Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

I hope that (geography willing) you managed to view the Great American Eclipse. Originally, I’d planned on driving to Oregon for the event. I live in northern California, and we have a fishing boat berthed near Coos Bay, less than two hours from the total eclipse zone, so this didn’t seem like an unreasonable expectation.

But unfortunately, real life intervened. We own a construction company—waterproofing, which is a subcontractor job, and thus we are at the beck and call of general contractors. So of course our contractor down in San Luis Obispo, seven hours to the southwest, chose this time to schedule us.

Well, drat. The Sacramento area where we live was only going to get to see 80% of the eclipse, and traveling further south would only reduce those numbers. Still, it’s not as though I’ve never seen an eclipse before. I viewed one from Los Angeles in the…