It is the 25th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.

That's my photograph, taken in the evening, in 2007, when a low cloud kept the memorial lights from projecting upward and the light spread horizontally.

The quarter-century mark feels important — I was 50 when it happened, I'm 75 now — but I will repeat what I said in 2022: "I don't like terrorists squatting on the calendar, forcing us into darkness every 365 days. We must honor the dead? But if we truly ordered our life around honoring the dead, every day of the year would be a somber day of commemoration. Instead, we have a scattering of death days on the American calendar. Why those and not others? What interests are served by keeping those horrendous events fresh in our mind and not others?"

There is always a low cloud keeping us from seeing the full picture. 

"The cloud-being in the pictograph... includes the symbols of a snake, which is associated with lightning, and a hummingbird, which is believed to be..."

"... a messenger with prayers to bring rain. The outstretched arms of the cloud being have rain as well as its full body consisting of rain. The lightning snake under its arm is stimulating the rain to fall. It looks like a storm cloud with lightning that has a heavy downpour in one region and lighter rain falling in others. There are examples of cloud beings with lighting that have a very similar appearance to modern photographs of storm clouds that have captured lightning bolts. Clouds can seem to be standing on lightning feet, which look like plant roots going down into the ground...."

From "Prehistoric Art of the Colorado Plateau: It’s All About Clouds!" (Cloud Appreciation Society).

Alligator.

That's yesterday, with evocative clouds. Today was blustery:

The sky at 4:40 in the afternoon.

We skipped the sunrise. The cloud cover was 100%, so we wouldn't have seen the sun (or the blood moon), and anyway, it was raining a little. We took the morning off, but we got out in the afternoon. It wasn't quite sunset, but the sun was low at 4:40. It's there in the photograph... behind that demonic profile.

And here's Meade's view (from a little earlier in the walk):

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Sunrise — 6:00, 6:38.

That's the sunrise.

Tonight is the full moon — the blood moon. Meade was out just after nightfall, getting moon video, with the hooting of barred owls:

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

UPDATE, 6:09 a.m.: That wasn't the blood moon back when Meade made that video. The blood moon was a moon eclipse that happened, I'm told, over the past hour. We were up and ready to catch it, but the cloud cover was 100%. So, as usual, it all depends on the clouds. The celestial orbs do their thing, and it's powerful, but the mere clouds decide what will filter through to us Earthlings. It's raining too, just in this one hour, the sunrise hour. Such is our fate, in the clouds.

"Mr. Peng was apparently the victim of a potentially dangerous phenomenon that paragliders call 'cloud suck,' in which a pilot is rapidly drawn upward into a cloud."

"At extreme altitudes, people risk hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, because of the thin air. Severe hypoxia can cause organ damage or death. Still, Mr. Peng managed to land about 20 miles away from where he took off. In stable health and recovering from his surprise flight, he has since said, 'Thinking about it still makes me quite scared,' China Daily reported on Thursday."

From "Chinese Paraglider Reaches Near-Record Heights, Over 28,000 Feet, by Accident/After video of the incident went viral, showing a face and body covered in ice, the local sporting authority said it had banned the paraglider from the sport for six months" (NYT).

At the Tuesday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The lake and the marsh.

A western view of Lake Mendota at 12:41 p.m.:

Gardner Marsh at 1:47:

Please use the comments section to talk about whatever you want.

Lake Mendota — 3:26 p.m.

It was still too cold (and windy) to go out for the sunrise, but it had warmed up nicely by mid-afternoon. Just look at that. Toasty! Mid-20s — the same supposedly bone-chilling cold that drove the inauguration ceremony indoors. 

Icy lakeshore — afternoon.

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At the 6:05 PM Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

At the Thursday Night Café....

... you can write about whatever you want.

(The photo is another photo from the plane yesterday afternoon. I didn't wake up for the sunrise today. It's as if I was jet-lagged, but I'd only gone to Texas and had not changed time zones.)

At the Sky High Café....

... you can talk about whatever you want.

At the Pink Cloud Café...

... you can talk in the middle of the day.

Photo taken this morning at 6:53.

At the Not-the-Sunrise Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

(The photo shows Lake Mendota at 2:02 in the afternoon.)

"Part of the beauty of Kelvin-Helmholtz clouds is... how, like waves in the ocean, the atmosphere moves and responds to the environment around it. The air is effectively rising up and tumbling over on itself."

Said the BBC weather man, quoted at "Kelvin-Helmholtz: Rare wave clouds amaze sky-watchers in Wyoming" (BBC).

Click to see a photo of the clouds that look like cartoonish waves.

It rained this morning, so I missed the sunrise, but we got out for a late afternoon walk.

Meade took this picture:

 

Talk about whatever you like in the comments.

The Levanter cloud.

The London Gatwick @easyJet flight taxiing and taking off from @RAF_Gib this morning with the backdrop of some impressive #Levanter cloud over the Rock of #Gibraltar

The #levanter cloud just keeps getting better today! #LevanterSpam pic.twitter.com/WYyOPktSij

— Met Office Gibraltar (@MetOGibraltar) August 24, 2022

 

Found via "Remarkable ‘Levanter’ cloud seen over the Rock of Gibraltar" (WaPo), which explains that "the Levant wind that blows eastward across the local terrain," and "[m]oist surface air is forced upward by the sudden spike in topography and ascends to a height where the temperature is cooler than the surface air’s dew point" where it "condenses, forming a cloud."

The lake in the early evening — 5:55 and 5:47.

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

And here's a bee on that coneflower (video by Meade, unintended audio by me):

At the Friday Night Café...

 ... you can talk about whatever you want. 

The photo was taken at 11:44 this morning. No sunrise picture today. It was too cold to go out!