Once upon a time, I thought I would convince Mr S-P to pull his RV jalopy out of storage, so we could drive up to the Colorado/Nebraska border, and watch the eclipse. I was really going to push for that. Then he offered me his airline miles that had to be used by the end of the month, and my return flight from California wasn't until hours after the eclipse. Then he got a new gig that I don't know whether I'm allowed to talk about yet (I'll ask later), and he wouldn't have been available for the drive anyway. I totally gave up on the idea of seeing it, and I pretty much got over my mild case of eclipse fever. I figured I was around to watch the one in 1979, with all of my adolescent friends, holding paper plates and wondering if that little crescent of light was what the big deal was about.
I have been getting terrible sleep the last few nights. My daughter was kind enough to offer up her bed and she camped out on the floor of her one bedroom apartment, but the disruption in my routine was a lot to overcome. I woke up a lot during the nights. Also, we've been doing a ton of activities that kept us up late, and I have been staying up even later trying to get the blogs out as usual. When she found out that she had to work this morning, even though she was scheduled to have one more day with me, we had to get up super early to beat LA traffic to the spot in the hills where her job sent her this week. I am not allowed to be very close to it, for a number of reasons, so I had to hang out rather far away while she did her thing. I took advantage of the time to nap in the vehicle. Mid-morning, she woke me up and dug out a piece of cardboard that we had ditched in the back seat. We created a pinhole camera, and watched the eclipse after all. Down in SoCal, we got maybe 70 percent occlusion, which was still enough to dramatically affect the light and ambient temperature. It also set off all the dogs in the houses just up the hill from where we were. There was a chorus of at least ten dogs barking and howling as the light dimmed.
I can't believe it has been more than four years since I flew from Charleston to Boulder to watch my daughter graduate from CU (getting the degrees she was putting to use today). At the time, I wrote about the mystery ailment that bothered me when I traveled. I remember posting the pictures of my massively swollen feet and ankles, with my toenails painted gold with a little black "CU" on one big toe and a carefully painted buffalo on the other. At the time, I had no idea what was causing this horrible reaction to sitting up in planes, trains, and automobiles, but obviously I have since seen this in several lists of symptoms to watch for in my long series of maladies. Yesterday after the trip to the beach, my feet started getting a little puffy, and by the time my flight started its final descent, I knew that my lower extremities were stretched to their breaking point. The skin on my left foot was so stressed that just having the strap of my leather flip-flop on it rubbed a hole in the skin. I walked back to the main terminal from the A Concourse at DIA, so that I could initiate more circulation in an effort to pump fluid out of my ankles. Didn't work. By the time Mr S-P picked me up, he cracked jokes about how long it took him to drive down to the airport, that southbound traffic was really backed up on the 25, and what a mystery it was to have that many cars out late on a random Monday night. I was so absorbed in the screaming pain in my ankles and feet, I totally didn't get the joke. I felt like a heel when he had to explain it to me.
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