Six Weird Things About Me

As our two week wait drags on, I have nothing interesting to report. So instead of informing you of my random boob soreness and pelvic twitches (I know, they could be anything) I've decided to take up this meme and share some factoids about moi -

1) I am addicted to crafts and shopping for anything craft related. I quilt, I scrapbook, I love it! (See one of my creations above.) Crafting feeds my creative side in a way that my career feeds, well, I guess my job just allows me to eat. I can spend hours on the weekends strolling down the aisles of my local craft or fabric stores, hungry for interesting new items that will inspire me.

2) My parents are from, and have retired to, the Caribbean. I am fortunate enough to spend the holidays basking in the warm sun and lying on the beach, rather than freezing up here.

3) As a follow-up to #2, I hate being cold. A college buddy of mine, who is a medical doctor, recently diagnosed me with a condition called Raynaud's Phenomenon, whereby the blood flow to my fingers diminishes in the cold, resulting in the loss of feeling and color in my finger tips. Strangely enough, this can last for nearly an hour and has begun happening even during the Spring (like, eh, yesterday) when my house is chilly (60-65 degrees).

4) When I was a little girl, I used to get nauseated in the mornings, after getting dressed for school. I believe this went on for months. I would eat breakfast, get sick, throw up and go on to school. I was fine for the rest of the day. No one figured out why this happened, I suppose it was just nerves.

5) I nearly, accidentally, blew up the apartment in which we lived when I was a kid. My mom and I were baking (we usually baked cakes or pies on the weekends) and I turned on the gas stove b/c the recipe we were preparing called for a preheated oven. What I didn't know was that the pilot light wasn't lit, so when my mom opened the lower oven door and struck a match to light it, the force of the blast knocked my mom through the room. Fortunately, the gas hadn't been on for very long and she hadn't opened the main door to the oven. Otherwise, who knows what might have happened.

6) Both my mom and I worked in the World Trade Center and were present for the first bombing in 1993. She worked on the 96th floor of one of the towers and I worked on the 59th floor of the other. We both had to walk all the way down the stairs to exit the building. A group of colleagues and I were forced by Port Authority officials to stop at a cafeteria halfway down the stairs due to congestion in the stairway. Back then, the stairways were poorly lit and there was no functioning speaker system throughout the buildings.

In so many ways we were fortunate, while we were delayed we had no idea the buildings had been bombed, we thought they'd simply been struck by a small aircraft or that there had been a minor earthquake b/c the building actually shook. (In the early nineties, we had no cell phones and no way of communicating with the outside world). As we stared out the windows of the cafeteria and helicopters and emergency vehicles raced around, we actually believed that those buildings were indestructible.

By 9-11 my mom had retired and I'd moved on to another job in different city, but I will never forget the feelings of terror and outrage that I felt as those buildings went down. Sadly, my mom lost many former colleagues, but my old office suffered no deaths or major injuries. And even though I had been in my early twenties when I worked in the WTC, I felt like a part of my youth had been lost.

Gosh, this post turned out to be a downer. Here's hoping for good news on Friday.