A star party with no stars
2004-10-17 ~ 9:56 p.m.

I'm currently at my brother's place, thawing out.

I just spent the weekend at the Frozen Banana Star Party, just south of North Bay. It's a bi-annual event, usually once in the spring and again in the fall. A group of astronomers from Sudbury, North Bay and a few other areas troup out to a campsite and hunker down in a field to do some serious observing.

The only serious thing we did this time, though, was serious drinking. The weather turned out to be crap-tacular, freezing cold and pouring rain. I thought I was going to freeze to death in my sleeping bag. To get through the nights, we hung out around the bonfire and downed glass after glass of hot chocolate liberally laced with Bailey's. Oh, and we ate. Dear lord, did we eat. What else was there to do??

It was fun otherwise. The people were terrific and really made the time enjoyable. As miserable as I was, I'll still go back for the one in the spring.

Memorable moments? Me trying to use a plastic coffee cup (like the ones you get at Tim Horton's or other coffee places) as a flashlight - "Hey, how come this torch doesn't work??" "Here honey, why don't you use this FLASHLIGHT instead of that coffee mug?" Hey, it was dark! Another fine moment came in the middle of the night when I had to piss like a racehorse, but it was pouring out and I didn't want to get wet. Solution? A plastic cup I had brought in to the tent. A little adjustment of the clothes, and I was ready to go. A gusty sigh of "Ahhhhhhhhhh" was heard across the camp, and then a splash as I hurled the contents of said cup out the tent door. It was raining, so I figured it would all get washed away.

You gotta do what you gotta do when you're roughing it.

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