The changing season and weather here has been a trip. For the first month or two here, it was partially cloudy, but still quite a bit of sun. Even though it’s sunny, being outside has always felt weird. It took me a while to realize that because the sun is so low on the horizon, long shadows were being cast off of everything, even at noon. This made it feel like it was much later than it really was.
After daylight savings ended, the long darkness started setting in. The sun goes down behind the trees around 4:30 PM. The week and a half have been very cloudy, thick clouds at a low altitude. I realize now why people say the sun comes out at the end of the day: it’s finally low enough on the horizon to shine under the cloud layer. This usually lasts 15-30 minutes before it sets. There’s still a month of shorter days ahead. I went out to Target and bought several more lamps to keep the apartment bright.
I had the obvious, expected reaction to the clouds. I started feeling gloomy when I couldn’t even tell where the sun was for a couple of days. What I wasn’t expecting was how giddy I got when I could see the sun again. The same goes for seeing the moon + stars too. It’s fairly dark in Redmond, there’s no excessive streetlamps, and the clouds blanket out the sky completely. The other night I walked to Trader Joe’s and noticed the sky was clear. I could see the moon and quite a few stars. The sky felt like a dark version of Montana big sky, just so expansive and big!
Today it finally snowed! I was kind of disappointed it started off sunny, then got cloudy. I wasn’t expecting it to snow, but it did. This made me terribly excited. I drew all the blinds and sat in my office with my feet propped up on the windowsill watching it snow. After a while the flakes got bigger, so I used TJ’s as an excuse to go walk around in it. That was about 30 minutes ago, it’s since stopped snowing. :(
I need to plan my sun retreats. I learned today that the passes may be closed to non-4x4s and those without chains, so this limits the domain to north/south.
