Is anyone else watching the Geminid Meteor shower tonight? I went out for an hour and twenty minutes and saw 13 meteors. The sky was always clear in patches, although most of it was cloud-covered. I could always see from four to a dozen clear stars and the meteors, which were supposed to all be emanating from the proximity of Gemini, instead all had completely different trajectories. Some were horizontal, some diagonal and some completely vertical in their paths and they seemed to come from different parts of the sky. It is a somewhat chilly night and I was sitting in my short nightgown with a warm top pulled over it, so now that I am in bed, it feels good to have the duvet over my frigid knees and toes. The boy cat is kneading the duvet cover by my shins. If it were the girl cat, she would be lying on my legs or on the space between them, warming me up a bit, but the boy cat lies by my side, extending his claws to pull at the duvet cover. If there were bare flesh exposed, he would not discriminate between the two.

I don’t know how the twenty minutes since I came in passed so quickly, but it is now 2 A.M. and the shower is supposedly at its height now so I suppose I’ll go out again, lean back in the padded metal chair, and get dizzy from bending my neck back to peer up at the sky. Earlier, Forgottenman kept me company via phone, but he has perhaps gone back to his program or to bed. Here I go lonely into the night to see what performance the universe has prepared for me. The count i presently at 13. I’ll give it one more go, but this time I’ll take a blanket along.

Back inside again at 2:40. In 20 minutes, I saw seven definite comets and possibly three others that were so faint that I questioned whether I really saw them or it was my imagination. So in the first hour and twenty minutes, I saw 13 and in the 20 minutes after 2 AM I saw 7. So much for scientific notation. I need to turn on the heated mattress pad to try to get my feet and legs warm. I still have on my warm top over my nightgown. Plans are to sleep in it. Kitty is curled up by my side. I’ve let Forgottenman off companion duty. All’s right with the world.