As usual, the best sunsets we see are those we can never really get a good photo of. There was a nice sunset Sunday night as we drove home from a short outing. This is the best we could get.
The moon was a waxing crescent.
Maybe one of these days I’ll start taking an actual camera with me instead of relying on the iPhone, as good as it is for some shots.
Wednesday afternoon a thunderstorm appeared within a matter of about 45 minutes to the east of us. I walked out on the front porch and told Leah to come out and see a classic thunderstorm anvil cloud.
It was late enough in the day that the shadow of the Earth was creeping up the base of the cloud. There was an occasional lightning flash beneath it. I checked my phone’s weather radar app to see how far away it was.
The pushpin shows our house. The storm was about 15 miles away. Unfortunately it was not heading our way. We have experienced a few light showers lately, but the strong storms have avoided us. We are very dry up here on the mountain top. I would like a light rain that lasts for a couple of hours, but I would settle for a heavy rain that lasts for 30 minutes.
Leah and I were driving back home from town Friday night close to dusk. The sky was full of clouds lit by the setting sun. A view of the sunset itself would have been nice, but we had to settle for this.
This is the view from our front porch looking east over town.
The sky had been full of puffy cumulus clouds all day. There were some thundershowers 20 or 30 miles south of us. They didn’t come to visit here, unfortunately. We are quite dry here, although there has been a lot of rain all around us. We have watched significant storms brew and creep around us, parting as they crossed over us so we remained dry, or simply disappearing before they reached us. This is a typical summertime pattern.
Our Atlanta TV meteorologists have attributed some of our current weather to Tropical Storm Barry, which is really too far away to have much effect here. We are hoping some of the moisture channeled up from the Gulf will make its way here and maybe cause enough rain to encourage our new plantings to live another day.
I cut some more of the big cedar that I mentioned in a post back in January. Some of it has rotted so much that it falls apart when I pick it up, but a surprisingly large amount of the tree is good firewood. This is a section of the trunk near the base.
I counted around 50 rings. As you can see, it had split into two trunks at this point. There is some decay and a few holes just above the left trunk segment. Those holes lead to living quarters. It turns out that the cedar was a huge carpenter ant apartment complex.
The black in the chambers is actually ants. I had to use an insecticide on the firewood I cut from this tree to avoid bringing the ants into the house.
It hasn’t been all trees lately. We had a lot of rain, then some clear weather, and now some more cloudy skies and drizzle. This was the late afternoon eastern sky a few days ago, right after the rain and just before the clearing.
I like the way the trees look against the sky, especially in the winter. A couple of days ago the sky would have been deep blue, a color we haven’t seen much of lately. On Tuesday it was mostly cloudy.
There were a few clear spots.
It’s supposed to be rainy again soon, so we won’t see much blue for a while.