Were you in the “path of totality” today?!

In case you missed it, there was a solar eclipse this morning. And if you’re not from around these PDX parts, you may also have missed that they’ve been hyping this sucker for months now. 40 minutes south of us is the “path of totality” aka complete darkness aka mylifewasCHANGED aka thecoolkidszone. For weeks, all I’ve heard is “what are you doing for the eclipse?”

The “cool kids” answer is “oh, I booked my campsite in this little unknown campground near Madras eleventeen months ago. How about you?”

Uh.

“Maybe taking a break from work to go out into the backyard?”

Alas, takes a little more than a cosmic event to motivate this clan into action. So much so that I blithely bypassed the “GETYERECLIPSEGLASSESHERE!!” kiosks at the grocery store for the past many weeks thinking, “oh yeah, I should prolly get some of those.”

“Should” = this past Saturday and “get some of those” = “not a chance you silly girl – all of Portland is sold out and you are a loser.”

A wee bit panicked (not so much for my own sake, but wondering whether my children would forgive me for forcing them to stay inside during the EVENTOFALIFETIME because SOMEONE left it too late to get glasses), I hit the ol’ Google and found that there’s more than one way to view an eclipse safely! We went old school!!

Yep, the ol’ “pinhole in a paper plate” method. You let the sun shine through the first plate and view the projection caught on the second.

It seemed to be working, so I ran in to tell the kids “hey kids, it’s starting! It won’t be at its peak for about an hour, but there’s an eighth of the sun covered already!”

[….]

So I tried 15 minutes later. “Hey kids! We’re coming up on a quarter of the sun covered! You should come!”

[….]

(Now it’s not like this is 7 am or something ridiculous. It was almost 10 am!)

Finally, I gave them last call.

And lo and behold, they eventually showed up.

My backyard is definitely not in the path of totality, so we didn’t get complete darkness, but we were at 99.2%, so it definitely got darker. Way eerie! The neighbors’ chickens were going kinda nutso, and it felt like everything was in an Instagram filter. There were some super cool shadows made by the sun through that tree behind us.

Aaaaaaand 30 seconds later it was done. My FB feed tells me I missed the experience of a lifetime, but I feel like we got into it about as much as this lazy family gets into anything.

And my paper plates? They totally worked.

(Saved myself six bucks on glasses, I did.)