Unless you are living off the grid somewhere in Oregon or Montana or Utah or wherever it is people go to get off the grid, then you were aware that there was a total eclipse on August 21, 2017.
And where we live in N.C. we were going to see a 95% eclipsw but we only live a little less than 2 hours from totality. So Dan planned to take off work and we were going to drive to somewhere in the path of totality and park on the side of a road and watch the eclipse.
Y'all, I was so proud of myself, I even ordered glasses from Amazon. But as luck would have it, we got a nice little message from Amazon a couple of days before the big event telling us not to use them or we might go blind. Thank you, Amazon for refunding our money but a pair of un-blinding glasses would have been better.
Unfortunately, I realized that the day of the eclipse was also the day of New Parent Orientation at Peter's high school. I asked Dan if he thought we would be back in time and he said "probably but it would be close". And that made me nervous.
And then the reports about predicted major traffic backups on the major highways we would be using possibly lasting hours and hours after the eclipse sealed the deal for me.
I know it sounds horrible but I really wanted to go to the orientation. I had questions and I wanted to get them answered before school which was a mere two days later and I didn't want to miss anything and I was nervous enough about Peter starting a new school that I really felt like I couldn't miss the orientation meeting.
So, we decided no big deal, Dan would take the afternoon off, come home and we would all experience 95% darkness at 2:00 in the afternoon together and that would be cool enough.
Dan even researched and viewed all the models to see what it would look like and decided he was okay with that.
And then the time came for totality (and I now hate that word thanks to hearing in so much in August), and it was such a huge letdown. All the models "showed" it would dark. Everything we looked at on the internet made it look like it would still look dark. BUT NO!!!!!
It just looked cloudy and a little dim. If you hadn't know there was an eclipse going on then you would have been thinking that the sky looked a little odd but that a storm was maybe moving in. No biggie. AND CERTAINLY NOT THAT YOU WERE IN 95% TOTALITY OF AN ECLIPSE.
And because we thought (how dumb were we?) that the cool thing would be it getting dark, I didn't even bother to go on the hunt for new glasses. (And based on the Facebook posts begging for glasses or announcing where you could buy them, they were available just not readily and you just had to get off your butt and go look for them. Wanna know something I'm not good at?? That would be getting off my butt....) So, we didn't even get to see it with glasses on.
And the worst part? The new parent orientation was a great meeting but it was more of a pep rally/your kids are going to be fine than an actual information session. As Dan and I were leaving we agreed that we totally (totality?) could have missed the meeting. Hindsight....
But no worries, Dan has already decided that come hell or high water we were going to Buffalo, NY on April 28, 2024 to see one. And I have decided that while we are checking off one of his bucket list items, while we are there, we might as well check off one of mine and visit The Anchor Bar and Grill - home of the original buffalo wing!
Meanwhile, here are some pictures we took of the "eclipse".
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| Eclipse selfi |
3 comments:
We had 75 percent and I was really thinking it would have been dimmer outside. I guess that big ball of fire in the sky puts out more light with just a tiny bit of itself than I give him credit for. LOL We didn't have glasses either so we did the cardboard cut out stuff. It was pretty cool nonetheless.
If it makes you feel better we HAD glasses, but it was super cloudy that day, so we all napped through it!
We were at 82% and also thought it would be darker. I didn't get glasses, because we thought the darkness would be enough, but like you, it just looked like a storm was coming... Bummer!
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