Thursday, December 13, 2007

• Currently Listening Pure By Hayley Westenra see related

  Things seem to happen when I get off work. I don't know why. But last Saturday as I was winding down my shift, a storm blowing in, and although it started with mere drizzle and snow it was already beginning to freeze as I stalked to my car. Much to my chagrin, I had to break out the ice scraper and chip my way inside. I sat, shivering, thinking dark thoughts about winter weather while I waited for the engine to warm up. Sunday was uneventful. Church and pretty much everything else was an obvious no-go, but I was able to keep my geeky brain focused inside the house with the computer, etcetera, and pretty much ignored the world outside. Monday, however, things changed. We lost power at six o'clock in the evening and didn't get it back until mid-day Wednesday. A pretty small block of time, actually. (Just a day and some change.) But hey, I saw some p-r-e-t-t-y things. And it's all thanks to losing power, because that's what it takes for me to lift my head and look around these days. A few things that stand out:
  
  1) Iced-over trees are gorgeous in daytime and at night. When there's light, it's the effect of seeing a whole wood's worth of iced trees standing silently, solemnly. And it's so incredibly quiet... At night, the appeal is not in a mass of trees but instead in the picturesque beauty of a single tree, backlit by a streetlight - especially the way the iced edges glow, letting you to see every curving icicle hanging from each twig.
  
  2) How all the white forms a canvas that allows otherwise-overlooked flashes of color to stand out boldly. I spent a half hour or so in the freezing drizzle on Sunday trying to capture everything I'm talking about here, but this bullet I was actually able to preserve to my satisfaction. (See pics below.)
  
  3) Candles. Wow, life must have been much more artistic back in the days of wax and wick. I mean seriously, it's like living in the middle of a 'mood lighting' demo. They may be hard on the eyes when you're reading and they can't cook a pizza too well (although they will toast some chunks of bread), but I'm converted. Nick likes candles now.
  
  4) There is, nothing, nothing, like the sun breaking through the clouds over a reflective winter landscape. I was on the way home from the post office when I saw this out my passenger window; I dove into a little church parking lot, pulled out my cell phone, and ran along the side of the road to get a good view. Too bad I didn't have a better camera, but it was amazing. I couldn't believe how the shafts of sunlight broke through the clouds and made the white hillsides glow orange. Didn't seem real.
  
  
  
  Here's a link to a Photobucket album with the full-sized pics.  The password is, surprisingly, 'vortex'.
  
  

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