I saw it!!! I saw the circle in the sky! I took pictures, even though I'm not a professional photographer and don't have any fancy equipment or anything, so there are certainly better pictures than mine. (I did do a bit of editing with GIMP.)
I went with my mom to a park; there were people there, but it wasn't too crowded. It was a really nice day; pleasant temperature, very few clouds:
My eclipse glasses worked with my camera. I took several pictures like this. Without the glasses, it just looked like a normal sun.
As I got up to use the bathroom, I noticed the shadows of the trees (this particular picture was actually after totality):
I also noticed the sun's shape was affecting the lens flare on my camera—notice the crescent shape to the left of the sun here:
I didn't notice it getting that much darker until fairly close to before the start of the eclipse. As totality approached, it became dark; from what I remember, it didn't quite seem like night, even during totality; more like twilight, just after sunset. Around this time, there was a bit of orange color around the horizon (unless that was an optical illusion and it was actually just less blue), but nothing particularly special. Also two planets were visible! I didn't notice any stars, though. And onto the main event...
Aside from the poor quality, the pictures I got looked like pictures of eclipses I'd seen online. However, in real life, it looked more like just a white outline of a circle. Of course, seeing an outline of a circle in the sky isn't particularly common...
And I almost didn't see the best part...
