February 20, 2008

Dear Sis~
Just before 10:00 pm tonight I was standing on my bunk, posted up in my narrow, horizontal slit window, trying to catch the rare, full lunar eclipse, which was supposed to be preceded by a blood-red moon. The eclipse was supposed to last about 30 minutes but I never got to see it, either due to excessive cloud cover or, more likely, I simply could not view the moon from the narrow field of view offered by my window. At any rate, all I saw was a noticeable darkening of the night sky, as well as one of the prison's feral cats creeping across the yard to investigate some trash bins. I enjoy watching the night sky from my window, but due to the glare of the high-intensity fence lights, I can't do any real star gazing. Sometimes I catch the full or partial moon, sometimes I could see Venus or a particularly bright star, but more often, late at night, all I see is an occasional skunk, possum or cat, or some of the rats that race along the foundation walls. During the warmer months I'll sometimes see, around 2am, some strange-looking ground birds, nervously racing around the yard, silently stabbing their long, thin bills into the ground. I don't know what they're looking for, probably earth worms or crickets. Anyway, that's the extent of my night gazing ... not exactly a wildlife safari! (Somewhere, in the deepest reaches of my mind I'm probably hoping that a UFO will come cruising by and beam me up. That would sure make for an interesting headline when they found my cell empty...)
Obama won the Wisconsin and Hawaii primaries very convincingly yesterday; that's ten in a row Obama has won over Hillary; he's on a real roll and I think he's going to pull this off to become the Democratic nominee, and thereafter become president. (If the Democrats can't win the presidency this time, they can't ever win it. It should be a cake walk given how King George has screwed up our country over the last 7 years).
Love, Bill