Author Archives: Mark P

Pink clouds

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Just before dark Friday evening, all the world was suffused with a warm glow from the clouds, which were illuminated by the setting sun. This was the view to our south from our driveway at the back of the house.

Just as I got my iPhone out to take this panorama the color of the clouds started to fade. Just a few seconds earlier the pink was deeper.

This was the view from the front of the house, towards the east.

This shot was taken about a minute after the previous one. There is a thunderstorm cloud just at the left edge of this image. It’s a smaller cloud in front of the elongated cloud on the left. The elongated cloud looks  like the top of an anvil cloud, but I think it was actually not associated with the thunderstorm. The thunderstorm was located about 20 miles away over a little town called Adairsville on I-75.

The clouds on the right of the lower image are the same as those on the left of the first image.

Of course there was no good or easy way to capture the warm glow on the ground and the clouds in the same image.

Red surprise

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When I walked the dogs on Thursday, this caught my eye.

And no wonder. As you can see, the leaves and twigs at the side of the road were almost monochromatic. This red fungus was a surprise.

I’m almost completely ignorant about fungus, so I don’t know what this is. The closest I could find online is Sarcoscypha dudleyi, which, this Web site tells us, is microscopically different from Sarcoscypha coccinea, a similar cup fungus found on the West Coast.

Maybe someone who knows their fungi can say for sure.

Broad Street

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Leah and I hardly ever go downtown any more, but we arranged to meet Leah’s hairdresser Sheila for dinner and a drink Thursday night.

Downtown Rome is very different today from the way it was when I was growing up. Back then, the five blocks of downtown had multiple dime stores, locally-owned clothing and furniture stores, multiple chain department stores even in the same block, a theater, shoe repair shops, a newsstand (where one Baptist minister was caught buying a copy of Playboy. Scandal!), banks, and two restaurants. The Post Office was one block off Broad, and there were two mail deliveries a day. Today, the biggest draw is the many bars and restaurants. There are a couple of tattoo parlors (do they still call them that?), a few sad boutiques, the history museum and more restaurants. Oh, and one local jeweler who still manages to hang on.

If the city fathers had had the sense to realize what they had in the original buildings, downtown would look like Disneyland. This is an example of the architecture.

This is the Masonic Temple, whose upper stories remain pretty much the same as they were when the building was constructed in 1877. The street front has changed. The tan building behind it is the old, old Post Office, where my father worked. I spent many a long afternoon parked in front of that building, waiting for my father to get off.

I have updated this post to show this image that was on display on the wall of our local mall along with a lot of other shots of Rome from years ago. If you compare this to the current building, it’s clear that the ground level of the Masonic Temple has suffered the same fate as most buildings in downtown Rome — “modernization.”

When we walked into the restaurant, I recognized the long, white hair belonging to Bob, one of a pair of twins who went to Darlington School one year ahead of me and two years behind my brother Henry. He’s now Leah’s eye doctor.

We sat right behind him, but none of us bothered him. When we were almost finished, Bob got up and Sheila patted him on the back and said, “You don’t remember me, but I used to cut your hair all the time.” Bob insisted that he did remember her. They spoke for a  minute and then Bob turned to us. Leah introduced herself, and Bob seemed to kind of remember her, but probably mainly her brother.

I told him my name, and after a short pause, he threw his hands into the air and said, “Soccer!” I said, “No, you’re thinking of my brother,” who played soccer. In my freshman year I spent a lot of time in our car waiting for Henry to finish soccer practice. Henry played soccer  and ran track and cross country. I never played soccer, or any other sport.

After we left, Leah and I meandered up Broad, where I took the previous picture, and then this one.

“Psycho kitty” has been in this blog before. He’s a book store mascot.

When we got to the car, I thought about Bob mistaking me for Henry, and remembering that Henry had played soccer 53 years ago.

I thought, “I need to tell Henry about that.”

Crepuscular rays from behind

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Leah called me out onto the front porch Tuesday evening right at sunset to see the sky. This is what we saw.

The Sun was setting directly behind us, near the horizon but high enough to illuminate the thunderstorm in the distance. Apparently there were some clouds between us and the Sun, and the shadows of those clouds spread across the entire sky.

Here’s a closer shot at the moon, the clouds and the sky.

The normal view of crepuscular rays is of bright, fan-shaped rays shining out from the Sun through gaps in the clouds. What these images show are the dark areas between the rays. “Normal” crepuscular rays are, as I said, fan shaped, with the narrow part near the Sun, getting wider as you look further from the Sun. These dark “rays” appear wider closer to us, the viewers, and the Sun behind our backs, and they get narrower as they go away from the position of the Sun. How can that be?

Well, my explanation is that the fan-shaped appearance of “normal” crepuscular rays is an optical illusion. The rays are nearly parallel, widening only a small amount. However, they look wider as they get closer to us, just like a road looks wider where your car is and narrower further away. The rays look like they are fan shaped because we tend to see the phenomenon as two-dimensional, as if the rays were pasted on the sky in the far distance. Instead, the rays are actually shining towards us.

This is what we see in these pictures; the rays have shot out from the Sun around the clouds and passed over our heads, disappearing into the distance in the east. Since the rays (or the darker areas between the rays) are very close to parallel, we see them as wider directly overhead and appearing to get narrower as they disappear into the distance. I am not sure I remember seeing this phenomenon before.

If we could have seen the entire dome of the sky, I think we would have seen crepuscular rays appearing narrow at the Sun, wider as they approach and pass over our heads, and then getting narrower again as they shine off into the distance. That would have been a sight.

These rays stayed visible for about a half an hour. I watched as the shadow of the Earth rose up on the bright cloud in the distance until the cloud was a barely-discernible gray mass on the horizon. I thought about the Sun moving towards the west and the shadow climbing up the cloud, and it occurred to me that the Sun was not, of course, moving; it was us. The surface of the Earth was flying at around 860 miles per hour around its axis, at the latitude where we live, carrying us and dragging the entire atmosphere along with it. So it was not the Sun that was moving, gradually hiding the clouds, but the clouds themselves that were retreating from the Sun.

Later Tuesday night that cloud (or one very like it) gave us a show as lightning flashed inside the cloud.

Leg up

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Dogs are pretty relaxed about how they end up lying down on each other. We were interviewing a potential pet sitter a couple of days ago, and Zeke and Sam came out to see her. After some petting all around, they settled in on one of their beds in the living room.

Zeke missed the bed almost entirely.

That’s my sock foot up against Sam’s back. He likes personal contact.

This pet sitter seems like a winner.