A beautiful evening sky.
It's just as well, because the morning spent itself teetering between hazy, broken and overcast before it tripped up and spilled right over into rainy during church. Grey and lazy; wet and foggy. No, not my favorite. I found myself things to do around the apartment after picking up groceries: finished a couple of Weekly Standards left over from - amazing! - the last two weeks, cleaned up, fiddled with the local intranet, and then played some guitar before banging the pots and pans for dinner.
Afterwards, I was continuing to putter to some African-heavy National Geographic television show in the background, when the view from the balcony window finally caught my eye. The clouds had broken an hour before, and the rain system was well-contained enough to be visible from the backside: right there, stretching from end to end of the horizon above the valley, was a massive, airborne mountain of cumulous. I hadn't heard any thunder, so it was to no surprise that the cloud peaks themselves weren't of any notable height. But the girth! It looked at once like an enormous, golden slug and a pile of boulders you'd find in a quarry. It slowly sunk away while strings of purplish stratus hung half in, half out of a reddish sun refraction while they tracked obliquely to the northeast.
Hot damn! I keep my grandfather's old Nikon F on an endtable in the living/family/dining room. Yet without even a couch, I don't entertain much and haven't felt beholden to buying the requisite lamps and Ming vases (filled with flowers, I presume, then accidentally broken in comic hilarity). So the camera bag sits there, just ten feet from the balcony's sliding-door window. Within five minutes I had cashed out the fifteen or so exposures left; some details with the zoom, interesting croppings with the 50mm, and the quarry-slug's entirety captured with the 30mm lens. With any luck the ancient light meter successfully guided the F's "free-spirited" aperture and shutter. It should be fine; I overexpose and usually end up with the saturation I want anyway.
I sat down and rewound the roll. Then I just let the camera sit in my lap and watched the cell roll off, over Cleveland and Hopkins International. These days, with so many thoughts and tasks circling about the mind, I feel almost uncomfortable just sitting in one place and watching the world. When aren't we on a schedule - even vacation? Not that I mind keeping busy; I hate idleness. But I miss out when I don't stop once and a while: again, it was beautiful. Jets were taking off from Runway 24 (23 now, due to magnetic declination), so every ascent gave me a profile. A 737. DC-9. Or a 717? MD-80? Another 737. The stratus strands rolled, a formation of clouds about fifty miles southwest appeared, the quarry went deep gold; then lavender, then blue.
The moon's out. Back to the balcony. I'll stay tuned to this show for as long as it lasts.
(Sky photoblog coming soon. Soon.)