On Sunday, I searched and searched for hours and finally found them: my official solar eclipse glasses. The forecast for the following morning — the big day of the Great American Eclipse — was sunny and clear. I fell asleep imagining a spectacular otherworldly event. The moon eating the sun. Darkness in daytime. It doesn’t get any cooler than that.
I woke up to pea soup. Instead of heading east to clearer skies and higher ground, I trusted the forecast and sat tight. I walked outside every few minutes hoping for good news, but the morning only got yuckier. As the solar eclipse began, the sky was a featureless uniform gray. It actually rained. OK, it was drizzle. But still, it drizzled for like three hours.
Just so you know, the average rainfall for the entire month of August here is 0.06 inches. That’s like two millimeters. For the whole month.
Our view of the Great American Eclipse (Image credit: Steve Tobak)
North America’s first total solar eclipse since 1979, and all we got in the Bay Area’s Santa Cruz Mountains was a big wet nothing burger. Just another gloomy Monday. What a freakin’ letdown.
“You can burry me in these solar eclipse glasses,” I told my wife. “That’s where I’ll probably be for the next one.”
With all the hype about artificial intelligence, weather forecasters are still clueless. Now the Weather Channel app says “Cloudy.” Gee, thanks for the tip.
You know who owns the Weather Channel? IBM. A product of Watson, the deep-thinking supercomputer. That’s always been the big application for supercomputing. But with all Watson’s neural networked cloud computing power, weather forecasting is just like figuring out when your delayed flight is actually going to take off. Every 15 minutes, it’s another 15 minutes.
Everyone talks about positive thinking these days. What a load a crap. High expectations are the bane of human existence. I’m so bored and depressed I’m actually backing up my Macbook. And making a tuna melt. In August. Yup, it’s that bad.
Don’t get me wrong. Some dreams do come true. But the truth is, most don’t. The universe is simply too random for it to be any other way. Like it or not, dreams will usually let you down. And hype is so, well, overhyped. Better off staying grounded. The best things in life are always the unexpected.
P.S. The partial eclipse ended at 11:38 am, pacific time. Just after noon, the clouds finally started to break and I glimpsed the sun, its bright yellow orb looking just as it has for the past 38 years. You know, all I could do was laugh.
Image credit Kuboki via Flickr