47, Dinner and a Show

Yesterday was #47 and on the list of wedding anniversaries, I don't remember any special attention given to it. 10, 25, 50 years, yes, ...but 47? We could always think of it as halfway to 94. Now there's a challenge!

I was still suffering the effects of a long translation project, havingworked through the night from Sunday to Monday, and by Monday afternoon I still lacked a couple of hours of work on the project. But I told Abbie I would take her to the mall to shop. It had been so long since she had been there that she accepted it as part of a fitting celebration. Then, I took her out to eat and to see a show.

The restaurant is right at the top of one of the three mountain passes at 1410 m (4650 ft) elevation. The show was at a somewhat higher elevation... the upper atmosphere.  Every year right at this time, there is the meteor shower as the earth moves through a "cloud of dust". This year the big night was on our anniversary, so after eating we went a bit further up. Unfortunately at the very top, a radar installation has been built so the lights were interfering with our view of the sky. We worked our way downward and found a spot that was dark and less exposed to the wind. After moondown,  the setting was perfect for watching the stars, and the air was unseasonably warm. It would have been better to stay a big longer as the show was just beginning, but by midnight, we had seen 15-20 meteors, some quite large, and since I hadn't slept for 48 hours, we came home. Over dinner, we had tried to see how many anniversaries we could recall, in terms of where we were and what we did. A daunting, and admittedly impossible, challenge to get all the previous 46. If nothing else, this year we made 47 one we'll remember.