Vernon!

Mom, Jed, and I (Sarah) drove out to Vernon against last night. It took us 1 hour and 15 minutes from Provo, using these directions. We lost cell phone reception for a fair portion of that drive (turns out, there's still wilderness out there), but we drove through some cute towns and empty landscape. It was 10:30 pm by the time we arrived (we started late), and everything was dark--except the sky, which was lit up with a million, million stars. The Milky Way was a creamy band across the blackness, and we saw the Big Dipper, the North Star, and Cassiopeia so clearly, I felt like a Greek stargazer. Mom said, "I wish we could have an astronomer at your party." And then she said, "Oh! We will!" One of my best friends is a PhD in astronomy who works at the Hubble Space Telescope. She's more into using high-tech computers to calculate the ages of star clusters than she is into identifying constellations, but an astronomer she is. And she's coming to our party.

And even though the party will end just after sunset, so we may not see the stars out in full force, know this: the Vernon night sky is worth the drive. Last night as we walked around the Vernon property, keeping our faces to the sky and trying not to trip on our feet, Jed said: "It's like to be human you need to know some basic things about stars. But we so rarely see them, we don't know those basic things. It's like we're not really human."

I feel human in Vernon. I'm so excited about this party. So very, very.