In addition to being my son’s third birthday, there was was also a solar eclipse today.  Here in central NC, we were expecting about 94% totality, which I mistakenly assumed that meant it would get fairly dark.  Apparently 6% of unobstructed light from a star is still pretty significant.

My son is currently home sick from school (we were going to keep him out anyway to see the eclipse) with croup, having interpreted his birthday party the previous evening for an emergency room visit when he started to having trouble breathing.  His fever of 102 has now broken and we spent 20-30 minutes outside during the peak of the eclipse watching the sun through our eclipse glasses.

If I learned anything today (other than that a non-totality eclipse doesn’t make it very dark outside) it’s that we would be more than willing to drive to the path of totality for the next one.