When Bob was duck hunting a week or so ago, he went outside the cabin one night and saw the Northern Lights.

He said they weren't the classic sheets that he had seen in Canada, and that you normally see in photographs, but a red glow in the sky, and then what looked like spotlights coming up from the ground.

Then last night we got a call from John, who lives out in the country away from all the light pollution, and he said he had gotten a call from his cousin Craig, who lives north of Kasnas City, and who said that the sky was lit up again.

It was about 9:00; we stuck our feet in shoes, and I grabbed my jacket and a bottle of water, and we piled into the car to go looking for the Northern Lights.

We had to drive quite a way before we could get away from the lights of the city. We drove south, then east, and I had my head stuck out the window like a dog, and we eventually saw a faint red glow in the sky, like a stain, but that was it. Still, it was obvious that something was going on. Bob came down later and said he'd looked on the internet and that there was a major solar storm going on, which was causing the unusual things to happen in the sky.

I did some more research this morning and found this, from SpaceWeather.com:

A fast-moving coronal mass ejection that billowed away from the Sun on Nov. 4th swept past our planet at 0150 UT on Nov 6th (8:50 p.m. EST on Nov 5th). The impact triggered a severe geomagnetic storm -- now subsiding -- and widespread auroras reaching as far south as Florida, Texas, and California in the United States.

Storms on the sun! That would have been a good title, too. Or "Coronal Mass Ejection." As Dave Barry would say, an awesome name for a rock band.

I've been listening to The Breaker, a British mystery by Minette Walters, in a car. She writes dense, complicated mysteries something like those written by Elizabeth George or Ruth Rendell. I'm listening to it on CD; I have a 6-CD changer in the trunk of my car, so I just load it up and I'm set for a week or so.

This book was on ten CDs. I had finished the sixth disk last week and refilled the changer with the last four (and a couple of music CDs to fill the changer) over the weekend. Last night I was about halfway home when the eighth disk finished . . . and the tenth disk started.

At first I thought, oh damn, what will I do now? I can't listen to them out of order, I'll have to stop somewhere and switch them. I turned off the CD player and listened to NPR for a few minutes, until I realized that I didn't have to listen to them in the order they were in in the changer--I could switch disks. What a revelation.

So I turned the CD player back on and hit the "next disk" button or whatever it is, and the tenth disk came on again. What? So I backed up--Disk Eight. Forward: Disk Ten. This time I looked at the display--it was skipping over what was actually the fifth disk in the stack, going from four to six. I thought, well, it was remotely possible that I'd left that slot empty, although I didn't think that I had.

I felt sort of silly, but I did pull over, into a shopping center parking lot, and popped the trunk and checked the changer. Nope, there was a disk in that slot. I took it out and looked at it, and it looks like it has a big scuff on it near the center. I polished it, sort of, with my t-shirt hem, and put it back in, and I thought at first it was going to play--it cued up on the display--but after a few seconds of silence, the changer went on to the next disk.

It's the library's copy, so it's not like I can take it back to the store and get another one, and I doubt the library has another copy. And anyway, it was just getting to the good part--they were closing in on the criminal, I could just feel it. I guess I'm going to have to get the book and actually read it if I want to see what happens.

. . . Well, it looks like they do have more than one copy. I've requested one through the library website, although I'm going to have to figure out what to do so I don't get the same one back. I guess I'll just hang on to this one, maybe, until they let me know that they have another copy in stock.

And now I don't know what to do--should I start another book, or just wait? What a dilemma. I guess I'll wait a couple of days, listen to NPR and some music for awhile, and see what happens.