Meteor Shower...We Made a Memory!

This weekend was supposed to be the perfect weekend for seeing the Perseid meteor shower. Clear skies and a new moon...but with all the activity of Friday night we figured we'd skip it. As we were making dinner, friends of ours called and asked what we were up to. When I replied that we were getting dinner together she was excited and said, "Then it's not too late." When all was said and done they came on over with a big stack of freshly picked sweet corn and marinated chicken. We grilled up the chicken and boiled up the sweet corn and when dinner was all over it was already 9pm! Well...they didn't call until 6pm.

As we all ate, we mentioned the shower and began to make plans to go ahead and sit out and take a look. Our friends decided to leave and we decided we should make it a night too. While I bathed J2, the others were outside just in case they could catch a glimpse of a shooting star. With J2 snug as a bug snoozing, I asked how the star watching was going. Well...they had seen some in a short amount of time. Typically the best time for this is very early in the morning say 4am before the sun rises. I gathered up some blankets and warm clothes (it was clear and cold last night) and we laid out for almost an hour watching the heavens above. We got to observe about a dozen shooting stars! I-5 fell to sleep somewhere in there and we had a great time answering the kids' questions about meteors, space, the atmosphere, and comets. Every so often we'd all shout out that we'd seen a falling star.

Just as it was approaching 11pm, there was a great smell from nearby. Can you guess? Let's just say if you took a satellite photo of our neighborhood at this very moment, you'd probably see small mammals that like trash coming from miles around all making a pilgrimage to our street to visit what I'll call the "great opportunity". The opportunity is our nasty trash left to fester one week more because they are too heavy. This information should actually be an addendum to my previous post on the $100 trash can, but I can't bring myself to describe it in full just yet. The most important piece of information to note is that our trash company completely let us down and did not take our copious amounts of horrible trash, leaving a husband and wife to bicker about said trash and what to do about it and how to handle the trash company along with home owners and neighbors alike to give our property easement a wide berth.

Where was I? So...suddenly there was a very strong skunk odor surrounding us on every side. We were loud out there under the sky so if this critter was checking out our new trash can and its community of flies and got scared, I'm going to blame the neighbor's cat. He must have known we were there the whole time. The odor was so strong it ended our star party abruptly. We scrambled for blankets and Dan took the sleeping boy and we ran into the house!

The kids were so excited to have stayed up a second night and really, really excited to have seen so many shooting stars! We added to the memory with our skunk incident. Once inside, Dan told I-5 to use the bathroom so he could get in bed and he left the room. When he went back to check on I-5, he found him lying on the bathroom floor sound asleep! What a sight!!

This morning we had a great time going over our evening of discovery from the night before. The kids all decided they loved it until the skunk came to which I-5 made the comment, "What skunk?" Peels of laughter filled the room at breakfast as we remembered that I-5 had slept through the whole incident!

We sure did make a memory!!