I mentioned the other day that I was heading up to Lake Tahoe to, among other things, catch the somewhat rare, ruby-red, total lunar eclipse.
With the weather prediction of early morning temps around 10ºF who wouldn’t want to load up the night before on medicinal anti-freeze?
Mine happened to come in a bottle labeled Tahoe Moonshine whiskey, a local product.
And the best place to do that was that the annual Ullr’s Night of Sacrifice at a local casino. As I’m sure all my thousands of readers will recall, last year I reported on my pilgrimage to the place where we pray for massive amounts of snow dumpage for our outside winter obsessions, e.g. downhill sliding—or as practiced by more competent people than myself—downhill skiing.
As it was, spirits from the local micro-distillery was not the only adult beverage flowing in great quantities.
The Official Girls of Grand Marnier were there offering Shot-Skis.
(For those unfamiliar with that device, eHow offers instructions on constructing and using yet another alcohol delivery system.)
Not surprisingly, the GM Girls begged to take a picture with me.
“Oh, alright, if you must,” I said. “Maybe we should stand closer. Much closer.”
The photographic evidence notwithstanding, my hand was NOT on her…ah…lower, backside area.
What the picture does not show is the wife-person standing about four feet away, with her mostly empty glass of Marker’s Mark and Diet Coke, in the fully cocked—and ready to fling at my head—position.
But, I digress. I was up there to view the lunar eclipse in the crystal clear clarity of the high elevation sierra sky.
At about 5:00 A.M. (for some reason, my eyes could not focus on the time) we put on 12 layers of winter clothing and packed up the necessary survival gear, and by necessary, I mean, a thermos of hot chocolate and 90-proof Ullr peppermint cinnamon schnapps.
We crossed into Nevada and drove along the east side of Lake Tahoe to a beach called Logan Shoals.
After a short walk with minimal stumbling over the rocks in the pitch darkness, we waited and watched and waited (thank goodness for our thermos of body warming and numbing magic potion) until I was able to capture the picture, below, of the full lunar eclipse over the west shore of Lake Tahoe.
Originally, we planned on hanging around to catch the selenelion and syzygy, the rare condition when both the sun and the fully eclipsed moon can be seen at the same time, where,
“the sun and moon are exactly 180 degrees apart in the sky; so in a perfect alignment like this, such an observation would seem impossible because if the sun is above the horizon, the moon must be below the horizon and completely out of sight (or vice versa).
But, since our “provisions” were consumed and our feet were frozen, we did not hang around and decided to head back to California and the warmth of the great indoors. I’ll take their word that it did happen.
After the night before and the morning of, I can summarize the story by saying; a good nap was had by all.
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