And of course

A moment of silence for the lives lost on Sept 11, 2001.

We lived in London and I was at the park with DS1 who was about 1 1/2. I overheard someone on a cell phone saying something about people jumping from buildings on Wall Street and was confused. When I got home, the phone was ri nging and it was my MIL asking what I thought and I said I didn't know.

I went and tuned the TV on and watched the towers collapse.

We lived a mile or so North of the Thames, which is one of the main flight paths for the approach to Heathrow. We could go out to the park and watch - and hear the roar - the Concorde land. For the next week or so, they diverted the air traffic over our house and then had it make a sharp right at the river for the rest of the approach so that they didn't have 100 planes a day flying over Parliament.

An English friend's husband worked as something financial in an insurance company and they lost just about everyone from their New York office. An American friend was in the airport in Portland, Maine and saw the terrorists - made eye contact with Mohammed Atta who looked pretty angry - before they got on their planes. The same friend lost a friend in one of the planes. My mother was flying home from Alaska where my sister was stationed in the Army and instead of changing planes in St Louis, she stayed there while my dad drove out and picked her up (about a 5 or 6 hour drive and one he knows well, since he's from St Louis). My brother sent me an email that said, in its entirety, "holy shit."