Last night I woke up at 1:30 to find that I’d been asleep on the couch for the last two hours. At that point I decided that I was more tired than I thought, and pushed my run to Sunday, when I’ll have the bonus of an extra hour of sleep thanks to daylight savings time (not to mention it’ll be light earlier). So it was that I was still asleep at 9:30 when I awoke to a strange sound.
“What is that roaring?” I wondered groggily. I’d left the window open last night and was trying to figure out if it was windy or not, and how it could possibly so be windy that it was roaring through the open window. It happened again — sounding like a dragon breathing fire from a movie. Wait — dragon breathing fire? That’s it! Fire! A burner! It’s hot air balloons!
I leapt out of bed and opened the blinds to see dozens of hot air balloons coming right for me. I grabbed a sweatshirt and ran outside to find them floating over my parking lot, close enough that I could wave at the people in the baskets and greet them with a “good morning!” The rest of my apartment complex was out as well — I’ve never seen so many neighbors out at one time.
After the balloons passed, I watched the skydivers from my balcony. My balcony looks directly across a field to the Ballunar Festival site that’s less than a mile away. My apartment complex is the only one with a view of the festival from home! Pretty cool.
I’m currently watching Scott Parazynski dangling out on the end of a huge makeshift robot arm adding “cufflinks” to the torn solar array on the space station. What an insane view he has right now — Earth below, station below, nothing but solar array and space in front of him. What a crazy world we live in where people can work in space. They’re about to start redeploying the array now that he’s added all five cufflinks, so I’m crossing my fingers that it deploys smoothly from here on out!
Update: It deployed smoothly! The cufflinks worked! To echo the astronauts: yaaaaaay!
Gorgeous photos! What a lucky morning you had.