Last night was the annual spectacular lightshow: the Geminids meteor shower. I watched in my backyard.

I live in Reno. My house is at 5,000 feet elevation. It’s mid-December. So it’s pretty cold. I set up the cot and wondered if one sleeping bag would be enough to keep me warm. Checked the weather forecast. Clear skies, low of 25. I got the second bag.

At 8pm I went outside with my flask of cognac, cell phone, and crawled into my sleeping bag within a bag. I started seeing meteors right away. It was sporadic at first, bursts of 1 or two meteors per minute and then nothing for a long while.

I snoozed on and off from 8pm to midnight. I’d wake up, peek my head out of the sleeping bags, watch a few meteors, go back to sleep.

At midnight the show really began. I was seeing several meteors per minute. Then the moon started the rise and the night sky got brighter.

At 1pm I started to feel a little too warm, so I unzipped my bags and reached out with my arms to feel the freezing winter air. As my arms settled on the top of my sleeping I felt something very cold and slightly wet: ice. The 70% humidity was enough for frost to form all over my stuff.

I would have spent the rest of the night outside were it not for the wet/frosty bag.