Normally, I avoid the ‘popular’ news items (or, for that matter, nearly all news items) because frankly, there are enough sources for such out there and I certainly don’t need to offer my two pfennigs, much less jump on any bandwagon, and I have established my own typical subject matter herein anyway – stay in your lane, kind of thing. At this point in time, however, the ‘greater public’ is bringing its focus more into my realm, and so, while it might appear that I’m becoming one of the crowd, it’s more accurate to say that the crowd is starting to cluster around me.
Or not. But what we’re talking about is the upcoming total solar eclipse across a great swath of North America, and Randall Munroe of xkcd has featured not one, but two eclipse-themed comics recently:
Both are quite accurate, though right now I’m identifying more with the second, since I’ve been doing, and seeing, the exact same thing: cloud cover for where I will be is predicted to be less-than-ideal and getting worse. The accuracy of weather reports recently has dropped – things getting too unpredictable what with, you know, nothing at all happening, according to Republican fuckwits – and so I can hold out hope that the skies will be clear enough at the crucial time without being too blindly optimistic, but I’m also prepared for the likelihood that I’ll see nothing.
Small update on the tracking motor, because I know you’ve been hanging on every word (If you even exist, which is unlikely): I said I had two options for getting it working, and option one failed to pan out. Option two was using a different motor, requiring a driver chip that I’d ordered. This arrived the day before I was scheduled to leave early in the morning, and I spent far too much time getting it all together and wired and programmed. But it doesn’t work. The whole shebang is still coming along, on the chance that I figure it out and get it working before Monday, but it’s not looking good right now – call it a weak, ‘maybe.’ We’ll see.