The Many Faces of the Sky

Something that just strikes me as weird is how versatile the sky is over a short period of time.

I left my house at around 6:45 AM this morning to a completely blackened darkness, mostly due to the fact that stratus clouds covered every direction as far as the horizon of my 'in-the-woods' house would allow me to see. Said cloud coverage continued up to about 7:10, as I passed my second 'checkpoint'* on my way to work. At this point, I encountered a number of sunrise phenomena.

[* I travel a two-lane highway for some 55 miles on my way to work, passing through no less than 4 'settlements' as I like to call them--small towns where the population can be counted on fingers and toes. I affectionately refer to these as checkpoints.]

First, there was that eerie sepia-tone tint that everything has as the sun crescends over the horizon at such an angle that the light is trapped under the clouds. See, the clouds were starting to dissipate in the direction of the sunrise (East, if my middle school-era education serves me), but the clouds directly overhead and in every other direction were still thick. So, I got to experience that 'I think I'm in the 1940's' feeling driving down the highway.

This is always a fun experience to behold. For one, you experience that invisible wall for seeing complete cloud coverage in one direction, while zero cloud coverage in another--without any gradual smoothing between the two, as if somebody put a giant glass bottle around the clouds and I was actually trapped inside with it. (Fears of crashing through proved unfounded.) Again, you get that cool tone of color as you drive.

Finally, once you get out from the range of under the doom cloud wall, you get that weird 'dystopia' effect--the one where, as you look ahead, things look like early spring: bright, cheery, full of hope; while as you look behind, all you see is the dark, forlorn clouds that you had just left, almost as the sky looks over a destroyed metropolis. (Is it just me, or is it weird that in sci-fi movies, dystopias are in a constant state of rain/heavy cloud coverage? As if to say after complete destruction of a city, they could never have a bright sunny day to take the kids to the park...)

Finally, I get to work, and it was like I woke from a dream. Absolutely no cloud that I could see, save a few whiter clouds to the south. This, of course, makes it all the more strange that I had encountered no rain on my entire drive, but got inside my work building just in time for the rain to come here.

Anyways, that was my adventure today with weather. In case anyone is interested, the computer still is dead and is not looking good for me. On the other hand, I came up with some interesting plot points for NaNoWriMo.

Oh, and yes, it's Final Fantasy Friday--week three in a row. Tackling soundtracks from FFX and FFXII mostly today.