I never really gave it too much thought, but when I look back on it now it seems like I do have a sense of good timing.

The popular saying is "right place, right time" for someone who is lucky.For me, it's more like "wrong place, right time."The most recent example of this came a few weeks ago during a trip to New York.Last Saturday, Miriam and I would be having our daughter Sophia's second birthday party and we had some family coming in from the outside the area.Miriam's cousin came in Thursday night from just outside Detroit, and on Friday she wanted to go see Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, or the Green Lady as Sophia calls it.The forecast originally called for rain, and while it spritzed a little in the morning, it turned out to be a nice day.I went up in the crown when I was much younger and all I remember is that I hated it. At the top, I was so soaking wet from sweat, not to mention I'm not the biggest fan of heights. On top of that, the steps are too narrow.I may have sat on one of them and protested for someone to carry me down the rest of the way.This trip went off without a hitch, but that Friday around 3 p.m., exactly 24 hours after I walked the pedestal of the Green Lady, it was a much different story for visitors of the popular tourist attraction.Someone called in a bomb threat, forcing an evacuation of Liberty Island.Bomb-sniffing dogs focused on lockers near the base of the statue, but in the end it was deemed a false alarm.As it turns out, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, and last Saturday, one of my college roommates was at the Statue of Liberty. He missed the evacuation by one day.Even though the excitement was all for naught, I'm still glad for a narrow miss.Now we turn the clock back to 2012. We had another trip to New York City and yet another near miss.A gunman shot and killed a former co-worker outside the Empire State Building on Aug. 24 of that year.Nine bystanders were wounded by stray bullets fired in that altercation.Not even a month before that shooting, Miriam and I had again visited the city and were in that same area where the tragedy happened.I remember watching the news on the morning of the shooting, thinking, "wow I'm glad I'm not there today."If you're interested, I can send you a text alert the next time I go somewhere. That way you can stay away for a month or two while things calm down.