A total Solar Eclipse in Texas

A total solar eclipse was cutting a swath through North America from Mexico, diagonally through Texas towards Maine. We looked into booking flights to Mexico and considered a sleeper train car from California to Texas, but we didn't make reservations in time, so I booked plane tickets from San Francisco to Dallas.

Joy was driving down from Idaho and could pick us up at the airport. During our visit, we would tour the state of Texas, visit Amanda's relatives, and Amanda would bird along the gulf coast.

At 5:00pm the night before we were scheduled to leave, I received an email from American Airlines saying they were predicting a weather alert at our destination with an offer to reschedule our flight for free. I called, but the lines were full. The robot told me they would return my call in an hour and forty minutes. We had until midnight to change our reservation.

Our phone service doesn't work in our apartment, so fifteen minutes before the call, Amanda and I drove down the hill to sit in the downtown plaza atrium. While I was speaking to the airline representative, Amanda called the shuttle company to change our shuttle reservation. The woman on my call could hear Amanda's conversation with the other company, and we all waited as that guy struggled to update our reservations. For a moment it seemed like he wasn't going to be able to do it and after Amanda hung up the airline representative said "Wow, it sounded like he didn't know what he was doing."

At 3:30am the next morning we picked up our bags and walked downtown to the airbus pickup curb. Our bus was scheduled to arrive at 4:30am. At the airport, when they learned I had the audacity to attempt to take a shaving razor through security, they made an example of me, sending me through the security line several times.

The plane was full and Amanda and I weren't seated together. I had an aisle seat diagonal to her. I spent the trip watching the young woman in the seat in front of me using her phone. She would pick it up and put it down every few minutes, and her fingers hammered on the various notifications, messages, instagram pictures, and other apps like she practiced every waking moment of the day. It was impressive to see how quickly she could brush away interruptions and scroll past the pictures that didn't interest her. As a software engineer I have some insight into the code required to do this responsibly and I can guarantee the developer never tested his memory management this thoroughly. After a while, I started to time her usage, counting the seconds between when she would put her phone to sleep and when she would pick it up again. On average it was 60 seconds.

Her phone desktop was a picture of several young blond women who could have been her clones, or at least raised in the same bio-vat.

At one point she watched a video where another young blond woman rubbed the bags under her eyes and she put her phone down and rubbed her own eyes. A few minutes later she opened her camera app, put her phone down in her lap, casually looked around, and then raised the camera to her face to look at her own eye bags.

There were two overweight young boys and their mother across from me. The mother passed out deli sandwiches in hard plastic containers. Before each bite, she carefully smothered the exposed surface of her sandwich with mayo. Each of the two boys had a tablet. The older boy played a jumping side scroller for a while and then what looked like an auto-moving FPS, killing hundreds of men as they popped up out of the trees and grass. The younger boy's tablet had a yellow pokemon case with a molded plastic picachu that hung over the top of the frame. He was playing minecraft in creative mode, putting villagers up onto high burning dirt pillars and burying complex redstone circuitry.

We arrived in Dallas 10 minutes early and Joy and Joann met us at the curb and drove us into Denton. Aunt Joann and Mike have a nice house with a wrap-around porch and a large backyard situated on the edge of a wilderness reserve. They had two dogs, Hunter and Harley. Upon our arrival, Amanda took a tour around the yard and added five birds to her life-list. The air was humid and warm and the weather event our airline cautioned us about rolled in as we sat on the porch drinking hard blueberry lemonade. The trees strobed with each flash of lightning.

With his phone, Mike kept an eye on the weather report. The weather system was driving tornados and 70mph winds towards us. As the storm got closer, it started to sprinkle. We heard the tornado warning siren from the nearby elementary school. Joy told us how when she first arrived they all had to take shelter in the bathtub as a tornado churned towards the house. Mike told stories of places that had been destroyed by tornados and how the sky once turned bright emerald green.

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately because I wanted to see a tornado, the storm passed north of us, and we went inside for a dinner of corn casserole, scalloped potatoes, peas, and asparagus. I got on the Wi-Fi, and downloaded the map of Texas onto my phone.