Good morning! Pretty out.

I'm tired. I didn't feel well last night when I went to bed and had to get up again; in the end I got to sleep around midnight. But I'm feeling better, so.... I may have to come home early if I flag, but the key stuff will get done.

Anyway, I'm awfully glad I'm up. I've debated racing out with the camera, but I'm not sure it could capture this...and I would rather drink it in than photograph it. It's still very dark outside, of course; there are dark grey clouds over much of the sky, but broken here and there, the high patches showing dusky cornflower blue.

The clouds are almost missing along the treeline, the same place that was so dark cloudy yesterday; there are a few little bits of them, drifting along, and above the trees is a band of pale melon orange, and above that that shade of green you sometimes get, very pale, almost spring green, the jagged edges of the trees forming evergreen silhouette lace against the melon and the clouds drifting through the green or the very upper reaches of the orange.... It is absolutely gorgeous.

Okay, then there was the rest of the morning weather....

...which I made notes on at work, and am now stitching those notes together and posting.

[8:00-ish]

Oh my goodness. This morning was amazing, gorgeous, way beyond what I wrote about before I shut the laptop down. I'd gone downstairs to make my lunch and grab a waffle for breakfast, and I looked out the deck door to see that the sky (which, shortly after my last post, had turned gold, then washed out to white-and-clouds and become quite uninteresting) was lighting up again, this time with the underbellies of the clouds lit orange. A standard-ish sunrise look, but vivid and very pretty, so I grabbed the camera and took a bunch of shots. (Since I wanted to look, I let the camera do all the settings in the two scene modes that most closely matched the light. I will look at these pictures later, but I'm dubious. That's okay. I got to watch, and imagine how it would look framed thus-and-so, so....)

Then they faded, and it was back to a blah sky with very very faint hints of orange still here and there. I put the camera away and left it at home (tired today, and also planning to exercise, and why lug expensive electronics around only to not use them?) and came to work. And oh did I wish I'd had the camera, even though I'm not sure I could have captured any of what I saw.

As I drove up Stafford toward 65th, the eastern sky turned a glowing, living orange-gold as the sun almost cleared the horizon, not quite yet. It was...it was indescribable, but if you've ever seen it, you know what I mean, such brilliance you don't look at it and yet it glows at the corner of your eye, the upper clouds are polished gold, every reflection and tint anywhere in that direction is gold, and it floods over you with light, brilliant, glorious....

It was still like that as I turned onto 65th and immediately onto Elligsen (really, if 65th didn't keep going that would just be one slightly attenuated curve). Elligsen runs west, so I was now driving away from the golden sky, with it in my mirrors....

...and the western sky was all clouds, soft grey above and flushed pink by the sunrise below, and although it was dry where I was, there was an absolutely brilliant, complete rainbow crossing the road, very vivid and intense in its colors, looking so large and so close - as a child I'd have been sure I could reach one end of it. It was just amazing, especially against that flush of sunrise pink and with the gold-orange eastern horizon still in my mirrors so that I was all too aware of it. And all the way up Elligsen and back down to I-5, it held; the pink gradually faded, but the rainbow stayed, as did the eastern sky.

As I turned onto I-5, literally on the ramp, there was just a little hint of pink-orange around the base of the rainbow...which is when I saw, next to it on the grey clouds, a second rainbow, very faint; never a whole arc, just a bit of the end of it. I drove north with glimpses of rainbow when I glanced left and spatters of gold when I glanced right, 'til about halfway up the sun cleared the horizon completely. I glanced to the rainbow and it was still there, but very faint; that was the last time I saw it.

As I took the exit for work, I was driving into a pale morning cloud-sky, a few pale pearl greys, lightened by whites and creams swirled together, utterly gorgeous. Then I got into work; my drive faces east but my window faces south. Here, now, the sky is a thick and heavy grey, a blue-grey almost unrelieved, except to the south and slightly west is a spot where the clouds are thin and blue shows through, pale blue (but the clouds still visible as a mist over it) and a bit further east a single, curving band of cream. Almost al of this (not quite) is behind the half-blocking lace silhouettes of the trees....


[9:50]

And now the sky is entirely light to mid greys, and it's been raining for a while, with wind. Even with the overhang that shelters the window, it's speckled with little rain droplets. The rain is lashing parallel to this face of the building right now, and the trees are bending over, and now and then the sound of the wind rushing along is actually audible inside (it often isn't). It looks grey and miserable and fall-like, and I can see the rain even off toward the road against the evergreen trees, coming down like a faint fog, only moving much too quickly for that.

It's gorgeous. I am glad to be safe inside, and I don't want to be safe inside; I want to get up and go out and play in it, and get soaked to the skin and laugh.

Somehow, I don't think that would work very well with my workday, but perhaps it will still be raining this evening, or will oblige some other evening this week or on the weekend....


[3:20]

It's been a really gloriously Oregon day. A bit ago it was pouring rain - not as much wind as this morning's note, but really really heavy rain coming down, slight wind. Beautiful. Medium or light clouds, not dark, but a heavy haze of rain.

That was maybe an hour ago, probably less. Now we have no rain, cloudy skies with sun-breaks, the clouds moving moderately quickly, light greys edged and topped with bright white/cream edging where the sunlight touches them, and the occasional near-all-white cloud drifting along in the middle.

Bad day to leave my camera at home, and really freaking gorgeous.

Pictures!

The full moon is alternately hiding behind clouds and peeking out, beautiful and mischievous. And rather than posting my third set of oo-pretty words for the day - though it is, never doubt! - I figured I'd go with photos, instead. A bridge shot from Saturday's trip to the city; one of the photos of this morning's sunrise (some oversaturated and captured the mood better than the appearance; this one is fairly true to how it looked, though); and a photo of tonight's moon, as best I could manage. (I haven't played a lot with this camera under such challenging conditions. It shows, but I think the photo is still evocative enough to be worth sharing.)