We were located directly in the path of this past solar eclipse. The entire city was freaking out about how bad the traffic would be. Most schools in our area were closed for the day. As it got closer to the date things still weren’t as busy as we were told they would be. An RV club came to the area but that was about the brunt of the traffic. It hit us around 1:30pm and lasted a few minutes. The kids all got free UV glasses at school and they all got to go outside after lunch to watch it.
One minute it was hot and sunny with quite a few clouds surrounding us. Then it got dark. Like, three minutes after the sun sets dark. If you were wearing your fancy glasses you could no longer see the sun. What you got was this wild picture of the night sky with what looked like the moon with a hole cut out of it. You couldn’t help but feel some level of nervousness through it, even though you knew what was happening.
Something you couldn’t see from my poor phone images was along the edges of the shadow were two massive orange solar flares. Like, know how big the sun is, and these flares were visible from the edges of it by quite a bit. It also got much cooler, and all the stormy looking clouds around us were washed out of the way. When it was over it was crazy hazy in the sky.
In other astounding acts of nature, my veggies have started to produce. There has been some wonky hot/cold extremes lately and half of my radishes bolted. The ones I saved came out pretty good though. I had to start thinning the onions, some of them bolted as well but were salvageable. The potatoes, strawberries and such are still going strong in the other planter.
I managed to read two whole books this month. Normally I pick up something and make it a few chapters in before life gets in the way and I have to put them away for a long while. But here is the kicker, most of the books I’ve been reading for the past four years or so were written between 1880-1980. These two much newer books were surprisingly fast reads. Piranesi took only two nights. Rest & Relaxation took three. Now I’m wondering if all modern books are like this.
Piranesi
This one is a fun semi mystery story told by an extremely unreliable narrator who is called Piranesi. He goes through the story highly documenting his days inside of this massive world of rooms and hallways. Imagine something like the levels of Act IV of Diablo III. Ignore the reviews on this one where people say they can’t follow along or that it has no story. I don’t know where they are getting any of that from. It is an extremely easy read and follows along like a wild episode of Doctor Who in the early 2000’s.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
Rest and Relaxation took an extra day to read because it’s not in an epistolary format and I had things going on last week with the kids after school stuff. This one is a much more intense story about a wealthy girl in NYC who goes on a month long sleeping pill induced hibernation in order to mourn her dead parents. (Calm down, that’s in the first chapter and on the back blurb.)
Now, I had to google what on earth a gallery girl was because back when I was in art school galleries here were run by schools or catered to wealthy retirees buying stuff to go above the couches in their vacation homes. The concept of a gallery girl makes total sense but it just wasn’t something I had heard of before. Everything about New York City is surreal to me in the first place. It’s a fantasy land. It’s where Spiderman lives. The people that live there fly closer to the sun.
Even though this girl lives a life in a parallel universe from me, from most of us, you can still follow her along this little rabbit hole she gets herself into. I’m not going to give away any major stuff but it’s an entertaining read. My only issue was with the ending, not the content of the ending but the volume of it. It ends very quickly, which I like to do myself, but this ending is given to you several pages in advance. You know what will happen, but when it does it’s given only a few lines. I really wish that had more meat to it but other than that the book is extremely well written.
One last thing I did this month was revamp the Y2K Quarterly website to make it look more like something out of 1998. I found some templates that emulated windows98 and styled my site similarly. I am hoping to have the windows draggable by the time the next issue comes out, and there are still some bugs with the visited link text colors but it all works for now. There are only two days left to submit for the second issue which comes out in June.