Rainy Day Sunset

A Bit of Glory

It's been cold and nasty all day.  Spitting rain.  Then at sunset this happened.  Very quickly too.  It was there for just a few brief minutes.  It started to rain and blow harder.  A cloud covered the sun and it was all over.  Lucky for me or I'd have been soaked!

Sneaky Snow!

I'm just  not ready for the white stuff!  There it is, sneaking in.  Only made it to the top of the Sonomas, but enough that it's stayed up there all afternoon.  We got a little cold rain down in the valley.  It's windy and cold enough that I've got the wood monster going.  A good day to stay inside!

Desert Light Show!

We've had amazing desert light shows most evenings.  They don't last long but they are spectacular while they do.  This is one when the sky threatened, but did not carry out the threat, of a thunderstorm.  A splatter of rain through the dusty haze is all we got.   But what a light show it created!
 
This is another picture of the same storm.  It just got better and brighter.   Finally a combination of wind, dust, and just a bit of rain, drove me inside.  But I came away with these pictures to share.
  I have an interesting observation to make about the humans in my town.  Only a handful, in all the years I've taken these photos, are curious about what I'm photographing.  It's almost like they literally cannot see the beauty.  A handful of special people do.  If they see me, they'll come out an comment and sometimes rate the sunset.  Most of the time, they, and me, simple watch the desert light show unable to critique it at all.  Too lost in all that beauty and light to comment!

Thunderstorm coming!

We have a thunderstorm coming directly from the west.  It may pass us by.  They often do.  But this one challenged the sun.  It made a colored photo look grayscale.  I actually hope it comes and dumps water on my poor dusty town!

More weed pictures!

This is a weed.  It was living by my back fence.   Parentage and genealogy unknown.  A nasty thorny thing, it produces a beautiful bloom.  Even more amazing, the flowers open all at the same time.  Beauty in an unlikely place.

Fire on Blue Mountain!

This is the result of years of drought.  The land is tinder dry.  Now when a lightening storm comes along we can watch these things spring up across the valley.  This one is on the east side of Blue Mountain.  A beautiful place.  It'll take years for the beauty to be restored.  It is being fought, but the winds are high.  We won't know until morning. 

The second photo is of the leading edge of the storm that sparked the fire.  Beautiful, but very, very scary!!!!

This may seem a strange selection for a blog based on the desert, but it is such an evocative photo I had to publish it.  It was taken by my mother when she attended the San Francisco Exposition in 1939.  In a few short years, if that ship survived Pearl Harbor, it would have been in the heat  of the War in the Pacific.  I'm hopeful that someone will be able to identify the ship.  Or at least the class of vessel it belonged to, I cannot.  The image was not in an album, I found it when I developed old negatives.  So I haven't any other information about it.  Hope someone out there knows more than I do!!!