11/19/2006 Where, Oh Where Are the Leonids?

I'm sitting out here in the freezing cold waiting for the Leonid meteors to appear, but apparently they didn't receive the invitation.
It's a crystal clear (but cold) night here in Tucson, a little past midnight, and I have yet to see a meteor. I must admit that I'm not observing properly, i.e. laying back in the chair watching the entire sky; but it seems like I should have seen something by now.
Sadly I am missing out on numerous star party opportunities. Some friends are up at Vekol, others at MM44, but due to other commitments I wasn't able to pack it up and get out. I did have a good time with my wife and kids though so I can't complain too much. We even went to the used bookstore tonight and I picked up a couple of Ben Bova sci-fi novels (Mercury and Venus) to read on those cloudy nights.
I am doing some imaging, worked a bit on M45 again. But for the past few nights I've been having trouble with the autoguiding. I've had to discard about 3/4 of the images due to star streaking. However I may have just discovered the cause, and if so, it's a simple operator error - I was messing with the program and turned on a dithering mode improperly. So now it's off and in a little while I should know whether this was the probelm - I sure hope so!
As I said, it's cold. In fact for the first time I'm running the ccd at -30 degrees Celsius. Keeping it cold minimizes the dark current, resulting in better signal-to-noise ratio in the images. It's funny how just a few months ago I needed to use a special water cooler to get the chip cooled to -15, and now I can go to -30 without any water!