Watching the Weather

[akirlu]

It's just gone sunset, and the thin band of sky above the western hills is a molten mixture of neon red and sodium white. Over the hills, some gargantuan hand has dipped a bamboo brush in water, and let the water flow downward through a broad stroke of indigo ink. The whole westerly sky looks like a weeping watercolor as the rain moves in across the Kent valley towards us.

It is, on the whole, pretty cool to have a view right next to my computer. Must go check the asparagus soup now...

Comments

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

Um, isn't that why God invented digital cameras, so you could share this with the rest of you LJ friends, right?

We've been eating a lot of asparagus lately too - getting it at the (all_year_round!) farmers market that opened down the block. It's better asparagus than I remember having before, too.

I heard a talkshow interview of a central valley asparagus farmer last weekend. He says it has lots of Uric acid - which is a gout causer. He says he can't eat it every day. (he also went on to say how tough it is to be a farmer in the central valley where fields are below sea level, and where foreign competition costs are 1/7th of his). Still - asparagus soup, yum!

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Having seen enough digital snaps of sunsets, I much much prefer Akirlu's eloquent words, and found them, in fact, a better sharing of the sunset than another one in nearly 15 million pictures would have been.

This grouchy, snotty attitude means I'll take a picture of a sunset within the week and post it myself. So much for moral superiority. ;>

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, thank you kindly for calling my words eloquent. And as I say, taking a good sunset shot is tricky stuff. And I don't find your expressed attitude particularly grouchy or snotty -- sunset photos are a bit trite, really. But I do often find it personally tricky to commandeer the moral high ground for any length of time -- it seems to be uniformly surrounded by slippery slopes...

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

"Um, isn't that why God invented digital cameras, so you could share this with the rest of you LJ friends, right?"

Eh. I find good sunset photography incredibly tricky, and that sky was changing by the second. By the time I could have run off to find the camera, set up the shot, and taken it, it would have been different. And our overall view isn't without its challenges. Overhead powerlines, light bleed from Kent station, the general visual clutter of a suburban neighborhood, etc. Taking a picture that really showed what I was looking at would have taken great skill, timing, luck, and a fair amount of Photoshop diddling after the fact. It really was a moment better suited to word pictures than photography.

It's very cool that your local farmers' market is year round. One of the advantages of being in California, I reckon. Our year-round farm stand goes over to Christmas trees once the last of the squash and cabbage are sold, and then they stick to their core business of mulch and manure and chipped bark until bare-root season rolls around. (Bareroots come available a lot later in Washington than in California, so it's not as if they can roll straight from Christmas trees to bare-root shrubs.) On the other hand, once the home farm starts producing, it's a lovely farm stand and lots of it is their own stuff, or at least very local. It's fab to be able to get local apples from this year's crop; just the smell is worth the candle.

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

I've been eating a lot more apples now that I can walk down the street & have boxes of choices, with a little plate of slices so I can compare one apple from another.

Farmer's markets are getting popular around here. There are two farmer's markets in Palo Alto - one Saturday downtown, and one Sunday down the block from us - with a different selection of stuff now that I think of it. There is also one in Menlo Park, a few miles north, and one in Mt. View, a few miles south.

Farmer here is pretty broad - there's a bunch of jewelry stands at one end, and a bunch of food stalls at the other (e.g Indian, Mexican, Crepes & other ethnicities) (not that Crepe is an ethnicity or anything). There are 3 bakeries (5 if you include the cinnamon bread and Indian bread stalls), a chocolate stand, fish from Monterey Bay & smoked fish from somewhere else, canned pickled veggies, and an excellent tofu booth. (excuse me, I had to wipe the drool off the keyboard)

In the middle there is space for musicians; its turned into quite a neighborhood gathering. Everyone packs up their kids and their dogs and walks down to the farmers market. I keep running into people I know that don't live particularly close (including a nephew I otherwise never see).