SkyWatch Friday: An Apollo Picnic Under Mercurial Skies :-)

I find it nearly impossible to believe that we're on the brink of October's final weekend! Not only because of the month's speedy passage, but also because of its unseasonably balmy weather, more summery than autumnal.

Last Saturday's softly serene sunrise was both lovely and illustrative of our mild and gentle weather lately...

Knowing all too well that despite its delayed arrival wintery weather is inevitable, BW and I have been taking advantage of the beautiful days with bike rides and lots of outings with the dogs, while my friend Pam and I have been logging many miles on long walks, laughingly referring to ourselves as "Lewis and Clark" because of our explorations and adventures (and occasional need for a guide, given our shared lack of any sense of direction!) :-) The three of us even threw together a fun picnic on Tuesday. That morning, Pam and I walked the three miles to Sheridan's quilt shop, then hoofed it another 3/4 mile or so to the library to take another gander at this year's annual Fiber Arts Show entries (yep, post coming) and meet up with BW, who arrived in our car with the picnic supplies. 

It won't surprise those of you who know me well when I tell you that our picnic venue was the cemetery. :-) Not the main municipal cemetery, but the adjacent Bellevue Cemetery, home to a rather mysterious collection of columns from the 1930s. They used to support a wooden pergola which has long since succumbed to the elements that are also taking their toll on the columns. A local historic pamphlet that Pam bought at the library identified the structure-that's-no-longer-a-structure as the romantically pagan "Sun Temple." Despite the fact that our sunny day was morphing into an overcast one, it still made a great spot for a picnic lunch.

But before eating, Pam and BW decided to burn a few extra calories by helping to prop up this lone little puffer cloud… 

Pam gave it a gentle push with her finger so BW could hold it like a serving tray! 

We set up our picnic in the center of the "temple," so were encircled by the columns as we dined on our yummy feast of tempeh salad sandwiches, hummus, carrots, apples, bananas and hibiscus tea. All we were missing were a lyre, our togas, and Apollo...

Oh, wait! Look who showed up! And ate most of the hummus! 

(okay, maybe that was me. LOL)...

After lunch we headed next door to the large municipal cemetery and visited several of the more scenic and interesting sections and historic graves there. At one point, Pam looked up and saw this dragon in the tree above us!...

Though it remained a balmy 77ºF, the weather grew increasingly cloudy and blustery, until the skies to our north looked like this at 6pm...

Though teasing us with the promise of some much-needed rain, it turned out the clouds were just for show (and cemetery ambience). The night remained dry, and the next day was another sunny one. In fact, the lack of clouds has made for fairly boring sunrises this week, at least until yesterday when more nocturnal clouds made for an appropriately pumpkin-colored and picturesque dawn before clearing out later that morning...

For more picturesque skies by day & by night, beneath sunshine & clouds, 

and both autumnal & vernal from both sides of the equator, please visit...

SkyWatch Friday: "O Hushed October Morning Mild…"

I fear that between last month's premature killing freeze and some very wicked winds, we've been robbed of most of our fall foliage here. 

But we've been enjoying - and taking full advantage of - a long stretch of glorious Indian Summer weather to make up for it, and on a recent lovely evening spent at the local cemetery fulfilling photo requests for Find A Grave, I spied this stately cottonwood. Despite its golden leaves being more muted this year, it's still a standout against the blue sky and its evergreen companions...

Though the local leaves aren't providing much fall color this year, the local skies certainly have been! Here's a sampling of our harlequin sunrise on Wednesday, taken during a five-minute span (from 7:07 - 7:12am):

Autumn mornings: sunshine and crisp air, 

birds and calmness, year’s end and day’s beginnings. 

~Terri Guillemets

It was October again... a glorious October, all red and gold, with mellow mornings… 

~L.M. Montgomery, "Anne of Green Gables"

In the entire circle of the year there are no days so delightful as those of a fine October, when the trees are bare to the mild heavens...
 and you can feel the breath of winter morning and evening.
~Alexander Smith, "An Essay on an Old Subject"

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow,

Make the day seem to us less brief…

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst…

~Robert Frost

Autumn bowed to place a beautiful crown on the Queen of Morning, 

and her velvet robes sway merrily in the chilly breeze. 

~Terri Guillemets

There is a harmony 

In autumn, and a luster in its sky…

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Enjoy more October skies ~ lustrous & mellow, glorious & crisp ~ from around the world...

SkyWatch Friday: Summer Sets, Autumn Dawns

Seems it was summer just yesterday! Or at least just last weekend….

But all good things must come to an end, and so the sun has set on another summer season. Literally. I took this series of sunset photos over the course of 15 minutes from the all-but-deserted Sheridan visitors center/rest area off I-90 last Friday evening. We'd gone there to use the free RV dump station after a weeklong camping trip in northern Montana (future post!), only to be thwarted by a new - and premature, IMO - "Dump Station Closed for the Season" sign and a winterized, waterless hose. Oh well, at least I'd thought to bring my camera since the views of the Big Horn Mountains from the visitors center seldom disappoint!

Going...

going...

gone.

But even more spectacularly than it set on the final weekday of summer, the sun rose on the first day of autumn. What an enthusiastic greeting for the new season! I took these straight-out-of-the-camera photos just 7 minutes apart. Amazing how much the sky can change in such a brief time...

