The Evening Clouds
I don’t think I’ve seen a sight quite like this in Seattle before. About twenty minutes ahead of sunset, the condition is nearly overcast, however: In the vast foreground, covering Seattle south to north, there is no sunlight hitting the clouds from above and so they are a dreary bluish gray. The midground, meanwhile, over the western shores of Puget Sound, does have direct sunlight hitting the clouds, causing them to be a vibrant reddish gray. The background, meanwhile, which includes the Olympics and their eastern foothills, is a dark wall of colorless gray clouds, crowned by splotches of bright blue sky and vast swaths of directly-lit, orange-white clouds. Consequently, in front of the aforementioned dark wall of colorless gray clouds is a diffuse, glowing orange mist. Meanwhile, all of the clouds are moving steadily to the NNE, which is almost directly to my right, creating a very dramatic dynamic. Honestly, it reminds me of Ganondorf’s cathedral at the top of his tower in Ocarina of Time. It’s very impressive. I can almost hear the organ playing. I would photograph this, but my camera would never do it justice.
Yesterday Kendra finally left Seattle for South Carolina. I had coffee with her, and we talked for a bit, touching on cosmic thoughts and banal ones too. I hugged and kissed her goodbye, and that is that. She’ll be back for Christmas, so I am told. I expect I will see her then. I realized last night that, while I have generally recovered from our separation and have been able to move on with my life, it will still be quite a while before I am emotionally ready to look for another mate.
Today, most of my remaining next-generation computer parts and programs arrived. I am now in a position to make the system operational. The case I got is enormous. I clearly underestimated its size. I could fit two computers in there. This very likely won’t fit on top of my desk like my current tower. I’ll be putting it all together tomorrow evening. I still don’t have speakers, a mouse, a printer, and most importantly a monitor, but, technically, I don’t need any of that immediately. After several years of acquisitions, it now looks as though my days using my present, venerable computer from 2000 are coming to a sudden, nearly spontaneous close. Naturally, I get a shot of nostalgia from that. This computer has been my closest material possession for all that time. Except for the original hard drive, some electrical connections controlling the CD and DVD drives, and an aging keyboard, this system has served me well. I expect, however, to be very glad to use my new system. The smallest improvement of performance I am looking at is the roughly tenfold boost in RAM that I’m going to be installing. The hard drives are thirty times more capacious. The monitor is more than twice as big. The processor is about twelve times more powerful. And the complimentary Blu-Ray media disc I got with the Blu-Ray recording drive is able to story 25 GB all by itself-half my present hard drive. The speakers are going from 2.0 to 5.1. The mouse will have Logitech’s tilt wheel (which I finally got to work on my recently-acquired secondary mouse), and also its appealing hyper-scrolling ability. The new video card…oh, hell, my current computer doesn’t even have a separate video card. The new card will be at least a hundred times better.
The sun itself actually broke out briefly for sunset, in between long tendrils of cloud. The skyscape developed into a more traditional-but still awesome-scene of orangey golden cloudfire. The sun got low enough to pass beneath the main cloud layer, enabling the underside of the clouds north of here to light up a paler, apricot orange. The Olympics, meanwhile, gave me quite a treat. Ahead of them was a line of very low, red-gray clouds. Behind them was a considerably higher, but still low expanse of blue-gray clouds, set against the nondescript dark cloud layer. In between the red and the blue clouds were the highest of the Olympics, their peaks peaking out at a medium height relative to the clouds, making the entire world look like it was tilted downward toward me.
In Seattle, sunset is often not on the horizon but into the clouds, which usually creates nondescript sunsets, but, if you are fortunate enough to have a view like mine that offers a direct line of sight to the action, can make for some very lovely viewing.
Yesterday Kendra finally left Seattle for South Carolina. I had coffee with her, and we talked for a bit, touching on cosmic thoughts and banal ones too. I hugged and kissed her goodbye, and that is that. She’ll be back for Christmas, so I am told. I expect I will see her then. I realized last night that, while I have generally recovered from our separation and have been able to move on with my life, it will still be quite a while before I am emotionally ready to look for another mate.
Today, most of my remaining next-generation computer parts and programs arrived. I am now in a position to make the system operational. The case I got is enormous. I clearly underestimated its size. I could fit two computers in there. This very likely won’t fit on top of my desk like my current tower. I’ll be putting it all together tomorrow evening. I still don’t have speakers, a mouse, a printer, and most importantly a monitor, but, technically, I don’t need any of that immediately. After several years of acquisitions, it now looks as though my days using my present, venerable computer from 2000 are coming to a sudden, nearly spontaneous close. Naturally, I get a shot of nostalgia from that. This computer has been my closest material possession for all that time. Except for the original hard drive, some electrical connections controlling the CD and DVD drives, and an aging keyboard, this system has served me well. I expect, however, to be very glad to use my new system. The smallest improvement of performance I am looking at is the roughly tenfold boost in RAM that I’m going to be installing. The hard drives are thirty times more capacious. The monitor is more than twice as big. The processor is about twelve times more powerful. And the complimentary Blu-Ray media disc I got with the Blu-Ray recording drive is able to story 25 GB all by itself-half my present hard drive. The speakers are going from 2.0 to 5.1. The mouse will have Logitech’s tilt wheel (which I finally got to work on my recently-acquired secondary mouse), and also its appealing hyper-scrolling ability. The new video card…oh, hell, my current computer doesn’t even have a separate video card. The new card will be at least a hundred times better.
The sun itself actually broke out briefly for sunset, in between long tendrils of cloud. The skyscape developed into a more traditional-but still awesome-scene of orangey golden cloudfire. The sun got low enough to pass beneath the main cloud layer, enabling the underside of the clouds north of here to light up a paler, apricot orange. The Olympics, meanwhile, gave me quite a treat. Ahead of them was a line of very low, red-gray clouds. Behind them was a considerably higher, but still low expanse of blue-gray clouds, set against the nondescript dark cloud layer. In between the red and the blue clouds were the highest of the Olympics, their peaks peaking out at a medium height relative to the clouds, making the entire world look like it was tilted downward toward me.
In Seattle, sunset is often not on the horizon but into the clouds, which usually creates nondescript sunsets, but, if you are fortunate enough to have a view like mine that offers a direct line of sight to the action, can make for some very lovely viewing.