Partitioned Sky

 

Damn, who would have expected a jogger out on a windy wooded road hours after the sun had set? I felt bad, I mean, I had my brights on till I was almost on him, coming the other way. I don't know what I thought he was in his reflective vest with a flashlight strapped to his head; a construction barricade or reflective tape on someone's mailbox or something, certainly not a jogger.

The early dawn light was soft as ever, but seemed chill this morning, reflected as it was off of the layer of white that still covered the lawn. I turned on a light to counteract that impression. My compact florescents aren't bad, being second generation. I mean they're not cold per se, but in in the vent hood above the range I still have an ancient incandescent that hasn't expired yet. I have to admit they give off a cozy glow, and that's all the light I needed anyway. I'll have to experiment with the new high efficiency bulbs they're coming out with now, when it goes.

It was nice too that there was a fire still smoldering in the wood stove. I only had to throw a couple of pieces of wood in there and I was done. In a few minutes it was warm enough for me to take a shower. A fairly warm day was forecast so I didn't bother to stoke the stove when I left for work. As I was cleaning out the ashes after work I was pleasantly surprised when I dug into some live coals. The newspaper was beginning to smoke before I'd even placed the kindling. And I'm still only using poplar, a fairly soft hard wood. My neighbor has some real hardwood cut and split he's going to sell me cheap, as soon as it dries up or freezes so that he can get into his property over in Brown County. The way it's been going it may not do either for the duration of the winter!

I was going to kvetch about my car problems, and work, which are interrelated, but we were going along so nicely and I really don't want to think about all that right now. There is one more thing that I want to tell you though. Something that happened at work this morning:

I was on a small two lane highway in the glacier flattened north of Indiana, flat as a pancake. The sun was shining full on me but the western horizon was dominated by a massive purple cloud trailing the shadows of isolated rainstorms; trailing like the tentacles of a jellyfish swimming against a swift current. That rain, or snow or whatever it was didn't reach the ground until it had traveled miles and miles from where it started in the sky.

I noticed more cloud bursts to the north, but these fell at a gentle, normal angle. The interesting thing was that they fell at an angle opposite to the others. Then I noticed that the southernmost of these rain showers, a fairly heavy downpour, bent at a sharp angle two thirds of the way to ground, forced backward to the same angle as those thrashed trailing tentacles. The division was half way to the cloud by the time that I got to Logansport and lost sight of the phenomenon. It would have been cool to see the one storm completely overtaken by the other.