April 8, 2024 Journal Entry
If you are reading this, then you survived the Solar Eclipse. That is what every headline on April 9, 2024 should have said. Mainstream media and social media seemed to collude in order to stress out the average American citizen. The last few days I’ve had numerous conversations about what governments and federal agencies are doing leading up to and during the Solar Eclipse today. States have already declared a state of emergency days before the Eclipse, so they are expecting something pretty serious to happen today. Numerous cities along the path of the eclipse have all suggested to prepare for an extra 100,000 people in each city. That certainly could cause massive issues on any city, let alone multiple cities all next to each other. Our own government has issued a warning about cell phones potentially not working during the solar eclipse. Well unless we get hit with an EMP attack the networks should work fine since they have in the past eclipses.
Obviously April 1st did its part in helping to spread drama. Stories of CERN firing up its particle collider with the goal to create dark matter. If successful they could create a black hole, which would be a concern for anyone ignorant of the hoax. The truth appears to be that they have fired up the collider a month ago and have been doing maintenance and preparation work on it.
Multiple news outlets reported about the “Red Heffers” that Israel had recently purchased from Texas. For those interested, the Jewish faith leaders believe they need an unblemished Red Heffer that is three years old. It has special raising requirements as well. That cow is then going to be sacrificed. The ashes will then be used by a specially designated Rabbi so they can officially begin building the third temple for the GOD of Abraham. Most protestant pastors preach that the Antichrist will take the throne seat when the temple is built and pretend to be GOD and rule the earth for a few years. It is certainly a topic to pay attention to in the future, however the reports seemed to leave out that the recently purchased cows are 1.5-2 yrs old. So the sacrifice will not take place for at least another year. Also Israel has begun breeding their own Red Heffers in hopes that they can discover one worthy of the sacrifice. Also throughout history they only document sacrificing nine Red Heffers in the temple and none have been found in the last 2,000 years.
If you overlap the last few eclipses it appears to form the Hebrew letters Aleph and Tav. Many prophecy speakers claim that means GOD the creator is saying he is done. To that claim, it could be as we appear to be in the final days, but many things have to occur before the final few seals in Revelation can be opened (if you follow the Christian faith). Also earthquakes a few days ago including a 4.8 in NJ caused some to be scared but those occurrences happen often enough and do not appear to be a direct statement from GOD in my opinion.
There are other activities going on that do cause me concern. NASA is launching three Black Brant IX rockets from Virginia today before the eclipse. They are part of the “Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path” (APEP). A simple internet search would show you that the Egyptians believed Apep was a God who would try to kill Ra(the Sun God) every night. The goal was to try to push Egypt into eternal darkness. Solar eclipses were seen as Apep being victorious over Ra. I do not trust their motives, but that would be more fitting for a different journal entry.
The University of Washington is doing a “Solar Engineering Experiment” in San Francisco. They are shooting a massive amount of sea salt particles into the air in order to potentially fight climate change. They are mum on any known risks form blocking solar radiation to parts of the earth. They will be repeating the process through May but who knows what the positive or negative outcome will be. Blocking sun light from the earths surface sounds like a bad idea to me. Think about how unhealthy people were when they were stuck inside during covid.
Now with that background understanding of my thoughts recently and today, I can now talk about the activities of the day. I got up and went into work at 7am. Management agreed to let us off at noon so that we could spend time with our family during the eclipse. I did not take a lunch since we were getting off at my lunch time. During my five hours of work time I finished a small project that I was working on and then gathered tooling for a special R&D project for one of the big automotive manufacturers. One step of my lathe work is a complicated bore dimension. It will take more than five hours running non stop just to complete that one tool path. I will save that for tomorrow though.
At noon I went home, took a shower and put on a “Muncie Sailing Club” shirt. The group rented our Murpah Shrine Club last Saturday for a meeting. My wife made a comment that she really liked their shirts. It was created for todays solar eclipse, so after the event I talked to one of the representatives and bought a few of the shirts for my family and my wife’s family that lives near the Muncie Reservoir. It felt good to support a group who was helping to support our Shriner goals.
