Feb 20th, 2008
Evening events
I just spent the last hour or so watching tonight’s total lunar eclipse (the last one for three years). For the first half hour, I observed it from my living room. But when the moon moved behind the branches of a nearby tree, I put on my heaviest coat, hat, and super-warm mittens (not thrummed mittens, but gauntlet-shaped, insulated snowboarding mitts with fleece liners, to boot—toasty, indeed!) and headed outside. I pulled up a chair and sat down to watch the disappearing moon do its dance over the barely snow-covered landscape.
It’s amazing how quickly the moon moves. You don’t really get a sense of it unless you spend a few minutes just watching it. One minute you can see the whole thing, and the next minute half of it is hidden behind some tree branches. (Hmmm. Maybe it was the tree that moved. Ents, anyone?)
It’s cold outside, but not so frigid that I’m miserable sitting outside for a little while. The sky is remarkably clear—I can’t remember when I’ve seen this many stars over eastern Pennsylvania. (The best night sky I’ve ever seen was over Canyonlands National Park, in southeastern Utah, where there were so many stars that it looked like someone had just thrown handfuls of glitter into the sky. Tonight’s was pretty good, though.) I even saw a shooting star.
Sylvia is sleeping now, and Jan is out. Even though I could hear the hum of the nearest major road (this is suburbia, after all), and even though all of my neighbors have their inside lights on (and sometimes their porch lights on, too—why do people leave those things on all night, I wonder?), the quiet and stillness and cold made it seem like it was just the moon and me out there tonight.
Beautiful.
I poked my head outside for about half a minute to watch the eclipse as well. I felt guilty for not doing what you did–camping out and really enjoying it. But it was -6 degrees outside and I got too cold to be out and enjoy it at the same time!
It was gorgeous – but I was a wimp and viewed from inside. So flippin’ cold here…
They leave the lights on to scare off burglers. They should really get motion-activated ones, but it’s probably not a priority for people.
I missed the eclipse last night. I don’t think we would’ve been able to see it from our apartment windows and we’ve both been under the weather, so going out in freezing temps didn’t seem like a good idea. And I wanted to watch Project Runway .