The biggest full moon of the year is a wild ride

Perigee moon May 5 2012 (photo Peter Asquith, New Zealand rights reserved)

Last night I saw the Perigee Moon when I fell asleep early but not at 3:50 AM when I awoke on the east side of the house.

I jumped in my wheelchair and zipped to the west end of the house and there it was, big and butter yellow shining through the trees.

I had to get dressed and go chase the moon for a better picture than from a kitchen window. I would get a picture of the moon, but not as good as the by Peter Asquith from New Zealand. 

The rain was moving in from the west so now was the time to get out and catch the super moon. Changing quickly, I dumped the wheelchair for forearm crutches and left the house, driving off into the night searching for the moon.

Day of the Full Moon

I should have known with the full moon, the day was going to be weird and weirder. Almost as soon as I started to work on a sifting through 25,000 emails, my computer locked up.

It might have been the “no sender” email opened by mistake. It got deleted immediately but right after that Outlook locked up. Then Explorer locked. Then system manager wouldn’t load so I pushed the off switch.

This was supposed to be the penultimate day of organizing the thread of my life for the last four years. At first the computer wouldn’t boot, then it wouldn’t boot with more than 4 GB of the 12 GB RAM it had. I tried Windows Safe mode and restore but no luck. It was 10:45 AM and the morning had slipped away.

At 11:15 AM, I tried another Hail Mary restore from back in April and it seemed to take. After two reboots it tried to load Windows and hung with the cursor going around.

Thinking the computer might need time, I went to the media room and started watching Leonardo DiCaprio in Ridley Scott’s CIA spy flick Body of Lies on the PVR. Every commercial I’d check to see if the swirling cursor was still moving.

Watching a thriller in the dark at noon is not my usual occupation but it worked because Windows 7 finally brought back the desktop.

Then I sent the computer into an Avast boot scan to make sure any virus was rooted out.

I was getting restless, trying to recover some sanity from the ashes of the day.

I started texting looking for a car to get out-of-town.

The full moon was getting to me but I didn’t realize it at the time.

Going to the country

By 1:30 PM the movie was over, Avast was chugging along, and a car and driver were on the way, going to the country where life is real.

‘Going to the Country’ – Canned Heat

We headed east along the road to Wood Islands and the ferry. As I drove,  there were stories to tell about this village and that house where I had boiled beef dinner at noon back in 1976 when I was looking for properties to sell.

There were fishing villages and farms to pass, boarded up restaurants and businesses that were clients back in the 1970s. As we passed the heritage road, I thought about the topless girls gardening in Lewes.

We passed roads to beaches, lighthouses, the school where Premier Pat Binns was nominated and the ladies offered us tea and biscuits while protested outside for Islanders with disabilities.

So many beautiful vistas of the water. “I’ll bet you people who live on that high bank spend most of their time thinking how they are going to get across the Strait to Nova Scotia.”

I remembered the people, this one moved out west, and the father of an MLA who had to get the Mounties out to protect him on the wharf, this man who died, and that one who committed suicide, the friends gone, the house I lived in, the neighbor so drunk he met me on the road driving on my side until he went into the ditch.

After 4 hours of driving we came back to town and a lobster burger a small joy of spring on PEI. The evening got weirder as I sunk tired into the sofa drink in hand to watch the gonzo journalist, my hero Hunter S. Thompson or at least Bill Murray’s acting, in “Where the Buffalo Roam” before I fell dead asleep early.

Chasing the moon

Perigee moon with iPhone (photo Stephen Pate)

By the time I got out of the house at 4 AM the moon was getting ready to hide behind those western storm clouds.

A quick shot on my street with an iPhone was over powered by the street light.

It looks like a picture from Edvard Munch after he painted The Scream.

iPhones are great for daytime snaps or scenery but fail miserably at helping you chase the moon. I gotta get a real camera again.

I headed out-of-town to get away from all the city lights but as soon as I got on the bypass, the moon was already hidden behind the clouds. Rats!

Perigee moon over Charlottetown harbor (photo Stephen Pate)

Taking one last shot,  I headed to the bridge hoping the moon would appear in the small break in the clouds.

It did but the iPhone failed again. The zoom on those things is pathetically grainy.

There is my last view of the Perigee Moon, peeking through the clouds almost overpowered by the lights of the city. It did manage to shine on the water which doesn’t show.

Hopefully, you’ll get a better picture than I did. If you post it on Flickr, Photobucket, Instagram or where ever leave a comment with the link and we’ll post them.

I went home and fell asleep again.  Saturday is going to be weird. I can feel it.

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