9/11

It's September 11 today.  I was living in Germany on Ramstein Air Base with my husband when it happened.  We had just moved over there in June- base life and traveling completely changed from June to after Sept. 11.  I was working at the Ramstein Officer's Club at a German gift shop and Rich called to ask if the bar was open and if it was, he wanted me to see if they had anything on it about the "small plane that had hit one of the WTC towers"- it was late afternoon for us and the day was just starting to unfold in NYC.I went down the hall and found out it was more then just a small plane- I had two girls working with me that lived off base and had kids coming home on buses- I sent them home in case they shut the base down and thier kids were at home by themselves.

I closed my shop and went to the bar.  Maybe 20 minutes had passed and the bar was filling up.  Ramstein is just not a US Air Force base- there are military people from ALL over there- NATO Air North is right beside the Officer's Club. I think there was someone in there from at least 10 countries staring at the TV in disbelief. We all watched the 2nd plane hit together. Finally it came down that everyone needed to leave- the base never shut down, but it was close enough to it.  I walked home (I could do that, we were close enough) and watched TV all night.  Rich worked at Sembach, another base about 45 minutes away- he didn't get home until after 11 that night- his base had been shut down.  Ramstein was pretty much completely shut down for 2 days- no one left, no one came on.  When everything started up again, it took some people 3 hours to get through the gate.

I am going to share the scrapbook layout I did for this day. I had this image in my head to make it a 3 page spread- there was so much I wanted to include.

This is the layout when you open the book.

 

    The flip.

The first page flips open to reveal this layout.

First page.  I printed the words to Alan Jackson's "Where Were You" off on vellum.  The stamp set I used was the first hostess set from Stampin' Up! I had ever gotten, I loved that set.  The letter were stencils that I traced, cut, glued and cut again, and glued and cut out again.

On the back of the first page, after you flip is this page.  "Where we were"- I made pockets and wrote what Rich and I were doing when we heard about everything.

This is what I did so I could always remember what happened that day.  I think the stars were a pattern I found and I used my Creative Memories wave cutter for the flag.  I found the pictures on CNN.com- I made a timeline of the day.  The bottom 2 lines were an explaination of what happened.

Comments

[Leigh Ann Baird]

I remember sitting at my desk at work and hearing someone gasp and talking loudly about something really bad happening. I got online and checked one of the online news sites, CNN maybe, and remember being shocked. I also remember feeling fear and wishing I was home with my 5mo. old baby. Every time I think of 9/11 I can't help but cry. Hubby had his HS reunion later that year and one of his classmates worked in one of the WTC towers and was telling us that he was on his way in to work and remembered he forgot something important at home and had to go back for it. That's why he wasn't in the building at the time. Ok, I can't talk about this anymore. It's making me sad. I'm such a crybaby! LOL