Stacy Horn

Okay, I don’t want anything bad to happen, and I hope no one is hurt, but I must admit I’m a little excited about the storm. For the first time in New York City history there’s a mandatory evacuation order for parts of the city!!

Hey, Suffolk Horns! How are you doing??

I am mad that after so many years of post-9/11 preparedness I finally stopped being so vigilant and now I feel unprepared. I stopped into my local hardware store this morning, the place was demolished, the shelves empty. I went to Home Depot and asked where I would find the hurricane supplies and they said they were cleaned out too. I really wanted a battery operated Coleman lamp to read by. Oh well. I’ve got all the crucial items.

You can still get beer!

That’s how many laps I swim, except this week I forced myself to stop counting. Everything is a competition with me and if there’s no one to compete with I compete with myself. This can be a very good thing, but in this case it was wrecking something perfect. Swimming is not only great exercise, I love it. But I was turning it into something grueling.

As long as I keep swimming the whole time, I realized, I was getting the great exercise part, and I should just relax and enjoy it. So now I do. When I’m doing the back stroke I look at the sky and the gingko trees. During freestyle and breast stroke I look for the diamonds the jewelry store robbers lost underwater (it could happen) or perhaps a new undiscovered species that only lives in the Carmine Street pool.

Workers down at the World Trade Center leaving work at the end of the day.

During the earthquake yesterday, I looked over at one of the cats and realized immediately I had no way to get two cats out of the apartment quickly.

If they were near each other, maybe I could throw a blanket over the two of them and wrap them up and run, but they they almost always flee in opposite directions. (Unless I’m feeding them, their default position is to foil my plans.)

What is the best solution?? Is there a good solution? I’d feel better if I could come up with something.

I’d need something to fit two cats, something that I can lift, and carry down four flights of stairs, and it should probably be on wheels for when I get downstairs. Ugh. Maybe a big thing and a wagon. I wish I could store the wagon under the stairs on the first floor, and then my only issue would be getting them downstairs.

Oh, I am SO getting a chihuahua next.

Things that went through my mind when my chair first began to shake.

– What the hell?
– Oh, God. It’s a ghost. And it’s mad at me.
– Maybe it’s psychokinesis. (I just wrote a book about the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory so I have these things on the brain.)

It gets worse and I run to the back of the apartment to where the woman who comes once a month to clean my apartment is (it’s my one indulgence, don’t hate me). The building is swaying and shaking now and I’m terrified. We think they must be doing some construction work next door. I yell out the windows, “STOP IT,” three times. Those neighbors now think of me as the crazy lady next door.

– Should I grab the cats and leave?
– Maybe we should go to the roof and jump over to the building next door. (My building is an old tenement, which tilts as it is and is in bad shape.)

I pick up the phone to dial 911 to complain about my neighbors when my cleaning woman says “earthquake,” and I realize she’s right. Her husband calls and he says he felt it in Queens. I see tweets are flying by and they’re feeling it in Maryland. I finally turn on the news.

VERY freaking scary. I was just thinking the other night about 9/11 and what those people felt in the last moments, when the floor gave way beneath them and there was nothing they could do to save themselves. I swear my building is tilting more. Or maybe my tilt-detector is out of wack.

A beautiful bird I saw yesterday when I looked out the window for my pigeon. Something I do all the time now. The Wild Bird Fund called to follow up about my pigeon release, to make sure it went okay. They are great people and run a great organization.

At a certain point the City built a ramp running along the cemetery in the back of St. Paul’s Chapel so people would be able to look into the pit at ground zero. I absolutely understood the need to look, so I’m not judging, but it was very weird for those of us working at St. Paul’s, and it must have been even weirder for the people working in the pit itself, to see this parade of spectators looking down at you.

A lot of people hated it, but I knew if I wasn’t working at the site I would have been one of the people on that ramp. I took this shot from the back door at St. Paul’s. (I didn’t own a decent camera at the time.) I just remembered, people would smile and pose for pictures when they got the end. Okay, that was a little messed up. But people are so oblivious (myself included).