Feather Cloud

I saw this while riding to my parents' house in Westford yesterday around 12:45pm.  I think it is perhaps a fallstreak cloud without the fallstreak hole.  Some people are saying its a "chemtrail" and others are saying it is an angel feather.  While I prefer the scientific explanation for clouds, I did hear that a young boy passed away around noon yesterday and many are taking comfort in this cloud.

Morning Mood

I have not written in this blog in a while because honestly only a couple of things have caught my eye lately that I was excited about and i already publicized them to death on Facebook. 

However, this morning there was something SUPER exciting out there!  

Now, I have been saying for weeks (months?) that I am going to get up early, and I mean really early like 5:00am, and take a walk.  I've been slacking on the walking because of construction blocking my ways and sheer laziness.  Somehow I am not ballooning up from sitting on my butt and eating bon bons all day but my back is starting to hurt again (weak thighs) and I am getting depressed.  

ANYWHOOOO  I actually DID get up at 5:15am today!  I had laid out my walking gear on the end of my bed *this is the key to success!* and when my iPod started alarming I contemplated going back to sleep but told myself "If you keep putting this off you are never going to do it!  Now get your lazy pudding butt out of bed and GO!"

So I did.  And it was so nice.  I forgot how I love walking early in the morning (haven't done it regularly since 2008), KMFDM in my headphones, especially this time of year when the sun is coming up early and everything has dew on it.  The birds are singing, and most people are not driving around yet.  It was slightly drizzly and only 57 degrees but no wind so it was delightful.  I took my husband's Pentax point and shoot with me just in case I saw something cool.  I didn't really see much and that camera just doesn't do it for me after almost 3 yrs with the Canon Rebel. 

Yeah, I just don't dig how these look.  But its better than nothing in a pinch I guess!

 

When I got home I decided to shower!  A morning shower!  That hardly ever happens.  I'm usually able to take one around 1:30pm when the kids are having their "rest" time.  I looked out the window before I jumped in and saw that the sunrise was looking very cool but I said "No, you need to shower and put yourself first not the camera".  That is hard for me to do.  When I was done I got out and started to get dressed.  I happened to glance out my West facing window in my bedroom and saw that the sky was really dark because the sun was breaking through to the east.  Then I caught a slice of heaven out of the corner of the window and threw on a shirt and raced downstairs.  I grabbed my camera, threw a battery in it, and ran outside barefoot.  

This may not sound earth shattering, but remember I have construction going on DIRECTLY in front of my house, which is very close to the road.  And I may have not had time to throw on certain undergarments.  Let's just say that construction stopped for just a moment there.  

Here is what I saw:

See the supernumerary bands beneath the regular ones?  This was one very vibrant rainbow. 

 

A panorama composed of 5 photos using Autostitch.net

What makes this cool is that if I had not gotten out of the shower at just that moment I would have completely missed this.  It disappeared less than 1 minute after I took these.  

First Snow Squall Of The Season

I spent a lot of time in downtown Burlington, VT last week but was so busy I didn't get a lot of time to go to my beloved waterfront and see the sunset.  So on Friday at around 3:45 I took a walk before I headed home.  Despite 30mph wind gusts and no gloves I stayed long enough to take these pics of a snow squall coming eastward over the Adirondacks of NY state:

It was so beautiful with the snow dropping down and then spreading out as it hit the mountain tops.  Very eerie and surreal.

Over to the south a bit was the sun breaking through.  We had a lot of gray skies last week and have had very little snow this winter.  It will snow a bit, then warm up to 40 degrees and melt, then be frigid and no snow, and then start all over. 

This was as clear of a closeup shot that I could get with my zoom lens and frozen fingers!  

Supernumeraries Make Me Happy

Today was a day of partly sun and partly windy, driving, cold rain!  We tried to go for a walk in the woods in Milton but the baseball field you have to walk across to get there was completely saturated from the 1"+ of rain we got over Friday night!  So we axed that idea and as we were walking back we looked up and saw a frightening scene:

Yeah it was pretty much going to torrentially downpour on us and there was nothing we could do about it.  I tucked my camera inside my purse and we started speed walking!

