Today I left at 2:35 to pick up the kids at 3:20. That is pushing it a little but I arrived at 3:15 last time I did that so I wasn't worried. Then, in the tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan, the train stopped. After 5 minutes a lady came on telling us the train in front of us had broken down and had to evacuate and clear the tracks before we could move. Weird!

We were in the tunnel for about 20 minutes, then got to 1st ave and picked up an entire other train worth of people (awesome) and then went straight to Union Square where we sat for another 10 minutes before our train was evacuated because the tracks needed to be cleared of this broken down train. I got uptown and to the kids at nearly 4pm. Ugh! Bain was great and picked up Lillie and they were at the apartment building waiting for me downstairs when I walked up and he had called me a bunch of times.

It stunk because I was trapped in tunnels and couldn't call or text him. When I got there he said that since my phone was off (going straight to voicemail over and over) he was afraid I had fallen asleep and forgotten. Touche. It is a possibility I guess, a sad possibility, but a possibility none the less.

We grabbed a cab and were only 5 minutes late in the end. Whew.

Okay, so this all got me thinking. I've been living here since 1997 and I don't remember a train ever breaking down that I was on. Is it really rare? When I told the kids Lillie asked if that meant the train fell apart while people were on it. Whoa! That would be scary! Breaking down is far more boring than that. It just stops working. She was bored by that explanation. Then Bain asked me if that happens all the time. I don't think so. I hope it doesn't. It was an enormous pain in the butt for everyone using that train line between 230 and 4 and I can only imagine the inconvenience for the MTA workers who had to clear it off the tracks.

When I first moved to NYC in 1997 there was a subway accident where one train hit another train, knocking one off the tracks. I remember the news story I watched about it saying that you should never be in the first or last cars because in the event of an accident those are the ones with the most injuries/death. I think about that any time I get in the first car twelve years later despite not hearing about an accident like that in twelve years.

Still no shoes for that wedding. I could always wear something different. Ha! I am hilarious. And by hilarious I mean stupid.