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.

Liese said it all for me. What an amazing experience. Hours later and I'm still whispering "Amazing" to myself.

Thanks for the ~ma earlier! Gretchen and Em were so late getting to my hotel, I was starting to fear the worst. And of course neither has a cellphone, ffs. But they were just stuck in traffic, made worse because they tried a shortcut and got briefly lost. (That trick never works.)

There was so much traffic! Apparently the local park's festival was The place to be and thousands of people came from all over the region. We, being crowd-averse, went the other direction, found an abandoned driveway off the highway on the mountain, parked and watched from there. It was perfect. Em (all Cute Goth with her parasol) finally started to get into it when the light changed and the shadows got weird.

And then the moon's shadow rushed up the hill and engulfed us and the sun became a fiery black hole in the sky, and everything went silent for 2 minutes. (Even Em!) It was just awesome. I was awed. Nothing can really describe it. I'm so glad I got to see it!

Then things slowly went back to normal, and we went back to their place for naps and cheesecake and board games. It was a good day.

I want to see it again.

Get this, where I was watching (Creve Coeur Lake) a bald eagle swooped down along the shore about 50 feet away from me a couple minutes before totality. My jaw dropped. (They're not an unheard-of sight around here, as there's a big nesting ground at Lake Reelfoot just south of the Missouri border, but still not an everyday thing and the timing was surreal.)

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

That's fantastic.

Woo, I hit my insurance deductible. How many different tests can I undergo so I can stick it to Humana? (Our coinsurance is 100% covered by Humana after we hit our deductible.)

Thanks, stomach. You are an expensive organ this year.