Friday Fish Wrap

1. I have my own personal 'Idaho' of stockpiled phobias. One of those jewels is being trapped underground on a public trans system. Irrational? To each her own. Whenever I embark for a jaunt on the lovely BART rail network which connects a web of metropolitan destinations in the San Francisco bay area I never step onto the platform without a mini flashlight, a bottle of water, ipod, and a charged cell phone (I was caught in a 24 hour power outage in Honolulu with my wallet locked in the hotel room safe and my cell phone battery level hovering at 40%). Fool me once. Uh-huh. Fool me twice. No. No. So when BART snapped this week and halted all trains for 3 hours due to a phantom glitch, I loved that spin, I dialed up some croc tears and sobbed with relief that, thank the goddess, I had been spared. Then again, Mama didn't raise no fool.

2. Have to give that old warhorse, Diana Nyad props for attempting to swim the 103 miles between Cuba and the Florida keys without a shark cage. Nyad 61 and thwarted once in a previous attempt, succumbed to intense shoulder pain, asthma and choppy currents after 29 hours in the water at the half way point. Nyad an endurance swimmer, and record holder, who had trained 2 years for this 2nd attempt said it was unlikely she would try the swim again.

3. The Perseids are baaaack. Showering the summer night sky. Best times to check out the light show are on Friday and Saturday night. And lucky you, if you're somewhere outside of the city. Full moon flooded windows the last 48 hours; not really optimum for the display. The Perseids in their magnificence, however, cannot hold a candle to the Leonids. One of the most spectacular displays I've seen was in either 2001 or 2002. Backyard bundled up against the cold. Sitting in a lawn chair with my next door neighbor. Drinking tea and coffee (where were those cross hatched benes from my youth?), we waited. Mitchel smoked. I was tempted. And then around 2am the Leonids arrived. It was cool. Super cool...streaking across the night sky, hundreds of meteors, the trailing dust of the comet, Tempel-Tuttle, showered the horizon for several hours. Spectacular. Silent. For more than a nano second, I longed to be sprawled on the desert floor.