06:45

06:47

06:52

That sunrise will be hard to top, but I'll give it my best from now till the winter solstice. :-) Meanwhile...

And happy spring to all you Southern Hemisphereans! :-)

SkyWatch Friday: The Mysterious Skies of Halloween

I know, I'm a week late with these. I've been working on quilt show posts instead of SkyWatch posts (those of you waiting for the quilt show finale, despair not - it'll be next, promise!)

Anyway, we had lovely weather the weekend before Halloween, and took advantage of it by taking the dogs on some wonderful walks around a new park area north of town, even enjoying a picnic lunch by the creek. Here are a few sky photos from our adventures…

Though admittedly not much of a sky photo, 

I wanted to share our pretty picnic spot by the sparkling creek 

(the picnic table is to the right out of the frame) :-)

What is Halloween without a leafless tree? 

The moon in the upper left helps set the mood as well. :-)

This piece of modern art is part of this inexplicable, mysterious "gate to nothingness"...

Someone went to a lot of trouble and expense to put up this front entrance!

Guess they must have depleted their funds and had nothing left for the house.

Appropriately, our lovely weather ended on Halloween, when rain, cold temps, and very gusty winds arrived along with the goblins and ghosties… and this rainbow! It barely lasted long enough for me to grab the camera and had already faded a lot by the time I snapped this, but since we never get rainbows at this time of year I was grateful to have captured the mysterious moment at all…

Though another Halloween is past, may you continue to enjoy hauntingly beautiful and bewitching skies! (And those of you in the Philippines, please stay safe!)

Atlas Aftermath (The Destruction)

I think The Weather Channel should rename Winter Storm Atlas "Winter Storm Asshat" because of all the damage it did across so many states. As you can see in this slideshow, compared to several places - especially South Dakota with its fierce blizzard and tornadoes - we got lucky with "only" about 10 inches of snow, 45mph wind gusts, and a lot of downed trees and power lines. Despite my pessimism in my last post, I was able to save our own little trees from breaking and am now hopeful they'll survive, and although the school across the street lost power, we never did. But power was out all over town, schools and the local community college closed (that happens very rarely here), as did many businesses and most state and Interstate highways in and out of Sheridan (and Wyoming). But the ever-intrepid UPS was out delivering what they could in the mess (tomorrow will be a delivery horror show again in spite of it) and I was miraculously able to keep my massage and haircut appointments. After seeing some of the devastation on my way to those appointments, as soon as I got home I grabbed my camera and went back out to take some photos, and took more yesterday in the sunshine after BW and I walked the dogs. 

Mine aren't nearly as dramatic as the photos in the slideshow I linked to above and I missed getting a couple of the best shots because it was just too dangerous to try. But I did brave the slushy, icy streets (they didn't plow), downed and perilously-close-to-falling tree limbs and power lines, several non-working traffic lights at some of Sheridan's busiest intersections, and a ridiculous amount of traffic (some of which were utility trucks and emergency vehicles, but most of which were regular civilians - and I didn't see any of THEM with cameras to their faces, so what were they thinking? LOL) to bring you these photos of the storm's local destruction...

These first three were close to home in our neighborhood:

One of several large trees that shade - err, shaded - the front of the elementary school across the street. Most of them took fatal hits like this one. :-(

A neighbor's house by our mailbox bank. Note the garden hose... people were still mowing and watering lawns last week, and no one has had their sprinkler systems winterized yet.

This was a lovely row of large trees along the road leading out of our neighborhood.

All over town there were a lot of close calls...

And several direct hits...

This house was for sale two years ago and we'd looked at it before rejecting it as overpriced and needing far too much work. The people who bought it fixed it up (at least on the outside) and are probably less than thrilled at this huge tree limb crashing into their window! At least it didn't land on their roof.

Doesn't that figure? They're seriously needing that gutter as all this snow melts (which it was already doing with enthusiasm in yesterday's warm sunshine)!

This is the fence around one of our favorite houses in town, part of which is pictured below...

Big cottonwoods, elms and maples all over town were looking like this. They're not supposed to be shaped like weeping willows! (Note the large downed tree limb on the right). At least I was able to shake the snow and ice off our little trees, there was nothing anyone could do for the larger ones except listen helplessly to the loud cracking sounds all over town, now replaced with the sound of chainsaws. Like I said, "Winter Storm Asshat!"

I tried to get into Kendrick Park (where we lived when we rented Dragonfly Cottage), but first was stopped by this tree limb across the road...

... and then by barricades erected by the city at each entrance. I'd heard through the hair salon grapevine that Kendrick Park was a tragic mess with all its huge deciduous trees. :-( In sad irony, there's a sign at this entrance declaring Sheridan's status as a "Tree City USA." 

With the traffic and downed power lines making my photo safari increasingly treacherous I headed to the much quieter cemetery...

And while there, as well as closer to home, I also got some photos of the beauty to try to balance out the destruction, and plan to share those in my next SkyWatch Friday post (I'm burning some midnight oil to make time to put one together before Jo's arrival on Thursday). So until then, enjoy the Fall colors for me if you've got 'em! Because what few we were starting to get around here now look like this...