where were you when this happened?...

I am borrowing this tid-bit of information from Cup of Zup:

On this day in 2003, a major outage knocked out power across the eastern United States and parts of Canada. Beginning at 4:10 p.m. ET, 21 power plants shut down in just three minutes. Fifty million people were affected, including residents of New York, Cleveland and Detroit, as well as Toronto and Ottawa, Canada. Although power companies were able to resume some service in as little as two hours, power remained off in other places for more than a day. The outage stopped trains and elevators, and disrupted everything from cellular telephone service to operations at hospitals to traffic at airports.

Where were you?  What did you think was happening?  What did you do while the power was out?  Do you know of anyone who had a baby 9 months later?

I was at work, sitting at my desk at Jeep Truck Engineering in Detroit.  I was chatting with my cubemate, Dwayne.  The next day (Friday) was supposed to be my last day with this department; Jeep Chassis.  I had been laid off, but given the opportunity to stay for an additional two weeks ~ thanks Greg.  Luckily within the day that I found out that I was going to be laid off, I was able to use my networking abilities to obtain a new job in my old department; Truck Interiors (by the way, the best job I've had so far, by far) ~ Thanks David R. and Dana W.  And was able to work it out that the new job would not begin until after I returned from my honeymoon.  I was getting married in less than two weeks...my in-laws (every last one of them) were going to be flying in from France in less than a week.  The wedding party was going to be in our backyard and so we were in the middle of a home improvement project; laying a brick paver path that led from the driveway to the backyard.  So, we really didn't notice too much that the power was out.  Luckily we didn't need power to lay brick pavers.

Back to the day that it happened, we sat there in the dark for a little while and then finally decided to leave work.  Walked out to the car which was parked in the back 40 and turned on the radio to my favorite talk radio station to listen to Deminski and Doyle (they are now located in NJ).  They were running on generator power and were talking about what could have possibly happened.  By that time it was already determined that this was not a terrorist attack, which I could see why people would have thought that - and even I had that thought cross my mind for a brief moment.

Now, I needed to get from Plymouth Road and Schaeffer in Detroit to Harper and Crocker in Clinton Township.  I figured this was not going to be easy.  I can't really remember if I decided to take surface streets or the highway, but either way I got home safely and the trip was uneventful.