Being in OZ the 11th was almost over. Only an hour or so to go. I was asleep in a chair in the lounge room. My wife came out and woke me up. She said they were talking on the net about a plane hitting the WTC. I thought it was some sort of net crap but I turned on the TV any way. I rang my mother to tell her but she already knew and was actually about to ring me. We talked into the night, finally hanging up about 3 in the morning.

9-11 was one of those things that came at me from an odd angle. In January I went to a friends wedding in another state. When we went through security at the airport they let me walk through wearing steel capped hiking boots. They never asked me to take them off, to check them. I said to people later I could have had a thin knife under my foot and they would never know. When it was announced later about the hijackers having box cutters my previos concerns came back to me. But that was the lesser of two odd incident. Two days before 9-11 I was cleaning out my humpy at work. Behind a set of lockers I found an old Nat Geo magazine from 1987. In the center it had  a fold out section with 2 pictures of lower Manhatten taken from the top of a bridge. The images had been taken exactly 100 years apart.  Over the next few days I studied the pictures for hours. And when the planes struck late Oz time on the evening of the 11th the magazine was still laying open in the middle of the dining room table. I always get the feeling something was telling me something was about to happen.