October 5-14, 2023

October 5-14, 2023

We made an emergency trip today back to Amarillo, TX to say our final goodbyes to Aimee’s mom. She finally succumbed to the accumulated ailments she was suffering with. She is in a better place. We spent the rest of the week cleaning out her apartment.

When we visited her, I could always count on being greeted with my favorite beverage. She did one last favor for me, scheduling a rare astronomical event for our drive back to Tucson. A solar eclipse occurs somewhere every six months but because the area of totality is only some 100 miles wide, any particular spot in the world only has a total eclipse about once every 400 years. If it happens to be cloudy that day, it is another 400-year wait. My mother-in-law really had to pull some strings with the big man for me.

We spent Friday night in Portales, NM because all the hotels on the eclipse line were booked. In the morning, we drove the last hour to a highway pullout about fifteen miles east of the Alien City of Roswell, NM. We are literally in the middle of nowhere. We had to laugh though when we found we had to share the spot with several dozen cars.

We watched the shadow of the moon slowly advance across the surface of the sun using some eclipse glasses I bought in Amarillo. This solar eclipse is known as an Annular event because the moon happens to be a little farther from the earth than normal, so it doesn’t completely cover the sun disk. Without the glasses you would never know the eclipse was happening. Seeing just a round ring of fire is still simply amazing. Thanks to my Irish Mother.