Dark skies

    Or rather, lack of dark skies. The thing about having cats is that they are likely to wake you in the night at least once. The thing about being really really old is that one's bladder is likely to do same. So I was pretty confident that I would probably be awake during the dark hours and be able to choose whether to go out Perseid hunting before the peak ended this morning.
    I wasn't expecting it to be a hairball. However, as delightful as that isn't, the cleaning up process meant that I was well and truly awake, with lights on, at 5 in the a.m. I took this as a sign, though from what low or high deity I couldn't say. Thus I gave the meteor shower a try. In the interest of substituting irony for suspense, the only meteor(-ite, -oid, whatever) I saw was just down the block from my door, surrounded by house lights and street lights. Considering that I could only see a couple non shooting stars, not surprisingly I didn't see it well. I went out Bluff Road on a friend's suggestion, but couldn't find anywhere darker. Thus I went down I77 to 12th Street Extension and headed south. This turns out to be where the Amazon Fulfillment Center is. I wish I could say that it is a palace with streets paved with gold, but this might be an exaggeration. Still, it was kind of neat to see, and I hope that the Amazon is eventually filled there.
    I did find some darker skies between industrial properties and headlights, but alas, the northeast section of the sky where I was supposed to be looking was covered with clouds and getting more so. Mere hours later there were no clouds in the sky, but when it counted, there they were just where I needed them the least. So what I mainly learned is that I77 is crazy busy before 6 in the morning and I too live in a City That Never Sleeps. We don't tell anybody about it, though.