Seems like one, sara, but I don't know how you don't already have a smartphone so clearly I'm biased

I came down to Portland for the weekend--we went to a Thorns game (the women's soccer team, its super popular and it was awesome). And yesterday we went bowling and to a batting cage, which I'd never done before! And today got up early and drove southward. There was surprisingly little traffic! And we sat in a field with a bunch of people and totality was awesome!! Very very neat. The lead up was fun too. And shockingly getting back from there wasn't bad at all. However, our bus home is apparently stuck in traffic getting here so is delayed at least an hour. Sigh.

sarameg, that is kind of what I thought, but there were news orgs and local weather people live streaming and going on about what an amazing experience it was to stand on the sidewalk and stare at the sky.

I admit it. I got caught up in the hype.

It was fascinating to see it get as dark as mid-evening in the middle of the day, and see the cars with headlights on on the freeway.

meara, most of the time, my cell sits on a shelf at home. I still live 90% of my life as if it were 1993, as far as phones go. I have wifi at home and oops, if you can't reach me, I'm unreachable on purpose. I like it that way. But I can still stay that way, but just use the perks when I damnwell feel like it.

...though if I go to Alaska again, will have to swap cards. No service up there.

It didn't get dark in NYC, but a coworker friend brought his telescope with solar filter to work so we all lined up in the parking lot to have a look. Enough people had glasses that we passed them around too. So fun!

I went out on the terrace on our building at 10:15 and for the first few minutes we didn't see anything (it was cloudy all morning), but then the clouds got just a little thinner, and we could see the crescent of the sun through the clouds! So cool, although mostly it just looked like a crescent moon in the sky. But I got a photo.

Then I got a headache and went inside.

Ooof, there were so many people at our event today! Which was crazy, but also awesome! And 96% of an eclipse is so amazing. Gotta do totality next time. (all our observatory/planetarium staff who left for totality this year get to do the next one, I've decided.)

I loved it. We didn't have totality, but at 94%-ish we were close enough that for the first time I understood what all the excitement was about. And a perfect day for it, and an office full of total nerds.

Sadly we got caught in crazy traffic not leaving the eclipse but leaving Portland. The bus was over 90 minutes late leaving, then took two hours to go what should've been maybe 45 min. We got off the bus in a rando small town and are waiting for our Portland friend to come pick us up. Will try to leave tomorrow. Bus ticket is a loss but was only like $25?

Dang, meara, can't believe you had to give up, but that sounds like the right call. Some folks have been on the road all day, seems like! Yikes.

Man, I just loved the whole thing so much. I was gonna walk down to the nearby park, but I'm glad I just ended up hanging out with my new neighbors. It was super fun, they got all excited about my pinhole viewer, and I had a great time with them.

The actual event of totality I think I'm going to have to process some yet. It was just so surreal and beautiful and freaky and disconcerting and did I mention spectacularly beautiful? It was just completely bizarre to look up in the sky and see the sun all alien. To see how far the corona extended, and to recognize, fundamentally, that it's there like that all the time, I just can't see it. To hear the crickets chirp and the dogs howl and the temperature drop precipitously. There would be some big thing about perspective and one's place in the universe and all that here, but it wasn't that, really.

I mean, it was kinda like the first time I saw Saturn's rings in the telescope, and it was really me looking at it, you know? It wasn't something in a book or a tv show, or artwork I'd seen, it really was just something in the universe that I was looking at. It felt like that, like suddenly, totality was actually a thing that existed for me.

And I love that I live in a universe where there are things I've never experienced before that I can experience.