Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Well, I just got a bit of a start. The weather has been raining, not raining, pretending to be about to rain, threatening downpour, delivering soft showers off and on, blowing this way and that at varying speeds with or without the rain, and generally feeling cool and damp and turbulent. But not, y'know, perilous.

A few minutes ago I got up to go to the bathroom, and as I passed the stair landing I noticed that some of the clouds had been painted brownish by the setting sun, and that the cloud deck was doing funny things near the horizon (as often happens here). But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a peculiar repeating pattern. "Wait, did I just see a nipply sky?? It didn't feel like Big Storm Weather ...

A closer look revealed a different situation: a closer and lower layer of cloud had been whipped into sharp peaks with round valleys between them -- sort of meringue-ish really -- and that cloud was lighter in colour and closer to the background pale-grey of the sky near the horizon in that direction, so what I was seeing was not teat-shaped brown clouds, but a wave-shaped mask in front of a reasonably boringish brown cloud (not that a cloud that colour is ever all that boring). *whew* So my ears and skin were right and it was just my eyes that were fooled. Bit of a moment there, between the two glances, though.

Since seeing that, I notice that the clouds closer to overhead are moving lower at the same time as they draw nearer (or rather, as they slide past), which may foretell a different sort of interestingness. The expected slate, poofy white, and slightly gold-tinged (right over where the sun just set) are visible in various directions as well, and just to confuse the issue, a patch of barely-veiled Blue Sky nearly straight up, with just enough light to show its daytime colour and the merest wisp of cirrus spiderwebbing it, visible through a hole in the lower cloud decks.

Baltimore has interesting skies.