Today was much warmer, although it didn’t feel like it most of the time, courtesy of a brisk breeze that blew most of the day. The official high is being reported as the same as our current official temperature: 43. The problem with that is that our own thermometer, sited in the shade, clearly reads […]
It’s been a long time since Wings has been able to capture a shot like that. He caught it in digital format, an opportunistic shot using his cell hone’s camera, just two days ago: taken from the main highway heading toward town. For the first time in far too long, we received enough snow to […]
Today dawned cold and bright, the wind already brisk at sunup. Initially, it seemed as though we might buck the current trend of highs that are forty to fifty degrees too warm, but it was not to be; once the wind calmed around midday, the mercury rose substantially. Officially, today’s high is being reported variously […]
Today dawned clear and bright, and it appeared that we were in for yet another unseasonably warm day. And it was, in terms of actual temperature; the contradiction arose with the late-morning arrival of a trickster wind that continued until sundown. The official high is being reported at fifty, but the mercury rose significantly higher […]
Today dawned very cold. It was expected; the overnight forecast was for lows in the single digits where we are, although in all honesty, I doubt it got below the ten-degree mark. It just seems colder because we’ve had so little in the way of actual winter for so long now. And, of course, the […]
Another seventy-degree day, another morning full of too much spring and not enough winter. When I say that, I mean it literally: It’s December 23rd, and the aspens on the north side of the house began budding two months ago. Today, those buds opened, and the fuzzy white catkins, not due to appear until early […]
First full day of “official” winter, and the mercury here hovered perilously near seventy. Oh, the also-“official” high for today was supposedly only fifty-six here, but out own thermometer, hung in the shade, told a very different story. Of course, so did the fact that I was able to walk outside all day long in […]
It’s cold. In truth, the actual temperature remains some forty degrees too high for mid-December. But a fierce northwest wind, once vanishingly rare in this place that lies right in the path of the southwesterly track, is making it feel very much colder than the sixty-one degrees the weather service insists is our current wind […]
Monday, the very middle of December, and we have trickster weather everywhere. No snow; that would be ordinary weather, and welcome besides. No genuine cold, either, which would also be “normal” for now — if we had “normal” anymore. Instead, we have chaos and caprice . . . and Coyote making his way through here […]
Today dawned cloudy and cold — sufficiently so that the frost was still visible on the grass even after eight o’clock, when the sun was already rising high in the southeastern sky. It was no longer crunchy; I could feel only softness underfoot. But it was still coated with the pale shimmer of the melting […]
Today felt cold, courtesy of a steady wind throughout most of the day. Tonight will be colder still, and yet, it will be nothing compared to what conditions should be now. Supposedly the mercury reached at least fifty-three this afternoon. I did not have time to check our own thermometer, and the air certainly felt […]
It’s clear and cold — not precisely wintry yet, but at least more like late fall. Save for a couple of low thin bands of cloud behind the peaks to the east and northeast, the sky is a clear unbroken blue, with abundant sun and very little breeze. In other words, it’s a beautiful day […]
December first, and we have a dusting of snow. Perhaps more accurately, we had a dusting of snow; midday, and it’s virtually all melted already, despite our more seasonal cold temperatures today. But the dusting on the peaks will last a bit longer, if only, perhaps, until tomorrow. And in this drought? It’s something, and […]
Today dawned cold and mostly clear, clouds still evident behind the peaks and trailing bands of fog clinging to the slopes beneath an otherwise bright sky. We had enough of a hard frost to leave puddles on the hard surfaces, and to soak the softer ones. But now the clouds are almost entirely gone, save […]
It’s been a day: born swaddled in a blanket of low gray cloud; sent to its rest beneath a gradient afterglow of amber and jade and indigo. It’s been a day for us, too, one of those in which certain errands cannot be put off, and they take up the entire useful part of the […]
Today is cold and mostly gray. Oh, there was plenty of sun this morning, playing hide and seek with the lingering cloud cover that reformed just before dawn. The French call the phenomenon cache-cache, which has always seemed to me both more poetic and more descriptive than “partly sunny” or “partly cloudy” could ever be. […]
There is new snow on the peaks. We haven’t been able to see much of it, shrouded as they’ve been all day in low-hanging clouds. And, of course, there is none down here at their feet, last night’s weather service assurances notwithstanding. I walked out into the cold early this morning, the chill made more […]
Overnight, the forecast has altered once again: warmer for the first half of this week, then sharply cooling toward the weekend. At this moment just a a bit past noon, our thermometer registers just shy of sixty-five, and unlike yesterday, today’s bright blue skies are webbed not with contrails, but with feathery bands of cirrus […]
It’s been another glorious day, far too warm for November, with clouds that held ot the tantalizing hope of a change in the weather only to be blown out beyond te eastern peaks this evening. The extended forecasts suggests that the mercury will drop another ten degrees, on average, at mid-month. Then again, it also […]
November light is a thing unto itself. It’s true that October is the month when our light is perhaps most striking — most purely gold, shafts and shadows long and low, dancing with each other across the earth beneath impossibly clear blue skies. But this year, our October skies were less clear, and our air […]
Today was clear and cold — in relative terms, at least. Most of the “clouds” were not actually clouds at all, but contrails diffusing into whie ribs and spins across the sky, and while the cold could more accurately be said to have been “chilly,” it was at least cooler than it’s been in recent […]
Today was absolutely beautiful: blue skies, abundant sun, perfect clarity of air. The first clouds didn’t show up until afternoon, and even then, they were only small wisps, all but one entirely gone by sunset. The breeze was steady, even brisk, with a few tricksterish gusts, but overall, the weather was wonderful. Albeit too warm […]
It’s another glorious October day, skies flawlessly clear, leaves a little more red and a little more gold, ground a little more bare. Still no sign of snow, and all of our earlier indicators of a hard and heavy winter seem to be being supplanted by those of an even harder winter: the kind with […]
Dawn delivered a little autumnal morning magic — a very small amount of shirred clouds rising behind and above Pueblo Peak, not much substance to them at all, but a beautiful, fast-changing gradient of iridescent coral and gold and silvery-white. It’s not the level of sunrise cloud cover I’ve come to hope for from October, […]
