Over-Hyped

I woke up early today and decided to see if I could see any meteors from the Geminid meteor shower.  My track record to date for watching celestial phenomenon has not been great so far, at least from Toronto, which has massive light pollution and often is overcast.  And indeed, when I went outside, there were clouds everywhere, though curiously enough, I did see a patch of sky to the north.

Frustrated, I turned to the internet and was reminded that I should try to book my tickets to Yayoi Kusama's upcoming Infinity Mirrors exhibit at the AGO.  This is going to be one of the hottest tickets of the spring, and already there are no advance members' tickets left for the entire month of March.  There was limited availabilty from mid-April onwards, and late May wasn't too bad.  However, it is pretty clear if you want to go, you should sign up as a member, and if you are willing to go in the middle of the day, then tickets are much easier to come by.  I ended up booking a spot for myself and my son in mid May, and then one follow-up trip for myself in late May.  Reading through the exhibit rules, it sounds like it could be a kind of frustrating experience where only 4 people at a time can enter 6 rooms and then only for 20-30 seconds.  The wait time for each room is estimated at 20 minutes.  (We took a sneak peak at the exhibition catalogue, and I certainly hope there are other things to look at rather than just the 6 rooms!)  I think it is a good thing that it will mostly be members getting tickets and that Canadians are, on average, a bit more polite than Americans, since this could be a fairly stressful experience.  I do worry that the hype will overshadow the art; in fact, I think it is inevitable that it will.

After I booked my tickets, I did take a look outside and the clouds had more or less lifted, so I went outside.  I was wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me, showing me little light streaks that could be meteors.  Finally, I saw one meteor go shooting by, which was pretty cool.  It's the only one I can recall seeing.  Perhaps if there hadn't been so much snow out on the porch, I would have waited to see one or two more before going in.  Still, it hadn't been quite as amazing as I had been told, with a meteor every minute or so lighting up the sky.  I decided to watch from inside the house for a bit and saw two short squibs and then one more meteor with a longer path.  It is a case of blink, and you'll miss it, but at least I can say that I did see a few this time around.  Now if I can just arrange to be somewhere north of here the next time that the Aurora Borealis flares up...