Sol Power–BrammoBlog.com

Ok, I had hoped to write a few blog posts this weekend and get them up today…Sigh

Well this weekend was a bit of a “Found Weekend” (as opposed to a Lost Weekend). Actually they are quite similar: booze and weekend being two key components, but without the Lost part.

As described by this English class test question,

“While it was a booze-filled weekend, Gavin actually remembers almost every key event that happened.”

Now class can anybody tell me whether “remembers” is an active or passive verb?

And does the adjective “booze-filled” describe A) the weekend, B) Gavin or C) Both?

So fun in the blistering sun at the State Fair (90 degrees and endless sun mixed with cattle crap and alpaca urine…sweet sweet nectar…if you’re a fly. Otherwise not so lovely…though still quite nice. Good company. Roasted Corn on the Cob, Navajo Taco and Funnel Cake. What’s not to like? ) and then heading over to my brothers two nights in a row to watch football, listen to albums (yes people still play albums. Well at least my brother 🙂 ) and kill a bottle of Tequila and a few beers. Well it was all fun, but not conducive to writing. Unless you’re Charles freakin’ Bukowski. Which I sadly am not.

So I am behind. Luckily the boss of this blog is a bit of a push over and I can get away with murder 🙂

So today I will make a quick early morning post…this one. And hopefully get time to write up my Solar Panel post this evening. Or maybe in the morning, which seems more realistic. Of course realistic isn’t a very natural state for me.

So……

Since this a just a quick blog out to the universe thingy, I thought I would talk about my favorite rain clouds of the desert. That and I found some photos on my phone that I took a while ago.

Desert rain is very different than any other rain I’ve seen. In Santa Monica, Berkeley, Pennsylvania and Maryland; other places I’ve lived for some time, the rain tended to always cover the whole sky. As far as the eye could see you would have clouds and rain. A gray day.

Now we have days like that here in New Mexico too, though not nearly as often. And All-Day Rains are a once a year event. Usually the rains are short and wide spread. Here the sky stretches so far that these short rains cover only a small area of that sky. Heck we will have rain that is so localized that it will be raining in the backyard, but not out the front door. Crazy….Cool……Crazy Cool. Kinda like Charles freakin’ Bukowski.

Because of this combination of big, wide sky and short spread out rain, we have rain clouds that seem to float across the sky at a distance with blue sky on either side. Cloud “body” floating, rain dangling down from cloudy belly to ground.

And I call these clouds, obviously, Jellyfish clouds.

Last month I was riding my bike home from work and stopped to take a few photos of a group of Jellyfish clouds floating across the sky. Since I just re-found these photos yesterday I thought, heck let me share (an easy way out of actual research and fact checking that I need to do with my solar panels blog, or weekend trip blog…etc etc)

iPhone photos…so not great, but ok. And it seems lightning will interfere with my iPhone camera sensor.  Here two Jellies combined into one larger mass.

Now to me the best Jellyfish clouds are solitary. A lone mass of water vapor and electrons quietly gliding across sky and crying down to a desperately thirsty ground. Blue on either side and flashes of angry light (sometimes contained within the belly, sometimes striking outward, down, across).

This was not a day like that. Three Jellys converged to cover a wide expanse of sky. Still quite lovely.

Two Jellies floating.

They make me quite happy for some reason. So it seemed quite normal to stop bike on overpass, then begin taking both photos and video. Winds kicking up and lightning moving slowly closer and I knew I should get on bike and ride home. I’ve been in hail and lightning on bicycle before and I know it is not fun. Still I wait and watch for far too long. I know the ride home might be wet. I know the lightning will strike much too close more than once on the ride home.

But those moments of happiness and peace come far too infrequent to pass up*. And riding in the rain is a guilty pleasure anyways 🙂  Sure the bike’s brakes won’t work for crap. Sure cars will purposely veer through puddles to splash you. But riding with warm fat raindrops pelting you relentless like a 2 year old at a Chucky Cheese asking for tokens to activate the Animatronic Band so they can play that damn Chucky Cheese theme song for the 37th time in the last hour (and only 2 more hours to go), well you know you’re going to be freezing cold later, soaking clothes clinging to body like week old fly paper, but it feels so right at the time.

A Jelly raining down on the west side Volcanoes**. Jellyfish clouds and Volcanoes, gah, what’s not to love about that?

Gavin

*far too infrequent is HIGHLY variable. If you witness 10 miracles and day and miss the 11th, well that is a shame. Never skip any joyous moment, even if that moment is surrounded by other joyous moments. Mmmm, surrounded by joyous moments…how could that ever be a bad thing? “Honey, you know life is just too dang good right now…I’m going to go outside and drop a very large stone on my left big toe. Be right back.”

**yes we have a few volcanoes in New Mexico. All, I think, are extinct. This small cluster haven’t erupted in 200,000 years. Still fun to have them around to walk and climb.