So here’s the love part in my love-hate relationship with the Internet: The Capital Weather Gang. Namely, their twitter feed. I say this not because I am becoming obsessed with the weather in my old(er) age, though I suppose there’s some of that, too. Their feed tells me what I need to know. They put our area in perspective with the rest of the world. And when they tweet, they often get me OFF the computer, and back outside where I belong. They have sent my family into the yard to view planets and meteor showers and sunsets. On a night I’d caught a particularly good sunset on my own, they told me why the sky looked the way it did. Last night, they told my family just where to look to catch a rocket launch from Wallops Island. I set my alarm for 7 p.m. so we wouldn’t get too lost in dinner and homework and miss it.
BUZZ. My alarm went off.
I checked my twitter feed. The launch had been postponed to 8:15, the weather gang told us. When it was time to go outside, they even told us to bundle up.
By 8:06, my husband and I were on the driveway with the kids. We’d turned off the house lights to try to do our small part in getting rid of the light pollution. 10…9…8…3… We could see it! There! Shooting through the sky between a gap in the houses. We followed the arc up and up. Then the light seemed to freeze. We stared at it in the dark and cold, until it went out — in the night sky, anyway. Because I’m pretty sure that when I looked at my kids’ faces, the light was still there.