We got home just as the rain was ending, of course.  There was a faint rainbow, but nothing to write home about.  I sat down and started looking at some of the other pics I took from earlier in the day.  At about 5:40pm my husband looked out the front door and said "Ooh hon you should take a pic of that" so I grabbed my camera and ran out...into the pouring rain!  "Coulda warned me first that it was freaking raining!!!" I said and ran back inside.  I took this pic of the West:

Pretty yes, but nothing to ruin my camera over!  I said "I bet there's a rainbow somewhere..." and he ran to the back door which of course faces East.  "OOH HON its out here!" so I hurdled some stuff and ran out the back.  It was still raining pretty good but worth it!

This one is a panorama built with three images.  There is a double rainbow but I need a wide angle lens to get that in!

Surreal brightness

Landing on the hills behind my house :)

This rainbow only lasted about 2 minutes at its peak.  That is why it is deserving of a blog post all its own because if I didn't have my camera permanently glued to my shoulder I probably would have missed it!!!

A Picture Worth a Hurdle

This morning at 8:38am I went outside to put a car seat in the "economy" car to drive the kids to school.  It had rained very very hard last night apparently.  I was sleeping so hard that when I was awakened from my dream about taking an hour long shower with shampoo bottles that moo'd at me I did not know that it had even rained.

Anyhoo, when I was walking to the car which is parked in front of the house I looked into the very large puddle (I call it Lake Killmenow when it gets really big and I can't reach the car) that always forms on the lawn.  I saw a beautiful rainbow in that mud puddle and was puzzling over how on earth it got in there.  Then I looked up and saw it was indeed a reflection of a giant rainbow right in front of me!  My coffee quota had not been met at all.  I still thought I had mooing shampoo bottles in my shower.

I have never seen a rainbow in the West before as usually I am not up early enough for the sun to be at the right angle, and also most rainbows occur when the sun is setting from my experience.  I dropped the car seat in the middle of the driveway and sprinted back inside, jumped clear over both kids that were sitting by the door putting their shoes on, and grabbed my camera.  I made sure it was set up correctly this time and jumped back over the kids and back into the driveway.  I took these photos and then turned and noticed my next door neighbor watching me probably thinking I am seriously a psycho, like the kind that needs to go to the funny farm.  I picked the car seat back up and put it in the car and then ran back inside.

Always look up!

I was taking the kids to the library so I could use faster internet to upload my oodles of fall foliage photos when I saw the halo and sundogs (cut off in this pic).  I noticed the bouncy curvy spot resting on the top of the halo, and then my eyes wandered farther up and there was a circumzenithal arc!!!   I've wanted to see one for a long time.  It is unseasonably mild right now for Vermont and we hadn't had any clouds at all for 8 days!  

Hunter's Moon Over Foliage

So it was my sister's birthday this past Tuesday and we were supposed to go to my parents' house for her birthday dinner at 6:00pm.  As usual I thought we could get going with the exact amount of time it would take us to get there.  Not sure if that sentence makes sense.  Anyhow, of course we had to wrestle one or more of the kids and then realized we were almost on "E" in the van and had to stop, then figure out how we were going to pay for the gas, and then we finally got to the main road before the town they live in.  As we were turning one of the many curvy corners on Westford-Milton Road we were greeted with this scene:

Or at least I was.  I am not sure anyone else was looking until I started shouting and spazzing.  I took the above photo through the car windshield.  The mountains are the Green Mountains for anyone unfamiliar with Vermont's topography.

I made my husband pull over (I hate driving because then I can't take pictures like a brainless dog hanging my head out the window) at a school bus depot that you can see in the bottom of the first picture.  I knew we would be a few minutes later to the party but my family  knows me pretty well by now and they understand I can't pass something like this up.  I'm that obsessed.

For names of the Full Moons each month click here!