We packed a few lawn chairs, eclipse glasses, and the extra shirts. We then headed to my wifes family house that is by the Muncie Reservoir. The eclipse started just after 3pm. My wifes uncle threw some hotdogs on the grill. Once they were ready we added some sides to our plates and took seats around an outdoor table. We had great conversations while randomly putting on our special glasses and looking at the sun to see the current state of the eclipse. I was actually surprised how many hours it took the moon to slowly cover up the sun and how long the moon seemed to be blocking all the light.
We were supposed to have six planets lined up and visible during the eclipse. I used an app called “Sky View” to help pinpoint the planets that were visible. Only two were able to be seen though. One on the left and one of the right of the Sun. It appeared to be Jupiter and Venus.
Something I found very surprising was during an almost full eclipse, the light that came out seemed to cast an eclipse or curved shadows from tree branches and leaves. The temperature dropped a noticeable five degrees here in Muncie. Other areas in the state had claims of up to nine degrees. It seemed to be noticeable when about 75% of the Sun was blocked. Perhaps its our distance from the sun causing the temperature drop to be felt at that point. Around this same point I believe I witnessed the “Purkinje Effect.” I forgot to check a green and red top worn by other family members, but the area around me seemed to appear different. My wifes stepfather even said, “Hey, look at people!” Everyone seemed to have more of an orange tint to their skin. I guess we all know what its feels like to be Donald J. Trump for a few minutes.
There is a pond on the property we were at. I was caught off guard that all the animals, fish, frogs, etc reacted as thought it was a normal night and began being very active and loud for the few minutes of the total eclipse.
I tried to get photos of the partial and full eclipse on my cell phone. I even attempted to cover the camera screen with the special glasses and had zero success in getting an impressive photo. Social media is full of photos of successful attempts by others, so I will relive those memories through others examples.
At one point my wifes step grandfather wondered aloud, “I wonder what the Indians(Native Americans) thought of Solar Eclipses?” I told him that I recently watched a Navajo (or Dine’ is what they call themselves. It translates to “The People”) tribal leader, who stated they recommend staying indoors during the eclipse. If you leave the house, your should wear black. It you are pregnant, black should cover the belly area. You should spiritually pray as the eclipse is the sign of a new beginning. I believed the Navajo were “Sun Worshippers” however the tribal leader said, “We do not worship the Sun it just represents the creator God. It gives life to our planet when it appears.” Perhaps other societies felt the same way and we have simply misunderstood their beliefs because they have no spokesperson living on to explain their stances.
After the eclipse was over we stayed awhile reflecting on the event and had normal conversations about life and work. My wifes uncle pitched an idea of me returning to Honeywell. We have had numerous conversations in the past with me having zero interest. He informed me that the new Muncie site leader used to be his boss and that he was trying to bring back all the skilled and experienced workers they lost over the last few years due to their corporate policies changes during the covid outbreak. Supposedly the former workers would retain their lost seniority, vacation time, and the wages would be raised. I will have to weigh my options over the next few days. I have been happy with my current employer but the stress level is higher, and there have been some health concerns recently pop up.
After wrapping up that conversation my family left and headed to Olive Garden for dinner with my mom and sister. I explained to them the conversation I just had about employment. After dinner I headed home. I have to try to relax when now I’m thinking about updating my resume. Tomorrow(Tuesday) is my daughters first track meet of the season. Wednesday is a Masonic meeting with a new member going through his EA degree. Thursday I will have to go set up the Shrine Club for Fridays dinner. Friday is dinner at the Shrine club then a full tear down of the dining room because there is a Craft Bazaar Event in that room on Saturday. Saturday is the Craft Bazaar Event from 8am-1pm then we have to change all the tables and chairs back to its normal format for a second event on Saturday 3:30-6pm. I will work that even until 5pm when I will have to leave for a Morningside Neighborhood Association Meeting. Sunday I will try to make time to go to church. All these other things are a distraction from my true mission of being closer to GOD, so I need to find a way to balance all these activities. So to wrap this journal entry up, I am going to go home and try to relax.