~it was a sight to behold~

Sometimes you just have to choose between two things.
Stuff that really needs to be done tomorrow and the stuff that won't be around again for a long, long time.

Fortunately I had the good sense to choose catching a glimpse of the lunar eclipse two evenings ago.  I was doing a whole lot of paper grading that Sunday evening and even though I'd heard it was going to be happening, I had forgotten until it had already started.  Thankfully I'd received a reminder from a friend who asked if I was indeed sitting outside and taking in the sights.  Since I was not, there was only one thing to do.

I told Mike on my way out the front door that we had forgotten about the eclipse and that I was going out to watch.  A moment or two later, Mike joined me with Sally the dog and together for the next 20 minutes or so we gazed up into the heavens and watched that beautiful full moon seemingly disappear.  From our vantage point on the front porch we could see it happening right before our very eyes.  The beautiful nighttime sky here in our part of Texas was virtually cloud free and with the evening temperatures in the 70's, it was a perfect evening to be a witness to God's wonderful creation of the moon and the stars.

We tried to take pictures but with our little phone cameras the images didn't come out as well as we would have hoped for.  After several attempts we did get a couple of them that were pretty fair.  One thing I have learned in the recent years of my life is that sometimes the best photos will never be taken with expensive cameras.  Rather, those kind of photos that will remain with you forever, unfaded with the passage of time or accidentally deleted from a cell phone, are those that will be taken and stored within your heart.

The next full moon lunar eclipse will appear once again in 2033 in the 78th year of my life.  The papers that I was grading that evening were mostly finished when I got back in and the remainder were taken care of yesterday morning at school.  In retrospect, I have come to one conclusion.

I'm glad that I chose the right thing to do.
It's all about in how you look at things.

This was my message to Mike this morning in our daily journal that we keep with one another.

Back home in south-central Kansas, atop the highest mountains of Colorado, or here on the plains of Texas, that old moon was a sight to behold.