Wolves eat the sun! Humbolt Style
     Yesterday was the great eclipse, and we in Humbolt were fortunate enough to be able to see it in it grandest style. Everyone was abuzz about it, and Arcata even held a special street fair to celebrate. Unusually it was a clear and cloudless early afternoon, holding forth a great (and unusual) promise to see the event. For the good of everyone's visual safety a booth sold those special glasses to stare at the sun and not go blind. I got there early enough to see that the line was already huge, and was at the same time late enough to find them sold out before I got to the front of the line.
     I mentioned to the organizer (who was pretty pissed off that they hadn't ordered a thousand sets) that she ought to hand out flyers to make a viewing box, whereupon she told me that they were doing just that at another booth, that had recycled materials on hand too! I went there, and they'd run out of that too.
     Well, thanks to my daughter Alisha we were not going to be skunked out of this possibility! She and Brian got everything in hand and made four viewing boxes and picked up up so we could ditch the crowd and find a less crowded place to watch the cosmos move. Shortly after the event was to begin we hopped into Alisha's car and went out to the Mad River to watch.
     It would take an idiot not to be able to look through the viewing hole to see things. The picture is us trying to figure out how to work the boxes. Not really--it's us clowning about it in our front yard in front of one of one of our beautiful rhododendron bushes. So we peered into the boxes in awe and wonder as the wolves devoured the sun. They crept up and cit out of it until it was a crescent shape.
     Then clouds moved over the sun and wolves both disappeared just long enough so we didn't get a view of the full eclipse with its promised ring of fire. That was very Humbolt, the usual kind of clowning that the clouds do to dupe us into thinking we will have something besides fog or clouds. Boo clouds! They cleared away in time to watch the sun fight way back, apparently making the wolves vomit it up to attain wholeness once again.Yay sun!
     Nonetheless, we had a fun time and shared our boxes with strangers on the Mad River bridge who believed the reports and didn't look at the sun. It was a fun day, and I'll say that hanging out with one's wife, daughter and son-in-law is a good thing, clouds or not.