After the aftermath

I'm looking out my windows at the moment and am rather mesmerized by the atmosphere, for once.

I've mentioned before that weather fascinates me (I like to claim it's a result of my upbringing on the farm where the weather helps define nearly all events... though it could also just be due to sheer dorkitude), and given the dearth of interesting weather phenomena here in Northern California (the occasional hurricane-strength tree-toppling gale, aside), my hunger is rarely satiated. Winter brings steel grey stormy skies, and summer brings with it the low blanket of the marine layer, but beyond that is usually a featureless cerulean infinity, save the periodic high contrail-derived cirrus. Lovely and amazing, certainly, but terribly boring compared with the atmospheric drama of continental climes along the Front Range.

Just now, however -- and in serene contrast to Friday -- with rain pouring straight down without even tapping the glass, the Financial District skyscrapers are cloaked in mauve, their wet facades shimmering through the curtain of a passing shower. To the west above Nob Hill, beyond a swirl of lavender mist, blue sky is coming into view filled with alternating layers of nimbus aglow with the early sun. Shafts of light pierce through in places, and just below the unsettled mackerel sky to the far west roils another pregnant purple cumulus. A few low tendrils of icy white fog are drifting in off the bay, wisping between obstacles in the opposite direction of the elements aloft.

It is, to say the least, sublime.