probably had a beer. Just a normal Monday.

One of the things I remember is that on Tuesdays I always read my web comics (Sluggy, User Friendly, PVP, and a couple of others). Needless to say on that particular Tuesday I didn't, and then I didn't the next week, and the week after. Then it kind of became a thing. Wasn't until December of 2002 that I started reading Sluggy and PVP again, haven't picked up any of the others, and I read them on Mondays instead of Tuesdays. Those subtle changes in life are the ones that interest me.

[boomop1]

Ditto

[vikingcelt]

I was getting ready to go on another trip to Ireland. I had just returned from there on August 22nd but since my husband couldn't go with me that time we made arrangements to fly back to Ireland on September 17th. Then the horror of 9/11 came. We actually made it to Ireland. Planes started flying again on Sunday, September 16th, so we made it. It was a strange, strange flight. Very quiet at SFO. Lots of confusion at LAX and a very long wait. When the plane landed in Dublin (first stop before on to Shannon) the pilot gave a beautiful speech...I can't remember his words anymore...I just remember being very moved by it and crying. I expected that when we returned to the Bay Area after this trip things would have changed. That people there would have become more patriotic and perhaps even recovered their common sense. Didn't happen. If anything, it was worse. It was then that I knew absolutely for sure that we had to get away from that place...which we did just a little over a year later.

[Orangedog]

I always get the creeps when I think about it, but on 9/10/01 I was trying to decide to take a chance and buy out of the money 'puts' on the QQQ. By the end of the day I decided against it and sold what few stocks I had left because I was expecting a lot of tax loss selling by mutual funds later that month and bulked up on cash instead of going negative in the options market. Kinda glad I didn't buy the puts. I might have had a hard time sleeping knowing I made money because terrorists attacked Wall Street.

[EggsAckley]

I have absolutely NO idea what I was doing the day before, due to the fact that the next morning was such a complete shock. Seems like everything changed that day.

I'm sure though that I was on FR....that is a given. I do remember that the Condit thing was still generating big threads, and the very morning of 9-11 there were several going on at the moment of the first plane hitting the tower.

I still say Condit probably heaved a HUGE sigh of relief on 9-11. At that moment, he got away with murder, and he knew it. JMHO~~~

[Psalm 73]

Hmmm, Monday, Sept. 10, 2001 -
I spent the day poring over blue-prints and writing procedures for rebuilding Black Hawk helicopter tail pylons - came home and did housework because my 43-year old wife was 9-months pregnant with our daughter.
I had no idea our world would be forever changed the following morning.
Let us never forget why we fight this war - and why don't those treasonous Demoncrats just shut the hell up and quit bashing America and our Commander-In-Chief......

[jae471]

I was here, at this desk, working on porting science code from IRIX to Linux. I was part-time then, working between classes, having two jobs, one on-campus (so I could work between classes), and this one for NASA (so I could make a decent wage).

I probably had a browser window open to FR. I can't remember that much. The big news of the day was the rep from Modesto -- umm what was his name -- and the Shandra Levy case. (Seriously, I can't recall the guys name -- shows you how he moved to the dustbin of history.)

[jae471]

Condit. That was his name -- Gary ConDIDit.

[vikk]

I flew from Raleigh-Durham into JFK. The weather was absolutely perfect, as it was for the entire month of September. I was on the left of the plane, I seem to remember making a point of doing that so I could get that great view of the entire island of Manhattan. I'm pretty lucky to have seen it all from the air one last time.
I caught a cab from JFK to the WTC so I could take the PATH train to my place in Jersey City. I went out that night with some friends and had a few too many. That, and the general hangover from the wedding I was at that weekend made me keep hitting the snooz the next morning. Normally, at 8:45, I would have been somewhere in the bottom of the WTC, heading to the subway so I could get to work. Instead, I watched it all unfold from my front stoop.

[Mr. Silverback]

Amen to that. BTW, love, love, love the Blackhawk. Great piece of machinery; almost makes me wish I'd joined the Army.

Almost. ;-)

[Poohbah]

I was flying to Washington, DC for a three-day meeting that started on Tuesday. I read a couple of point papers, edited a PowerPoint presentation, and then began reading a Dale Brown novel ("Warrior Class").

That night, I was at the Crystal City Holiday Inn, with my co-workers, nailing the last details down and having some dinner. I then went out for a walk, called my wife and daughter, and went to bed.

An utterly ordinary business travel day.

I had no premonitions about the next day, aside from knowing that the meeting was going to involve a lot of yelling and screaming (I was working on a controversial project).

[Mr. Silverback]

Wow.

[SamAdams76]

I remember the morning of 9/11 (before the events began) very well. I remember it was a spectacular late summer day here in New England (much like it is today). Deep, blue skies. No humidity. Comfortable temperatures. I remember being bummed out I had to work that day because it was such a perfect fishing day. The previous Sunday (the 9th), I had gone fishing off Gloucester pier and had a great time. Anyway, I missed out on the immediacy of following events because when I got to work that morning (about 8AM), I decided to do an employee's performance review on the spur of the moment. Thus, I was locked in my office with the phones shut off as events unfolded. I began to get an inkling that strange things were happening when I saw co-workers (through the window of my office) pulling a television into the center of the room. Then the employee I was doing a review with got a cellphone call from his wife and all hell broke loose after that.

I mentioned that I spent that Sunday fishing but I don't remember what I was doing on Monday. I'll have to dig out my DayPlanner from that year and see. I do remember that a fairly hot topic on FR at that time was all the vacation Bush took that summer. There were some snide remarks being made in the papers about all the time Bush spent on his Texas ranch. Well as we all know, it turned out to be a good thing that Bush had all that rest.

[Marysecretary]

It was Gary COND(U)IT.

[ko_kyi]

I was in California after my dad's funeral. On the morning of the 11th I was in LAX holding my boarding pass, waiting to get on the plane at 7:50 California time. I was in a hurry to get home in MD as my wife was due to give birth soon. They told us there was a 1 hour delay, then a 2 hour delay, then evacuate the airport.

I was stuck in LA trying to find an affordable way to get to Santa Barbara where I was stuck for 4 more days. I am just glad I wasn't ON the plane at the time - God knows where I would have ended up staying.

[N3WBI3]

Starting a new job for Adelphia ;)