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Last night, or early this morning, there was full lunar eclipse.

I had seen a solar eclipse before, but not a lunar one.

When I read that it was going to be best seen on the west coast, I thought, gee, that's us...maybe we should get up and take a look.

I set the alarm clock for 2:15am. It went off at 1:47am.

My wife and I stepped out on our front porch and sure enough there was the moon...huge...in an otherwise pitch black sky with a piece missing out of it.

My wife, being the photographer that she is, and I, not knowing anything but wanting everything decided we needed a picture.

It was ridiculous.

Her camera is one of those digital things that zooms things in.

I wondered will it reach the moon?

She put it on super zoom but then couldn't find the moon through the lens.

"How hard can it be? It's right there? Aim and look."

Didn't work. I couldn't do it.

The moon was slowly being eaten away.

Finally, we figured out how to get the moon into the screen so we could shoot a picture.

But, then, once again wanting what I can't have, I found a pair of 5 cent opera glasses - the kind that get stuck to a bag of popcorn at a baseball game for people like me who sit in the peanut gallery because I am too cheap to buy something better - think a real telescope that might really take a picture.

So, there we are - she's holding the camera and I am holding the opera glasses in front of the camera to try and blow up the moon. The only thing missing was duct tape.

She could hold the glasses and the camera but didn't have any fingers left to push the 'take' button. I pushed and we got a picture of the fence.

Lo and behold, at around 2:40am and an even bigger piece of the moon gone now, a long-haired, grass eating (smoking?) Californian comes jogging by....seriously.

He was looking cool, straight ahead and beating his body into healthy Californian lifestyle shape.

"Did you see the eclipse?"

He gave me the same response all Californians do... he ignored me.

Yeah...ignored has the same root has ignorance.

The moon was almost gone.

Finally...my wife figures it out. The secret was to for me to NOT be involved.

She brought out a kitchen chair. 

Kitchen chair + opera glasses + camera + zoom - Bill = What in the world is she going to do now? 

I got hungry...and sleepy.

But, in the morning, when I got up, my wife showed me these -

Turns out, things worked pretty well AFTER she sent me to bed.

Seems to me that my parents used to think the same thing.